Cakes come from a factory!!!

Some things are really weird. We need to understand why. Let's look at cakes for example. We all like sweets. It's in the genes somewhere and we crave sugar no matter how bad it may be for us. Maybe nature's revenge on us for taking over the planet, maybe part of the Cosmic joke. Who knows, the thing is that cakes are liked by everyone and in the West we have elevated cake making into an art form.

Go into any part of Europe and you will find a little bakery somewhere, or a cake shop, a place where someone has put their heart and soul into making a cake and they are probably part of a long tradition of home-baking.

You know that if you go to the next one down the road the same cakes will taste differently. I know we don't think of it very much, it's so ingrained in our culture we have developed selective blindness but we understand it to such a huge degree that we resist buying pre-packaged cakes even though we know that there's nothing wrong with the quality.

Deconstructed this approach also underpins a certain way of doing things: we know that if have the skill and a certain amoutn of passion we can make our way in the world, imparting in it a certain degree of our individuality and creating a tradition and a future for ourselves.

It's the way things are.

Not in Russia.

Blindly wedded to the idea that group activity and centralisation are a much more preferable (and probably safer for the ruling elite) alternative to individual effort they centralised every aspect of society.

What's that got to do with cakes?

Everything! The most basic of activities: cake making was centralised and re-introduced as an industrial concept. Comfortable with having our cars, planes and tractors mass-produced in vast machine-controlled warehouses, we might, in the West, balk, at having our cakes created the same way.

Yet in Russia this is the way it is. A factory called Cever with a long tradition of cake making going back to 1903 mass-produces some 30,000 cakes a day and delivers them all over St Petersburg. So the cake you buy in the little dive just round the corner from the underground is exactly the same in packaging, quality and price as the one which you will get in the massive, gleaming supermarket.

There are a lot of issus here. Let's look at the practical ones first: I suppose you get the same quality cakes everywhere. The price is the same. The packaging is the same. The factor has been in business for over 100 years so I guess hygiene must be good enough for them not to have killed anyone yet (otherwise they would have been closed down or lost their customer base).

Now here comes the part that's hard to swallow. You want a cake: you go to the dive down the road. You expect somethign quirky. The kind of traditional recipe the little woman that runs it has had handed down to her from her great-grandmother whose husband was a hero of the Red Revolution. Ok, this is not going to happen. You're going to get the same degree of standardisation and she has put as much effort in the cake she sells as in a packet of cigarettes.

Then you think this is enterprise. Bakers in the UK vie with each other to produce recipes that smash your senses, give you a taste of something special.

Not here.

Everything that seems natural and instinctive like personal competition and an enterprising spirit has almost been bred out of this country. Russians love cakes and they all buy the same. It's a weird thought. No matter where you are in St Petersburg you can buy the same cake at the same price, made in the same factory using machines!

There is a State-sanctioned soulessness here at times which is hard to describe unless you experience it. A wave of collectivisation that's hard to fathom. It persists to this day. I went into a small shop. The experience was weird enough to warrant a post of its own and today I am running out of time.

I never thought I'd miss baking from home, not just for the taste but also for what it represents.

Personal space is not big in Russia

I was walking down the street the other day when I felt the hairs at the back of my neck twitch. You may think I am kidding but coming from a place like Manchester in the UK where violence, potentially, can break out in a nunnery during daily prayers, you learn an entire panoply of survival tactics which you take for granted.

Step outside that environment and things become complicated. It was broad daylight, I was in a busy street. I was walking on my own, both hands free and wearing the loose type of clothing which back in Manchester marks you as willing, able and capable of loosing mayhem at the drop of a hat. Normally, though I would never let my guard down, I would not be expecting a fight either.

This however is St Petersburg. There are dozens of probably unemployed, or shadily employed, or Black Market employed guys hanging around or walking around carrying bottle of beer (yes, it’s common practice here and it gives me the jitters) and drug taking is on the increase. Add to it the fact that the normal signals do not apply and I am obviously not Russian and you begin to see why I was getting twitchy.

I listened as the steps directly behind me quickened. I was walking on a pavement broad enough for cars to drive on (which hey do here, but that’s another story) and there was no reason for anyone to walk directly behind me.

I slowed down a little, looked sideways appraising both those around me and the shape I could peripherally pick up coming up fast behind me. Now, if it was dark and an empty street I would be turning around and getting ready to deck whoever was coming up behind me, out.

It wasn’t and those around me were not registering any alarm (and no intent of assault takes place without ripples), so I slowed down a little more, feeling my body relax and though my heart rate was now up I knew that I had to let this take its course. The worst thing that would happen would be a violent shove I could absorb and roll with and I would then rain down some nukes on anyone sufficiently idiotic to think Westerners are easy targets.

Whoever he was he did come up in a straight line and fast and he was not slowing down as I was. He came right up behind me, veered sharply left and continued on his way towards the nearby underground station.

I looked at him as he receded. He was about 24, thin, dressed in the drab, dark colours that seem to mark everyone here. Wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shabby backpack, his head down immersed in whatever music was piping into his ears through the MP3 player he had on.

In all likelihood he could have been a student, maybe he wasn’t, the point is that here personal space, for some reason is not very big at all. In a country where space is no object, Russians like grinding against each other.

Go to the supermarket queue and the guy (or woman) behind you is standing close enough for you to feel their body. Walk down the street and people around you get well past what back in Manchester would have been the personal assault range past which you would be laying into them with both fists.

Get on the train and you are running the risk of having sexual intercourse with half the commuters there.

I don’t know why this is. It could be because the weather sucks here and everyone is into the multi-layered look of wearing almost all their winter wardrobe at once, which kind of makes men and women in Winter look very much like each other from a distance (many men here have long hair!), until you start noticing the beards (Russian women do not have beards!). It could be because three quarters of a century under communism succeeded in destroying their sense of personhood and the sense of the individual and have fostered the collective mentality that they have yet to escape from.

Whatever it is, it is really unnerving. You meet them in the street and they stand so close you begin to wonder what to do. You take a step back and smile they take a step forward and touch your shoulders.

There are other things they do wrong. Like hold your gaze when you do not know them and just cast that appraising ‘don’t mess with me or I will take you down’ look in the street. Things here are simply wrong.
Westerners can get in trouble real easily (or go quietly mad).

World War II, national pride and bent cops

The second World War made a lot of things difficult, caused a lot of misery and ultimately changed the political and social landscape of the 20th Century. For one, it seems to have provided countless grandparents with a common pool of reminiscences (but that’s trivializing it a little so I won’t go into it too much), for another it polarized the world into East and West, ‘Democracy’ and ‘Communism’ and spoilt the 20th Century for the rest of us.

War is pretty meaningless and once it gets started it embodies everything that’s worst and best about us as a species. Nevertheless, what happened, happened, and because so many people died defending what is an honourable ideal of justice and freedom it is only right they should be remembered.

It happens across Europe which has decreed 9th May a holiday and it happens, as you’d expect, in Russia, which seizes the day to foster some much needed national pride. National pride is important. It helps to remember why we each belong to different nations (I know it’s outmoded but hey!) and it also helps bind a nation together in a moment of crisis.

In Russia there is a strange thing about national pride. They all feel proud about what Russia achieved, they all want to move on and feel proud of what it achieves again and they also harbour a suspicion and a jaded sense of celebration fatigue regarding any official holiday and celebration.

They have had to many crammed down their throats by the previous regime and many of them at the time actually believed them. They went on thinking that Russia in the 20th century was doing great and leaving the rest of the world behind and if there was any perceived problem it was only going to be transient and it was really just a question of time before all the sacrifice paid off.

So you can’t really blame them for being jaded and going through the motions.

The thing is 9th May is a holiday and holidays in Russia mean expense as you will have to go out with friends, drink, probably eat somewhere out and so on. For a cop on a month’s salary of £80 a month it is going to be really expensive. The cost of living here is comparable to the West give or take a few pounds (or dollars) the salaries aren’t!

Now there are quite a few issues here like what sort of system trains policemen, gives them guns and authority and then pays them so little that the cadets in the training academy get more while they are being trained to do the job, but we’ll bypass all of these because this is how grown men lose their hair and wise ones their sense of reason.

Let’s just accept that yes, that’s the reality of it. If you’re a cop with a gun and a car, expected to uphold law and order, live a life beyond reproach and support society, you are given the princely sum of £80 per month and left to get on with it.

You know of course where this is heading. Cops will stop cars for speeding (ok, they use no equipment and have no evidence beyond their word), faulty fire extinguishers (you’re required to carry one here!), out of date insurance, you name it and they will issue an on-the-spot fine. Or at least that’s what they call it. Money changes hands, any alleged offence is forgotten and everyone involved goes on their way.

There is a system to this organized fleecing. A cop car stops by a busy road. The two cops (there is always two) get out. They use their batons to stop passing motorists, they ask to look at their papers. At this stage the motorist is taken into the cop car (you can’t have money changing hands go on in full view) and the transaction takes place. Prices are reasonable, about £4 a graft, but I suppose over the course of the day they will all add up.

At least come 9th May the instruments of the law will not have to worry that their drinking and carousing will eat up into the meager paypacket and family finances.

I live off a busy road and I could watch all this take place. I took some pictures I have posted here and some video. The cop car stayed there for about four hours and they must have stopped over 30 cars in that time. Then they moved on to find another spot.

In Hot Water

The devil is always in the details and the details are always the devil. You take some simple things and deconstruct them and you end up with capturing an entire universe in a grain of sand and probably even eternity in an hour.

It is Sunday and I’m out of bed late. Lazy day and no plans of doing anything beyond having coffee and reading a book. So the day has to start with a hot shower. Sounds idyllic, right?

It would be. Except there is no water. Ok. Backtrack junior and take things from the beginning. How can there be no water? Where? Have you checked the tap? It’s this kind of monologue that goes through your head when you find yourself in a 21st century flat in the middle of a modern city and with the nearest river, well, here it’s not that far away really, the Neva is everywhere but how do I get water from there to here in a meaningful enough quantity to have a shower and shave?

This is the kind of thought that raced through my head and you see with not a drop of water coming through the cold or hot tap I was suddenly without any water for the shower, shaving, the toilet or the washing machine.

You can’t drink tap water in St Petersburg, not unless you’ve decided you have had enough of life. Residents here buy water in 5 litre bottles so drinking and making coffee was not going to be much of an issue but the toilet…. Uh-uh, this was getting a little worrying.

You begin, of course to wonder why? How? And it inevitably boils down to ideology. Anyone who says ideas cannot save you or damn you knows nothing about the world. Democracy is an idea. So is Communism. And the Protestant Work Ethic.

Ideas have the power to change the way we see everything from the glass being half full as opposed to half empty to day being night and black being white. It is really the case here. In a Communist paradise it was felt that no one should ever want of hot water, or be subject to the vagaries of earning capacity and social status when it came to taking a hot bath.

You have to admire this. Used to stories in the news of UK pensioners cutting back on taking baths and running the heating only during the evening the notion that plentiful, hot water could be easily available to anyone does have a certain appeal.

This is exactly what has happened here. Hot water comes in plentiful supply from the city’s water authority at an incredibly hot temperature. This is where my knowledge of 20th century plumbing kicks in. Think what normally happens: water gets from a pumping station to your house. You want to use it, turn the tap on. You want it hot, get it into a heater and heat up as much as you need.

Not here. Here water comes in two separate pipes: hot and cold. You want cold water, no problem, it would make any Polar Bear feel at home. You want hot, it’s like the gates of Hell have opened up. I’m no water engineer but the logistics do pose a few questions even for me: how do you heat up enough water for everybody in all the city and then make sure everyone, no matter how far away they live from the pumping station gets it at a hot enough temperature to be hot?

Suppose you manage to solve this problem, how do you then, manage the network of pipes which, running at such super-heated temperature must be subject to more wear and tear than usual?

See how a well-intentioned notion, put into practice, leads directly to the road to hell?

I can’t say what temperature the water gets heated to or how much it costs to do this or how they judge the use or what it dos to the environment, but the days when it cost a few kopeks to use are long gone. I have two water meters, one for cold and one for hot and they both measure exactly how much I use.

Then there are the little technical details: The moment the water authority carries out repairs somewhere in the grid I have no hot water, even though the icy-cold tap may be running no problem.

It’s expensive to heat up all that water so they fire up the boiler (or whatever it is they use to heat it up) sometime in the morning. But because they don’t get up early enough, by 7.00am when everyone wants to take showers to get to work the water is not hot enough for that (it’s lukewarm at best).

I am quite lucky. I work from home and don’t hit the shower until about 9.00 or 10.00 am by then the hot water is hot enough to give you third degree burns if you are not careful and because everyone who could have used it is by now on their way to work, and hasn’t, the tube at this hour is a mélange of odours which would make a closed-air bazaar in Kathmandu seem tame by comparison.

Then there is the thing about plumbing. Used to Western plumbing which mixes high-pressure cold water with gravity driven hot water from the boiler, I am used to cold water gaining the upper hand at some point in the mixer tap and making my shower an adventure.

Not here. Up the pressure and the hot water, having a much higher pressure, thanks to its super-heated status, gains the upper hand and blisters your skin before you get the chance to turn the mixer tap handle the other way. This kind of thing acquires greater interest when the increase in pressure (and temperature) happens as you have your eyes full of suds and are trying to blindly find the mixer tap handle and desperately remember which way to turn it to get the cold water flowing again.

And then there are mornings like today. When the water stops.
Oh, and there are of course the industrial accidents when the pipe repair crews working on the hot water pipes get scalded to death quite frequently as super-heated steam or water escapes from a burst pipe.

All this because they tried, at some point, to be different, socially equal. Create a better world. By the time I have written all this the water is back on, running a dirty brown from some repairs and it looks like I will get my Sunday morning shower and lay about reading my book.

In case you’re wondering no one can drink the water because the water pipes here are so old that there are things there which had they been in Saddam’s possession during the Iraq war he would have been able to unleash them and overwhelm the American army in its tracks.

As I said, ideology, it can really damn you. Ideas are powerful things, particularly if you apply them and then forget about them and just start doing things because that’s the way you think they should be done.