Three and a half hours of darkness

St Petersburg this time of the year is a wonder in its own right. It gets totally dark about 11.40pm and dawn breaks around 4.00am. We are heading towards the white nights and there is a palpable sene of energy in the air that is hard to exaplain.

Why we do what we do

There is always a deeper underlying reason in patterns of behaviour. In why we do what we do. In behaving in a certain manner and developing a certain outlook and making certain decisions.

The 'Hawk' or 'Dove' argument, the risk or the safe choice are not always the defining charactersitic here. The argument though has perfect validity with the way we see the world.

Some build and some destroy. The motivation, in each case, is the same. Each chases a world view, one in which they believe in staunchly.

Sometimes I want to scream!

There is a nightmare I once had while awake in which I thought that hell on Earth must be a place where no one cares and no one listens - humans are trapped in a somnabulistic trance from which there is no escape, doomed to forever amble about in a zombie-like existence where life has little real meaning and where every action is governed by the same animal instincts that drove man before he came out of the cave and looked up and saw the sky.

To say that Russia is like that is too hard. There are people here (and let's not forget Google's Founder is Russian - though, yeah, he got out) who must be good. Who are good. Yet as a society governed on primal instincts, where, women are used up and cast aside, where everyone steals and everyone lies, where the group is prized above the individual, this kind of society makes me want to scream: wake up!

There is no censorship of the internet in Russia (though news and television are now State controlled and there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of expression), but so few people access anything other than porn on it that it may as well not exist.

You can never make a horse drink water no matter how hard you try!