We drive on the pavement here

Russia, or rather St Petersburg is a city made by a city planner who knew how to use a ruler. "We make a road here," he must have drawn a line on a pristine sheet of paper, "and another one here," drawing perhaps a parallel line, "and one here, and here and here," more lines, reach perfectly parallel to the others and then those lines intersected by perpendiculars until he ended up with something that looked like an extended version of the framework you use to play 'noughts and crosses'.

"And here we make the pavements," I can imagine him saying shading in with his pencil on either side of the straight line creating in his head a city with streets built to take gun carriages without even trying and pavements where crowds could gather to watch without feeling too jostled with each other.

The Communists, when they came into power, did their best to translate their ideal of architecture which was so functional as to crush the human spirit, so bleak as to relieve life of anything resembling happiness and so universally similar as to stamp out individualism practically forever.

Flats became boxes. Furniture became items. Everyone had the same flats, furnished by the same furniture and wearing the same clothes and if you think IKEA is bad (which is doing great down here by the way) wait until you see what can be produced by factories governed by the notion that the one aspiring goal of every individual is to arrive at a worker's paradise where everything is free (yes, including furniture) and everyone takes only what they need (yeah! you heard that one right, they actually believed that).

In that version streets, incredibly straight and incredibly wide were bordered by incredibly wide pavements, space, as a matter of fact was all around (ok, there were precious few cars) and cramped quarters were reserved only for where people lived.

In the 21st century St Petersburg has more cars than it used and no parking spaces. Ok, that is not a new problem. Every city on the planet suffers that ill. But where others create underground car parks here they simply park on the pavement.

Worse still, they drive on the pavement. Now there are many reasons for this, not least because pavements are meant to be driven on, or at least they have sloping curbs which allow cars to drive on and off in order to take a shortcut, access a shop entrance or simply get off the road.

And drivers, being drivers, which means they are like water, simply use them all!

So you are walking along marvelling at the fact that here is a pavement which could easily take two cars abreast when you hear a roar and there behind you there are two cars abreast driving on the pavement with you in the way and that's when you also realise that in all that flat expense you are on there is no place to hide and nowhere to jump to other than a busy road!

You would expect cars on pavements to go a little slower but then that would credit Russian car drivers with an amoebal awareness of something lying beyond the end of their bonnets and this they simply have not got!

People of course here are used to it and they squeeze against buildings or step into flower patches or the curb in order to avoid them, but for a Westerner used to pavements meant only for people it's still something that takes a little getting used to.