Читать книгу The Further Adventures of An Idiot Abroad - Karl Pilkington - Страница 9

People always use the ‘Is the glass half full or half empty?’ question to find out if you’re an optimist or a pessimist. I think it’s hard to tell how full a glass is these days with the amount of ice most pubs put in your glass, but Suzanne tells me I’m a half-empty sort of person, which makes me a pessimist. I agree, I am a bit of a pessimist. I’ve been one from a young age. Me mam said I learned to frown years before I could walk. The first time she saw me smile she thought I had wind.

When I was told stories as a kid the pessimism was there even then ’cos I never believed me mam when she finished a story with ‘And they all lived happily ever after’. ‘No, they didn’t. I don’t believe it,’ I’d say. I prefered Humpty Dumpty – nice and short, and a realistic ending. He never hurt anyone, but he had a little accident and died. Shit happens. That’s life, innit. No great life story, or love interest, just a dead egg. But I heard they’ve messed with this story now, as I have mates with kids who sing a new song that goes:

Was he pushed?

Did he fall?

Was there such a crime at all?

Why did Humpty Dumpty fall?

It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery.

The courts assembled here today,

To see that justice has its way.

The guilty one will have to pay.

Let’s start proceedings right away.

What’s going on! Kids are struggling with basic spelling and maths, and yet they’re putting more effort into the Humpty Dumpty case than they did with OJ Simpson. I don’t know how Humpty Dumpty ends these days. I’ll have to buy the box set.

Anyway, me being pessimistic, I just expect the worst, so when it happens I’m prepared. Isn’t that the right way to live? Why else do we all wear seatbelts when we get in a car? I mention being pessimistic as I imagine this is how most Russians would be. It’s not a country where you hear about people going off to for a good laugh, is it? I read that when McDonald’s opened branches in Russia they treated it like all their other shops and asked the staff to smile at the customers, but it didn’t go down well as people in Russia don’t smile at strangers. It’s something saved for friends and family.

The flight to Moscow only took three hours, but then we were held for a further six hours because we had to write down a list of every piece of equipment the film crew were bringing into the country. Even though I’m a pessimist I thought the day couldn’t get any worse, but then I met Pascha, a bearded man who spoke in a breathless irritated way. He would be giving me a quick tour of Russia in his old Range Rover that was covered in mud and had dodgy brakes. I told him my reason for being in Russia and asked if he had been on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

PASCHA: No. Why would I want to do something that’s totally predictable? I’ll leave that to you British. So, anyway, what do you want to see? Red Square?

KARL: Yeah, you can show me that if you like. Errmm, I mean, whatever you think is worth seeing here.

PASCHA: Nothing.

KARL: Right, well, that isn’t very . . .

PASCHA: Red Square is a place of execution. The ground is saturated with blood. We would be walking waist deep in blood.

KARL: Do you do this as a living, this tour guide thing?

PASCHA: Occasionally. It’s not really my main service product, but, yes, I do these things. The more I do it, the less I like it.

I never understand why people stay in a job they really hate. Yes, we all have to make money to pay the bills, but if you hate your job so much you’ve got to get out.

The worst thing would be to have a job that you can’t leave. I’ve always thought that with doctors and surgeons. If they left and became interior designers or butchers I’d imagine they’d feel guilty. It would be like Superman knocking it all on the head to become a financial adviser.

I’m always surprised when they ask if a doctor is on board a flight. There they are trying to have a holiday from their stressful job and now ’cos someone in seat 47b is choking on their bag of free nuts, they have a call of duty. The closest I’ve come to having to do a job I really didn’t like but couldn’t leave was having to do jury duty. There is no getting out of it. Having to sit there for weeks in court judging a stranger. I felt like Simon Cowell. The most annoying thing was that you’re not allowed to eat or drink when doing jury duty. I don’t know why as I watch Midsomer Murders while eating a Twix and having a brew, and it doesn’t affect me working out who did the murder. If anything, eating helps you to think. Kojak solved plenty murders while sucking a lollipop.

I offered Pascha some of my Revels as a way of bonding, but he wasn’t interested. So I tried to be friendly by showing interest in his car.

PASCHA: It’s the worst car I ever bought, and it’s British. I never thought a car could be that bad.

KARL: But you’ve got to look after cars. You can’t expect it to just run and run. You’ve got to service it if the brakes have gone. You’ve got to get the brakes fixed.

PASCHA: How many times do you think I’ve had the brakes fixed this year?! You want to guess?

KARL: You say fixed. Do you mean replaced?

PASCHA: Replaced the whole system. I would take to a qualified Land-Rover dealer and say, fix it, I don’t want to think about it, four times!

KARL: Four? But maybe it’s just a bad garage then.

PASCHA: Uh, how many garages do you think I went to?

KARL: (pause) Four?

PASCHA: What do you think I was doing this morning?

KARL: Fixing your car?

PASCHA: Attempting to.

KARL: Well, get rid of it. If I’m annoyed about something I get rid of it.

PASCHA: That’s what I’m trying to do!

KARL: Are you fed up at the moment?

PASCHA: Yes, I am. With car, with job and, frankly, with you British.

KARL: What? Me? I haven’t done anything.

PASCHA: No. You’re not my usual type of client. Before you I had a British couple come to my cottage to do horse riding. They signed up for two days. I told them it is important to inform me once they left Moscow, but they won’t do that, because the Brits, um, you have the mentality of slave owners. You expect people to wait on you.

KARL: What do you mean? We don’t have slaves. Where did you get that from?

PASCHA: You speak a different language. By now I would have called another driver. I don’t understand you.

I think I moaned less when I was with Pascha. His pessimistic approach made me more optimistic. This hasn’t happened much to me before. Suzanne very rarely moans, and I wonder if it’s ’cos I do it all for her, as Pascha was doing for me. If someone is happy I tend to look at the negative. There’s no fun in moaning if it isn’t getting the opposite reaction. The longer he was with me, the more he moaned. If Pascha was a dog I’d have had him put down.

Other than his tuts and huffs we drove in complete silence until the police pulled us over. Pascha spoke to them in Russian and then we drove away again.

PASCHA: The fine for this is 300 roubles.

KARL: What, for having a dirty car?

PASCHA: But they can’t be filmed while fining us, so no fine.

KARL: But they would normally?

PASCHA: They would. They would if they had nothing better to do. Three hundred roubles. About ten dollars.

KARL: But, still, it’s only a dirty car. What about the brakes then? You told us the brakes were dodgy. What would they do if they knew about that?

PASCHA: Ah, technically nothing, because Russia is more concerned about appearance. It’s consistent with the general Russian pattern – form and appearance. If you have errors, factual errors, in your document they will not be noticed. If you cross something out and correct it yourself, it will be noticed and you will be required to fill out the entire thing again.

KARL: Yeah, we had that at the airport, with all the equipment. We had to write it out, someone made a mistake, and we had to do it all again.

PASCHA: Now this is the kind of discussion I do welcome, because it has to do with the essence of the country.

I got out of the car while I was on his good side. The director took me to an old-looking place that I thought was going to be for food. I entered the main room where old dark wooden furniture soaked up any light. Me mam bought some old antique furniture like this once, but me dad found it depressing so he stripped it and painted it in white gloss. Me mam went mad. He did that sort of thing a lot. He washed an old ornament with a Brillo pad ’cos he thought it was dusty, and all the paint came off, so he tried painting it himself. It ended up looking like a garden gnome. There’s a song by Daniel Merriweather with lyrics that go ‘took something perfect and painted it red’ – I’m sure Daniel must have met me dad.

Men sat around talking, some naked, some with very little on apart from a towel and a white bell-shaped hat. I sat down on one of the hot leather high-backed chairs. Not the sort of chair to sit on naked ’cos it sticks to your skin. It took me back to when my dad had a Ford Cortina with a dark PVC interior, seats that on sunny days could heat up to temperatures close to that of molten lava. People always talk about the hot summer of 1976 when it was so hot you could fry eggs on your car bonnet. Well, in my dad’s Ford Cortina we could have slowcooked a leg of lamb. Baby seats were not needed back then ’cos the hot plastic kept young kids stuck to their seat. Everyone had car seat covers in the late ’70s, not for comfort but ’cos they were needed to stop drivers getting third-degree burns and oven gloves were used as driving gloves the steering wheel got so hot.

I picked a row of seating where nobody else was sat and pointed at some food from the menu, which I thought was sausage. A plate turned up with thin strips of dark meat. It could’ve been bits of burnt arse skin scraped off these leather sofas, but it turned out to be horse meat, and going on the amount of meat on the plate I’d say it was the whole horse. It was dried, quite spicy and tasted all right, but I didn’t get to eat much as a man threw me a towel and asked me to get undressed. This place wasn’t just a restaurant, it was a banya, which is a traditional Russian steam bath. Blokes were wandering about in the huge tiled area wearing the little white felt hats but nowt to cover the bollocks. If you’re hot, surely the hat comes off before the pants! It’s not a good look. It’s like being naked with socks on – it looks bloody stupid. It always seems to be the people you don’t want to see naked that are happy to be naked. The man said that the hat was worn to protect the head from the intense heat in the sauna. It was roasting in there. I was asked to lie on a bench where another man then took it upon himself to batter me with a shrub. It was twigs from a birch tree that they use to help blood circulation. As I was being whacked, other men in the sauna sat and cheered and laughed. There was not one bit that was nice about the whole experience. It felt like walking through an automatic car wash.

I’ve had quite a few different styles of massages around the world, and they’re getting madder. In China I had some woman rub my legs wearing gloves that were set on fire. In Thailand I had a woman prisoner bending me about. I saw something on the internet recently where they pile a load of snakes on your back to wriggle about! There’s even some procedure that involves smearing bird poo all over your face to take off dead skin. I experienced this once when my pet magpie poo’d on my ear and I didn’t have anything to wipe it off with. I thought I’d leave it until I got home, but I ended up forgetting it was there. A few hours later, it was pointed out to me, so I cleaned it off to find it had burnt away my ear. But what’s the world come to when a relaxing day is having snakes all over your back and your face smeared in birdshit? I remember when a posh face wash was using Imperial Leather, an expensive bar of soap that we only got out when we had visitors.

After I’d been battered by the bush I was told to pull a chain on a bucket that then tilted and poured a gallon of freezing water over me to finish off the relaxing process: hot to cold, back to hot and then freezing, a bit like Pascha’s personality.

Later, we made our way via Red Square to where I would be boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was the first time I’d seen tourists while being in the country. They were all busy getting photos of themselves stood by St Basil’s Cathedral. When I think of Russia this is the building I picture. It’s not your normal design for a cathedral. It looks like something a Lottery winner or a footballer might build. The amount of different colours on it, you’d think the whole thing had been done using Dulux sample pots. The story goes that Ivan the Terrible was so impressed with the building, once completed, he gouged out the eyes of the architects so they wouldn’t build another one like it. Seems a bit harsh, but then his name says it all.

The biggest queue in Red Square seemed to be of people who wanted to see the dead body of political leader Lenin. He died in 1924 and was embalmed and then put in a glass box. I think I quite like the idea of this. People will never forget him while he’s there to be seen. Statues kind of do this job, but you can’t beat having the actual person, can you? I wonder if we’ll get to a point where we do it with loved ones. I can imagine having Suzanne waxed and stuffed in the front room. I’d just have her sat reading a book. That seems like the most normal thing to have her doing. If someone came round to read the meter or decorate they wouldn’t say anything to her ’cos people don’t interrupt people who are reading. They wouldn’t know she was stuffed. I’d just change the book now and again, so they didn’t think she was a slow reader. I think it would be nicer having her there like that than not at all.

We got to the station early, which was just as well, as it wasn’t easy working out which train I needed to be on. No one spoke English, and the signs didn’t help in the slightest. Russia has the angriest-looking font in the world. When email first came about I used to get told to stop writing everything in capitals as this comes across as though YOU’RE SHOUTING. That’s what all the signs in Russia look like. A love note would look like a warning on a bottle of bleach.

After a lot of wandering around trying to make sense of the departure boards, we eventually found our train. A stern-looking woman who had a face like there was a bad smell in the air checked my ticket and gave me a nod. My little cabin wasn’t as fancy as I thought it was going to be. I was picturing the Orient Express, where the carriages have bright white table cloths and silver cutlery. This had worn red velvet seating like the type you see in an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse in London, and an off-white net curtain. Still, I had my own space, and that was more important than the decor. When on a train at home it’s nice to get a table, but it’s a gamble, as you never know who you’ll be sharing it with. It’s like going on Come Dine with Me.

I sat and played Patience, and made my way through another packet of Revels. Things were going well until about two hours in when guards came to my door and asked to see my ticket. It only gave me the first-class coach for so many stops, and I should have moved a while back. I said I would move but I needed some time to get my stuff together. They waited to make sure. I followed them as we made our way down through the carriages that got smaller, smellier, smokier and busier. We stopped. The same space I’d had to myself in first class was now shared with five others. It was like one of those mad charity events where they try to squeeze as many people as possible into a phonebox. The guard pointed to a bed. I say bed, but it was more like a shelf. This was third class. I don’t even send letters third class.

The people below gestured that I sit with them. The way they were crammed together I presumed they were a family, but they weren’t. The man of the group looked tough. He had a black eye and some cuts and bruises on his face. He offered me a beer, which I took. Richard the director told me I should give him something in return, as this is what travellers do when using this train. I offered the bloke some Revels, which he declined. Just as well, as they’re not to everybody’s taste. I like all the flavours, but some people don’t like the chocolate-covered coffee or the chocolate-covered orange ones. In a way, it’s the equivalent to Russian roulette in the chocolate world. I got my cards out and tried to teach them the higher or lower game.

I didn’t have to sleep in third class in the end, as the guards moved me into second class after it started to kick off between some drunk Polish people and some Russians. I guess they didn’t want us to film it. Second class was like first class without the velvet.

I slept like a baby. When I say slept like a baby, I mean I was up all night. The toilets didn’t work. They were locked half an hour before getting into a station, but then some stations were half an hour apart, which meant they were never open. They also have a rule that you can’t use the loo while at a station, as the toilet had a pedal that empties the loo straight onto the track. I think they should allow you to use the loos while in the station because if human waste was all over the tracks it would stop kids messing about on them. Putting up signs saying ‘Danger’ doesn’t stop them, but if there was a chance of getting shit on their trainers I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be as keen to mess about on the lines.

This sounds like the nicest train journey of all train journeys – passing impressive views whilst travelling in proper comfort – but I don’t think it would be as memorable as the Trans-Siberian because that was pretty grim, and bad memories seem to hang around in my head for longer and are a lot clearer than the happy ones. Maybe it’s because when I’m comfortable in a situation my mind thinks about other things, whereas if I’m not enjoying something I can’t think about anything else. So, if you want an unforgettable holiday, don’t bother with the Caribbean, go to Rhyl for a fortnight.

The next morning Ricky called to tell me that it was 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. To celebrate he suggested I visit Star City, which is home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. A teacher at my school said he waved to Yuri Gagarin when he visited Manchester in 1961 after his trip into space. He said Gagarin drove through Moss Side, which some would say is more dangerous than travelling to outer space, and hundreds of people came out in the rain to show their appreciation. He said he was a true hero who had risked everything to make history for his country. I remember not being that impressed at the time, as I knew monkeys had been launched into space before him. He was basically taking over a monkey’s job. How hard can it have been? Plus, there was so much more that needed inventing back then. What was the rush to get to space? You know, we landed on the moon before someone thought about putting wheels on suitcases!

The teacher then asked us to write a story about doing an heroic act and the speech you would make afterwards. I made up a story in which I had one of my tonsils out to give to my brother. I wrote that I couldn’t do a speech about how I felt about my heroicness afterwards as my throat hurt. The teacher wrote ‘Lazy’ in red pen.

I wasn’t really interested in space when I was younger. It was something that was a big deal before my time. I liken it to how Benidorm was a popular place to go in the 1970s, then Tenerife in the 1980s. Space was all the rage in the 1960s. Since Armstrong landed on the moon it seems everyone has lost interest after seeing there wasn’t much there.

I got to Star City. There was a statue of Gagarin not far away from the apartment he used to live in. The head of the statue was good and looked like him, but the trousers were not so good. Maybe this is why most statues are of naked bodies. Sculptors find it easier carving out a knob and bollocks than getting the creases in trousers to look real.

I’m pretty impressed by the heads that have been carved into Mount Rushmore. More of this should be done. There’s loads of mountains all over the world and we don’t do much with them. Rather than taking a chunk of rock down from a mountain and making a sculpture and then sticking it in a town centre where it just gets in the way, leave the rock where it belongs and sculpt it there.

Also, people get lost when they’re out climbing in mountains in Scotland. What could make life easier for rescue people than being able to pin-point where you are by saying who’s face you’re climbing up. Also, maybe kids would get off their arse more and go walking if they could go and see the faces of One Direction cut into Ben Nevis.