Diary – 14 January 2012

To Moscow! To Moscow! Recently I was in Russia as a guest of the British Council. My friend Damian Barr hosts a regular literary salon in London, and the idea was to put one on here, with the poet and essayist Linor Goralik, the novelist Alexander Ilichevsky, the publisher Dan Franklin and me. Extraliterary considerations: long johns. I asked my Russian friend Natasha, who’s from the Perm region, how cold I could expect Moscow to be in December. She made a hum-haw noise. ‘Actually you can’t know. Sometimes it can be pretty warm. It may even get up to minus five.’ She wasn’t trying to be funny. The great refrain of Chekhov’s Three Sisters has the advantage of not needing a Cyrillic keyboard to reproduce: ‘B Mockby!’ In English lettering, though, it sounds less like a cri de coeur than the name of a bureaucrat in an experimental novel of the 1950s.