OUR MAN IN VOLOGDA

I am back from Vologda.

It was a city of a third of a million but felt like Wokingham. Though obviously not in every respect.

I will now list everything of interest in Vologda, in roughly decending order:

1) the world's oldest statue of Lenin, from 1924. The statue is also lifesize, which doesn't make it a very impressive monument (Lenin was, I now know, rather short). But they'd stuck him on a big pedestal to compenstate. Though now you really have to crane your neck to see him. He looks a bit lost up there to be honest.

2) a Christmas tree carved from ice, and a big children's slide made of blocks of ice. Julia, who came with me on the trip, slid down this (the slide, not the tree!) and scared the bejesus out of all the little kiddies.

3) some nice wooden buildings in the centre, that people still lived in, and looked about to collapse. The irony being, they had probably looked that way since they were first built hundreds of years ago.

4) a cool statue of a bloke on a horse (with no plaque so I don't know who he was). But he was overlooking...

5) ...the river Vologda. It wasn't very big. But it was totally frozen over. I fell on my backside several times, indeed once slid along on it for at least three metres, and amused the ice fishermen. The small children would also probably have laughed had Julia not scared them about an hour before.

6) no phone reception. The first place in Russia I've been to where I couldn't get a signal on my mobile.

7) a very unbusy art gallery in an old church in the city Kremlin. The gallery only displayed pictures by one artist, and he wasn't even from Vologda. And the gallery staff (all seven of them, for two of us) were so flummoxed by actually having visitors to the gallery that they forgot to charge us foreigners' prices.

8) the local club. To celebrate the highly romantic Women's Day, the club administration presented Julia with two separate and different porcelain models of frogs having group sex. One of these now has pride of place on my TV next to the statue of a bear being intimate with a sheep (a present from my Welsh flatmate).

9) lastly, and least interestingly, the town made their own potato crisps, which Julia liked. And all the restaurants cooked with garlic in every dish, which I approved of.

A strange world, isn't it?