THAT WAS RUSSIA

To clear up a bit of confusion... I am already back in the UK, but I have such a backlog of Russia stories to write about that I'll probably be posting on-and-off for another month or so! The trouble is, you can either live your life or write about it - but not both at once. For the past month or two I've been living my life, and now I'm back in England I have time to write about it. Does that say anything about the two countries? Probably not; just about me.

As you might expect, my departure from Russia - for what may be the foreseeable future - was not uneventful. She wouldn't let me leave without a crisis or two to remember her by. I'll write about it now, even though it'll put my weblog out of sync. I'll trust that you won't all be too confused.

Anyway.

As part of my contract, I had a driver booked to take me nice and safely from my front door to the airport, which is outside the city to the south. As it happened, the driver turned up five hours before my plane was due to fly, and such un-Russian time-keeping started to make me suspicious.

About twenty minutes into the journey, the driver, Artyom, who I know passingly well, said:
'James. I have very busy day today. If it is okay I will drop you at the train station and you get fast train to airport, yes.'

Normally I wouldn't be too happy about this, but as I knew the driver and had taken the very efficient, quick and clean airport train before, I agreed. Of course, this meant that we now had to drive into the centre of Moscow rather than round the ring road. It also explained the five hour buffer the driver had allowed.

We got within three hundred yards of the station and the traffic ground to a halt. Five minutes passed; ten; fifteen. We inched forward a little and could suddenly see the problem - a tram had come off its track and veered over into the incoming traffic, blocking two lanes. It was obvious that we weren't going anywhere for a while, and though I still had three and a half hours until my flight, I only had fifteen minutes until the train to the airport was due to leave.

Artyom made a split-second decision. He drove the car up in front of a builder's yard, jumped out, and started hauling my enormous suitcase out the back of the car. 'Come on, James! Run!' he implored, and started to leg it down the street with my handluggage, leaving me to handle 'the beast'.

Now I doubt you've ever run down a busy, potholed pavement with a 30kg+suitcase on wheels chundering along behind you. Even worse, it was one of those very scenic but completely impractical streets with trees planted every 15 metres right in the middle of the pavement. It was like Ultimate Pinball, although I think I did well only running over three pedestrians, a small dog and myself (twice).

I made it to the train, retrieved my handluggage, bought a ticket, and was seated in a carriage before you could say 'angry mob'.

The next obstacle to a successful journey home was the check-in desk. A BA staff member took me out of the queue to a special frequent flier zone just because I had an 'e-ticket', which was nice, and I was even assigned a staff member, 'Tanya', to look after me. Inexplicably, there was a camera crew hovering around but I ignored them long enough to heave my suitcase up onto the conveyor.

'Thirty five kilos, sir,' Tanya said, unbelievingly. 'I'm afraid that our absolute maximum is 32.' And I know from experience that you often have to pay excess on anything over 26.

So there I was, opening my giant suitcase on the floor of the airport. What could I take out? Aha - my jacket. Never mind that I was already holding my winter coat and the temperature outside was a balmy 25. And I was wearing my thickest jumper and jeans just to bring the weight down. And look - my towels! They're heavy.

I removed my towels and checked my bag - hovering around 32 and a half kilos - without being charged excess. At the time I assumed it was because I was boarding with the magical e-ticket (which either gets me privileges, or creates confusion, depending on whether the airport staff know what the hell it is). There was another possible reason, which came to light later.

But in the meantime, I was left on the ground floor of the airport with a trolley stacked with - one very large piece of hundluggage, one winter coat (I was wearing my jacket), and six assorted fluffy pink towels. There was no way I could go anywhere without at least securing a plastic bag for the towels. After begging the BA desk for one (which was unsuccessful), I had an idea. It's the kind of idea that always seems to be original and unique when you yourself have it, but later you realise that not only has everyone else had it before, so have you. The idea was to buy something small from a shop, and thus get a plastic bag with the purchase. Genius, eh?

The only flaw in my plan was that I was on the ground floor, and the shops were on the first. The only was between the two seemed to be by escalator, and have you ever tried getting a trolley onto an escalator? The only alternative - carrying all my handluggage by hand - was promptly ruled out after the first attempt resulted in towels scattering to the wind. It's only now that I realise the irony of having handluggage that is impossible to carry by hand. Although trolleyluggage isn't as catchy.

At this point I had the realisation that the likelihood of me getting the towels to the plane were slim, and even if I did so, there was little chance that I would be allowed to board with so much luggage. So I decided to bin the towels. But could I find a bin in the airport? Of course not. It's an airport. Again, I had several options. I did consider leaving the terminal briefly to dump the towels in a bush. But I thought that that would like highly suspicious and probably end up with me being arrested. I also thought about asking my friendly friend at the BA helpdesk to dispose of them for me, but one look at the condition of the towels (remember - they had been on the floor, and not machine washed for six months) and I decided not to inflict that on him. Even though he couldn't get me a plastic bag.

To cut a very long story long, I finally managed to buy a newspaper from a kiosk and stash the towels in that. That was the last major obstacle but I was then nearly scuppered by my own idiocy.

When I had checked my bag in, my personal assistant Tatiana told me that I would be boarding from Zone C, Gate 3. After I found a bag for the towels, I looked up to see Gate 3 written boldly on the sign above me. I of course followed the arrow round to the left to the gate. Now stop me if I'm wrong, but a good way to number gates and zones would be like this:

Zone A Gates 1-5
Zone B Gates 6-10
Zone C Gates 11-15

- and so on. Instead, this airport had decided to number them like this:

Zone A Gates 1-5
Zone B Gates 1-5
Zone C Gates 1-5

- and so on. So in fact there were a number of Gate 1s, Gate 2s, Gate 3s. And I had the right gate number but the wrong zone, and therefore the wrong gate. Of course, I didn't realise this at the time. 'But there are security checks,' I hear you say. And you would be right. And on this particular day, the security check involved me trying to give my documents to the officials, and the officials waving me through.

It wasn't until I was past security that I realised that my fellow travellers were all, how should I put it, a little bit darker-skinned than me. They looked neither particularly English, nor especially Russian. Just to be on the safe side, I decided to double back and ask one of the officials where exactly this flight was going.

'Uzbekistan.'

Oops.

Fortunately I had time to leave this gate and find the real one. Once again I went through the security checks - slightly more rigorous, but again not objecting to me having three items of handluggage. Oops, I bought some cigarettes for my mum so by this time I had four.

I got to the gate itself only to be greeted by along table filled with champagne glasses and other refreshments.

'Have some champagne, sir,' one BA staff member offered.

It turned out that BA were celebrating one year of flights from that particular airport (earlier, they had flown from Sheremetievo in the north). Perhaps this was why I hadn't been charged for excess, especially with a camera crew hovering.

In the end, I made it back home without further adventures, and even managed to stash three of my four bits of handluggage precariously in the overhead locker without them falling and injuring my fellow travellers.