Have you ever drunk vodka out of a teapot? I have, though I still don’t fully understand why.
I was in the grim Urals city of Sverdlovsk, in a large echoing Soviet hotel restaurant, consuming the usual unlovely Marxist dinner of chewy chicken cutlets and chewier fried potatoes.
I and my companion, my fixer and interpreter Rachel, thought vodka would improve the meal. Anything would have.
All around us, an almost totally male clientele were cheerfully drinking vodka from bottles brightly labelled with the word ‘Vodka’. We asked the waiter to bring us some. He replied that the restaurant did not have any vodka and did not serve it.
We pointed indignantly to the surrounding tables. Just as Admiral Horatio Nelson once claimed he could not see an important signal (which he planned to disobey), the waiter, very persuasively, said that he could not see any vodka. We might think we did, but we were mistaken.
The usual solution to problems of this kind was to offer a bribe, generally of Western cigarettes (I always carried a supply, though I do not smoke). But not here in Sverdlovsk (then named after an especially nasty Communist weasel, now restored to its original name of Yekaterinburg).
It was then a city so full of secret weapons factories that it had, until a few days before, been completely closed to foreigners for more than 50 years. That was why I was there, to see what one of these long-closed cities was like, and to search (in vain, as it turned out) for the place where the murdered Tsar had been buried back in 1918.
Bribery having failed, making a fuss might work. And eventually it did. The Head Waiter was summoned to mediate, and, after listening carefully, nodded solemnly and walked away, clearly deep in thought.
A short while later a tray was brought to us, bearing a teapot full of vodka, wrapped in a linen cloth, and two cups with saucers. I have to say that the vodka, which was perfectly good of its type, tasted very strange when drunk in this manner.
But Rachel reckoned it would only cause trouble if I decanted the Communist firewater into a glass, so we sipped away from our cups, like dowager duchesses.
Later (was it revenge?) Rachel was telephoned every hour on the hour all through the night, by a prostitute offering her services.
Rachel, who is both heterosexual and sensible, explained to the woman that she and I had swapped rooms, and gave her my room number in case she wanted to persist.
But she said that the KGB had given her strict orders to call that particular room, until she was hired or the sun rose, and she wasn’t going to disobey them. And so it went, until grim dawn broke over the freezing city.
Yes, it was mad, but there was logic to it all. It was, in a way, like the wild logic of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’, in which it is always teatime, gardeners paint white roses red, rabbits wear waistcoats, and croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos.
The prostitute, for example, was obeying orders, as it was always wise to do (and still is) when dealing with the Moscow-run Organs of Security.
The restaurant, where foreigners had never dined before, was afraid to serve spirits to such foreigners publicly in case it violated some rule they did not know, but which could have brought savage punishment on them. Safer to say: ‘Nyet!’
When at last I returned to the sensible, rational West I at first felt a great relief. I was back in the Kingdom of Reason.
But as the years have passed, I noticed that the same sort of suspicion and obstruction was creeping into British life, usually on the pretext of health and safety.
This is basically a fear of grasping lawyers and no-win, no-fee lawsuits, which often prevents (for example) innocent parades.
But there are other things, in my case usually to do with our privatised railways, aboard whose trains I spend a terrifyingly large part of my life.
Here is a simple example. The train I take to work most mornings is a highly sophisticated Japanese (but British-assembled) super-express, part of a class which cost us about £3billion some years ago, to take advantage of an electrification scheme which cost another £2.8 billion.
It could easily do the journey from my home town, Oxford, to London in 45 minutes, or perhaps 48 with a stop in the middle. It runs quite swiftly between Oxford and the main intermediate station, Reading.
But if it does this part of the trip quickly, it then has to sit, sometimes for as long as eight minutes, before it is allowed to leave. I often fear that if it lingers much longer I shall be asked to pay council tax in Reading.
As a result it is not significantly faster than the throaty old British Rail diesels and clattering carriages on which I used to do the same journey 40 years ago.
I am pretty certain this is because of the crazy system under which, rather than building and running a good, punctual railway, we rely on a sort of penal system to force a crummy, decrepit railway to be a tiny bit better.
Train companies are effectively fined through a system called ‘delay repay’ when their trains are late, and the money is handed to delayed passengers. It can cost many millions per year. The best way to avoid this is obviously to be on time. But not in Wonderland Britain, where it is safer by far to pad out timetables with longer stops, to avoid being late.
Nobody admits this or calls it by its true name, just as the built-in inefficiencies of the Communist system were never openly acknowledged. They call it ‘recovery time’ but it might just explain two mad things that happened to me last week. I’m not saying it does explain it – just guessing.
In one, my train bound for the depths of the Cotswolds was suddenly halted at Reading and all its passengers ordered off. There were delays ahead, explained by one of the litany of excuses – signal failures, broken rails, hot weather, wind, cold weather, rain, snow, points failures, track circuit failures, bridge strikes, trespassers-on-the-line and, for all I know, alien abductions – which are constantly deployed and are effectively uncheckable.
With untypical speed, the train was then waved off towards the Cotswolds, but by another route, where none of us wanted to go. I expect it arrived at its terminus sooner than if it had stuck to its original path. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.
The next day, my train home to Oxford was announced, at London’s Paddington station. But it would not actually be stopping at Oxford (trespassers again). So it was useless to most of the people who wanted to travel on it.
Its first stop would be the village of Long Hanborough, population 3,800, before it disappeared among the sheep, stone villages and celebrity farms to the West. As it happens, the trespassers (why are there so many of them nowadays?) either evaporated or stopped trespassing, and the train halted at Oxford anyway, despite containing no passengers who wanted to go there.
These are symptoms of a crazy country, in which the sane are tormented with stupidity. Bring me a cup of vodka, someone.
