Siberia, the Place to Be

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"My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying."
- Ed Furgol

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I'm cold, ill and depressed - and I'm going to Moscow in a few weeks. Which is unlikely to change things. The famous Russian weather and equally famous Russian soul.

The Polish school couldn't offer much in the way of perks, the Bulgarian school isn't actually finished yet, and the other Moscow school has a five page contract consisting mostly of threats. The Czech school is impossibly slow to communicate, the Hungarian school want someone better qualified, and the other Czech school refuse to give any information.

On the plus side, My near future employers arrange visa, accommodation, insurance etc, and pay well. On the minus side, it's in a paranoid, freezing city and the school's dull and corporate. On the plus side it's useful experience, it'll look good on my CV and I'm finally getting to see the world. On the minus side...well, paranoid, freezing and corporate.

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Yesterday, a woman in a white coat stood over me, sticking needles into my flesh. Yes, inoculations - against measles, rubella, tuberculosis, two kind of hepatitis and polio. With rabies to come.

After that, window installation. No, not the operating system - an actual window. With hammers, chisels, nails, pliers and putty. And some glass. Lots easing into position, pushing into crevices, smoothing gently with hands, leverage, and banging.

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On the front page of the local rag, a mother pleading for a police crackdown on marijuana. Why? Because she's convinced it made her son kill himself. Oh, and it also caused his schizophrenia.

What has this woman been smoking?

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Years ago, my hobby was collecting language textbooks. I must have hundreds of them, stacked away in boxes - Croatian, Mandarin, Icelandic, even some Hopi. But they've come in useful because...there's five books on Russian there.

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How many weddings have you been to where you just knew the marriage wouldn't last? Where it was just painfully obvious that the groom had been pressured into it, or the bride was trying to persuade herself she was it was what she wanted, or the two of them were just hoping they'd regain their fading love over the honeymoon.

After the dull bit in church, after the eating of bad catered food and the disco (and the punch up, if you go to that kind of wedding), you maybe compared predictions with a close friend in a quiet corner. You give the happy couple eighteen months, possibly a year; Your friend says a year at the outside. You nod sagely to yourselves and drink some more cheap red wine.

Of course, you might be wrong. I've known couples who were perfectly suited but barely lasted six months. Actually I've been one half of several couples that were amazingly well matched - but only by moonlight. And more importantly there's been some odd couples who grew old happily together.

Well, now there's an online version of that conversation in the corner. Wedding Betting dot com. Is it a bit of hard-bitten cynical fun, one more indicator of a sick and dying civilisation, a hoax...or all three?

While you're pondering, add Rate My Cock and Marry Our Daughter (which is a hoax) to the list.

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