In February the British Council sent four British writers -- Mike Gayle, Tim Lott, Marian Keyes and myself to Russia for a week. I accepted the invitation last year. Jumped at the chance. A week in Russia, possibly even going as far as Siberia? Hell yeah. I grew up in a very small, very rough timber town in New Zealand -- ok, so British-ish Council then -- travelling to Siberia was not part of my childhood dream. (Though seeing the Bolshoi certainly was. Which I did in Moscow. And went backstage. And saw how teeny tiny those little dancers are. And heard opera singers opera-in. But that’s not what I’m talking about now.)

Russia? In winter? For Valentine’s Day? Of course I was going to say yes. I like these trips. You get to meet new people, pick up the yes/no/thankyou/coffee please of another language, discover somewhere that of course is going to feature in at least one chapter of the next book -- and play with other writers. Yes, I do mean get drunk with other writers. By far the best way to communicate with writers that I’ve found to date.

So it was with something of a shock that I received Mike’s email saying he’d heard we weren’t going to be travelling together at all. The BC was sending four British writers to Russia for a week -- but we would be in different cities at different times. All alone. With minders. Strangers. Which was a bit of a shock. I hate strangers. And writers like to travel in packs. It makes us happy to share God-awful experiences –- and to get drunk together. It’s a bonding experience and one of the things the British Council clearly didn’t understand was part of all our reasons (well, mine & Tim & Mike’s anyway, I never met Marian to ask) for agreeing to go.

Of course we want to spread the glories of British culture across the planet. Of course we are interested in dialogue and a free and frank exchange of ideas. And of course we want to get to know another land, its people, take away some version of who they might be, even from as fleeting a visit as a week. And we also want to get pissed with each other and bitch about how our publishers don’t understand us. (All right, maybe that’s just me.)

Despite my fears of travelling alone though, the flight to Moscow was perfectly uneventful. And not alone either -- Tim was travelling to Moscow and stopping there for three days, while I was to catch a connecting overnight flight to Novosibirsk.

Call me geographically challenged but it had taken a little trawling of the internet to realise Novosibirsk is the unofficial capital of Siberia. (Though I gather there isn’t an official capital either.) And rather a lot more trawling to find an atlas that had both Moscow and Novosibirsk on the same, projection-mangled page. Not close. Further than London to Moscow. A really long way away. Not geographically, not really. I’ve travelled to and from New Zealand about a dozen times. So I understand long haul flights. But Novosibirsk has to be the furthest I’ve travelled in concept. Siberia. Cold. Russia. Soviet. Cyrillic alphabet. No one I know has ever been there. Not a mention in the Time Out Guide. Helluva foreign.

The arrival in Moscow defied all the warnings culled from both guidebooks and the British Council’s "how to cope in Russia" pages. Customs was quick and efficient, there were no queues, there were no hassles. Meeting Matt my British Council minder for the week was easy too. Once I’d sussed with relief that he wasn’t the non-English speaking bloke picking up a musician for the BC.

Only the incredibly ugly seventies-style ceiling (apparently made from up-turned copper cake tins) of Sheremetyevo airport so far made any effort at all to conform to what I’d been expecting. (Despite trying my hardest to not have expectations and convince myself that the only things I knew about Russia were inevitably based on Western propaganda anyway.) Tim Lott took his car to the Moscow hotel and I followed Matt to the check-in for internal flights. Small queue, no problems, bag checked on and whisked away. So far, so slightly dirty ageing airport, but not much different from any other airport and certainly way less ugly than LAX.

And then we went to wait at the gate. And now it started looking like the Russia pictures of my dreaming. Everyone was wearing either fur or much heavier coats than I was -- we were after all, headed for Siberia. I’d done my best for a big warm coat (stolen the wife’s), but Brixton’s chill winds tend to leave one slightly under-dressed for the minus 30 degrees I’d been led to expect in Novosibirsk. So they were all bundled up and yet apparently not sweltering in the over-heated waiting area. I however was under-bundled and hot already.

This was to prove a pattern for the rest of the visit -- not quite warm enough outdoors, way too hot indoors. But it wasn’t the heavy clothing that confirmed my status on foreign soil -- it was the smoke. The lit cigarette in two out of three hands. The all-over smoking area. The pall of pale blue that hung over the room.

Now, I abhor Californian-style body-purity as much as the next sane human, but I don’t smoke. I don’t like the smell of smoke and I don’t like breathing it in much either. I knew people smoked in Russia. I knew this was the norm. But loathing jazz as I do, I have had no need to sit in an entirely smoke-fugged environment since my childhood car journeys, both parents smoking continuously, my sister and I carsick in the back. (Somehow it never occurred to my Mum and Dad that merely abstaining for an hour might make the journey all that much faster -- certainly would cut back on roadside vomit breaks.)

Anyway, I didn’t throw up. I breathed it in. The smoke of Mother Russia. That and the caffeine-rich black coffee. (Milk is not the usual with tea or coffee and I hadn’t yet worked out how to ask for it.) Hell, on London time it was eight at night. I was tempted to ask for alcohol to go with it but refrained, aware I didn’t need to show the young and possibly impressionable Matt my true colours too early.

The flight to Siberia -- on Aeroflot and remarkably modern & normal it was too -- passed uneventfully and smoke-free. By the time we arrived in Novosibirsk (a four-hour journey from Moscow -- taking longer than the first trip from Heathrow to Moscow) it was 5:30 in the Siberian morning, six hours ahead of GMT. I was now a wee bit tired. Matt had been up all night. He was knackered.

The plane disgorged us right on to the tarmac, the walk to the (literally) airport hangar where the bags were to be picked up was a few minutes, I was treading Siberian soil. Rush of small-town-girl excitement, tiredness all gone. The local greeter Dimitri was waiting for us, ready to grab us and go. But unlike the knowing Siberians I had not taken my bags on board with me. I’d noticed some of the locals appeared to be taking all their bags on board -- with no September 11th-style imprecations to limit themselves to one small piece of hand luggage.

Then I found out why. We went into the hangar -- where we were harassed for the following ninety minutes by taxi drivers who really didn’t believe we were being picked up. That we had a driver. That he had a car waiting for us. Nicely harassed, helpfully harassed, politely harassed, but harassed all the same. Inside the hangar that was also the taxi drivers’ pick-up place, that was also the arrivals hall, that was also baggage reclaim, there was a luggage conveyor belt just like every other airport I’ve ever been in. There were the usual big rubber flaps leading on to the conveyor belt behind which luggage was being unloaded. And there were also high metal bars, basically creating a cage around the whole area.

When flying to Novosibirsk do not lose your baggage receipt. You will need it. For about fifty minutes we waited on the non-conveyor belt side of the bars. Me and the other poor unfortunates who had not had the sense to take their bags on board with them. Nothing happened. Then the gate was opened. We walked through. And stood by the conveyor belt. Still nothing happened. Every now and then an announcement was made, people nodded to each other, the young guy picking us up shrugged, my minder explained they were saying there were ‘technical difficulties’ -- an old Soviet favourite of a term apparently.

"What’s wrong? Technical difficulties."
"My car has been stolen. Technical difficulties."
"Why have you confiscated my passport? Technical difficulties."

This was made all the more interesting by the fact that across the top of one wall of this hangar was a huge, dated banner welcoming us to Novosibirsk -- Home Of Technical Exhibitions. After almost an hour and a half, by which time I was feeling not only knackered myself but also incredibly guilty for keeping Matt awake this long and making Dimitri get up horribly early only to have to wait ages for my bag -- the luggage eventually came through.

I picked up my bag, proved the tiny sticker on the bag matched the small sticker on the back of my plane ticket and we went outside. Into the snow and the car park to find that the taxi that had been waiting for us all this time already had another (clearly very ready) passenger who had also been waiting for us all this time. I didn’t learn the Russian for sorry.

The drive was another experience. Not that the driver was not good -- given the conditions he was incredibly adept and anyway I’ve caught way too many minicabs to and from South London to care too much about driving expertise. But it certainly looked as if he was driving on pure ice. Lots of it. Snow that was compacted and had turned sheet-solid. Not that I could see this too clearly as the windows -- other than the front windscreen -- were covered with dark plastic. The car was a Lada not a limo, but still the dark plastic tinted windows. The driver drove across the ice as if it were tyre-hugging grit. He did it really well. I suppose he was used to it.

And after a roundabout journey to drop off the first passenger -- who remained Bond-movie-silent throughout the journey -- we were finally deposited at our hotel. Which is when things not only got really Russian, they also became incredibly stereotypical, movie-set backdrop, everything you’ve been told but assumed was no longer true, everything you just know middle America still thinks Russia is. And at the Tsentralnaya Hotel, it was. Hell, it was what my mother thinks Russia is.

It was brown. And a bit orange. With a little more beige thrown in. if I could have picked up the incredibly heavy dark wood coffee table in the ‘lounge’ of my ‘suite’ I might have sold it for a vast amount of money for the truly gorgeous piece of seventies kitsch it was. But then I would have had to carry it past the security guard stationed next to the lift.

There was a huge fridge in the room. Not a hotel-sized fridge, but a real, proper home-size fridge. It rumbled. I put bathroom tap water into the china teapot and left it in the fridge to cool. The room was very hot. It was only four days later in Moscow that I heard stories of tourists not drinking the water. Not washing their teeth with the water. Idiots.

The deluxe double room had two narrow single beds. The plug attached to the bath with a piece of fishing wire didn’t fit either the bath or the sink. Nor was there a shower curtain. The towels piled up in the bathroom were tea towels. Lots of them, big ones, but tea-towel material. They were orange and brown and beige too. In stripes.

While I unpacked my wife was trying to get through to call me in the room, ask how the flight went. The hotel staff did not speak English. Any. At all. She called my mobile. With the help of the Time Out guide we worked out the room number in Russian and she tried again.

Still through to reception and still nyet. They agreed with her that I was in room 504. Pyet nul chiteerney. Duffy -- pronounced Darrfi -- da. Telefon? Nyet. The next morning Matt found in his room a list of direct room number to call from outside. There wasn’t a list in my room. But that time the mobile bill was rocketing anyway so we’d given up.

So it was brown and orange. No-one spoke English, I hadn’t eaten for about twelve hours, had had a cup of coffee seven hours earlier. I drank fizzy vitamin C in the now-cold water from the teapot in my fridge. Sure the room was a little depressing but with all the lights on it cheered up in a very orange and beige way. The television was crackly and in Russian but the newsreader’s voice made the room feel a little less lonely.

As I pulled the (nylon, apricot) curtains I saw the snow piled up across the road and a digital clock on the side of a building. It was eight thirty in the morning and minus four degrees. Surprisingly warm. Now I felt I was somewhere different. Now it felt like an adventure. I’ve stayed in a B&B in Leeds where the owner was drinking from his whiskey bottle at nine in the morning, it was way nastier and much dirtier than this. The sheets were striped like the ones I had as a kid. And they were clean. Temazepam saved me from jetlag insomnia and I slept away my first-night-away-from-home blues. It was morning anyway.

Two nights later I am at a poetry reading. In a nuclear bunker. To get here we have walked through the snow and a warren of an overheated subway which doubles as a market -- vodka, fur, big boots -- and then up into the cold again. But apparently this is not cold. It is minus seven degrees -- a ‘soft’ winter. We walk down steps from the street. The door -- wedged open -- is about a foot thick. Solid. We go in. To a Mexican restaurant. Tortillas, margaritas and a band. In ponchos and sombreros.

I am to read first followed by a dozen or more Siberian poets. This is a Syllka, a ‘poetry jam’. I am treated like something of a guest of honour -- despite the fact that most people here do not speak any English. The event takes place in the part of the building that is not a Mexican restaurant. It is not anything yet, just a concrete basement. But then three years ago the Mexican restaurant was waist high in water and the ‘arts entrepreneurs’ who created it on only $500 of funding paddled their way through the flooded building in rubber canoes.

Now it is a thriving business, they hope the same for their arts’ centre to be. Two nights earlier Aleksei showed me round the building, Andrei simultaneously translating his words -- his enthusiasm I understood. The planned entrance, the walls-as-gallery, the bar, the stage, the seating, the dressing rooms. Walked us through a freezing ex-bunker and made it look possible. If they could see nachos beneath the waves, I guess a simple stage and curtains isn’t too much to dream.

People come in slowly and the empty basement fills up. We sit on wooden benches, the basement dust gathering on snow-wet boots. I read and maybe a quarter of the audience understand me, their English is very much better than the dozen words of Russian I have learned in three days -- and use as an introduction to ingratiate myself with the audience.

They appear to find the funny bits funny. Either that or they are amused by the video projections Dimitri and Max are making with my face on the back wall. Then Yana reads me in translation. She has caught my intonation, my speed. She is not a performer but my visit here is her baby -- so she tries. And does me very well. Then the poets.

This evening is meant to last an hour, maybe two. But it seems that every poet in Siberia is ready to read their work. And they are all men. Except for Julia. I figure Julia is the only woman poet in Siberia. Certainly she is the only one I have seen so far and this is the second all-Siberian poetry event I have attended. She does not seem very sober.

At the last reading her poem consisted pretty much entirely of the lines "Vanya bring me back a red dress from Moscow. Vanya bring me back a red dress." And repeated. With actions. Eyes closed, body-stroking actions. It occurs to me that perhaps getting to be a woman poet in Siberia might take being a little obvious. Tonight she does not read the red dress poem. But she is wearing a straw hat and a thin cotton skirt in the nuclear bunker in winter. She has a group with her. They are entranced by Julia, talk all through the other poets. I don’t see anyone ask them to shut up.

My translator leaves for the bar. I wait for Igor. I heard him the day before and though I have no idea what he is saying, his voice sounds like music. Then there is polite Serge who gives a little bow whenever he sees me. He’s from the Mongolian side of the border, perhaps they do polite there.

In the background Aleksei is preparing the ‘Russian smorgasbord’. Baked potatoes, gherkins, cheese, sausage. A huge bottle of vodka. It looks good. Eventually the poetry is done. There is eating and drinking. I try to talk to Julia, hope for some girl-bonding, but her group are tight around her. I do attract the attention of her husband. Andrei sticks close, translating as we go. A baked potato is placed in my hand and a little man starts bringing me big shots of vodka. He is a gravedigger. Rips the "In memoriam" page from the local paper to explain himself.

A designer makes it her job to feed me. You must drink then eat, drink alternately. She hands me another plastic cup, half full, I sip and am encouraged to drink it all down. The designer is ready with a plate of cranberries. They are not yet thawed. I’m told they are good for Vitamin C. I crunch, swallow. More vodka. Now I am brought a local delicacy. I bite. It smells and tatses like smoked cheese. It is salar -- pig fat. Oddly, I am not disgusted. I drink the next shot of vodka.

The little gravedigger has turned his attention to Julia. Julia’s husband meanwhile is telling me how much he hates gays, I get out a photo of my wife. He does not believe me. And anyway, he only hates male gays. Julia diverts her attention from the gravedigger to warn me off. Truly, I am not interested. The designer is still feeding me salar and cranberries, alternate mouthfuls, apparently this will stop a hangover, her boyfriend is bringing vodka shots, the potato is cooling in my hand, Aleksei fusses with the food table. It still looks good.

Serge leaves with a bow, Igor takes his voice to the bar, Yana and the video boys start to tidy up the equipment. This place feels exciting, dangerous. The people are different. Very intense. There is no jaded-London. I like it. The vodka too.

Julia’s husband notices the gravedigger with Julia. He breaks away to throw a punch at the smaller man. Several poets step in and out. I am watching a scuffle, in a nuclear bunker-turned-arts-centre in Siberia, I have a cold baked potato in my hand. Aleksei is tidying away the goodies, the massive vodka bottle is still only half done. My minder has party intentions, I assure him I can get back to the hotel alone. I walk out into the cold, past the huge Lenin statue, the tiny church in the middle of the road marking the centre of the Russian Empire and round the corner to my hotel.

My room is brown and orange and pink. I imagine it was last decorated in 1972. But it is clean and very warm. I drink water from the bathroom tap. I sleep for three hours and then get up to catch the early flight to Moscow. I do not have a hangover.

The hotel in Moscow was plush. Western. Easy. The cafès in Moscow were groovy and modern. Good coffee. The publishers in Moscow were well dressed and articulate and sophisticated. St Basil’s was exciting, Red Square smaller than I expected, Lenin’s mausoleum bigger. Dinners were great, journalists intelligent and interested.

And I know it’s a childhood of propaganda and too many movies and really just silly of me -- but of the two, Novosibirsk felt like "Russia’. Soldiers at the ballet. Huge statues in the square. Big snow. I’m glad I got to stay in the Hotel Tsentralnaya. I’m glad I dried myself with tea towels. And I’m glad I drank the water. The place where the minibar wasn’t -- that felt like somewhere new.