Sunday 6^th April

We’ve moved ahead yet another timezone ,so it’s gone midnight, 5pm back home.  The whole nation knows the results yet not one of them has had the decency to think, “hold on, Flicky’s out in Siberia, he’s bound to be waiting on a text”.  Even my wife and daughter who have been primed week after week on these things – nothing.  I begin to fear the worst.  We’ve lost away to Fulham and no-one want to break the bad news.  We’re back in the danger zone of being relegated.

Then a text from ReaL Madras which simply says “Get in ye bassa!” which cheers me up no end.  A quick flurry of texts and emails (thanks KT but footie IS more important than playing the sax, especially when you’re on a train in Siberia heading towards Mongolia, trust me) now start to arrive and the story is good, we won 1-3, some good goals, we are now 13^th and looking good for survival, 10 points clear with only 5 games of the season left to play, and we’ve now won 3 on the trot.

I sleep for a while until the Match of the Day reports come in at 6am but don’t care about being woken up.

We pull into Krasnoyarsk and the lady train attendant emerges with an ice pick in her hand.  I have visons of her doing a Trotsky on me, but thankfully, she just climbs underneath the train and chips away at some huge lumps of ice which have built up during the journey.

Krasnoyarsk looks pretty much like most of the cities we’ve been to so far.  Grotty tower blocks on the outskirts, smarter business centres in the heart of the city.  It is 11am and -5 so we head for a taxi which takes us out of the relatively nice business sector, across the river to our “hotel” on the side of a run down industrial area.  I don’t care, we check in, grab a coffee while our rooms are cleaned, then I have a quick “bath” in the shower basin and spend the rest of the afternoon trying and failing to connect to the internet, so doing bits of catch up work and hacking into other machines on the hotel network.  I was tired and bored.  Some of that skiing where they cross country ski around a circuit and pop rifles is on, and I recognise a lot of the regions represented, Krasnoyarskiy Kray, where I currently am, come 2^nd so I spend another hour or so just idly browsing a map of the Russian Federation on my laptop.  It is the same time here as it is in Beijing, and I’m more hours on from Moscow than Moscow is from home.  I think it’s safe to say that by the time we’re done here, I will honestly be able to say that I’ve “done” Russia.

Nik comes back from meeting a friend and tells me its perishingly cold outside and is going to go down to “-17, I think”.  The weather forecast comes on and says -9.  Who knows?  It’s cold again after the brief warm spell of last week.  I get messages from the UK saying  they’ve had a bit of snow and that it’s about +6 degrees and worry for them, wondering how they’ll cope.