Free Further Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes

and lovely. Just as soon as they turned off the deafening techno.
    We rattled through the snowy night between two small points on this enormous land mass.
Day two
    And then it was morning and we had arrived in the beautiful city of Nizhni Novgorod. (I love saying that. ‘I was in Nizzzhhhhhni Novgorod, you know.’ Even now, I still look for chances, however tenuous, to drop it into conversations. ‘So you like chocolate, do you? Funnily enough, I had some lovely chocolate in Nizzzhhhni Novgorod.’)
    God, it was cold, though, the kind of cold where it hurts to breathe. Although not by local standards – they were having a heatwave. Normally, at that time of year, it was thirty below, but this was a balmy, unseasonable minus ten.
    We were met by a wonderful young man called Artim, checked into our hotel, the dinkiest, cosiest, most charming place. From our bedroom window we could see children ice-skating on a frozen football pitch. I felt very far from home. In a nice way.
    My first gig was a creative-writing session with some university students. Artim, Valya, Himself and myself descended into the bowels of a violet-walled nightclub, where said students slumped around, reassuringly surly and disenchanted. I beamed with pleasure. I can’t be doing with those eager, puppy-eyed teenagers who are keen to learn. It’s not natural.
    My next engagement was a television interview. Off we all went in Artim’s car, our numbers swelled further by a sweet if slightly smelly student called Pyotr, who’d developed a crush on me in the violet-walled nightclub. We were stopped twice by military police en route to the telly station.
    The interviewer was a skinny, super-intense bloke who called himself Ed and wanted to talk about ‘art’.
    ‘Would you die for your art?’
    Well, of course I wouldn’t. But I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I nodded yes, certainly, indeed’n I would.
    But then he threw a curveball. ‘We have just heard the tragic news that your Princess Margaret has died. Would you like to say something?’
    Caught on the hop, I said the first thing that came into my head: ‘They should have let her marry the man she loved. The bastards.’
    This caused confusion. ‘You do not love your royal family?’
    ‘Irish, see? Not mine.’
    More confusion. When the interview ended, we decided to go for a drink and Ed said he’d come too. And so would his researcher. By now, my entourage had swelled to Jennifer Lopez-size proportions.
    Back in the hotel, before we went out for dinner, Himself and myself were hit by a sudden longing for coffee. Luckily we had sachets – they’d been in our little welcome packs on the train – and all we needed was boiling water, so I volunteered to try out my Russian on the hotel staff. Standing in front of the mirror, I practised a few times: a gracious smile, then ‘Zdrastvuti.’ (Hello.) ‘Voda, pazhalsta.’ (Water, please.)
    Down I went, smiled at the lady and delivered the line.
    ‘Hmmm?’ she went. ‘Oh! You want hot water? Would you like it here or in your room? Whichever you like, it’s up to you.’
    ‘Er, right. Up in the room, so.’
    (Helpful hint for you here, which I discovered entirely by accident because I wanted to cool my coffee so I could drink it: if you want a cappuccino but you don’t have access to a machine, you could try adding carbonated Russian water to your coffee. It fizzes and froths like something in a scientific experiment. Funnily enough, it doesn’t seem to work with non-Russian water.)
    Then we went out for dinner and were stopped about sixteen times by the military police on the way to the restaurant. I was starting to recognize some of them.
    We had a lovely evening, the people were so intelligent, warm and funny, tingeing even their saddest stories with a very attractive irony. I LOVE Russians. I want to be one.The thing about them is, in an increasingly homogeneous world, they’re so
Russian
. And when the bill came, the Russians