Waiting for the Night Train to Siberia

16^th Sept – waiting for the night train – a burst of poetic creativity!

Sitting on Yaroslavsky Station platform watching Russia go by.

I suspect those we’ve met in Moscow, Red Square and around, were not truly representative. Here, the women are ‘normal’ – not the pencil-thin, stiletto-shod, Paris Hilton lookalikes toting pink-clad puppy dogs in handbags and baby slings. Not the hordes of tourists posing and clicking, nor the wealthy office-dwellers profiting from the beaurocracy of the rest of Russia.

These are soldiers with kit bags, bedrolls and bottles of vodka, chubby children yawning in pushchairs as they wait for the night train to Siberia. These are stumpy women and hard-featured men, fag in mouth and luggage of cardboard boxes and cheap plastic bags. Bleached blonde thirty-somethings with pompom-pigtailed girls in tow, and older women with patterned headscarfs, patterned skirts and patterned jumpers.

Everywhere smokers. Everywhere Russians.

The night train to Siberia.

Platform-waiting with crowds of eager be-luggaged Russians. Light spills out of the open train door with the promise of ‘home’ for the next four nights. Samovar smoke wafts over the heads of the waiters like London fog. Time warps gently with the leather seats, Bakelite door handles and the orange glow of a hundred lamps.

We’re moving! The gentle thunder and clacking of wheels on tracks to be the background music of our journey. Train 10, heavy, ponderous, hot, the fug of human bodies all pervasive – what will it be like in 3 days? Somebody open the windows!