Cordonski Bleuski

My first encounter with the restaurant car on the Trans-Manchurian Express... By way of explanation (and you might need it) when I refer to the toilet situation, you should know that all of it empties directly onto the track...

... I don’t have far to travel, as the restaurant car is the next carriage down from ours. First impressions are that it has promise. To my right there is a small bar area, then on either side of the aisle, four cubicles that can seat four diners each. Pink curtains are draped at each window, tied back with lace ties, turning the rectangular picture windows into triangles. There is a large no smoking sign under which two Russians are smoking like steam trains. I miss the entrance to the galley on the way in but I catch its smell. It’s a sort of musty cabbage, not unlike an old peoples’ home at dinnertime.

The waiter pops up from behind the bar. He looks like Charles Bronson from the Death Wish films, except his features aren’t symmetrical. Someone jogged God’s elbow in the design phase. The left side is out of kilter with the right. He’s wearing a black suit, black shirt buttoned to the collar, and a pair of blue furry slippers. It’s the sort of garb I imagine Johnny Cash’s mother might have worn. When he smiles it makes him look ill and me feel ill.

‘Menu An - glee skee?’ I say with a phrase learned this very morning from the back of my guidebook.

‘Da - breakfast?’ he says. I detect mild incredulity.

‘OK.’

‘Eggs, cheese, butter?’

This seems an odd combination, and I’m not sure if he’s offering me breakfast or a recipe.

‘No cheese, please.’

‘No cheese?’ He says this like I’ve just informed him Putin is a lesbian, but nevertheless shuffles off, presumably to meter out some vigilante justice on the chef.

I look out of the window: it’s my first proper look at Siberia. While I slept I missed about 300 miles of it, but I’m not worried, there is still another 4400 miles to go before I reach its eastern border with China, and yet another 900 miles before I jump off in Beijing. This thought catches my imagination.

As I mentioned before, Moscow to Beijing covers 5623 miles of track. Not that I believe it. Who decides where to start measuring in Moscow, and where to stop in Beijing? Have you ever seen, in any city in the world, a marker post heralding it as the centre of the city? The mileage signs showing distance to London used to be marked out from Charing Cross. So Charing Cross was consider the central measurement point for London. Then they moved it to nearer Whitehall, but I bet they never changed all the signs.

I start to think of more reliable ways to measure my progress. What about books? I have four books with me so Moscow to Beijing could be measured as four books long. The benefit of this measuring system is that I can adjust my reading to meet my estimated arrival time. For example, I’ve already started a Bill Bryson book that I know I will read slower than a fast-paced thriller. A little bit of careful planning in this respect and reckon I’m onto a winner. I like this idea and decide it’s the only form of measurement flexible enough, and I decide to adopt it throughout my trip.

However I’m not sure it adequately solves the time issue. I’ll be passing through 7 time zones. Keeping track of this is made more complex by the train insisting on retaining Moscow time throughout the journey. This means just before I get off the train at Beijing it’ll be 2am in the corridor. Immediately I step onto the platform it’ll be 9am. That’s one small step for me, and one giant leap for confusion.

But a solution comes to me. What if I wear seven watches? Set at hourly differences I could use the watch nearest my elbow from today and as I get nearer to Beijing I can progressively work down my arm, until I am using the watch on my wrist. All I need to put this plan into action is another six watches…

We passed Nizhny Novgorad, better known as Gorky very early this morning and the next town of any significance is Vyata, which, not that long ago its citizens called Kirov. Despite my internal machinations I’m becoming quite blasé about the distances which might be why my mind turns back to ablutions. The regimented forest decked out in its early autumnal uniform marches past me at pace outside my window, but fails to deflect me from this thought.

What’s vexing me is this. There are eighteen people staying in my carriage, two Provodniks and one Provodnitsa. That adds up to twenty one arses. Times that by the eighteen carriages and you get 378 rear-ends when the train is full. And that doesn’t include the train drivers, who supply a pair of buttocks each on strict rotation. Stick with me here. Assume, on average, people do their business four times on this journey, a fair average for a week I think. That adds up to an almighty 1512 dumps. OK, the toilets are shut just before, and just after stations, but that still leaves an awful lot of shit on the tracks. From the air it must look like someone’s trailed a thick brown felt tip from the back of the train.

I’m driven from my diversion by the untimely arrival of breakfast. Bronson coughs over it as he places it in front of me. He also places down some black bread that he doesn’t cough over.

‘Beer?’

It’s early but I look at the meal and think it might be a good idea.

‘Da.’ I say in fluent Russian.

The breakfast has been delivered in a sort of miniature frying pan without a handle. Its not immediately clear whether this is because the chef couldn’t transfer it to a plate, or if it’s his take on a breakfast classic. I rather think it’s the former. The contents looks like a large fried egg with a big knob of butter melting in the yellow yolk. The whole is specked with light brown droppings, which I think is ham. I dig in. I can’t tell you what the bottom half tastes like because it is impossible to peel away from it’s casing, but the top half tastes OK.

Despite Bronson handing me the bill as he collects the remains of my breakfast, I linger in the restaurant car drinking coffee, which is awful but improves with my clever remedy of sprinkling pepper in it. The Russian smokers left some time ago and nobody has replaced them. No one has even walked through. The chef came out of the kitchen once, which did nothing for my appetite. He looks like the reflection Don Estelle from it Ain’t Half Hot Mum might see in a Hall of Mirrors. He’s wearing baggy shorts and his legs, like the ends of his fingers, are the color of nicotine.

I’m expecting to see Janet up and about by the time I get back to my cabin but he’s in bed, asleep. Encouragingly, there are signs he may have had some breakfast as a large tin mug the size of a potty has appeared on the table together with some packets of plain brown biscuits. This can only mean one thing. He does wake up from time to time...

Parking

Regular blog-ees will know that I am occasionally prone to the odd rant.

Some consider ranting a futile exercise given that nothing ever really gets changed as the result of one. But, I would argue that these poor unenlightened souls are missing the point. Rants are the release valve on the steam engine that is everyday life. Letting fly at the iniquitous shit that’s thrown at us is remarkably cathartic. Ranting should be available on the NHS. And we all know the NHS needs a purpose.

The NHS used to be cutting edge. In 1962 they performed the world’s first kidney transplant. Two years later they replaced the first hip, a few years after, a heart. In the 1980s they successfully ripped out a heart, lung and liver in the same operation and replaced them with some others they had lying about.

When the NHS was in its pomp it was a sort of leading edge organ Swap Shop.

These days it concentrates on more mundane things… like Chlamydia (see previous blog), sex change operations for confused teenagers and fertility treatment so we can keep up population growth sufficiently high for our island to sink into the English Channel by 2020.

The truth is, as it gets older, the effectiveness of the NHS, like peoples’ health, is failing.

If you don’t believe me try parking near the lifts in a shopping centre car park. You won’t get within a mile. And I’ll tell you why: the exits are surrounded with acres of disabled parking bays. Row upon row of extra wide spaces.

And why are the bays extra wide? I’ll tell you. To accommodate the fat lardy arsed lumps struggling to get out of, or squeeze into, people carriers with back seats supporting tiers of baby seats full of snotty nosed urchins wearing only 1 shoe.

If these lumps are so disabled how do they drive? How do they manage to pro-create so efficiently? In reality they should be made to park a mile away from the lifts, then they might shed a few pounds on a shopping trip, rather than get to the cake shop more quickly.

When I was young there was only 1, maybe 2 disabled parking bays near shops. They were often empty for days. And, when you did see someone parked there, they looked proper ill. They often took an hour to get out of the car because of the shrapnel lodged in the section of their brain responsible for movement and co-ordination. They had knees that had been peppered with sniper bullets whilst fighting off the Bosch in the Ardennes. They needed to park nearer to the shops because they only had minutes to live.

These days you can qualify for a blue badge if you know someone who might be disabled one day.

Naturally I have a solution. Only give disabled badges to people who need a walking aid. OK, Ok, I know what you’re thinking – anyone can get hold of a pair of walking sticks.

Which is why I suggest building in booby traps to the base of all walking aids. Sensors will pick up the reliance of said walking aids by measuring a simple ratio: weight of the stick owner Vs pressure exerted onto the stick.

If the downward pressure is not sufficient it will prove that the owner is not sufficiently disabled to need sticks. This will detonate a small explosive charge of sufficient strength to remove their shins.

By using this method of control we will at least know that the next time they trundle to a halt in a disabled parking bay they will truly qualify for one…

Simples, as they say on that irritating advert.

Next week: How to solve the problem of excessive signage…

Chinese Tucker trials...

How about another section from my book? I had been tracking down a famous food market in Beijing without much success and then, by more luck than judgement I find it...

.... An hour later I arrive, via a narrow alley that doesn't exist on my guidebook map. Donghuamen market is actually a street of about seventy stalls. Each stall is covered in a red and white striped awning. Nothing unusual in that I hear you say. Well no. The interesting stuff is the produce underneath them, because this food market specializes in ingredients that westerners would normally bludgeon with the heal of a stout shoe.

The first stall I look at is typical. In fact, its pretty much repeated all the way along the row. There are a few things that are obvious. Scorpions piled next to mountains of ants. Skewered grasshoppers, deep fried frogs, although some of these have lost their original shape due to the cooking fat partially melting them. Other items look like the contents of an autopsy bucket and are, I suspect, the internal organs of larger species. I walk up for a closer inspection.

'You try this,' the stallholder says, offering me a worm impaled on a tooth pick. He's large and fat, not unlike the worm. I pull it off its spear with my teeth and bite. It's been deep fried, and to be honest, the overwhelming taste I get is garlic and ginger. I open my mouth to show him it's gone. He laughs a very high-pitched laugh, like he's been sucking helium.

'Ha, ha, ok, where you from?'

'England.'

'You have this in England?' He produces a small handful of ants in his podgy palm.

'Ants?' I say. 'We love them.' I scoop them off his hand and munch them down - easy. I notice, as does the stallholder that I'm starting to draw a crowd of extremely interested Chinese. It’s like having five million people to dinner but on the upside I'm getting fed for free.

My new best friend says something to the crowd and they all burst out laughing. He then offers me a water cockroach. I'm struck by the silence as I push it in. The texture is disgusting and the wings give way almost immediately. I then bite down into the body. If you want to know what it tastes like ask a teenager if you can chew on the cluster of whiteheads on his chin. However, I am conscious of the fact I am representing the UK now and manage to turn my gag into a gentle cough, which I follow up with a smile.

'Ha, Ha, England, you Chinese man!' He translates for the growing crowd and they clap. Honestly, they clap. I contemplate a bow, but I don't have time. He moves on to a jar of bile, from which he ladles a small spoonful into a plastic bowl. A hush falls over the crowd and his employees stop serving. Its so viscous I struggle to keep it on the spoon, so in the end I just upend the bowl and let it slide down. It's like blowing my nose backwards. The taste is hard to describe but here goes. Run three hundred miles in the same pair of pants. Cut out the crutch section. Soak that in paraffin and bury it in a dung heap until flies have eaten the dung. Retrieve the cloth and boil it in the putrefied remains of a dozen skunks. Add pepper to taste. It made it as far as my tonsils before it came back with the velocity of a discharging shotgun cartridge. The cockroach and scorpion followed it, but curiously not the worm or the ants. The crowd burst into spontaneous laughter.

'Ha, ha, not Chinese man!' my fat friend shouts and then repeats for the crowd.

He hands me over half a dozen dumplings, which I eye suspiciously.

'This you can eat England.'

Its pork, and delicious. He refuses my offer to pay and waves me off. The crowd I've pulled is sufficient reward and he and his employees sets about serving them, still laughing at my pathetically weak Western stomach.

if I'd been better prepared I could got revenge by force feeding them some of those £1 meals from Iceland...