I know its MY problem. I know in some respects I’m not ‘normal’. Who is? Logically, statistically, the world would be the most boring of boring places if everyone was strictly on the mid-line of a normal distribution in every facet and parameter you could measure. So my ‘deviation’ is that I lack patience generally and that I grow impatient very quickly with repeated stimuli that are all of a similar class… except when that class of activity is ‘a football being kicked’, then I’m fine.

The Hermitage is (or surely fucking MUST BE) the largest museum in the world. Oh no, I just remembered, the Louvre is slightly bigger. That’s it behind Mel looking splendid. The building too, ha,ha, haaaaa…

Its an entire block AND is a deep as it is wide. Built as the Winter Palace for Peter… possibly Catharine, maybe a Nicholas or Paul, they didn’t exactly skimp on either space or quality. Because it was built in (guessing here) 1786, that’s pre-Brexit so they used mainly East European builders, carpenters, bricklayers, which is why its still standing now. It is humungously big. And outrageously flashy. And filled with so many treasures that if you were to spend 30 seconds at every piece on display, you would be there for 8 years. That is honestly what they tell you.

After 8 minutes I was bored. I’m always like that. Its cultural. If I was like everyone else there, ie a group of 37 Orientals with cameras mounted on selfie sticks pointing at every available everything, blocking the paths, pushing and shoving, then I’d be fine. But I’m not. I’m just a solitary English geezer with the attention-span of a flea. Yet the building fascinated me. In which every room you think must be ‘the ballroom’ because its the size of a football pitch but with marble columns round it. But who needs 35 ballrooms? So some must have been ‘living rooms’, ‘tv rooms’, family rooms, who knows. If they did tell us they did so in Russian, which is a touch problematic for those who struggle with the Cyrillic alphabet. Like you. I worked out yesterday that its so similar to Greek and my old, beloved list of mathematical variables and constants, that I can read a lot of it. I worked out that ‘PECTOPAH’ is actually ‘restaurant’. And was smug for a day.

So we ended up walking the bits of the Hermitage that no-one else wanted. If the 19 groups from China, Japan and Korea turned left, we turned right. And eventually found some lovely things in peace and quiet. Very similar, no doubt, to the lovely things they were looking at, but ours were European pre-17th century and theirs were early Macedonian. Who gives a shit. An artefact’s an artefact, innit?

Tomorrow morning, bright (probably) and early (very) we’re catching the fast train to Moscow. Loving St Petersburg though, and loved every minute.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx