:: Numeric Field Overflow ::

Today's header is the bane of my working life. Three days back in the office, and no time to post, because I seem to spend all my time patching up dodgy bits of databases...

Despite promises to update my blog from internet cafés in St Petersburg, I found time seriously lacking and was only able to check emails. There's obviously been a high-tech boom in the city in the past 3 years, as the places I went to were obvious, speedy and cheap (about 40p for 20 minutes). If I hadn't gone and lost my phone, then everything would have been fine and dandy. As it was, Daddy dearest availed me of his which enabled me to maintain SMS contact with people there. I've got a replacement phone on the same number, so it's just a case of trying to get those phone numbers back now...

St Petersburg lived up to all expectations. The city has been spruced up for the recent 300th Anniversary celebrations. Whilst trips to many of the tourist sights with the parents and Blondinka B were essential, I managed to see friends working at the St Petersburg Times as well as old Russian friends, Pasha, Tolya and Stas. As anticipated, I brought back large quantities of "contraband" and a rather fetching t-shirt depicting Yuri Gagarin (soon to make an appearance at bAsTaRd).

Essential places for art lovers to visit in St Petersburg are the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum. Whilst the former offers a world-class collection of paintings, sculpture and furniture from around the globe, the Russian Museum traces the history of Russian art from early icons to grand 19th century portaiture (Repin and the like) to the Russian Avant-Garde of the 20s and 30s. Artists such as Kandinsky and Malevich are well represented - these provided an interesting contrast with the later propgandist and soviet-realist pieces also on display. It is possible to see a satsfactory amount of this museum in a day, whereas I felt our two four-hour visits to the Hermitage barely did it justice. A disappointment of my parents' last visit was that they hadn't been able to visit any of the imperial palaces outside the city. To compensate this time they went to Peterhof (I was too hung over to join them (but went several times when I lived in St P 3 years ago). Later on in the week, we headed to Tsarskoe Tselo to the magnificent Catherine Palace.

Apart from the tourist sights, it's easy to see that much has changed in the city in the past three years. I was delighted by the increased availability of decent music - Pasha has opened a music shop in the suburbs which sells excellent dance music on Ninja Tune, Warp and other London labels. Although the touristy parts of the city are now worthy of any European metropolis, change in the backstreets is still painfully slow, and Russians are still reassuringly impolite and pushy on the metro. I found it surprising that relatively few restaurants had menus in any other language than Russian - meals could have been pot-luck for the olds without a resident translator! The number and variety of interesting bars has increased encouragingly. With Pasha and Tolik (and later with others) I went to the moderately priced but rather trendy "Imbir" bar (the name means "Ginger" - the spice, not the hair colour). Here Russians and foreign visitors from all backgrounds mixed in an arty, fairy-lit atmosphere. Despite costing more than other drinking holes, Imbir boasted a decent menu (my delicious Chinese-inspired soup cost about £3) and flasks of well-chilled vodka. as we toasted the last of our third flask, the three of us noted that things my have changed in "Piter", but that we haven't really. I didn't see Stas until my last night there, with Pasha, he had been one of the stalwarts of those heinous drinking sessions in our student days. He now works in the marketing department of a building company - and apparently has quite good prospects for promotion. We went to a new bar which could never have existed in St Petersburg 3 years ago. Called "Epoch", this place was a repository of Soviet kitsch of the highest order, topped with an imposing life-size portrait of Brezhnev. Russian humour may be as black as coal but it has taken a while for even them to swallow this. The Brezhnev days represented a complete clampdown after Khruschev's "thaw" in the sixties. Secret police were rife and corrution soared. This level of brazen irony in presentation represents for me a brave and necessary step for Russia as she develops in the post-Soviet era. By not closeting the skeletons of the past, new generations may not run the risk of repetition. We cannot see into the future, but in my heart I can only hope that this place I love will change (even more) for the better.

Doubtless I shall be returning to the topic of Russia in later posts, but now on to domestic news:

Those kitten-fetishists at b3ta have once more excelled themselves with the weekly challenge to design a poster for National Smoking Week. I heartily approve of this campaign from Mr Brainstuff:

Elsewhere I read of the sad news of Katharine Hepburn's death. In that linked article, Zadie Smith touchingly describes her idolisation of this grande dame of the silver screen.

The prize for most contrived and innuendo-laden headline of last week goes to ESPNSoccernet. They should be ashamed.

And finally... a photo which has something of the Gary Larson about it...