Back in Moscow with old comrades

GREETINGS from Moscow where, with our usual sense of timing, we arrived here late on Sunday night and managed to miss the Russian capital’s annual ‘City Day’ by a matter of hours.

The long journey in from the airport gave us a hint of what must have been a jolly enough knees-up for the locals: at various significant sites across the darkened route, stages were in the process of being dismantled and crowd barriers loaded onto trucks. Between music and fireworks and huge video installations, new mayor Sergei Sobyanin had been determined to put on quite a show, even to the extent of borrowing a leaf from the old Soviet May Day copybook by sending up aircraft to seed the clouds in a bid to keep the rain at bay.

When we awoke to a dank, drab morning yesterday, it seemed the surly weather was determined to get its own back while, in place of a street carnival, we were given ominous warnings about the commencement of extensive roadworks in the city, the prospect of which has tormented residents for months with the fear of being paralysed by traffic gridlock.