Russian Potatoes

 From an interview with Mary Dinan in 'The Global Suitcase'

Q:  Why did you choose Russia for your jacket potato business?

My so-called business was a way of getting deeper into what was happening in Russia at the time than by journalism or tourism. Russia is a fascinating country. It was a fascinating time. There was a revolution going in. I wanted to get stuck in. Be part of it. For me business is an excuse not a goal.

Q: What went wrong?

Russia was the biggest potato producer in the world. I was told by the man responsible for coordinating Soviet production of potatoes I would not find a single one you could serve up in its jacket.  He was right. The coup de grace was being summoned to meet the mafia over breakfast at nine o’clock in the morning at a topless restaurant. They wanted ten percent of the takings in return for protection against other mafia or the police who were just as bad. No thank you.

Q:  Did you go to Russia with the purpose of writing a book?

I never do anything with the intention of writing a book. I write about it afterwards if there's a good story but often there isn't or I can't be bothered.

Q:  What did you think of Russia?

Where do you start? History, geography, politics, society, culture...full of contrasts and contradictions. Run by gangsters and inhabited by generous and cultivated people. Its sheer size is overwhelming, matched by the resilience of a people subject to the most appalling acts of tyranny and war over the past century.

Q:  Is it easy to break into Russian life?

In general I found people very hospitable and with a great sense of humour. Even if it means going naked on the ice after a sauna in 20 below. You can get on well if you are white and speak some Russian and resist getting on a high horse about how things are done. There is a Russian proverb: Don't go into someone else's monastery with your own rule. 

Q: Did the corruption disturb you?

It is a blow to my self-esteem that no-one has ever tried to bribe me.

Q: What is the new Russia like?

Wonderful for a minority of wealthy middle class. No much different from the old one for many. A lot worse for some.There’s as much graft and bribery and official corruption and violence as there ever was. It’s now  institutionalised, centred on the Kremlin and the government. If you do business or go to court or deal with the tax inspector it’s who you know and who you can, let’s say influence. In the big cities at least people have jobs and salaries and flats and cars and can lead a more or less normal life. Look at the millions of ordinary Russians who go abroad on holiday. 

Q: How did you adapt to the Russian winter?

Like a Russian. Fur and booze.

Q:  Tell us about riding on the pig’s back

On my first official visit to a Russian farm I was dressed up like a bank manager in a dark suit and tie and shiny shoes. It was an old fashioned farmyard with lots of animals except that it was two feet deep in thick black mud. The first indignity was being carried across it piggy back by the farmer.  Inside we were treated to homebrew vodka and raw pickled piglet tails. I sneaked outside to get some fresh air to keep the piglet tails down and there in front of me was a wonderful Russian landscape like something out of Dr Zhivago. It was so beautiful. I instinctively walked towards it across some stepping stones in the mud. Except I discovered too late they weren’t stepping stones. Do you remember when James Bond skipped across the backs of crocodiles? Crocodiles swim flat and their backs are knobbly but pigs are slimy and buck up and down. It was a wonderful adrenalin rush. Pig surfing in a sea of mud. But I’m no better at surfing on a pig than a surfboard. Everyone was very nice. I had a hose down outside to get the worst off and then went inside for a shower and a change of clothes. When I went back into the kitchen dressed like a farm labourer they all clapped. “Oh Ivan, Welcome to Russia.’

Q: You set up a company with an institute of Biochemistry of the Russian Academy of Science. Tell us more. 

They had bacterial technology for purifying industrial air emissions that was ten years of anything in the west. I set up a British company to market it. Russian bugs help to keep the air of Wolverhampton and Wigan sweet.

Q: Does this make you an Oligarch?

Everyone is an oligarch in their own mind. 

The Travel Bug

 Interview with Mary Dinan for 'The Global Suitcase'

Q: What are your earliest memories of travel?

When I was six years old, my father went on a business trip to the USA. He flew there and came back on the Queen Mary. My mother, little sister and I were driven to Southampton in a big car with leather seats and we came back by train. I had never been on a train before. The compartment filled with American toys and the excitement of family reunion led me to collect train journeys throughout the world. 

Q:  What drew you to Greece?

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved Greek stories. I get a thrill from standing in places that are part of my mental landscape. This year I went to Pergamon, Sardis and Troy and although there's not much to see, they live in the imagination and give me the feeling of coming home. 

Q:  What was it like to live in Athens after London? Was it difficult to adapt?

Life in Greece was so different from  Britain. Foreigners and children are welcome. Families and family values are predominant. Good humour, cheerfulness, optimism, argument, sociability, an obsession with food and talking about food. It was a most engaging and refreshing place to live. It was so easy to adapt, so easy to flee from Thatcher's Britain, so easy to throw off snobbery and stand-offishness and weather and introversion and xenophobia and...you name it. 

Q: You saw Greece when it was re-building after seven years of dictatorship. How has it changed? 

It's hardly changed at all. Greeks have stumbled from one political and economic catastrophe to another since its independence. Their ideals and aspirations have always outstripped an ability to realise them. They are the instigators of their own problems and blame foreigners for them. 

It isn’t Arcadia by any means – poverty, emigration, corruption, rightwing/leftwing political fissures are woven into society. The basic Greek social unit is the extended family and the network of mutual obligations and loyalties that bind it together. The net stretches very far. The dark side of this is the mistrust, the desire to outdo and do down other 'families'. It makes the kind of civic society we have in Northern Europe very hard to replicate. For example the idea that an elected representative should defend the interests of all their constituency and not just of those who voted for them is alien in Greek politics. 

Q: Would you prefer the Greece of today or yesterday? Would you like time to stand still?

Time does stand still. It's us who grow old and die. It's best to make the most of now.

Q: You met some colourful characters on your travels. Who was the most memorable?

- The Mogho Naba, King of the Mossi tribe, under a baobab tree outside his palace in Ouagadougou surrounded by aged courtiers and a woman killing chickens behind me. Since childhood he was fed millet beer and consequently filled his outdoor throne, a two seater G-plan sofa. He has considerable political power in parallel with the official institutions.

- A Yemeni driver I engaged whenever I went to the Gulf. He learned his few words of English in the British hospital in Aden when it was a colony. He'd greet you by snapping to attention, saluting and booming in Home Counties English “Good morning Sah. Have your bowels moved?”  He demonstrated his expertise at catching snakes and summoning the Haji Eagle in Abu Dhabi zoo.

- Pat O'Connor of the British army catering corps. He saw plenty of action in the Korean War. Forward troops did not have ration packs but were supplied from the corps  kitchens. Pat's job  was to guard deliveries of Irish stew and spotted dick from Chinese ambush. Their motto was 'The stew must get through'. Now a sprightly octaganerian and full of stories.

- Elpida the wise woman of our Greek village who cured my back back with a raw egg, herbs and incantations.

- Mother Shyama, (Guru Shyama Devi) a lovely lady who founded the Radha Krishna Ashram in Balham. She radiated goodness and welcome. She is credited with the gift of bilocation having simultaneously attended weddings in Leicester and South London. 

Q:  Who was the most influential person you met on your travels?

In St Petersburg I once lectured a room of politicians about entrepreneurship. They included one of the two new deputy mayors, Vladimir Putin. He’s a little chap so in those days you wouldn’t pick him out in a crowded room. Perhaps I gave him an idea or two.

Q: What was your most memorable journey?

How to choose? The most eye-opening was the train from Abidjan in Cote D'Ivoire  to Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Then to Niamey and northern Niger by bus and taxi. It was fascinating to see the transition from tropical forest through savannah to the Sahara and how peoples adapt to their environment. 

The country I find the most expensive and the best value for money is Japan. Everything is different or odd or baffling but always exquisite.

Q:  What is the most hilarious experience you have had while travelling 

I’ve had plenty. Once I went into a church in Moscow where a service was going on. Lovely Russian choir. It was packed except for a side chapel. The main occupants were two dead old ladies lying in open coffins. One of them had lots of mourners standing around her and flowers and candles and stuff. The other had nobody. I felt sorry for her being on her own. So I lit a candle and stuck it on her coffin. When I backed off another little old lady grabbed my arm. I got a shock because she looked just like the dead one.  “She knew you’d come” she said. 

She dragged me off to an old man leaning on two sticks. I was nervous in case it was my putative father. But she stuck his hand in mine and told me to take him outside to the soup kitchen next door. He was a horrible yellow colour and covered in bright red scabs and had the worst case of the shakes. We shimmied and shook down the aisle and when we got outside he steered us to a whitewashed shack that was a makeshift lavatory. In front of gutter he had a lot of trouble undoing himself and he said “hold it please”. Oh Lord. In for a penny. So I took it out for him. Remarkably, and very conveniently, it was the only bit of him that didn’t shake. I tried to think beautiful thoughts. I tucked him back in and he looked up at me. “I only wanted you to hold my stick. But thanks anyway.”

Q In 1995 you set up and implemented a project to control water hyacinth on Lake Victoria, Tanzania. How did you become aware of this as a problem?

Sitting on the shore of the lake chatting to fishermen who couldn't launch their boats. 

Q: What do you most like about London?

The British library. I collect library reader's cards in preparation for old age: Bodleian, Bibliothėque Nationale, Gennadius in Athens, Lenin Library. There's always a warm radiator, something to read and somewhere quiet to doze off.

Q: Do you ever go on a conventional holiday?

I like trundlecasing - the bus-passer's equivalent of backpacking. A step away from shoppingtrolleying, then zimmering. Travelling on buses and staying in hors-suite rooms with no bedside light and mosquito splats on the walls. I love the rumble of a trundle case, so romantic, like a ship’s siren.

Q: What have you learned from your travels?  

First, never leave home without six feet of string. So many uses from a tourniquet to a washing line. 

Second, avoid airports. My millennial resolution was never again to fly over anywhere I hadn't seen on the ground. Six weeks later I was invited to Korea. I took the Trans-Siberian to Beijing and then trains and buses. I’ve stuck to it ever since. When I do fly it's satisfying to look at the map on the seat in front and know what's down there.

Into The Tomb

One of Evia’s most ancient monuments, a Bronze Age Mycenaean beehive tomb, is half an hour from our house. It’s outside the village of Katakalos beside a dirt road skirting a valley. 

There are no signs, fences, information boards, just two rusty metal poles on the side of the road.

The Mycenaean civilisation flourished three and a half thousand years ago. It takes its name from the city of Mycenae on the mainland of southern Greece, famous for its king Agamemnon, who led the Greeks in the war against Troy and was murdered in the bath by his wife Clytemnestra when he got home.

The Evian tomb is a smaller version of the cavernous one in Mycenae but still the genuine article, a bronze age relic from the age of Odysseus on our doorstep.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark.

After half a day of searching on Harley, my old and trusty motorbike, I find the entrance. I’d driven past it twice thinking it was a sheep pen. A wicket gate guards a tunnel into the hillside. Undo a couple of turns of wire, stoop, and by the light of my phone creep into the musty dark. 

After twenty feet or so it opens up into a stone clad beehive chamber fifteen feet wide and fifteen tall at its apex. It’s shored up with beams inside to stop it falling in. 

A storm of bats fans my face and ruffles my hair. I drop the phone, lens down, and scrabble in the dark and bat guano. Homer sings in the Odyssey about gibbering souls of the dead like bats sped by Hermes into hell. I see what he means as I flee the realm of death into the day. 

I wipe bat shit off my phone on the grass and look over a rumpled landscape of olive orchards to a gleam of sea. People who once stood here might have watched Homer’s Greek fleet cruising up the gulf on its way to Troy. Or imagined it. As I do.