In Dostoevsky time, you worry about stuff like heavy swing doors and Britishness

St Petersburg

The first two things that grab you about Russia are the women’s clothes and the health and safety laws. Or, at least, that is what grabbed me. Wander the streets of St Petersburg, and you don’t see much of either. Wander the museums, even, and you don’t see much of either, either. In the Hermitage, I saw a girl in thigh-high boots and leopard-print hotpants gazing up at a Canaletto. Had she simultaneously been frying blinis on an leaky gas stove, I think I would have taken a photograph. There. That’s it. That’s Russia.

I am here as part of the Liberatum Jewel of Russia Festival, one of a delegation shipped out for a few days by the organiser, the endearingly bonkers Pablo Ganguli. Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureishi, Jon Snow, Alex James (of this parish) and ten or 15 others. For the last few days we have all followed each other around, wide-eyed. It is not yet too cold in St Petersburg, but you can tell how much snow is on the way by the drainpipes, each the size of a builder’s rubbish shoot. The air is already thick, grey and bleached, not just on the skyline around the golden domes, but right up close, between hand and eye.

My fellow travellers, I sense, were not thrilled to find a gossip columnist in their midst. There must be a technique to declaring your profession in situations like these. I could have done it that first civil morning, when we visited the last home of Dostoevsky, and saw the room in which he smoked himself sick, and haemorrhaged to death from the throat. But no, not me. I had to do it just afterwards, as part of a small giggling group that went across the road into a sex shop.