The temperature outside is currently -30. I can feel it - despite my double-glazed windows being cellotaped up along the edges, in true Russian winter style, a chill is still coming through them. Yesterday the temperature dropped about 10 degrees in the space of an afternoon, from -5 to -15 over lunchtime, and today when I woke up it was -25.

It wasn't actually that bad. I stepped outside this morning and expected to feel like I'd been hit with something, as if the Russian Santa Claus, Ded Moroz (Father Frost), himself was giving me a big hug. I was probably too neurotically dressed, with 2 sweaters and a jacket 4 inches thick on top, and socks so thick my feet hurt inside my shoes. However, I did have -extremely- cold thighs. The coldest thighs I've ever had.

The effect of the cold weather was compounded by the the local power company today deciding that to conserve power when people will predictably all switch on their electric heaters at home, power to industrial users should be cut off. Including our office. So at 3pm, the lights flickered off, and the only light in the office was from two emergency bulbs and the pale blue glow of computer screens on the faces of forty journalists and editors. We all looked like teenagers with an unhealthy nighttime addiction to the internet (speaking from experience). At 4, as it began to get dark, everyone lit tealights, and the paper's photographers were taking photos to commemorate the occasion.

Apparently it might be -40 at the end of the week.