Jeffrey Colins of Burford Trust bank

I’m hoping that a quick blog entry will ease the extreme pain and mental blockage I’m experiencing trying to write this article.

My editor wanted a new angle on the city's elite gyms for the paper's Spring Guide, so he suggested I write about their bars and all the kooky things you can buy there. And it's true, there's some pretty crazy stuff. One place, aside from the obvious pumpkin and celery juice cocktails, offers portions of Burgundy snails. And they all have the requisite hundreds of giant tubs of whey supplements and ampoules of guarana and L-carnitine juice ("these'll keep you going all day!" said the bartender at Reebok).

After three hopeless days of trying to organize official visits with the gyms' PR departments, my editor said I could just go incognito and - check this! - order stuff and then get refunded by the paper. So I dressed up a bit smarter than usual, went in, gave my name as Jeffrey Colins (my dad's first and middle names), my firm as "a small English bank, Burford Trust" (my dad's company), and calmly nodded at the $2,500-per-year membership fee. "I'm here with my firm," I said, "of course, they're paying." Later I discretely scribbled names and prices down in the gyms' bars, and tried some frankly minging fruit juices which didn't seem in the least bit healthy, and also glugged a test tube-full of L-Carnitine walking up the road to my own £3-per-session gym. Effect? I felt a very slight burst of energy. -Very- slight.




I went to my first ever ballet last week -- an open rehearsal of Shostakovich's The Golden Age. I have the same Russian teacher as a ballet critic just over from England, and so Yelena put us in touch. We went to the Bolshoi's New Stage (the old building is currently under renovation as it's about to collapse) at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, chose our seats in the front row -- there were only a few hundred other audience members there -- and watched as it proceeded with full orchestra. Very excitingly, the head of the troupe kept shouting directions over a microphone. At one point the stage walkie-talkies broke, and the technical director sheepishly came on stage to sort it out. The director was furious - "What's going on?? EXPLAIN!!!" he screamed, terrifyingly.




Of course, I thought ballet was wonderful, and I shall definitely be going again. 'Golden Age' is set in the early days of communism in the 20s, and the characters are wicked capitalists, sinful 'Chicago'-esque nightclubbers or brave Soviet youths. The set style was Constructivist - a visionary communist avant garde that flowered very briefly before being replaced by Stalinism in architecture (which most people love) and Soviet Realism in art (which a lot of people think is quite dull).

We were chaperoned by the husband of the principal ballerina (Anna Antonicheva I think is her full name), and at the interval we all simply wandered where we liked in the working part of the theater. After, Naomi, the critic, interviewed Anna, and I, very poorly, translated. We also went backstage after the curtain fell -- despite seeming enormous on stage, the ballet dancers were mostly only a little taller than me. And all the girls were very thin. Anna, who was lovely, let me take a photo, although I nervously had to ask Naomi beforehand -- is this ever -done- in ballet interviews? Will she think I'm completely daft?




Moscow is all drip-drip-drip at the moment. It's not consistently above freezing, but enough that the dominant sound in the street is the clattering of drops of meltwater onto rooves and pavements, and the occasional enormous crash that makes everyone turn to stop and look as huge pieces of partially melted ice come flying down. The sky is sometimes blue, too.




I'll be on the overnight train to Helsinki this time tomorrow night. I'm going to renew my visa (absurd Russian regulations - for a new visa you have to leave the country and come back, expats call it the "visa run"), but decided to turn it into a little holiday. I think I'll probably catch the ferry to Tallinn, Estonia, as soon as I arrive, hang out there over the weekend as everyone says it's very cool, and go back to Finland for visa and 2 days of sightseeing on Monday.

Am I still writing-blocked? Probably. It it 10:30 at night, have I an article to write, a bag to pack, am I working tomorrow? Yes. Is it pure folly to continue writing this entry? (*click* as Ali closes Internet Explorer).