The Magic of the Moment.

The Magic of the Moment.

(Or Funeral Music)

This wall, which, like the one in the silent movie, descended, didn't have a window frame!

I spent several minutes flattened under the wood and mud-brick, weighty completeness of it - glasses thrown off; wet dribbling down my left arm.

I am "somewhat blind" with my glasses on - living in a haze of a world - and almost totally sightless without. Before anything else, I needed to see.

I managed to haul myself painfully out, crawled around the floor feeling and searching for a bit, then descend the hill and asked for some help finding my glasses - goodness knows what the poor American Evangelists who occupy a house on the edge of the nearby village saw or thought at my appearance - but two pairs of eyes, one adult, one child, accompanied me back up the hill.

Glasses found easily, I thanked my saviours, declined to join them at their next church meeting, saw them to the edge of our land, and hobbled back into the weather besieged ruin I call my home.

Then I became aware of the damage - not to the buildings, to me.

Complete 'babiness and pathetic response' occupy me at the slightest sniffle or ache: Broken bones, dislocations and anything serious bring out the 'idiotic-valiant'.

The blood on my arms (both) was soon wiped away; the crushed ribs were more intransigent to treatment.


Fast forward to the early hours of the morning - attempts to lie down proving impossible, I am sitting up listening to Romanian, middle-of-the-night, radio, waiting for death or exhaustion to close my eyes.

Winds of Change

I recognise it instantly - I have long held it in my consciousness, having lived in Moscow for a time, and spent several very happy nights in Gorky Park.

And a revelation - that is the music I want played as my atheistic body chuggers along in its casket through the purple curtains on its way to cremation.

It could be a pain-heightened response, or comatosness – but a wave of understanding crashed around the song that night.

Nights are short in Moscow in August – a few hours only - and the hot days drift into warm nights.

The Moskva, a river not of greatness but of significance, sweeps through the city in a few wide meanders, traffic rushing along its banks at breakneck speed, even under the walls of the Kremlin.

Cross from the Kremlin near the old British Embassy, go upstream, pass the chocolate factory, along the riverbank near the New Tretchekov Art Gallery and you come to Gorky Park.

Soviet-Disney I like to think of it as (but then I think St Basil’s is Tsarist-Disney).

Gorky Park has long been favourite with the Muscovites – it has a sub-Blackpool (and safety-conscious-less) funfair, long winding walks along the banks of the river, food sellers, drink sellers, and lovers strolling. In winter paths are flooded and freeze for the lovers to ice skate arm in arm; in summer the sides of the dry paths fill with the ‘fluff’ from many of the trees and young men bend down to set light to this and amuse their lady-friends with the resulting ribbon of burn which rushes away along the edges of the path.

Many of the young men are soldiers, on leave, still in uniform.

It is an atmosphere perfectly captured in the Scorpions’ song – Winds of Change.

I walked those paths with Fiona, the only woman I think I could ever marry, at a time when the world was changing: Yeltsin had assumed power, Russia was opening up: Communism had fallen in name if not control; an optimism lit the faces of those young men and women out walking.

It was a moment of magic – a glory night.

We would buy a bottle (or three) of Stalin’s favourite sweet, red, Georgian wine; get some lethal outside-burnt, inside-undercooked shashliky, and go and sit in the mock classical temple, watch the river flow and talk - sometimes deep, sometimes trivial - until it was time for the last metro to leave (not long before dawn, on those summer nights).

The goose droppings never bothered us – but the green stains were difficult to remove from light coloured trousers.

For me, both lyrics and music encapsulate not only a feeling of personal value, but get right (as few songs do) the feelings of a time and of a people.

More than that, they represent all those ‘moments of magic’ in my life – from playing with my Dinky cars in the long, back-garden grass at Ryeburn Ave. as a child (with Steven Smith?) to walking with Cris and Don, the dog, through the forest in Sistarovat only to be surprised by the first family of Wild Pigs we’d any of us ever seen.

They are the moments which sustain us when despair and pain are creeping up – and I can’t think of any other moments I’d like to take with me through that curtain into the flames of oblivion.



I managed to snooze away the rest of the night, and the following morning, well, that’s another story.