Two mouthfuls and I was there,

back in my brother’s flat in Moscow in June 1996, after 6 weeks in Kazan. The taste was Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice-cream, which could be found in his freezer, along with frozen plastic cartons of milk. Finding it in Tesco’s last night was another serendipitious experience - I had bought it to stuff myself, in the vain hope that too much food would assuage my insomniac tendencies. It did.Moreover, the taste also led to a wave of Russophile nostalgia, aided and abetted by Andy Home’s “Siberian Dreams“; his reaction(s) to the Russian suburbs of both Moscow and Norilsk capture beautifully the disorientation experienced by the first time visitor to the Russia beyond Red Square, the Kremlin and Piter.