PETER HITCHENS: Vodka in a teapot and the symptoms of a crazy country in which the sane are tormented with stupidity

Have you ever drank vodka from a teapot? I am, although I still don’t quite understand why.

I was eating the usual cheesy Marxist dinner of chewy chicken cutlets and chewier fried potatoes in a large Soviet hotel restaurant in the dreary Urals city of Sverdlovsk.

Me and my friend, my fixer and translator, Rachel, thought vodka would enhance the meal. Anything would happen.

Around us, a group of customers, almost entirely male, were merrily drinking vodka from bottles brightly labeled ‘Vodka’. We asked the waiter to bring us some. He said the restaurant does not have or serve vodka.

We pointed angrily at the surrounding tables. Just as Admiral Horatio Nelson once claimed he couldn’t see a significant signal (which he planned to disobey), the waiter very convincingly said he couldn’t see any vodka. We may think we did, but we were wrong.

The usual solution to such problems was to offer a bribe, usually consisting of Western cigarettes (although I was not a smoker, I always carried a supply with me). But not here in Sverdlovsk (then named after a particularly obnoxious communist weasel, now its original name has been changed to Yekaterinburg).

At the time, it was a city so full of secret weapons factories that, until a few days ago, it was completely closed to outsiders for more than 50 years. That’s why I was there, to see what one of these long-closed cities looked like and to search (but it turned out to be fruitless) for the burial place of the Tsar murdered in 1918.

Making a fuss might work because bribery failed. And finally he succeeded. The Head Waiter was called to mediate, and after listening carefully, nodded gravely and walked away, clearly deep in thought.

After a short while, we were brought to a tray with a teapot filled with vodka wrapped in a linen cloth and two saucers. I must say that vodka, which is extremely good in its kind, tastes very strange when drunk this way.

But Rachel thought it would only cause trouble if I poured the Communist firewater into a glass, so we sipped our glasses like widowed duchesses.

Later (was it revenge?) A prostitute who offered her services to Rachel called every hour throughout the night.

Rachel, who is both straight and sensitive, explained to the woman that we were switching rooms and gave her my room number in case she insisted.

But he said the KGB had given him strict orders to search that room until he was hired or the sun rose, and he would not disobey them. And so it went on, until a gloomy dawn broke over the freezing city.

Yes, it was crazy, but everything had a logic. In a way, it was like the wild logic in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; It was always tea time, gardeners painted white roses red, rabbits wore vests, croquet was played with hedgehogs and flamingos.

The prostitute, for example, was following orders, as was (and still is) always the wise thing to do when dealing with Moscow-run Security Organs.

The restaurant, where foreigners had never dined before, was afraid to serve alcohol in public to such foreigners in case they violated some rules they did not know about but which could lead to brutal punishment for them. It is safer to say: ‘Yet!’

Residents of Moscow, then the Soviet capital, await the opening of a food store in the 1980s

Peter in the GUM store near Red Square in Moscow, 1990s

When I finally returned to the logical, rational West, I felt great relief at first. I was back in the Kingdom of Logic.

But over the years I have come to realize that the same suspicion and inhibitions have crept into British life, often under the pretext of health and safety.

This is mainly due to the fear of getting caught up in lawyers and unwinnable, pro bono lawsuits, which often hinder (for example) innocent marches.

But in my case there are other things too, usually related to our privatized railways, on whose trains I have spent an awfully large part of my life.

Here is a simple example. The train I take to work most mornings is a highly advanced Japanese (but British-made) super express train; It’s part of a class that cost us around £3bn to benefit from an electrification scheme that cost us £2.8bn a few years ago.

My hometown can easily travel from Oxford to London in 45 minutes, perhaps 48 minutes, with a stop in the middle. It runs fairly quickly between Oxford and the main intermediate station, Reading.

But if he makes this part of the journey quickly, he sometimes has to sit for up to eight minutes before being allowed to leave. I often fear that if this goes on for much longer I will be asked to pay council tax in Reading.

As a result, it’s not significantly faster than the old British Railway diesels and clattering cars I made the same journey with 40 years ago.

I’m pretty sure it’s because of the crazy system where instead of building and running a good, punctual railroad, we rely on some sort of penalty system to force a run-down, worn-out railroad to be a little better.

Train companies are effectively fined when their trains are delayed through a system called ‘delay reimbursement’ and the money is given to late passengers. It can cost millions of dollars a year. The best way to avoid this, of course, is to arrive on time. But not in Wonderland Britain, where it’s by far safer to pad timetables with longer stops to avoid being late.

No one acknowledges this or calls him by his real name; just as the built-in inefficiencies of the Communist system were never openly acknowledged. They call it ‘healing time’, but that might explain two crazy things that happened to me last week. I’m not saying that explains it – I’m just guessing.

Ten years after leaving the country, Peter Hitchens returned to Moscow. Seen in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior near the Kremlin

On one of these, my train heading deep into the Cotswolds was suddenly stopped at Reading and all passengers were ordered to depart. Ahead were delays explained by a series of excuses that were constantly deployed and could not be effectively controlled – signal failures, broken rails, hot weather, wind, cold weather, rain, snow, score failures, track circuit failures, bridge attacks, even trespassers and, for all I knew, alien abductions.

The train was then diverted at unusual speed towards the Cotswolds, but by another route that none of us wanted to take. I predict it will reach its end point sooner than if it stuck to its original path. From where? Your guess is as good as mine.

The next day, the train I would return to Oxford was announced at London’s Paddington station. But actually stopping in Oxford (trespassers again) was not going to happen. So it was useless for most people who wanted to travel with it.

His first stop would be the village of Long Hanborough, population 3,800, before getting lost among the sheep, stone villages and famous farms of the West. By coincidence, the trespassers (why are there so many these days?) either evaporated or stopped trespassing, and the train stopped at Oxford anyway, even though there were no passengers wanting to go there.

These are symptoms of a crazy country where the sane are tormented by stupidity. Someone get me a cup of vodka.