America's secret Dirty Wars are exposed in Kilburn and the Rolling Stoned cheer everyone up in Putney… what a world…..

Up in The Lexi cinema, about the size of a small suburban front room, something very big is revealed by a documentary film called 'Dirty Wars'.

Reprieve executive director Clare Algar, director Rick Rowley and Mark Pyman, director of the defence and security programme at Transparency International

We had heard of the secret Drone wars, and the frequent Drone missile attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan that attempt, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to assassinate leading Al-Qaeda members. We can see the problem - Al Qaeda, after all,  has declared war on the United States but doesn't do so from a particular state or territory. But their response is dangerous, immoral, illegal and counter-productive.The USA is waging war in lots of countries without telling their own citizens or those of the country whose citizens they are attacking.
Naturally, in the course of these attacks, innocent civilians are often killed, homes are destroyed and lives ruined - that's what war does, especially since the 20th Century, which legitimised the industrial slaughter of civilians under the banner of 'Total War'. So the United States is now creating its terroristic enemies of the future which will justify even more surveillance and secrecy and more murder and mayhem. (Russia and the USA co-operate in this endeavour, despite appearances, and this hybrid is the Great Satan that will rule the planet in the era of nuclear terror which we are about to enter.)
We are depressed and disillusioned at the thought of president Obama signing execution warrants on the lives of individuals who are presented to him on a list composed by the CIA. Has he read McNamara's memoirs called 'In Retrospect?  McNamara was Presidents Kennedy and Johnson's Secretary of State. He wrote the most candid memoir ever written by a powerful politician in which he pointed out how all 'intelligence' is almost bound to be inaccurate and hence should not be used to launch aggressive operations without very careful scrutiny. It was wrong during the Cuba Crisis in 1962. A good job Kennedy didn't act on it and the recommendations of the Generals or I wouldn't be writing this and you wouldn't be reading it. But Obama seems to be the captive of his security and military elite. They tell him that the world is the battlefield and that they know who the enemy is, where he is and how to kill him. And Obama believes them whilst forgetting that the real enemy is an idea and you can't kill ideas by killing people, especially if you kill the wrong people.

Oh Lordy, if only you really were there and could pop down and bang some heads together!

Luckily, there are still people whose sole ambition is to give us a good time - and boy do we need them. Yes, at The Half Moon in Putney, London, we saw the Rolling Stoned perform their hilarious parody of The Rolling Stones. It was wonderful to see so many people enjoying themselves, letting it all hang out. Come on down, Obama, Putin and all you Taliban types and just rock with the sound. If you miss the joy of life, you miss everything. But maybe you don't know what joy feels like or looks like. See below.

Latvians in London in Russian restaurants, a big night out as Snowden hides out in Moscow airport

Our good friends Jim Archer and Janet Tweedie know how to have a good time, so we knew they would enjoy an evening at Sobranie, a Russian restaurant in Victoria.

We pre-loaded at The Jugged Hare on Vauxhaul Bridge Road nearby, in which an eccentric elderly Englishmen danced in front of the bar clad in over-tight lycra sports wear, revealing the morphology of his manhood, and most unfortunate morphology it was too.

On the TV screen, the news came through that the whistleblower Edward Snowden is in Moscow, holed up somewhere in the airport, protected by that well known friend of freedom Vladimir Putin.

Why anybody is surprised that the US and UK governments read our e-mails I don't know - how else can they catch the people that want to blow us up, or hack us to death in the streets. We'll soon moan if they don't nip a big one in the bud. Poor old Obama just can't win, but Julian Assange is a naive fool and Edward Snowden has made a strategic blunder of lifetime proportions. We only get one run at this life, as far as we know, and Edward has blown it. Don't take on Uncle Sam - you don't stand a chance, and Uncle Vlad probably won't be much help for long. The Guardian, who got and ran the exclusive story of Edward's 'revelations',  won't be much help for Edward either, despite him helping them out with something to fill the front page.

But what can any of us do about these things?

You know our line: we must love one another, while we can, and non - violence is the only acceptable strategy of change and protest. Enjoy life and you will learn how to enjoy people. It's much nicer than killing them, honestly!

Look at Jim and Janet here - they are your role models: people who know how to make you laugh, good kind people who look after each other and their families.

In Sobranie, our waiter Denis was another role model of courtesy and helpfulness.

All the way from Latvia, he loves life in London and has decided to settle here.

He is certainly conscientious beyond reproach - he tried to stop us ordering an entire bottle of vodka, suggesting a half bottle instead. Who is he working for? The NHS?

We were having none of it and insisted on self destruction with a full bottle of Russian Standard, on top of the several shots we had warmed up with and the pre-loaded pints. Wise move it was too, as the food and conversation both were excellent and needed the heart warming thirst quenching vodka to keep them properly paced.

Home and to bed in a blur!

We hope Obama decides to forgive Edward - he's only a young boy, led astray by Julian Assange - he's the one you want! Or Sweden wants.

Constables camping it up at Victoria station
probably staying at the YMCA

Beethoven in London, Prince Albert waits, Prince Philip fades , us at Lords

It's not my car but it's the same colour as my suit!

Mild air is making an occasional and timid appearance in London, but it's usually chased off by its cold front rivals as soon as they spot us walking out without our coats on, thinking that the summer might have arrived.
But the sun kept the cold at bay for us as we toured the hallowed halls and bars of Lord's Cricket Ground, led by my good friend, former boss, and author of the most important cricket book yet written, Mr Tom Rodwell, Chairman of The Lord's Taverners, which is the leading cricket charity in Britain.

Tom wrote 'Third Man in Havana' to document the power of cricket to change lives.
His qualification for doing so was that this is what he achieved as Chairman of Cricket for Change, and the book is both a hilarious and informative account of cricket played around the world by young people who, within conventional classification, we call disadvantaged, but measured by the more demanding standards of spirit and talent, are among the most impressive individuals you are likely ever to meet. Imagine facing a fast bowler when you are partially sighted, going by the sound of a rattle inside the ball.

The ground at Lord's is the headquarters of world cricket, and a paradox : a bastion of exclusivity and privilege and an inspiration and enabler of opportunity for millions through its generous support and donations to charitable enterprises which give young people a chance to participate in the sport.

It's a private club, wealthy, crusty and posh, with a long history - and it's great!

We stood on the balcony of one of the bars overlooking the pitch. A game was under way and I tried and failed to explain exactly what was going on to Elena.

Happy work though, as we supped the cool refreshing ale and watched the white clad figures who occasionally sprang into life before reverting to a form of statuary.

Later that day, we walked across Hyde Park to the Royal Albert Hall where The Philharmonic were due to give a performance of Beethoven, culminating with the great 9th symphony.

Two towering statues of Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert stand sentinel at the north and south entrances to his eponymous hall.
I stared up at him atop his great plinth outside the south entrance, and wanted to reach up and touch his hand.

'" Oh, she's warm" sprang to mind from the scene in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione's statue comes to life at her husband's touch and  she is resurrected by Shakespeare to remind us that anything is possible.

If the stern Victorian Albert came back to life today he might soon find a vacancy as consort to a Queen. Prince Philip, the present occupant of the role is feeling unwell and is 92 years old.

Most of Philip's views would probably coincide with Albert's so we should expect no change in approach from our Monarchy.
Perhaps if Albert's revival coincided with Philip's departure, we would interview him before giving him the job, rather than it being a shoe in?
What was the relationship between Victoria and Mr Brown?
And while we're at it, why does Prince Andrew look so different from Charles and Ann?
The answers' don't matter, these aristocrats are only human it's true.
So why do we treat them like Gods?

Prince Albert remains domineering in death

Beethoven had a healthy contempt for Princes.
'There have been many Princes', he said, 'and there will be many more, but there is only one Beethoven'
The performance was electrifying.
The turbulence, terror and pathos of the human condition charge through and trample over your soul as you sit before the spectacle of the huge orchestra and choir in the Albert Hall.

Thanks Victoria, for this hall.
We hope it will always be here, and that future generations will listen in peace as Beethoven reminds them that we must live together in love.
Schiller's great lines to the greatest great tune in the world were rendered with Godlike majesty by the huge choir.

Oh friends, not these tones!
Rather let us sing more
cheerful and more joyful ones.
Joy! Joy!

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
We approach fire-drunk,
Heavenly One, your shrine.
Your magic reunites
What custom sternly divides;
All people become brothers
Where your gentle wing alights.

 Listen up, oh you great leaders of our world, Obama, Putin, Assad, Li Keqiang - reflect on these lines!

All ye tempted to kill and maim to right your wrongs, think again, Gandhi and Martin Luther King showed another way!

Afterwards, we go to The Goats Tavern with friends and drink a few pints of London Pride.

They were good, and we are lucky to be alive.

Leaving the pub, we met two young musicians who had played in the orchestra.
They were delighted that we had enjoyed their performance so much, and talked enthusiastically about the power of music.

If music be the food of love...play on!

A Moscow riddle, our experience, North Korea and Jazz

A riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma......Churchill used this image in a broadcast about Russian foreign policy in the early years of the second world war.

Now that we are homeward bound to London it seems like a vivid way of summarising our experience of life in Moscow.

Some things work very well - the Metro, for example.

The food in shops and supermarkets is good, and cheap, and there is a wide choice of everything.

Drink and cigarettes are very good and very cheap.

The people are very hospitable, love conversation, and are generally very warm and and unaffected - there is very little sense of the snobbery that pervades English life.

Russians are well educated - they know about our literature and world literature whereas we tend to know only about our own.

Russians know how to behave in public spaces - we saw none of the moronic rowdiness and drunkenness that is common in London.

Young people always give up their seats to the elderly on the metro.

There are many beautiful buildings, especially churches, tucked away in nooks and crannies, and Moscow has many quarters of back streets which retain their pre - war living intimacy.

A touching example of the sensibility of Russian people is given by the graffiti on these walls, which illustrates and celebrates the poetry of the great Esenin, a poet who is still a national hero and whose verses are known off by heart by young and old, despite the fact that he died in 1925.

Esenin floats above the church in this graffiti and we even heard a young busker on the metro  sing one of his poems to an appreciative audience on the train

Lines from Esenin's poetry on this backstreet graffiti.

But.

You see a lot of poverty in Moscow - a lot of old women begging on the streets and, a very sad sight, many amputee beggars on the metro trains, and the mainline train stations play host to large numbers of very shifty looking characters. Fagin and his boys are alive but not well here.

Everyone seems to be on the take, and it is generally accepted that every one will rip you off if they can and if you let your guard down.

Service in shops and restaurants is hopeless - people just can't be bothered. There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare, and often accompanied by incompetence, so that the helpful attitude is negated by the practical result.

Today we had a fairly typical experience, we were in a bar, an Irish pub called Harat's on Arbat street,  in which the music was painfully loud. We asked if it could be turned down a little - no, but they could turn it up if we would like. Organisations often give the impression of being run for the people who work in them rather than for the people who use them.

This tiny basement in Harat's reverberated with the noise of a painful thrash rock band  which the barman  refused to turn down so stay away if you value your hearing.

My guess is that Russia will soon suffer from an Irish or Spanish style property crash.

Everywhere there are enormous blocks of ugly but expensive apartment blocks going up, and a lot of them seem to have been empty for some time. Economic forces are global, everywhere else has had a property crash, China's is just beginning, so Russia's can't be far behind.

The next crisis will take longer to play out : the Russian economy depends on the export of oil and gas. The infrastructure that makes this possible is rusting away, and recovery rates for Russian oil are declining.
Russia is frightening foreign capital away, so raising the money to replace the pipes and rigs that get Russia's only exports out to its customers going to be a problem, just as the rest of the world is learning to consume less of these anyway.

Russia's own elite does not trust its legal and financial system, hence the Cyprus crisis and the flood of money to London and New York.

If the Kremlin responds to this by punitive measures aimed at Germany, which it perceives to be behind the decision to penalise big depositors in Cypriot banks, it will be cutting off its nose to spite its face, and other customers of Russian energy will take fright.

Surely they can see this for themselves?

But is there anyone running the shop?

Or are there lots of people claiming to own it each of whom are quietly dipping their hands into the till?

Who knows, we hope we are wrong, because we love Russia, its culture and most of its people.

And as usual, we believe the answer is more jazz.

During the Soviet era, jazz was banned. ( of course, jazz demands initiative and individualism, qualities the Bolsheviks discouraged. What a disaster for Russia the Bolsheviks' were - Lenin too was a miserable sod, cruel and narrow minded, a puritan....uggghhh, and what an egotist, statues of him haranguing the people are still standing all over Russia.)

So those that kept jazz alive and revived it once the next disaster called Perestroika arrived are rightly regarded as legends.


We were privileged to experience a performance by the greatest living jazz legend in Russia and to meet him personally at his club in Moscow last night.

Alexey Kozlov is now 77 years old, but he is still playing beautifully with his own band in his own club in central Moscow. The club plays host not only to jazz, but brings together different genres, including opera!

Alexey should go together with Charlie Wright's club in Hoxton, London.

Alexey on stage at his club with his band, tuning his alto saxophone, which he plays with a Parker like fruity and strong sound which swings infectiously.

There is a surprise in store for club goers every night, and for the best and true spirit of Russia get yourself down to Alexey's jazz club as soon as possible.

If only Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin and Barrack Obama could get down there too, as soon as possible, before some sort of terrible accident happens as these power - mongers posture before their military masters  over who has got the most deadly killing machine.
A couple of pints each, Alexey and his band pushing out a cool vibe, and all could be sorted without any loss of face, which is what counts for these guys.
Here all three of them will discover that there is only one tribe that really matters, and it's called humanity, and that music brings it all together around the rhythms of life.

Talking of tribes, we were amused by Sasha Baron - Cohen on the David Letterman show to promote his film Borat.
Asked if he had learned anything about the USA on his trip, he replied that there was something he wished he had learned before he arrived- that you are not allowed to shoot Red Indians now. He then sincerely apologised to the Indians working in the Nevada casino........

In these posts, we have tried to describe how we found Moscow and Russia, and to find connections between these and the rest of the world. We believe that people are roughly the same everywhere, and that whilst there are obvious differences these are both important and superficial. Important because they provide humanity with variety and more opportunity to solve our common problems, but superficial because our humanity underlies the differences and our recognition that this is the case is ever more vital as the clock ticks towards nuclear midnight and our numbers move towards eight billion.

We will miss Moscow, and we hope to be back soon, meanwhile, here we are, at the exhibition centre on the top floor of the enormous new shopping centre located in the new financial district in central Moscow, posing by the inspiration for Churchill's remark about a riddle wrapped inside an enigma - yes, the Russian Doll  - a mystery indeed.

Next week, back in London, so long Moscow.

Moscow's vast gated communities, an Orthodox Service with unorthodox service and a safer world

A beautiful day unveils itself before us as we draw back the curtains. Flurries of snow float gently down through the trees. Everything below our 7th floor apartment is hidden beneath a huge and brilliant white duvet of snow. It looks as if the pristine clouds themselves had landed in the night for a rest and couldn’t be bothered to float off again.

We set off into the surprisingly mild air, along the recently cleared paths that cut through the park, part trees, part vast blocks of flats, that we live in, towards the metro station.

The fitness club we belong to is housed inside one of the many enormous gated communities that Moscow has erected to protect its wealthy elite from the barbarian hordes of the unwealthy.

In these, you can safely shop for all your needs, served by the service tribes of Moscow, the descendants of Genghis Kahn who once terrorised the city in the 13th century.
How things change, and like in Heaven, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Which thought reminds us of the unlucky Roman Emperer Valerian who was defeated at the battle of Edessa, captured and spent the last years of his life as the foot stool that the Sassanian emperor Shapur 1st used to mount his horse. Talk about role reversal.

But how safe can you be inside a gated community?

Another gated community, probably inspired by the human penis, reflecting the deep insecurity  felt by  the
wealthy buyers. They may be safe, these gated cities, but they're not pretty. Power trumps pulchritude. 

In South Africa, home of the gated community, the athlete Pistorious’s girlfriend was shot to death by her heavily armed legless lover inside a gated community.

The Barbarians you are so afraid of simply wait outside your gates for you to emerge, as you eventually must.

And can a gated community protect you from the permanent peril of nuclear annihilation that exists as a result of the ‘fire on warning’ nuclear deterrence strategy employed by the USA and Russia?

I would ask all those denizens of gated communities, here in Russia, in the United States and the United Kingdom, to reflect on how much safer they would be if this system were replaced by one in which both sides shared their technologies of Anti - Ballistic Missile defense and replaced their offensive missiles with these defensive systems.
The present setup is almost bound to lead to disaster, either by accident, or by design.
Scrap most of the offensive missiles and share the means of defense against the few that remain. This would make both powers safe from each other and from any ‘ rogue states’ out there. It would also set a good example and lead to co-operation in other areas of life that we all so desperately need.
Mr Obama, Mr Putin, time please for some statesmanship.
Like Kruschev and Kennedy did over Cuba, ignore your military and your hawks and put humanity first!
Gated communities, open the gates of your hearts and minds, write to your president, bombard him with pleas on behalf of your children and theirs to come, stop this insanity now!

Anxious now about how much longer we might be in this world, we decide to make one more foray into the waiting rooms of the next and attend the evening service at the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the headquarters of the Russian orthodox church and the site of the Pussy Riot protest.

The evening service here begins at five, (different from most other churches in Russia which start at six) an unhelpful time for a lot of working Muscovites, and indeed the congregation was small.
Despite the sumptuous marble, gold and silver everywhere, there appeared to be no access for disabled people or wheelchair users, something of an extraordinary oversight given that it was built in 1997. Perhaps the priesthood are relying on the infinite mercy of God to get my pious and disabled friend up the steps and down again to the service?

When Stalin demolished the original cathedral back in 1929 he replaced it with a swimming pool, but the citizens of that time were not impressed by the pool and nicknamed it the big Moscow puddle.
Top down systems would seem to have their limitations, assuming the Orthodox church to be a top down system with a similar organisational model to the Stalinist one in which the top is a very long way from the bottom, but with the crucial difference that nobody comes back from a meeting with the ultimate boss of the church.

An orthodox service is difficult for me - there are no pews or seats, and suffering is therefore built in if you have a bad back, especially given the number of times one must get down on ones knees to kiss the floor.

The choir was beautiful although something of an austerity choir given that there were only three of them,but then there were not many worshippers either.

I respectfully suggest that pushing back the service to six pm and providing wheelchair access would make a huge difference to the numbers attending, and therefore to the number of souls that the church could save.
But then we’re assuming that that’s what they want to do.
Unfortunately, we left feeling no closer to God but a lot closer to the long suffering Russian believer of elderly years or with any disability at all.

Talking of safety, perhaps we’d all be better off if we could get back to the days when Kings or Foreign Minister equivalents were happy to engage in trial by combat, jousting in full armour upon their sturdy steeds, just like in the movie The Knights Tale. Perhaps then they would think a little more carefully about how to arrive at a compromise.