Table Plans And Lake Gods

So the new Martin Amis novel is good, although - as usual - he has stolen some of my ideas. How does he do it? Me sitting here and thinking about writing, and he just keeps bringing novels out? Anyway, he got there first with writing about Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia. Mind you the lake is massive - 31,500 square kilometres and it holds a fifth of the world's fresh surface water - so I guess there is room for more than one person to write about it.

Mart's take is on an old man revisiting a gulag on the shores of lake where he was imprisoned with his brother after the second world war. I don't know if he has been there, but I went to a place near the lake called Irkutsk just before I got married last year, to give some talks - ie I was working rather than taking the stag night thing to some kind of Sov extreme with a minke whale hunt or something.

The soon to be mrs househusbandnot was v cool about me going on this trip just before the wedding, even though I got so buried in various Russian time zones (Irkutsk is nine hours by plane from Moscow) that we discussed the table plans for the wedding on a faltering telephone line after I had been awake for 36 hours - which would explain some of the ideas I had about who would get on with each other over the wedding dinner. (The other day one of mrs househusbandnot's quite straight friends asked me who the guy who was thinking of calling his child Twig was that she sat next to at the wedding. And last Saturday another of mrs househusbandnot's quite trad friends admitted to me that he was really stumped when he sat down to dinner at our wedding and was welcomed into a conversation about sex education in Africa.)

Anyway, Lake Baikal is the most extraordinary place. I was there in deep Siberian winter and just looking at the lake made you worried for your life. It gives life in the form of massive Russian dog fish that is the local staple diet. But it must take away so much life too. One slip on the deck of a fishing boat and I reckon you'd last about 30 seconds in that water. I went to an open market on the shores of the lake where half of the stalls were selling smoked fish with the stall holders huddled around the smoking vats to keep themselves warm. The other stalls were selling loads of different statues and plaques of spirits to protect you from the lake. The people selling the statues and plaques didn't have anything to protect them from the cold, other than their local voodoo crafts. When we were wandering around the market a girl ran up to me and our male translator and asked if we wanted to come and have "fun and friends and free vodka" on a boat with some young girls. "Younger than me", she promised. She looked about 13 or 14. I guess extremes breed extremes, and choices - or fewer of them. (Bollocks, I'm trying to write like Martin Amis while I am reading him again.)

Anyway enough of my random travels around the world. Although on the writing theme and travels, I got the most honest and damning critique of anything I have ever written from a Khazak woman who said "Your report on your visit to my country is wrong...and boring". (No say what you really think love. Don't hold back.) Which - for some reason - reminds me of a great headline I saw on the front page of a newspaper in Trinidad: 'Mango Thief Caught..At Last'. And another in China which said: 'Police Say Crime Was Probably Committed By Criminals'. Right really enough of my random travels for today.