It’s the Kotelnaya christmas pint per present tour. The rules are you have a pint in a different pub every time you buy a present. If you buy more than one present in the same place you can have more than one pint in the same pub.

Here we have what can only be described as Manchester’s Luzhkovshchina

Do any journalists know what "trendy" means? Myata Lounge is an extremely tacky chain of shisha bars that nobody who follows any sort of trend would ever want to be seen in -- from the NYT story on the Assads in Moscow. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/w...

Notes from the pre-holiday round of Zooms and Yandex Telemost meetings. All of my UK/US/European clients want a quick call, a 15 minute update that is mainly pleasantries about Christmas and New Year. The former USSR clients want a 2-hour in depth discussion about every aspect of the work.

I first saw an influx of Chinese cars in Moscow over the last three years. Then, in the last 12 months, I began to see them around Dubai. Now, they're all over the UK. Even my parents' neighbours in our small town in the North West drive Chinese cars www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/b...

A grey but not very wintry Hyde Park this morning

More UK train fun. I booked from Manchester to London tomorrow about 25 minutes ago. 10 minutes ago, I got an email saying the train is cancelled because of a shortage of staff.

Big Tim with some extremely "5am at the afters" discourse.

In what to me is an early Christmas present, the New Yorker has finally uploaded its full archive in a format that can be read on the site like any other New Yorker article. No more having to download pdfs of the original print layout. www.newyorker.com/issue-explorer

Always faintly amused by the amount of people jogging or cycling in London in the morning darkness. It's something you pretty much never see in Moscow, where gym memberships are much more affordable and gyms are in every neighbourhood.

Today I'll undertake one of life's most perilous tasks: trying to catch a train in the UK

Today, I went to Falanster, an independent bookshop in the centre of Moscow. It's in a basement, as all good indies should be. They have 20-30 literary journals, mostly publishing every other month, and including "foreign agents" as writers. Today, I got two editions of NLO.

Owen Hatherley on Mayakovskaya metro station, which is probably the most beautiful place in Moscow and puts every other public transport station in the world to shame newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Russians surpassed themselves at the airport yesterday, already queueing an hour before boarding because there was a single member of staff behind the desk. They all stood there for an hour and then, in any case, had to wait for everyone to go through the gate before the bus to the plane took off.

The decline of Moscow's Patriki -- something @jonnytickle.bsky.social has noted -- is complete with the closure of Gutai, one of my favourite lunch spots since 2017. The area, which used to be go to, is now just overrun with people filming vox pops and trying to be content creators.

A bit of rain in the last few days has knocked the leaves off the trees and the temperature was in the minuses over night. Winter on its way to Moscow, and reports are that it's going to be one of the coldest of the last twenty years.

It's very much boeuf bourguignon weather in Moscow today

Great article on the theft of rare Russian books from libraries across Europe www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

A piece in the New York Review of Books about my favourite artist, Gustave Caillebotte www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Completely anecdotal and not based on anything other than a feeling over the last few weeks but I've finally noticed that Moscow has become more expensive, especially for daily items. Speaking to family in the UK, it doesn't seem massively out of line with economic general trends post Covid.

The most recent issue of NLO (Новое литературное обозрение/ New Literary Review) features some brilliant reflections on the late Katerina Clark's work. For those who don't read Russian, some have been translated into English. www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/no...

Sheila Fitzpatrick on denunciations, or why Americans are grasses www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

No surprise that Flesh by David Szalay has been nominated for the Booker Prize. Easily the best novel I read this year. www.ft.com/content/ee39...

It's autumn in Moscow, which, if you live in a Soviet era building like I do, means the heating is back on and you're back to regulating the temperature by opening your windows.

Drinking in Moscow in 2025. You can now get far more beer imported from the West than you could before February 2022. kotelnaya.substack.com/p/a-pint-of-...

Reading Zubok's The World of the Cold War. It's a little bit disappointing. I've read all of his books and Zhivago's Children is one of my favourite books about that period. But this feels like a Wikipedia-level survey. It lacks depth and detail.

Six weeks month off social media. The world keeps turning. Would recommend it.

Lots of fun arriving back in Moscow this weekend with airspace closures. We started circling over central Russia, then we landed at a random airport for 3 hours, set off again, started circling, eventually got to a different Moscow airport to the one we were supposed to, and sat there for 3 hours.

The Russian Premier League season —which, like Christmas adverts, seems to get earlier every year — starts tonight

a great piece from Kommersant Weekend about the band behind the Bashkir song which took over the world a few months ago www.myweekend.ru/doc/7872806?...

Fyodor Smolov is in trouble after hitting two people in a Kofemaniya in Moscow, the same one that Pavel Mamaev and Aleksandr Kokorin previously battered someone, for which they were imprisoned. More than anything, why are millionaire footballers hanging out in chain coffee shops?

It's Saturday, you might be having a pint. Here's what it's like drinking in Moscow in 2025 and what's changed since February 2022 kotelnaya.substack.com/p/a-pint-of-...

Drinking in Moscow in 2025. You can now get far more beer imported from the West than you could before February 2022. kotelnaya.substack.com/p/a-pint-of-...

Having never read Ferrante, I just read My Brilliant Friend, which is excellent, but I don't really understand the level of praise. Is it the evocation of Naples? There are plenty of family sagas published by Russian authors this century (Ulitskaya's Big Green Tent, for one) which are just as good.

A great novel and an absolutely spot on depiction of the vapidness of the sort of image-obsessed, Instagram-reliant generation of yuppies found all over Europe

Israel playing media warfare on easy mode. This Economist article is basically -- "Israel says Iran has nukes. They have a dossier. We haven't seen the dossier but we see absolutely no reason to question the official Israeli version of events". Awful journalism, clever media manipulation.

Leeds signing Jaka Bijol, who I watched play for CSKA for four years. He came over from Slovenia as a defensive midfielder but never really fit in. Then, in his last season, he moved to centre-back and things started to click. A good play but very slow for a Premier League centre-back.

Is there are more attention seeking pair of academics than Shore and Snyder anywhere in the world? Snyder, in particular, seems to have completely given up on being a historian, which he wasn't great at anyway, to churn out rushed think pieces. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I have no great interest in LBJ but these books are so good. The way Caro writes, his level of detail, the way he expresses his thinking and marshals his evidence, the way he unites the micro with the macro without bludgeoning the point. I’m not saying anything new here, but what a piece of work.

Was discussing the Russian beer market yesterday and some of the odd changes. Carlsberg owned Baltika before nationalisation and produced Tuborg in Russia. Baltika is still producing Carlsberg, which is available in every shop, and also Tuborg, but for some reason changed the name to “Green Beat”

The 2018 World Cup in Russia will probably go down as the last "real" one for fans. Qatar was in the winter, in a city state with restrictions. The USA is banning fans from countries, and then it's Saudi - winter again, restrictions again. A visa free summer World Cup with parties everywhere is gone

I love articles like this -- a long read on how sushi took over Pakistan, first as fine dining and then as beachside street food www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

Tomorrow is Wednesday, which means it's banya day for my friends in Moscow. The last time I went, I walked from Aeroport metro station to Grazhdanskaya, from where I took the МЦД to Kalitniki. That journey, and the train to the banya, left Metroland for МЦДland, urban planning for urban wasteland.

Every Wednesday, friends from my “local” in central Moscow go to the banya at Kalitniki. Last time I joined them, I walked from Aeroport to Grazhdanskaya, transitioning from Metroland to МЦДland, the unregenerated periphery flanking the centre kotelnaya.substack.com/p/the-projec...

Fascinating reporting, but it's not just Moscow reaching out to freelancers via dodgy Telegram accounts, is it. That's what Ukraine did in the Vladlen Tatarsky killing in April 2023. Seems to be a developing trend across espionage services. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Every Wednesday, friends from my “local” in central Moscow go to the banya at Kalitniki. Last time I joined them, I walked from Aeroport to Grazhdanskaya, transitioning from Metroland to МЦДland, the unregenerated periphery flanking the centre kotelnaya.substack.com/p/the-projec...

Repeatedly seeing this. The centrists, or liberal centre-right, manage to get back in to power and disappoint everyone who voted for them, like Starmer. When the people who didn't vote for you hate you, the least you can do is give your voters a reason to vote again. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/o...

Find it odd but not surprising that Starmer is giving out these lines a press conference and the most obvious question -- why? -- seems to be the only question not being asked.

Just finished @shaunwalker7.bsky.social brilliant book about the history of the Soviet illegals programme. Some incredible vignettes in there, the strongest, and most eye opening, is probably the series of chapters on the identification, training and deployment of Yuriy Linov.

Try working in a client facing role in any country and see if not drinking is better for your career than drinking. Maybe this applies if all of your clients are Silicon Valley incels, but in London and most of the rest of the world, you gain and keep business by being good over drinks.