Not long before Vladimir Putin was first

crowned president in the Kremlin cathedral

where the Romanovs had been coronated

Tzars, we were lunching in a self-service

restaurant near Red Square – with vodka shots

for a rouble by the till. As we finished eating

a young man on his own at the next table

leaned over and spoke: ‘May I speak English

to practise, please?’ He was a Japanese

political science graduate student,

he said. He had flown from his home city,

Kyoto, to Vladivostok, and taken

the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow

(via Lake Baikal and Omsk) to study

the decline and fall of Boris Yeltsin –

and had stayed on temping as a translator.

He asked where we were from, and, when we told him,

“Chester”, expressed delight. He had visited

our ‘home city’ on a tour of Europe

with his parents. He remembered its central

thoroughfares following the pattern

of the Roman camp it was named for –

and described the first floor Victorian

shopping arcades, which line parts of those streets,

and which the last Kaiser had much admired.

The three of us shared our wonder at the world’s

smallness – and then were silent, thinking, no doubt,

of vastnesses travelled, and imperial

mishaps. This student of politics

exuded loneliness, but we had appointments

to keep at Lenin’s Mausoleum,

and so we wished him well.