From Russia, with love...

Just returned, and my head is still spinning with a kaleidoscope of images from St Petersburg and Moscow. The white nights, Picasso and Rembrandt in the Hermitage, the reflections on the dark river; Cartier directly opposite Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square, the ancient icons within the Kremlin, the Faberge eggs and Imperial jewels in the Armoury; the seven towers that Stalin built, looming like Gotham City; the Madonnas and angels and other winged creatures that have survived, against so many threats...
But above all, the people: I met with such kindness and warmth, and felt the tug of threads that I had never known before; the curve of cheekbones that contained within them the lost faces of my Russian grandparents.
All of these just blurred snapshots, I know; impossible to do more than glimpse the tiniest fraction of such a vast nation, so many centuries of turbulence and tragedy and triumph... It seems presumptuous even to try, but still, I want to thank everyone who took the trouble to talk to me, and share their ideas and conversation, including the six-year-old boy who came to his first bookshop signing in Moscow, and sat through the hot evening, listening to a foreigner.
Now past midnight, and time for bed, at the end of my birthday. But instead of feeling my age, I am overcome with the wonderment of discovery, and of knowing how much more I want to know, and to explore...