Tom Ball

If ever you find yourself bored and with 15 minutes to spare, I recommend looking up Pornhub’s annual report, the closest thing you will get to a statistical breakdown of the planet’s libido. Here you will discover that the average visit to Pornhub lasts nine minutes 59 seconds; that the most popular time to watch porn is a Sunday evening; and that sexual tastes for the most part tend to follow cultural lines, with English-speakers prizing lesbian material most highly, and eastern Europeans on the whole preferring anal. There’s nothing new about porn, and humans have been trying to get their hands on it pretty much since they left the primordial soup. The novelty is in the rate of change.

On the day that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, Arsenal were hosting CSKA Moscow for the second leg of a Champions League group stage match. The game ended a goalless draw with the home side left frustrated by a series of squandered chances. Watching the game that evening from his box above the stands was Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire tycoon who had fled Russia six years earlier and been given political asylum in Britain. Two boxes over and former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi was also watching the game. As he would later claim, Lugovoi had travelled from Moscow the day before to watch his home team in action. But Lugovoi also had business to attend to in London.

It’s difficult to think of a good comparison from the thousands of public holidays, festivals, galas and pageants around the world by which to describe Victory Day celebrations in Russia. Remembrance Day is too sombre, Bastille Day too jolly.  The day on which Russians remembers the nasally voice of Joseph Stalin coming over the wireless to announce the end of the war is a curious mix of solemnity and jubilation. In St.

Last year, more than 15,000 communists gathered in the Russian seaside town of Sochi for a week-long commemoration of the centenary of Lenin’s revolution. Nearly every nation was represented. Stalls manned by party members from Zimbabwe, Greece, Cuba and India lined the narrow concourse of the event’s main piazza. Under the eye of the Russian police, celebrants staged rallies, meetings and marathon seminars. The daughter of Che Guevara was there. After giving a lecture on the legacy of her father, she received a standing ovation that lasted more than five minutes. ‘It feels like 1959 again,’ someone said when the cheering had finally died down.

There are nights when, crossing the dark parkland by my house, I see a man beneath a remote streetlamp. He is usually alone, and smokes as he circles the low walls of a squat little building. Most nights, after innumerable cigarettes and several laps of the place, he will slip from the light for good. Sometimes another figure will appear, warily loping in and out of the lamplight. A brief exchange follows before cigarettes are extinguished and both slink off into the building. This, I have discovered, is cottaging — or at least the first stages of it. Those who know about cottaging might, quite understandably, have thought it a thing of the past. But as my man under the streetlight explained to me later, when we met, even in the internet era it still has appeal.