Nastya, from Prospekt Mira

Walking to Casa's for a beer after recording a programme on Golos Rossii (the Voice of Russia) on climate change, the evening light was rather nice, and Nastya even nicer.

Nastya does a culture programme there, and I used to do Russian Book World. Today, however, I was on John Harrison's EcoPlus, trying to tell the world how Russian scientists tend to be more sceptical and less sheep-like than most of those on the lower rungs of the Western climatological and conservationist ladder, where a combination of precarious institutional salaries, competition for research grants and a general lack of moral fibre seems to produce a chilling, Soviet-like unanimity in the view on things as diverse as climate change and the best way to encourage corncrakes to breed. I will say no more here as I have written at length about this in my book about sailing round the Hebrides, Isles of the West (Birlinn).

Naturally, Nastya and I needed a couple of cold Bochkarevs (at £1.25 a pint) to discuss all this afterwards.