I thought I should explain why this blog has the title it does, as I am sure people will wonder. A couple of years ago, when I was still working as a driver, I used to listen to the Radio 4 travel programme "Excess Baggage". One week, the presenter, Arthur Smith, went somewhere - I forget where now - where Russian was widely spoken. He said that the Russian word for "Hello" - zdravstvuitye - was easy to pronounce as long as you affected an Irish accent and asked "Does your arse fit you?" Several yeasr after this I was on a bus, trying to get into Belarus when a border guard boarded, his wide-brimmed peak cap glinted officially in the early morning light. He had a quick look along the bus and then, to my delight, I distinctly heard him say to the people on the front row that very sentence.
This is all well and good, but it isn't getting the bag packed. Tomorrow morning at 6.30am I am supposed to be on a bus from Liverpool to London to catch the flight to Tampere in Finland. I guess I will update this as I go along at sporadic intervals, depending on the availability of internet emporia in Russia and Ukraine...
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