But unlike in Britain, where Christmas seems to have lost most of its religious meaning and become primarily a commercial occasion, in Russia it retains its religious significance. The present giving is already dispensed with: for Russians, the holidays start on New Year’s Eve and the tree is a New Year’s tree (a Yolka) not a Christmas tree. So Christmas is primarily a festival kept by the newly religious…or the anciently devout. The Orthodox church has undergone renewal since the collapse of Sovietism. It has many devotees. Our daughter, Emily, was baptised into the Russian Orthodox church. Her Godmother, Ocsana, is devout – she takes Communion every Sunday at the new church where her children went to school. The priest who presides there, Andre Tkachyov, has a Holy presence – when we were at the baptism, I felt the authority of something divine in his person. Yes. I did. And it felt comforting. Yes. It did.

An Orthodox service seems to last ages. On Sunday morning, we arrive at 10am and leave at the end. The service has always been going a long time and we arrive – usually about twenty minutes before the taking of the Sacrament. The church is full. Everyone stands. People – children, adults, men and women, wander in and out. This is not a static affair like in the Anglican church. Here you move about, chat outside, look after babies, pop back in, cross yourself (I don’t – the Protestant in me, er, protests), soak it all up, recite the responses if you know them, pop out again. The choir is not visible but the singing is, for me, the Great Soul of All the Russias. It is mystical and enveloping. It transports me into the ethereal world and I find great comfort there. I wish you could hear it. It is transportive. Deep. Soaring to Heaven. Vibrating into the Earth.

At Emily’s Christening, taken when the service had been completed and the congregation was going home, our lovely priest, so Holy in his resplendent gold robes, leads the Godparents around the font three times and they renounce the devil. Emily is immersed in her golden bath for the first time. She is naked and held in the hands of her Church incarnate in Andre. She is somewhat taken aback by this dunking, where she is wholly submerged. The second immersion calls forth her indignation which is written all over her shocked face: are you kidding? Again? The third is merciless and renders her speechless with shock at the effrontery that anyone would dare do this to her. She is wrapped once more in the warmth of her Christening robe. Belligerent but now welcomed into her church; indignant but saved. The family pose for photographs. Neil, Godfather; Sam, Emily’s eldest brother – I am so glad that he has come to be here on this day with us; Nefisa, loyal friend; Ocsana, Godmother and the one we have to thank for arranging all of this; Steven, ever so proud to hold Emily in his arms for the photograph. Tanya, head covered, as all women must be in the church, and beautific on this day of days; our priest, officiate and conduit to Emily’s introduction into the fellowship of Christ. Me. In Heaven already.

There is so much I will never know about Russia. But the fragments I see and feel and taste draw me in deeper and deeper. None more so than the peace I feel in the churches. Christmas has always been special to me. It holds my heart for the hearth of home, for those I love, for company and companionship and for drink, making merry and for the rituals of Scrooge, presents, feasting, cooking, holly, ivy, singing along to carols at full volume. But recently the religious significance has gone. The story that started it all is missing. At her nativity, Emily was an angel. Her part was to sing the 12 days of Christmas with altered lyrics. A partridge in a pear tree became, for some unfathomable reason, “A shrimp on the bar-bie”. She doesn’t even know the basic story. What chance has she got when they start mixing it up with some ‘I’m a celebrity, get me outta here’ menu recitation? In the Orthodox faith, Christmas is about Christ. Simple. No kangaroos. No platypi.

On this Christmas night, I am for the majesty of miracles. We need some magic, some hope. We need guidance and good news in these malign times. Focusing outside of ourselves, transcending the world and joining in communal celebrations of a life that served us all is a joyous way to re-centre ourselves. Maybe it’s the rituals; maybe it’s the smells and bells, the incense, the chanting, the music, the comfort of ritual. Maybe. And then again, maybe it is the Light of the World that comes to us from the most unexpected places.

The later arrivals in my childhood television viewing were Mr. Ben the fancy dressing adventurer, Parsley the Lion and his fellow herbs (who gave all my children the password Herbidaceous for entry into any walled garden but particularly the one in the Bishop of Fulham’s Palace) and the Oliver Postgate masterpieces: Ivor the engine, Noggin the Nogg and the Clangers. His voice was the sound of my Sunday evenings and after school treats at five minutes to six when children’s programmes led into the serious grown up business of the 6 o’clock news on the BBC.

All these programmes were brilliant. They did not talk down to children (well, Andy Pandy did, but it was the oldest of the lot and still stuck in the 1950s) and they used adult vocabulary. Oliver Postgate in particular stressed the fundamental importance of using adult words to pique the curiosity of his viewers – a philosophy which worked. As I watch his episodes now with my little girl Emily I feel the delight in language he started when I hear his voice narrate The Clangers with words no contemporary children’s tv programme would dare to use.

And now I have been introduced to an entire world of parallel programmes that my wife grew up with during her childhood in the Soviet Union. Our daughter is now being reared on a combined bilingual diet of 1950-1970s children’s programming which, to us at least, exemplify the simplicity that a childhood should comprise. We do not hold with the knowing wink and a nod to adult audiences and ahead of their years American slickness and sexuality of modern Disney films. Nor do we like the artless computer generated animation and auto produced narrative soundtracks of cheap cartoons that seem to have flooded YouTube to date. We like the crafted skill, intelligent storyline and proper production values of the classics, most of which are available with English subtitles. Cheburashka , Hedgehog in the Mist, the 1950s Soviet version of the Snow Queen and Bambi (I know, we never thought of the Soviets sharing the same stories, but of course they did!). Just you wait! with a wolf and a hare in constant conflict (like Tom and Jerry but without the violence). Soviet Multiki are Russian cartoons, funny (judging by our daughter’s laughing reaction) and often very quaint and sweet.

It has been such a wonderful discovery to realise that there is a world of cultured, clever, inventive children’s programming out there beyond the Received Pronunciation of the BBC archive. We tend to pickle our childhoods in aspic and think no further than the horizons of our own glorious, forever golden youthful experiences to define what is good and what is not. A real blessing of being married to someone not from this country is the hammer blow it wields to shatter such misconceptions. I have discovered too many cultural treats to list here – thought they are covered in other blogs about Russia – but watching Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker with Emily pirouetting around the room in homage and hearing her sing the culturally ingrained songs from my wife’s youth is a joy. Even I recognise many of them now: Gena’s song on the accordion from Cheburashka, Yolichka (New Year’s song) and Buratinas (Pinocchio to you and me).

For my part, I have introduced Tanya to The wind in the willows, which she loves. Secretly, this is my most important accomplishment – Russians are much better versed in English literature than we are in theirs. There isn’t a child brought up in Soviet life who does not smile at the memory of ‘Vinnie Pooh’ or Alice in Wonderland. Or Holmes and Watson. Or Dickens’ characters. Jerome K. Jerome’s Three men in a boat is universally loved and my wife can recite virtually the whole cannon of Kipling. So to introduce her to a book which has hitherto escaped her and the entire Soviet educational system’s attention is a rarity. And a joy. I had been looking forward to introducing my daughter to Ratty, Mole and Badger, but especially to Toad. However, Emily will have to wait. I am currently reading The wind in the willows every night to Tanya. The Edwardian language, descriptive, lyrical, slightly elaborate, transports her to a gentler age.

As we read, our sofa becomes a punt, moored in the reeds as the carpet river floats gently by. The fellow feeling she has with Ratty and the friendship with mole appeal to her sense of loyalty and communal good. My affinity with Toad’s excesses and love of the descriptions of riverbank picnics and roaring fires, allied to her appreciation of the language and the soft English countryside make every page a delight to share. So it has been the best Christmas present of all to find a book we both enjoy so much and to unwrap it page by page in front of her eyes, brand new and undiscovered. I am sure it is a present she will return to again and again. I hope so, anyway.

West Riding is people who still need to be near work where work is industrial, not agricultural. Entrepreneurs. Second generation industrial family businesses – textiles, engine parts, chain manufacturers, shampoo magnates. Private dentists. Sharp suits from Brills in Moretown (not country togs from Allens in Harrogate). The tang of a Yorkshire accent. Conspicuous displays of wealth – lions rampant at the wrought iron gates of their new build mansions, swimming pools, repro furniture (all bought, none inherited) and, in the 70s, the latest Jaguar.

I remember a workmate of mine reminiscing about his early teen years in 1970s Milton Keynes. He was smiling at his own recollections of those days and reeling off experiences, musical references, activities, descriptions of his school and food that I had absolutely no similar parallels for – he may as well have been describing a childhood in another country.

He was describing a childhood in another country. His childhood was perfectly normal, where both parents worked, holidays happened once a year, food was unbothered by The Galloping Gourmet or M&S avocado pears, school was a bog standard comprehensive, music was The Clash or The Jam and Saturdays were spent in the shopping centre hanging out at McDonald’s and WH Smith.

To help understand how these worlds were so different, when they both collided – which they did at university – a girlfriend of mine, when quizzed about her exposure to normal people by our new working class chums (sic), caused gales of incredulous laughter when she referred to them as ‘the lower orders’. And it became a running joke that we thought they all lived, rather quaintly, off tick (credit) at the local shop, like some cheeky, strike-a-light cockneys from a Dickensian landscape. A friend of ours saw a photo of me around this time. He was a Scouser. Done very well. Had a spot of bother with the police as a lad. And he described my face as ‘very punchable’. It was. And it was punched at university. But thats another story.

My school was founded in 627AD. No, that’s not a misprint. It had just celebrated its 1,350th birthday when I arrived at it. The school motto was ‘Super antiquas vias’ – along ancient paths. It wasn’t overly progressive. Some of the dormitories were decked out in the original furniture. Well, it felt like that. Our most famous old boy was one Guido Fawkes. Come the 5th November every year, whilst the rest of England was making merry burning effigies of the man who symbolised Catholic revolt against persecution by the government and who tried to blow up Parliament with gunpowder, we alone did not celebrate the night. We simply didn’t burn old boys.

It wasn’t just school that was different. My home was different. Technically, it was a four bedroom semi. Technically. But it wasn’t really. When my wife – a Soviet girl (ah, the irony) – asked to see a picture of where I lived from 1969-1986, I showed her a Georgian Manor house, draped in Virginia Creeper, eight foot high windows, acres of roof and a tennis court all surrounded by a gravel driveway, neatly mowed lawns, tall oak trees, a little cottage, other outbuildings and a stable block, all at the end of a 800 foot driveway. She asked:’ How many of you lived there?’ “Three of us…”, I replied. “well, and the servants”. Her eyes widened. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. “You’re…you’re bourgeois!” she eventually exclaimed. Oh yes. I am definitely bourgeois.

For a Soviet girl, raised as a Young Pioneer under the gaze of Comrade Lenin, it was a crime to have so few people living in such a big house. ‘Your house would have been partitioned – a bit like India (well, it was marginally smaller than India). Every room would have had a whole family in it and everyone would have shared the kitchen.’ This sounded more like the home my great grandparents might have had before they escaped the slums. Their hard work has made it possible for us not to have to share rooms. This didn’t wash with Tanya, and only added to her suspicion of my counter-revolutionary tendencies. A suspicion confirmed when I took her and our daughter – half Soviet, half capitalist – to visit the family’s dirty little secret: our dark, Satanic Mill in industrial Batley.

Yes. We were mill owners. Owners of Victoria Mills. Two generations ago our family had moved away from the valley where the mills were. The advent of the motor car enabled that, as it was no longer necessary to live up the hill overlooking the place of work. The Keans moved north of Leeds. To clean air and fields and big ‘ouses. They sent their children to public schools. They cowered outside the gates in their Bentleys, their children ashamed to be seen in the company of people ‘oo ‘ad flat vowels and d’int speak proper. And bit b’ bit, generation by generation, we became posh. Posh enough to live in a Manor House – even if it was only a semi-detached one. But the money still got made in t’mill.

Batley is a grimey place. In the Churchyard up on the hill top overlooking the mill, the gravestone of my great grandfather stands sandstone black with the pollution of the years. It nestles among the long, unkempt grass, stiff, like the Victorian values of the gentleman that lies beneath it.

We toured the Mill down in the valley beneath. Nowadays it is a Habitat and Heals store. When I used to work there – cleaning the directors’ cars – it was a noisy working mill, making shoddy, the poor grade woollen yarn that makes blankets and army uniforms. Tanya also comes from a textile area of Russia and studied textiles as part of her economics degree. Here we were – the workers’ heroine in the red corner and the son of a son of a son of a son who was the fourth generation of an ‘exploitative’ mill owning dynasty. The Proletariat versus the Bourgeoisie. What does that make our daughter? We visited the cafe. Our daughter sat, unbidden, at the head of the table. Imperious. I think she knows which side her bread’s buttered on. I’m not sure she’s a worker.

My childhood of the seventies. No hanging out at McDonald’s. No Clash. Or Jam. Just Pink Floyd, Genesis and records of Beyond the fringe and Pete and Dud. Stone school corridors, cricket and rugby. My parents giving dinner parties where everyone came dressed in black tie or evening dresses. (Dad looked lovely in his evening gown.) After dinner, the men went to the Drawing room and discussed business and world affairs. I do not know what the women talked about. None of them had jobs.

In winter, I went down the field and shot things. In summer, we played or watched tennis, went to friends’ houses to swim or rode our bikes around the country lanes. When we moved in to our semi detached Manor house, I remember putting my arms out wide and spinning around on the wooden floor of the Hallway, looking up to the corniced ceiling of the upstairs floor some fifty feet above me saying: “I feel like a King!”. I did. I do. It was a privilege to live in such grandeur. It feels like a bygone age. Above us was a military air corridor. Throughout my childhood, Vulcan bombers screamed overhead on manoeuvres, practising for the confrontation with a USSR that clearly meant to take all this away from us. And now it has. Not by force. But with love. It is a different world.

My wife worked for Google in Moscow. She speaks fluent English. She studied in the UK in the nineties for a year, lived and taught in a school in the North East. She is an Anglophile – can quote vast tracts of Shakespeare and Jerome K. Jerome and knows Kipling’s ‘If’ by heart. She has travelled extensively throughout this land. As a language student and trained linguistics teacher, she knows more about the mechanics of how the English language works than me, a native born Brit – by a country mile. Which is why it is so sad that on meeting her for the first time, so many of my English acquaintances’ first question to her was the v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y spoken enquiry: “Do you speak English?” She loves nothing more than a walk in a National Trust garden and loves the Turner-esque paleness of a hazy English morning. None of that counts. She is an enemy agent, apparently, and must be made to feel like one every night on national TV.

To come live in a new country is to leave all that you know behind. It is to burn your boats. It is disorientating, dislocating and incredibly brave. Millions have done it and tens of thousands are trying to do it everyday. Most of us haven’t got a clue what it feels like to uproot yourself and re-plant in alien soil. Glibly, we welcome new comers and expect them to fit right in. Our way of doing this is odd. I have seen that we Brits are a very uncurious lot. In every conversation (bar one, marvellous exception) when my British friends and relations have met Tanya for the first time, they ask her “how are you finding it here?” They mean well. They are, in their British way, trying to make her feel welcome by enquiring. But there isn’t a single enquiry along the lines of “tell me about Russia, I’d love to know”. What could be more welcoming than to ask about the country someone has come from? Provide them with a chance to talk about home and for you to learn something new. When I visit Russia, all the people I meet ask about the UK. They are interested. Many of them have visited the UK more than once. Russia isn’t a country most Brits have been too. In spite of this ignorance, it is a country we think we know well. “Cold. Cold people, too – they don’t smile, you know. ” Er, that’s about it. All our images are rooted either in the Soviet days of thirty years ago – grey men on the balcony of the Lenin Mausoleum taking the salute from row upon row of goose stepping soldiers, missile launchers and tanks at some Communist parade, queues for food in empty shops and tractor production quotas – or in the person of Putin: a stereotypical Bond villain. Our mental image of Russians is either as boot-faced, muscle-bound female shot putters or nubile, gold digging catalogue brides. As for the men, all oligarch gangsters. Or ignorant dupes. As a nation, we are content with this and think we understand everything there is to know about Russia. People ask Tanya how she is finding the UK because we are endlessly fascinated with ourselves and want others to talk about us, too. After all, we are fascinating whereas foreigners are, well, foreign. And their countries are therefore not very interesting. Especially Russia, which we genuinely believe we know all about. And even if we don’t really know all about it, we’re just not that interested in it. People have even said to Tanya that they suppose her parents must be very pleased she has escaped and made a fresh start in the West. Yes. To come to a new country is disorientating, dislocating and incredibly brave – especially when you are confronted with this level of ignorance.

Tanya is no longer a casual visitor, she is now a resident. The glister of postcard-pretty Britain, of fish and chips, country houses, friendly bobbies on the beat, red letter boxes and Brighton Pier has been replaced with a very different face of Britain: a hostile and officious Home Office; endless form filling to get set up as a resident; banks who treat you with suspicion (where previously, as a high earner working for a world famous company in Moscow, you enjoyed extended credit lines and were treated as a very valuable customer); daily hostility to your country of birth in the news media and from the UK government, and a political backdrop of xenophobia stirred up deliberately in the Brexit debate.

On top of which, Tanya now has to deal with the daily exhaustion of “new-ness”: navigating the bureacracy of setting up home in Britain, registering with a doctor’s surgery and navigating the NHS (it is a mineflield if you have never encountered it before), working out the education system (we have a teenager to put into a British school), getting a bank account when you have no credit history in the country. Everything requires concentration and effort because she is learning a brand new system – a system I was brought up with and is therefore second nature to me. But for my wife, it is confusing and different. Different to what she has grown up with all her life. Different rules, different approach, different assumptions, different behaviour, different expectations, different etiquette, different streets, different geography, different social mores, different, well, different everything. And because she speaks fluent English, no one makes any allowance for these different expectations. They just expect her to know how it all works – because, surely, that is how it works everywhere? It is exhausting because everyone around can’t see why it’s all such a big deal. After all, this is how everyone does it, right?

Wrong.

Until you have lived in another country, you cannot appreciate how quirkily odd and peculiar your own country’s assumptions and beliefs, ways of being, attitudes and institutions really are. Stuff we were raised to believe from birth causes us no problems if we were all brought up with broadly the same set of assumptions and experiences. But when our assumptions clash with another culture’s assumptions, and you are the odd one out, it is very discombobulating. It is also why immigrants tend to stick together – they are seeking those familiar bonds of life understanding and belief. It is also why, when Brits colonised the Empire, they congregated together in ex-pat communities. Isn’t it a little hypercritical to accuse Asian immigrant communities in the UK of not integrating properly and of living in Asian ghettos, speaking their own language, cooking their traditional food, worshipping in their traditional way, when we Brits work all over the world and stick together in little British enclaves, drinking gin and tonic in the traditional way, cooking Sunday lunch, hosting Christmas parties, using locals for domestic staff and failing to learn anything more than a smattering of words in the language of our host nation? But we expect others to do it when they move here.

Tanya was brought up with different values. For example, Brits think that foreigners are filthy. We make jokes about the French smelling of garlic. I have travelled around the Greek Islands with some Brits who I had to virtually force to eat at a traditional Greek taverna. “But it’s filthy, Dave!” they complained. It wasn’t, it’s just that their pre-judgement was that it must be filthy because it was full of locals not tourists. We think our standards of cleanliness are world beating. And yet, we think a bit of dust here and there or a splash of mud on a child’s knee is perfectly fine, and anyone who says different is an obsessive compulsive. We are blissfully unaware that other nations regard us as filthy and very unhygienic.

Our cultural norms are so deeply ingrained that we believe certain behaviour is perfectly natural – behaviour which causes disease transmission amongst children and adults alike and which makes our homes hotbeds of infection. We believe that all young children everywhere catch colds and that it is good for them to do so because it builds up their immune system.Just look at the statistics of how many fewer infections are being bought to doctors now that we are all being reminded constantly to wash our hands! Maybe our behavioural norms, our assumptions are wrong.

In Britain, we don’t wash our hands as an automatic ritual when we come inside from being outside. In most other cultures, they do. We go out into the world, touch all manner of objects that have been touched by hundreds of other people, come home, get ourselves a snack, contaminate our food with germs we have picked up from holding onto to the poles in busses or trains, the escalator handrail, and the money we received in change from the shopkeeper, and chomp away on our sandwich, happily oblivious to what we are putting into our bodies. We don’t wash our hands before eating. We don’t wash our hands at all, really. Until coronavirus came along and we had to do what the rest of the world does anyway, as a matter of course. Result? Fifty per cent less everyday infections than normal reported by doctors’ surgeries. A terrific by-product of having to be more hygienic generally as a result of a very specific threat.

We also think nothing of coming home from work, or shopping, or walking the dog or exercising, putting the key in the latch and walking into our homes in our filthy shoes. We traipse all around our homes, depositing anything and everything on to our carpets that we’ve brought in from outside on the soles of our shoes. It never occurs to us that we are bringing all kinds of muck and dirt and disease into our living rooms and bedrooms. I now look in horror as my fellow Brits walk into our home, have to be reminded to take off their shoes (which they resent) and then, when they leave, fetch these same shoes, sit on the sofa to put them on and tramp back through the house to the front door, negating the purpose of taking them off in the first place.

When I first met my wife, she noted that as I was searching in my pockets to find the front door keys, I often put anything in my hand such as a train ticket or wallet, between my teeth – to free up my hands for the rummaging. In her eyes, I might as well just get down on my hands and knees and lick the pavement. ‘Why would you do that?’, she asked, painfully. ‘You’re going to make yourself ill.’ And, to be fair, it is worth noting that she and our son were hardly ever ill when they lived in Russia. Since moving to the UK, my wife in particular has had several appalling bouts of flu, a series of colds throughout the winter – usually brought home by our toddler, more of which in a minute – and her immune system has taken a battering. “Ah”, I hear the Brits say, “it will make her stronger, get her immune system working better.” Hogwash. The only thing getting nasty colds and flu does is make your life miserable, weaken your immune system and make you more susceptible to the next one that comes along. We trot out this nonsense which we have repeated and heard others say so often that it has become, in our minds, true. But it is nonsense to say we are building up our immune systems. We aren’t – scientific fact. The consequence of this dangerous myth is we are the sickliest nation in Europe. We don’t operate on the principle of prevention is better than cure – we don’t treat hygiene as something related to our sickliness – and the reason our NHS is crumbling under the strain is that it has to cure so many people from illnesses they could have easily avoided with a bit of basic hygiene. Some of our precious national myths aren’t worth keeping.

When we moved to the UK, we had to find a nursery for our toddler. My, that was fun. Nurseries in Russia are purpose built. They are cleaned top to bottom twice a day. All the toys – hard toys only – are sterilised at the end of every school day. Children have a bed on which they take a nap every single day. Their bed is for one child only and that child uses the same bed every day. Each child has a locker in which to keep their stuff. The children are raised to take off their outdoor shoes in the locker room and wear indoor shoes only inside the nursery. When they go out to play they play in a play area specially designated for their specific age group. They do not mix with children from other age groups. They wash their hands as soon as they have changed their shoes, and again every time they come back from outside, go to the loo or are about to eat. Every nursery has a specific entrance for each year group. There is virtually no cross contamination and if your child does get ill, you are forbidden by law from bringing your child into nursery for three days. And if they do get ill, which is much less likely than in Britain where none of these hygiene protocols exist, you will attend a children only doctors clinic so that your child does not have to share a waiting room with adults and is therefore not exposed to even more bacteria or viruses.

Imagine my wife’s horror as she was shown around nurseries by proud proprietors in buildings that were old and dirty, watching children and adults tramping around the floors in their outdoor wear, with not a hint of hand washing hygiene. She was despairing. Exhausted – not just from the inevitable illnesses that our daughter brought home week after week, but from the alien behaviour and philosophy of a culture she felt was blind to its own stupid way of doing things, and even proud of it.

Our home now is a ‘Russia house’. We keep it the Russian way. Not just to make my family feel at home but because it is a more sensible way to run a home and it is a better way to live. But try telling that to Brits and they pooh pooh the idea. British is best, everyone knows that; even if we are bankrupting our NHS by living in a way which actually increases our likelihood of getting ill, and by refusing to learn from the healthier cultures that come to live amongst us. Well, that’s unfair, actually. We in Britain did take a very valuable lesson from another culture once upon a time. Back on the 5th July, 1948, we founded the most loved, precious institution in Britain today: the National Health Service. Where did the idea come from? It was inspired by the world’s first model of providing universal free healthcare for all – the one they pioneered in Soviet Russia.

Yes, it is exhausting to be a Russian in Britain right now. But, when you strip away all the politics and the British exceptionalism, we have more in common than that which divides us. It just takes a little tolerance of other’s attitudes and opinions, the courage to not to be blinded by the belief that we are always right and the humility to remember that they are just trying to get along in the world the same as us.