Moscow Bingo
In spite of the faint mystery about the week- end fire at the British Embassy in Moscow, and the contradictory statements made afterwards, most people who have actually been there will find it hard to imagine anything very remarkable happening in the Embassy 'club.' This place, which I visited earlier this year, is the slightly forlorn off-duty resort of the Embassy staff and their families: I say slightly forlorn because it is so nostalgic an effort to re-create the atmosphere and appearance qf an English pub of the kind found in prosperous outer suburbia. Beer, darts and saloon-bar badinage have a curious unreality when experienced in a converted attic within a
few hundred yards of the Kremlin walls. The Western diplomats are not so icily segregated as they were in Stalin's day, of course, but theirs remains a life of uncomfortable isolation, and this pseudo-pub is the result. The transient caller can easily shiver at the claustrophobic conditions it suggests, but now that it has been wrecked by fire I don't doubt its regular users will feel sadly deprived. For the time being, at least, I take it they will have to find somewhere else for their regular sessions of our national pastime: bingo is highly popular at our outpost in the capital city of Marxism. '
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