The Discreet Charm of the Aral Sea

Jonathan Harker wrote in his diverting journal that crossing the Danube gave him the impression he was "leaving the West and entering the East... among the traditions of Turkish rule". As the night train clatters across the frozen sleepers of Ukraine towards Russia, I survey my coupé companions and conclude that live Muscovites travel slow, much like the languorous decline of the Ottoman.

My current husband, No Good Boyo, thinks I should write more about my journey. In retaliation, I shall write about him and the belching branch-line locomotive that is his life.

Boyo's last attempt to persuade a woman to write about trains was directed loosely at a Welsh termagant who shortly thereafter left her husband for another woman. Such is the Allure of Boyo that he can dissuade women not only from further engagement with himself but also with the entire male genus.

Boyo was piqued by her tale of being offered a "beeg feesh" by a Russian naval rating on the Trans-Siberian Express. If they had enjoyed the double delight of being born a woman in the Soviet Union, Boyo and his interlocutrix would have recognised this as a simple proffering of an oversized and undersalted Caspian Perch, not some invitation to tug at his tangy root.

Expecting an anecdote of Celtic length and ambiguity, Boyo set off to relieve himself aforehand. Now, I should add that he was hosting this light supper in a tea garden deep inside Tashkent, the concrete capital of Uzbekistan - itself the East Germany of Central Asia. Uzbek café society has all the sophistication of Welsh café society, and similar comfort facilities, so Boyo stalked off to expel an evening's worth of arak into the nearest patch of twilight shrubbery.

Like Buñuel's eternally frustrated diners, Boyo stumbled into and over one obstacle after another - first a lady walking her dog (not a euphemism, he continues to assure me), then a literal outing of the Tashkent Exhibitionists Society.

As a group of monobrowed lovelies from the Uzbek State Academy of Demure Yet Saucy Librarians approached, Boyo decided on his failure-hallowed technique of understudied nonchalance. He noticed an apparently pointless parapet - Uzbekistan, like most out-takes from the great Soviet blockbuster, is littered with random ramps - glanced over at the reassuring loam on the other side, and strolled alongside it for a few yards before gracefully vaulting into a 15-foot-deep underground car park entrance.

Like the Piedmontese, Boyo is rarely drunk but does work hard at keeping himself "topped up". This ensures that his muscles are as relaxed as his self-awareness, and so he bounced gently from limb to limb rather than shattering on a slab of pebbledash. Seeing an opportunity both to harvest the librarians' sympathy and display his pahlavan resilience, Boyo sprung from the pit and gave them a cheery wave. They naturally fled amid a sea of squeals, thereby attracting the inevitable police patrol. The Jumaboys in Blue caught up with Boyo just as he was at last relieving himself against a tree.

Protests that he had maintained propriety by not first loosening his trousers impressed them less than the long-term loan of his wallet and signed, well-laminated photograph of Jenny Agutter.

A gaggle of Russian border guards puzzle over a ballpoint pen. I peer out into the darkness, and seem to hear in the turbid eddies of the River Shmonchka the gentle squelch of Boyo returning to that distant dinner table so many years ago. I settle back in my furs to sleep.

The Return of Countess Geschwitz

I would apologise for my long absence if I were a different person. Instead suffice to say that, by goading ex-President Yushchenko into testifying against former Prime Minister Tymoshenko at the latter's show trial in Kiev, I have almost completed the task of turning Ukrainian politics into an Expressionist performance of the missing portion of Gogol's "Dead Souls".

I returned to Britain with our daughter Arianrhod this week to see how Boyo and young Bendigeidfran have been coping. My house is, of course, ruined. Which is why I sold it quietly to a Montenegrin gentleman prior to my departure last year. Boyo has, however, been quite busy.

After unglueing the laptop - never was a computer more aptly named - I casually accessed Boyo's files (password "ImmerAngela") - and found two screenplays.

As for the first - "Alien vs Predator vs Dalek" - I think the executive summary says it all: "The Aliens and Predators take out the Daleks, dress in their Dalek suits and duke it out for an hour like mad-bastard dodgems before an atomic bomb or something. NB to self - Sarah Hadland, catsuit."

The second is altogether more ambitious. "The Lion Tamer" posits a Britain in which "some liberals" have freed all the circus animals "elephants, horses, clowns, sea-lions, real lions natch" into the wild because of a campaign by Blue Peter.

It also means that various animal wranglers are now out of work and thirsting for revenge on bien-pensant Britain. The police fight pitched battles with ringmasters, Cossack cavalry and large-footed buffoons on tiny bicycles, amid scenes of seals rampaging through fishmongers, but one man stands alone above the fray - the Lion Tamer.

This alloy of Conan and Camus is clearly modelled on Boyo himself, if Boyo were a slab of marbled beefcake who lets his single-tail do the talking. He wanders the land, righting wrongs by applying his beast-baiting skills to the underclass and irrigating shireswomen with his brackish seed.

It gradually clots into the sort of pepper-spray overdose of sixth-form symbolism and cartwheeling limbs that passes for plot in male dystopias, although this one has a happy ending in which the hero saves our Home Secretary, Theresa May, from being mauled by a lion through, er, taming it.

He then rides the Home Secretary sideways, on the swiftly-flayed hide of the lion.

Cue credits over the fortunate Privy Councillor's flushed yet ashen features as a voice-over explains that Mrs May becomes prime minister, exiles the wild animals to Scotland, and appoints the Lion Tamer head of a "special forces force" made up of battle-hardened circus performers.

Who will no doubt feature in "Lion Tamer II: Mark of the Beast". There was little to show in the file thus headed, except the phrase "Louise Mensch, cyber MP".

Boyo's other major achievement was to teach Bendigeidfran to shout at the television.

"Воспитание происходит всегда, даже тогда, когда вас нет дома."

Le bon Dieu est dans le détail

An explanation: I've spent the last few months helping the new Yanukovych Administration ruin Ukraine as a special advisor working on the Plekhanovite principle of The Worse, The Better ("чем хуже, тем лучше").

Having reached the "Worse" stage ahead of schedule, I was happy to retire to the other end of Europe and confidently let the Dialectic lead the happy Cossack collective onwards towards the "Better".

My return was not unclouded, as any wife can imagine. Boyo told me that he had taken up the ways of Gandhi in my absence, and I was naturally disappointed to discover he meant Mahatma not Indira.

Still, I reasoned, he would be saving me a fortune on vodka and laundry bills, and might even have managed to spin a half-decent pashmina for my collection.

Instead, I found Boyo doubled up in a corner of the kitchen, his jowls green and his palms furred. By his side lay a crumpled and curiously-modified photograph of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel.

I picked up a chipped piece of china, and quickly tried to drop it again.

"Oh Boyo," I sighed, "It was a cup of his own water that Gandhi drank every day!"

Green et idéal

Boyo is a lurching emporium of Welsh culture in all its gassy degeneracy. His conversation is a stream of Welshisms - the turgid verbal redundancy, pli selon pli, that I summarised earlier as "clanging tautology".

Boyo is also a delightful source of Mondegreen, such as his subconscious upgrading of the loathsome "Mull of Kintyre" into "Bollocking Time".

A recent conversation of his with another Welsh-speaker yielded a serendipitous conjunction of the two phenomena. They were discussing the lyrics of Welsh Wales's sole contribution to the punk genre, namely "Rhedeg i Paris" ("Running to Paris") by the group Anhrefn.

Boyo cited this song as evidence of the sheer literacy of Welsh popular music, in particular the line "wedi achub Boudu o foddi dan dwr" - "having saved Boudu from drowing".

I was impressed. Few punk singers refer to Renoir's "Boudu sauvé des eaux". Until his compatriot, in a treasonable display of accuracy and honesty, pointed out that the line is "cofio am bentrefi wedi boddi dan dwr" - "remembering drowned villages" - a constant lament of Welsh poetry ever since the English discovered that water is useful for washing and turned various Snowdonian valleys into reservoirs in the mid-1960s.

An amusing mishearing, and an apt puncturing of Boyo's bathetic bumptiousness, but there was better to come. I asked why "remembering drowned villages" takes so long to say in Welsh. The literal translation, it emerges, is "remembering villages that have been drowned under water".

Not just drowned, but drowned "under water". I don't like to imagine what else the Welsh are liable to drown in, but suspect that one day I'll find out.

De Bella et Gallo

Boyo has rediscovered his enthusiasm for Dr Who, a curious British televisual confection that seeks to graft 1950s science-fiction plots onto pantomime with the uncertain archness that passes for humour in much of BBC output.

Ever eager to find just causes in law, I watched the last episode to ascertain the source of this uncharacteristic spousal animation.

Was it the latest "companion"? Hardly. Ms Karen Gillan is an improvement on the previous auburn slattern to grace the Doctor's arm, but neither comes close to Boyo's type. Like the gentleman in this poignant documentary film, my partner still keens for Billie Piper with mournful and never-ending remembrance:



Was it the switch in writers from Russell T Davies to Steven Moffat? Boyo admires the latter's masterpiece, Coupling, and its sympathetic portrayal of a priapic Welsh simpleton in particular. He is, however, unlikely to applaud the ouster of compatriot Davies for a Scotch such as Moffat.

Was it the latest actor to play the heroic physician? Matt Smith rates an irritation factor of four, as opposed to the eight scored by his predecessor David Tennant, and dresses much like Boyo himself. But that cannot be enough, otherwise my prime subject would be glued to "Last of the Summer Wine".

Then I heard it. At 27'52" in the iPlayer version of "Victory of the Daleks", came this:

"This is the end for you. The final end."

The declamatory style. The repetition. And, of course, the clanging tautology - all the signs of the Welshism, as discussed earlier on this site.

Spring is in the air, but all I can taste is slate on the breeze.

From the Sleep of Reason

Boyo works from home on Fridays in an effort to educate our son Bendigeidfran in his preferred version of the Welsh language, one even meaner of vowel than most.

I ensure that the popular application of "working from home" is not available to Boyo by engaging the parental controls on his laptop and hiding the Calpol.

Boyo instead surpasses himself in both irrelevance and depravity by teaching young 'Fran his bolt-on tongue by simultaneously translating Universal horror films. You've not really experienced the full poignancy of Inspector Krogh's childhood encounter with The Monster in "Son of Frankenstein" until you've heard it in Welsh, apparently.

The inadequate English original is here at 07:06, if you care to compare:

Watching these films anew led me to a useful insight. The appeal of the Universal monsters to infants and adult males alike stems from their childishness. For they are babies:

• Dracula sleeps all day and suckles all night.
• The Frankenstein Monster raises its arms piteously to the unfamiliar light and stumbles about in ill-fitting clothes. This would in addition explain its appeal to the Welsh.
• The Wolfman is permanently teething.

We now see in context the popularity among grown men of the Predator film and its successors, as eloquently set out by The Daily Mash here on the basis of my initial thesis.

The Predator is what every young man aspires to be. His life is one long paint-balling weekend, with the added stimuli of invisibility (permitting the observation of female xenomorphs in the shower), rolling in mud with human skulls, and the binding of all loose ends by an atom bomb.

But now we're onto the secondary-school curriculum.

Actiones sunt suppositorum

In this festive season, it seems appropriate to ask what is mortification.

Some see it as a shriving of the body that frees the soul.

Others believe it is a natural consequence of approaching godliness.

These people know nothing. Mortification is standing at your door before a gathering of carol singers. They have just asked your pre-school daughter what Yuletide tune she would like to hear, and received the lisping response "Jesus Entering From the Rear".

Theodicy cannot encompass your feelings when she then launches into the chorus.

“He was laughing in the tower”

I grow weary of Boyo's diaries. The constantly doubled consonants in Anna Chancellor's name tire my eyes.

Instead I've taken to his record collection. Long abandoned by their owner, these discs of trembling ebony sing beneath my fingernails.

I have concluded that the finale of Sir Malcolm Arnold's 5th Symphony is a sour commentary on Wozzeck - Berg not Büchner.

Listen, and tell me what you think.

Am I Alone in Thinking?

Probably.

Che farò senza Euridice?

A bedtime story exchange:

No Good Boyo: So Dorothy and her little dog ran back to the farmhouse to escape from the tornado. And what was Dorothy's little dog called?

Arianrhod, our daughter: Cerberus.

Au fond de l'Inconnu

No Good Boyo subscribes to what he claimed is a journal of Attic Greek research called Radiotimes, but turns out to be a tele-vision and wireless listings magazine.

I leafed through it the other day in apprehension of finding out what British people watch other than the ritual humiliation of rural simpletons - a form of entertainment that Ukrainians prefer to enjoy live.

I found this:

Hay-on-Sky

7.00pm Sky Arts ARTS

Bill Clinton dubbed it "the Woodstock of the mind", and the annual literary festival in the small town of Hay-on-Wye attracts a much wider field that just London literati.

The likes of Sandi Toksvig, Simon Schama, Sophie Dahl, Rick Wakeman, Heston Blumenthal, Marcus Brigstock and Sting will all be there this year.

Many of them will make it along to Sky Arts's temporary studio for a chat with Mariella Frostrup and she'll also have daily reports on events through to the end of May.

Sting is revered as a demiurge by the mountainfolk of Tyahnybok District in the High Carpathians because of his physical and vocal resemblence to Yeldasys, an hermaphrodite wood sprite, but these others are unfamiliar to me.

I feel a little ashamed to have underestimated the intellectual balast that weighs down the barque of British public life, and shall apply myself during this confinement to studying the works of Brigstock, Wakeman et alia.

Any recommendations for a point of departure into this sea of knowledge would be welcome.

Getrennt-vereint

Some time ago I was intrigued to find myself pregnant again. A little later I was disappointed to find that No Good Boyo was the father.

My confinement has given me real insights into my spouse's daily life. For example, he has personalised settings on his computer that filter every Internet search into its nearest pornographic equivalent.

I now regret trying to augment my Hitchcock collection by Googling "remastered Rear Window".

I gave him money, name tags and a map of London before he set off for the British Museum's "Babylon" exhibition with our daughter Arianrhod. On his return I frisked his duffel bag to discover a Bob Marley t-shirt and a bottle of rhum.

He has a commendable approach to ecology, as indescribable items of his clothing also serve as dish-cloths, elementary footwear and devices used in the making of cheese as the years pass.

Paternity has not sapped his creative urge. I found a letter in my name addressed to the "Mrs Mills" column in The Sunday Times, asking for advice on "unsightly facial removal". No words had been omitted.

Finally, Arianrhod recently assured me that her ambition on leaving school is to become a "mod wolf". And I thought I had cleansed the house of Hesse.

Es Gibt Keine Alternative

A belated Valentine from Boyo, ready for my 2010 election campaign.

Un cœur simple

It is easy and rewarding to jeer at No Good Boyo, especially now that bear-rolling has been outlawed in Ukraine, but he does have some noble qualities.

One is his conviction of that everything he has ever done is a pleasure to behold, and an honour if he did it to you.

Earlier this week I finally managed to translate his college diary, with the help of the Welsh Academy's daunting dictionary and by asking Boyo what it all meant during his evening appreciation of Voskoboynykiv's latest vat of monkey juice.

I read that two of his college conquests subsequently "became" lesbians and joined convents. Now Boyo's tastes in the érotique are catholic rather than Catholic, and he has little time for the "nuns with guns" sub-genre, so we can assume that all he wrote was true.

I asked him how it felt to know that one boudoir encounter with him was enough to make two young women realise not only that they are homosexual but also that a life of prayerful chastity is the only way to regain their self-worth.

Boyo was watching John Carpenter's The Fog, a film that he maintains is a witty deconstruction of Conquista myths. But then he also thinks leprosy is caused by "too much rabbits". He paused in his viewing, focused on my shoulder and delivered himself of the opinion that:

"One night with me and they both knew no ordinary man would ever be enough. So they dyked up and went to try out some nuns. Makes sense, innit?"

I said nothing. Perhaps he felt he had been a little crass, as he added:

"It was separate nights, not both of them together. Though that would have explained where they got the idea from, mind."

A slot on Radio 4's Thought For The Day beckons.

The force that through the green fuse...

An excited but mercifully clothed No Good Boyo waved The Sunday Times at me in the afternoon.

He'd got round to reading a review of ageing actress Carrie Fisher's new book "Wishful Drinking" - a title designed not only to catch but firmly restrain his attention.

Boyo has admired Ms Fisher's work since being loaned a video tape of "The Return of the Jedi", a children's adventure film in which she sports a brass bikini and chain. As I recall he fast-forwarded to the relevant scene, watched it three times, then wrote Ms Fisher the letter that still has him debarred from entering the United States under his real name.

"Carrie done a course on electroconvulsive therapy, so I'll do the same!" he declared. "It's time I studied a science. I'll see you when I finished. Ciao for now!"

And off he went. As the daughter of an officially-sanctioned mad scientist I could only applaud his enthusiasm.

Intrigued, I flicked through the review of Ms Fisher's book. "Ah, a course of electroconvulsive therapy," I noted, reminding myself to check the back-up generator before retiring for a peaceful night.

One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back

To mark the anniversary of the dispersal of the Russian Constituent Assembly by weary but armed proletarians in 1918, No Good Boyo and I like to exchange gifts as a sign of our reciprocal respect for me.

Each year we take turns in presenting a gift to our daughter Arianrhod. Two years ago I left Boyo to his own devices, and have rued doing so with every blast on the little mite's specially-adapted Alpenhorn.

This year I suggested the distance-adoption of an animal. This would sidestep looming demands for a neglected pet of our own, and go a little way to overcome my regret at not applying for that job running donkey sanctuaries in one of the more inbred parts of England.

Imagine my delight when Boyo announced that he had adopted a Bengal tiger on Arianrhod's behalf, via the admirably unsentimental World Wildlife Fund.

With much less effort one can also imagine my reaction when Boyo wrote to the Fund asking whether for an extra "tenner" Arianrhod would have "first crack" at the said tiger when she reached "blooding age".

"A rug! A rug!" squealed my daughter on receipt of a photographic print of the beast.

The Sun may have set on the British Empire, but the occasional shadow still flits across my conservatory.

The Long March

The anarcho-syndicalist meeting had failed to convene, as usual, so I was home a little early last night.

"Yoo-hoo Boyo, it's me!" I cooed.

"Begone woman, I am at stool!" barked my beau.

I knew better than to interrupt what might be a prolonged and gruesome process, as this would only make things worse.

As I released the traps and tenderised Arianrhod's dinner, I dwelt upon the dialectical significance of what sounded like a brass band being savaged by seagulls in our bathroom.

Boyo has introduced his readers to the concept of the gosha. He failed, through the inherent contradictions of his being a man, to explain to womankind how the gosha is to be handled.

Common sense would suggest industrial gauntlets and fishing nets, but it is more a question of time than space.

Once an idea has taken root in the alkaline mulch of a gosha's mind, a woman must have the strength and patience to let it go to seed at its own pace. To try to train it into a more pleasing shape or, worse, to prune or uproot it, would drive the bravest Amazon into the apathetic rot of liberalism.

Boyo has shown little Marxisant enthusiasm for the impending downfall of Capitalism, and is busy with plans to make money. After a few canteens of Voskoboynykiv's jus de singe, he likes to "run his thoughts past me" in the hope that some might escape. I give some examples.

1. Alien-themed restaurant. Attentive readers will know that Boyo thinks all wisdom can be gleaned from repeated and drunken viewing of the films Animal House and Withnail & I. It is not so widely understood that he treats the Alien film franchise as a sort of apocrypha - not as canonical as the thoughts of imaginary frat boys and fey thespians, but nonetheless endowed with arete.

His latest idea is to deck out a restaurant like an Alien tabernacle (yes, including the minor prophets of the Alien vs Predator series), and have diners encased inside the food. They then have to eat their way out - either by climbing out of the top in the manner of the Alien "face hugger" or by burrowing out of the side like the "chest burster".

I could mention hygiene regulations. I could allude to the cost of the mountains of meat involved. I could refer to dry cleaning, as if those words meant anything to him. But I do not.

2. "Eat Like An Animal". Do you see a theme here? This brainwave predicates a television quiz show involving Lady Antonia Fraser as a contestant for reasons I don't like to speculate about.

Each victim is given a plate of food and an animal. They then have to eat the dish in the manner of the beast alongside them. The creature then "shows" them how it should be done, to the delight and edification of the audience in the studio and at home.

"This will teach the people of Britain humility before the diversity and dexterity of the Animal Kingdom," slurred Boyo over his plate of offal. "Imagine Lady Antonia or that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown trying to eat a trifle like an amœba? I can!"

I smiled brightly. I could have drawn his attention to the Food Standards Agency, the RSPCA, Harold Pinter, Heaven of Heavens and other likely opponents of his plan, but chose not to.

Boyo has other schemes, many more gauche and alarming than these. I shall pass over them in silence, knowing as I do that male indolence, grandiloquence and life-saving stupidity will overcome random enthusiasm.

Allow me to employ the techniques of multimedia to illustrate my point. I consider the Channel 4 comedy Father Ted to be a protean guide to understanding the male psyche, if such were ever to exist.

In an early episode, Father Jack Hackett is seen cavorting in some undergrowth. A policeman offers to shot him with a tranquiliser dart. Father Ted stays the Guard's hand. "No, let him go," says the clerical reactionary, "he'll make his own way back."

My thoughts exactly.

You may study the exchange at 58" on this clip:

Ansichtskartenspiel

No Good Boyo escorted myself and Arianrhod to our local commemoration of an English backyard auto-de-fé last night, at which pink-faced plumbers ate pork products as their children danced around a bonfire. It looked like any given Saturday night in the High Carpathians to me.

Boyo was intrigued to see that our neighbour's wife had broken her leg. "Does that mean you're housebound and unable to run fast?" he asked politely.

We returned home shortly afterwards for a variety of closely-linked reasons.

Boyo sought to comfort me with an offer to have the choice moments of my web blog published in book form. "The postcard format is making a comeback," he explained.

I laughed until he'd stopped crying.

November Theses

Constant reader Gyppo Byard has asked me to list six random things about myself. I regret to say that he did not ask me exclusively, but rather mentioned me in a list of his fellow cyberdrones. I will nonetheless give a response:

1. The most random thing in my life is No Good Boyo. Partner, chauffeur, unwitting food-taster and guerrilla gardener, he seems to leach logic and consequence out of everyday events.

2. I am a follower of the dialectic, but cannot match it in relentlessness. Sometimes I like to relax at our family's ruined laboratory in the Carpathians with a pile of Will Self novels on a nice warm pyre.

3. Boyo is my married name. My maiden name is one of the most widely-defaced on the cartouches of 18th Dynasty tombs

4. My father says I was conceived ("if that's the word") one heady night in celebration of the Soviet correction of the "Prague Spring" rightist deviation in both Czecho and Slovakia - a full year before that fraternal intervention occurred.

5. A border guard dog was named after me on the Uzh section of the frontier.

The circumstances that led up to this honour were the subject of my primary school essay "How Many Objective Banderites I Found Hiding in Bushes in the Closed Border Zone During My Summer Holidays With Comrade Uncle Colonel Jajcabiy", which won the Menzhinsky Prize for the under-sevens.

6. During work-experience with the People's Militia information dispersal department, I suggested expelling Esperantists from the state youth movement.

The reason I gave was that our tolerance of Esperanto was making the Socialist Bloc look like a haven for the mentally underequipped rather than a Vanguard of Progress. In fact I was rather taken with Volapük at the time - the original Schleyer version, not the infantile De Jong revision. I admired its purity.

If the organs had taken my advice, the Warsaw Pact might still be intact.

The rules suggest that I should to pass on these "meme" to six others. I shall do nothing of the kind. Instead I ask that my readers should try to think of six non-random elements to their daily lives. And meditate thereon.

The Sixth Art

No Good Boyo has decided to beat the recession by diversifying his multimedia portfolio. He is writing a "sure fire" screenplay for a Hollywood film.

On Friday, after an extended lunchtime, he came up with the title - "Escape from Bikini Island".

Over the weekend he fretted that this did not meet his usual standards.

Last night he announced in triumph the new, improved title:

"No Escape from Bikini Island".

I pass this on without comment.