Indestructible?

Adler, Russia, 2011

Indestructible?

I'm currently reading Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, an autobiographical account of him growing up in the US in the 1950s. It's an enjoyable read and humorous in a gentle, self-effacing way that seems in keeping with such an anglophile. Anyway, enough of that tangent... so, I'm sure you're wondering why someone writing about Russia would mention 50s America. This short extract made me think of two periods of my life:

Happily, we were indestructible. We didn't need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water or the Heimlich manoeuvre. We didn't require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn't need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without written reminding that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn't have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively. (pp105-106)

 

It transported me back to two times in my life... the first period was when my face was as bald as my forehead is now, in the UK twenty-odd years ago... days when I used to play outside, jump off walls without thinking about how my knees would cope with the impact, whizz down the road on my scooter and climb trees blissfully unaware of the possibility of falling.

The other time was...

... my years in Russia, unsurprisingly. I've mentioned it in passing elsewhere in the blog that in Russia safety is not high on the list of priorities. In Russia, there remains that carefree unawareness of consequences that I abandoned a long time ago in the interests of self-preservation.

It's there in the interests of excitement: one of my wife's recent, Russian teenage students told stories of how he and a friend had been running across a Moscow motorway to get hit by a car so they could sue for the money - they weren't poor, quite the opposite in fact, it was how they were getting their kicks. It's there in fun and macho bravado, sometimes fueled by alcohol, such as going swimming in a lake after eating shashlik and drinking beer. Moscow, for example, saw 688 drownings in a 20-day period in July 2010 during a heatwave, which was more than the UK in whole of 2012 (371 deaths). It's there in overcoming practical problems. I have experience of this when my wife and father-in-law are involved. For them, this...

and this...

appear to be testament to human ingenuity and the ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable difficulties and not death-defying acts of stupidity. Being with Russian family and getting DIY materials from the shop in a small hatchback has me getting my head around the laws of physics, working out how many traffic laws I'm breaking, figuring out whether I'm invalidating my motor insurance and calculating how many novel, Final Destination-style deaths could occur to us or passers-by.

Anyone for a shortcut?

For me, I entered into the spirit over there - cutting corners across building sites, giant icy puddles and frozen rivers, ignoring the fact I wouldn't have been found until the snow thawed; being one of several passengers flying around in the back of a works van (ok, I admit it, it was only me who failed to hold on and went flying); hailing random cars as taxis without consideration of whether the driver is Mother Theresa or Norman Bates...

Who'll stop? Saint or psycho?

It's given me stories to tell, but sometimes I look back and think, "Jesus!" In fairness, I don't know whether it's the fact that the UK's moved on the country from my childhood and we're doing the right thing by raising awareness of safety and wrapping our kids in cotton wool or whether we're protecting people to the extent that people don't think for themselves anymore? I mean, why do companies feel obliged to state that the coffee cup's contents may be hot or write on the bottom of a carton of milk to open it at the other end? How f*****g stupid do you have to be to require this information articulated in writing? Or, are we trying to extend to life of idiots long enough so that they contribute to the gene pool and help to reverse evolution? It's probably somewhere in between: Russia's a harsh place at times and Britain's turning into a nation of zombies.

The trees in the distance, on the horizon, are an island... I kid you not.

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More thoughts on this in my Russian blog