Darren

If you want to know anything in Moscow, I was told, talk to your babooshka.

Babooshki, I learned, are the old women who seem to run the city - or at any rate fill the essential jobs which keep it going. Roadsweepers, bus conductors, street vendors and anything else you care to think of.

“My” babooshka was Olga, the concierge at the small hotel just a few blocks away from the Kremlin in which I was staying while I worked at my company’s Moscow headquarters for six months.

She was a jolly old soul, probably only in her 50s but looking a good ten years older, with an apparently insatiable appetite for the western pop music she’d known as a girl.

“My father was in the Soviet Army based in Germany after the Hitler war”, she told me. “And at night I would tune in to the American radio station in West Germany and hear such wonderful music.”

But I soon found that her devotion to the music of the ‘50s and ‘60s had coloured her life in a more personal way.

Encouraged by her friendliness, after a couple of months I took her up on my offer to give me any advice on finding my way around the city.

Telling her that I was gay would probably have got me shot - or, at best, exiled to the gulag - just a decade or two before. But Moscow and St Petersburg are far more open these days.

The boy bars may not yet be quite on the same level as those in Prague or Bangkok, but they’re making rapid progress, believe me, even if it’s usually thought to be Mafia money that’s driving it.

And when I asked Olga for directions to the sort of place I was looking for, she showed very little surprise.

“Ah”, she said. “You are best to go to the Blue Boy bar. It’s on Solchinski Street, but it’s hard to find. Why not let one of my nephews take you there? It’s a rough part of town, so if you like he can look after you as bodyguard - yes? - for only a few roubles.”

It turned out that, in line with her musical tastes, she’d named the twin boys, whom she’d brought up after her sister’s death, James and Darren. Not very Russian, admittedly, but cute, eh?

Given that Olga has offered Darren’s services as not only my guide but my protector too, I guess I expected one of Mother Russia’s beefier specimens to come to pick me up that night.

But nothing can have been further from the truth.

When Olga brought him to my room and I first saw him, I thought that there must have been some mistake. This was no muscle god, but a rather skinny, even slightly geeky looking boy in his late teens. I’d have thought that, if ever we got into any trouble on the streets, I’d have had to end up protecting him.

I began to think that I’d have been better off with James.

Still, with Olga beaming proudly at her nephew, I dared not renege on my promise, so instead I sent her on her way while I finished getting ready.

As soon as the door was closed behind her, Darren spoke.

“Excuse me, sir”, he said in very promising English.