Another rush to the train and sweat is pouring down my back as I enter the hot, cramped carriage. Carriage three, they really do make you feel like third class right from the off; before you even get on you have to walk another fifteen carriages down the platform to reach your third class open sleeper.

The train stops and young men stand on the tracks smoking and spitting, their sweaters, jackets and jeans along with their short haircuts make them look Scottish. Babushkas with bags of cherries and people with huge amounts of different cuddly toys tied to them walk up and down the tracks next to the train. They walk around the smoking men, each one of the men seemingly taking in turn to talk on their mobile phone.

The blonde pregnant Russian girl, her husband and mother all changed out of their train clothes (generally for the Russians, tracksuits) into smart attire and left at the last station, a small town near Perm. I got off the train at Perm and almost immediately was seized upon by a tall toothless man who was selling food and drinks to passengers. He wore a dirty black woolly hat and equally dirty black coat, he spoke surprisingly good English, he told me about British history and that Britain is made up of sixty countries and islands. He was particularly interested in the Royal Wedding and had recently read ‘Ivanhoe’ by Walter Scott.

I am reading Bill Bryson’s book ‘Down Under’, it is very entertaining. He is travelling on the Indian Pacific railway in Australia, a railway I have taken myself, which runs straight across Australia from Sydney to Perth. He says:

“There is something wonderfully lulling about being stuck for a long spell on a train. It was like being give a preview of what it will be like to be in your eighties. All those things eighty year-olds appear to enjoy, staring vacantly out of the windows, dozing in a chair, boring the pants off anyone foolish enough to sit beside them – took on a special treasured meaning for me. This was the life!”

For twenty-four hours now the landscape has been unchanging, long spindly twigs of trees, snow in parts and frozen ponds, brown grass, brown earth, a brown land defrosting after a long deep freeze. Regularly obscured by monolithic soviet coal carriages or oil tanker carriages, old wooden shacks, the occasional empty concrete building with no glass in the windows, rusting containers, everything is downtrodden and old.

The middle aged Russian woman who was across from me got off, I helped her with her extraordinary amount of luggage. I tried my feeble Russian with her as she left, she spoke to me in Russian all day yesterday, me just smiling and nodding, even laughing when seemed appropriate, which was not often, she had a very serious way of talking. No sooner is she off than the Turkish men, barefooted, sit with their feet on the seat noisily slurping black tea from small plastic water cups. Putting your feet on train seats is a big faux pas on this train, and I expect the Provonista to scold them.

I pass villages with wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs, most brown and aged, but many colourfully painted in blues, yellow and greens,with painted patterns on the thick window frames, like poorly constructed Alpine lodges. Huge oil painted skies tower over the landscape, the background to an epic painting of a Napoleonic battle on these huge plains.

Still we pass wooden shed like buildings with thick grey smoke coming from their chimneys and cut logs staked up next to them.

I play cards and chat to the Turkish men, there are many more than I thought! I have warmed to their non-Russian ways, only one of them speaks English so everything I say is translated and in turn I am given the translation from any number of commentators. They are travelling to Omsk I think, I showed them a map of the Trans-Siberian route which they took great interest in, but I think some of them thought it was a map of the world so there was much confusion.

The Samovar is a great boon, tea, coffee, noodles, porridge, all of which I am eating from my old chipped enamel camping cup with a steel Chinese spoon I stole from the drawer in The Napoleon Hostel in Moscow. I could just imagine this back home, fifty-four people constantly carrying boiling cups of water thorough a rather wobbly railway carriage, health and safety nightmare!