Chapter 1. On Weather You Can’t Trust –
St Petersburg. This Is Normal.
There is very little point in discussing the weather in St Petersburg, because by the time you finish discussing it, it will already have changed. You can leave home in the morning under a perfectly respectable blue sky, put on sunglasses and spend several minutes believing that all those stories about the St Petersburg climate have been greatly exaggerated by people who simply don’t know how to enjoy life. Twenty minutes later, you’ll be standing under the awning of some shop watching the rain fly along Nevsky Prospekt. And I do mean fly, because falling vertically seems far too conventional for St Petersburg rain.
For years, I kept checking the weather forecast anyway, although I have no idea why. Probably for much the same reason people sometimes read horoscopes: not because they believe them, but because it’s interesting to see what you’ve been promised for the day. Your phone says eighteen degrees, partly cloudy, ten percent chance of rain, and an hour later you arrive at a meeting with wet hair and trousers sticking to your legs. The rain usually isn’t even heavy enough for you to announce with any dignity that you were caught in a downpour. No, it’s the fine, persistent sort that has been quietly ruining you all the way there and then stops the exact moment you step indoors. The person you’re meeting looks through the window at the perfectly dry street and asks:
“Was it raining?”
No. I decided to take a quick swim in the Fontanka on my way over.
At least rain is straightforward. The St Petersburg wind is much more interesting. It has an extraordinary ability to find the one part of your body you failed to protect. You can put on a coat and a scarf, button yourself up to the chin and leave home completely confident that you’ve prepared for everything, only to discover three minutes later on the embankment that there are two square centimetres of exposed neck somewhere between your collar and your scarf, and the entire force of the Gulf of Finland is now being directed precisely there.
This is why the phrase “It’s warm today” means absolutely nothing in St Petersburg. Fifteen degrees can indeed feel warm if there is no wind, the sun is shining and you’re standing in a sheltered courtyard. The same fifteen degrees on the embankment turns into February within five minutes, and you start wondering why you didn’t bring a jacket, a scarf, gloves and your emigration papers.
The people of St Petersburg, meanwhile, accept all of this with remarkable calm. If it snows in May, people say it happens. If it rains in January, well, that’s the kind of winter we’re having. If it’s twelve degrees in July, nobody considers that an event at all. Real concern begins when the weather stays nice for several days in a row. By the third or fourth day, people start looking suspiciously at the cloudless sky and saying, “It’s been warm for quite a while.” There isn’t much joy in that sentence. It’s more the anxiety of someone who knows the city far too well and suspects that it’s saving up its strength for something.
But the moment real sunshine appears, St Petersburg changes instantly. People pour onto the embankments, sit on the steps by the water, occupy every outdoor table, buy coffee and turn their faces towards the sun as if it were a touring celebrity and they’d somehow managed to get tickets. On days like these, even the city itself looks slightly surprised, as though it hadn’t expected things to turn out quite this well.
Perhaps that’s why you can never postpone a beautiful day in St Petersburg until tomorrow. If the sun is shining today, you go for a walk today, even if you have work to do, even if you had planned to do something useful, and especially if the forecast promises the same weather all week.
We know far too well what those promises are worth.
On the Language St Petersburg Speaks
Chapter 2 of St Petersburg. This Is Normal.
Porebrik, paradnaya, shaverma. Sometimes one word is enough for St Petersburg to know whether you belong here.