The Dark Tourist by Dom Joly

Author:Dom Joly [Joly, Dom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472146052
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2021-09-02T05:00:00+00:00

The weather was gorgeous and the streets of Kiev were full of life. There seemed to be an extraordinary amount of tall, beautiful blonde women wandering about arm-in-arm with short, squat men with mullets. I thought back to my time filming in St Petersburg, my interpreter Natasha and I standing near the statue of Peter the Great – a place where tradition dictates that newlyweds come to drink a glass of champanska. One after the other, couples turned up: beautiful women with hideous men. I’d asked Natasha why this was. She’d replied that Russia had been in so many wars in the twentieth century that the gene pool had been irrevocably depleted. The wars had been so savage that it had literally become a ‘survival of the unfittest’, as they were the only ones not at the front. It seemed that Kiev, with her unfortunate location as a kind of axis point for any European conflict, had suffered in the same way.

My erotic map being of not much use if I was after anything but a hand-job, I decided to follow my nose. I walked uphill towards a shiny golden dome: a beautiful monastery sat in a park on a hill overlooking the river. Beer was on sale everywhere. There were at least seven little stalls in the monastery grounds selling cans of strong beer along with some weird übercaffeine drink. I popped my head into the monastery but I was instantly bored. Using the river as a guide I tried to guess where the hip part of town might be. I decided that the lower part of town, where the river made a U-bend, was probably my best bet. I wandered off in that direction and soon came to the top of a windy cobbled street that seemed to lead down to the lower town. It appeared to be market day as there were stalls all the way down. Most of them were selling old clothes (and I’m talking really old) but there were a couple of wild cards. One place just sold old beer bottles while another specialized in broken gramophones. It was a bit like the lower end of Portobello Road, near Golborne Road. The posh, top end of Portobello by Notting Hill Gate sells expensive antiques and furniture, but by the time you get down to the end there are people sitting on the street selling odd shoes and old pants and you start feeling around in your pocket to check that your wallet was still there. This very much had that feel to it.

I ambled on downwards, stopping at the odd stall and feeling very content despite there being nothing very interesting until about halfway down. There, I hit Dark Tourist pay dirt. I stopped at a stall that was selling stuff from World War Two. They had iron crosses, Waffen SS insignia and a hideous picture of Goebbels alongside endless Soviet military detritus. It was a potted history of the city’s unfortunate military past.

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