I’m catching up with Apple’s grim and excellent STAR CITY miniseries, an alternate-history take on a successful Soviet space programme, and finding that its tone and atmosphere resonate with me to an unexpected degree.

In 1984 I backpacked by train from Finland to Leningrad on an Intourist visa. I stayed at the Europeyskaya Hotel on Nevsky Prospect and spent the time wandering and making notes. I had no contacts there, no one to meet. It was deep winter and the Neva was frozen over. Things that have stayed with me: the cheerful young guy on the street who wanted to buy my ski gloves (sorry, I needed them). The breakfast waiters who trooped out on cue and placed warm poached eggs at every table setting in a half-empty restaurant. The bookshop where people crowded in to inspect the books displayed under glass counters, like in a jewellers’. People lining up in a department store for a bootleg Paul McCartney single, playing on repeat over terrible speakers. The scary psychiatric prison hospital in the industrial quarter (purpose of visit).

But the most Star City feeling moment: a tourist excursion to the Hermitage, me and two others in a minibus with a male driver and a fur-clad lady guide. A car sideswipes us at an intersection. Not a big crash, but a solid damaging thump. So do we pull over? Exchange details?

The driver grips the wheel tighter and looks straight ahead. The guide has the fixed smile she’s been wearing all along but now her eyes tell a different story. She’s terrified we’ll say something. We don’t. We go on. It’s never mentioned. It didn’t happen.

Came home and set about feeding the notes into the WIP, a novel titled THE BOAT HOUSE. Discovered then that I’d brought back more than memories; Hepatitis A, courtesy of the Europeyskaya kitchens.

Thanks a bunch, comrades.