The first time I ate real caviar, drank real Russian vodka — from glass bottles, aye, but unlabelled ones as this stuff was, I was told (proudly), real peasant style, home-made potato, smuggled hooch — ate smoked eel and other, unknown, pungent pickled fish, on dark, dark, dense rye bread, was courtesy of some sailors from a Russian merchant navy boat, who’d come on shore-leave from their overnight berth in the Western Docks, back in the days when there were still large numbers of commercial working ships arriving there.
Pretty sure they looked quite like Peter Firth in this shot from Letter to Brezhnev. I certainly didn’t.
Wandering along and drinking in every one of the pubs lining Snargate Street, we met up, one fateful evening. The rest, as they say, is history. The world would never be the same again…
