I opened my suitcase, took out some clean underclothes, and walked into the bathroom. Everything was very stylish. There was even a little television set standing on a shelf beside the sink. An expensive business: all these televisions for bathrooms require insulation against damp and they cost big money. I once wanted to put one like that in our bathroom at home, to watch the news while I was getting washed, shaving, and brushing my teeth, but the price put me right off the idea.

I picked up the television—it was absolutely tiny, only twelve inches wide. I could easily lift it with one hand. I turned it round.

At the back I saw microcircuits glittering behind the holes in a standard plastic cover. How come? The guests get washed, splash water about, take hot showers, fill the bathroom with clouds of steam—and there’s a TV set standing here, with no insulation? It’ll blow a circuit! It might last a year, but that circuit will still blow! Why hadn’t they put in an expensive one, a proper one?

Well, for the same reason that they don’t demolish old buildings until they fall down on their own, an inner voice whispered to me. A special TV would cost two thousand dollars. One like this barely costs a hundred. Surely it’s far simpler to change it once every year or so than invest money in technology that rapidly becomes obsolete?

I put the television back down, switched on the BBC, and stepped into the shower, realizing that, for all my lack of sophistication, I had managed to grasp an intriguing point that was very far from our Russian mentality. Back home there either wouldn’t be a TV in the bathroom or there would be an insanely expensive one, and the price of the room would rocket by fifty percent. We don’t like disposable items. We can still remember how to mend nylon tights, wash plastic bags, and go to fetch the milk in a can. We can find a multitude of uses for an empty yogurt carton—from growing seedlings to storing small change.

To some extent Russia has unexpectedly found itself marching in step with the countries of the West and their obsession with ecology, economizing resources and recycling. Not because the green movement is popular here, but because of this centuries-old habit of economizing.

Only, as often happens in Russia, we take everything to absurd extremes—in both directions: the same people who darn their tights also buy hugely expensive cars and domestic appliances . . .