Read Online The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad by Karl Pilkington - Free Book Online

in his car.
    PASCHA : It’s the worst car I ever bought, and it’s British. I never thought a car could be that bad.
    KARL : But you’ve got to look after cars. You can’t expect it to just run and run. You’ve got to service it if the brakes have
     gone. You’ve got to get the brakes fixed.
    PASCHA : How many times do you think I’ve had the brakes fixed this year?! You want to guess?
    KARL : You say fixed. Do you mean replaced?
    PASCHA : Replaced the whole system. I would take to a qualified Land-Rover dealer and say, fix it, I don’t want to think about it, four
     times!
    KARL : Four? But maybe it’s just a bad garage then.
    PASCHA : Uh, how many garages do you think I went to?
    KARL :
(pause)
Four?
    PASCHA : What do you think I was doing this morning?
    KARL : Fixing your car?
    PASCHA : Attempting to.
    KARL : Well, get rid of it. If I’m annoyed about something I get rid of it.
    PASCHA : That’s what I’m trying to do!
    KARL : Are you fed up at the moment?
    PASCHA : Yes, I am. With car, with job and, frankly, with you British.
    KARL : What? Me? I haven’t done anything.
    PASCHA : No. You’re not my usual type of client. Before you I had a British couple come to my cottage to do horse riding. They signed up for
     two days. I told them it is important to inform me once they left Moscow, but they won’t do that, because the Brits, um, you have the mentality of slave owners. You expect people to wait
     on you.
    KARL : What do you mean? We don’t have slaves. Where did you get that from?
    PASCHA : You speak a different language. By now I would have called another driver. I don’t understand you.
    I think I moaned less when I was with Pascha. His pessimistic approach made me more optimistic. This hasn’t happened much to me before. Suzanne very rarely moans, and I wonder if
it’s ’cos I do it all for her, as Pascha was doing for me. If someone is happy I tend to look at the negative. There’s no fun in moaning if it isn’t getting the opposite
reaction. The longer he was with me, the more he moaned. If Pascha was a dog I’d have had him put down.
    Other than his tuts and huffs we drove in complete silence until the police pulled us over. Pascha spoke to them in Russian and then we drove away again.
    PASCHA : The fine for this is 300 roubles.
    KARL : What, for having a dirty car?
    PASCHA : But they can’t be filmed while fining us, so no fine.
    KARL : But they would normally?
    PASCHA : They would. They would if they had nothing better to do. Three hundred roubles. About ten dollars.
    KARL : But, still, it’s only a dirty car. What about the brakes then? You told us the brakes were dodgy. What would they do if they knew
     about that?
    PASCHA : Ah, technically nothing, because Russia is more concerned about appearance. It’s consistent with the general Russian pattern –
     form and appearance. If you have errors, factual errors, in your document they will not be noticed. If you cross something out and correct it yourself, it will be noticed and you will be
     required to fill out the entire thing again.
    KARL : Yeah, we had that at the airport, with all the equipment. We had to write it out, someone made a mistake, and we had to do it all again.
    PASCHA : Now this is the kind of discussion I do welcome, because it has to do with the essence of the country.
    I got out of the car while I was on his good side. The director took me to an old-looking place that I thought was going to be for food. I entered the main room where old dark wooden furniture
soaked up any light. Me mam bought some old antique furniture like this once, but me dad found it depressing so he stripped it and painted it in white gloss. Me mam went mad. He did that sort of
thing a lot. He washed an old ornament with a Brillo pad ’cos he thought it was dusty, and all the paint came off, so he tried painting it himself. It ended up looking like a garden gnome.
There’s a song by Daniel Merriweather with lyrics that go ‘took something