She's a star

Ok, one should admit that, on occasion, other threadbare curiosities of the countryside are also periodically in the frame as your eagle eyes will have spotted, the broken down bus, the crackpot local mayor, the bewildered goat herd or even the legless concrete communist apartment block now throttled by a jungle of nettles, to name but a few.

But wonderfully miserable though all these choices are, none of them, it would appear, epitomise downtrodden Eastern Europe quite as well as the glum village gran in the eyes of your average media mogul. None makes such an impact on the impulse buyer at the newsstand. So Citizen Kanes admonish editors to stick with the little old lady on page three! She’s a star, a gem, a real celebrity!

No doubt harassed photographers rebel from time to time, weary of shooting the identical thing endlessly. "You do realise we have been photographing exactly the same old bird since 1963, don’t you, Mr Editor? Isn’t it about time our bored readership had some variety?"

"What? Spice the golden oldie up a bit? Well, I suppose you could get her to drop the dead donkey off her back for once and swap it for a brace of oak trees or the hulk of a rusting Lada instead. No, I’ve got it. A huge old commie statue covered in moss and graffiti that she’s going to use as a scarecrow on the allotment! Or maybe even her house!

Yes, either of those would really get the lovey’s Sherpa hunchback a few inches closer to the pavement, wouldn’t it? Wow, what a photographic coup! Go on boys, slip her a couple more stotinki to go that extra mile for us!"

"An extra mile? Huh!? She is still only 23 metres further up the road from where the grumpy crone was when we first snapped her all those decades ago for gawd’s sake! She isn’t clockwork you know, let alone a Duracell bunny. Oh please, let us take a photograph of something else!"

"Good Lord, no", barks the editor. "The wrinkly stays! It’s quite imperative that our pictures speak a thousand words about Eastern Europe, after all."

"Yes, but why does that image always have to be thousands of years old into the bargain too, boss?"

Anyhow, when you do come across one of these seemingly ‘listless celebrities’, as you surely will, there isn’t a hope in hell that either of you will speak the other’s lingo let alone dialect, so conversation will be strictly limited to body language. This will still baffle you, though, as such fairy godmothers are so heaped in crocheted garments you will not be able to tell which parts are moving and which aren’t.

Before long, therefore, your enthusiasm for chat will dissolve into bashful smiles as you begin to fidget nervously and shift from foot to foot. Grandma Giles will then instantly get the picture and her eyes will light up. You all want to dance!

That’s why you’ve turned up out of the blue! So ditching her walking stick quick as a flash she will click her fingers and cluck loudly and off wooden benches the length and breadth of the village will miraculously hop, skip and jump a bingo-hall’s-worth of her ordinarily lame widowed friends who will grab you all to their bosoms and start boogying the light fandango folk-style. Indeed to badly misquote the song, at the beat of a tambourine they all morph into dancing queens, old and sweet, only seventy-three!

Some of them will even warble delightfully, too, when fully charged up. Cross your fingers.