I spent my birthday building a fence around some compost in Belarus, which, as strange as it sounds, is stranger still as the compost heap didn't look like it was about to escape. We were in the middle of a visit to the capital city, Minsk, when it was decided that a sojourn out of the big smoke and into the countryside was in order. Karina's Grandmother had a cottage out there somewhere and the prospect of digging up vegetables and eating them too was delightfully foreign and appealing to me. (Back home, I rely on an excellent fruit and veg supermarket just down the road...) What's more, the house had no heating, no running water, no phone, and no internet. I've experienced this once before after not paying the bills in a London share house,
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