THE LAST WORD: No sooner had Frank McNally got back from Russia recently than an e-mail arrived from a woman called Natasha. It was probably just spam, he knew, but the subject line was intriguing. "English make improve with you," it read.
Maybe Natasha was one of the railway ticket-counter assistants I'd met, who had tracked me down and was cruelly mimicking my efforts to speak Russian. So I opened the e-mail which, disappointingly, turned out to be an ad for a Moscow mail-order bride service. Natasha's message in full was: "Hallo. I wanting to meet man from West Europe/North America/Asian. Men in mine country not so well." I knew how men in her country felt the day I arrived in Moscow, off the night train. A victim of the famous Russian hospitality, which is almost as lethal as the Russian winter, I saw Moscow through a hangover that didn't wear off until two days later, when I got the train out. But one thing was as clear there as in St Petersburg: that women in Natasha's country are - in terms of physical appearance, anyway - very well indeed.
This wasn't a complete surprise. I was warned of the dangerously high incidence of beautiful women by others who'd visited Moscow, including a female acquaintance who wishes to remain anonymous but threatened to divorce me if I went anywhere near one of them. Sure enough, everywhere you turned in Russia, there were women who made Anna Kournikova look like Pete Sampras. I know there's a theory they don't age well: that sooner or later, they turn into Leonid Brezhnev. All I can say is, I didn't even see men who looked like Leonid Brezhnev.
It's no coincidence that it was Russians who perfected the "honey trap". This is the standard espionage technique in which a beautiful spy accidentally bumps into a male target in the street, starts a conversation ("English make improve with you?") and, after a night of passion, steals his defence secrets.
So honoured is the honey trap's place in Russian history that it is soon to feature in a musical, with a thinly-disguised Vladimir Putin as a central character. The comic melodrama follows the adventures of Masha, who is sent to Moscow by the CIA to seduce Premier "Krutin", but mistakenly uses her love potion on his bodyguard, with predictable results. As the story unravels, we learn that Masha is in fact a double agent who has recently returned from a mission in the US, where she successfully humiliated the president via a sordid affair. It all sounds far too plausible for a musical, I know.
Russia still lends itself easily to thoughts of espionage and intrigue (its international dialling code is 007, for God's sake).
But spying is not what it used to be, and the honey trap has probably declined in importance as a strategic weapon. These days, women who bump into you in the streets of Moscow and start conversations often have more basic missions in mind.
But I have to say that with the weapons at their disposal, I don't know how Russia lost the Cold War.
I also have to say that no woman started a conversation with me, which is the sort of thing that can give you a complex. I tried to start conversations with several of them, mainly railway station assistants, along the lines of: "I wanting ticket to West Europe/North America/Asian. Mine Russian not so well." But they usually just sighed, in Russian, and referred me elsewhere. Communication with men was even harder.
On the night of the soccer international, which was in outer Moscow, the Irish fans were kept in the stadium for an hour and then given a military escort to nowhere in particular, from which point I tried to find the nearest Metro station.
The Russian for Metro is "Metro", more or less, and two policemen I asked pointed me down the same dark road. The road had a few lights that could have been a Metro station, but weren't. Undaunted, I walked on until the brightest lights were on the ends of cigarettes being smoked by factory workers on a break. "Metro?" I asked them, and sure enough, they waved me on. There were no lights at all now, and I was probably half-way to Omsk when a man finally shook his head to my "Metro?" query, and assured me there was nothing down this road. I have no idea what the others thought I was asking.
Nor do I understand why, when I absent-mindedly stepped across a ceremonial rope on Red Square while exiting the Lenin Mausoleum, the guards pointed me to the front of the Mausoleum and made me go through again. As Natasha would say, Lenin was not so well the first time. He didn't look any better on a second viewing.