I Am a Polar Bear

Well, now seems as good a time as any to go back to my trip to Russia last year because one of my major projects at the moment is to get the scrapbook finished. The main obstacle is picking which of the 2-300 photos to have printed. The other obstacle is making it fit in a book that simply wasn’t designed to be this big.

It was an 80 page (40 sheet) 10×10 wirebound scrapbook, just under an inch thick. Right now, with only Moscow and St Petersburg done, it’s two inches thick (at the thin end!) and only going to get bigger. I’ve had to remove the coil binding and replace it with big binder rings and I suspect I’m going to have to upgrade them to really big binder rings by the end. Or split it into two books, which will mean buying another for the covers, in which case I’ll have a whole extra set of pages and some of my special measures will become redundant. You’ll see what I mean.

So, this is the inside front cover. I made a little book which I called my Little Book of Russia – it contains my timetable, notes for each city, essential Russian vocab, addresses of accommodation and descriptions of how to get there. It needs to go in the scrapbook so I made an envelope from shiny gold mirrored card and stuck that in the front. I also took an old-fashioned film camera and when I went to get it developed, the film is so old that it fell apart so they put them all on a CD for me instead. I’ve stuck a plastic CD wallet in the front as well and the CD is in there.

The front cover isn’t finished yet. I’ve stuck a tiny red envelope in there and that contains the visa stuff – a business card from the Russian Visa Centre in London, an Instax of the building, my deli ticket for waiting for my turn and my receipt. When I’ve finished, I’ll scan the visa itself and put a copy in there too.

First day! My boarding pass is obviously in there and my Aeroexpress ticket. I knew I wanted journalling in this one – I don’t always bother but this is a special book. So I wrote out that day’s diary on the notepaper of my hotel. This is a red and gold scrapbook, by the way.

More of my first day – a picture of the train, the little card holder they give you for the card (I didn’t keep it!) but I’ve tucked the hotel’s business card in instead. I wrote more journalling on the hotel paper but after that I moved onto the page itself and wrote a column of text.

This is one of my busiest pages. I wanted to do a bit of sketching. The fact I’m no good at it is irrelevant. I sat down and stared at St Basil’s and tried to draw it and properly appreciated how many little details there are. When I stuck it in, I wanted to use it as a pocket to put in postcards and that day’s diary scribbles but it didn’t hold so I cut out edges from red card to turn it into a concertina pocket, like you tend to get in the back of hardback notebooks. It contains two postcards and my diary. At the top is a single-use metro ticket, stuck in at one end with gold washi tape so you can see both sides of it and then because the space underneath it looked a bit bare, I put a postcard of the Saviour’s Gate Tower underneath. Then there’s a nice postcard of St Basil’s and an Instax of it in the corner. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get postcards in Russia from looking at this scrapbook.

Did I accuse the previous page of being the busiest? This page is so busy it’s become five pages. I built an extension from gold mirrored and red glitter card. It folds out from the book and its four faces are covered in pictures from St Basil’s. Underneath is one of my film photos of the cathedral plus a digital close-up. Then underneath is my ticket, stuck in as usual with washi tape so you can fold it back to reveal some facts and figures. This is why it would be annoying to have a second scrapbook and twice the paper, because this sort of thing is what I’ve had to resort to because I literally didn’t have the space for everything.

How to fit two A4 pages of writing plus six photos on one page? Overlap and hinge the photos and stick the writing on the back. This is the most interactive scrapbook ever – everything opens, everything has something on the back. This is why it ended up so thick.

This page is deceptive. It looks quiet and calm. The leaf is one I picked up in Gorky Park for the purposes of sticking in here – I put a big yellow leaf in my Ukraine scrapbook and liked it so much I thought I’d do it here as well. The two photos fold back to reveal another photo on the back and then the top one has a drop down concertina of more journalling hidden underneath, plus a Russian Coca-Cola label. There will be more wrappers appearing as and when I figure out how best to put them in.

Another deceptive page. A nice quiet page of photos turns into two fold-outs with photos on one side and journalling on the other. A 40 sheet scrapbook simply wasn’t big enough for this job.

This one genuinely is a quiet page. I need to fill that big gap, just haven’t figured out what with yet. The map is from my hop-on-hop-off bus trip and it’s stuck in so that it fully unfolds.

Another calm-ish page. This was when I tried to climb the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour at sunset and it was closed. It’s not quite finished – I need to pick a photo to print on Instax film to put on top of that concertina.

Another way of fitting photos in – use paperclips to attach them to the rings as miniature extra pages.

I mean, hinged fold-back photos are pretty standard by now.

This is another busy page. I used the magnetic bookmark to hold my Kremlin ticket, which means I can take it out and look at both sides of it. A timer-selfie outside a cathedral is acting as a pocket for the info leaflet and the notes I scrawled in one of the chapels. There’s another postcard and another of my bad-but-precious watercolour sketches. I should add that I did the ink drawing right there and then but I took it home and did the painting in my hotel or apartment in the evening. I’m not sitting there with actual paints in the actual Kremlin.

How to get five big multi-page leaflets into a scrapbook? This was the first page I did because I mentally designed this one right there in the Kremlin. A big red pocket you can pop them all in! And then I decorated the pocket with most of the Instaxes from that day. If you look closely, they’re all bubbly. That’s because this was the day an entire bottle of Coke leaked into my bag and all over my camera.

Another busy page! A concertina of photos at the top, a hinged photo at the bottom and hiding under them both, a concertina of text. The top concertina is held in place by a little gold tab and a velcro dot because it kept falling open every time I turned the page.

More extra mini pages to fit in photos that simply cannot fit.

And this is the last page! The gold souvenir coin is attached with a piece of magnetic sheeting, which means I can take it out. I liked to borrow one of the prayer slips if I went in a cathedral and scribble down some there-and-then diary – not sure I’m supposed to but it’s a nice thing to have in there. My ticket is in there too and then there’s a pocket holding my rooftop selfies.

It’s all chaotic. It all has to be chaotic. There’s far too much in there to fit in a normal scrapbook. I briefly considered abandoning it and using a 12×12 postbound album but there’s so much stuff I want to be able to take out and handle that putting it in pocket protectors seemed even more impractical than putting it in a book far too small for it.

It needs a lot more decoration and embellishment. It needs Murmansk, Ekaterinburg, Perm and the return to Moscow finishing. But I’ve got a lot of time on my hands at the moment and it’s certainly exercising my creativity. (In St Petersburg, I use a bag as a page and resort to putting a handful of photos in an envelope).