I've led a sheltered life

I'm 60 years old and I've had quite an exciting life: an interesting job, a bit of travel and some great holidays, but on Saturday I realised that in comparison to some people, ordinary people like me, my life has been very straightforward.

Most significantly, I've been in control of it, able to do what I want to do, work where I want to work ... I haven't always made the best decisions, but they were my decisions, freely made.

On Saturday, Margaret and I went across the Leicester to have dinner with Inna's parents, Michael and Marina and two of their Russian friends, Vladimir and Ellanora (I may have got those names slightly wrong).

It was a really nice evening, exceptionally good company and fascinating to hear their stories. They would all have been born in Stalin's Russia, all grown up under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev - names I would have known only from the news.

I watched the Cold War from a spectator seat in the dress circle, they lived in the grip of communism, they experienced it first hand.

We talked about a lot of things, it was interesting that all of them (except Ellanor, who was a concert pianist) had been sent to work on collective farms during the summer. This wasn't a volunteer job, some extra work to earn a little bonus, you were told to go and you went. Milking cows, building water towers, digging potatoes, they'd done it all.

Vladimir had been sent to Kazakhstan, which was then part of the USSR and is a country the size of Western Europe. He said that all you could see in every direction was the horizon. He and his fellow "volunteers" were dropped off with a sack of buckwheat and the nearest water supply was 40km away.

The local population were Kipchaks, but once they’d gone out on a scouting mission to try to find alcohol. Most villages were small collections of mud huts (wattle and daub) and were very drab, but they'd come across one village where there were flowers everywhere and blonde girls - and everyone was speaking German.

During the reign of Catherine the Great a lot of Germans had been encouraged to emigrate to Russia; then during the Second World War, Stalin had rounded them up and exiled them to Kazakhstan. many had died en route, but these were some survivors.