“If you’re going to learn English, you must learn it in England,” he says.And it matters to his clients – or, at any rate, to me – as the idea of sitting outside in our shabby corner of Moscow, minding one’s own business over a quiet drink while watching Russia stream by, is relatively new.Apartment blocks here often have balconies, but Russians very rarely use them, even in a heatwave. This is partly because – I’m told by a friend – the balconies are likely to collapse, partly because they are indispensable storage areas, and partly because sitting on your own, high up in the smoggy city air, is a touch boring.Until a year or two ago, outdoor drinking was a prohibitively nasty experience. Just around the corner from Mohammed’s new cafe, were a couple of “iron box” kiosks, inhabited by bad-tempered, sweating young women who communicated with clients through a hole not much larger than a letter box.The letter box was only chest-high, and to buy anything, you had to bow down and peer into the gloom. Customers then had to gather furtively around the kiosk or sit on the concrete wall around the Metro’s entrance along with the genuine vagrants.The whole affair had a squalid feel, like snatching a swig from a paper bag round the back of King’s Cross station in London. It was the last resort of the down-and-out, the desperate and the lonely.

Most of us gave it a wide berth, averting our gazes as we hurried home, fending off derelict, half-drunk old men wanting to drink na troikh (an offer which means pitching in some roubles and splitting a bottle of vodka three ways).Now, happily, we have people such as Mohammed (anxious about his bosses, he declines to give his full name). Letneye (summer) cafes have sprung up across Moscow in record numbers this year. At least half a dozen have opened within a few minutes’ walk of my home Business is brisk. “We do OK,” says Mohammed, cautiously.It matters for another reason Mohammed’s cafe does not serve vodka or wine. Time was when Westerners would rather have swigged the contents of a washing-up bowl than Russian beer.

But the domestic brewing industry has taken off, producing several drinkable varieties.And the Russians are taking to it. Mohammed concedes that his clients sometimes complain about the lack of the hard stuff But he never budges. Vodka, he says, is ruining the country and, with it, his clients Why should he help?. THIRTY THOUSAND dead; 3,226 villages burnt to the ground; 3 million people displaced from their homes; 14 years of violence and terror.

The major city of south-east Turkey, Diyarbakir, once dubbed the “Paris of the East”, is reduced to a vast, filthy, refugee camp. These are the costs of Turkey’s long and bitter struggle with the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a struggle Ankara will claim it has finally won today when a Turkish judge passes sentence on the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
Mr Ocalan will be given one last chance to speak from his glass cage in the courtroom on the heavily guarded prison island of Imrali. Then the judge will read out the sentence.Nobody doubts that he will be condemned to death, but Mr Ocalan’s nemesis – the men who brought him to this final humiliation – will not be there. As always in Turkey, the generals who hold the real power will be out of sight.Mr Ocalan still has a long road to travel to the gallows By law, parliament has to confirm a sentence of death. His lawyers say they will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. There are reports the all- powerful generals are divided, too, over whether he should be hanged, fearing that he may become a martyr..