I was a proud man, always had been but times they were a changing. With the election of Gorbachev came Glasnost then Perestroika. The iron curtain was fraying at the seams. For the aging party faithful like myself, the final days of our once proud totalitarian state brought precious little to smile about.

By day I braved the ice-strewn, mountainous seas of the Bering Strait, trawling the depths in search of the slippery and highly elusive cock-fish. The pittance I earned could be tripled in port at Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk with just half a dozen of these sublime creatures of the deep.

And by night, well, by night I played chess with Vladimir – a one-eyed salt-dog who stank of shit and stale tobacco. We drank potato-vodka from a tin, shared a battered corn pipe and told tales of far-away women and loose ports. It wasn’t until the next day amid the haze of a potato-vodka hangover you could see, that we’d realize we should have been talking about loose women and far-away ports. That potato-vodka is some fucked up shit man!