Lenin was being re-waxed. Well, they will tell you that he wasn’t and that the body is real, but others say that his head fell off some time ago, and the great revolutionary is actually a Madame Tussauds rip-off.

Whatever the truth, his body had been whisked off from its place in Red Square and was either being injected with lots of embalming liquid or dipped in some industrial-sized vat of Communist wax. And to think I just wanted to thank the man for his contribution to my history course, which, to be honest, would be so much sparser without his happy trip to the Finland Station.

Russia has played a big part in my life, and it was time to pay the place a visit. Being born in Eastern Europe and studying in a school named after Pushkin, the giant of Russian poetry, meant that it was time to experience the gaudy mix of the great Russian soul, although no-one seems quite sure what that involves right now.

Well, at least at a first glance it involves mullets. And I don’t mean the fish. You possibly didn’t believe that mullets were still an acceptable hairstyle. Thanks to a certain pop star called Dima Bilan, they are in Russia. The streets of Moscow are full of mullets, in amongst all the dust, grand boulevards and cars.

There is a certain vanity amongst many young Muscovites who, unable to resist a shiny, polished shop window, just have to turn and check themselves out. A group of 15 teenage girls did just that outside the hostel I stayed at and nearly tumbled into the opening of an underpass. I think this may answer a few questions about the demographic crisis in the country.

That said, there is a special charm about the biggest city in Europe, something that you won’t find in St. Petersburg. Moscow is the mix of Europe and Asia; all the influences that define the country.

The onion-domed churches testify to the European influence that stretches through Byzantium and arguably back to Rome, prompting some Russians to see the city as the third Rome. The Kremlin’s battlements bear the influence of the East.

The Soviet architecture helps – many of the grand boulevards are lined with blocks of flats that have little to do with the drab tower blocks that ‘Soviet’ conjures up – classical columns, large facades, arches.

It’s all pretty exciting, especially if they have a supermarket underneath where you can stock up on Russian favourite suyroks – an outer layer of chocolate, something like cream cheese inside it and then a core of whatever flavour you have chosen: blueberry, vanilla or even potato.

But you can read about Moscow in any guide, really, so I won’t bore you. You’ve seen the pictures, you’ve heard the tales. What you won’t have heard is, for example, somewhere like Yaroslavl’. The town is situated on the Volga, about four hours to the north-east of Moscow by train.

Four hours in ‘obshtiy klass’, the collective carriages are, I shan’t lie, an uncomfortable experience. But in Yaroslavl’ I had the chance to experience a bit more of authentic Russian life – a babushka! A breathing, talking, cooking, smiling babushka!

It was a good day, not least because of the meals that she put on. Word of advice – when going to Russia, break into one of their apartments and make them give you home-made kompot. Well, maybe knock rather than break in.

Yaroslavl’ is different. Despite being the size of Liverpool, it has a more provincial feel (and yes, this does mean yet more mullets.) It also has more soldiers than Moscow – which is a surprise, given how many there were in the capital in the first place. Uniforms everywhere – there was a military band trying to tune up on a corner, though I didn’t wait around to hear them.

The place is also full of churches, everywhere you turn. The town was a capital of Russia for a while, and also the second biggest city before Peter the Great built his new capital in 1703. There is a small Kremlin, impressive cathedrals, and of course the Volga.

Europe’s biggest river is, well, big. And dirty. On closer inspection it seems a curious mix of brown and purple with interesting rainbow splatters floating past you. Pretty.

What is really beautiful though, is the price of beer. A quick trip to the supermarket reveals bottles of two and a half litre for about fifty five roubles. At an exchange rate of about forty two roubles to the pound, you can do the math. Basically it equals lots of Russians with lots of bottles in their hands.

Surprisingly, they seem to function fine. Not many places would tolerate the sight of a woman ambling along with her little child, all the while sipping from a bottle of Baltika 3 – but in Russia, it’s a matter of course.

The remnants of old times are also absolutely great. There are not only statues of Lenin and hostels named after him, but bars called USSR and Che. I recommend the latter – good milkshakes and those excellent radios you’d expect to see in Cuba circa Castro’s rise to power. It was all my dreams come true.

And then there was the weather! Sunny. Hot. Un-British. Bizarre. Russia is really not what you’d expect.
Of course there are horror stories. The visa application process can be a nightmare. The country is rising again and is starting to challenge the legacy of Yeltsin’s years, which is of course disconcerting to the West. The KGB simply changed its letters. But there are horror stories everywhere.

Russia also has charm, culture and history. A country that gave humanity Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy or Pushkin can be excused for giving us Dima Bilan (well, we will be subjected to him sometime in early May when Eurovision comes around).

Moscow may be dusty but it is also grand and breath-taking. The Volga may seem like a big oil-slick, but it is also serene. People do not carry wires. The police ignore you. A babushka may even feed you.

And for all that you should give it a go, even if Lenin is being re-waxed. Wearing shorts in Churchill’s ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ is a good barometer of our new Cold War.

Maybe I could join an all-male voice choir,’ muses Palin – and is on the point of elaborating when the harassed-looking photographer hovering nearby finally pounces and bundles him into the back of a van. I watch it tear out of Christ Church’s Tom Gate, swerve into the oncoming traffic, and disappear down towards the river. Then I walk off.

This unlikely encounter with a fully operational legend doubtless came on one of Michael Palin’s more mundane days. In Oxford on a flying visit to shoot a few promotional scenes for one of the Vice-Chancellor’s access videos, tea in the Cathedral and a jaunt to the river cannot have ranked highly on his list of colourful exploits.

Author, Python, traveller and film star, Palin has had an asteroid named after him and been assailed by bandits, the Vatican, and student journalists. The weight of his experiences shows in furrows and lines creasing his open face – yet he still exudes vitality and energy. All in all he comes across rather like the kind of wise and ancient tortoise a Polynesian community might once have worshipped.

It is this wizened face which causes me to double take as, carefully negotiating tourists through Christ Church cloisters, I brush past a more elegant duffle coat than usual. Ten minutes later, Palin has been tracked down, and I snatch an interview on the move.

It would hardly be like Palin to remain still. For the past nineteen years this son of Yorkshire has been travelling the world, filming for the BBC, circumnavigating it Phineas Fogg-style in 1989’s Around the World in 80 Days, taking the land-based route from Pole to Pole three years later, going anti-clockwise for 80,000 kilometres around the Pacific in 1996, retracing the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway in 1999, and in this century, taking on the Sahara, the Himalayas, and Eastern Europe.

Palin has visited 85 different countries in the course of his travels – 86 if you’re counting Bosnia and Herzegovina as two – and written nearly 375 best-selling coffee table books. ‘The Palin effect’ has played a major part in global tourism; from Cappadocia to Machu Picchu, regions or places featured in his programmes and books have done very well out of the attention.

Certainly this was the intention with Eastern Europe – to open up the old Soviet states to western eyes, and promote everything from understanding to commerce. Yet as the world becomes increasingly aware of the adverse impact of its travel upon the environment, is foreign tourism really what a man as popular as Palin should be advocating?

The question is unfair, and I confess I was too embarrassed to phrase it so bluntly. Palin has, after all, always preferred more traditional methods of travelling – hitchhiking, buses, elephants, smelly trains filled with goats and chickens – the personal experience is improved immeasurably. Yet a certain amount of flying is inevitable? Palin agrees reluctantly, and comes out with a slightly shocking statement.

‘I’m not planning any more adventures any time soon. I’ll be staying close to home – I’ve had enough of airports and departure lounges.’ He cites his bones (the man is 65, remarkably enough) as a more pressing reason than carbon footprints – ‘and of course, I have to edit volume two of my diaries…’

I ask Palin what his next step will be – presumably the hermetic life is not for him? And indeed not; it’s the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War this November, and Palin has plans to mark it. He admits that ‘history, and especially television history, is a crowded field’ – but this isn’t about to stop him from walking those crowded fields himself.

A series is scheduled for broadcast in November, shot in France and Belgium. Fewer exotic locations, perhaps, than on previous outings, but Palin is clearly deeply affected by the work; his brow furrows even further, and he talks more sombrely about the tragedies of war – yet more animatedly too.

The project has certainly grasped both his imagination and his conscience. And he has something like the requisite training; he read History at Brasenose back in the early ’60s. It was there that he struck up a fruitful comic partnership , writing for Cherwell no less.

He points out that ‘I had a comedy column going for ages with Robert Hewison,’ the man who pushed him into comedy as a career. But did he ever read the rest of the paper? ‘Of course – I read Cherwell avidly. Before wrapping my chips in it!’

Irrepressible as ever, we clearly haven’t seen the last of Palin yet. His personal ambitions are yet to be fulfilled – I ask him if there’s anything that, in such a long and varied life, he still feels the need to achieve. After chuckling contemplatively and talking about other things for a while, he finally comes out with two. Both are as simple and worthy as you’d expect from such a man.

‘I’d love to play trombone in a brass band.’ A noble goal indeed. Perhaps feeling this wish a little too simplistic, and unable to elaborate further, he advances a second desire. ‘More than anything else, I’d like to learn a new language.’

This seems more logical. Having spent the first few decades of his life advancing the boundaries of his own in surrealist and comedic directions, he has spent the past two decades exposed to a bewildering variety of other tongues. But which to choose? Swahili – very useful across Africa? Or something more niche – Mongolian?

No; ‘Something like Welsh.’ Trying not to seem taken aback, I make encouraging noises. But why Welsh? ‘It’s an extraordinarily beautiful language – I heard the most beautiful Welsh song yesterday.’ Palin seems to be exhibiting that whole spur-of-the-moment whim that apparently lies within all great travellers and improvisers.

He continues earnestly, ‘It’s essential to understand the native language to really understand any country,’ logically enough, before pursuing his logic to its inevitable conclusion. ‘I could join an all-male Welsh choir!’ Do I sense another television series in the pipeline? ‘Well, perhaps’, he demurs.

In wrapping up such a piece, it is customary to draw out some unique insight into the interviewee’s psyche. Yet Palin leaves me facing one very stark conclusion: he really is every bit as lovely as we’ve all been led to believe.

Always the housewife’s favourite Python and the very model of a favourite uncle to all, the man is charming, entertaining, interested and humble. It is entirely in keeping that he reveals his favourite Python sketch to be, not something as hackneyed as the Dead Parrot, but the scene towards the end of Life of Brian where he plays the obliging centurion – ‘line on the left, one cross each.’

He seems delighted with the most prosaic of my questions, exclaiming ‘brilliant!’ or ‘aha!’ at each new line of enquiry. Best of all, when asked whether he’d mind being featured on the Icon page, he responded, with the greatest sincerity you could possibly wish for, ‘how lovely!’

On Little Clarendon Street, there’s an art shop. In the window, there’s a framed, printed target. Above the target are the words ‘the first printed target’.

As if you weren’t already gripped by the staggering sub-fucking-versiveness, it’s followed by a question mark. And beneath that’s the price tag: two grand.

When I get older, I’m going to sell art, because it’s the easiest job in the world. My first piece will be a centimetre-wide green triangle on an eleven-foot white canvas. I’ll call it ‘War’.

Just in case you aren’t gripped by the staggering sub-fucking-versiveness, I might add a question mark (‘What is “war,” anyway?’).

When I get to the dealers, I’ll tell them it was drawn by an autistic Colombian genius over five months, at one dot per day. It’ll sell for forty grand.

Art today is idiocy made expensive. I don’t mean to generalise, but it all is, so I will. Take Banksy. Now, he’s seen as the aerosol Messiah at the cutting edge of the forefront of tomorrow.

But he’s rubbish; a more irritating equivalent of a stoned friend at a party asking the toaster why the world can’t just get along.

He can’t sneeze without someone bidding on the snot, but everything he does boils down to ‘capitalism is bad’, or ‘war isn’t nice.’

I’ve spent the last week building a Random Banksy Generator – when I press the button, I get ‘art’. The first one’s of 9/11, except instead of the planes, there’s cups of Starbucks, and from the fiftieth floor, Mickey Mouse is crying.

The Statue of Liberty is crouched in an orange Guantanamo jumpsuit, and the flames are made of Britney Spears. What does this actually mean? Nothing much, but I hear it pays well.

Some people once genuinely thought that art is a reflection of the self. Of course, we’ve all forgotten this now, and all we have now is contrived ‘points’ with pretend ‘depth’, the artist’s job being to look slightly cleverer than you do.

Look at any student poetry magazine, and you’ll see my point. Here’s one poem: it’s written upside down, every ninth word is in Danish, and the sentences start with full stops.

It’s called ‘Dubya?’, and if you don’t get it, you’re a philistine.

Yet at the end of it, we’ve learned nothing about either the author or ourselves. It’s hardly art at all; and if so many bereted dustbrains fall down in worship, more fool them.

Oxford’s brim-filled with these types, it seems, who think that writing with a pin and a dictionary make them ‘postmodern’. But they’ve forgotten that art is about the emotion and the message.

We’re sliding towards Banksy’s cold, pretentious idiocy, when I’d actually give anything for a little feeling.