RELEASED from the grip of the hardest winter for 13 years, Russia is enjoying a sudden warm spring. Actually, it is quite a disgusting process. The melting snow forms huge muddy lakes across Moscow. There are no flowers yet, only "snowdrops" (police slang for the bodies of long dead drunks which are revealed as the snow disappears).
But the sky is blue and the birds are singing. The sap is rising. Summer will soon be here.
For most Russians, this is a source of joy. But there is one eccentric group of people who try to pretend nothing is happening. They are the ice fishermen who go on sitting on their diminishing ice floes until their lives are at risk.
You do not have to travel to Siberia to see them. You can find them within easy driving distance of Moscow, for example on the River Oka at Kolomna, just 100 km south of the capital.
Two weeks ago, I was out there and the river was still frozen solid. The fishermen nodded to me as I walked across the ice to a little pine forest on the far side. The snow lay deep under the trees spotted with bloody feathers and raked with thin lines which looked like the marks of very long finger nails. My guide informed me they were the claw marks of a lynx.
Last week, with the coming of the sun, the scene had changed dramatically. The ice had cracked and water was sloshing over it in several places. The forest had become inaccessible by the direct cross river route. But amazingly, the fishermen were still dotting the ice like tiny figures in a painting by Brueghel.
Despite warnings put out on the local radio, they were refusing to accept the end of their beloved winter. Each year dozens of them drown nationwide, but that does not deter them. In a famous case a few years ago, helicopters had to be scrambled off the coast of Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union, to rescue hundreds of fishermen who had floated out into the Baltic Sea on an iceberg.
Cowardice has been the secret of my long career in journalism. I decided to interview the old man sitting nearest to the bank of the river. If the worst came to the worst, I reckoned, I would only have to swim about 15 metres back to the shore, where stout men from the rowing club were preparing their boats for the new season. Later, I was informed, this was wrong thinking. If you fall through a hole in the ice, you cannot be sure your head will come up again at the same spot, and you can flail about under the surface and drown just as easily close to the bank as in the middle of the river.
But my chosen fisherman assured me. "It's perfectly safe. The ice is still seven centimetres thick," he laughed as I slithered up to him. He introduced himself as "Kozyrev Valery Kozyrev, like that young chap who used to work at the Foreign Ministry".
In contrast to the dapper former Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, his namesake was bundled up in several layers of filthy jumpers and had an old brown fur hat pulled down over his ears. He said he used to work at the local machine building factory but now had plenty of time for fishing as he had retired.
So that was the explanation for his risk taking, I thought. The poor old fellow had to manage on the miserable pension of 200,000 roubles ($40) a month, and so he came out fishing for food.
How wrong can you be? Mr Kozyrev was pulling nothing bigger than yorsh (rough) from the hole he had made in the ice with his "ledabor", a metre long which looked as if it had been borrowed from a demon dentist. About a dozen of the tiny fish were collected in an old milk carton next to his worms and other tackk. Good only for feeding a cat. And that is exactly what they are for.
"I shall give them to Kunak when I get home," he said. "How he rubs round my legs when I come in from the river." So he was not fishing to supplement his own diet? "Lord no. I do odd jobs for my neighbours when I need extra money for myself. This is just for sport. We're enthusiasts. Once you're bitten, it's in your blood."
The fishermen do take some precautions. Normally solitary, they sit closer together as the ice starts to melt so as to be ready to help each other if disaster strikes. Each thinks he can weigh the exact moment when he must leave the ice, but accidents do happen. One man drowned on the River Oka last season.
Mr Kozyrev senses the time is running out. "The sun is getting warmer. I have taken off my mittens. I reckon you have caught me on my last day." What will he do now? "Fish in the pond and dream of winter."