The talk, ‘Travelling with Intourist’, took place in association with GRAD’s inaugural exhibition SEE USSR. For me they bring back a distant memory of the highs and lows of the Intourist experience.

‘Today began what I fear will be an ongoing battle with Intourist...’

‘Tonight the hamburger is served with an egg and called beefsteak...’

‘We stocked up with eggs and cakes and returned to the hotel, and had coffee in the coffee bar to the tune of breathily suggestive western music. In fact we have heard no ethnic music at all since coming to central Asia.’

‘Intourist are serving up the most mindless of bourgeois facilities and entertainment and one yearns for an austere little boarding house run along strict collectivist lines instead of this jarring attempt at sophistication.’

‘We travel today to Khiva by bus. This involves three separate buses, each crowded with Uzbeks including some fine old men with wispy white beards and broad lambskin hats. It is good to be organising ourselves again. There are very few tourists about and the majority of people in the street look like locals.’

‘Our tour-guide is a young student from Samarkand called Timur - “My friends call me Tim”. He asks us to send him a book from England “about love”. Tashkent is spacious and pleasant with impressive post-earthquake public buildings. We eat ice-cream In Revolution square - a pleasant park of trees and flowers around a statue of Karl Marx. The people in the park are young, animated and colourfully dressed...it could be a corner of Paris.’