Seems fair enough to me, fella’s got to make a living after all.

The previous time we tried to film with the ball in Red Square, another militia guy (or possibly the same one, since I guess it’s his patch) came up to us and tried a similar trick. He asked us for our Moscow registration stamps, which I have on good authority don’t exist. He claimed that if we stayed more than three days in Moscow we needed a special stamp on our visas. We managed to ply our passports out of his hands by involving him in our football story, and he went away.

So this time the militiaman tried the same thing, and I said to him that we had only been in Moscow for two days, which seemed sufficient to thwart that particular blag. It was only when Phil used the tripod that he saw his chance to impose what I can only assume to be his entirely spurious story about the tripod.

Having just written this, I remembered that the Greenwich Meridian folk also disallow tripods, but I thought they had a better case, inasmuch as it is a pretty tight space there, and if there were a hundred tourists all with their tripods, no-one would be able to move. Red Square on the other hand is huge. You could fit an army in there – some folk once did, as I recall.

Anyway, reasonable or not, I hate corruption in all its forms.

Unless you want to bung me a tenner, that is