Moscow Letter: Whatever the season, Moscow is a suitably contrary capital for a country of extremes.
In winter, the temperature shivers down to minus 20 C, icing up eyelashes and nostrils on the dash from one super-heated interior to the next.
On the coldest days, outdoor assignations are brief and their conclusion ungraceful, swaddled figures groping across a pitted crust of ice and filth that is left to thicken on the pavements until spring.
Six months on, the bleached concrete of the city bakes under a sky drained of colour. A pale sun glints dully across the cars that seethe between the stone monoliths of Soviet power and the air-conditioned glass atriums of multinationals and merchant banks.
In this massive, sometimes stifling summer city, walks are often simply short staggers towards means of transport. Flag down a car - any car - and bargain for your ride. Trolley-buses sway like broad-hipped mamas through the melée. Beneath, the metro transports more people every day than its equivalents in New York and London combined. The heat in its high carriages is second-hand, radiated from thousands of bodies briefly at rest.
Storms are frequent and become a focal point of Moscow's day: the cool of the 5 a.m. first light burnt off as the heat builds until mid-afternoon.
Then the glare is dulled by a rolling mass of blue-grey clouds and a stillness slips over the city. Sometimes the storm passes over in silence, usually it lashes the place with lightning and sheets of rain, soaking the summer clothes of pedestrians and strewing their path with puddles of village-pond proportions.
Few things are soft about this city and indifference is hard to effect.
Perhaps the best at that are the young rich who are springing up, as a Russian might say, like Gucci-clad mushrooms after rain.
The leather and air-con of a chauffeur- driven Mercedes can take the edge off even Moscow's sultry summer and a roof- mounted flashing blue light - an illegal perk enjoyed by many of Russia's moneyed elite - can clear traffic as well as anything in this snarled-up city.
This is the kind of conveyance - replete with tinted windows, lowered suspension and bodyguards as beefed up as the engine - that sweeps the metropolitan in-crowd into rural Russia for weekends of intensive, and preferably expensive designer-clad leisure.
The craze among New Russians for kottedzhy - a misnomer for what are usually many-turreted mansions strafed by security cameras - has seen thousands of hectares of pristine forest felled and paved since the Soviet Union crumbled 13 years ago.
Before then, the well-connected kicked back in luxury state-owned sanitoriums, while the masses made do with unassuming private dachas, which could range from a small summer house to a shed listing gently beside an allotment.
Ordinary Russians knew their dachas were modest, but they were also their own, at a time when private ownership of land and property was banned.
They were also the source of the fruit and vegetables that people made into pickles and jams to sustain them through the long winter.
For proof of Russians' enduring love affair with the dacha, whether a 20-room faux-Disney castle or something akin a clapped-out packing crate, witness the brutal motorised ritual that is Friday afternoon in summertime Moscow.
It is then, on every road out of the city, that much of Moscow's humanity collides in a metal-bending dash for fresh air, barbecued meat and powerful quantities of booze.
Pity the many-membered family, pink faces pressed to moist glass, whose toiling Lada steals seconds from the weekend fun of the BMW-toting "biznesmen", while the Ray- Ban and bandana-clad boys in the six-litre Jeep Cherokee will run dawdling pensioners off the road rather than lose precious, sweat-soaked minutes in the banya.
The banya is the the sauna that is seminal to the relaxation of most Russians, especially when accompanied by the therapeutic thwack of birch twigs on bare flesh.
In a style to match their diverse means, most Russians manage to enjoy a banya and a barbecue during the summer and many do it every weekend.
The only cloud on the horizon of their own personal idyll, and it is one that draws nearer with every drink, is the return journey into Moscow on Sunday afternoon.
It is another object lesson in automotive evolution, a race in which the fittest live to drive another weekend and the losers end up crumpled and steaming at the roadside.
For those who stay in the city, by choice or necessity, the reversed flow of racing traffic means their own weekend is drawing to a close.
They will have enjoyed the relative peace of the abandoned city and the space to stroll its few leafy boulevards without being hemmed in by honking cars.
They will have been able to find a seat in an outdoor café without resorting to low-level violence and walk through the summer rain without being drenched by the spray from passing traffic.
Now the working week begins again, but Russians are a stoical bunch: take shade from the sun, take shelter from the storms, keep clear of the armoured Mercedes and, above all, keep your eyes fixed on Friday afternoon.
