Лето в Петербурге  Три года назад в конце...

Summer in St. Petersburg

Three years ago, at the end of June, a girl Sarah from England rented a room with me. When we discussed the weather, she said:
“It's colder here than ours.” And you have very dramatic weather changes. Yesterday it was +20, and today it is +12!
“It was just some kind of unsuccessful June,” I answered. “It is usually warm in June.”

Two years ago, at the end of June, friends from Ulyanovsk came to see me. They wore jackets and were wet in the rain. They talked:
- Damn, well, the weather. And is that always the case?
“No,” I answered. “It just happened this year.” It happens.

There was no summer at all in St. Petersburg a year ago. Well, of course, there were ten days in total. But that’s all.
This year you can look out the window, then at the thermometer, then remember how many warm days were in June, and everything will become clear.

I don’t know what about global warming, but the new ice age is clearly getting closer. It will be another fifteen years, and in the summer in the city there will be no more than +18, and in winter it will not be colder -8. Then people will begin to pack their things and leave St. Petersburg back. For example, to Siberia and the Far East, where the heat is now - in Novosibirsk +26, in Yakutsk +30, in Khabarovsk +28.
“We cannot,” they say, “live in your climate!” We played football on the street in our forty-degree frost, and as we got into Peter, we sniff our nose and throat all the time. Neither your normal summer nor the human winter - one gray gloom. Live here yourself!

So they will slowly leave — some deep into the mainland, some to Europe, some to Asia. And the empty skyscrapers of Kudrovo, Parnassus and Devyatkino will be frozen in silence; on the playgrounds of Prospect Veterans moose and wild boars will graze; and in an abandoned Okey, near the Kupchino metro station, an old hermit who writes the Great Russian Roman will settle down at the counter where they used to sell cod fillets and live carps.

The remaining residents will move closer to the center, and the metro will be limited to the Krestovsky-Chernaya Rechka-Vyborgskaya-Novocherkasskaya-Obvodniy-Moscow Gate-Narvskaya-Vasileostrovskaya ring. At the other stations, heavy doors will close, the lights will go out, and they will go into deep hibernation until better times, if any.
Tourists will still come to the city, but few of them will take the charm of the white nights and decide to stay. Indigenous Leningraders will sometimes catch tanned visitors from Yekaterinburg on the streets and ask:
- Well, how do you like us?
- Very like! Such a city is beautiful! The weather is just not very.
- And you are moving to us. - Leningraders will offer. - We have a lot of places! The city is big! And the weather - what the weather. Get used to it over time.
- No thanks! - tanned Yekaterinburgers will laugh in response. - We are better in our own Urals.

Then it will become even colder, and gloomy Scandinavians will come from the north. They will arrive on Tesla and off-road bicycles with wide tires and will be asked to Petersburg, because after the Gulf Stream weakened, their countries turned into unsuitable snow-covered plains, where there are neat houses frozen through and through, and frosty rickety wind turbines. And of course Petersburg will accept them - they are good people, hardworking, accustomed to the weather. Let them take away the depopulated Primorsky district and the empty and dead Gazprom tower, where only the former top manager, who has gone crazy, lives on the top floor and holds meetings and meetings for her thirty cats endlessly.

So a few more years will pass, and on one dark night, when icy palms like a nutshell crush the Chapel of Silence in Helsinki, the last Finns will ski to Petersburg. By that time there would be no border between Russia and the northern countries, but on the way to the city there would remain a symbolic post-hut, in which Ivan Vereshchagin, the self-proclaimed Last Frontier of the North, would settle. In a sheepskin coat over a Columbia jacket and with a hunting carbine on his shoulder, he will come out to meet the Finns.
“Where are you now, Jussi?” - he will ask the main Finn in a hat with a Moomin.
- To the south - he will answer. - Taymaassa. Bangkok. Will you come with us, Ivan?
“I can’t,” Vereshchagin will say. “Service!”

Then the Finns will silently leave at his hut a bunch of salmon ice cream, a parcel with dried venison and a kilogram of licorice sweets, and glide with white shadows into the dusk of eternal winter to continue their journey to the warm shores of distant Thailand. And Vereshchagin waved after them and returned to the hut to meditate on a burning candle and a portrait of Leo Tolstoy.

And after a few years no one will remain in Petersburg. He will freeze in a frosty captivity, and no one will order a Boyarsky cocktail, draw the logo of the Zenit football club on the wall, or buy a street shawarma. Neva will freeze, avenues and streets will be covered with snow, drawbridges will collapse.
And only in front of the dilapidated Winter Palace can you notice some movement - this huge mammoth scratches its back against the Alexandrian column, clings with its trunk fragments of imperial furniture and, playing, throws it up, admiring how gilding shines in the sun.

Source: m.facebook.com/oleg.vikharev/posts/102078103…