The one that starts off well but degenerates into schoolgirl humour quite rapidly...

I guess I've lived 'an international life', friends-wise, for about 6 years now; pretty much ever since Boy #1 went to day nursery, in fact, and I discovered that he was one of only two British passport-holding children in his group of 16.

It's great to interact and become friends with people from different cultures, I love it (this may account at least in part for my having married a Dutchman), and since moving to Moscow it's become even more the case for me. It's unusual, in fact, for me to be sitting in a group of people with more than one Brit apart from myself nowadays; I ate last Sunday's lunch, for example with one other English woman, two Russians, an American and my Dutch husband. The previous evening had seen me sitting down with Kiwis, Russians, Americans, again one English woman, and two Dutch. The time before that had been Dutch, Korean, Canadian, Kiwis and Russians - and so it goes on.

But there are some conversations that you can only have with other Brits. The Monty Python 'I were brought up in a paper bag & had to lick 'road clean for breakfast' conversation. The 'Hyacinth Bucket' aka 'More tea, vicar?' conversation. And the one I had with an English girlfriend yesterday which went completely over our Russian friend's head, but which had us both cracking up over a reference to a character's beautiful furry muff in one of our children's library books.

Even when you explain this one to a Russian - and let me tell you, trying to do that that can be painful beyond imagining - for some reason they don't find it funny. She was stony-faced.

Sadly, I must admit that this is not my first experience of having to brave these waters; there was also the incident last year when a friend and I were trying to explain the double meaning of 'beaver' to a Russian after she found us wiping the tears away in a particularly undignified manner following our discussion of the fact that there was one living nearby under a bridge. (A mutual male friend of ours - not British - was particularly interested in visiting this beaver on a regular basis and, I'm ashamed to say, this situation was particularly easy double-entendre land for ex-convent girls such as myself.) Our rather hiccupy explanation as to why we were nigh-on hysterical (OK, there might - MIGHT - have been a contributory white wine factor involved in this) fell on extremely stony ground with our Russian acquaintance.

At the time I was confused by this (who wouldn't find references to a beaver funny, surely? Oh. Just us Brits, then?). But then yesterday, after the unsuccessful attempt at explaining the humour in a furry m... the furry m - god, I can hardly even write it - I remembered my trip to the banya last year when it was evident that extreme waxing is something of a patriotic duty in Russia. And suddenly, it all became clear. No wonder the Russians don't get these particular cultural references! The chances are that the only beautiful furry muff's they have ever encountered really are something which you would use to keep your hands warm in, in cold weather...

What?