Ibis Paveletskaya, Moscow

Moscow is a famously expensive city to visit. Good hotels, of which there are quite a few, can be found in the city centre but only at rates (£500+ per night) that would make even residents of cities like London or Paris, who we might expect to be accustomed to being fleeced by service companies, wince and complain. That doesn't mean that there aren't "cheap" hotels to be found but it does mean that they aren't necessarily very good or, in fact, cheap.

One such hotel is the Ibis Paveletskaya, located about three kilometres south of the centre of Moscow in a pretty average district opposite a strange modern church (probably - it's difficult to discern the precise purpose of some buildings when you can't read the signs on their exterior).

The Ibis is by no means a destination hotel; you would choose to visit only if you had business in its immediate vicinity or if you were financially constrained. That's not to say that there is anything particularly wrong with the hotel, it just doesn't have the facilities that you might want if you were expecting to spend time in the hotel itself. If you simply want to use the hotel as a base of operation then the beds are warm and comfortable, the showers are clean and the price (about £180 a night) isn't too bad (although in any other city you would probably feel a little put out if asked to pay more than £60).

The good points are the price (very low compared to other hotels in Moscow), the availability of wifi (fast and free throughout the hotel, as it should be everywhere) and the comfort of the rooms (warm, if basic and unpleasantly decorated).

To deliver the low price, however, they have cut a few corners. The restaurant, while serving reasonable (if basic and very dull) food is a soulless, poorly decorated room that wouldn't look out of place in a British holiday camp from the early 1980s; in other words, it's grim. There are no exercise facilities, gym or swimming pool; a jog around the hotel's locale, especially in February, holds absolutely no appeal whatsoever. The business facilities are pretty much non-existent; if you can do all you need with a wifi connection then you should be fine but if not the hotel won't be able to help.

Finally, you won't be bringing guests back to the hotel bar to impress them. Located in the foyer, the bar is very basic and although it's perfectly serviceable in terms of supplying coffee or alcohol it isn't going to feature in a "Top 10 Hotel Bars" compilation.

Would I return? I would hope not to but, given the average price of hotels in Moscow, I think it is entirely possible that I would end up at the Ibis again if I ever returned to the city. My preference would be to stay elsewhere but the Ibis is at least safe, clean and bathed in free wifi.

Navigating the Moscow Metro

It sounds like a small task, easily completed; navigate across Moscow using the the Metro. Such a thing is simple in London or Paris or New York, where language, alphabet and layout are readily understandable by first-time tourists, but Moscow is different in several important ways.

The most obvious problem is the alphabet. If you're not familiar with Cyrillic characters it can be difficult to recognise the names of the stations, particularly if the directions from which you are working are written in tourist-friendly Latin characters. To prepare for this you need to know the Cyrillic name of the stations on your route and preferably you need to be able to identify them in both upper and lower case characters in a variety of scripts or fonts.

When you know where you are heading your next task is to find the right Metro line. The lines are numbered and colour coded so that, unlike the London Underground, you don't need to remember the name of the line you want to take. Unfortunately, it is not always immediately obvious which line a platform serves and if you apply your experience of the Tube it is easy to miss overhead signs and, without realising, travel along the wrong line.

Two things exacerbate this problem. Firstly there are almost no maps to be found in the stations so by the time you get to the platform you have to be sure you are in the right place because you probably won't be able check that you are still going in the right direction. Secondly, there is a strange tendency for information about several lines to be presented together as a list of stations on the wall opposite the platform; it isn't clear whether this describes the trains leaving from the platform, the lines passing through the station or something else entirely.

If you do find yourself travelling in the wrong direction or on the wrong line it can be difficult to work out what's going on because the station names generally aren't clearly displayed on the station (unlike London, where the station names are everywhere). When you do spot the station name it's often in a small font on a sign that isn't particularly clear, especially if you're suffering from Cyrillic character recognition issues.

Finally, there are the crowds. Even though the carriages and platforms are long and wide there are so many people using the system that the trains, entrances and exits get very crowded indeed. You need to allow lots of time for getting into and out of the very deep tunnels that form the system and if you don't like being crushed together in a large underground chamber with hundreds of other people you should probably consider travelling on foot.

On the plus side, the stations are magnificent, the trains are fast and regular and the tickets are cheap; if you can master the navigation, Moscow's Metro is by far the best way to move around the city.

Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphic design has been hitting the headlines recently (in the specialist tech blogs, at any rate) because of Apple's use of the technique in their iOS and OS X operating systems. The name of the game is to make your software easier to use by including visual elements based on real-world items. You can see an example of skeuomorphism in action in Apple's iBooks app, which presents text in the form of a book, with page-turning animations and shading along the spine (along with other visual tricks to make the iPad look like a physical book). Whether or not you like this sort of thing depends almost entirely on personal taste. Steve Jobs liked these features so iOS is stuffed full of them, from iBooks to Calendar (designed to look like a desk calendar) to Contacts (looks like a tabbed contact book) to Find iPhone (looks like a folded map). Jony Ive apparently doesn't like skeuomorphic design and the recent changes to Apple's corporate structure, notably the departure of Scott Forstall, have prompted many pundits excitedly to predict the end of skeuomorphism in a flurry of app updates in iOS 7. To me that doesn't seem very likely. Would they really want to make large changes to most (all?) of there core apps? I suspect not but I think it's very likely that they will begin to remove some skeuomorphic features with the next release of iOS from the apps where those features no longer make sense or where they add little value. In some apps the first steps have already been taken. iBooks, for example, now has a continuous reading mode that allows you to scroll through the text without the (somewhat tedious but undeniably beautiful) page-turning effects of the original version. This takes some getting used to but it provides a much smoother interface and the removal, or at least the invisibility (since you can turn off the feature if you want to), of the skeuomorphic features doesn't in any way detract from the usability of the app. Could this, or should this, be extended to other apps? Apple will doubtless change their apps as and when they decide that doing so improves the user experience and, at least in my mind, removing the skeuomorphic features would probably be a good thing in most cases. It's likely that defining new interface elements that bear no resemblance to their real-world counterparts will improve usability once users get used to the changes and in many cases users probably won't have any problems at all. In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter whether you have buttons that look like buttons and pages that turn while you're reading a "book" as long as you can work out how to do everything you need to be able to do. Minimalism has some appeal and interfaces like those in Letterpress show that there are alternatives to skeuomorphism that work just as well. Exciting times are ahead of us.

Marriage Equality

On Tuesday the House of Commons will vote on the latest version of the Government's Marriage (Same Sex Couples) bill. The most surprising aspect of the process is that it has taken so long to get to this point; a simple correction of an obvious inequality should not have required so much consultation and argument.

The bill's opponents have been vocal and their predictions of the impact of the legislation have been apocalyptic. Opposition has been led, as has so often been the case in the past, by the Church of England and other, even less representative, religious cults. God, we are told, is very upset about attempts to "redefine" marriage away from the biblical "norms", despite the total lack of clarity in his guidebook (see here for a list of the types of marriage God has allowed) but he isn't able to put in a personal appearance to influence the debate or clarify his policies.

The Churches are backed by a variety of right-wing politicians who, if they aren't motivated by crude religious beliefs, presumably think that their constituents will be impressed by a display of old-fashioned bigotry. Today, these politicians stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghosts of colleagues from previous generations, trying to hold back the tide of reform. Their arguments, often bolstered by the teachings of an unsophisticated religion (often, but not always, some form of Christianity), have been used many times to justify inequality, oppression and discrimination and to block the development of a fairer, more caring society.

The rest of us, however, have moved on. We see the value of equality and the destructive, unpleasant power of discrimination. We want to live in a country where rights and opportunities are not limited by gender, race, age, religion, class or sexuality. We recognise that the desire of a minority of out-of-touch individuals to discriminate is based on unfounded worries and justified by flawed arguments that lack evidential support. We are familiar with the arguments made by opponents of marriage equality, having heard them when earlier generations fought for the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the decriminalisation of homosexual acts and the establishment of Civil Partnerships.

In short, the dire predictions made by opponents of marriage equality have never previously come to pass when made by similar people about similar reforms and there is absolutely no reason to believe that society will collapse on Wednesday (or at any point thereafter) as a result of the bill being passed on Tuesday. Some MPs will still vote against, of course, but they will quickly be seen as bigoted extremists whose value to the country and Government has been greatly diminished.

After this, of course, the next target for reform is the Church of England itself, which enjoys a strange and undemocratic position at the heart of Government. Removing the bishops from the House of Lords and disestablishing the Church will take us just a little closer to a fair and equal society.