My name is Olga Alexandrovna Matyushkina-Gerke (seriously!) but normally - for reasons you may guess - I call myself either Matyushkina or - more often - Gerke. :)

I live in Manchester, a fast-growing English city, where people speak with quite a peculiar accent.  :) Not that I speak without any - English is not my native tongue. As a matter of fact, I was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia). My family are still living there.

I have moved here because my husband Nikita had obtained a job in the University of Manchester. 

We have found a lot of friends here and have some kind of a Russian community, but of course we don't confine ourselves only to our compatriots when choose our friends.

We have travelled a bit, lived for a while in France (Marseille and Paris).

I happened to graduate as a lawyer from Department of Law at St.Petersburg State University, Russia and used to work as one back in Russia. But here I have sufficient excuses not to try to do this - at least for a while.

Idleness is the mother of art... so, since I've had plenty of time, I've developed my fondness of reading and art. I also write short stories and essays for the Russian London Courier newspaper and draw caricatures and more "serious" pictures - mostly to amuse my friends.