Journal ·
I AM COMING BACK AS THE CUCUMBER QUEEN
Cucumber Day broke my station but gave me a costume. Next year I return in green leather, and I am streaming from the castle walls.
Okay so. Remember how my expedition was a total disaster and I came home in garbage bags and swore off the entire hobby forever?
Well. I have been thinking. And I have been sketching.
Because here is what actually happened at Cucumber Day, underneath all the antenna trauma: I stood in that festival, surrounded by a thousand-year-old town having a completely sincere party for a vegetable, with the wooden churches and the costumes and the pickles, and something in my brain went click. Not the radio part. The radio part went considerably worse than click. The other part.
The part that said: I could look INCREDIBLE at this.
So while my transceiver was sulking in a bin bag, I was designing a costume. And I finished it. And I need you to see it.
LOOK AT IT.
A proper kokoshnik — the real traditional Russian headdress shape, the tall crowned one — but rendered in deep pickle green, painted all over with cucumber vines and little yellow cucumber flowers, and spiked in gold like something you’d wear to negotiate a peace treaty. Green leather corset, gold vine embroidery, harness, matching cuffs, tall boots with the vines climbing up them. Cucumber. Couture.
Is it historically accurate? Absolutely not. Is it respectful of a genuine folk tradition? I am choosing to believe that a festival which celebrates a cucumber has already given me permission. Will I be the most photographed person at that festival? I have run the numbers and yes.
So here is the plan for next year, and I am putting it in writing so I can’t chicken out.
I come back to Suzdal. Same festival, one year older, one disaster wiser. In the costume. And this time — this time — the radio works, because between now and then I have twelve entire months to fix everything that went wrong, and I have already started: the tuner arrived, the rig survived, and I know exactly which mistakes were mine.
And I’m not doing it from a field. Oh no. I have my sights on something much better.
I want to activate from the castle walls. There is a WCA reference sitting right there in Suzdal — object UA-00303 — and Castles on the Air is a proper award programme where you put a historic fortification on the air and chasers all over the world come hunting for it. A thousand-year-old kremlin. Ancient white stone. Me on the ramparts in a cucumber crown with a morse key.
Streaming it. All of it. The pileup, the crown, the whole ridiculous glorious thing.
So mark it down, darlings: next Cucumber Day, from the walls, in green. One year to get my station right and my corset laced. If you hear a very determined little signal coming out of UA-00303 with a slightly unhinged operator on the other end — that’s me, and I made it back.
The cucumbers gave me a costume. The least I can do is give them a proper activation.
73 and 88, Iskra