"Pavel was born in 1927 in a village called Teremetz in the Tverskaya area, and was soon put to work on the winter felt boots we call valenki. I was born in 1933, in Tambov, but my parents worked in the kolkhoz, the Soviet collective farms. After the war, after the cities had been destroyed, they were calling the people to help rebuild them, and I enlisted."

It was 1952, and Pavel had just got out of the army. Those days things were so bad there would be five families living in an apartment like this. But Russia thought it had emerged victorious from the Second World War, and things were going to be better.

"Of course we fell in love!" says Ekaterina when I ask. By 1954 they were married, and they've stayed together and stayed in Podolsk ever since. And they started a family, and had a son named Alexander, or Sasha, and a daughter called Galina, or Galya. And Sasha always took care of his sister when Ekaterina had to go to the shops, shops and times when you had to stand in queue for a couple of hours to buy eggs. And when she'd come back she'd swear Sasha was exactly as she'd left him. And Sasha grew up and studied hard, and met another Galya and married her, and left Russia during the chaos of the Nineties so he could earn money for the family. He'd work in the oil companies and when he came back he'd drive or take the train to Moskva every day. And if you don't believe that Sasha wasn't the nicest papa (I know because I met him at Yalki Palki) you could ever meet there he is, on the wall with the kitschy wallpaper, standing next to Galya in her yellow dress, with Pavel standing proudly besides them, and a Lada in-between.

And Sasha and Galya lived with his parents for three years until they got an apartment in Podolsk, and they had two children: Alexandra and Maria. And Alexandra got married and now has two children, and a job in London doing something complicated with insurance. And Maria lives in the flat in Moskva her papa bought for Alexandra, and Sasha and Galya eventually sold their flat in Podolsk and bought an apartment in Moscow so they could be closer to their daughter, and Maria sits at the table smelling faintly of the perfume she bought in Abu Dhabi, and that's where this story is now, more than a half century after Ekaterina and Pavel fell in love after the war. I reach for more Crimean wine, sweet and yellow, and spill some over the plastic tablecloth, like the dyadushka.

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