May 11, 2020 - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

At least we can all die laughing

Published: 11 May 2020

The media may be slating Boris Johnson this morning over his obscurantist speech the day before, but I for one found it intensely amusing. I haven’t laughed so much in years. If I’d have been wearing false teeth at the time, I would most likely still be looking for them.

I am not altogether sure what is most amusing, Boris attempting to provide us with a catch-all solution when there is not one, or Joe (and Joanna) Public betting everything on an answer tailor-made for them and then being disappointed when they did not get it. Perhaps Boris should have filmed his address to the nation with Sooty’s magic wand in his hand, and then we would all feel better.

UK Coronavirus Confusion Strategy

Who was it who sang “Do you know where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you?”

Is it the media, not our politicians, that have led us up the garden path and into the maze into which we now find ourselves? Consider the following headlines and out-takes from online news reports over the last two months:

Derbyshire Police force was heavily criticised for using a drone to “shame” people walking with members of their household in the Peak District. (27 March 2020)
[What a terrible thing for the police to do. But aren’t they supposed to be enforcing the isolating rules?]

Coronavirus lockdown likened to ‘police state’ by former Supreme Court judge (30 March 2020)
[So, does that mean that lockdown is unnecessary, bad, to be avoided? Was the Supreme Court established by Tony Blair?]

UK police warned against ‘overreach’ in use of virus lockdown powers (30 March 2020)
[Police should enforce lockdown rules, but they haven’t got the power to do so?]

Keir Starmer calls for ministers to set out plans to end lockdown (15 April 2020)
[Lockdown should end]

Coronavirus: Labour calls for lockdown exit strategy this week (15 April 2020)
[Labour wants an ‘exit strategy’]

‘Blair and Brown never missed Cobra meetings (19 April 2020)
[And? ~ Ahh, so perhaps it’s a positive thing that Boris has missed some of them?]

Coronavirus: Which are you? Britons are reacting to lockdown in one of three ways (27 April 2020)
[Hoorah! It’s just a game]

Fearful Britons oppose lifting lockdown (2 May 2020)
[But many people are opposed to lockdown, aren’t they?]

Coronavirus: UK to bring in two-week quarantine for air passengers (9 May 2020)
[Why are people still flying into the UK? Why wasn’t this done earlier? Why are we in lockdown when people are still flooding in from other countries?]

I’m losing my teenage years (9 May 2020)
[And?]

‘Recipe for chaos’: union leaders sound warning over return to work (10 May)
[But I thought lockdown was tantamount to a police state and should it not be ended? And hasn’t the Labour party called for an end to it?]

Doctors and police warn of new coronavirus wave as UK lockdown weakens (10 May)
[But I thought people wanted out of lockdown, as does the Labour party?]

Boris Johnson suggests coronavirus lockdown will be loosened on Monday (6 May)
[That should please Labour as they want an ‘exit strategy’ and want lockdown to end, don’t they?]

Boris Johnson’s lockdown release condemned as divisive, confusing and vague (10 May)
[It didn’t please Labour. If they have an exit strategy, perhaps they should tell Boris]

BBC’s Marr stuns Ashworth after blaming Labour for lockdown chaos ‘Take responsibility!’ (11 May 2020)
[Truth is stranger than fiction]

And this is without citing the plethora of news stories about strange new symptoms …

UK Coronavirus Confusion Strategy

So, here we are in the Coronavirus Maze and we just do not know how to get out of it.

Economists, scientists, healthcare professionals, business consortiums, psychiatrists, ‘experts’, MPs, all scampering this way and that looking for the exit and the strategy that goes with it. But the most confused, and we could argue the perpetrators of confusion, seem to lie with certain ladies and gentlemen of the press. Does the confusion lie in a desperate almost hysterical pursuit of political point-scoring: which way and how can Boris and Boris’s government be discredited and the current crisis used to pave the way for Labour’s resurgence?

An extremely cynical friend of mine, who has always voted Liberal Democrats, opined, “Perhaps it would be better if a Labour government was in power. We might be on the edge of the precipice waiting for the final push, but at least if we go over we would meet our end with Labour right behind us, after all they have been pushing that way for years.”

UK Coronavirus Confusion Strategy ~ like being in a maze — (Photo credit: Tarey (pixabay.com))

I personally still believe that the ‘maze’ analogy is the best one, although ‘Shit Creek without a paddle’ could be a contender.

Another confusing article: Lockdown! New Board Game

The views expressed in this article are my own (unless stated otherwise) and have nothing to do with Boris Johnson’s haircut.

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 52 [10 May 2020]

Published: 11 May 2020

Yesterday was the 9^th May, which is not surprising as today is the 10^th May. But here, in Russia, the 9^th May is one of the most important day’s in the nation’s calendar. It is, of course, Victory Day, the day when the nation celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.

As I wrote in my blog post, Thoughts on 9th May Victory Day Celebrations 2002/2020 , this year Coronavirus upstaged the ceremony as it has everything and everywhere.

In lieu of the parade and formal celebrations that would have been held on the ground in Kaliningrad, we learnt from online local news that there would be a military flypast, which was scheduled for 10am.

Now, I am not entirely sure who got what wrong, but we were out of bed and on the terrace by 9.45am and, like our neighbours, gazing skywards. Nothing? Apart from a lovely blue sky.

Blue skies 9th May Kaliningrad Social Distancing — **A remarkable display …** (Photo credit: Junior Libby [Link] https://www.publicdomainpictures.net)

Either the news feed was wrong, our clocks were caught up in one of those coronavirus conspiracies that everyone is talking about or else? I wondered if the planes that they were using were one of these new stealth jobs: so swift, so fast and so ultimately undetectable that they were there, but we just could not see them?

If this is the case, then airshows of the future are likely to be extremely challenging. Imagine thousands of spectators staring into the azure, a collective sweep of the head, deep intake of breath, loud round of applause, appreciative mumbling: “Wasn’t that a …” and “The way he, you know …” and “I really liked the, er, yes …” On the positive side, such airshows would be relatively easily to organise, inexpensive, no safety problems to worry about and the pilots could all stay at home, thereby running no risk of breaking social distancing rules, which is more than could be said for the spectators.

9th May Kaliningrad Social Distancing

Made of sterner stuff than you may think, we did not let this blip on the horizon, which we thought we almost saw, phase us, but continued to pay tribute on this special day as we had planned.

As I have said, it was a glorious spring day, and this enabled us to hoist a large red velvet soviet flag from the superstructure of the terrace canopy. This flag, of genuine vintage, has on one side a symbolic image of Vladimir Lenin and on the other the Soviet hammer and sickle emblem together with the names of the constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Our immediate neighbours across the way had erected a Soviet victory flag and as we are people of many flags, we were able to give our neighbours on the ground floor another soviet flag, which went well with the patriotic marching music that they were playing from their gazebo.

Who is losing it?

During the day, my wife, Olga, occupied herself in what has become, sadly, as much a part of the annual event as the event itself. The controversial discord of who exactly won the war ~ was it the East or the West? This year the argument descended to a new level of bitter acrimony, thanks to what a friend of mine described in his usual vernacular as a lot of ‘shit stirring’. He spoke of deliberate attempts in the United States to abnegate acknowledgement of Russia’s decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

As if airbrushing out the Soviet Union’s inestimable role in defeating the Germans was not enough, adding insult to injury came, apparently, in a White House Tweet ‘On May 8, 1945, America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis! “America’s spirit will always win. In the end, that’s what happens.”

Judging by the indignant comments on various Facebook posts, if this was a deliberate misappropriation, I would have to concede, using a football analogy, that someone in the US Revisionist Department has scored an own goal. It is bad enough having to endure relentless and politically motivated revisionism of historical TV dramas, but please could you desist from insulting our intelligence by trying to rewrite history itself. How about victory in WWII came about as a combined effort. As the refrain from the old 1960s’ pop song goes, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get on with me neighbours …”

Come the evening of 9^th May, we were ready to sit down, relax and toast Olga’s derdushka for the part that he played in the war. The history of my wife’s grandfather is a rather interesting one and one that I hope to research and elaborate on at a future date.

She posted this brief biographical detail about him on Facebook: Alexei Dolgikh (1910-1987) MVD Kaliningrad