Monthly Archives: November 2023

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Smartphone Spy in Your Pocket or Liberator?

30 November 2023 ~ Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

The last man to leave the sinking ship; the last man to go to the Isle of Man before they change the name to the Isle of Person; the last man to be the fourth man, as you know there was a third; the last man out at the wickets; the last man to be allowed to be called a man; the last man to play the white man; the last man behind the penultimate man; the last man ~ real man~ to win the lottery; the last man on Earth; the last man in Islington (even more rare than the last man on Earth) ~ you probably wanted to be, if not all of these, at least one of them, in the same way that I had led myself to believe that I was and would be the last man without a mobile phone. I didn’t plan things to be that way, neither did I design my phoneless status, as rumour has it, according to some highfalutin principal. It just happened. I never had a mobile phone, because I never had a mobile phone.

As with being a vegetarian (I became one of those in the 1970s.), I discovered, and I must confess with some delight, that not possessing a mobile phone became other people’s problem not mine, but when those around me who were most effected by my not possessing a mobile phone began to turn up the morality and invoke the strains of guilt, viz that my not having a mobile phone did not prevent me from using theirs, I had to agree, they did have a point.

There cannot be many of us who do not realise that the mobile phone (and I use this term generically to also include the smartphone) is, as with every other technological communication system, a tool for mass surveillance. Whenever you use a smartphone, they know where you are, what you are doing, what you are saying, and, once they have compiled that electronic dossier on you, you can bet your life they presume to know what is on your mind, even how it works, if indeed, it does work after you have enlisted yourself into the ranks of the twiddling masses. So, there it is, the smartphone, but for whom is the smartphone smart? ‘The Spy in Your Pocket’ my brother calls it.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Mass surveillance is the price we pay for our addiction to technology. Some of us rail against it; some of us accept it; most of us ignore it. I, personally, am not so much bothered about Big Brother as ending my life as the Lone Ranger to become one of the twiddling cattle-driven.

Not having a smartarsephone is a little like not being saddled with children. Without both, you can sit back at comfort’s distance and watch with a heartfelt sigh of relief as it passes you by. But as Nature and habitualisation dupes us into doing things that others think we ought to do, so William Gates and his band of silicons coerce and cajole us, hunt us out, hound us down and round us up until, with no place left to hide, the last stop is the twiddler zone. Remember, just because your paranoid does not mean that they’re not out to get you!

Whilst having children is not so much of a stigma as a life sentence, having a mobile phone is incalculably stigmatic. As soon as you pull out that phone and twiddle, an arrow seems to flash out of the ether, pointing the caption at you, “One of the brainwashed masses!” Tell me, in some American states is it still a felony not to guzzle alcohol inside of a brown paper bag? Taking this as my cue, I was thinking of disguising my phone as a sandwich or rubber duck, but that would never do, because twiddlers who twiddle their lives away do so as if by self-enslavement, they are wearing a badge of honour. All for one and look like all! WTF! (The World Twiddling Forum).

It astonishes me how inveterate twiddlers, who twiddle whilst they walk, do not meet with a horrible accident. An acquaintance of mine, an elderly gentleman, has seen fit to turn this banal practice into a source of entertainment.

Whenever a pedestrianised twiddler is heading in his direction deaf and blind to all around them, he takes up position on the pavement, having first worked out their approximate trajectory, and stands there whilst they collide with him. Judging by the average response, it would seem that even the demigod smartphone, with all its apps, bells and whistles, is powerless to resist when it comes to timely embarrassment.

My personal favourites of the twiddling fraternity are pub twiddling couples. I have seen couples come into pubs twiddling, buy drinks whilst twiddling and then spend the entire evening sitting next to each other, never saying a word, just twiddling. Are they beyond repair, or do they actually ‘talk to each other’, for example on the WhatsArse messaging system?

“What an interesting evening, darling. Time to twiddle back home.”

You’ve probably guessed by now where all this is leading. Correct, no matter how much I might rail against it, and in the process vainly hope that somehow, somewhere along the way, I will exonerate myself, the indisputable fact remains that crumpling under umpteen pressures, I eventually succumbed. Yes, I went out and bought a twiddler (‘Arrrggghhh!’)

So, whatever could have gone wrong to have brought about this extraordinary U-turn?

For all its social and psychological evils, whilst it irrefutably is an implement for mass surveillance, the smartphone also doubles as a cloak of invisibility.

Before the smartphone and its mass uptake, going to the pub on one’s tod was a peculiar exercise in self-consciousness. If you hadn’t got a newspaper to hide behind, and even if you had you might end up reading it cover to cover, upside down and back to front, all you could do was to stare into space. Thankfully, the days have gone, except in some up-North benefit-class clubs, previously ‘working man’s’, when a knuckle-dragging neanderthal clocking how you were sitting there with seemingly nothing better to do than letch would adopt a confrontational tone: “Are you looking at my girlfriend?” which obviously you were, or, if he hadn’t got a girlfriend, which usually he hadn’t because he was far too stupid to have such a thing: “Are you looking at me mate?” The temptation to reply, “Given any number of variables, I would rather look at a piece of s_ _t!” was often too hard to resist, even though as a means of closure, it often ended in fisticuffs and sometimes a trip to the local nick.

Today, pubs, in the main, are much more civilised. Possibly because they are more food, and therefore family, orientated, and also because some of the ‘men’ who frequent them would be positively miffed if they didn’t catch you looking at them. You can usually tell who these men are. You’ve seen them on the adverts. They’re always winning the lottery.

How many men have stopped doing the lottery since adverts like that appeared is a question for another day. It does not alter the fact that sat there in the boozer looking like Billy No Mates, constantly checking your watch, as if someone you had arranged to meet is late, or coddling the delusion that after you have finished that long, that slow, that lonely pint you are going on somewhere else, are no longer ruses you have to resort to in an age where everyone looks and acts as if they are everyone else.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

As long as you are a paid-up member of the Zombified Smartphone Club, nobody is going to bother you, nobody is going to question you. With that little (not so little and also rather heavy) rectangular glass-front phone, a voyeur’s window on the world, not so different from Pandora’s Box, flings itself open to you. You can kerb-crawl the net at will, take as many selfies as you like ~ hundreds if it floats your boat ~ before seizing on that magic one that looks not remotely like you. As long as it hides those sags and wrinkles and makes you believe you look 20 years younger (Likes and Followers! Likes and Followers!), you’ll kiss the ass of your mobile phone until all the old cows come home. Ahh, shrine to delusion, vanity, narcissism, thy name is social media!

I instinctively knew that to take a selfie of myself was something I should avoid. And was I ever right. But for the sake of historical record, I took that selfie. Good heavens, I thought, when I looked at my selfie, what on earth do I think I’m doing wearing the nose of Charles de Gaulle?

This first sorte into the realm of selfie-taking taught me in no uncertain terms that there is obviously more than meets the eye (and nose) when it comes to taking fawning photos for mass consumption on Facebook, especially abracadabra ones that transform you from what you really are into the oil painting you never can be. Indeed, every photo on Facebook is intrinsically an art form, art meaning ‘artificial’, and not everyone can master it. The trick (and what a trick!) is to make your faithful believe that the life your photos say you are living is primarily better than theirs and certainly better than yours.

Look out! Selfie in Victory Square!

My next trick was to put the smartfun away, cease repeating “He nose you know!” and shoot off on my solo run into Kaliningrad’s city centre, where, it embarrasses me to confess, that in front of the monument in Victory Square the compulsion took me again. I had to try for another selfie! (You can see the way it goes, can’t you?)

This time I would bring into play the much loved sucked-in cheeks and ubiquitous silly pout. At the very last minute, however, drawn in cheeks were dropped (they tend to do that, don’t they?), as I had noted in my dotage that my impression of Peter Cushing was already quite advanced and that to remodel my cheeks into two squeezed lemons might prove a bridge too far. If only I’d have stuck in my youth to murdering animals and eating them, by now my cheeks would be lovely and round like two plump rolls of prime pink brisket!

Even though my lips had not been enhanced, pumped up so that they looked like slugs, and I had no Frankenstein’s bolt through my snout, which given its size on my debut selfie could easily have accommodated any number of scrapyard pieces, this was destined to be my first (and also my last, I might add) outdoor-taken selfie. All that I succeeded in doing by pouting my lips like a retard was to convey the regrettable impression that although I was out on the town tonight my false teeth had not come with me. They were probably still in the gherkin jar into which they had landed when I let out that sneeze.

“Well, bugger that!” I said to myself, and shoved my Toosmart phone deep within my inside pocket, and I did not take it out again until I was standing outside the bar to which my feet had been programmed to take me. (Blame it all on the technocrats!)

Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka in Kaliningrad

Here are some facts for you. There are two bar/restaurants in the centre of Kaliningrad which are joined at the hip: one is Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka. The only pubs in the UK I know which had a similar arrangement, occurred in London’s Greenwich. They were the Richard I and The Greenwich Union (since vandalised by Young’s Brewery, which, with typical corporate disregard for social history and heritage, knocked them into one).

How embarrassing it was that on one occasion when a group of us had gone to the Richard I, I somehow ended up halfway through the evening accidentally in The Greenwich Union. I had stepped outside the front of the Richard for a quick puff (that’s right, I said ‘puff’!) on my King Edward cigar and when I went to return inside unknowingly entered The Union. Thinking I was in the Richard and that my friends were playing a silly joke, ie they had gone into hiding somewhere, I took the pint I had freshly ordered and went and sat in the beer garden to ponder on what I should do. It was only when I heard my friends chatting away behind the fence in the Richard garden next door that I realised my folly: it wasn’t my friends who had played a joke; it was beer and navigation!

“Well, that’s nothing to be proud of. Is it!”
Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one.

Out of the two Kaliningrad bars mentioned, my first bar tonight would be the Bavarian one, an establishment where, if you are lucky, you get to sit down the centre of the room inside a make-believe beer barrel. Unfortunately, my luck was out this evening ~ it had probably gone to Maxims ~ and I was shown to a line of seats and tables that ran along the perimeter of the room. Good! A young couple sitting together at right angles to my table would provide the perfect opportunity for testing the cloaking function of that recently purchased gadget that was jumping out of my pocket.

A businessman, to the left of me, who had obviously not just bought his phone, was so absolutely invisible to everyone in his orbit, with the exception of himself, that had his skills at twiddling not been so well endowed (which seemed to beg the question, was he born with his smartarse in his hand?), I would never have thought to notice him.

Smartphone how smart as mass surveillance systems?

He was a pro, I was a novice, and I have to say it showed. My first message on WhatsArse was an all fingers and thumbs job. It took me 20 minutes to compose a reasonably legible paragraph which, had I been working on a laptop, would have taken perhaps a minute or less. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns, and over the next 40 minutes, managed to shoot three messages into and across cyberspace complete with photos attached. During those 40 minutes, the young couple facing my profile (and thinking “It’s Peter Cushing!”), and whatever it was the man was doing down the other end of the room with his Bavarian sausage, were so plainly indistinct as to issue the suspicion that I had come as close to vanished as Davos had to resetting the world. Had I been any more gone, I would have been shaking hands with H.G. Wells!

Next door, in the Czech bar, I was again unlucky. The best seats had been taken, and I ended up perched upon a sponge-filled leather-look bench, which was, I suppose, alrightish, except that being so high off the ground it left one’s little legs dangling with nothing to rest one’s feet on, rather like sitting in the barber’s chair when you were six-years old. How fortuitous and kind of fate that she had arranged a stool in front of me so that I could use its stretcher as a foot rest.

Mick Hart's shoes with microphone attached

In this bar, I tried out my phone with an email or two. Fine, although when it came to attaching images, the process became a tad mysterious. Exit quickly and onto Google. I had never opened websites using a smartarsephone before, and now that I have, I cannot say that I found the experience particularly positive: yards and yards of constant scrolling. It’s like an electronic version of bog roll. But twiddling and swiping go hand in glove, and for me, the man with the reputation for being the Last Man on Earth to Own a Smartphone, the gauntlet had been thrown.

In the bar up in the clouds (the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery) overlooking the spot where I shouldn’t have taken my second selfie, and now on my third beer, not only had I become more confident in my twiddling and more comfortable with my twiddler, but my Russian language had improved no end. Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo (“Good Moaning”) may well have had good reason to feel proud of me, but could his approval be half as rewarding as thinking you’re getting it right, whilst most likely you are not, or rather not quite, but not knowing nor either caring because sitting snuggly in your pocket, if you haven’t already lost it, is your little spy and pie in the sky, your customised, very own smartphone ~ ahhhh.

By the end of the evening I was able to say two things. No, I had not drunk so much that I could only say two things, I mean two things pertinent to my smartphone experience. The first was something I had always suspected: Never take a selfie and, if you have to think again, never take a selfie. The second was that my expectations of the smartphone as an instrument of lonely-guy concealment when sitting alone in a bar or pub was vindicated. And yet, the keeping-tracks-on-you downside that inevitably comes with owning a smartphone, unless you keep it switched off, continues not to sit easily with me.

In more recent years, I have heard people say that the Silicon Valley Mob have turned up the heat in their racket to enslave people and to extort as much personal information about everyone on Earth as completely as they can. Like the Capone organisation, which, after Al’s demise, moved with the help of Sam Giancana into the labour rackets, the Silicon Outfit found a new racket in 2-step verification.

Conspiracy theory or not, with the roll-out of 2-step verification for online banking, as a sign-in function for websites and blogs and as the only option for identifying yourself on ecommerce sites, such as eBay for example, the message is loud and clear, either get a smartphone or else be bolloxed.

The one-step further exploitation than 2-step verification is fingerprint and/or eye recognition. Now it’s getting personal. Where will it all end? The clue may lie in the word ‘end’. In other words and words more plain, is Anus Authentication already passing from science fiction into the realms of science fact? It is too much of a coincidence that AI (Anal Intelligence) is the state of the art abbreviation on the tongue of every news editor. AI is everywhere, so there must be something in it, as I’m sure there must be someone out there, in a small secluded brick-looking building in Silicon Valley’s back yard, who is poised with the paperwork in his hand for the biggest breakthrough yet. Zappa may have the answer …

Image attributions

Man with phone on couch: Image by <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/character-playing-videogame_7734013.htm#query=clipart%20sitting%20using%20a%20smartphone&position=17&from_view=search&track=ais&uuid=00c57546-c79e-4db8-a98c-c064c40ce15e”>Freepik</a>

No walking with Smartphone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/No-smartphone-while-walking/81731.html

Spectacles: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Glasses-with-eyes/44056.html

Microphone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-clip-art-of-electric-microphone/28206.html

A couple more posts

It’s that man in the Russian Hat in Bedford!

Secret Weapon in Kaliningrad

Kanapinis (Cannabis) Beer in Kaliningrad is it good?

Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Kanapinis

Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad

20 November 2023 ~ Kanapinis (Cannabis) Beer in Kaliningrad is it good?

Kanapinis: This is one of those beers which if you are English and linguistically challenged will be difficult to get your mouth around. Let’s just say by this I mean canapés, and say no more about it.

Whilst Kanapinis’ cannabis-hemp connection cannot fail amongst certain circles to attract (not that I am suggesting foul play by advertising), this beer has three things going for it before you even think of whapping it down your neck. For starters, it’s got bottle, and the bottle is made of glass. It also has a resealable Quillfeldt stopper (as featured in my previous post Butauty) and a label that could take first prize at any pagan festival.

“Plastic coat and plastic hat, and you think you know where it’s at,” sang Frank Zappa. Poor old plastic, destined to travel through life second class. But let’s be Frank about it, Frank, ‘better than glass my arse’, no plastic isn’t and never will be. You certainly got that right! Best beer is best drunk from glass glasses and out of bottles made of glass. Tins are also crap.

The Quillfeldt stopper is what it is: one of those simple but oh so very practical inventions that looks as good as it gets and couldn’t really get much better even if it wanted to. Glass beer bottles in a litre size complete with Quillfeldt stoppers make the urge to save the bottles virtually irresistible. It’s a great way (if you are short of ways) of cluttering up your house. Note: These bottles will come in handy even if you never use them.

Beer review links:

[Butauty]
[Kanapinis (Dark)]

The olfactory clues as to the nature and taste composition of Kanapinis do not do the beer half as much justice as they ought. Not that from the bottle the aroma of the contents can be said to be in anyway dour or as dull as dishwater (are we talking Baltika 3?) or by any stretch of the connoisseur’s thirsty, impatient imagination unpleasant, indeed quite the contrary, the nostrils positively swoon at the subtle shades of bright and smoky, the happy hoppy, the secret scents and the affably aromatic, but subtle is the word and complex is the next one. We’ll get to that in a minute.

In the glass, the decanted beer assumes a smoky amber appearance and comes with a big creamy head. Once poured and given room to breathe, the initial aroma transfigures itself, becoming progressively less like barley and more like a fragrant perfume, not Brute or High Karate or any of that flared-trousers stuff but an exclusively minted, quality Versace.

The exact composition as detected by the nose remains elusive, but drinking is not about sniffing. If it was, the health-conscious caveat added to beer-bottle labels by seemingly indulgent, public-spirited brewers would hardly exhort their customers to play the game and ‘drink sensibly’, as the doing of such a curious thing would have obvious negative impacts on brewery profits. No, the label would instead advise you to sniff the beer with care.

But let’s be done at once with matters of the nose and get down to the business of carefree drinking!

Kanapinis (Cannabis) Beer in Kaliningrad

First, let me assure you that the Kanapinis’ head sits there proudly where it is poured at the top of the glass. It does not wassail away like someone who has vowed that they will love you for eternity but as soon as your back is turned they’ve gone. In other words, the Kanapinis’ head has a certain respectful staying power. It does not go just like that, no matter how much you fool yourself that you would rather expect it to do so.

As you drink this beer, the loyal head clings firmly to the glass, like that special someone you should have clung to in the days before you realised that you were anything else but Love’s Young Dream. But these things invariably happen, and in the world of beery beverages we call this phenomenon not a bitch but by her name, which is lacing.

Kanapinis (Cannabis) Beer in Kaliningrad

As the brew goes down, without unnecessary recourse to rude expressions such as brewer’s droop, it is the fruity innuendos, saucy herbal asides and various suggestive digestive delights that service your longing palate.

The experience is an holistic one: a blend of soft and easy, a tincture of this and that. It’s that mouthwash you almost bought from Aldi but then thought better of it, or that wine you were made to taste by a bunch of pretentious farts, who wouldn’t know the difference between Schrader Cellars Double Diamond Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon and a glass of Andrews Liver Salts (Would that be ‘Andrews’ as in ‘Eamon?’). ‘Spit it out! I should cocoa ~ not!’

Once Kanapinis has gone, it hasn’t. Lacing still clings to your glass, and beyond the climactic finish, which is enough to make your toes curl, the aromatic aftermath is as sweet as the milf next door.

One pint of Kanapinis is nearly never enough. It’s wildly better than sex, with no refractory period. And you never have to worry about it living up to your expectations because, just like playing solitaire, you can cheat as much as you like.

Kanapinis (Cannabis) Beer in Kaliningrad

You’ve got to hand it to the brewers, whether they like it or not, Kanapinis is a babe of a beer. A double-page spread in a paunchy world where beers build better bodies, and you don’t have to switch the light off in order to enjoy it. A word of warning, however, both to the sceptical and the uninitiated who are apt to read the wrong kinds of things and believe what they read is gospel: watch out for those beer reviews that should be taken with a pinch of salt or a glass of Eamon Andrews. Downright obscene it would be, if on consummating Kanapinis, you complained about her virtues and the value you never got for your money. This is not a beer to take home to your mother, but you have to admit its got style.

Kanapinis is habit-forming, but at least it is a natural one. If you don’t come back for more, then there must be something wrong with you. Please to remember the age-old motto, not coming back for more often offends the Lady. I think the someone who coined this phrase was a fan of Margaret Thatcher?

BOX TICKER’S CORNER
Name of Beer: Kanapinis
Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai
Where it is brewed: Lithuania
Bottle capacity: 1litre
Strength: 5.1%
Price: It cost me about 288 roubles (£2.62)
Appearance: Hazy-daisy amber
Aroma: Beer bitter with subtle aromatic hints
Taste: An encyclopaedic experience
Fizz amplitude: 4/10
Label/Marketing: You wouldn’t want him looking over your shoulder
Would you buy it again? Just try and stop me, pal!!

Beer rating

About the brewery and the beer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai | Kanapinis
The brewer’s website has this to say about Kanapinis light:

“Cannabis, Unfiltered light beer: Beer is brewed according to the classic brewing technology. Natural raw materials, open fermentation and long and careful aging give this beer a mild frozen taste. The barley malt in its composition gives the beer a light amber colour.”

And this to say about their range of beers:

“Each beer recipe is exclusive, with a real story and an authentic composition. The bravors of Aukštaitija produce beer, which dates back to the 1750s. The recipe for one of the brewed beers came from Germany back in the last century, which today is included in the Culinary Heritage Foundation.”

Comment: I would venture to suggest that to look for a better way of enjoying history other than by quaffing it in the form of an authentic, tested-by-time, celebrated historic brew would be a completely pointless object.

Brewer’s website: aukstaitijosbravorai.lt

Wot other’s say [Comments on Kanapinis (Cannabis) beer from the internet, unedited]
😑Hardly tangy, spicy in taste…but overall rather bland
[Comment: This bloke obviously has taste-bud problems.]

😐Slightly sweet, reminiscent of honey, and very drinkable. It could just be a little spicier
[Comment: OK, so make with the chili sauce!]

😁Stonkingly good beer!
[Comment: Alright, I admit, it was me who said that.]

😐Very unusual beer, smells of honey, but not too sweet, very drinkable, delicious! The only drawback is a bit too little carbonation*. Can I drink more of this?
[Comment: Well, if you can’t, pass me the bottle!]

*He needs to add a spoonful of Andrews Sisters

Kaliningrad in Autumn Leaves it Out

The autumns of our years leaf everything to our imaginations

15 November 2023~ Kaliningrad in Autumn Leaves it Out

You’ve heard the one, ‘Bringing in the sheaves’, but here, in Kaliningrad, at this time of year, it’s more a case of cleaning up the leaves.

I love autumn, it is by far the most favourite season in my romantic calendar. To enjoy it to its utmost and garner from it the utmost joy, you really must locate a tree, or better trees in plural, and cuddle up beneath them. Leaves in autumn (as I wrote in an earlier post) are one of Kaliningrad’s municipal treasures.

Kaliningrad is a green city, haven’t I told you so already. Its tree population is quite prodigious: many streets are lined with them, many gardens full of them, many parks play host to them and the city in itself, in its large and spacious capacity, is endowed with small spinneys and woods, none of which are treeless. In fact, as strange as it may seem, none of Kaliningrad’s woodland is short of a tree or two. I cannot recall a single occasion whilst walking through the wooded areas availed of by the city, when I could not find a tree. Thus, when the time eventually comes, as come around it must, for the leaves to eventually twig-it, they’ll be sure to let you know.

Recently, however, Kaliningrad has entered the phase when it best at worst resembles Britain. In Britain some blame it on ‘global warming’ (they usually look and sound like parrots), others on globalist bullshit (They are quickly labelled conspiracy theorists and sectioned under the Mental Health Act for being too perspicacious.(Hysterical Whitehall laughter!)).

Whatever the explanation, it has all gone damp and soggy when previously it was crisp and dry. All it took in those conditions was a light to moderate breeze and leaves were swirling from the trees like proverbial pennies from heaven. (It’s good that leaves aren’t feminine pink, for when outed by the tree it would be difficult not to compare them to confetti at a gay pride wedding. (“Oooh, now, just listen to him. Who does he think he isn’t!”)

Kaliningrad in autumn

One day these leaves line the trees like a coat of many colours, the next they lay like a carpet, or like Sir Walter Raleigh’s autumnal cloak, thick and deep and predominantly yellow, on lawn, verge, road, cobbles, on pavements where there are some and on pavements where there aren’t.

The affect of this time of month on Kaliningrad’s leafy parts is to transform it into a dense yellow snowstorm, which on closer inspection at ground level reveals a colour composition of varying yellow hues interspersed with auburn, browns and intricate shades of red.

If autumnal colours do something to you, if they reach the parts others cannot, if in the changing fate of leaves you find all that your heart desires and more than you thought you could ever deserve, then Kaliningrad in autumn is the place you should have gone to when you had the chance.

If, on the other hand, the sight of leaves makes you incurably phobic, then your relief will be as keenly felt as my infatuation for the leaf collectors when they hit the streets to engage in their yearly task, which by no means insurmountable is none the less redoubtable, of lifting and shifting piles of leaves before buckets of snow plummet down on top of them, not on them you understand, but on top of the fallen leaves.

Hanging, floating, whirling, twirling, falling and settling autumn leaves possess a poetic beauty but come the damp and the snow, they can overnight turn slippery, ‘mighty slippery’ I might say, but I’d only say it in an Old West accent and when I’m wearing my cowboy suit.

I don’t expect you to go so far, to visualise this scene, a scene like that is nobody’s business, but please do take a moment to gander at the lovely photos of Kaliningrad’s autumn leaves:

Thank you for travelling Autumn Post, the next stop will be Christmas.

Konig Power Russia’s Ultimate Tribute to Deep Purple

Kaliningrad’s Konig Power had the pleasure of Mick Hart listening, dancing, and drinking to their Deep Purple tribute. How did they rate his performance?

12 November 2023 ~ Konig Power Russia’s Ultimate Tribute to Deep Purple

I’ve learnt the hard way never to expect too much (Out of life, Mick? Please let me finish.) from tribute bands.

I learnt this lesson in particular during my Rushden Bowls Club years. Not that I have ever played bowls, mind, even if by age I was qualified then and am more-so qualified now. For us, the Rushden Bowls Club was a handy venue from which to run antique auctions and, occasionally, 1940s’ concerts and dances. However, since the club also functioned as an entertainments hosting centre, we were sometimes in the right place at the right time to catch several tribute band performances.

Needless to say, the professional quality of each band veered from downright dandy to downright dastardly. When they were good, they were good, and when they were bad, they were very, very bad.

Sadly, one or two ‘sank beneath the water like a stone’, and whilst this did not happen often, when it did it had you asking, “Why did I spend good money to listen to a bunch of wannabees butcher the songs of my favourite band, when I might just have easily stayed at home and listened to the real thing courtesy of YouTube?”

The answer to that rhetorical question is that the ‘real thing’ on YouTube is not the real live thing, and when the real live thing is not available, we go for the next best live thing, which, in case you haven’t guessed, is the tribute band.

And so, we come to a recent event, not staged at the Rushden Bowls Club or anywhere vaguely near it, but at Mr Smirnov’s Badger Club tucked away on the Kaliningrad outskirts. Would admission be dependent on the wearing of badger-head codpieces?

Konig Power Russia’s Ultimate Tribute to Deep Purple

The night in question was the 4^th of November; the tribute band in question was Konig Power and the band they were representing was Deep Purple.

As all you know-it-alls know, Deep Purple is an English rock band formed in the late 1960s. Together with British bands Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, they made a name for themselves as the ‘Holy Trinity of hard rock and metal bands”. Deep Purple started out as a psychedelic/progressive rock band, but later moved out and moved into hard rock and some say heavy metal. In its lifetime, the band has undergone numerous line-up changes and nuanced shifts in its musical style but has always maintained its place at the summit. The recipient of numerous accolades and coveted music awards, including, after an uphill struggle (which some believe was motivated by institutional cronyism) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Deep Purple, like their ageing peers Mick Jagger and his Rolling Stones, may not be as young as they used to be, but the pioneers of heavy rock continue to shine the light for new wave bands to follow.

A bit of heavy rock trivia
Deep Purple toured Russia on a number of occasions. It did so from 1996, and in February 2008 appeared in concert at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow.

During the 1970s (My, doesn’t that sound a long while ago!), when heavy rock was in its infancy, I cannot claim to have been a celebrant of it. I was certainly into heavy rock, as I was working in demolition, demolishing disused U.S. aerodromes built in England during the war, and I was also into heavy metal, as I was selling it on the side.

However, at some point during my early teens I turned away from commercial pop, having stumbled upon what is known today as psychedelic and progressive rock.

Bands like Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, featured on the periphery of my new frontier in music, but my inclinations ran more to the likes of Pink Floyd (strictly in their earliest incarnation), Emerson, Lake and Palmer and other truly progressive bands. Then, in 1971, a close friend and collaborator pulled out of his record collection a white album with nothing on the cover but a facsimile handwritten scrawl.

The artist’s name and the name of his band sounded rather silly (which appealed to me immensely), and I certainly had no knowledge of them. Had I missed them on Top of the Pops? That album was the Fillmore East. It was recorded live at the Fillmore in June 1971, and the band that was playing that venue was Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention.

I played the album and was immediately hooked. I hadn’t heard anything like it, because there had never been anything like it, and there’s never been anything like it since. Having played it more than sufficiently to drive my parents to distraction and annoy the neighbours no end, I then raced out and bought, in rapid succession, Freak Out, 200 Motels, We’re Only in it for the Money, Chunga’s Revenge and another half-dozen Zappa albums at £2.20 a pop from Peterborough’s Woolworths. It was an Overnight Sensation; Zappa had converted and, some admonishingly said, thoroughly perverted me.

So, onto this recent tribute concert, where I was going not, as I have intimated, as a dyed-in-the-wool Deep Purple fan but as an open-minded listener with a knowledge of and interest in heavy rock and heavy metal music.

The night before the gig, I had a nocturnal gig of my own ~ insomnia, which ended in a dose of Nytol. Throughout the day of the concert, I was not up too much. It was all I could do to scan one of my old hand-written diaries, the 1976 edition, for storage in the ‘cloud’. It is an ongoing and laborious task, scanning the pages of diaries (I am sure you do it all of the time.) but the upside of it is, it does not entail much mental effort. So far, I have scanned diaries spanning the years 1971 to 1976; only 25 years to go before I catch up with the time when I swapped my pen for a keyboard.

The point is, just in case you think I’ve forgotten what the point is, that my insomnia had left me with a not unusually dull and heavy background headache, which Nytol had exacerbated: just the thing one needs, I thought, when attending a heavy rock concert! But, to quote my old friend Frank, “I was born to have adventure …” So off we went, headache and all.

On our way to the Badger Club, we stopped off at a nearby bar where I sunk a pint of beer. It seemed to do the trick. Doesn’t it always? I cannot for the life of me begin to understand how non-drinkers get over their headaches!

Konig Power

The Deep Purple tribute band that we would witness this evening goes by the name of Konig Power. The line-up consists of: Yuri Koenig, vocals; Viktor Markov, guitar, solo and backing vocals; Dmitry Isakov, bass guitar; Alexander Nazarov, keyboards; and Alexander Kazbanov, drums.

Yuri Koenig, lead singer and founder of the band, may be Russian but he sings his Deep Purple cover songs in perfect English. Before launching into his act, Yuri came to our table and in conversation revealed the sixteen or seventeen tracks that the band would be playing this evening. They must have been among Deep Purple’s most famous hits for, with one or two exceptions, I seemed to know them all.

During our conversation, Yuri revealed that as well as Deep Purple, he was a lifelong fan of the Beatles. This did not surprise me any, as the greater percentage of Russian folk over a certain age seem to have a perennial soft-spot for the mop-top band from Liverpool.

My sister was a Beatlemania victim. I suppose in the Beatles’ hey days it was hard to be anything else. Youth culture at the time was simplistically split into two cult camps: you either went with the Beatles or favoured the Rolling Stones. I leant towards the Stones, but my favourite ‘commercial’ rock band of that era was neither of the big two, it was the third spoke in the music scene’s wheel, the one and only Kinks, and out of that 60s/70s trio, it remains so to this day.

None of the groups that I have just mentioned fall into the generic category occupied by Deep Purple.

Deep Purple’s music is heavy rock, and if any of you reading this are unsure as to what that is, ~ maybe because you have suffered the inconvenience of having been born too late, when there is little more to listen to than rap-crap mediocrity ~ it is heavy and it rocks.

The opening chords of Konig Power left no doubt in anyone’s mind what brand of music it was. The ‘heavy’ passed like a shockwave through our bodies and the building in its entirety actually, physically rocked.

Konig Power Kaliningrad Deep Purple TRibute Band

Indeed, so heavy, strident, loud and utterly surprising was the initial amplification that had my badger’s head codpiece not been properly secured by a pair of lady’s suspenders, I would have run the very real risk of losing it. It could have shot right off! As it was, I discretely adjusted it just in time to hear Yuri cry what he had no need to cry, “I want to smash this wall!” He very nearly succeeded, with the help of my flying codpiece.

My codpiece was not the only victim of the band’s explosive intro. The dramatic opening chord seemed also to have blown away Smirnov’s leather outfit, for, having put away his pipe ~ I didn’t know he smoked one? ~ he appeared from the back rooms of his TARDIS looking every bit the caveman in a short-sleeved furry waistcoat open from chest to midriff. Aleks is one of those alpha guys. He has a hairy chest. My shirt was well done up.

The first track of the evening was Deep Purple’s signature tune Smoke on the Water, based on the 1971 fire at Montreux Casino*.

Understandably, it is a powerful song, requiring a lot of clout from the vocalist, and for guitarist Dmitry Isakov a tightly scripted performance to live up to a guitar riff which has gone down in rock history as one of its most memorable.

*Do you not believe in coincidences?
Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water song is reputed to have been inspired by the burning of Montreux Casino in 1971. My favourite band is The Mothers of Invention. My favourite album is The Mothers of Invention live at the Fillmore East, recorded in 1971. The casino burnt down as a result of a Mothers of Invention fan firing a flair gun during a Mother’s of Invention concert. I wasn’t there. I have an alibi. On the night in question, I was sitting quietly at home playing roulette and blackjack whilst listening to my Fillmore East album. I think I was wearing flared trousers and smoking a cigar.

This, then, was the moment of truth. It was the first track of the evening. Deep Purple’s headline song, the one that would sort the tribute men from the boys.

Success! I am pleased and relieved to report; Bravo!; and a standing ovation! Konig Power had not disappointed. We could settle in for the rest of the evening. Yes, I will have a glass of vodka.

It has to be said that lead singer Yuri Koenig excelled himself. He has a good, strong, voice, with a flexible range and tempo and had no difficulty in oscillating between the low growling guttural notes and clean, high-pitched screams which characterises the Deep Purple sound.

A vital clue as to how he reaches those high notes could, I quietly ruminated, be the very tight trousers that he was wearing. They looked like a pair once owned by the Bee Gees. I didn’t say a word. However, you, being less diplomatic than I, might have been tempted to say, “Pardon me for asking, but were you ever awarded the Badger’s Head Codpiece with Two Golden Globes?” I’m rather glad that you were not there.

Guitarists, Dmitry Isakov and Viktor Markov gave dazzling displays of nimble fingers, which were expressively more than capable of drawing perfect musicianship from the instruments they were wielding. I tried to work out how they did it, how they were doing it so well and doing it so rapturously, but just like seasoned magicians with professional cardsharp skills, if it wasn’t simply down to their fingers, it must have been up their sleeves. Their extraordinary and excellent playing hit the spot like it ought and certainly contributed to ‘smashing’ Yuri’s wall, as though smashing walls to them was second nature.

A heavy rock group without drums a-rockin’ is almost as inconceivable as a globalist without tentacles. Manning the drums this evening was Alexander Kazbanov, who effortlessly, or so it seemed, brought it all together in an assured style and with a classic sense of timekeeping that his alter ego, Ian Paice, could only have applauded.

Whether his keyboards colleague, Alexander Nazarov, wanted to or did distort the sound of the organ he was playing in emulation of his Deep Purple counterpart, the legendary Jon Lord, is not for a novice like me to say, but the rhythm he produced rode along with the heavy rock beat without becoming lost in it, either utterly or partially, adding, not subtracting, and holding its own quite comfortably within the epicentre of the storm of sound.

In fact, there was nothing to complain about in the band’s rendition of the band they loved to play, and nothing by way of syncopation that failed to fit the tribute bill.

Whilst Konig Power paid homage in the best and most professional way to every Deep Purple song to which they treated us, by far the most accomplished in my opinion was the last song of the evening, a reprise of Deep Purple’s signature tune, namely Smoke on the Water. Already sung and sung well, beyond the level of prosaic competency, the striking difference between the earlier rendition and this, the evening’s sign-off track, was the well-appointed inclusion of Mick Hart guesting on chorus vocals.

Mick Hart with Konig Power's lead singer Yuri Koenig singing 'Smoke on the Water'

Although it could be argued that Konig Power had no need to add this particular cherry to the icing on their cake, all I can say in response to that is stand by Wembley Stadium, and yes, if they ask me nicely, I’ll sponsor a toilet door . I’ll even throw in a photo of me as well.

You know, it’s true what they say about fame: it can quickly go to your badger’s head!

Pardon me for badgering you

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Butauty Beer in Kaliningrad How Good is It?

Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Butauty

Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad

6 November 2023 ~ Butauty Beer in Kaliningrad How Good is It?

Quillfeldt! No, it’s not the name of a beer and neither is it a term of abuse. It is in fact the name of a gentleman, Charles de Quillfeldt, to be precise, the inventor of the ‘flip top’ or ‘lightening toggle’ bottle stopper, whose name is eponymous with his marvellous creation.

Qillfeldt’s bottle closure system consists of a hinged wire frame attached to a stopper which, being harnessed to the bottle neck, allows it to be removed and replaced with ease and relative swiftness. (Just the job in a thirst emergency.) Since the stopper is attached to the bottle, it is impossible to misplace it, enabling the bottle to be opened and closed at will, a thoughtful contraption and that’s a fact, although in my experience a quality bottled beer once opened will never have need to be sealed again.

Butauty Beer in Kaliningrad

Butauty beer, by Lithuanian brewers Vilniaus alus, has such a top, or should I say had, as recent information discloses, without revealing why, that production of this beer has ceased. That being noted, however, as recently as last week I discovered a shelf full of Butauty in one of Kaliningrad’s Victoria supermarkets, so either someone is telling porkies, or the beer displayed is remnant stock.

Nevertheless, as I drank it, liked it and also made notes about it back in 2022, I shall now proceed to review it, even if it has become just an affectionate bittersweet memory.

It isn’t, not bittersweet that is. It has a slightly bitter twang, but overlaying that a predominantly burnt, smoky, caramel flavour, slightly aromatic, one might even venture to say subtly aromatic, with a deep and generous peaty aroma.

When my Quillfeldt flew off, a bit like my toupee did last summer, as I was racing along in an open-topped car, the aroma genie popped out as if it was old Jack from his box, and started into shouting up my nostrils, “Get a load of this! It’s deep and richly peaty!”

And isn’t it just the truth.

Butauty Beer in Kaliningrad

In the bottle, the beer looks as black as your hat, or most parts of South London, but once you’ve outed it into your glass, it could be any one or other of fifty shades of grey.

Butauty gives good head, the sort of rich, frothing, foaming head that they used to like up North in England before the Daleks invaded the area and everything went south ~ although it didn’t help them any. But like a lot of endangered English traditions, the head shows little resolve. It fizzles, farts and splutters and by the time you’ve come back with your crisps, it’s as shockingly gone as a case of white flight.

I, personally and in particular, have never cared much for a big creamy head. As far as I am concerned, beer can be as flat as a triple ‘A’, as long as it retains its zest and unique flavour. There’s nothing much flat that I can’t handle, although I don’t care much for the Fens. Mind you, with its rich peaty smell and Fen-like hue, Butauty beer, at 5.5%, has an earthiness about it that would fable well in the Cambridgeshire Badlands, ‘Ay up, and Jip Oh!’, except, of course, it hails ~ or did hail ~ from Lithuanian brewers, Vilniaus alas ~ sorry Vilniaus alus (with a four-letter word like ‘alus’, it could have been far worse!).

Among Butauty’s internet reviews, many are rather scathing. I just don’t get it (You’re not the only one! Have you any suggestions?). And, if what is written is not a black lie, and the beer is no longer produced, no one will be getting it.

I, for one, and some others I imagine, can honestly say that I like this beer. It smells like good beer should smell and is right tasty, I’ll tell you that!

Should the rumour of its demise be credible, it will indeed be a sorry day for beer connoisseurs wherever they are, and yet we must take heart, for there is consolation in everything: as Bogart once famously said, “We’ll always have Quillfeldt.”

BOX TICKER’S CORNER
Name of Beer: Butauty
Brewer: Vilniaus alus
Where it is brewed: Vilnius, Lithuania
Bottle capacity: 1litre
Strength: 5.5%
Price: It cost me about 280 roubles [in 2022] [Note: recent supermarket price is 490 roubles, £4.30]
Appearance: Dark
Aroma: Caramel and peat
Taste: Complex taste of all things dark and beautiful
Fizz amplitude: 4/10
Label/Marketing: Olde Worlde Parchment
Would you buy it again? If they ever start producing it again, anytime

BEER RATING:

About the brewery: Vilniaus alus
Vilniaus alus’s claim to fame is that it is the only brewery of beer and natural drinks in Vilnius. The brewery is proud to assert that no chemical additives are used in their beers, guaranteeing quality products wholesome in natural ingredients. Both bottled and draft beers are produced, and the company exports to Europe and to the USA.
Vilniaus alus

Wot other’s say [Comments on Butauty from the internet, unedited]
😊Caramel bitterness, like a pleasant surprise, Doesn’t taste bitter, but pleases with its taste, like a little whim

😒Butter, caramel, diacetyl. Powdery mouthfeel. Nutty with a bitter note. But destroyed by rancid butter.

🙂 Good chocolate stout

😮Lithuanian Shit! [I say! Steady on!]

The right connections
Cultura Kaliningrad ~ a world-wide beer bonanza
Variety of beer in Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad Gothic in the Chimney Sweep’s House

It’s Gothic! But what kind?

1 November 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Gothic in the Chimney Sweep’s House

There’s no spires, towers or turrets silhouetted against a full-moon sky above an impossibly craggy, precipitous cliff top, no sinister Baron Frankenstein or bat-metamorphosising sharp-toothed count, no film-set outsized lightning rod rising from the roof poised for that life-giving thunderbolt to kick-start the borrowed heart and incite the cadaverous limbs of a grizzly patchwork embryo ~ at least, I don’t believe there is. But remembering where we are, within the eternal shadow of German Königsberg, there’s more than a whiff of the Hoffmannesque both in Aleks Smirnov’s chimney sweep image, as fabled in German history, and his Badger Club/studio complex.

The Gothicism that forms the basis of Mr Smirnov’s public image (some would say his soul) and suffuses his club and art is a meeting place of invocations, each containing the traceable elements of folklore, legend, superstition, witchcraft, dark-side sorcery, imaginative tall-tale flights and dream-like childhood fantasy.

His grotesque artistic compositions, sometimes risibly ironic, often tormented and twisted, always enigmatic, are an intercopulation of various Gothic sub-genres that attain apotheosis in the legend of the Green Man and the anything-goes enchanted forest.

Aleks Smirnov’s world, let us coyly qualify that and say Aleks Smirnov’s ‘artistic world’, is a meeting of the ways; a rum place wherein the fantastic, unsettling otherness as explored in TV programmes like the 1960s’ Twilight Zone, 1970s’ Thriller and in fictional tales that you may have heard of, featuring bespectacled Harry What’s-His-Face, come together with Freudian fantasies to hold each other as if they are one.

Kaliningrad Gothic

It is not by chance or accident that Alex’s art is skewed by snatches or glimpses of something half-seen, sometimes almost invisible. For example, wall plaques of barely discernible faces blurring into and partially erased by stylised foliate overlays; mythological creatures, devoid of detailed features, ill-defined in form, swooping bat-like from daubed textured ceilings; the cruelly twisted disfigured face masks that impel you to put them on but more quickly to take them off; the sack-cloth and ashes hessian gowns, lightly touched by tapestry and the heavier hand of superstition that dwells in ancient lore and in Little Red Riding Hood subterfuges, which help to conveniently explain away the dangers that lurk in dense, dark forests in terms of ghosties and goblins; the clumsily grandiose over-the-rainbow other-world helmets and repertory theatre gilded crowns ~ indeed, everything you’d expect to find in a parallel world of magic and sorcery, you’ll find in the House of Smirnov.

And yet, viewed from another angle (and there are plenty of those in Smirnov’s art) could they be distorting props taken from a surrealist film set, or things of which we never speak but which, both in our sleeping and waking hours, exists in each and all of our minds? Like the mirror of life itself, the shapes that we are permitted to see in Mr Smirnov’s visions are a cradle to the grave experience where “more of madness, more of sin and horrors the soul of the plot”.

But the madness, if it exists, is not opaque. The House of Smirnov has many mirrors. And the sin is hardly original: pleasure is what pleasure does and has been doing since time immemorial. Like everything in the Chimney Sweep’s lair, it may be in your face, but you can only ever really see it through the spectacles of your senses. It is a kind of delicious confinement and is all the more enticing for it!

As for horror, if it exists, then this is the vaguest face of all. Now you see it; now you don’t. It is easy to look in the mirror when you’ve prepared yourself to see someone else, but which side of the mirror is throwing the reflection? As with E.A. Poe’s mysterious Usher, the House of Alex Smirnov, could well be Smirnov himself.

Kaliningrad Gothic in the Chimney Sweep’s House

Personality is everywhere, and it runs through almost everything. Like a phantasmagorical current it links the disparate parts. Every shadowy, half-complete (or so we are led to believe), vague, ambiguous, ambivalent emblem, be it cast in the form of a bronze planished wall plaque, painting of a symbolic nature, surrealistic sculpture or just a gnarled, tormented, piece of driftwood rescued, sanctuarised and, once resuscitated, displayed in the most unaccountable place: never before has juxtaposition been so content and connected.

Olga Hart with Singer Songwriter Andrey Berenev

At first such apparitions appear disjointed but thematically and psychologically a river runs through it all. It is as naturally unnatural as nature itself is truly unnatural, but it carries you into the Green Man vortex as effortlessly as a nursery rhyme: ‘If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise’.

Obfuscating, sometimes suffocating, nature, whether human intrinsic or external organic, plays out its co-existence to interdependent extremes. It is the bogey man of sin, of guilt, stalking hapless generations trapped in the conscience forests of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s mind. It is the temptress lying in wait inside her soft, inviting, secret garden.

Kaliningrad Gothic

As in every game of chance, there is only one winner and that is the House, and this is no more certain than in the House that Aleks built. Whoever we may be and wherever we may be, victims are not spared, not even in Aleks’ toilet, especially not in Aleks’ toilet.

Draw back the crude and heavy, the clumsy wooden rustic bolt, pull back the fairy-tale door and off you go down Alice’s rabbit hole. It is not a WC, unless WC means Wonder Closet; it cannot be called a lavatory, more laboratory of thought; and it is anything but a rest room, a testing room, perhaps. In the strange, dramatic, dynamic department, an awful lot goes on in there, where functionally it shouldn’t.

Gothic in Kaliningrad Aleks Smirnov's toilet

Quiet in place but oppressively loud in colour, spacious but confining, placid but somehow caught in motion, the only way of escaping is to obey the laws of natural contractions. Relax. Take a deep breath and let them push you headlong into the magic of the sweet little garden that lives beneath the wash basin. This illuminated scene, seen through moulded windows, begs for someone to come inside. Could England’s Alnwick Garden ever be more beautiful, more graphically serene, more wantonly irresistible? Could it take you gently by the hand and lead you up the garden path as Aleks’ garden does?

Secret Garden Aleks Smirnov Toilet Kaliningrad Kaliningrad Gothic

Mr Smirnov is no mad scientist, and neither is he a bewinged count from an exotic fictious realm. He is a fabled German chimney sweep returned to Earth as artist. His residence and his club are not so much a turreted chateau or multi-faceted castle overlooking a bat-infested tarn but a playful topsy-turvy take on Germany’s Gingerbread House.

Seen from outside, preferably at night, when cold and invaded with rain, the arched and crooked windows filtering light through panes of contrasting hue call softly to your childhood memories the ghouls and goblins of the Brothers Grimm, whilst below in the cobbled courtyard, headless female mannequins dressed like predator tarts prowl the streets of your later life reminding you of all the places where you said you’ve never been.

Gothic in Kaliningrad Aleks Smirnov Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad Gothic Mannequin Aleks Smirnov Kaliningrad

The sinister woodland theme, wherein do dwell all kinds of elves and ghouls, replaces the streets beneath it. First, Aleks will put you in the club and then, if your luck is in, take you to places you’ve never been.

A tour of the chimney sweep’s backrooms, replete as they are with myriad props and costumes, all in form and nature an epitome of the bizarre and grotesque, is a Masque of the Red Death moment. Within these bewitching antechambers, space ought not be compromised but the walls have a habit of closing in and the light, which filters, falls and falters in the taints and tints of the backlit panes, formulates the kind of seduction that Mother Nature would never condone, least not without a spiritual condom.

In the company of sweeps and badgers, you are given the chance to be anyone, everyone if you so desire, even those in your wildest dreams who you never thought you would be, which includes yourself if you want it that badly. Remember that classic scene in Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner: “We thought you would be happier as yourself …” It’s all part of the grand plan, the eternal trick, the fairy tale; the who is deluding who; the question where have I put myself? The self.

Aleks Chimney Sweep Smirnov’s self is who he would have you believe he is and who you want him to be. It really is nobody’s call but your own. However, accepting limitations, it is futile to look for Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker or any one of those Gothic guys and gals. He could never be that archetypal. And the place where he works, where he drinks, where he dreams is It. Here, there is no Baron Frankenstein, no graveyard afterlife embryo waiting perchance on that shard from the heavens to turn the crank on the sleeping heart, no long-toothed fiend in a bat-like cloak, no orgasmic sigh from the pit and the pendulum, but for all that Mr Smirnov isn’t and for all his art and habitat is, even with gaps, it’s Gothic.

Let’s call last orders, blow out the candles and say Amen to that.