A new QR code era in Kaliningrad - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 579 [14 October 2021]

Published: 14 October 2021 ~ A new QR code era in Kaliningrad

ON THE 9^thOF OCTOBER, the day after the QR code restrictions hit Kaliningrad, Olga and I walked through the atmospheric autumnal streets of Königsberg and then whizzed off by bus across the other side of town on an errand.

Having alighted from public transport, we decided to stop for a coffee. If we had attempted to enter a café, restaurant or bar today, we would have had to produce a QR code, but because we were buying refreshments from a pavement kiosk, we were, at least for the moment, QR exempt.

Subliminally, the advertising gimmick had worked. I saw a giant cup and a cup of coffee I wanted.

As I waited for my brew, I could not resist contemplating what it must be like to go to work each day not in an office, school, fire station, police station, on a building site or in a city bar but inside a giant coffee cup ~ and an orange one at that!

Through the little glass windowed serving hatch it did not look as if there was an awful lot of room inside the cup, and I began to imagine some of the more expansive people whom I knew in the UK working there. I concluded that they would not be so much inside the cup as wearing it.

Coffee can be bought from kiosks during a new QR code era in Kaliningrad

Joss, my brother, could live in it. I could see the place slowly converting before my eyes. It had a television arial on top, a satellite dish on the side and protruding from the roof a long metal chimney that was smoking like a volcano. Outside, there was a crate of empty beer bottles and a pair of old pants and socks, both with holes in them, hanging on a homemade line strung across the front of the cup, looking like last month’s tea towels.

If this coffee cup was for sale in London, it would be described by London estate agents as ‘a most desirable property’, well-appointed and almost offering commanding views over the road to the bus stop. You certainly would not get much change out of a million quid for it. Five miles outside of Dover, with a 5-star sign above it, the cup would be housing a boat load of migrants. Why Nigel Farage is gazing at it from a hilltop through his binoculars the British government will never know ~ and don’t want to! But this is hardly surprising, as Nigel has a reputation for waking up first and smelling the coffee!

With no one any the wiser as to whether we had a QR code, a bar code, a one-time code, a code that needed verifying or a code that was Top Secret, we took full advantage of our incognitoism by finding a spot in the autumnal sun in which to savour our brew.

Giant pavement-side coffee cups, even bright orange ones, do not as a rule run to tables outside, but just at the back of this one there happened to be an old, long, green Soviet bench, where one could drink one’s coffee whilst ruminating upon the good old days when the proletariat sitting here would have been comfortably unaware that the USSR when it folded would eventually be replaced with coronavirus QR codes. This long and sturdy bench also facilitated my admiration of the pretty and well-stocked flower bed and enabled me to keep an eye on the plums.

Plums! What plums? Whose plums were they? And how had these plums got there? They weren’t aloft growing on a tree these plums but scattered upon the ground. Someone, I conjectured, must have sworn bitterly, perhaps a bit stronger than blaher moohar, when the bottom of the bag that they had been carrying split, plummeting plums all over the paving slabs.

The who and the why of the plums, whilst inspiring at first, soon gave way to the far more exciting realisation that by observing people’s reactions to the plums, I could play the psychoanalyst and categorise them according to plum personalities. Of course, the way they approached and dealt with the plums would not help me to determine whether or not they were in full possession of their QR codes, were evading pricks or considering vaccination at any moment, possibly when they least expected it, but when all was said and done the experiment would be an interesting one, and, besides, I had a cup of coffee to drink.

Twenty sips or so into my coffee and a substantial cohort of pedestrians later, and I had been able to determine that there are basically four types of plum approachers.

1. Those that spotted the plums and walked around them, giving them a particularly wide berth. Any wider and they would have needed a visa, not to mention a coronavirus test or six, as they inadvertently crossed the Polish border.

2. Those who spotted the plums but carried on walking anyway, chatting casually to their companions as though they were no strangers to plums in public places, yet who picked their way through them gingerly as they would a minefield on their way to buying a Sunday newspaper.

3. Next came the sort of people that you would not want to walk across a minefield with, since, seemingly oblivious to their feet and where they were putting them, they inevitably stepped on one or two plums, immediately looking down in alarm at the squish beneath their shoes, no doubt fearing that the lack of fines for Fido’s indifferent owners had landed them in it yet again.

4. Finally, it was the turn of “I’ll give them plums on pavements!” This category was mostly comprised of manly men; you know the sort, either their arms don’t fit or they have gone and grown a beard, not knowing why they have done it and because, quite obviously, it certainly does not suit them, it was the last thing on Earth, next to deliberately stepping on plums, that they should have gone and done to themselves, unless it really was their intention to make themselves look like a bit of a dick.

This category saw the plums but chose to pay no heed to them. They juggernauted along as if plums grew on trees and these boots were made for walking. Unbeknown to them, however, plums can be slippery customers and more than once were the over-confident nearly sent arse overhead. They would step, squash, slip a little, look around really embarrassed, hoping no one had seen them, and then hurry on their way, leaving behind the priceless memory of a bright red face burning like a forest fire in a beard to which they were both ill suited, as well as a boot-imprinted trail of squishy-squashy plum juice.

So, what I had learnt from all this plum gazing? Not a lot. It had been a different way of occupying one’s mind whilst drinking a cup of coffee, although it had made me wish that I was 14 years’ old again, so that I could shout, “Watch out for the plums!” or simply “Plums!” But you can’t go around doing silly things like that when you are (ha! ha!) a ‘mature person’, especially not when you are in somebody else’s country. I bet Adolf Hitler never shouted “Plums!” when he was cruising about the streets of Paris. Boat migrants to England certainly don’t. They just shout, “Take me to your 5-star hotel and give me benefits!” And liberals, who always find something to shout about, would, on seeing the black shiny plums in their path, have been unable to resist the wokeness of going down on one knee whilst crying, “My white knees are in trousers, please forgive me, I am too privileged”.

Conkers on the day of A new QR code era in Kaliningrad

Young boy: They ain’t plums!
Me: I know. But I just wanted to show that in Kaliningrad at this time of year there are also a lot of horse-chestnut tree …
Young boy: You put those there because you ain’t got any pictures of plums …
Me: Why you cheeky little f …

I finished my coffee, wished the entertaining plums good day, and off we went to complete our errand.

On the way, on this second day of QR codes, giant cups and plums (plums, no less, my friends, which had fallen by the wayside), we overheard a lady at a bus stop complaining loudly to anyone who had a mind (or not) to listen.

It was quite evident by her excited, ruffled and animated manner that she had recently undergone a most traumatic experience. Apparently, she had ventured into a small café to buy some jam and was horrified to discover that not only were most of the people inside the shop not wearing masks but, as far as she could ascertain, none had been asked for their QR codes. “I shall report them! I shall report them!” she wailed, shouting so loud that had her mask been properly in place, which it wasn’t, it would have fallen from her nose, like plums from a wet paper bag, to end up uselessly wrapped around her chin. It was fortunate, therefore, that such a calamity could not occur, as that is where her mask was anyway ~ swaddled around her chin protecting it from coronavirus.

On completion of our errand (there has to be some mystery in this post somewhere!), whilst sitting on the bus with my mask strapped to my elbow, I drifted into contemplation of the feasibility of QR codes extended to encumber access to the city’s supermarkets.

I wondered: “Does it mean that if you do not want to get vaccinated you will have to buy your own shop?” And: “What is the going rate for one of those giant coffee cups?”

Mick Hart on Day 2 of A new QR code era in Kaliningrad

If it does happen, if they do impose QR code restrictions on shops, I can see some astute entrepreneur, some Russian equivalent to Del Boy, quickly cashing in on the act. It is not difficult to imagine a fleet of shops on wheels whipping about the city from one estate to another, selling everything from buckwheat to outsize, wooly, babushka-made socks.

Alternatively, we could convert our garage into a Cash & Cart-it Off. Our garage stands at the end of the garden, some distance from the road, but in these coronavirus-challenged times what once might have been regarded as a commercial disadvantage could potentially be transposed into a positive marketing ploy.

All that was needed would be to install large glass windows in the sides of the garage, stack shelves behind them full of sundry goods, position two telescopes on the side of the pavement, preferably coin operated so as to make a few extra kopeks and, Boris your uncle, Svetlana your aunt, you’re in business!

Potential buyers viewing our wares through the telescopes provided could place their orders by Arsebook messenger. On receipt of their orders we would select the goods, load them on the conveyor belt and ship them from store to roadside before you could say, who’s making millions out of the sales of coronavirus masks? What could be better than that? Accessible shops, you say?

Come to think of it, there are probably not a lot more inconvenient places than shops where QR codes could be implemented, except, of course, for public lavs.

Imagine getting jammed in the bog turnstile unable to get your mobile phone from your pocket to display your QR code whilst the call of Nature grows ever more shrill!

This situation, difficult though not insurmountable, would stretch both the imagination and the resources of even the brightest entrepreneur, who would be faced with the daunting prospect of rigging up some curious contraption or other, consisting of a series of pipes, funnels and retractable poes on sticks.

On a less grand but no less adventurous scale, my wife has suggested that we plough up the lawn at our dacha and use it for growing potatoes, which is not such a bad idea, as it would mean no longer having to mow the lawn. But would it mean that we would have to get a statutory dog that never stops barking as a deterrent to potato thieves and to ensure that our neighbours are completely deprived of peace? “What is the use of having a dog that don’t bark? An intelligent lady once said to us. Answer: about as much use as one that never stops barking! Or about as much use as a dog owner who allows its dog to incessantly bark.

Whilst a constant supply of beer and vodka would not be a problem as we could always convert our Soviet garage back to what it was obviously used for when it was first constructed, alas ploughed up lawns will not grow washing sponges or cultivate tins of baked beans. And the last thing that I would want, even if my potato patch was the best thing since Hungary stood up to bullying EU bureaucrats, was to own something so useless that all it does is shite on pavements and bark as if a potato thief has thrust a firework up its arse before leaving the garden with a sack on his back.

Of course, all things considered, it would be far easier and, perhaps, far wiser, certainly less embarrassing, just to go and get vaccinated. But if you do that, will you be tempted to go out every night to the city’s bars and restaurants, just to say that you can? And if so, can you or any of us for that matter, be 100% sure that, even after vaccination and thirty years of boosters, whichever vaccine it is and from wherever the vaccine comes from, will we, the little ordinary people, be guaranteed at some point, preferably sooner than later, a return to the life that we had before? Er, or any life, for that matter. >>‘This statement is false!!!! (See G Soros’ Fact Checker). You will now be redirected to the neoliberal globalist version, which is as honest as philanthropy and almost twice as honest as the EU parliament ~ which is not exactly difficult (Source: An Open Borders Publication}’<<

Plough a straight furrow or walk a taut tightrope, whichever path you choose to take, do ‘Watch out for those plums!’

ON TOPIC>
A trilogy of games by that renowned board-game maker John Wankinson: the perfect way to unlock, unwind and vaccinate whilst taking your mind off coronavirus and the interminable elusiveness of returning to normality:
UK Lockdown New Board Game
Exit Strategy Board Game
Clueless ~ a World Health Board Game

Image attributions:
Yapping dog: https://www.clipartmax.com/download/m2i8Z5H7G6A0N4H7_barking-dog-animal-free-black-white-clipart-images-yap-clipart/
Plums: http://clipart-library.com/clipart/539028.htm