A swarthy face and a dinghy, the only way left to keep warm in Britain
26 April 2025 – UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is
The cost of heating one’s home in the UK is a joke — a sick one. It’s alright if you’re an entitled millennial, as most likely you are still living at home with mum, and, given the prohibitive cost of striking out on your own, most likely will still be living with mum when you are in your 50s. For us old fogeys, however, who belong to a generation who would never have dreamt of living at home with mum, and who left the nest at the age of 15, heating one’s home is past a joke — it’s a travesty wrapped in catastrophe.
I returned to the UK from Russia, where I had been enjoying affordable gas central heating 24/7, to a rambling old Victorian house so cold that I wondered if, in my absence, I should have let the Cryonics Institute use it for cold meat storage. Birds Eye would have had no difficulty in hiding its fish fingers here. And this was during a winter which, once again, was unseasonably mild. Let’s clasp our hands together brothers (many times may help) and thank the heavens for global warming!
Disinclined to hand over my hard-earned cash to insult-to-injury utility companies, who unashamedly explain away the reason for their extortionate tariffs by boasting about the part they play in planet-saving strategies – we invest in renewable energy! – but then go rather schtum at the mention of corporate virtue signalling or shoot-yourself-in-the-foot back-firing Russian sanctions, I, like many other Brits, spent three uncomfortable UK months surviving on rationed gas and electric.
Swaddled in two fleeces, one of which is a British-army thermal, with long johns under my jeans and four pairs of socks on my feet (OK, so I bought them from Primark), I thought of renting the icy house out to special forces operatives training for cold-climate combat. I’m fairly certain that Sir Edmund Hillary and the adventurer Robert Falcon Scott used my house for training purposes before setting off respectively, one to climb Mount Everest and the other to meet his maker in the Antarctic.
As I sat in the smallest room in the house, the easiest to heat, with a hot water bottle shoved up my jumper, I thought how perspicacious it had been to bring with me to chilly Britain a pair of those splendid thick Russian socks, the sort traditionally knitted by winter-savvy and wise babushkas. I put them on over my Primark’s and said hello to my toes again.
Things may seem bad in the UK now, as bad as they can get, but under the lefty jackboot doctrine of ‘tax them to the hilt and raid their hard-earned pension pots’, Starmer’s rip-em-off Britain can only get progressively worse.
As it is, I was forced to set the coordinates and dash off in my way-back machine into the 19th century to enjoy the luxury of a real coal fire, which I cannot do in present England at £13 a bag. Actually, to give the local coal merchant, Cagey Smythe, his due, his smokeless save-the-planet coal does belt out some heat — but at £13 a bag! That’s almost as bad as British pub beer prices, which in some pubs have already reached, and in others are nudging slyly towards, a shameful £6 a pint, or as bad as a farting packet of crisps, which can cost anything in British pubs from £1.50 to £1.90.
Double Diamond may not have worked wonders as the adverts claimed it would, but in 1976, it was 15 pence a pint and a packet of Golden Wonder crisps cost something like 3p. Everything is relative, so they say, and they also lie. Quick, back into the time machine! Take off!
My next time-travelling stop will most probably be Edwardian Britain for a good shave and a haircut by a barber who isn’t Turkish when he really might be Albanian, and whose hairdressers may not be a front for laundering money from his nearby Grow Shop.
UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is
The compelling need to cut my hair and to trim my beard now that winter is on the wane, derives from the uneasy feeling that I am beginning to look like Rasputin would, had he been permitted to continue his natural journey into the later years of his life.
Some self-overrating practitioner of the proverbial art of piss-taking was thrilled to liken me recently to Merlin the Mad Magician.
If that is who I am, I thought, I would go to Dover, go directly to Dover, surpass myself by shouting ‘Go’, and, waving my magic wand, I’d litter the English Channel with row upon row of very sharp objects, dinghy-puncturing objects, adding for good measure the odd sea serpent or two.
What else could we do with a magic wand? I know! We could wave it over Number 10 and transform our Judas government from something disturbingly anti-white British into a patriotic force of old.
But what if the spell was to go wrong, turning our !!*£!-! government into EU-pandering clowns, lovers of Macron and Turdo, driving the country like Edward Smith steered his ill-fated ship towards an unthinkable destiny, its passengers, mum’s millennials and the unfortunate not-yet-borns, passing obliviously up Shit Creek into the blade of the mugging iceberg (Innit!), the tip of which, I have to say, is thrusting its way, in a most rude manner, into my front living room, where I cannot afford to turn up the gas or switch my electric light on. But hey ho and wait a mo! — it would seem as though the dreadful spell has already been tragically cast. ‘It must be the Russians that dun it!’ chorus the British media, led by their Portland Place choir leader, the baton-wielding BBC.
UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is
Turning up the heat these days, the heat that comes from the ring of truth, must be done whatever the cost, if you want to prevent your country from slipping into a leftist ice age. Scott and his brave companions, Dr Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers, are moving into warmer waters, and we must do the same, but preferably whilst our minds, in harness with our collective will, are still above the surface.
I know that it is no easy feat. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy, especially when your jumper has a water bottle up it. There’s more at risk than you first might think, unless you read The Guardian — and then you probably just don’t think. For, in ‘Watch Whatever You Say UK’, it only takes an honest remark posted on social media to get your collar felt:
“Oh, officer, I say, what big strong masculine hands you have!”
“Don’t you masculine me, you heterosexual breeder!”
My country’s gone My feet are cold But I must think What I am told — Net Zero Common Sense
One way of escaping UK woke culture and eluding the big freeze that’s burning a hole in your wallet is to pack your bags and move to Russia. It’s warmer in Siberia in more ways than one than it is in Britain’s Home Counties.
The other way is to build a TARDIS and waft wantonly back in time to those halcyon days when Britain’s coal mines proudly and productively fuelled the fires of every British home; back to the days before net zero, which were days of common sense, when we had more warmth in our homes, considerably more warmth in our hearts and, before Labour got into office, a lot more money in our pockets.
Read my A to Z of how to build a TARDIS, and once you have mastered the art of not turning woman or black, and ruining a very good TV programme, zip back old-days Dr Who fashion to your nearest polling booth and wipe out Labour by voting Reform.
Stopping the boats coming in will stop the migrant hotel bill. There’s an awful lot that could be done with the £7 million that curtailing the boats would save each day. You could build a couple of power stations, squander some on renewable energy and still have enough in reserve to give everyone in the British Ilses £6 for a pint of beer, £1.90 for a packet of crisps, a bobble hat, a pair of gloves and a pink hot water bottle called Cassandra.
No one’s ever said it before, but do these things and do them quickly and we might never have it so good!
NB: Cassandra, the hot water bottle, as seen in the feature image of this post, may well be available from all good adult shops. Keep warm next winter without the risk of gender issues.
If it’s highly recommended by Mick Hart, you know it must be good!
9 April 2025 ~ Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?
As a follow-up to my series of posts ‘How to get from Kaliningrad to the UK and vice versa’, I bring you Hotels by the Airport!
Having been held up at the Polish border more times than Dick Turpin held up the overland stage, I decided that a good contingency plan when travelling to the UK from Kaliningrad would be to bed down for the night in Gdansk and then proceed to the airport the next day. “But,” said a relative, “as your flight to the UK requires you to get out of bed at the godforsaken hour of 3am, why not stay at a hotel close to the airport itself?” “Hmm,” I said, “I’m not sure about that.” And then she said, some have bars, and suddenly I couldn’t be surer.
A search on Google under ‘Gdansk Airport Hotels’ quickly rummaged out a handful of places that were too expensive to contemplate. Paying over the odds for a room is OK when sliding beneath the sheets with a delectable bit of totty, but just for the sake of crashing out, it simply isn’t worth it.
Besides, I did not need to stay at the Hilton just to impress everybody, all I had to do was lie. And, of course, it works out cheaper!
The out-of-season price for a bed at Gdansk Airport Hampton by Hilton was, at the time of booking, £117 a night; the Hi Hotel Gdańsk Airport Lotnisko was £64 a night; not bad as hotel tariffs go in this extortionate era. But, unless I am much mistaken, this hotel is one of those self-service jobs, meaning it does not have a reception desk, or, even if it does, the desk is unmanned, unwomaned and everything else in between, which we will not dwell upon here, because we do not wish to propagate woke. I imagine, without validation, that it must be one of those impersonal places where access is determined solely by an electronic code, with not a human or anything vaguely like one neither in sight nor on site. For me, this proposition was out of the question, as you will understand better if you read my post Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
That left but one more option, a hotel near the airport, which, as luck would have it, the travelling relative I spoke of earlier stayed at on her outward journey after visiting us in Kaliningrad. “It’s comfortable,” she said. “It’s very close to the airport, and it has a bar.”
Sleep and Fly
The sixty quid price tag for a one-night stand, sorry, for a one-night stay, at the hotel she referred to is a lot easier on the pocket than the £100+ at the Hitler ~ Hilton ~ almost half the tariff in fact. Being almost twice the price, perhaps if you booked at the Hilter, they would allow you to stay there twice in one night. This complication appealed to me, ‘stay one night get the same night free’, but the deal breaker with Sleep and Fly was the name of this hotel. Perhaps if they have a step ladder, I could cross the word ‘Sleep’ out or change the name of the hotel slightly to one that suited my lifestyle, viz ‘No Sleep Then Fly’. As long as it did not prove to be ‘No Sleep No Fly’, there would be nothing for me to worry about, a most unlikely scenario as I have a knack of finding something, however elusive it may be.
Hmm, Sleep and Fly? I mused. I liked the name a lot. It was perfect for an insomniac.
^Journey starts: Kaliningrad Central Bus Station^
The fact that on the occasion of my leaving Kaliningrad recently we passed through both the Russian and Polish borders without let or hinderance, whilst mildly ironic in and of itself, since the time before and the time before that, we had been kicking our heels for hours, did not in any way invalidate my decision to split the journey across two days. On the past two travelling occasions, the long inevitable interval between arriving at the airport and the flight, which is a painful seven hours, was extended by delays from seven hours to 10 hours and to 15 hours respectively, which rather takes the Wizz out of flying with Wizz Air. Never mind editing ‘Sleep and Fly’, how about adding an ’S’ to ‘Wizz’!
In the unlikely event that the flight is delayed the morning after the night before, having stayed at the airport hotel, at least the disruption will occur when most who sleep are rested, and with any luck you might still get home when the buses and trains are running during daylight hours.
Apart from these considerations and the precautions they invoke, if the truth be known, I was looking forward to the novel experience of staying close to the airport and strolling at my leisure to the terminal in the morning.
Ice Cold in Gdansk
As there had been no holdups on our journey through border control, the bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk rolled up at the airport at the time advertised.
On alighting from the bus, I was glad, mighty glad that I had worn my thermal-lined Russian coat. It was cold, mighty cold, and there was a nasty, razor-sharp, fingers-freezing gusting wind whipping across the hillock on which Gdansk Airport proudly perches. I tell you, without a word of a lie, it was enough to blow a moustache right off, even a big important one such as that belonging to Lech Walesa.
Now, either the directions given to me by word of toe on how to get to Sleep and Flies had not been given correctly or my interpretation of them had not been up to snuff, as, after wandering up and down a little, I ended up where no one wants to be, somewhere in no-genders land, stuck beneath the pillar of a large concrete flyover, just me, a suspicious rucksack and, crammed inside two cars, a herd of Polish security men, none of whom, by the way, took a blind bit of notice of me, even though my frozen fingers resembled glowing red sticks of dynamite. (‘Ere, whoever said that dynamite is red?” “La de la, de da, de la ~ Shut up!”)
^Gdansk Airport on a cold evening: In there somewhere is my motel^
A half-glass-empty man at best, I had already convinced myself that I would never find my hotel and would be forced to spend the night inside the airport terminal, before it up and occurred to me that airports have information desks, where you can get answers to rareified questions like does my hotel exist? Gdansk has an excellent desk, behind which a young man sits with a beard as silly as mine.
Fortunately, not only could this bewhiskered fellow converse quite well in English, but he was multilingual enough to understand the language of chattering teeth. His assistance was par excellence. No sooner had I mentioned Sleep and Fly than he said, “What?” I suppose he could hardly hear me above the sound of my knocking knees. “Sleeep and F-f-flies” I said, and he leaned over the counter a mite to see if they were undone. As they weren’t, thank heavens (think icicles, but large ones), it dawned on him, like tomorrow morning, that here was a silly old fart of an Englishman without a hapeth of directional sense who was having the utmost difficulty in telling his Sleep and Fly from his elbow.
Quickly, he whipped out a folder ~ his beard was larger than mine ~ and proceeded to show me patiently, on the nicest map imaginable, something on a street in Naples, and then, swiftly finding the right page, but showing it not to the quite right person, Captain Horatio Compassless, he said, like Studebaker Hoch, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”. Shucks, no he didn’t say that at all, that’s what Macron tells the migrants as he waves them on to Dover. No, what the young man said was, to get to the end of the rainbow, I would need to follow the long blue line. And sure enough, there in his folder was this long blue line.
Leaning over his desk, as he might a castle parapet, he pointed at the ground. We had already done the one about flies, so I wondered what he was getting at, and then I saw it for myself. I was actually standing on top of it! The blue line was beneath my feet. This young man didn’t lie. How could he with that beard! I thanked him for putting up with me, pointed myself in the right direction, that certainly made a change, and was off like a shot from a peashooter.
(In case you didn’t get it, by coincidence, or through someone using their brains, the blue line was right beneath me as I stood at the information desk.)
Being the sort of man whose glass is always more than empty when it’s someone’s turn to fill it up, I was already of the conviction that the blue line would peter out before I got to where I was going, and cuh, huh, would you believe it, if I hadn’t been right, I’d be wrong. However, all was not entirely lost and neither, I am relieved to say, was I.
Before leaving home I had taken the wise precaution of memorising what the hotel looked like from a photo on its website. Now you might say, why bother? Why not use your smartphone and look it up on Google? Ah, now then, now then, now … that’s because you’ve got a smartphone, and I’ve got a phone that is not so smart, at least not as smart as I’d like it to be. My Russian Tele-2 sim card doesn’t function in Gdansk. You might say, that’s understandable, but neither does O2. Thus, whenever I switch on roaming, I am free to roam wherever I want without knowing where I’m going, since every time I visit Gdansk, I can never ever ever, and never ever ever get an internet connection. (Take out a two-year rolling contract, which O2 continually steers you toward, you will be able to roam as you’ve never roamed before! But I don’t want their two-year contract!)
Anyway, on this cold and bitter evening, all was saved by my impeccable memory. I was standing on a small eminence at the side of a little round roundabout about to give up the ghost and sit in the airport terminal when, lo and behold, there it was ~ the On-The-Fly Hotel!
From a distance, and the closer I came even more so, the little hotel, which is deceptively large ~ larger on the inside than it appears to be on the out (fingers crossed it will be William Hartnell and not a regenerate blackman wearing a fixed silly smirk), the warmer and more inviting it became. With my teeth knocking and my knees chattering, I hoped it was not a mirage. (“You get those in warm places, don’t you? Such as in deserts and the like.” “Be quiet and just clear off!”)
But it looked warm, and it was warm. Thank heavens, this was not England, where the only places that are warm are centrally heated migrant hotels. The rest of us simply cannot afford to switch the heating on. If ever I finish my time machine, I will guarantee Napoleon wins. Only then perhaps will the historically beaten, Macron-bound BREXITed French cease offloading their migrant surplus onto an ECHR-compromised Britain.
My hands were so cold, seriously, that I had begun to get the hots. But then who wouldn’t, I ask you, exposed, in a manner of speaking, to a gorgeous young lady like that. She stood behind the reception desk as though she was a blowlamp, her comely presence alone enough to thaw an iceberg. On the 14th of April 1912, had they stood her on the bows of the ship she could have averted a tragedy.
Seriously though, how nice it was, especially on a night like this, to book in face to face and not be forced to place one’s trust in a series of memorised digits.
Sleep and Fly Gdansk
Going back to my booking experience, whilst perusing Sleep and Fly’s website, I noted that the room of my choice had in several different places ‘small’ written next to it, leaving me in no doubt that the room I had booked would not be large, but was I prepared for titchy?
I did not take photos of the bedroom since for one thing my mitts had not recovered from the icy Polish air, and there was insufficient elbow room by which to angle my camera, and even if there had been, my phone, the non-connection type, most likely was not equipped with a suitable lens which could function adequately in a diminutive space like this. Funny thing, however, was that the room containing the shower and bog was almost as big as the bedroom.
Now let me stop right there. Yes, it’s true, the room was small: but it was clean; it was warm; it was snug. The bed, I would find out later, lacked no conceivable comfort and, crucially for one like me, whose slumbers can be broken by the fluttering of a moth’s wing, peace and serenity reigned, which, to a man like you, means quiet. To put it rather more succinctly, for the one evening I needed to be there, it fitted the bill like a bobby’s hat.
Though Sleep and Fly had a bar of its own, making it Sleep, Drink and Fly, I wanted the experience, the very surreal experience, of sitting late at night within the airport’s cavernous interior whilst sipping thoughtfully on a pint of beer.
Never known to be keen on flying (understatement) but reformed partly by my age (I recall the words of the swing song, “Too old to die young now …’), I always find the word ‘terminal’ when used in conjunction with scareports somehow grimly amusing. Sleep and Fly for tomorrow we …, now whatever rhymes with ‘fly’, ah, obviously, its ‘sigh’, which is exactly what I did.
I was standing at the reception desk, before the attractive young lady, whom I believe I might have mentioned earlier, asking if she would be so kind as to give me an early morning call, when it dawned on me (dawn being rather too close for comfort) that there was no phone in my motel room, so how could she possibly ring me? Don’t be so silly, Silly, they would ring you on your smartarsephone, which, of course, Old Silly, though it may sound silly, would not be able to make a sound as my phone had no connection. When I tried to explain the glitch, Beauty incarnate, the young receptionist, clearly did not understand me ~ but then whoever does? ~ and took my number anyway.
I consoled myself with the fact that the degree I had awarded myself in The Use of Mobile Phones that Refuse to Connect in Gdansk had taught me how to set the alarm. My wife is fond of over-stating that “Michael has a problem to every solution.” Not this time it would seem. Sleep and Fly it would be.
Despite the cold, I plucked up courage and walked to the bar in the airport terminal, where I drank a pint of ice-cold beer whilst lapping up the peculiarity. There must have been about 40 people scattered around the gargantuan space, but they and the sounds they emitted appeared to me as if in a dream, like phenomena and apparitions swallowed whole in Jonah’s Whale.
The near psychedelic contrast between drinking in the airport terminal and the next stop Sleep and Fly had shades of the Twilight Zone about it. The stark difference in spatial parameters made me feel like Lemuel Gulliver, who had nothing much to boast about whilst he was in Brobdingnag, but when he got to Lilliput was naturally having it large.
My relative, the one who had stayed at Sleep and Fly the week before I travelled and had apprised me of its amenities, had reported to me then that the motel had a bar but that there was nobody in it. There was only me on this occasion, but that was fine with me, because if nobody else enjoys your company, you can always pretend to enjoy it yourself. Besides, what can be better than loneliness when you have no choice but to be on your own.
Since I was their only customer, and the young receptionist had nothing much else to do but double as a bar person, I bestowed the honour upon her of serving me a second beer and then, looking at the time, as midnight was fast approaching, I thought I had better go to bed. I only had three hours to kill, or, if I could not sleep, which I generally can’t, the case would be vice versa. Each Dawn I Die. That’s a very good film, almost as good as The Lost Weekend. I suggest you watch them both.
It’s that ‘Finish that last beer and go to bed’ look!
Either way there was not much time, and as much as parting with Sleep and Fly’s bar whilst it was still in motion was a rum-un and a wrench, if I did not leave it now, I would be passing myself on the stairs in the morning when going up them to bed at night.
So, take it from a man who has stayed in a very small room where everything looked larger, should you be travelling, Gulliver, to or from Kaliningrad via Gdansk, unless transiting all the way by taxi, you could do very much worse than stay in Gdansk overnight and finish the last leg of your journey the following morning or afternoon by bus, if heading towards Kaliningrad, or, if going the opposite way, by taxi to the airport.
Gdansk Old Town is beautiful, packed to the rooftops with atmosphere. There’s oons of historic architecture waiting for you to soak up, together with splendiferous beers, and an enticing array of grub from an eclectic range of restaurants.
On your return journey from Kaliningrad to the UK, if your flight is an early one, I advocate you take a room in a hotel next to the airport. You could, of course, elect to stay overnight in Gdansk again, but accommodation close to the airport mitigates potential meltdown in the unlikely event in the wee small hours your taxi-to-airport fails to show.
Should you go for the airport option, if, like I, you are somewhat sensitive when it comes to paying through the nose or through any other part of your anatomy, I would go for Sleep and Fly. Its pleasant and its comfortable. It’s got a bar where you can sit and drink, which is extremely convenient for a first-thing hangover, and, as its less than 10 minutes walk to the airport, if you like your sleep you’ll get more of it, since you wont have to factor in the time it takes to prepare for the taxi and the time it takes for the taxi to run you to the airport. In plain speaking, it’s a simpler option, with less risk and less hassle.
Plus, if like mine your phone is duff and and no morning call is forthcoming, back in the bar downstairs or even from your bedroom window, you will be able to see the plane you’ve missed taking off without you. And what could be nicer than that!
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
30 March 2025 ~ Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
Once upon a time, whilst wandering lonely as a cloud (has anybody else done this?) along Bedford’s magnificent Victorian Embankment, I found myself recalling photographs of this elegant tree-lined vista as it had been in a previous existence, namely in Edwardian days and later in the 1920s.
The quality of gracefulness in the apparel and deportment of those people in whose ghostly footsteps I now presumed to tread romanced me by their disappearance. I felt as though I walked among them, that they were all around me but nowhere to be seen.
The vanishing act was like, or so it seemed to me, a carnival trick gone wrong, which nothing now it had been played could rectify. We are all of us in the Western world walking along such wistful vistas; sleep walking in the washed-out footprints of those who walked before us; shuffling robotically into Caligari’s cabinet, or should that be Count Kalergi’s cabinet?; hiding in the dark of it; preferring the suffocation of denial and inaction rather than exit through the back; knowing that all that is waiting for us is the end of civilisation.
Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
In the meantime (whatever the meantime is), enveloped by the past and evasive of the future, I had walked as far as the monument to Britain’s dead of two world wars, and pausing there for a moment or two, or it could have been 80 years, Time is a terrible trickster, I smiled the smile that people smile when they have very little to smile about.
“I’m not afraid of you!” I said, addressing my own mortality.
Mortality smiled back at me, a knowing, sad and secret smile.
We shared the embrace of mutual sorrow, and I was on my way.
“It’s not the dying,” I explained, as I walked along the side of me, “it’s the ephemerality of what you were, what you are becoming but which you actually won’t become since by the time you have become it, you will in every conceivable way have become what you least expected and most certainly never wanted. It really is as fast as that.”
I stopped, hoping no doubt to suspend my animation, upon the Embankment Suspension Bridge (where better?) and gazed, for who knows how long, steadily into the water; the fast, the flowing, relentlessly fluid, the ceaslessly wet and willing water.
A young man of the present time was scorching down towards me, his arms a going at it like two strong steam ship pistons. He passed beneath the bridge, he and his canoe, and by the time I’d turned my head to look, he’d gone. I wondered if I’d gone too, for now I was quite alone.
The river’s rivulets rolled on. The riveted bridge resisted. But I was quite alone, apart from a little touch of rust, which would not, I reasoned, have been there once, when the bridge was built, but which seemed the more I focussed on it to be getting larger by the minute. The rust and I were in each others company.
I gazed along the river, this way and then that, but as for the boat and the young man in it, both had vanished into nothing and were nowhere but a memory.
As I alighted from the stone slab steps, some of which were crumbling ~ it would not have been crumbling when the bridge was built ~ the word ephemerality was bouncing around inside my bonce as if sprung by a pinball wizard. Had that been Roger Daltrey flashing by in that canoe, his hope to die before he grew old could well be the propulsion that has moved him on so fast; so fast we can barely equate the OAP he is today with the youthful figure whose ironic lyrics have been used in evidence against him for the better part of his life.
Overwhelmed by the stammer (and underwhelmed by Starmer) of Daltrey’s My Generation, I had to put myself down, purely in a manner of speaking, and nowhere could be better than on one of the many benches dotted around Bedford’s Mill Meadow.
There used to be a mill here once, a real working mill, until time, short-sighted foresight, the love of money and poor town planning (ask Richard Wildman, he will tell you) took everything it had except its name.
Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
Sitting there in a mill-less state looking at the swans, painfully aware of the amorphous shapes hobbling by in the shadows of their predecessors, to which not even those who were spotlessly white could ever hold a candle, I thought of the many celebrities that age had been unkind to.
All things being as they are ephemeral, the great facilitator of fame and spectacle, I refer, of course, to the internet, is a double-edged sword to the public figure. TV personalities (devoid of such as they often are), Hollywood moguls, celebs, statesmen and the women who try to emulate them but never quite succeed and show themselves up in the process, have a back-stabbing friend in the internet.
In the temple to temptation, all it takes is two or three clicks to move visually and effortlessly through every successive degenerative stage of an individual’s life. The ‘before and after’ comparison can be truly quite disturbing, especially if, like Michael Jackson, attempts by plastic surgery to arrest the natural ageing process (and Buttox doesn’t help) have only succeeded in making it more grotesque. Disintegration and decay flash before your eyes. Yesterday’s sex bomb has gone off bang, and all that remains is a smouldering ruin. Whatever else the internet may be, and we know it for what it is, a fulsome, fatuous, flatterer, it is the last gallery here on earth to which you would want to entrust your ego.
Look at me, I thought, sitting here on this riverside bench, here in Mill Meadow, Bedford, the very embodiment of morbidity. Pull yourself together man! But Roger Daltrey’s balls were too insistent. They were swinging low like chariots, and though I really should have gone home, which is where they should have carried me, retreated from the Edwardian parasols and boaters of the 1920s, they carried the ‘E’ word with them, and I, like the buffers on a pinball table, could not avoid them striking me time and time again. The bells rang, the lights flashed, the scoreboard registered ‘Lucky 13’, the name of the game ‘Ephemerality’ turned gold and then lurid black, and ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.
But now I was growing tired of it, or afraid of what it was leading me to. Like bananas from Lidl’s and Aldi’s, nothing stays fresh for long. I’d dearly like to shop at Sainsbury’s or be seen in town with a Waitrose bag, but who at my ephemeral age would be willing to give me a mortgage?
The soliloquy between myself was nearing a crucial stage. I was revelling in impermanence, whilst taking from my carrier bag a going-brown banana. It was then that temporality took me by the hand, not the one with the banana in it, and led me off chariot fashion to that Victorian villa across the river, yes, that one over there, for a privileged peep in a young lady’s boudoir.
Said the chariot in dulcet tones, which I recognised immediately as those of the Standard Quartette, “Take that gorgeous young woman …” (Who wouldn’t, without a second thought, were it not for those horrible tats and piercings.) “Take that young woman, for example. Here before the mirror she stands believing that she holds the present tightly in her pretty manicured hand, when all she has is a glove that slips easily from her fingers. These are the minutes and their minion seconds, which, in the dazzle of self-adoration, fall cleverly from her grasp. She is so impressed with the here and now that she cannot see beyond her current reflection, which, if she looked a little more honestly, she could recognise as changing with each diminishing beat of her ageing heart.
It starts with that straight, that perfect chin, which even as we look is turning into a double act, and then travels down to those full, firm breasts, soon to resemble John Wayne’s saddle bags, and next the midriff on display. It’s all of it destined to go south, from the tip of her powdered nose to her proudly pedicured toes.
“Avalanche!” I cried.
“Bugger!” someone else responded.
“And take this young man,” (I’d rather not, said I.) (We had moved from the boudoir to an upmarket gym.) (I never knew before today, or could it be tomorrow, that chariots had the ability not to mention audacity, to swing low wherever they wanted and whenever the mood so took them.) “See how he works those weights,” said the Chariot, “pumping up his muscles to make them look like Popeye’s, only to end up rather cockeyed: an awesome-chested arse-less wonder desperately searching for Arthur J. Pye.
Temporality does this to us, no matter who we think we are. It reads from the Book of Ephemerality, the penultimate chapter of which reminds young women of the age-old proverb that beauty is skin deep and says to young men who body build that by the time they reach the age of 40 younger men will point at them and say, “That’s a magnificent body you’ve built for yourself … shame about the bay window!”
Do you ever have the feeling that you continually wake from a beautiful dream into a carnival freak show?
How I ever got back to my seat overlooking the River Great Ouse, I suppose I will never know, and neither will you unless I lie. But whilst I had been away, someone had stuck a plaque on the back of my seat, which said, “Here sits a right silly Tw..!” I am sorry to disappoint you, but the plaque in question had always been there; always. In fact, almost every park bench in the meadow bore a memorial plaque.
The inconsolability that follows the loss of a loved one creates the need to make material a memory that one can reach out and touch. My encounter with my own mortality had reminded me of this, that the fear of ephemerality is for most, not all but most, not so much the loss of ourselves but the loss of someone close to us, someone so dear, so precious that the thought of being left alone in a world of utter indifference is the thought that is unthinkable.
In fairy tales, heroes and heroines frequently die of a broken heart. Yet for us in our ephemeral world where everything ends but not that easily, we have to endure our broken hearts and somehow learn to live with them. They are perhaps, after all, all that there is in our fleeting lives which seem to go on and on and on and probably do forever.
17 March 2025 ~ Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track
Of all the roles I have played, or wanted to play, I never considered myself to be a second Bruce Reynolds. But here I was, about to pull off in my mind the world’s Second Great Train Robbery.
Everything was set; planned to the very last detail. Nothing had been left to chance. The moment my accomplice hit the switch, the moment the lights went down, it would happen; unbeknown to and unseen by everyone, history would repeat itself. And when the lights came up again, as they would on cue, the train and its trucks would still be there, but as for its valuable cargo, all that would remain of that was the empty space where it once had been.
This was me then, watching intently as the train and its freight wagons loaded down with beers trundled past at eyebrow height, but with my mind at a lonely railway bridge tucked away in rural Buckinghamshire, which, in the summer of 1963, was about to enter the annals of criminal history.
When they finally caught up with Bruce Reynolds, they thought that they had collared the mastermind behind the most audacious heist of all time, but how mistaken they must have been. For had they got it right, I could hardly have been sitting here, in Kaliningrad’s Art Depot Beer Bar, free to monitor the freight cars of booze as they passed mesmerically before my eyes.
Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track
The less dramatic but no less novel circumstances in which I found myself was that of watching beer and other intoxicants being delivered to customers’ tables by way of a model train. Although it may seem that I am merely substituting a long-held boyhood fantasy for something from Alice in Wonderland, I am firmly back from both, biding my time in a world where the cliché ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ was beginning to make me wonder why my entire life had been challenged by a second-hand lie detector.
I was actually sitting beneath the Gothic-vaulted red-brick ceiling of a series of interconnecting catacombs. Whoops, there it goes again! My imagination wandering at will where it will wilfully wander. Not exactly catacombs, but a subterranean space occupied long ago by an elaborate network of beer cellars belonging to Ponart Brewery, which, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the largest brewery in Königsberg. This environment met my every requirement, blending the architectural style I love with social history, brewery history and my personal history of drinking beer.
And yet I had not imbibed sufficiently for me to invent the existence of a scaled-down railway that permitted drinks to be conveyed direct from bar to customer.
Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad
The train-delivery concept is as intriguing, as it is entertaining as it is educational. The train leaves Königsberg station, passes through the suburbs of Kaliningrad as they are today and from there heads out into the past across the Königsberg countryside.
To achieve this effect, models detailed in construction mark the route of the train and the settlements at which it stops, the old German names of which fastened to the wall, by corresponding to the booth-style seating, act like table numbers, enabling the bar staff to literally keep tabs on customers and their tariffs. The miniature version of Kaliningrad’s Central Station (once Königsberg Hauptbahnhof) from which the beer train leaves, stands proudly and unmistakeably, thanks to the accurate portrayal of its 1930s’ postmodern façade, at the point where all good beer journeys start, which is, of course, the bar.
To announce the departure of the train and the onset of one’s drinks, a bell is heard to ring, and the train carrying its valuable cargo steams urgently out of Central Station, travelling via Zelenogradsk ~ observable by its Ferris wheel ~ and off across East Prussia, except in this particular instance, it is charging along the side of the wall heading in one’s direction.
Being a beer and bar enthusiast but knowing nowt about model railways, except that they make good money at auction, I am unable to enlighten those who are interested in such things as to the track gauge of the railway, but presume that I can safely say that since the train is hauling lovely big pint glasses, the track width must be considerably larger than a Hornby Double O.
I bet that even Bruce Reynolds couldn’t have told you that.
The positioning of the bar’s booth seats at 90 degrees to the wall enables the train to divert to them as a full-sized locomotive would into a railway siding. The train and its precious cargo come to rest on a platform ramped up ‘viaduct’ style across the length of each table at a height above the seated occupants’ heads. This all goes to make the arrival of one’s eagerly awaited beverages infinitely more exciting, even, from the angle viewed, spectacular, the only drawback being that the supports on which the train track rests tend to get in visions way of normal social interaction with others in your group sitting on the opposite side of the table. This disadvantage, however, may be one concealing a hidden advantage, should, for example, the company you are in necessitate some subtle moves on the social evening’s chessboard, viz ‘Amanda Woke is a bit of a lefty, we’ll hide her behind that strut!’
The novelty of Art Depot Restaurant’s train network and the modern predilection for photographing everything, whether it moves or not, is not without an intrinsic risk, for should you be distracted and not act quickly enough to remove the cargo on arrival, the train can suddenly reverse, causing more than a mild hysteria as it makes off with your drinks back to the bar from whence it came.
It may strike you as rather odd that a beer bar housed in a former beer cellar located beneath a former brewery is not thematically predisposed to the matter of beer production, but the railway as a feature is not without connection both to the brewery itself and to the district in which the brewery stands.
A long while ago … and now
One hundred and seventy-five years ago, Ponart was little more than a village waiting to be subsumed by the expanding city of Königsberg. During this dynamic period, the district’s major employers were Schifferdecker’s Ponart Brewery and, from the 1860s to the 1900s, the Prussian Eastern Railway, which eventually came to be known as the Royal Prussian State Railways. The development of the railway system in East Prussia and Russia significantly impacted Königsberg’s commerce, stimulating demand for enlargement of the workforce.
The resultant influx of labourers generated a need for the provision of homes close to the industries the workforce would be servicing. The high-density living created by these converging influences can effectively be quantified from an observation of the housing stock type, which predominantly comprises three-storey flats built as a series of uniform terraces, and also from an estimation of the close proximity of the Pomart Brewery to the railway’s rolling-stock marshalling yard, which is crossable by a through-truss Bridge, acting as the gateway from the centre of the city to this erstwhile working-class neighbourhood.
So let that be a lesson to you!
If you think that a model train delivering beer to your table is a whimsy of a thing, it will do you no harm to know that at Art Depot Restaurant the railway theme ends not at your table but follows you into the toilets. Not the train itself, or the station master or the ticket collector, but piped noises you would expect to hear at a busy railway station.
Now, toilets are hallowed places with particular sounds of their own, so it is vitally disconcerting to hear the outside world inside of them; indeed extremely difficult when it’s “All aboard!” and the whistle blows to divorce yourself from the governing fantasy that you are actually in a station loo. Blast! I thought, having heard the whistle shrilling, the carriage doors slamming and the train a chuff, chuff, chuffing as it left without me down the tracks. I had only gone and missed the 8.30 to Nowhere! There was nothing more that I could do. Well, what else could I do? I would have to go back to the waiting room, sink another beer or two and hope that anyone watching me would mistake me for being anyone else but the man they thought I wasn’t: “That’s him! That’s not Bruce Reynolds!”
6 March 2025 ~ UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance
Having watched the spat in the White House recently, where Trump missed the opportunity to stick one on a man widely regarded as the world’s biggest scrounger but couldn’t really do such a thing whilst he was talking peace, I predicted that when the Great Z rolled into Britain, the Disunited Kingdom under the worst government since Noddy Blaire would really show us up. I hoped that this humiliation would not go further than a cuddle or two with Starmer, as cringing as that was, but no, we had to go the whole hog: a propagandist photoshoot with the King of England taking tea in the totally incompatible company of a T-shirt wearing erstwhile actor looking less like the person he is purported to be and more like one of those things ~ though considerably less well dressed ~ that keep rolling into Britain on the back of a rubber dinghy.
In a show of absolute disregard for the declining prosperity of the UK and as an insult to the intelligence of its populace (did I say intelligence?), its Davos-orchestrated media flooded airwaves, newspapers and the internet with a fulsome display of stage-managed rejoicing. With a single flick of the media switch almost every Brit in Hatebook land was once again changing their avatars and standing with Ukraine. Not that this has any significance, they would stand in a bucket of shit if that was where they were told to stand. Snap! Snap! went the whip: the Zelensky circus was back in town.
Even in these cash-strapped times, when the majority of Brits and even some migrants, but not the ones in 5-star hotels, cannot afford to heat their homes, Mr Starmer’s government, or rather the forces that control it, is pledging to donate an additional £2.26 billion to a conflict which the West should never have provoked and, as Trump is at pains to point out, if not soon brought to a halt could plausibly precipitate World War III.
In jingoistic and sanctimonious language reminiscent of that which, let’s hope not prophetically, heralded the dawn of the First World War, on the 1 March 2025 (it could be a day that will live in infamy), the UK Government issued this self-congratulatory statement, clearly intended to justify its phenomenal overspending folly whilst proclaiming itself to be the saviour of national security and the champion of democracy.
Rachel Reeves, christened by Katie Hopkins as ‘the woman with the Lego hairstyle’, and some other bod with a name that I cannot pronounce (whatever happened to Smith and Jones?), were poised to sign the grandiloquently titled Ukraine Bilateral Agreement.
Cutting through prose that reads like an extract from a classic Dad’s Army script (I mean, just look at it! I ask you!), the best of British from the worst of people is impressive but meretricious:
“A safe and secure Ukraine is a safe and secure United Kingdom. This funding will bolster Ukraine’s armed forces and will put Ukraine in the strongest possible position at a critical juncture in the war. [Fanfare of heraldic trumpets!!!]
“It comes as we have increased our defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, which will deliver the stability required to keep us safe and underpin economic growth.” ~ said Lego
What this bilateral agreement means is that instead of going for peace, Britain is going for broke. In order to keep the Zelensky show on the road and perpetuate the hostilities in Ukraine at any price, and that includes the cost in human terms, the UK Government is now pledging a whopping great £2.26 billion ‘loan’ on top of the £3 billion it already throws away each year (that’s where your tax money’s going) for Ukraine to spend on bombs and bullets. That’s an awful lot of money to give to a man with no dress sense; let’s hope he uses some of it to buy himself a suit.
[Quote:] “The Prime Minister has been clear that a strong Ukraine is vital to UK national security.” [Unquote].
How and also Why? After that statement from the PM, even those who didn’t regard him as a bit of a prat, because their fathers have always voted Labour, may hopefully have a change of heart.
Moving on swiftly from this stupendous tax on the UK’s coffers at a time when we can least afford it, the government statement is keen to head up the recently announced, but for some lefties controversial, increase in the UK defence budget.
“… to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with an ambition to spend 3% of GDP on defence in the next parliament as economic and fiscal conditions allow.” ~ notice the qualification. Hand over your piggy banks, kids! Tax! Tax! Tax!
Let’s just pause for one brief moment and think this document through. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a government, indeed successive UK governments, who do not give a flying fart about destroying the country they represent by endorsing and encouraging the immigrant invasion, should so solemnly be concerned with and so unswervingly devoted to the sovereignty of a country, I refer, of course, to Ukraine, which until social media exhorted Britain’s Arsebook sheep to change their pretty avatars, not one man Jack of them, or dinghy-arriving Abdul, knew Ukraine existed. According to popular rumour, neither did Liz Truss. Liz who? Allow me to jog your memory: She entered Number 10 like a queen and vanished like a magician’s assistant through the back of a magic box.
Trussed-up-like-a-Turkey had no idea where Ukraine is and, let’s be frank and honest, neither do 90 per cent of avatar-changing Brits. “Duh, let’s change our avatars. You click ‘Like’, I’ll click ‘Like’, we’ll all click ‘Like’ together.”
Giving billions of pounds a year to Mr Zelensky’s T-shirt fund has nothing to do with UK national security. We compromised that years ago when we opened the migrant floodgates, and what little we have left of it is being trampled underfoot by thousands of happy migrant feet that are wearing the welcome mat threadbare as our politically correct two-tier coppers bus them off to plush hotels.
The real threat in the UK to every man, woman and child and thus to national security is the one that nobody, except Reform, is willing to confront: catastrophic immigration. Thousands, literally thousands, of young men of fighting age, migrants from the third world, are languishing at the taxpayers’ expense in hotels and hostels up and down the country. Thanks to the loony left, bolstered by Brownshirt organisations that masquerade as equality heroes ~ who mentioned Antifa and Hope Not Hate? ~ but which are really infested with anarchists, hardly any of these aliens will be sent packing to whence they originally came. Hundreds of thousands of these lovely items are poised to be unleashed onto the wretched streets of Britain, ushering in a dark new age where holding hands and candle-lit vigils, already a British tradition, is steadily replacing all that our forbears worked for and all that they believed in: “Get your candle-lit vigil kits here!”
Of course, I could be wrong. The experiences of the past few years may be nothing at all to go by. They may simply want to hold hands with us and, like the Coke advert of old, sing in ‘Happy Harmony’.
In a further demonstration of liberal social media’s stranglehold on UK freedom of speech, Facebook, aka Hatebook, is quick to delete all and any comments that do not align themselves with the West’s ‘I stand with Ukraine’ narrative. The comments of attackers and haters are preserved in liberal vinegar; the comments of all who challenge them are swiftly siphoned away.
Two sides of the jolly old argument, ay chaps. “It is essential for democracy to listen to what other people are saying (Goodin, 2003).”
The Russian point of view: “We continue to operate on the premise that a truly just and durable peace is not possible unless the root causes of the Ukraine crisis are completely eliminated. The main ones among them include the West breaking its promises not to expand NATO and the alliance’s absorption of Europe’s entire geopolitical space all the way up to Russia’s borders, as well as the Kiev regime’s systematic elimination of everything Russian, including language, culture, and church, just like the German Nazis did in the past. The demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as recognition of existing realities on the ground remain Russia’s unchanged objectives. The sooner Kiev and the European capitals in question come to realise this, the closer to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis we will be.” ~ Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s comment on Vladimir Zelensky’s voyage to Washington, D.C., 1 March 2025
The idea that the Western World’s survival hinges upon propping up the ultranational regime of Ukraine is a feebly spurious and egregious premise. The West’s proxy war with Russia has failed, so why continue the virtue signalling by showering Zelensky with false praise and filling the bottomless pit of his unaudited war chest. Bankrolling Zelensky is nothing more than a face-saving exercise, an immoral funding of loss of life destined to ensure that Ukraine ends up like a lunar landscape.
Instead of hoodwinking gullible Brits with jingoistic soundbites and huggy huggy Zelensky time ~ quick, let’s change our avatars ~ a responsible, grown-up government, if only we had such a thing, would admit that national security is a net-zero migration issue and would be doing all that it could to slam the porous borders shut and combat the hostile hoards that are already within our midst. After all, it is they that shipped them in; the indigenous British people never went online and ordered them from Amazon.
UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance
The only real potential threat that Britain faces today to its national security, indeed to its very existence, is the Trojan Horse of third-world migration. It is here, now; here and happening. An insidious ticking timebomb waiting to explode. All talk of old-style threats, of invasions from abroad, are as convincing as telling a country bumpkin that if he pisses against the wind the world will be a better place. The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! What would they want to come here for? Such megaphonic announcements are opium for the bewildered masses, many of whom are yet to wake up to the terrible state that Britain is in. Please, pass me one of their sleeping pills!
The only positive thing to come out of Britain throwing its money away and the avatar-changing farce is that Trump by word and deed has been unequivocally vindicated. By advocating a path for peace, he has already proved to the world that contrary to the deriding image that mainstream media painted of him during his first term in office, the crazed war monger never was him; it was, and always has been, the backsliding liberal left. Biden was a stooge; Obama was a black bum sitting on a fence, though they claim he played good golf; Trump, though not a peaceful man ~ he is not a lefty wimp or a wokist pushover ~ is a man who believes in peace. The clamouring desire for war, for never-ending, relentless war is an obsession exclusively liberal.
Indeed, Trump’s defiant stand for peace contrasts strongly in his favour against the liberal craving for war, which reverberates hysterically on both sides of the Atlantic. If you couldn’t see it before Trump’s sincere endeavours for peace, your vison should now be clearing. The real war mongers of the West are the pseudo-liberal cabal, the elitist globalist clan, who hide behind tired old slogans that project them as the patron saints of democracy and humanity but really who are perfectly willing to spill the blood of others in their relentless pursuit of hegemony.
These are the goons who want you to ‘Stand with Ukraine’, or rather the last thing that they want to happen is for Trump to broker a peace plan. They do not want peace full-stop, especially peace by a peace-making Trump, as this will only cement his glory, expose them for what they are, and spur him onto greater things, none of which they have no doubt will be in their globalist interest.
Standing for Ukraine, as defined by British policy, means perpetuating warfare, which, as Trump has laid on the line, could edge us closer to World War III.
UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance
If war does break out in Europe, and let’s fervently hope this day will never dawn, it will surprise an awful lot of idiots who repeatedly spout the mantra that nuclear war will not effect us, as the UK has its own deterrent. This might be an appropriate juncture to remind the lefty lot that it was not so long ago that they wanted to scrap our nuclear deterrent and use the money instead for welfare handouts and to fund migration.
Sing along now: ‘We can’t all live in a yellow submarine …’
Our politicians, whose only skill seems to lie in their remarkable ability to never tell the truth, should nevertheless make it abundantly clear to the obfuscated British public, particularly those who ‘Stand by Ukraine’, that the first casualty of a war that goes nuclear will be the United Kingdom. In the first seconds of a nuclear war, our little, bitty, titchy island and all who reside upon it will unfortunately but effectively be evaporated. There’s not enough room on our two nuclear subs for Britain’s ever-increasing migrant army, let alone the rest of us.
The West breaking its promises not to expand NATO and the alliance’s absorption of Europe’s entire geopolitical space …
The Cuban Missile Crisis ~ a lesson from history In May 1962, the Soviet Union began shipping missiles and technicians to Cuba. The yanks were none too pleased about this. It was the closest brush with World War III since the end of World War II.
The irresponsible to the extent of insane notion to billet NATO missile bases in Ukraine capable of carrying nuclear payloads within easy reach of Moscow is comparable to Russia siting missile bases on the Isle of Man. You just don’t do it, do you?
Forget about the government (Oh, you already have!), forget about Ukraine (You can’t! You’ve gone and changed your avatars!), what we need, and urgently, is a bomb-disposable expert, one who will leave other countries to manage their own affairs and who will focus his mind exclusively on dismantling the clear and present threat of Britain’s Migrant Doomsday Bomb.
Do I stand with Ukraine? No! I stand for Trump and peace. The rationale of my thinking being that it is hard to stand almost anywhere in a pair of smouldering boots.
“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.”
28 February 2025 ~ Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
There is a gastro-bar on Mira Avenue Kaliningrad which lies at subterranean level. At the bottom of the steps that lead down to its entrance is a sign. The sign says enigmatically: “Fall into the Hole, Get Lost in Time”. The name of this gastro-bar is unlike any I have ever encountered. How many Rabbit Holes have you frequented? Through the windows of the front door, I can see the bar itself, the thing with beer taps on it. Without a second ado, like a ferret down a rabbit hole, and what could be more appropriate, I cross the portal to the other side.
Like Alice who passed before me (Who the !*!* is Alice?), who, it has been suggested, had an addiction of her own, I find myself in Wonderland. But first a passing word, or more, on what we mean by ‘cozy’.
Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
When people use the term ‘cozy’ they usually employ it in a complementary or even compensatory way, intimating that whilst the place they are describing may be small, it is warm, comfortable and inviting.
Before becoming a city slicker, I lived my life among country folk, whose view of the average rabbit hole was anything but romantic, and I tended to concur with them. But this strictly urbanised concept persuaded me to revise my opinion.
From the moment I entered its rarified world, I felt the urge to compare it to the British pub of yore, with its typical two-room segregation: one for the serious drinker, traditionally known as the public bar, and the other for more discerning types, which went by the name of the lounge. But the two-room similarity ends at this point of the parallel, since whilst one side of the gastro-bar has a discrete and inglenook feel and the other, being slightly larger, though not tremendously so, an aspirant sense of restaurant, neither one nor the other can be said to be less cozy.
It is the larger room of the two, however, where Wonderland is best perfected. Not exactly the gossamer Wonderland as conceived in the maze-like labyrinth of Lewis Carroll’s inventively playful, playfully odd, often obtuse and fantasy-making mind, but rather the rich star-spangled extravaganza bristling with special-effects, which, we are told at the time of writing, is the highest grossing film of director Tim Burton’s career. The framed anthropomorphist images displayed on Rabbit Hole’s walls are not the exquisite renditions of Tenniel or of Attwell, they are loud, near-modern grotesque, decidedly Burtonesque, and the looped Alice in Wonderland film shown silently on the wall-mounted screen needs no introduction: it is Mr Burton’s Hollywood blockbuster.
One of the most compelling draws of this pantheon to Burton ~ no, not a monogrammed pair of Alice’s ~ is its enticing assortment of Wonderland hats. Casually tossed in a wicker basket just below the TV screen, these simulated props, which identify with Alice’s fictional characters, enable those who are smitten by the happy-snappy smartphone age to plonk them on their bonces, take photos of each other and feed them proudly to their ‘Like-clicking’ friends, who are presumably waiting, phones in hands with nothing but bated breath, for the next instalment of lives that surprise. ‘If the hat fits, it fits’, and the management of Rabbit Hole have latched onto this modern compulsion, for it certainly fits their marketing ploy.
Wearing an Alice hat or not, there is something important you need to know about dining out at Rabbit Hole, which is that before the evening is out you will be rubbing Deep Heat into your neck. I think we can safely say that the last thing Mr Burton would likely want to hear is that his multi-billion-dollar film has been upstaged by a ceiling, but there you have it, and there it is.
Rabbit Hole’s ceiling is a work of art, an engaging, colourful illustration that wouldn’t look amiss in an early 20th century children’s story book. It is in itself a fitting tribute to the golden age of authentic Alice.
Its canvas is awash with iconic Wonderland objects, which float around in a densely turbulent space as though, caught up in the Wizard of Oz tornado, they have been flung at random and as a whole into ever-lasting affection, which, as all we avid readers know, is the library of our impressionable years to which we owe a lifelong membership.
‘Crikey!’ you might think, as you crane your neck in admiration, ‘they’ve even crimped’ the ceiling, but in this respect you’d be lavishing praise where praise is not readily due, for whilst the effect lends the images an appropriate dreamlike character, as every student of Königsberg’s history knows, or if he doesn’t should, the series of narrow arches that give the ceilings of basements and those in old industrial buildings in this part of the world their characteristic ripple, as aesthetically pleasing as they are, are principal to the fulfilment of an essential structural purpose. Having made this distinction, however, artistic concept and construction complement each other, as though their eventual coexistence had been ordained by Carroll himself. Carroll’s tale has innumerable twists, but Rabbit Hole’s ceiling has a few of its own.
If you haven’t come to Rabbit Hole to gawp in amazement up at the ceiling, the only explanation can be that perhaps you are here for the food.
Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
I see a lot of positive comments regarding the quality of Rabbit Hole’s food posted on the internet but have failed to find anything much written about the quantity. A word in your ear, if I may. On the evening that we dined there, one amongst our group was rather disappointed that the prawn salad she had ordered only contained as many prawns ~ two to be precise ~ to justify its name and warrant its plurality. And I was not exactly impressed when the baked potato for which I had paid the British equivalent of three whole pounds was lost in the landscape of a bowl whose suspiciously disingenuous proportions could have taken a single olive and optically turned it into a melon. Taste in all things was in place and thus it goes was quality, but the whereabouts of quantity was anybody’s guess, perhaps it was off taking tea with Carroll’s March Hare and Mad Hatter.
I have no idea what brand of beer they serve in Alice’s wonderland, do you? But down in Kaliningrad’s Rabbit hole, I was perfectly happy to reprise my friendship with the ever-amenable Maisel’s Weisse, which, as every student of good beer knows, perhaps those very same students who are so up to scratch on Konigsberg’s history, is a special Bavarian wheat beer.
I would have been quite content sitting and sipping at my Maisel’s Weisse whilst gazing at the ceiling ~ pass the crick-in-the-neck cream, please ~ had it not been for my discovery of that something exciting going on at a nearby table of ladies. They had just received a wooden platter from the waiter in a bowler hat containing umpteen shots of different vodkas. You may recall, and if you don’t here is the link that will jog your memory, that I knew all about these special platters and the different vodkas they conveyed, having been bought one at the Dreadnought.
Did Rabbit Hole have a vodka or two tinctured with different flavours? Most certainly they did not! They had a vodka or 54, replied the indignant waiter, and before we could disarm him, he had whipped his phone out of his pocket as smartly would have Hickok had he possessed a mobile phone instead of his trusty side-iron, and tippy tapping away on his phone, not Hickok but the waiter, he began to recite a list of vodkas as long as Alice’s arm when whatever the potion it was she drank inflated her general stature. The only way we could switch him off ~ and here’s a mark of salesmanship ~ was to interrupt his roll call by ordering up a batch of those vodkas upon whose fragrant personalities he was so zealously expatiating.
The least adventurous of our party, and, if the truth be known, cursed by the same affliction as Wonderland’s White Rabbit, I stuck to my staple flavoured vodka, horseradish, a choice I presumed would be safe by precedent, but which, as it transpired, was nothing of the sort. The grimace on my face could, I suppose, have been mistaken for the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat, but whatever it was that he was on, this was not my fix. I am not sure what became of the radish, but I felt the kick that came with the horse.
The next safe bet was cherry flavour, but this concoction as nice as it was being rather more sweet than I cared for, made me think that it may have been more prudent had I approached it via the stepping stones of turnip, carrot, swede and cucumber, but that my friends is what tasting is, a bit of a tightrope to getting it right, but a talking point when getting it wrong.
By the end of this Rabbit Hole evening, the unpredictable marriage of Maisel’s Weisse with exotic vodkas brought me to the realisation why when Alice drank her magic infusions one minute she felt too small for the room and much too tall the next. But the sorcery hadn’t ended here. Before returning to the ground above me, I was aghast to see in my reflection that some of the vodkas had gone to my head and one ~ it must have been carrot ~ had definitely gone to my ears … Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit …
18 February 2025 ~ Ponart Brewery in the Strange Case of Creation
>> Creation — the famous exhibition from Annenkirche and the art group Grain is now in Kaliningrad! This is a biblical view of the creation of the world through the prism of modern Christian art. The exhibition is located within the walls of the atmospheric old Brewery Ponart, where the past and the present, faith and creativity, deep meaning and stunning visual design are harmoniously combined. At the exhibition, you will learn all the most important things about the days of creation. You will be able to touch God, get closer to the heavenly bodies and decide for yourself whether to bite or not to bite the forbidden fruit. Large-scale installations and aesthetic locations help to penetrate the theme and provide the opportunity for many beautiful keepsake photographs. << Translated from the exhibitor’s website
Sailing past the world and saying goodbye to the dinosaur, we entered a short, narrow section of corridor, the walls of which were decorated with multiple lights, each having flower petal shades in hues of natural green and yellow. This room appeared to represent Day 3 of God’s world creation: the introduction of the natural environment, the phenomenon we call ‘nature’.
The impact of the following room would have been awesome without comparison to the cramped and confined space of the last, but no such prelude was necessary.
We were now standing in an area of the old brewery, which once would have comprised three or four storeys but, gutted from floor to rafters, had been recast as a towering shaft, gnarled, scarred and ragged. The entire confinement was bathed in a low red glow, causing me to bookmark Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, which was a rather unfortunate negative parallel, because the huge illuminated moon suspended from the ceiling suggested that in the narrative structure by which the rooms were sequenced, we must have arrived at Day 4, the creation of the universe. Don’t quote me on this, however, as my proficiency in maths is far below the standard of the divinity’s.
A low, not humming sound, but musical chord, which wavered slightly, but not enough in noticeable degree to be called melodic, vibrated sonorously through the vertical vastness of this lofty chamber, adding audibility to its already visual awesomeness. Stunned by the giant moon, I also found myself becoming inadvertently absorbed by the many scars with which the faces of the wall were pocked and disfigured, the many uneven ledges and protuberances, the legion of empty joist holes, which reminded me of eye sockets in the face of an ancient skull.
Scaling three of the four walls was a metal staircase, linked by two horizontal platforms at higher and lower levels. This was a staircase which, if you had not turned adult, you would want to climb immediately. Up I went!
The difference in elevation of the two landings provided an agreeable variety of photo opportunities, which, have smartphone will snap, we, of course, took full advantage of.
At the summit of the steps, we passed into a small piece of truncated passageway, emerging thereafter into a great rectangular room, the installations and arrangement of which in relation to one another reminded me of the surrealist work of Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s collage animator.
Lighting ~ green, blue, orange-red ~ bird flocks strung in mid air, paintings of beasts on the walls, a row of trampoline-seat swings and, in the centre of this row, but at the further end of the room, an enormous pointing white hand (if this had been the UK, it would have been liberal black), thrusts out of the heavens (in this case from the ceiling) through clumps of something that I am rather fond of. I was thinking ‘cauliflower’; the artistic creators most probably clouds.
“Michaelangelo!” Olga announced, annoying me. I had wanted to say it first
The next venue, the room immediately above the one containing the giant hand, was, arguably, more surreal than the last. Two rows of the same sized but differently stylised mannequin heads centred atop rectangular plinths travelled along the centre of the chamber, whose every wall had attached to them paintings of a symbolic nature depicting either variations on the theme of divine creation, Michaelangelo’s version, or unsympathetic renditions of the progenitors of original sin, the hapless Adam and Eve.
Lighting continued to generate atmosphere as it had in the rooms before, and once again could be heard that low, impenetrable but penetrating, measured background hum, which, speaking for myself, had nothing of hallelujah in it but a lot of numbing depth. It gave me grim satisfaction to note that it, and all I had experienced whilst on this voyage of wonder, accorded with my sullied view that of all God’s myriad creations, with the exception of man himself, the world is the most imperfect. Indeed, I have to say and must say, that you would need to be less receptive than deaf, dumb and blind, or a child upon a rocking horse or swing, not to arrive at the end of this incredibly evocative ghost-train ride with more of awe and wonder and less of self-possession than you had upon starting out.
True to form, there is nothing in this biblical treatise on the creation of the world that does not deserve to be called amazing but at one and the same time peripherally unsettling, and nowhere was this more apparent than in each and every one of the artistic interpretations of the spark of life and the fall of man.
The grotesque ethereal landscapes portrayed symbolically in these works of art made the scores of red rosy apples suspended on threads of different lengths, some so long that the apples attached to them descended through circular pits in the floor, wherefrom they could be witnessed hovering above a rectangular trough scattered with scarlet bricks, divine enough to test the wrath of God. This then is the thematic ethos of the exhibition’s penultimate room, where it is hats off to Creation’s creators who, by ingenuity or by accident, have made the legendary curse of original sin never seem more tempting!
I will never now be able to look again in innocence at a store-bought rosy apple or pluck one off a tree without that the act of doing so emphatically returns me to this desirous scene at Ponart Brewery, as well as to the mythological premise that almost every instinctual human act is sin wrapped up in guilt or guilt wrapped up in sin.
It occurs to me that there is someone out there who is abrogating responsibility for filling this flawed world of ours with a dynastic glut of apple pluckers. Tell me, who can think of Granny Smith when the orchard in full bloom is full to bursting with attractive distractions like Honeycrisp and Golden Delicious? It’s easy to blame it on Adam and Eve, they are not here to defend themselves.
Ponart Brewery in the Strange Case of Creation
The truth of the matter is that the biblical story of creation, that masterpiece of tragedy of which we are a part, means different things to different people. Go and see it for yourself, and ask yourself at the end of the journey, is the biblical view of our world a slice of apple pie, or does it give you the pip? One thing is for certain, Creation is an exhibition, which starts and keeps you thinking. https://zernoart.ru/creation_kaliningrad
A socio-cultural perspective on Russia’s cake habit contrasted and compared with and illuminated by one or two supplementary notes about having your cake and eating it in Great Britain
Revised 4 February 2025 | First published 26 March 2023 ~ Russia’s Love of Cakes Differs from the UK’s
Cakes. I don’t imagine for one moment that when somebody in the West mentions Russia, cakes are the first thing that spring to mind. Equally, I’m willing to wager that the UK media has written precious little lately, or written little at all, about the magnificent variety of cakes in Russia and the widespread availability of them in spite of those silly old sanctions.
They certainly would never divulge that the super-abundance of cakes in Russia is part of a western plot organised and funded by the Sorryarse Open Cake Society to swamp the Federation with cakes, similar to the way in which it is suffocating the western world with boat loads of useless migrants. I am not so sure about cake, but the spotted dick that they are creating is fast filling up with gritty currants.
Whoa now! Hang on a minute! Blin, yolkee polkee and blaha mooha! How dare you lump our delicious Russian cakes in the same inflatable dinghy with a gaggle of grinning third-world freeloaders destined for 5-star hotels at the expense of the British taxpayer!
Sorry, I stand corrected and in the same breath exposed. It is true that I am no Don Juan when it comes to loving cakes. However, as one of the last of the few true Englishmen, I concede to enjoying a nice slice of cake whenever the mood so takes me and, when the opportunity avails itself, regard it to be the perfect accompaniment to the English custom of afternoon tea.
All well and good, but neither affrontery apologised for nor my confessed willingness to embrace the odd iced cake rather than the swarthy migrant amounts to diddly-squat when it comes to explaining the cultural differences that set cake worship apart in Russia from similar proclivities in the UK.
Cakes are cancel proof
Cancel-proof, like most things pertaining to Russian culture, as the West is finding out and finding out the hard way, Russia’s love of cakes is in a sacrosanct league of its own. For example, it is not often, if indeed at all, that you will see men in the UK roaming around the streets with a big sticky cake in their hands. There is every possibility that you will see them holding another man’s hand, or, if you are really unlucky ~ or lucky if you are a professional photographer assigned to defining British culture ~ some other part of their brethren’s anatomy, but never a cake in hand. In the UK there seems to be an hypocritical subtext, an unspoken reservation at work, which, ironically, seems to imply that even in these enlightened times cakes and men together in public is tantamount to poofterism. Alack a day, but there you have it.
Russia’s love of cakes differs from the UK’s
Having thus established that men carting cakes around in public is not the done thing in Britland (but then what is and, more to the point, who is?), we arrive at a striking contrast. I’ve lost count of the number of times when entertaining at home (dispel all images of magic tricks, juggling, charades and karaoke) that on opening the gate to greet our Russian guests, at least one man will be standing there with a large stodgy cake in his grasp. As for dining out, I have yet to go to a restaurant with my Russian friends where rounding off a meal without a sumptuous sweet, most of which resemble cakes drenched in cream and syrup, would turn an everyday event into something of a precedent. Perchance it ever occurs, it would breach the unexpected like a hypersonic missile bursting through the dream of eternal hegemony. Cakes don’t come in on a wing and a prayer in Russia; they are part of the national psyche, in which whim and caprice can play no part.
The company Cakes R Rus is yet to be incorporated. The reason for this oversight is not immediately clear when cakes in Russia attract such popularity, but the greater mystery by far must be why in Russia are cakes so popular? It is a matter for conjecture, is it not, that often what presents itself at best as a half-baked explanation turns out in the long run to be remarkably overdone. Not so when it comes to cakes. Cakes are interwoven into every Fair Isled fabric of daily, popular and expressive life. Judge this on the merit that there are almost as many traditional sayings, remarks and literary allusions to cakes, and on matters pertaining to cakes, as there are cakes themselves. We will come to that in a moment.
Speaking from experience, all shops in Kaliningrad, that is to say all food shops, except the fishmongers, the butchers and the caviar sellers (add your own to contradict me), however small the shop may be, are guaranteed to stock one, two, even sometimes three, fairly chunky, big, round cakes, whilst supermarkets routinely offer flotilla to armada volumes of seductively sumptuous cake varieties, rich, lavish, opulent and sufficient in taste, size and price to float everyone’s cake-craving boat.
For the love of cakes
In addition to these generic outlets, Kaliningrad is no stranger to the small independent boaterie, sorry I meant to say bakery. There are any number of such bakeries (I won’t tell you just how many, for if I did that would be telling.), but the most noticeable because most prolific chain is undoubtedly Königsbäcker. Why not Kalininbacker? What a silly question.
Now we have both stopped crying, I will try to explain how the Russian perception of cakes differs to the perceived role that cakes play in modern British society and why; and in the course of doing so, you may suspect that you have stumbled upon a hint that enables you to answer the question, why in Russia are cakes so popular?
Exactly how the Russian cake mentality diverges from its English counterpart is not as subtle as you might first think. So, for all you cake lovers out there, let me try to explain. Here goes!
First and foremost, bugger The Great British Bake Off, an awful television prog which is opium for the masses. Like coronavirus, which also kept people at home glued to their televisions, The Great British F!*off most likely foreshadows something more dreadful to come, such as The Great British Bake Off in the Nude and I’m A Cake Get me Out of Here, currently previewing on the Secretly Ashamed Channel.
The Great British Bake Off, which I always find time to switch off, lost all credibility for me when one of the female contestants was allegedly discovered substituting Viagra for self-raising flour. When the cake flopped, she was most disappointed. Aren’t we all when our cakes don’t rise. But her story had a happy ending, three to be precise, for when the show was over, after tea and cake with three of the show’s male competitors, she left the studio a satisfied woman. So satisfied, in fact, that she continues to pay her TV licence even to this day!
Anyway, Great Bake Offs or preferably no Great Bake Offs, my experience has it that the celebritising of cakes has very little impact on consumer purchasing habits. UKers may gasp in unison when confronted on the goggle box by Big Cake El Supremo, but it’s a different story altogether when buying down Asda or Iceland. Small synthetic packet cakes are the type that Brits on average go for, something cheap and abundant, over-stuffed with sugar and small enough to fit inside one’s pocket. (Hey you, watch out! There’s a store detective about! “And what of it! They can’t do nothin’. It would be a violation of our subhuman rights. Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! He! He!”)
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake baker’s man bake me a cake as fast as you can (The cherished belief that all bakers are highly motivated individuals lends itself to scrutiny)
It occurs to me (which is the get out clause to ‘it occurs to nobody else and why would it?’), that cakes in Russia are rather more special-occasion items than tear open a packet of Kipling’s as quickly as you like and let that be an end to it!
Kipling’s individual pies are probably not as bad as so-called experts on synthetics would like us to believe, although when shady and disreputable store owners infringe the sell-by date, and this happens with greater frequency than it should in the UK, especially in shops run by migrants, the pastry tends to be dry and falls in embarrassing flaky bits down the front of your jumper. In winter, when it may, or conversely may not, be snowing, such socially unacceptable things may pass by virtually unnoticed, but once the Christmas jumper emerges in all its dubious glory into the glaring spotlight of spring, the shards of pastry in which you are covered can begin to look like dandruff. Mr Kipling may very well make exceedingly crumbly cakes, but to stop yourself from being conned and from looking more like a bit of a prick in your unfortunate Christmas jumper, particularly when it is splattered with pastry, choose your cake stores carefully and always check the sell-by-dates, especially if you have no option ~ and options in the UK are getting fewer by the boat load ~ than to buy from P. Akis Convenience Shores, a disproportionate number of which are concentrated in Dover. I wonder why that is?
Inspired by my last comment, I am tempted to ask, do you remember the 1970s’ individual fruit pie phenomenon, characterised first by square pies wrapped in grease-proof paper and later round pies presented on a tin-foil base? Tasty, ay! But, alas, like most things in life, they tended to shrink as time went by. Any road, can apple pies truly be classed as cakes? I suppose they can if you drop the word ‘pie’ and substitute it for ‘cake’, and am I stalling because I have bitten off more than I can chew in my self-appointed role as Anglo-Russian cakeologist?
Russia’s love of cakes is holistic
As I have already said (I hope you’ve been paying attention!), cakes in Russia are rather more a special-occasion commodity than tear open a packet of Kipling’s as quickly as you like and get them down you in one mouthful before the pastry crumbles. Kipling’s individual apple … (ah, we’ve already covered that …).
Moving on: I am not suggesting that they, Russian cakes, are strictly reserved for special occasions such as births, weddings and funerals, but they often come bearing people, such as to get-togethers at home, to private parties, social gatherings and events of a similar nature. They also occupy pride of place among boxes of chocolates and flowers as a way of saying thank you to someone who has rendered a kindness to another mortal soul or has performed some function in their official capacity above and beyond the call of duty.
In these contexts, the cake’s presentation shares equal importance with noshability, which possibly explains why Russian cakes, with their white-iced coverings, frothy cream crowns, candy sequins and fruit-festooned exteriors, make our traditional English jam and cream sponges look like poor relations; same bourgeoise boat perhaps but not at all on the upper-deck with their ostentatious Russian counterparts. Sigh, how ironically times can change and ostentatiously do, and with them cakes as well!
But let’s not leave it here! Whilst we, the English cannot compete with glitz, there is still a lot to be said for our good old-fashioned sponge cake, something that wants to make you sing not ‘There will always be an England’, because it’s much too late for that, but ‘There will always be a sponge cake’. There is something solid, enduring, traditional, something reassuringly staid and respectfully no-nonsense about plain, old English sponge cakes; something wonderfully neo-imperial, boldly neo-colonial, something so 1940s in the sense of stiff-upper lip that frankly I am astonished that these thoroughly English cakes have not been singled out for special ethnic-cleansing treatment by ‘take a knee’ cancel-culturists, or cast like so many heritage statuesover walls and into ponds with the blessing of the left-wing British judiciary. Tell me, is it premature of me to feel even a little bit mildly complacent about the safety and sovereignty of the patriotic British cake? I’ll take a Tommy Robinson, please, he makes an exceedingly difficult rock cake for the soft under-dentures of the British establishment.
A socio-cultural perspective on cakes
The socio-cultural and historic significance of cakes may strike you as more than a mouthful, but history is replete with examples where the icing on the cake is the role of the cake itself. Spectacles such as birds flying out of giant cakes have been going on since the time of ancient Rome (not now, of course, due to animal rights laws) and scantily clad frosted women have been leaping out of oversized cakes since the 19th century (not so much today, however, because of the feminist movement). I am perfectly aware of the existence of the Cambridge Stool Chart, but tell me, is the feminist ‘movement’ in some way linked to this chart?
And you thought they were just coming in by dinghies!!
Literary cake tropes have fared much better than their visual counterparts. Boris Johnson (You remember him, don’t you?), who had a cake named after him and in Kyiv no less ~ where else?, borrowed and modified the well-known phrase, ‘Have our cake and eat it’ in his bid to convince democracy of the benefits of Brexit. What he forgot to tell us, however, was that behind the political scenes the British and French governments had cooked up a migrant shuttle service ~ one-way ticket only ~ thus ensuring that after Brexit the cake would be ‘had’ alright, had and eaten by others, nibbled away like vermin at cheese, leaving nothing but crumbs for the British.
Slightly more famous than Boris Johnson but not, as far as I am aware, cake enriched by name, is Mary Antionette. She is credited with uttering the oft quoted and immortal phrase, ‘Let them eat cake!’, and although in all probability she said nothing of the sort, her disregard for, or indifference to, the plight of her country’s poor (typical of the French) is nowhere near as offensive as the Conservative party’s debasing betrayal of Britain’s Brexit electorate.
Boris ‘The Fruit Cake’ Johnson, sometimes referred to as ‘that Big Cream Puff’, is not the only man in showbusiness to have had an honorary cake named after him. Other cake-named celebs include no less than Elvis Presley, as well as such Russian personalities as ballet dancer Anna Pavlova and the first human to leave our world by rocket, Mr Yuri Gagarin, both of whom the West zealously tried to cancel just because their cakes were better than Boris’s, an all-show but nothing-of-substance confection cynically whipped up in Kyiv in order to keep the ackers flowing. Boris’s cake was made according to Biden’s recipe (that’s Biden as in empty chef’s hat not as in Master Baker). My question is, therefore, that with all this cake naming going on, isn’t it about time that somebody in Russia baked a cake and named it ‘Kobzon’ in memoriam of my favourite crooner? Come on chaps! How about it!
Whist I wait for this honour to be bestowed, we will hold our collective breath in anticipation of Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, Adolf Hitler, oh and don’t forget our Tony ~ Tony ‘Iraq’ Blair ~ having cakes named after their illustrious personages. And what about a ‘Boat People’ cake to celebrate the end of Western civilisation.
And what is so wrong about that? A good many famous people and not so famous events and places have had the honour of cakes named after them. The most obvious being Mrs Sponge, who lent her name to the sponge cake. No kiddin’! No, its a historical fact! Her first name was Victoria. She lived the better part of her life at 65 Coronation Crescent. (Source: Alfred ‘Dicky’ Bird). Crossword Clue: 7 across ‘Queen’; 5 down ‘custard’.
Another famous namesake cake is Battenberg, relating to Prince Cake, and in the towns and locale category, that is to say where places not people have given their names to cakes, we have the English Eccles cake, which obviously gets its name from Scunthorpe, and a cake we all love to bypass, colloquially known as Sad Cake, named as legend has it after the UK town of Wellingborough. It’s a ‘going there thing’: so don’t!
The metropolis has its own cake, historically known as the White Iced Empire but renamed in recent years, if not entirely rewritten, and consequently referred to by those who would rather it remained as it was as Double Chocolate Black Forest Ghetto. Also known as Chocolate Woke or, by those who have not had their brainwashed heads thrust right up their arses (This is the BBC!) as the Liberal Upside Down cake. It is often confused with the Fruit-Bottom cake which, though far from all it is cracked up to be, sells like proverbial hot cracks during Londonistan’s Gay Pride month. If you have the extreme good fortune to be in the UK capital during that poof-pastry period, do make sure to skip lickety-split down to London’s Soho, the geographical and moral-less centre of LGBT fame, and treat yourself whilst you are there to a slice of the famous Navy Cake from Hello Sailor’s bun shop or a ‘once tried never forgotten’ Golden Rivet Muffin from the café El Bandido’s.
All of this, I am pleased to say, is a very long way away from Kaliningrad and its culture, and everybody who lives in Kaliningrad is also pleased to say, may it, with the Good Lord’s help, long remain that way.
Meanwhile, whilst you sit there wondering which of the world’s biggest cakes ought to be named after you, if there is anything in this treatise on Russian/British cakes which you think I haven’t covered, if you really feel that you must, then jot down the one or two points you believe I might have missed and consign your trunk full of comments to ‘Care of the Cake in MacArthur Park’ . It’s only right and proper since ‘It took so long to bake it …’
Please note: At the time of writing, Starmer hasn’t had a cake named after him yet, but according to one political commentator, a man who narrowly escaped debasing himself by appearing on the Great Bake Off, who understandably wishes to remain anonymous, when that great cake day eventually dawns Starmer’s cake is bound to be called something resembling CurranT, with the capital ‘T’ standing for ‘Taxes’ and some of the letters in between omitted. That one’s got me really foxed?
Vintage sponge cake: I found this image at <a href=”https://freevintageillustrations.com/vintage-sponge-cake-illustration/?utm_source=freevintageillustrations&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=downloadbox”>Free Vintage Illustrations</a> / https://freevintageillustrations.com/vintage-sponge-cake-illustration/
Nursery Rhyme Baker’s Man: I found this image at <a href=”https://freevintageillustrations.com/pat-a-cake-nursery-rhyme-illustration/?utm_source=freevintageillustrations&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=downloadbox”>Free Vintage Illustrations</a> / https://freevintageillustrations.com/pat-a-cake-nursery-rhyme-illustration/
Revised 19 January 2025 | First published: 16 June 2022 ~ What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyers paradise?
NOTE>: Kaliningrad flea market has moved! Follow the link to the new location here. Use this article to gain an insight and overview of what the market has to offer. The address of the new location can also be found at the end of this post.
In 2000, the first time I set foot on Kaliningrad soil ~ a giant step for a man who had never been to Russia before ~ one of the major attractions very quickly became the city’s flea market or junk market, as we like to call it.
In those days, the junk market was located at the side of Kaliningrad’s central market, a monolithic and cavernous complex consisting of all kinds of exciting combinations of traditional stalls, purpose-built units and multi-layered shops, selling everything from fruit and veg to jewellery.
To get to the market we would cut around the back of Lenin’s statute, which occupied the place where the Orthodox cathedral stands today (irony), and making our way along a make-shift pavement of boards raised on pallets, often treacherously slippy as winter approached, we’d pass amidst the wagon train of covered craft-sellers’ stalls, trek across the city’s bus park and, on the last leg of the journey, sidle off down a long, wide alley, which had rattling tin on one side and a towering building on the other. I have no idea why, as I was often in Kaliningrad during the sunny seasons, but my abiding memory of that alley was that it sucked wind down it like the last gasp of breath and was never anything other than cold, wet and raining.
Another ‘in those days’ was that the junk market extended along the side of the road, which is now a pedestrianised space between buildings ancient and modern and the latest super monolithic shopping centre.
Dealers could be found in an old yard opposite, plying their trade from a shanty town of stalls, all higgledy-piggledy, thrown and cobbled together, whilst public sellers set up shop on a narrow sloping scar of land, a grass verge at the side of a pavement worn down over the years by the restless itinerance of junk-seller hopefuls.
In our militaria dealing and 1940s’ re-enactment hey days, we bought twenty pairs of sapagee (high leather and canvas military boots) from a bloke stalled out on this piece of ground over several consecutive days. We also bought his Soviet military belts, the ones that he was wearing. On the last day of purchasing, we would have had his belt again had he more to sell, but all that he had left by the time we were through with buying was a piece of knotted string, which he needed to keep his trousers up.
When we left Russia at the end of a month’s visit, this was in 2004, border security couldn’t help sniggering when they found inside our vehicle twenty pairs of old Soviet boots, rolled up tightly, lashed down with string and packed away in bin liners. But he who laughs last, laughs longest. We hadn’t sneaked off with an icon or two or anything of any great value, but boots bought for a quid a pair that we could sell on in the UK at £35 or more a pop to WWII re-enactors and members of living history groups was unarguably lubbly jubbly. Whilst we wouldn’t get rich on the proceeds, it would certainly help to offset the cost of our trip to Kaliningrad. Dear, dear comrades, it shames me to admit what a despicable capitalist I once was.
When I first came to Kaliningrad (2000), I was buying stuff mainly for myself, but as I turned dealer, as most collectors are obliged to do to reclaim the space they live in, I did what all collectors must when the fear of decluttering wakes them in a cold sweat from their slumbers: I went out looking for more clutter, the justification being that I was no longer buying it for myself but selling it on for profit.
Believe you me, sooner or later (usually later), every junk hoarder arrives at a critical stage of consciousness, when they finally have to admit to themselves that buying old stuff is not just a compulsion, it is in fact a disease. After confession, however, absolution swiftly follows and, like all professional sinners, hoarders quickly learn that regular sin and regular confession go productively hand-in-hand. Thus, wherever it was we travelled to ~ be it Lithuania, Latvia, Poland or Odessa in Ukraine ~ the story was always the same: junk markets and antique shops loomed large on the itinerary.
What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyers’ paradise?
Be it ever so difficult, if not impossible, for the likes of us to understand, but accumulating old stuff is not everyone’s cup of tea. Thus, the first victims of the development and progressive gentrification of Kaliningrad’s market area were the junk sellers. Speaking euphemistically, they were ‘politely asked to move on’.
I must admit (there you go, I am at it again, confessing!) that when I discovered their absence, I was truly mortified: new shops, block-paved walkways, tree-inset pedestrian-only streets ~ to be sure an incredible face lift, which no amount of Botox or timely plastic surgery could hope to emulate. All, I suppose, applaudable. But oh! Wherefore thou goest junk?!
As it happened there was no cause for alarm. All I needed to do was go around the bend, something that I am known to be good at, and there it was, as plain as the specs (the vintage specs) on your nose.
The precise location of the junk market was ~ I use the term ‘was’ because rumour has it that the purveyors of indispensable high-quality items and second-hand recyclables may be made to move on again to make way for further civic tarting ~ parallel to the road at the back of Der Wrangel tower, thereupon extending at a right angle, along a sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy, tree-shaded stretch of embankment, skirting a remnant of Königsberg’s moat.
The better-quality items ~ such as militaria and Königsberg relics ~ are generally to be found on the stalls lining either side of the pavement. Here you can discover gems, although not necessarily, or regularly for that matter, at prices to suit your pocket.
The pavement-side sellers are mainly traders, people ‘in the know’, who are hoping to get at least market rate for their wares or substantially more, if they can wangle it.
Experience has taught me that in dealing with these chaps movement on prices is not unachievable, but don’t expect the sort of discounts that are possible to negotiate at UK vintage and boot fairs. Sellers in Kaliningrad are skilled in the art of bargaining and are seemingly absolute in their conviction that if you don’t want it at the quoted price some German tourist will.
A busy Saturday at Kaliningrad Flea Market
If you are after military items, especially those relating to WWII and to Königsberg’s German past, then it is here, along this stretch of pavement, where most likely you will find them. Badges, military dog-tags, Third Reich medals and weapon relics are often quite prolific in this quarter, as is cutlery, ceramics and ceramic fragments, many backstamped with political symbols and the insignia of Germany’s military services.
A word of warning, however. For although Kaliningrad’s German heritage and the fierce battles fought there during WWII would reasonably lead you to expect a preponderance of genuine military relics, as anyone who collects Third Reich memorabilia and/or deals in this specialised field will tell you, counterfeit and reproductions abound. German WWII relics, both military and civilian, bearing ideological runes attained collectable status almost before WWII had ended, and a thriving market in quality replicas to service this growing interest emerged as early as the late 1940s.
Party badges, military decorations, particularly of the higher orders and those associated with the German SS, have been faked and faked extensively, and faked with such credibility that it is difficult to distinguish, sometimes almost impossible, the later versions from the real McCoy, particularly since many were struck from the same dies and moulds that were used to create the originals.
The rule of thumb when hunting out Third Reich bargains from dealers’ stock is that you are less likely to get a bargain than to experience a hard bargain, as the pieces acquired by dealers will almost certainly have been exhaustively studied and meticulously researched. However, if you are tempted to buy, pay attention to the item’s appearance. Remember that genuine military items dating to the Second World War are now well into their dotage ~ 80-years-plus ~ and just like ‘mature’ people will generally exhibit significant signs of age, age-related wear and tear and sundry other defects from natural use and handling.
The other thing to watch out for is a proliferation of similar items at any one time. When in the UK, I was a regular attendee at the Bedford Arms Fair, then held in the now demolished Bunyan Centre, you could guarantee each year that a ‘bumper crop’ of something or other would mysteriously materialise. What an alarm bell that is! For example, one year it was German army dress daggers. Every other dealer seemed to have some and all in mint condition; the next it was German flags. These looked and smelt the part ~old ~ with the exception of their labels, which did neither. So, beware! Before you part with your cash or touch your card on the handset, remember these two wise words: Caveat emptor!
When I buy German these days I do so not to sell on but mainly for nostalgic reasons, and because I am attracted by the historic value only, I am content to purchase military pieces, decorations, party badges and anything else that appeals to me that have been dug up out of the ground. Naturally, condition ranges from considerably less than pristine to battered, biffed, corroded and poor, but an item in this condition is more likely to be the genuine article than one that might be described as ‘remarkably well-preserved’. Moreover, you can usually buy such items at a price that won’t break your brother’s piggy bank (is that another confession?).
The same can be said for architectural pieces such as enamel and metal signs that are Königsberg in origin. Signs ~ advertising, military, street plaques ~ whatever they might be, are personal favourites of mine, since they make historically interesting additions to any thoughtful home design. In purchasing relics of this nature, the same rule applies as the guiding one proposed for determining whether militaria is genuine or not. Signs, whatever their type and whatever material they are made of will, in the main, have been used, thus commensurable indications of use and age should be apparent.
In the past four decades, as original signs, especially enamel ones, have grown in popularity and correspondingly price, various retro companies have been successfully plugging the gap in an escalating market, meeting demand with repro goods. Some of these shout repro at you from a telescopic distance, but as techniques in ageing evolve, it often can be hard at first glance, even after several glances and even after a detailed study, to separate the wheat from the chaff, particularly when impulsiveness knocks caution quite unconscious. And signs are not the only things that are being skilfully ‘got at’. I recall a ‘19th century ship’s wheel turning up at our local auction house. It was so well aged and distressed that were it not for the fact that it was so thoroughly convincing, you could easily have talked yourself Into disbelieving that it was anything other than the genuine article.
This is what to look out for: Signs that are ‘uniformly’ aged or show wear and tear in places where you would most expect to find wear and tear but not to the extent that it dissuades you from going ahead with a purchase are to be placed at the top of the suspect list. The last thing you want to discover, after years of gazing lovingly at the antique sign in your home, romancing on the fancy that this was once on a Königsberg shop front, long imagining how eyes like yours lost in time and to memory alighted on it as yours do now, is to learn that your treasured piece of history was in fact knocked out in China less than a week before you bought it.
Original German/Königsberg signs(photo taken Victor Ryabin Studio, c.2010)
Once authenticity has been established, anything to be had forming a direct link to Königsberg can only be irresistible, not just signs but home appliances, kitchen ware, tea sets, ornaments, furniture, garden tools, anything in fact, especially when that anything bears irrefutable provenance in the form of a maker’s mark. Metalware and ceramics embossed or printed with commercial references, ie references to memorable brands or specific retail outlets, are desirable collectors’ pieces. Old ashtrays, many of which are inventive in shape and size, are top whack in this category. Even if chipped and cracked, they still command high prices, and as for the best examples, which are usually in the hands of dealers, after you have exclaimed with astonishment, “How much!” in those same hands they may well remain.
For a less expensive and in-profusion alternative, you could do far worse than plump for bottles. Bottle bygones are dug up in their hundreds, possibly thousands, in Kaliningrad and across the region, but as there are as many different shapes, sizes and hues as there is quantity, it is not unreasonable to discover rare, curious and even exquisite bottles rubbing shoulders with the more mundane.
In the UK, old bottles from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s are as cheap as chips (used to be, before the West sanctioned itself), but Kaliningrad is not the UK, so don’t expect to get bargains on a par. The trade here adjusts the market price according to the needs and instincts of German visitors, many of whom are easily swayed to part with more money than they seem to have sense for a fragment of their forbears’ past. But “Ahh,” I hear you say, “what price, philistine, can anyone put on nostalgia?” Must I confess again?
I have been known to part with as much as ten quid for an interesting and unusual bottle when it has caught my fancy, but this kind of impetuosity acts in defiance of common sense. If you haven’t got the bottle to part with that much, and you shouldn’t have (Frank Zappa: ‘How could I be such a fool!’), when visiting Kaliningrad’s ‘flea market’, turn 90 degrees from the pavement, head along the well-worn and sometimes muddy embankment, and there you will find bottles and a vast range of all sorts, spread out on the ground on blankets, perched on top of little tables, hanging even in the branches of trees, for this is the market’s bargain basement, home to mainly domestic sellers.
I have bought all sorts of things from this part of the market that I never knew I did not need, not to mention clothes that I have never worn and never will wear. For example, I was once obliged to buy an old tin bucket, and I would not dream of wearing it. It’s far too nice a bucket to use as a bucket should be used; so, there it sits in our dacha full of things that one day I possibly may go looking for but will never dream of looking for in that old tin bucket. It’s the sort of bucket that dealers such as I typically find in house clearances ~ a bucket of flotsam and jetsam left behind by the owner when he up and decided to die; a bucket of odds and ends destined to take up valuable space; the accidental contents of which having absolutely no value at all, I would never be able to give away let alone turn as much as a penny on. I sometimes wonder if this is not the only logical reason why people fill their houses and barns with junk, viz to make more work for those poor sods whose job it is to clear them after they, the owners, kick the bucket. And what a lovely bucket, my bucket is!
Now, where was I? Ahh, yes wandering around on the bank mesmerised by matter.
As I said at the outset of this post, Kaliningrad’s ‘collectors’ market’ is on the move again. Please don’t quote me on this! As Elvis Costello said, it could be ‘just a rumour that was spread around town’, but its veracity is tied to the echo that the strip of wooded embankment roaming along by the side of the Königsberg fort may soon be hosting its last tin bucket. There is a whisper in the air of landscape reincarnation and the rustle of leaves in a public park.
Likewise, I am not entirely certain where this cornucopia of memories, this junk market par excellence, is now officially bound, although the wind in my tin bucket tells me that it may be somewhere not far removed from the city’s botanical gardens.
To be perfectly honest with you (another confession may soon be required), I really harbour no desire to know the new location ~ what the eye doesn’t see the heart won’t pine after. Thus, the next time that I wake up at the market handing over my roubles, I won’t be able to blame myself for going there deliberately and for buying things on purpose. Take a leaf out of my well-thumbed book: never leave chance to anything else but intention ~ you can always confess in the fulness of time.
Revised 22 December 2024 ~ Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information
Airspace Closures
Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Natzify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information. Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide
To visit Kaliningrad, you will need to apply for and have been issued with a Russian visa. For those of you who are not sure what one of these is, it is an official document that permits you to legally enter a foreign country, in this case the Russian Federation. The visa is valid for a specific duration of time. It contains the date of entry to the country and the date of exit, as well as your name, travel document (passport) details and the purpose for which you are travelling.
There are various types of visa depending upon the
nature of your visit, but, for the sake of this blog, let’s assume that you are
visiting Kaliningrad as a tourist.
Russia Kaliningrad Tourist Information: Tourist Visa
A tourist visa will allow you to enter Kaliningrad,
and leave, within a specified time-frame of 30 days. This means that the maximum
length of stay in Kaliningrad is 30 days and no more. It is important that
you leave the country before or on the date of exit.
Before a tourist visa can be issued, you will need to
have confirmation of where you will be staying throughout the duration of your
visit. Two documents are required,
commonly referred to as visa support documents, and they consist of: (1) a
Voucher; (2) a Booking Confirmation.
If you are staying in a hotel, you will need to ask the hotel to send you a hotel voucher and confirmation of tourist acceptance. Once you have received these, you are then ready to make your application.
To complete your visa application, you will need the following:
1. An original passport, valid for more than 6 months, containing at least 2 blank pages for your visa and entry/exit stamps
2. An application form
3. One valid passport-type photograph
4. Payment for application
Note: The Russian Service Centre (The Russian National Tourist Office) can assist you with all stages of your application, including visa support documents. You can contact them by telephone on 0207 985 1195; and/or visit this page on their website: https://www.visitrussia.org.uk/visas/getting-a-russian-visa/
Their location and postal address is:
Russian Service Centre Russian National Tourist Office 202 Kensington Church Street London W8 4DP
However, you will still be required to go in person to the Russian Tourist Office at 202 Kensington Church St, London W8 4DP for biometric scanning . This sounds worse than it is. Biometric scanning means that you need to supply your fingerprints.
The time it takes for you to receive your Russian Visa depends on which service you pay for. Visas can be received within two days of the completion of the application procedure.
Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information: Professional visa support company
To make things easier for you, there are various visa-support companies that you can contact, which will take you through the entire process. My support company of choice is Stress Free Visas, if only because if you do get stressed whilst using them, you can have a good laugh at your own expense! Their website address is www.stressfreevisas.co.uk.
When using their service, you will be asked to fill an
application form online. It is as well to know what to expect before you start,
since when they start asking you questions, such as what is your inside leg
measurement, it will be difficult to do so unless you have a tape measure
already at hand. OK, it’s not that bad, not quite, but there is information
that you will need that you might inconceivably not have thought of.
To this end, please see the following:
Q: Who is paying for your trip to Russia? A: [If it is you, put ‘independently’]
####
You will be asked ‘information about your financial
situation’. You will need to enter your ‘overall monthly income from all
sources’ and various other financial details.
####
You will need to include your National Insurance number
####
You will be asked to enter ‘place of birth’ and ‘date
and place of birth’ of your spouse
####
You will be asked to provide the following details
about your parents:
Name Date, country & place of birth Nationality If deceased, date & place of death
####
You will be asked to provide the name of the hotel you
will be staying at, plus address and telephone number
####
And that, as Bruce Forsyth used to say, “is all there
is to it!”
To assist you in all visa-related matters, here again is the web address for Stress Free Visas: www.stressfreevisas.co.uk
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