Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Tapkoc Belgium Blond Ale
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
6 August 2025 – Tapkoc Belgian Blond Ale
With the name Tapkoc on the collar label, and beneath it, on the label proper, the picture of a piddling cherub (Manneken Pis) with ‘censored’ slapped over his naughty bits, who could resist the play on words? We could, fellow drinkers, because, dear beloved, we are gathered here today to conduct the serious business of reviewing Belgian Blond Ale.
Trusting that the brewers would never be so brave as to brew a beer with ‘told you so!’ in mind, I left Cultura Bottle Shop with Tapkoc nestling in my nice brown paper bag, confident that what was in a name and upon a label had nothing to do whatsoever with what was in the beer or what it would taste like.
Heaven forbid that I would be so lax as to invite accusations of vulgarity, but I sincerely believe that no student of the English language can claim to have mastered that language until they have complete understanding and appreciation of the many idiomatic expressions and the daily uses to which they are put. Take ‘piss’, for example — no crudity intended — not to be confused with ‘taking the piss’, which is something I’d never do.
The impolite word ‘piss’, together with its derivatives and associations, has extremely versatile usage in the English language, a fact no better illustrated than when it is used in conjunction with the gentlemanly art of beer drinking. Take note (make some, if you like): the expression ‘going on the piss’ is a common phrase in the United Kingdom. Precisely translated, it means ‘to go on the beer’, of which an elaboration would be to indulge in a beer-drinking session. Not that in England beer is considered urine; on the contrary, since the dissolution of Watney’s piss water, beer is held in high esteem by many, even exalted by some. For example, when we say in England that we have been on a ‘piss-up’ or ‘pissing it up’, it’s not something we are ashamed to admit to; quite the reverse, in fact. ‘Piss artists’ are rather proud of having been ‘on the piss’. We regard it not in terms of disapprobation but as something of an achievement. In other words, when the English say they’ve been ‘pissing it up’, the connotation of shame is rarely present.
People who have been ‘on the piss’ may feel a little embarrassed when they are forced to admit in consequence that they ended up ‘totally pissed’ and in the process disgraced themselves, but by and large they are not ‘pissed off’ to have ‘pissed it (their money) up the wall’ and ended up quite rat-arsed. Please note, however, that whilst many who go ‘on the piss’ invariably end up rat-arsed, they are rarely ever, if ever, referred to by themselves, their relatives, friends or colleagues as ‘rat-arsers’.
The English are nothing if not reserved, preferring, if at all possible, to avoid the more debasing title of ‘pisshead’ in relation to their drinking habits but have no difficulty whatsoever in accepting the synonym ‘piss artist’ — a name which many practitioners wear as though it were a badge of honour.
Excuse me, once again, if only for excusing myself, which some may infer as a sly attempt to circumvent self-censorship for the sake of being crude and wanting, like a naughty boy, to see the word ‘piss’ in print (well, it makes a change from writing sh…hhhhh!) It’s just that ‘piss’ and the past tense ‘pissed’ have such astonishing versatility within the English language, almost as much, but not quite, as another adaptive English word, which is ‘fart’, but we won’t fart about with that at the moment. We will leave that for a later lesson and get down now to the serious business of tasting this Belgian blond, coz if we carry on like this, getting pissed will be out of the question.
Tapkoc Belgium Blond Ale won a Bronze medal in the ‘Light Ale’ category of the competition for brewing products ROSGLAVPIVO-2023 and a Gold medal in the international competition Beer 2024 in Sochi. [source: https://tarkos.ru/catalog/blond-el/]
Tapkoc Belgian Blond Ale
So, the beer with the piddling Belgian boy claims to be a Belgian blond ale. What exactly did I make of it?
At first sniff, the blond Belgian releases a lovely bouquet of tangy, hoppy notes, accompanied by a deeper, rounded sound. No, this is not the follow-up English lesson that I mentioned earlier. The aroma of this beer is a nose-fondling melody. It’s not quite a symphony of scents, but it pulls out the organ stops similar to the way in which Gobbo Fletton, our village church organist, did during the 1960s, that is, forcefully but in no particular order.
I was relieved, as much as the boy on the bottle, by this reassuring revelation. And yet, as the beer didn’t smell like p…, what exactly did it smell of? Potato juice or pastry? As pale and pallid as it certainly is, someone had come along and put body in this beer (which is different from somebody’s body), and the part that was the most pleasing was that it packed a bit of an oomph. (No, this is not the follow-up lesson to which I alluded earlier.)
In the glass, Belgian Blond has a hazy fantayzee look, which, for a blond beer, is often interpreted as a sign of honest-to-goodness, natural quality, particularly if the fruit-basket scent is oranges and lemons, say the belles with large melons. The chorus line of different notes is as revealing and provocative as the 19th-century music hall Can-Can. Can they? Yes, they can. Have they? By Jove, they have. The fruity exterior cleverly masks a deceptively deep, dense flavour, which may or may not be innocent or, failing that, have been put there on purpose.
Storm in a teacup or pee in a pod? I have no intention of pissing about or pissing off the brewers; Tapkoc is no clone. For a start, and at the finish, Belgian Blond is a six-percenter, and I seriously doubt you will find anything anywhere which subtly brings together such a pleasing piquant taste and underlying strength. If the motive for drinking it is still unclear, perhaps we had better call Poirot. He was Belgian, was he not?
Ah, now you are taking the — guess the penultimate word competition — p…
And my last word on the subject? Writing this review was easy. In fact, it was a piece of — guess the last word competition — p …
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Tapkoc Belgian Blond Ale Brewer: Tarkos Brewery Where it is brewed: Voronezh, Russia Bottle capacity: 0.5 litre Strength: 6% Price: 130 roubles (£1.20) Appearance: Blond Aroma: So much to choose from Taste: An interesting and not unflavourable test of the taste buds Fizz amplitude: 5% Label/Marketing: Statue of a small boy urinating Would you buy it again? It’s already happened
Beer rating
The brewer’s website has this to say about Tapkoc Belgian Blond Ale: A rich golden ale with a subtle, ethereal aroma of spices, created by Belgian yeast. The strong beer gives a noticeable warming effect and stimulates the taste buds but does not overload them. It is an ideal accompaniment to exquisite dishes. Website: https://tarkos.ru/
Wot other’s say [Comments on Tapkoc Belgian Blond Ale from the internet, unedited] 🤔 It’s OK, but it smells like cardboard. [Comment: That’s because he’s got a cardboard box stuck on his head.] 😉 The beer may not be quite in style, but it’s interesting, and I liked it. [Comment: You can’t say fairer than that.] 😑 I don’t get the joke about the name Tapkoc and its relevance to the peeing cherub. [Comment: An unassimilated migrant living in the UK] 😎 Unusual in everything – from the label to the taste. [Comment: He’s got it!]
Burgh Island and Greenway: on the Agatha Christie trail
25 July 2025 – Agatha Christie’s Burgh Island and Greenway House
Burgh Island
Going over the hill, especially when the term is used figuratively to describe the juncture between youth and old age, is not recommended. Likewise, when you reach the top of the hill on the approach road to Bigbury-on-Sea, I suggest that you step on the brakes and stop. From this point your first spectacular view of Burgh Island is likely to be not much different to the one offered to Agatha Christie, Noel Coward, Winston Churchill and Mick Hart.
You see that large building fronting Burgh Island, the white one in the striking Art Deco style, well that’s the Burgh Hotel. It was first constructed in 1929, modified and improved in the early 1930s and, as that decade unfurled, rapidly established itself as one of England’s most in-vogue venues for socialites and celebrities, a premier destination for those with money, those with influence and for those in search of inspiration.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, one of England’s most prolific and arguably most famous literary figures, was so taken by the inspirational ethos of the island, the sophistry of its hotel and the fictional source material offered by its top-drawer patrons that the hotel built her a beach house to use exclusively as a writer’s retreat. There, she is reputed to have written two of her greatest novels, And Then There was None and Evil Under the Sun, the latter extensively filmed on Burgh Island and in and around its hotel as part of the David Suchet series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot.
Burgh Island and Greenway House: on the trail of Agatha Christie
Before Agatha Christie made it her own, Burgh Island, known in ancient times as Borough Island and thereafter variously as Burr and Bur Isle, had a colourful reputation for smuggling, pirates and wrecking — where coastal in Cornwall and Devon does not? On a more prosaic level, the island in the 18th century was a base for Pilchard fishing.
That small, ruined structure sitting on the island’s summit, the one you can see with your naked eye and in more detail through your trusty binoculars, is not a Victorian folly but the remains of a one-time monastery, the remnants of a chapel and what is left of a ‘huers’’ post — a place where ‘huers’ kept watch on the sea. When shoals of pilchards came in sight, the huers would kick up a ‘hue and cry’, alerting the fishermen at shore level that it was time to knock back their beers, exit the Pilchard Inn and put out to sea in their fishing boats.
The Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island
Burgh Island’s Pilchard Inn, unmissable from the mainland even had its name not been emblazoned across its front in welcoming large black letters, is reputed to have made its debut in the fourteenth century. How much of the fourteenth century remains of it today is a matter of conjecture — something to keep you occupied whilst you sit there sipping your beer, gnarled oak beams above your head, much-trodden flagstones beneath your feet and, without a pilchard in sight, without a care in the world.
^ Mick and Joss Hart outside the Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island
The Pilchard Inn, the Art Deco hotel, Agatha Christie’s beach house, a couple of private houses, oh, and not forgetting the huers’ hut, plus a garden shed or two, these are the sole structural occupants of the island’s-built environment.
The island’s natural environment, criss-crossed as it is with a cobweb of tiny footpaths, is a dream of a place for ramblers. It offers spectacular views across a beautiful seascape to the mainland’s rugged and ragged cliffs and on the island itself imparts to the roving explorer awesome sights of precipitous drops into the foaming surf of the ocean below. Rumour has it that someone, mention no corporate names, took the legal route in an attempt to prevent the public from enjoying this gift from God, but thankfully for once on this occasion when money talked no one wanted to listen and justice came out on the side that it should. So gleefully put on your walking shoes and celebrate the ‘right to roam’.
^^ “It’s not true that we wish to deter people from walking across the island. Just follow the line of the fence and you’ll be fine …”
Burgh Island and Greenway House: on the trail of Agatha Christie
Burgh Island is a tidal island, meaning that at certain times of the day the sea recedes like so many hairlines, leaving behind a stretch of sand, similar to a widow’s peak, across which, if the mood so takes them, prospective visitors can plod.
When the tide is in, reaching the island by Shank’s Pony is still a possibility, providing you like wet trousers, but staying with the majority, it is easier and more fun to pay the two-quid passage and make the crossing on the Burgh Island sea tractor.
This intriguing shallow-water machine has been thrilling and ferrying passengers from Bigbury-on-Sea to Burgh Island and back since the 1930s. You may recall Poirot and Hasting travelling on the tractor across the causeway at high tide as guests of the Burgh Hotel in the TV adaptation of Christie’s Evil Under the Sun. On June 25 (2025, that is), we followed in their wheel tracks.
The current tractor, I have been told, is not the original 30s’ model, but the carriage and its application differ very little. I have scant regard for boats but enjoyed the trip to Burgh on this unusual four-wheeled vehicle. It may not be the exact same tractor that ferried Agatha from A to B, but the view of the island that it provides from its elevated platform of the historic Pilchard Inn and what is described consistently as the island’s iconic landmark, the mainland-facing Art Deco hotel, cannot be substantially different from the scene with which the famous writer would have been familiar.
Restored and refurbished in such a manner as to replicate the glamour of its 1930s’ heydays, today’s Burgh Island Hotel is widely regarded to be a faithful representation of what it would have been before it entered a period of slow but steady decline after the Second World War.
The hotel’s golden years are also said to be echoed in the many period events hosted there on an annual basis, with their observance of the sartorial elegance for which the thirties is famous and their ‘take you back to the time’ music of hot jazz, swing and Lindy hop.
A flick through the pages of the hotel’s website should be enough to convince you that no punches are being pulled in guaranteeing paying guests refinement, luxury and exclusivity on an unprecedented Art Deco scale.
It is said that to stay at the Burgh Hotel is a ‘Once in a lifetime experience’, and this is hardly surprising. It is difficult to ascertain what exactly a bed for the night will set your wallet back, but £480, £650 and climbing seem to be the ballpark figures, with afternoon tea ringing the till at £110 for two. At these prices ‘once in a lifetime’ is perfectly understandable’; staying there twice, highly unlikely; and never, more likely than that. However, should you win the lottery …
Whether extortionate hotel tariffs are an evil under the sun, a sure-fired way of keeping the riff-raff out (it’s odd that I’ve never stayed there?) or just an unpredictable gamble on a typical English coastline, often chilly, frequently windswept and not uncommonly pelted with rain, are points on which you may wish to ponder before you part with your hard-earned cash.
Agatha Christie beach house
Ardent fans of the Art Deco period and of Agatha Christie alike may take comfort in the knowledge that what you pay for is what you get. Recent refurbishments at the Burgh Hotel are said to have been made with utmost care and consideration for heritage authenticity. However, I wonder how true this is of Agatha Christie’s beach house?
It is written almost everywhere that Agatha Christie thought of the Burgh Hotel as a ‘home away from home’. What she would make of it now, now that her once authorial haven has been turned into – I quote – “One of the sexiest hotel rooms in the UK …” is difficult to say.
I cannot help feeling that this rebranding, as well as being vaguely tasteless, is a rather short-sighted move. Think about it, if you will. Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE, celebrated author of 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, creator of the world-famous Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, the best-selling fiction writer of all time, conceived and wrote at least two of her novels at the Burgh Island beach house, and now that beach house is being promoted as a place for potentially unwanted conceptions.
You would have thought, would you not, that this made-sacred-by-Agatha place would have better been preserved as a museum to her memory or alternatively restored to the inspirational model it was, no matter how basic by modern standards, so that those in search of the ultimate Christie experience, to whom it seems money is rarely an object, would unconditionally flock. Either of these two options have a more in-keeping ring, don’t you think, to the hotel’s glittering past, than words that would seem to cast it as a 21st century bordello. But then who knows what the future holds for England’s imperilled heritage?
Greenway House
Our personal ultimate Christie experience was to follow up our excursion to Burgh Island, with a visit to the much-loved author’s South Devon summer home, Greenway.
Greenway House, a late Georgian mansion enclosed within extensive grounds on the River Dart near Galmpton in Devon, had been Christies’ dream house since childhood. It came on the market in 1938 at a time when Christie and her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, were masterminding their escape from Torquay, which, as early as the 1930s, was rapidly falling from grace. [Visiting Cornwall and Devon: Is it a good idea? – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia]
Christie refers to the house and grounds as “beautiful” and her summer home as “cozy”. There’s no argument to be had that architecturally the house excels in every respect, but of all the grand English properties that I have visited (the invites are overwhelming!), my take on Greenway House, or to be more precise its location, or to be more precise than that its singular isolation, is that it leans a little on the eerie side.
Greenway’s isolation is one of a particular kind. It owes much to the lay of the land and the place it occupies within that landscape. Yet, its sense of exclusion begins a mile or two before being vetted and admitted at the gatehouse. Once you have crossed this threshold, the perception of leaving the world behind intensifies immensely, growing proportionally stronger as you wind your way along the shadowy woodland lane to arrive at Greenway itself.
Unlike many English homes of its stature, Greenway House does not possess a sweeping, open driveway with statement views of itself and of a customised, limitless landscape. Closed in on arrival by the estate’s former stable block, since converted by the National Trust into a tea room and specialist shops, at the back and to the opposite side, the house is a claustrophobia, albeit an attractive one, of landscaped rock and foliate banks. A short gravelled forecourt, embroidered with a strip of lawn, lies at the front of the property, from which the ground slips steeply away under a formidable curtain of woodland interspersed with thickets of shrubbery down an eye-squinting awesome descent to a wide plateau of water belonging to the River Dart.
I have read reviews that claim that from Agatha’s former bedroom window lovely views are to be had across the Greenway estate, when, in actual fact, the view is restricted to the sliver of lawn that borders the house at the front, and below, way down below, through the mire of trees and bushes, the wide expanse of the River Dart, which, resembling a barrier moat, consolidates the feeling of being locked away and locked within. The seclusion is extraordinary, and its effect upon a fanciful mind more extraordinary still.
Not by choice but by fate decreed, the day that we had chosen to pay our respects to Greenway was the wettest day of the week. No sooner had we entered the house than the heavens poured forth its contents. Trapped within the house, which is trapped within the grounds, whilst trapped within one’s imagination, with the rain streaming down the windows in an endless succession of tears, it was easy to comprehend how vulnerability might find a mind encircled by circumstances such as these susceptible to its intimidation, and then inhabit it and haunt it with scenes of unspeakably brutal murder. In their own different but similar ways, Burgh Island and Greenway House are made to measure locations for the propagation and proliferation of such disturbing thoughts.
There’s a little of each of these locations in a good many Christie novels and considerably more of both in And Then There Were None’s Soldier Island: the inescapable reckoning ground where Christie’s helpless, hapless victims are lured to share a collective fate of serial execution.
As for the house itself, with the exception of the library, I would stop short of calling it cosy, at least with respect to the way in which the word is routinely applied: imposing, yes; interesting, certainly; intriguing, delightfully so; imbued with singular Christie character, of that you can be sure; but if cosiness, the ordinary cosy, the commonplace cosy, the little, the cute and the cushioned cosy, had ever made its home here, then someone or something had come along whilst we were busy splitting hairs on the nuanced notion of ‘cosy’, and quietly done away with it.
I think that it was done in the Max Mallowan dressing room, either with the fax machine or the script of Dead Man’s Folly signed by David Suchet.
Below – literary genius: A copy of the script from Dead Man’s Folly, filmed at Greenway House, inscribed and signed by David Suchet, the eponymous Hercule Poirot, together with first editions of Agatha Christie’s masterpiece novels.
Below – antiques & collectables: Agatha Christie and her husband Max Mallowan were keen collectors. They loved antiques and curios. Greenway House is full of them. Even if the house hadn’t belonged to one of the most famous writers of all time, there is enough heritage on display to warrant more than one visit.
Below – over-fertile imagination:Quite easy to imagine any number of assailants lurking in the seclusion of the walled gardens, the undergrowth, in every nook and cranny, of which there are inconceivably many, and likewise behind every tree.Look at her, for example!
Below – bogged down in thought: If I lived at Greenway, I would thank the Lord every day that unlike the house I was brought up in, Greenway has an inside toilet. Would you want to venture late at night, outside, in the dark at Greenway! Thus, here I am on the Greenway throne, not exactly rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, but feeling rather cheeky all the same.
Below – Greenway library:During the Second World War, Greenway House was requisitioned by the US Coast Guard. The library, then the recreation room, became the canvas for a unique series of 13 murals, which travel across the frieze of all four walls.
The murals, which gain maximum impact from the four restrained shades used to create them — black, white, blue and khaki — tell the story of the US Coast Guard’s 11-month’s journey to England in preparation for the D-Day Landings.
When the property was decommissioned, Agatha Christie admitted that she had been “somewhat surprised” to discover on her library walls Lt. Marshall Lee’s ‘graffiti’. Fortunately, however, as well as writing masterpiece novels, she also seems to have possessed a highly developed sense of respect for our national heritage. She rejected the offer by the commanding officer of the US Coast Guard to have the frieze painted out, preferring to preserve it for posterity as another chapter in Greenway’s history, a memento of the Coast Guard’s stay and for its significance as a wartime record.
Above – Greenway library:Important point: During WWII, when Greenway library became the US Coast Guard’s recreation room, the bar was in the alcove.
Below – echoes of a past life:It is said that in taking on Greenway House the National Trust strove to preserve as much as was humanly possible of the home as it was when the Christies lived there. In this they did achieve, for you enter the property as a guest not in spirit as a paying visitor.
And then there was one (isn’t there always) who couldn’t find the pet cemetery As the rain eased off and the chance of getting soaked diminished, I finished soaking up the pre- and Agatha-Christie atmosphere of Greenway House, and, consulting the ground map of the estate given to me with my entrance ticket, went in search of, and never found, the Christie family pet cemetery. We did locate certain walled places, such as the tennis courts, the peach house, the croquet lawn and allotment, but the cemetery was not in the place where the map told me it would be. I knew I should have taken that course in elementary map reading.
As the appointed time rolled round to rendezvous with my brother — he hadn’t been prepared to pay Greenway’s 17-quid admission and had gone instead in search of fish and chips, which he found but never bought because they were too expensive — Olga wandered off to meet him where we had prearranged, leaving me alone with my map in the befuddling network of gardens.
With a few minutes to spare, I decided to explore further, wending my way at a pace through a series of narrow paths between the gardens’ dividing walls, which, without familiarity to tell me otherwise, took upon a maze-like character. Time conscious, I hurried along, passed beneath an old brick archway, found myself in a sunken garden alone with a trickling fountain, twisted my way through a rock ravine buried in ferns and backed with bushes, which hissed at me in the wind like rattled snakes in a steam iron, and, at one point having popped out briefly where I didn’t really want to be behind a garden gazebo, eventually materialised on a hard-surfaced lane wide enough for vehicular use and good enough for me.
You would have thought that being alone on a National Trust estate would hardly, if ever, be possible, but I was alone, quite alone, or was I? The strong winds rushing like panic through nature’s leafy and bowered confinement seemed to come from every direction, including the fourth dimension, instilling vulnerability, which I am sure our Agatha would have approved of, in my gathering sense of predicament.
There and then, I should have retraced my steps, should have headed off back to the rendezvous point, but the sight of an enormous tree stopped me in my tracks. It was a terrible magnificence, the scene of its uppermost branches spinning and writhing in wind-propelled ecstasy, that I felt the need at once to capture the wanton graphics of it, and, since the tree had no objections, or was otherwise preoccupied, I stooped as low to the ground as I could go (surely not at your age, Mick!) and took some lousy photographs. Alas, my smartarse camera proved itself insufficiently clever to adapt the lens to the angle wanted.
Fast developing cramp, and because the wind cried Mary, thrashing through the boughs of the trees and charging through the bushes like a machete wielding migrant let loose on the streets of London – it seemed to be a someone or failing that a something (a country, for example) descending into liberal madness – or was I merely thinking of my tumble drier at home (?), I gave up with a vengeance on my lonely pet-cemetery quest.
Having no desire to be remembered as victim number one in the unsolved case of the Greenway Murders (which, it would be postulated later, were committed by a psychopath, or psychopaths unknown, who, mesmerised by Agatha Christie’s 66 murder mysteries, all of which had been solved, had decided they would go down in history for getting away with the perfect murder at Agatha Christie’s home), I reviewed my situation with greater urgency than hitherto.
I wanted no part in this drama, that is to say the specific part that my predicament seemed to have singled me out for, so, with a furtive glance around me, and the wind in the trees growing louder than ever, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and nipped off rather sharpishly, not the way I had come, but back to Greenway’s ticket office via the tiny zig-zag path that runs down the bank at the side of the house. And do you know to this very day I couldn’t begin to tell you, even if I was that person who continually makes things up, where, exactly, on Greenway estate, Agatha Christie buried her pets. So, there’s another mystery for you; granted not a whodunit as such, more of a whereisitat, but a teasing, taunting mystery all the same.
You may wish to visit Greenway to solve the mystery of the missing pet cemetery and to reach those parts of Greenway, the famous boating house for instance, which the conspirators of rain and time prevented us from seeing — a good excuse for us to return again. You may also want to prove me wrong that, in contradiction of touristy websites, Greenway doesn’t do cosy, although, in its defence, I doubt that any house of its imposing size ever could or does. What Greenway has, however, is a lurking, lingering aura, which is as close a clue to homeliness as it gets.
The family photos on the grand piano, the umbrella in the hallway stand, the trilby on the table, the linen on the beds, there to create an effect you might say, but then how would you account for that essence of something else, that something quite intangible? The feeling that the house is waiting for those with whom it shared so many years of history, they who loved it and lived in it, to make their way back home again. It’s a persuasive sentiment and that’s a fact, yet is it a red herring? Do any of us ever leave the homes we really love?
Perhaps it really is true that ‘Time is just a mode of thought’. Perhaps this is the concept that holds the key to almost all life’s mysteries, including those we find ourselves in and find inside ourselves when we enter the gardens and beloved home of Agatha Christie’s Greenway.
On the sixth anniversary of Victor Ryabinin’s Death
18 July 2025: Victor Ryabinin, Artist — A Grave Decision
As the sixth anniversary of our friend, Königsberg artist Victor Ryabinin’s, death approached, the established etiquette of paying our respects to him at his graveside was brought into question by a discourse on the imperative or expectations of doing so. The postulation was challenged by another: that unconditionally consecrating the memory of the deceased is greater testimony to everlasting endearment than obedience to the yearly ritual of paying homage at the grave.
Looked at from the departed’s point of view, having stepped out of mortal time to make room for eternity, like the fabled ten thousand men of the Grand Old Duke of York, who, when they were up, they were up, and when they were down, they were down, within the abyss of eternity, when we are there, we are there, and when we are not, we are here. Or are we?
In mortal terms, but not in the dominion of the mortal deceased, a time will come when everyone known to him personally — family, friends and work colleagues, indeed, in time, his entire generation — will no longer be soil-side up, an incommoding inevitability which is almost certain to make visitations of any order difficult, with, perhaps, the exception of the supernatural kind.
Never is this inability to reunite at the graveside more problematic than when you are in your own grave. And never is this fact driven more firmly home than when walking solitarily, consumed by quiet reflection, among the weathered and stooping tombstones within a typical English churchyard.
^^Grave of Samuel Treeby, Ringmore, who departed this life in 1828 …
Pull back the ivy and brush away the lichen and moss from the tombstone of your choice, and there you will find the names of those who lie beneath your feet. There is every possibility that they have been lying there for nigh on a hundred years or more, living their lives again and again, trapped inside the immutable time capsule that begins with birth and ends in death but which only culminates long enough to begin the process all over again. Not a single detail of their lives — our lives — is vulnerable to change, once the lid has been screwed down and the capsule sealed forever. Even Britain’s most fanatical revisionists, the history-rewriting BBC, who constantly lie to the young, are but fleetingly successful in their ideological ambition to reshape and corrupt the past. Their falsification of history may persist for a while, briefly, for a flirtatious interlude, but bound by the law of immutability, the past, when it does, as it will, eventually reasserts itself, all is reset as it should be.
In the last analysis, the already interred are safe, and we who are waiting to be interred, we are safe as well. Somewhere, out there, in our future, locked within our immutable time capsules, the dates and the details of our lives, literally written in stone, are irreversibly and unrevisably sacrosanct: date of birth, date of death and everything in between — nothing and no one can change that, not even those that hate you for living out your life without ever paying for a TV licence.
Comparatively, the world has changed considerably in the six years that Victor Ryabinin moved decisively out of time. Coronavirus, the Ukraine conflict, the shift towards, or constant references to the shift towards, a New World Order (most of us are patiently waiting for a world order of any kind!), I wonder what Victor would have made of all this. I am sure the events of the past few years would have elicited a sketch or two in his daily journal or sent him reaching irresistibly for his easel and his paintbrush.
All deaths are hard to accept, especially for those who are most affected by them, but the death of a creative person is perhaps among the hardest deaths to reconcile. The imponderable is forever present: what would they, the artist, have gone on to create had death not overtaken them? What gems of culture has the world been deprived of?
Victor Ryabinin, Artist – a Grave Decision
The death of someone creative who was also a valuable lynchpin between the lives of numerous people from different backgrounds and walks of life, as Victor professionally and personally was, adds to this imponderability, since once the main link breaks, instantly or gradually, the remaining links are bound to suffer severance, resulting, either way, in the chain’s disintegration. I wonder how many of Victor’s relatives, his friends and art-world colleagues will honour him with their presence this year. Time is often praised, and so it should be, for being the healer it indubitably is, but people are apt to forget that the great healer is also a great invalidator and that with the more time that passes, the more forgetful we become and the easier it becomes to simply forget.
Where anniversaries are concerned, particularly those that relate to death, it is often the case that, willed or not, life gets in the way. ‘Time waits for no man’, making it rather sexist, and life, the bugger, it just goes on until, of course, it doesn’t.
I remember watching a film in which somebody utters the common idiom to the main protagonist, whose fictional wife has recently died, [paraphrased] ‘Life must go on,’ to which the main protagonist replies, “Well, I don’t know about must go on, but go on it certainly does.”
I think we will all agree that life does exactly that: it just goes on, with or without us. Its perpetual motion never ceases: the daily grind with its wearing demands, the past’s emotional baggage bearing heavily down upon us, the cast-iron plans we make for a future we may not live to see, the years that blow away with yesterday’s confetti, more deaths in one’s personal circle and, with each successive page that lifts and flies from the calendar, even be they on angel’s wings, the encroaching prospect of one’s own demise getting ever closer and growing ever larger in one’s consciousness. Yes, I think we can safely say that life goes on alright, irrespective of who we are, what we are, who we weren’t, and who we would have liked to have been and nevermore can be.
The death of a loved one may slow us down, but however hard it slams on the brakes, nothing stops life’s carousel from turning. Life and the world are indifferent mechanisms: Around and around and around they go; why they do it, nobody knows. As one gets off, another gets on. The organ grinder keeps on grinding. Hark! He’s playing our tune. Hum along; it’s called ‘Tricked by Nature’.
It was Mr Wilcox who said to me, “We are fighting a war against human nature.” He went and died in Spain, you know. He imparted these words of wisdom to me when I was at an impressionable age. His words made a lasting impression.
I have often wondered since, as I wonder now, have most of us surrendered? Conscientious objectors to thought are everywhere, and if actions speak louder than words, think what they can do to logic. Losing is never impossible, but fighting on the losing side has its compensations: it relieves you of responsibility and releases you from a troubled conscience should you ever wake in the middle of parenthood with the words upon your lips, “Lord, what is it that I have done?!” The Grand Old Duke of York had ten thousand men, none of whom, like you or me, ever escaped their destiny: when they were up, they were up, and when they were down, they were down. And we’ll all be that way some day and forever.
And so it is with our dear friend Victor: born 17 December 1946, died 18 July 2019.
Victor Ryabinin in his art studio, February 2019, displaying a work of art – a bottle of cognac
I never made it to Victor’s grave this year. Intention was vetoed by humdrumicity. In other words, life got in the way. I did raise a glass to his memory and to who he was and would always be, consoling myself with the thought that I was exactly where I had left myself in the summer of 2019. That’s the other haunting thing that old graves have in common: the mourners never get to leave them, no matter how often they return or if they never return at all.
Those of you who are authentic English – that rules out a good many – will not be unaware of one of England’s most famous children’s story writers, Enid Blyton. She wrote a series of successful adventure novels in the 1940s and 50s about five going somewhere or doing something. For example, Five Go Down to the Sea, Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five on a Hike Together. Without Enid Blyton’s consent, but I am certain she approves (as this is not a woke rewrite), we did something similar in Five Head off to Cornwall.
For those of you who didn’t know that Cornwall is in Kaliningrad, you’re right. It isn’t. But this account finds itself in my cunning ‘Diary’ category, in which I can write about almost anywhere and, failing that, almost anything, even when it isn’t in or relevant to Kaliningrad, so you haven’t caught me out yet.
The Five that went to Cornwall in June of this year (2025) consisted of my not-so-good self, my good lady (I left the bad one at home.), my youngest brother Joss, a venerable Old Gentleman and our version of End Blyton’s Timmy the dog, Kiera. How did we all fit into a Messerschmitt bubble car? The obvious answer to that is we didn’t. We bombed off from Bedfordshire in a large and comfortable Land Rover.
Visiting Cornwall and Devon: What to expect
This is that story, in words and pictures:
Five Use Airbnb Airbnb is a Godsend, isn’t it? It’s also a pain in the arse. Five used it to pick their ideal holiday home, because rumour has it that it’s the best place in cyberspace to track down self-catering accommodation at a reasonable price. To join Airbnb’s happy-go-lucky community, in addition to the usual written particulars, you need to provide a mugshot of yourself and also attach a document, such as a copy of your passport, to prove you are who you say you are.
One of the two cottages in which we stayed also asked for a statement to be written explaining why their cottage was a ‘good fit’. I wanted to write, “Because it reminds me of a pair of underpants”, but refrained from doing so and wrote instead, because we are the Famous Five, who go to places and do things.
Five Go to Briar Fisherman’s Cottage There are no shortage of fisherman’s cottages in Cornwall, perchance because there was a time when there was no shortage of Cornish fishermen. In fact, every fisherman had a cottage, the vast proportion of which today have been converted into holiday lets, presumably because it is an easier way of making money than to go bobbing about on the briny early at the crack of hangover in all kinds of English weather.
Briar Cottage (let’s leave the fisherman out (Oh, that dripping sow wester!)), the one in which we stayed, is located in Boscastle. If you like low ceilings, gnarled beams, lots of original nooks and crannies and plenty of old-world feel – and we most certainly do – then fall in love at first sight with Briar Cottage you most certainly will.
Briar Cottage is chocolate-box picturesque. It is tucked away in a truly sequestered spot, cozily contained within a Victor Matured two-tiered garden, with all the right dimples in all the right places. It is clad, adorned and surrounded by flowers and invested with foliage and shrubbery so perfect in their natural complement that even Enid Blyton’s pen would have struggled to make it more idyllic.
In the near distance, as the rise of the land precludes sight of any other, the sort of landscape that children draw — steep and rolling hills with little toy cows in pocket corners — reach up into the sky and touch the sun with their eyebrow hedgerows, and if you get to sleep in the room that is furnished with two single beds, this is the scene that will greet you, each new dawn as you draw back the curtains. Think character cottage enclosed in a lushly planted garden retreat, and your thoughts will lead you to Briar in Boscastle.
This is how we rated Briar Fisherman’s (Hello, he’s back!) Cottage nestled in Boscastle: Plus 😊 Location: Excellent for touring, not so easy for the local pubs at port level, for which you need to be an accomplished mountain climber or own a funicular railway. Facilities: Everything you could possibly need is there, including the most important thing, which, as you know, is a beer-bottle opener. Condition and Comfort: A+ The cottage cannot be faulted. In fact, it is even better than the owners, described.
Minus 🤔 Parking: If you are spoilt by off-road parking at home, you may feel inconvenienced by the fact that there is no off-road parking at Briar Cottage or designated parking space. There is a small layby just up from the cottage where you can unload your gear, but pay heed that this is a privilege and one that comes with a warning, namely that should you leave your car there unattended for any length of time, they, whoever they are, possibly the Boscastle Mafia, will block it in for a month of Sundays, as this is a private parking spot. The owners of the cottage claim that parking space is usually available a little further down the road. This turned out to be true, and we were happy with that. {Briar Fisherman’s Cottage, Boscastle, is listed on Airbnb and other online holiday-letting websites. Just enter the name in Google😊}
Five Go to Boscastle Remote, rugged, secluded, the village of Boscastle, location of an ancient but still working fishing port, is a treasure trove of antiquity and character. It is a pilgrimage destination for fans of the famous novelist Thomas Hardy and for stout-hearted fellows and gals of the outdoor hiking and trekking variety.
Plus 😊 Location: No better for landscape sightseers, especially those who like it rugged and brooding Amenities: Boutique shops; tourist-oriented cafes and souvenir outlets; three pubs; cafes Places to visit: The Museum of Witchcraft; The Grave of Joan Wytte (White Witch) — if you can find it!; St Juliot Church (Thomas Hardy connection) Atmospheric: Very Pubs: (see Five Review Pubs section)
Minus 🤔 Location: Steep, multiple-hairpin road. The walk from the top of Boscastle village to the port below is not for the faint hearted. This is a double-plus positive, if you like that sort of thing, but not so appealing if you are unsteady on your pins and are wanting in the lungs department when making the uphill journey. Parking: Pay and display only (well, what did you expect) Pubs: (see Five Review Pubs section) #
Postscript: I did not walk from the top end of Boscastle to the port below. I almost flew. My little legs and tippy-toe feet went down those snake-twisting roads as though someone had shoved a firework up my ah …, er, shirt. The time was early evening. The sky was grey and overcast. I was on my own. From one end of the village to the other, there was not a living soul. Or was there? If you like it close and eerie, Boscastle is the place to be.
Five Go to Newquay (but pass straight through it) Footnote (so to speak) The original title for this story was ‘Five Go to Newquay But Wished They Hadn’t’, but I’ve reserved that one for Five Go to Torquay.
Plus 😢 Nothing obvious
Minus 😢😢 Almost everything, without the ‘almost’ Location: Newquay is located southwest of Boscastle (now where did I put my compass?). It is about 20 miles away and, in our opinion, is only worth the trip to assure yourself that you wished you hadn’t gone there. Amenities: Lots of pubs, but, by the looks of them and by the looks of everything else, you wouldn’t want to use them. #
Postscript: We only got out of the car to buy something from one of Newquay’s shops and, even then, whilst leaving the place at speed, were worried about contamination. I checked myself for tattoos, looked in the mirror for rings in my snout and wondered if the soles of my shoes were as down and out as the buildings.
The best thing about visiting Newquay is the sigh of relief as you leave it.
Five Go to Somewhere Special (if only I could remember what it is called. I think it is between Widemouth Bay and Upton.) Location: We are talking here about a dramatic cliff-top view on a section of spear-pointed headland that looks out one side on a ragged coastline of craggy coves weaving and curving as far as the eye can see and, on the opposite side, upon and across a cove prodigious in its proportions, hemmed in either end by jagged wedges of sea- smashing rock.
My name for this dramatic headland is Commemoration Peak, since the top is dotted with slate-slab benches, each one personalised with the names of loved ones no longer of this world. There is also a curious monument, a man-made formation of rocks, where painted pebbles have been deposited bearing poignant tributes to those who were but are no more. The stillness of their lost presence on this wild and windy outcrop, high above the rolling waves, is amplified, and in order to escape the noise of loss, you instinctively cast your eyes to that faraway point on the distant horizon, the place where people across the ages have always gone to look, vainly for comfort and/or meaning, to the edge of comprehension where the sky embraces the sea. It’s an introspective journey, which starts at the end of everything but which, in the end, never arrives there. Practicalities: There is a layby you can park in and a van on the side of the road, where, instead of standing too close to the edge of the cliff, you can come down to earth with a portion of burger and chips.
Five Go to Tintagel The only one among our famous five who could pronounce this settlement properly was our very own Old Gentleman, but as he was once a scientist, it is perfectly logical that he could, n’est-ce pas?
Plus 😊 Location natural: Sublime, in the true sense of the word, as defined by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,1757.
If ever there are two words that have earnt their respective places in Hubert Conspicuous’ Guide to Travel Bloggers’ Cliches, then those two words must assuredly be first ‘breathtaking’ and secondly ‘stunning’. So, let’s go ahead and use them, as we could do a great deal worse in attempting to describe the stunning Tintagel headland and the breathtaking views therefrom: first inland, looking up to Tintagel Castle, then looking down from cliff top to sea and then gazing out to that mystical hinge where water shakes hands with the skyline.
Small man-made paths about the width of rabbit runs, rove up and down and around the grassy and rock-jutting promontories and across the dipping troughs, the highest point of which consists of two tall peaks linked for human passage by a simple scaffold bridge. From a distance, this looks so dangerous that you feel the urgent need to cross it as much as you do the compulsion to venture as close to the edge of the cliffs as you can and hurl yourself right off them. Yes, Tintagel is that sort of place. But it’s also good for the thighs and calves (Do I hear a wolf whistle?), and for wondering out loud for any seagull that cares to answer, how old is Tintagel Castle? Not the remains on the outcrop of rock, but the one that towers in liveable form above the coastal epic, the one which is now a hotel. Without cheating recourse to Google, I bet it dates to Victorian times.
Minus 🤔 If you watch telly a lot, Tintagel is the sort of place that is destined to make your legs ache.
Location town: Plus 😊 & Minus 🤔 Tintagel town is a lovely little place with a meandering main street containing all sorts of shops selling interesting but overpriced stuff for tourists. And why not! Come on, loosen that wallet! You’re on holiday!
It was in one of these shops, not the whisky-tasting one or the one selling pseudo-antiques, that I bought and sampled my first genuine Cornish pasty in years. My advice, as I’m not a carnivore, is to go for the cauliflower, lentil and curry option, and then park yourself on a free civic bench and enjoy! The cafes and restaurants in Tintagel are a ‘cost an arm and a leg’ job, and the pubs, though Cornish kosha once, of that I have no doubt, have, through injudicious gentrification, lost too much spit to too much polish. There are lots of great pubs in Cornwall but none, I’m afraid, in Tintagel.
Five go to Portwenn and find themselves in Port Isaac Phew! Didn’t my brother go on! If I had a rouble for every time he mentioned ‘Doc Martin’, I’d have saved enough to buy myself … not a lot, I should imagine? Location: It’s where they filmed Doc Martin, silly!
Plus 😊 Doc Martin is, I am told, a highly successful, long-running TV comedy drama set in the fictional Cornish port of Portwenn, whose real name is Port Isaac.
Put off by razzamatazz of any kind, I was at the outset loathe to go there, but once we had driven down its impossible narrow streets, along its tiny house-hemmed lanes, missing the sign completely warning ‘Unsuitable Road for Vehicles’, almost mowing three people down, nearly taking out a bay window and arriving much surprised back where we had started still unable to find a space to park in, and could that be with a painter and decorator attached to the Land Rover door handle, I grew immediately fond of the place.
Port Isaac is picturesque today because yesterday its commercial and residential properties were sandwiched together up hill and down dale, twisting, weaving and winding, in order to squeeze as much as possible into the natural lie of the land. Thus, the functional of yester-year becomes the historical quaint of our present. Bless ‘em all, bless ‘em all, the long and the short and the tall, not forgetting their crooked walls, their wonky roofs and their great slate floors …
My brother wasted no time in familiarising me with all the Doc Martin landmarks, particularly Martin Clune’s’ surgery (not the suspected ear job but the fictional office of Doc Martin fame).
After well-deserved refreshment in the Golden Dragon pub, which is painted blue not gold, we walked the sloping harbour road to the house made famous in the Doc Martin series. Judging by the ‘polite’ notice in the window of the property, the conclusion may be drawn that the property’s owners learnt the hard way that fame comes with a price. Respecting their privacy as requested, we refrained from peering through the windows as countless Doc Martin fans must have done, the fiction so bewitching them that it must have escaped all probability that the interior shots of the doctor’s surgery might possibly have been made somewhere in a studio as far away from Portwenn as Portwenn is from Port Isaac.
I am sure that at some time in their never-ending childhood Enid Blyton’s Famous Five visited Port Isaac and whilst there did discover many a smuggler’s haunt, secret passageways by the score and more ripping things going on than ever were conceived in the wildest Doc Martin plots. Unfortunately, however, during our time in Port Isaac, we were exposed to no such shenanigans but were happy to have been given the chance to embrace Port Isaac’s timeless past and pleased by virtue of our visit to have become a small part of its history and it an unforgettable part of our own.
Minus 🤔 The most significant downside to visiting Port Isaac is its dearth of parking. The official pay-and-display car parks sit at the top of the hill, some considerable distance on foot from the village. If the residents wish to put tourists off, and the regional attitude would suggest that they do, then the lay of the land of Port Isaac definitely works in their favour. With car park corrals far away from the port and with streets too narrow and steep to accommodate on-road parking, it would seem that Port Isaac’s structural history contains an inherently grockle-proof element.
Five Go to Padstow Location: Approximately 45 miles from Boscastle Known for: Historic harbour and seafood restuarants
Plus 😊 For me, taking into consideration that I am not a boating type, Padstow is as described above. It has a pleasant, centralised harbour surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fish and chip shops and a network of narrow streets embroidered with speciality shops. Hit it right, mid-afternoon, for Cornish pasties reduced in price. Apparently, if boating is your game, you pays your money and off you float to various destinations.
Minus 🤔 £8.90 for a jacket spud and 19 quid for fish ‘n’ chips. Hmm? Perhaps I have just lost touch with the UK’s inflated cost of living.
Five Go to South Devon
Unable to marry the prerequisites of our trip to Cornwall, which were, not necessarily in this order – a base with pubs in walking distance, accommodation on a reasonable budget, somewhere preferably in Boscastle or as near as dammit for touring purposes for the duration of five or six days – we decided to split the destination in two and, after spending an exorbitant time trawling through Airbnb, alighted on a cottage in the small South Devon town of Modbury, which would thus become phase two of our holiday destination.
Five go to Applecot Cottage in Modbury Applecot, another Airbnb find, is one of a parallel series of 19th century town houses forming Modbury’s Brownstone Street, aptly named once I’m sure, notwithstanding that the street today is predominantly white in colour. No matter to us, however, as Five Go Off with a Satnav.
Plus 😊 Location: Excellent as a home base for exploring South Devon by car
Brownstone Street connects with Modbury high street and in it (not to be confused with ‘innit!’) if you don’t find almost everything you want and almost more than everything you need, then you must be after something else. Amenities: Applecot is dug-friendly and also textile oriented: fitted carpets reign throughout, along with comfortable sink-in armchairs and a highly relaxing settee. You even have a choice of what to use for privacy: will it be curtains, blinds or both?
If I was to compare our first holiday cottage, Briar in Boscastle, with our second in Modbury, Applecot, the defining difference would be that whereas Briar, with its low oak-beamed ceilings and Cornwall trademark slate-stone floor has a masculine feel (ooh, missus!), Applecot, with its accent on soft-furnishings, it’s fitted carpets and comfy chairs, its patterned curtains, art-studio ornaments and all that it contains all in its thought-out place has a feminine personality. But let’s don’t get too gender. Here I am mindful of floaty feminine not frenetically, fearlessly feminist! I wouldn’t want to put you off.
A nice touch at Applecot is the information and welcome pack. Personalised by the host and her husband, this mine of useful information also serves to remind guests that Applecot is not first and foremost a strictly commercial enterprise but a loved and cherished home. It has that lived-in, cared-for feeling, as though the owners have gone on holiday, and you have faithfully promised to look after their home whilst they are away.
My good lady wife professed to be completely in tune with the unspoken essence of Applecot. From the naturalistic ornaments to the ideas expressed in the prints on the walls, both the aesthetic and esoteric ethos vibrated through her energy chords, whilst the rest of us, including the dog, were satisfied to say the least that this well-appointed property was less than a minute’s walk away to Modbury’s nearest pub. One for one and all for ourselves, a win-win situation.
Minus 🤔 It would be remiss of me — and you know that for all my faults, this is not one of them — if I failed to bring to your attention that, as with Briar Cottage in Boscastle, parking at Applecot is problematic. Whilst the inclines in Modbury are nowhere near as mountainous as they are in Boscastle, Brownstone Street is brownstone steep, and once you’ve unloaded your vehicle, which you have to do on double yellows, you must remove it and take potluck that you’ll find a place to put it somewhere at the top of the street. We have Potluck to thank, for he was on our side.
Another consideration, which may or not be important to you, is that since Applecot is a terraced property belonging to a certain age, it does not possess a garden, but in my opinion, be it ever so humble, in terms of overall comfort, its nearness to the pubs and to other high-street facilities, Applecot more than makes up for its parking and garden deficits. Moreover, I should add, the rental price is right! {Applecot, Modbury is listed on Airbnb and on other online holiday-letting websites. Just enter the name in Google😊}
Five Swan Around Modbury Location: Twenty minutes from the South Devon coast; twenty minutes to Dartmoor
Is Modbury a large village or is it a small town? Great imponderables such as this do not detract from the fact that it is darn pretty and quintessentially English. The high street, aka Church Street (or is that Poundwell Street?) meanders gracefully from a steep incline opposite the parish Church of St George down to a dip at the crossroads, wherein stands the Co-op, before becoming a rural road, rising out of site and drifting into the great beyond.
Described widely as a historic market town, in the same way that a renowned English figure couldn’t see any ships, I could see no market in Modbury.
What I did lo and behold was an attractive series of boutique shops, art galleries, delicatessens and a wonderful half-framed timber pub.
Everything in this little place evokes a sense of style and culture redolent of its English past. From the floral wreathes on shop doors, the trailing plants above them and the potted plants which flank them to the brightly coloured bunting connecting the shops both sides of the street, Modbury is a bright and beautiful place. Is it a village? Is it a town? I don’t think it cares that much. I think it is simply content being cosy and complete and being whatever you want it to be. For more information, see> https://www.visitmodbury.co.uk
Plus 😊 I think I may have already brushed upon some of its good points, but an additional feather in Modbury’ positive cap is that its beautiful rural location is in easy day-trip reach of many must-see places, including the golden sandy beaches of Bigbury-on-Sea and the wild expanse of Dartmoor.
Minus 🤔 Give me time, and I might come up with something.
^^^^Bollards!More than a hat trick in Modbury.
^^^^Ringrose, a recommended shop in Modbury. Fun, fabulous and friendly service.
*****Another recommended Modbury shop isMackgill’s Delicatessen : I Just couldn’t stop scoffing their Cornish pasties.
Five Go to Bigbury-On-Sea Location: Bigbury-on-Sea isn’t very big at all. It is a village in the South Hams district on Devon’s south coast about seven miles from Modbury. Even without an Arthur Daley-bought satnav do not expect to cover the seven miles distance in the time it would normally take by car, since the roads are devilishly narrow, are up and down like a roller coaster, maze-like in their twists and turns and claustrophobic in their impenetrable banks of foliage. Does this warrant a minus? I for one don’t think so. I consider it more of a plus on life’s roadmap of unique experiences.
Plus 😊 Bigbury-on-Sea boasts the largest sandy south-facing beach in South Devon and is a popular destination for surfing, kitesurfing, windsurfing, and wing-foiling types. On the day of our visit, although the sun was out, a stiff, cold breeze belted across the Atlantic, coming in such gusts that I had to hang onto my Königsberg hat! One man’s meat is a vegetarian’s poison, thus what to me was a state of inclemency was to the surfers a joy to behold.
Minus 🤔 The coastal view of Bigbury-on-Sea seen from nearby Burgh Island has been spoiled from what in the 1930s would have been an acceptable, even attractive, sprinkling of dwellings into an overcrowded jibbly-jobbly mess, primarily due to lax planning laws and, perhaps, who knows, the odd greased palm or two (are we talking butter or lard?). I particularly dislike the new fad and fashion for those horrible, huge plate-glass-windowed, so-called eco-friendly, wood-stuck, virtue-signaling, steel-framed holiday chalets that have in recent years the frequent and awful propensity for popping up around Cornwall and Devon like a nasty dose of ‘Whilst no one’s looking, we’re bound to get away with it.’ It is my considered opinion that a reprised version of Agatha Christie’s conclusive Then There Were None would do this stretch of South Devon’s coastline a purging power of good.
The other minus box ticked categorically by Bigbury-on-Sea is the old familiar bugbear, nowhere free to park. OK, there are too many people and too many cars, and life is a hustle anyway. But £8.50 pay and display for parking your tin for a measly four hours! Rip-off Britain strikes again. I would willingly cough up double if the local council would guarantee that they would use the money to put to rights the blot which they have failed to protect this beautiful landscape from.
Bigbury-On-Sea has a big, modern, pay-and-display unit, one of those which accepts all kinds of payments, including touch-card and QR-code-by-phone. The only problem is that not many people, including us, seem au fait with its usage. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a piece of proverbial p*ss, but should you be rushing to catch the tractor before it leaves for Burgh Island, give yourself plenty of time, for even if you are savvy with this irritating P&D system, all it takes is that one person to non-comprehendee in front of you, and you may need to roll up your trousers and make the trip to Burgh on foot! Not so very stylish if you are dressed black tie and evening jacket. (I always travel to Burgh this way, complete with a pair of wellies.)
Postscript: Anybody into Art Deco, which includes the 1940s’ clientele of our former Northamptonshire vintage shop, and every living soul who has ever read Agatha Christie, will be cognisant of the fact that Burgh Island is home to, and also privately owned by, the iconic Art Deco hotel dominating its frontal perspective.
It had never been our intention that Modbury would become a springboard for an Agatha Christie experience, the holiday merely evolved that way, thanks mainly to my wife, Olga, who decided when we arrived at Modbury to take a look at the map. Whilst we were in South Devon, we made the Christie-Deco pilgrimage by celebrated sea tractor to the romantic setting of Burgh Island, treading in the footsteps of other great celebrities, such as Noel Coward, Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson and Winston Churchill. Bitten by the Christie bug on Burgh, we later went on to visit Agatha Christie’s summer retreat, her Georgian mansion, Greenway, an account of which I will attempt to cover in a subsequent post next month.
Five Go to Torquay (and wished they hadn’t) Minus 🤔Minus 🤔 Often described with a wicked sense of humour as the ‘English Riviera’, apart from visiting Torquay as part of our impromptu ‘tread in the footsteps of Agatha Christie’, having been to Torquay before, back in the 1990s, I wanted to see for myself if it was as bad as my memory told me it was. It wasn’t. It was worse.
Torquay started its journey long ago and has now completed it, and every step of the way has been downhill. I presume that they call it the English Riviera as a means of circumventing the possibility of anyone going to its counterpart in France. If it’s a cunning ploy by the British Tourist Board, someone should tell them it doesn’t work. It may be Froggy France, but when the French finally wake up and kick posturing Macron out, go and compare for yourself!
Torquay town couldn’t look more rundown than if it was a road-killed rabbit. Urban decay and grubby dilapidation set a perfect scene for pavement sprawling outs and downs and winos. Meanwhile on the shore front, the flowers in the municipal gardens and what remains of Torquay’s famous palm trees, shiver not only in the cold June breeze but at the surrounding sight of commercialisation that is at once and impressionably stark and tacky. Blame it on a snide satnav or an act of gross perversion, but can anyone tell me, please, is Torquay twinned in any way with Newquay and Great Yarmouth? It was foot down hard on the gas pedal and back inland post haste!
Five and the Mystery of the Ever-Arsey Cornish Locals Are the Cornish locals friendly? In a word, no. In another word, ‘grockles’.
A grockle is a derogatory term that has been in circulation in Cornwall since the year dot. It is a means of identifying and disenfranchising tourists by those who consider themselves true Cornish born and bred; brought up, I expect, on a strict diet of pasties and clotted-cream scones. It is a well-publicised fact that those who subscribe to this traditional bigotry can sometimes come across as churlish and unwelcoming, but at the end of the day, it’s all a storm in a Cornish teacup and should be taken with a pinch of salt.
My personal way of getting around this straw-in-the-mouth and smock-frock attitude is by comparing it to those ‘hicks in the sticks acting strangely’ films. You know the ones to which I refer, where strangers come to town and the locals instantly all clam up, as if they’ve suddenly been stricken by a collective dose of Cornish piles.
The way to deal with this legendary hangback is much the same as with any other: Do not take offence; simply take the piss. After all, you are on holiday! That inimitable welcome in the hillsides is one of the reasons I go to Cornwall!
How we laughed😂: Instances of rudeness and unfriendliness that we encountered on our stay in Cornwall — and notice I reference Cornwall and not South Devon — ranged from rudeness in pubs and shops to snidey whispers and muttered remarks.
One glorious moment occurred when on sitting down at an outside pub table whilst one of us went inside the pub to check the interior out, a red-faced old piss artist, who had obviously spent a lifetime overdoing it on the jam and cream scones, warned us not to allow our much larger Akita dog to stray anywhere close to his mongrel pooch or his totally tiny and indifferent dug would ‘’ave her!’ Did he mean bite or sexually? When we rose to leave, he fired back sarcastically, “Thanks for sitting at my table!”, for which we thanked him in return. We assured him the honour had all been his, but on this occasion there would be no charge.
Another instance of unprovoked abuse, even more amusing than the first, took place outside Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft. For one moment, I thought one of the museum’s exhibits had escaped. A tall chap in a black sweatshirt suddenly turned on me: “F*ck off!” he bellowed and then just as quickly added, “Sorry, I’ve got Tourette’s …”
“Think nothing of it,” I replied. “Everyone tells me to F*ck Off! including myself.”
I believe my brother added: “If he’s not told to f*ck off at least once a day, he imagines somethings wrong …”
I am not altogether certain whether this gentleman really had Tourette’s or had discovered the perfect Cornish means of exercising abuse without fear of reciprocation. He did have a badge with ‘Tourette’s’ written on it, and his sweatshirt carried the slogan ‘Swear, Swear, Swear’, but anyone can wear a badge just as anyone can wear a sweatshirt. “It’s a blessing he’s not multilingual,” I thought. But then I remembered the shores of Dover, and every city in Britain, and strategically changed my mind.
Five Review Pubs in Cornwall and South Devon Cornwall Boscastle 👎👎👎 Legend has it that there was once 22 pubs in Boscastle; we found three: Two we used and one we did not, having been steered away from the third by scary tales of a stupendous revamp, which had resulted in the imposition of exorbitant recoup prices.
Cobweb Inn The Cobweb Inn, Boscastle, is prominently situated in the port area of Boscastle itself. It is a great slate-stone slab of a building, five stories tall with an 18th-century history, which evolved into a public house by way of a corn mill, grain store, and off-licence. The Cobweb is a survivor. It survived the devastating Boscastle Flood of 2004 and later, in 2024, a landslip, which brought part of the cliff above crashing down upon it. Its greatest threat to continued success today is its shifty opening times and tourist-unfriendly bar staff.
The Cobweb Inn’s website reassuringly states that the pub closes at 11.30pm. On the evening of our first visit, we were turfed out at 11pm and come the following evening at 10.30am. On neither occasion did those tending the bar forewarn of this impending doom and never the bell for last orders did toll.
On our second visit, the two XXL ladies manning the pumps kept loitering near the bar or peeping around the wall of the bar from the adjacent room, presumably reconnoitring to see how much beer we had left in our glasses, poised for the first opportunity to snatch them away and close the pub. Then came the corny routine of standing the chairs on the table tops and bringing out the furniture polish.
When I rose to buy a pint at approximately 10.30, I was abruptly told, “We’re closing!”
Could they have heard us farting? Except that we didn’t. Well, not this evening.
My brother, being less shy about coming forward than I am, piped up from his seat:
“This pub closes earlier every night. Last night it was 11, tonight it is 10.30, on your website it’s 11.30. Which is it?”
“We’ve got no customers,” came the tart reply.
“We’re here,” my little bruv replied. “What do you think we are?”
It was a good job that the large lady was not a quick thinker or an honest replier.
“You might as well pour me a pint,” I reasoned. “After all, it’s all money.”
She sullenly acquiesced.
Brother wasn’t finished.
“If you carry on treating your customers like this, the pub will end up as an Indian restaurant.”
“I doubt that very much!” snapped the hostess with much, much more than the mostest, thrusting my pint towards me as if she had just removed the pin and was off to take cover again.
We didn’t eat at The Cobweb. We couldn’t. The kitchen was always closed (snigger). But they say the grub is good. Let’s hope for all concerned it surpasses the Cornish greeting. Cobweb Inn, Boscastle website>https://cobweb-boscastle.co.uk/
Napoleon Inn Napoleon Inn, Boscastle: On the second evening of our visit, we were treated to one of the more surreal experiences of our trip to Cornwall: Let’s play it down and call it vernacular. We’ve all seen those films where the main protagonists walk into a remote and secluded inn expecting refuge and hospitality only to discover that there is something amiss with the locals: something odd, something strange, something secretive, something suspicious, something not quite right. Welcome to the Napoleon, Boscastle.
The setting could not be better for a stage play of this kind. An ancient inn off the beaten track: oak beams, flagstone floors, deep dark wooden settles; a number of rooms on different levels; a locals’ not a tourists’ pub; somewhat rundown, faded and jaded; an honest pub in its way, but a pub with something to hide.
We entered the pub via the short steep path that runs at the back of the building and, having been unable previously to use the smaller bar, as it was crammed to the rafters with locals pretending that they could sing, we swerved left yet again into the larger room. However, on this particular evening, the seats lining three walls of this room, and the stools fronting the bar, were occupied by locals who could sing. In fact, all harmonised perfectly, delivering sentimental ballads to do with their native county and singing wistful folk songs about sailing home to Cornwall. As there was nowhere for us to sit, we sailed off into the lower bar at street side, returning to the upper room when the choral troop had gone.
We had barely raised our second pint of Hicks up to our thirsting lips than the hicks from the sticks descended upon us; the first in the buxom form of a woman who introduced her personage as the landlady of the pub. She plonked herself down at the end of the table and began to ask us the usual questions: Where did we come from? What were we doing here? Why were we staying in Boscastle? Switching into banter mode, we soon had this rather stout lady in stitches. But then, just as it does in the films, the mood changed quite abruptly, and slowly, but with stealth, we found our table surrounded. The questions kept on coming, but more insistently now and noticeably with a warmth that seemed to be cooling rapidly. A chap, on whom we had never set eyes and didn’t really want to, was suddenly summoned behind the bar. He was a cross between Rolf Harris and Gerry Adams, with an attitude positively hostile. We had the buxom one to the left of us, some young fellow-me-lad sprawled half on half off his bar stool opposite, a good-looking bint perched on the bar stool next to him, a non-descript innocent bystander (they always get hurt, do they not?) and to my left, seeming to guard the exit, but possibly only loitering, a little Chinky Chinese chappie. To say that I suddenly saw myself on the Jon Huston set of the film The Maltese Falcon would be putting it mildly. Was it all about to kick off? I clasped my pint glass firmly. But then almost collapsed into tears, as it was roughly put to us that we looked like undercover authorities, possibly the police!
Whatever else the Napoleon wasn’t, and what it wasn’t was welcoming, it was a lovely piece of pub-goer’s theatre.
As for the Sunday roast and the tastiness of the Yorkshire puddings. You’ll have to see Trip Advisor if you want to know about that. Napoleon Inn, Boscastle website>https://www.napoleoninn.co.uk/ NB: Due to the escalating level of paranoia, we refrained from taking photographs 😁
The Golden Lion The Golden Lion, Port Isaac, calls you by your name. If you are a pub-going person, (and if you are not, you should seriously consider jumping into a rubber dinghy and trumping off to another country, as pubs are a part, an important part, of our heritage) Port Isaac’s Golden Lion, which is incongruously painted blue, is too irresistible not to frequent.
I’ve never seen any of the Doc Martin programmes, but I’d wager my penny to your pint that in the making of the drama, the Golden Lion must have featured in one or two of the episodes. The pub’s location in the port’s layout demonstrates how successfully town planners in days of old got their priorities right. Where better to put a pub than on a sharp bend at the bottom of a great big hill? Coming down, you need to stop for a pint to put a brake on your speed; going up, you need to stop for a pint to make the uphill journey more of a struggle, so as to blame it on the beer rather than too little exercise. Inside, the pub is as wooden as any old port pub should be. It has a much oversubscribed to veranda facing the sea and the cliffs, and out back, down a narrow alley, a stone-walled seating area that sits above the ancient harbour below. Within this welcoming walled-in wedge stands something you may have failed to install in your garden: a sea-salvaged ship’s cannon, the history of which you can acquaint yourself with here: https://www.portisaacheritage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/The-Gun-in-the-Bloody-Bones-Yard.pdf
South Devon
Modbury The White Hart Hotel Modbury’s historic coaching house, now a gastropub with rooms to let, is conveniently just across the road from Brownstone Street. I say conveniently, for if you are staying in Brownstone Street, as we were, it’s just across the road. The inn may be credited with a long history but, like many pubs in the UK, all that it had has been lost to an over-zealous and unimaginative revamp, which has robbed the pub of its past and turned it into an echo chamber. The older chaps at the bar were real, proper English chaps, one and all gifted by God with hospitable natures and senses of humour. The younger ones were yawpers, and it was their incessant grating cacophony that drove us from the pub to the Exeter Inn across the road. We noted in the brief time that we were on the premises that the White Hart stocks a range of beers more exciting than the standard fare of most pubs in the area, many of which are dominated by bog-standard brews from St Austell Brewery, but sadly when we called in, the beer selection was down to one. Catch it on a night when the yappers and yawpers are absent, or fitted with a silencer, and when all the pumps are fully loaded, and maybe the pub would be worth a more protracted visit.
The Exeter Inn The Exeter Inn in Modbury is billed as a 14th century coaching inn. The outside is a medievalist’s architectural dream and without question the jewel in Modbury’s high street crown. I wonder, however, if the half-timbered structure is less Middle Ages in origin and more a 1930s’ folly?
Peeping through at the diners in the window seat, we got the impression that inside the Exeter Inn would be the Talbot Hotel Oundle and were rather relieved, therefore, that having left our black-tie attire at home, the interior turned out to be anything other than we expected. Deep sigh of relief, also, came with the discovery that unlike Modbury’s White Hart Inn, The Exeter Inn had not been unwisely ‘got at’ — at least not yet!
The Exter inn, in Modbury, is unspoilt. There is plenty of wood, and it’s painted black – snob-screen divisions, low oak beams, wall supports – all painted black. There is a multiplicity of nooks and crannies and other age-old features, such as sections of dark slate paving, which can easily be likened to the in-floor tombstones found in Britain’s churches and cathedrals.
If it wasn’t for the lack of good beer and a woman behind the bar with little or no interpersonal skills, I would nominate this pub as a contestant for what a pub should be. Alack-a-day, however, good beer and a variety of it, together with a congenial welcome, were conspicuous for their absence. The woman behind the bar had an unfortunate way of addressing her customers. She sounded and she looked like she had entered the licensing trade by way of being a sergeant major, a matriarch of a 19th- century workhouse and the governor of a Victorian prison. Appropriately, the only beer on offer was the aptly named Jail Ale, which was perfectly in keeping since service at the bar was like admission to the nick — empty your pockets and just keep quiet!
Contrary to its external image, the pub’s interior is a trifle worn out, even to the extent that the down-the-yard outside gents has a wall painted black to pee up and the proverbial ‘plink, plink’ water cistern. This was fine by me, to whom such nostalgic details are hallmarks of propriety. An old pub should be what it is: not a pastel-washed, block-wood furnished waiting room, pandering to the whims and caprices of the arty-farty three-course meal and ‘mine’s a red wine’ brigade. If you would like to know what the food was like, the crisps are quite expensive. The Exeter Inn (which is not in Exeter but in Modbury) website> http://theexeterinnmodbury.com/
The Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island Almost every old tavern is Britain’s oldest tavern in the same way that almost every old tavern in Britain is haunted. Nobody has yet told me whether Pilchard’s pirate Tom Crocker haunts its 14th century cellar, but if he doesn’t, he should. The pint of Otter Ale that we bought in the unspoilt upstairs bar overlooking the sea was one of the best we savoured in Cornwall and in Devon. And even if it hadn’t been, the Pilchard is worth the trip, either on foot or by sand tractor, just to take in the historic patina of all that has gone on, been thought, felt and said within its time-sanctified, oak-beamed and ancient-walled interior.
The Journey’s End, Ringmore, South Devon You won’t find the pub immediately, but the pub sign is unmissable. It is a finely crafted work of art. The carpark is opposite Ringmore’s All Hallows Church. Pop inside and confess your sins (you know a confession is overdue), take a stroll in the graveyard as a timely reminder of what one day will be and then head off on mortal foot into the charming chocolate-box lanes of this tiny, seclusive hamlet. The pub is directly in front of you, there at the foot of the hill, built into the verdant landscape like the cottages that surround it as though there was never a time in history when they were never where they are now.
The Journey’s End is said to have started life in the 13th century and is a wood and flagstone memorial to the origins of its ancestry. It is all antiquity, abundantly layered with atmosphere and, on the occasion of our visit, gets a big gold star for having the friendliest and most accommodating host of all the pubs that we experienced whilst touring Cornwall and Devon. Thank you, Mr Publican, for taking the time, even though the pub was busy, to grant our party access to, and for apprising us of the history of, the building’s old armoury room! It was a pleasure to make both your, and its, acquaintance! The Journey’s End, Ringmore, website>https://www.thejourneysendinn.co.uk/
The Warren Inn Historically, and due to its isolated location high up there on Dartmoor, The Warren House Inn has got an awful lot going for it. I’ve stopped off here twice, this holiday’s visit making it three times, just to experience the odd phenomenon of walking out of a pub onto a magnificent rooftop wilderness.
The Warren House has many claims to fame, one being that it’s fire has been burning since 1845. Great Galloping Expenses Batman! “Shh, don’t tell anyone, but I forgot to stoke it up last night!”
I love the aged-in-the-wood and stone interior as much as I love studying the old framed photos that capture The Warren through decades of its history. It was such a shame, therefore, that the woman behind the bar got a bit of a bark on when she learnt we weren’t in the offing for a five-course meal. “They’re all reserved!” she rasped, alluding to the tables. Whereas, in point of fact, they weren’t. The Warren House Inn website> http://www.warrenhouseinn.co.uk/history.html
Five Go to Dartmoor Returning to Dartmoor after a 40-year hiatus, I was struck, as many have been before me, by the sudden change that occurs on leaving the green chequered meadows of the South Devon countryside for the rugged, rolling expanse of this inspirational landscape. The change is not purely one of visual contrast, it cuts much deeper than that. There is a permeating quality to Dartmoor, its wild moorland, formations of granite rock, lack of a new-build housing estate, its unexpected yet perfect isolation, that penetrates the psyche and sets the Romantic spirit free.
Dartmoor’s erratic climate has been well-documented over time, and, I am pleased to say, it did not disappoint. Within minutes of leaving the sunny climes of the rolling South Devon countryside and climbing into the moorland wilderness, the sun we had left behind was peremptorily replaced by a brooding panoply of seven, or maybe even more, non-erotic shades of grey. A fine wet mist descended. It carried in the breeze, bringing with its murkiness unforgettable images of Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing. Our very own Hound of the Baskervilles, except that she came from Bedfordshire, was, with her powerful shoulders and grey-white beast-like fur, as close as I had come in years to a real, live, snarling werewolf. “Stick to roads!” I heard a voice say. Luckily for us, the chances of doing anything less were slim. Not forgetting that we had in our possession the most reliable satnav money could buy, we also had new friends: several helpful Dartmoor ponies, who knew the moors like the back of their hooves.
Five Keep Out of Dartmoor Prison As soon as I mention Magwitch, you’ll think big man with a bald head and a bent nose, and before you know it the puzzle will have fallen into place: Dartmoor+Dartmoor Prison+Magwitch+Charles Dickens = Great Expectations.
Dartmoor was also the prison from which the infamous London gangsters, the Krays, were alleged to have sprung Frank Mitchell, alias ‘The Mad Axeman’, whom, it was also alleged, they later went on to murder.
To appreciate Dartmoor prison, preferably from the outside, in all its harsh Victorian glory, Dartmoor needs to be dank and bleak. As it is often, it seldom fails to press all the right emotive buttons.
Five Went to Other Places in Cornwall and Devon They did, indeed.
In conclusion, there isn’t one (Dr Towlson: “As you go through life, you often find that there seldom is.”): Devon and Cornwall are two counties in England where social and cultural history, ancient history, scenic and sublime landscapes and thought-provoking sensorial seascapes converge to offer the visitor an almost infinite range of experiences that will keep you coming back for more even before you leave.
Visiting Cornwall and Devon: Is it a good idea? Can you think of a better one?
A step-by-step guide to the six days it took to create the world
10 February 2025 ~ Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition
Holiness, theological doctrines and a biblical view of the world, these are some of the many spiritual components of our mortal existence with which, I imagine, I am rarely associated. I can think of hardly anybody among those few who think they know me, and that includes myself, who would even half believe that I would take an active interest in the genesis creation narrative. And yet, there I was ~ where, I shall tell you in good time ~ not merely taking an interest in, but following in the footsteps of, the Divine Creator’s plan.
This genesis paradigm has been used to explain why we go to, or in England used to go to, church on Sundays and why on that same day, before the evil ones changed the licensing laws, the pubs worked fewer hours, so that we, the people who used the pubs, would stay at home and rest in order to work greater hours in the restless week to come. Is nothing sacred to exploitation? The answer to that is no.
I had not been asked such searching biblical questions since I was a nipper, and, as far as I can recall, had never been asked them whilst standing in front of a giant globe of the world, lit up and suspended within a hushed and semi-darkened room, bathed in a red-filtered light, with a Lutheran priest standing before me dressed in a pair of jeans surrounded by a semi-circle of orange-painted rocking horses.
In telling you that the cavernous, scarred, hollowed out, red-brick room in which myself, my wife, the priest, the globe and the dinosaur were congregated was one piece in the mammoth jigsaw of Königsberg’s Pomart Brewery, a rambling late-19th century pile undergoing restoration and emerging from its ruined condition as a multifarious public space, those who think they know me, and this includes myself, will pick up on the one word ‘brewery’ and whisper slyly under their breath, ‘Hmm, so that’s why he was there!” But both of us could not be more wrong. Though it shames me to admit it, I was not strictly or exclusively at Pomart’s for the beer.
Not that I have not been aware of the Pomart Brewery’s existence; could I of all people be guilty of this oversight? I have known it as a historic landmark fallen into dereliction and, in more recent months, as an ambitious restoration project, complete with functioning brewery. The fact, therefore, that I have not had time to explore it in either its faded former or current glory testifies to the many things that there are to see and do in and around Kaliningrad. But here we were, or rather there we were, at last, attending an exhibition called Creation, a deceptively simple title for something of such conceptual and spatial magnitude.
Ponart Brewery Creation of the World Exhibition
The art group ‘Grain’, Creation’s creators, originates from ‘Annenkirche’ (in Russian: Анненкирхе), or the easier to relate to St Anne’s Lutheran Church in the Russian city of St Petersburg.
The group describes their exhibition as a “biblical view of the creation of the world through the prism of modern art … 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 the creation,” Creation’s creators promise. “You will be able to touch God, get closer to the heavenly bodies and decide for yourself whether or not to bite the forbidden fruit.”
Tempted? I wouldn’t recommend it. Although among the exhibition’s stimulating props and large-scale installations, you will find no shortage of apples, like everything else in this tour de force the apples are only as real as symbolic licence permits them to be. The creators of Creation invite you to leave this material world and sink your teeth into something that you may have bitten into before, but which lies beyond the secular yonder to which you have grown accustomed.
Ponart’s Brewery was not created as a venue for Creation, it was created for the creation of Pilsner lager (there’s no accounting for taste), but as an exact fit for Creation’s needs, it is difficult to imagine anywhere else coming reasonably close. Ponart swallows everything whole ~ you, me, apples and all, even the giant globe of the world and the looming sphere of the moon. To the exhibition’s props, the gargantuan scarred-brick labyrinth constitutes a compatible universe, an expanse in which each exhibit finds its own unique space, providing the parabolic journey, along whose line the exhibits lead you, with a transport of celestial commentary and a glimpse into your own beliefs, which, latent within your spiritual landscape, are as revealing in their intimacy as they are in cosmic proportion.
Each exhibit seems to signpost biblical images in your childhood past, which, as you are gradually reacquainted, shuffle to and fro against an ever-changing, dream-like scenery, part comprised of book illustrations, part the work of your own young hand. You can almost feel the wax of the crayons brushing against your fingers and feel the smile on your face at the Rembrandt you have created.
Creation is the kind of exhibition, the startling kind, where you can live the Earth’s first six days of life at a pace that suits your ruminations, and when you feel you have reached the seventh, you can take a well-earnt rest, for example, in one of Ponart’s relaxing bars or atmospheric restaurants.
Creation has never been so creative and Ponart’s never so tempting.
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Double Mother T.
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
29 January 2025 ~ Double Mother T. Double Chocolate Stout Rewort
A brother of mine who came and stayed in Kaliningrad refused to drink and eat with us at the restaurant of our choice. He claimed it was too expensive. He ate and drank in a place overlooking the Upper Pond. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he chided. “You get a big pot of green tea and a large burger for next to nothing. It’s f*cking handsome!!”
Unburdened by his eloquence, I am not about to say the same or even something similar about Rewort’s Double Mother T. For starters, I wouldn’t dare, as the tin leaves me awestruck.
Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu MC, better known as Mother Teresa or Saint Mother Teresa was, I’m sure, a dear old soul, but whatever is she doing staring out at you like that from the side of a lowly beer can?
Unless you are one of the chosen devout, and if you are, you most likely frown on the wickedness of beer drinking, purely in brand marketing terms the presence of dear Mother T is not arguably a horse you would willingly back, and yet the one thing it doesn’t do, this image, is put you off enough to prevent your curiosity from taking the can from the shelf.
Let’s pause here a moment to reflect on the packaging. It is purely and simply a work of art, not just in its visual makeup but also in its tactility. If you see this can in a shop, you will feel the need to pick it up, and when you feel the texture, you will feel the need to buy it. After all, if it tastes as good as it feels, you are on your way to a winner.
Double Mother T. is sometimes described as an imperial stout. There are two stories circulating in Russia’s beer circles pertaining to the genre imperial stout. The romantic one has it that imperial stout was commissioned by the Russian Imperial Court, brewed in Europe and then shipped to Russia by sea. The legend goes that the brew owes its strength to the safe passage of the beer, which needed to be highly hopped and amply infused with alcohol to preserve it on its long sea voyage. Story number two is somewhat less adventurous. It suggests that the Russian Imperial Court liked its beers rich and strong, and wallah! Mother T!
I confess, and I felt the need to do so as soon as I saw the tin, that I prefer the sea-salt legend, with its accent on discernment, rather more than I do the notion of the Russian Imperial Court looking for a recipe on which to get pissed quick. I could go on to gild the lily, alluding to sailing ships of oak, the billowing of the unfurled sails, the splashing foam of the ocean waves as the bow cuts through the silver-blue briny, but all of that means nothing to me. I am a steadfast landlubber, who is not fit to shovel (Could you help with a rhyme?) coal from one ship to another.
I confess, however (I’m at it again. It’s that picture of Mother T.), that when it comes to sinking beer, I’m an admiral in this league.
Piping myself on board, therefore, which is something I do with aplomb, almost with as much dexterity as when I blow my own trumpet, although the packaging of this brew both worried and attracted me, I was not altogether convinced that Double Chocolate Stout x 2 would partner well with crisps and peanuts. Would it be, do you think, as chocolate as double chocolate could be?
The answer is ‘Yes, it would!’ You can say what you like about this stout, using predictable beer-reviewing words such as ‘notes’, ‘hints’ and ‘tinctures’, but I am willing to swear on a stack of Mother Ts that when I pulled the seal from the can, chocolate, no, double chocolate, enveloped my old olfactories, just as it used to do when I lived in Norwich and regularly parked my car outside the since defunct chocolate factory; Rowntree’s, I think it was.
It was chocolate in the can; chocolate up your nostrils; and with some, as it turned out to be, unnecessary trepidation, it was chocolate in your mouth. And if you were clumsy and spilt it, it would be chocolate down your trousers.
I deduce, like Sherlock Holmes (I’ve got his hat!), that a single version Mother T. would not be as deep as the double version and also less in strength. At 6.9%, Double T. delivers a clout, but its gloves are lined, made of silk and black, so you do not see it coming (a bit like being mugged in Brixton) and when you do eventually feel it, the blow befalls you like a gentle caress (which is not at all a bit like being mugged in Brixton).
The finish is chocolate; the aftertaste ~ you’ve got it! ~ that is chocolate too. The cunning combination of chocolate, beer and alcohol makes for a strongly addictive beverage. “Whatever next!” I hear you cry, “Cigarette-flavoured beer!”
The all-round from start-to-finish taste is inescapably rich, so forget about winning the lottery. And each successive sip pays dividends; it just gets richer as the can goes down. I could drink this anytime, but preferably in winter when the nights are drawing in and the fire is blazing cozily in the hearth, but I would not want to drink it with a bowl of trifle in one hand and a chili sandwich in the other just before going to bed. How you could do this anyway, unless you had a third hand, is a matter for conjecture, preferably undertaken when wearing Sherlock Holmes’ hat whilst sipping upon a glass of imperial stout.
You have to hand it to the Rewort Brewery, when all is said and done, their Double Chocolate Stout is, with due respect for piety, one helluva beautiful beer!
My apologies to Mother T.
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Double Mother T. Brewer: Rewort Where it is brewed: Sergiev Posad, Russia Can capacity: 0.5 litre Strength: 6.9% Price: It cost me nowt ~ it was a present; average price 210-290 roubles (£1.72-£2.38) Appearance: Jet black Aroma: Chocolate on chocolate Taste: Chocolate Fizz amplitude: 0 Label/Marketing: Different ~ to say the least Would you buy it again? Yes, yes and yes
Beer rating
The brewer’s website has this to say about Double Mother T.: Unfortunately, it doesn’t have anything to say. But here is the website: https://rewort.ru/
Wot other’s say [Comments on Double Mother T. from the internet, unedited] 🤔Unfortunately, no. A very sweet aftertaste that does not hide a dense body. The double is not felt at all. The last similar one that comes to mind was a brulock with condensed milk. But there was a good stout and quite cheerful and recognizable condensed milk. This one is somehow out of place. [Comment: Do you know what he is talking about?] 😲Not bad at all, but there’s a shitload of yeast floating around, that’s a minus, of course. [Comment: There’s a ‘shitload’ of something floating about, and it’s not yeast!] 😑 Dark chocolate with coffee, thick, but has a slight heavy aftertaste, not something you can drink often. [Comment: Often, yes; a lot of, no.] 😂This stout was a lot easier to drink than the image on the can is to look at whilst you are drinking it. [Comment: No comment.]
It’s quite simple, really: If you love marzipan, this is where to go
23 January 2025 ~ Resort Shop Zelenogradsk a Must for Marzipan
The reason why many people have never heard of Königsberg is that in 1945 it ceased to exist. Very few people make the connection between the Königsberg that was and the Kaliningrad that is.
One chap, for example, on espying my Königsberg baseball cap perched on my head in the pub, insisted that Königsberg is a city in modern-day Germany twinned with the UK seaside town of Cleethorpes, and he wouldn’t take ‘niet’ for an answer. Learning something new every day is an occupational hazard when drinking in English pubs.
But even those who are acquainted with Königsberg, who know something of its history, the existence of its cathedral, that it was once home to the German philosopher Kant, and that it was, in WWII, reduced to ash and cinders, are probably none the wiser regarding the city’s reputation as an erstwhile-prized production centre for an exceptional kind of marzipan.
For the uninitiated everywhere, marzipan is a sweet whose primary ingredient is almonds. It is a versatile confection, taking many shapes and forms, and is more likely than not these days when found in general retail outlets to be a chocolate-coated version companioned by other candy bars.
Königsberg’s marzipan history kicked off in the first decade of the 19th century. The main players were the Pomatti brothers, who, because of the exceptional quality of their marzipan goods, were among the first confectioners in Königsberg to be granted a Royal Warrant of Appointment, effectively establishing them as approved suppliers of marzipan products to Königsberg’s royal elite.
As the taste for marzipan grew, Königsberg’s stable of marzipan makers increased in line with trends in neighbouring countries, leading to the production of different kinds of marzipan each endowed with their own regional character, each prepared and baked in a style which identified their origin, and which eventually became the trademark of a particular type or variant.
Although traditional Königsberg marzipan does not share the elaborate traits of marzipan originating from the German city of Lübeck, its scrolled ‘C’ and ‘S’ shaped sweets, tartlets and jam-filled confections are immediately identifiable by the toasted, crispy, golden-brown finish imparted to the marzipan’s surface by preparations and techniques that remain a secret to this day.
In taste, Königsberg marzipan is further distinguished by the incorporation of less sugar and a dash or two of rose water to the quality almond paste, which, together with the toasted topping, infuses Königsberg marzipan with an unmistakeable flavour.
Resort Shop Zelenogradsk a Must for Marzipan
Today, Königsberg’s successor, Kaliningrad, continues to purvey an eclectic range of marzipan products in many different forms and flavours. However, whenever I need my marzipan fix, I toddle along to the simply named, but not to be underestimated, specialist ‘Resort Shop’ (Kurortnaya Lavka as it translates in Russian), which is located in the high street of the pretty Baltic coastal town named Zelenogradsk.
Unassuming but attractive, this cozy and compact shop is a shrine for marzipan pilgrims. Its diverse array of almond-based goodies, in ready-to-eat chocolate-bar form and presentation gift packs, many of which are slanted towards a nostalgic Königsberg theme, offer a spoilt-for-choice selection that any marzipan addict will find difficult to resist.
Putting it another way, if it’s marzipan you’re after, either for yourself, or as a souvenir for a special other, Zelenogradsk’s Resort Shop is the place to find and buy it.
Another feather in Resort Shop’s cap is that offers you the opportunity to augment your confectionary purchases with novel souvenirs and ~ surprise, surprise ~ items of silver jewellery, as well as walking away with, after you’ve paid, of course, one of several or even several exciting tea and coffee blends.
And then there’s the economics of it. For an independent retail outlet geared to the tourist market, the prices at Resort Shop are really rather reasonable.
Resort Shop Zelenogradsk
I cannot walk Zelenogradsk high street without responding to the urge to call into this shop to furnish myself with a marzipan treat and, as I become notably fussier about the coffee that I drink, to unite my marzipan fetish with my rediscovered beverage hedonism.
For marzipan hunters anywhere, Zelenogradsk’s Resort Shop takes an awful lot of beating, which is why I am banging its retail drum.
Time for a coffee, methinks; pass the marzipan, please.🙂
The line up of commentators includes Chris Phillips, former head of the National Counter Terrorism Office, ‘terror expert’ Philip Ingram, Professor Paul Rogers, Emeritus of Peace Studies at Bradford University, Anthony Glees, director at the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham and Former UK army commander Colonel Hamish De Bretton-Gordon.
In the aftermath of the vehicle attacks in Germany and the United States, the consensus among the experts is that a terrorist attack in Britain is ‘likely’.
A cornerstone key word in this article*, and the many articles like it, is ‘vigilance’.
“Public vigilance is critical to our efforts to keep our communities safe, and we continue to ask people to report anything that doesn’t feel right to police”*
Rather impractical, don’t you think? Since the last time anything ‘felt right’ in the UK, Winston Churchill was prime minister, and nothing has ‘been right’ in the UK since the Immigrant Coup of 1997.
Easy to say and sounding good, just as impractical and also impossible, is the nice and simple notion that vigilance alone is all we need to protect us. Perhaps if we were less busy disproportionally observing ethnic sensibilities and watching our ‘Ps’ and ‘Qs’ for fear we may offend those whose mission it is to destroy us, we might better spot the buggers before they mow us down in trucks.
The takeaway from the cited GB News article would seem to be that what we need to be vigilant for is the waving of the ISIS flag, since the focus of this article, not the editorial focus but that of the security experts, is the resurgence of, or the ongoing threat from, ISIS ~ which it is, I am not quite sure.
However, the real threat is broader than that and also more endemic. For whilst terrorist organisations like ISIS have mass recruitment appeal and structured network resources, the crux of the terrorist problem, as it applies to Britain, lies in the sheer and growing number of migrant hostiles and the imported terrorist mindset that has taken root in British soil and is spreading like a pestilence across a land once green and pleasant.
By adopting the simple but incontrovertible maxim that if we didn’t allow the terrorists in then they could not do what they do, the gateway to the problem is brought sharply into relief. Either by failure, collusion or both, Britain’s liberal political elites have ignored the lessons of history, lowered the drawbridge and let terror in, and now everything they say, such as the paltry ‘you must be vigilant’, and everything they do, which is nothing or not enough, is akin to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted ~ or should that be, leaving the harbour gates open for the boats to come streaming in?
Brits told Be Vigilant
Vigilance is and has always has been a crucial survival pre-requisite, as life is a dangerous place in which to suddenly find oneself, but I belong to a generation that is old enough to remember a time when one could walk the streets of Britain with a vigilance commensurable with civilisation going forward, that is before the open-border fiasco and social engineering programme reversed the trend abruptly, throwing us back into a new dark age.
There is a certain secret satisfaction manifest in the irony of so-called ‘progressive’ liberals shunting civilisation backwards into a medieval turpitude, where the first casualties from harsh reality are destined to be their naïve doctrines and then their gullible selves, but beyond that there is very little to smile about.
You only have to compare the image of Britain’s 21st century police officer, encased in body armour, toting a submachine gun, with the iconic 1950s’ one of the British bobby with his little blue helmet and nothing more to protect himself with than the truncheon in his pocket to gain an understanding of just how radical, dangerous and inherently unstable British society has become under the suicidal postwar stewardship of the loony liberal left.
I for one need no reminding of the ever-present terrorist threat. I see it all around me, each and every time I walk a UK town or city street. But there is only so much vigilance one can openly indulge in before being hauled before the judges of the kangaroo court of social media and condemned for spreading conspiracy theories. Besides, how many different directions can we be vigilant in at any one time?
Chris Phillips, former head of the National Counter Terrorism Office, is quoted by GB News* as stating that it is impossible to protect against a threat where someone jumps into a car and drives it at the public, that “Intelligence is the only … way to stop an attack like this, before they [the terrorist] get into the vehicle”. But this is not as admissible as it sounds, as jumping into a car and driving through the public could be as random and spontaneous as taking a knife from the kitchen drawer and charging through the public. Spontaneous, random, unplanned attacks fly beneath the intelligence radar and therefore are unstoppable.
Thus, we return again to the simple but commonsense maxim that if they were not in our country, they could not be doing what they do. Prevention is better than cure. It is way past time to pull up the drawbridge and deport, deport, deport …
In modern-day, mixed-up Britain, ISIS and the like is not all we have to worry about, nor is becoming skittles for ideological fruitcakes flying at us in trucks and cars. We also have to be vigilant for all manner of other crazed MFs running around with bladed weapons from butchers’ knives to machetes, and occasionally, when they have nothing better to do or nothing much to live for, exploding themselves all over the place. Remember the Monty Python’s sketch: “Oh mother, don’t be so sentimental. Things explode every day.” Even Monty Python, as ahead of their time as they were, could not have had any idea how the premise of this surreal skit would take on a sinister irony in the state of things in Britain to come.
The potential threat of terrorism is everywhere. They are all around us, sewn within the fabric of our lives, and thanks to the ‘small boats’ crisis, the threat grows exponentially.
Brits told Be Vigilant
“The ongoing small boats crisis presents a significant security risk,” states Anthony Glees*. Britain must strengthen its border controls, he warns, to prevent extremists from entering the country.
GB NEWS is one of the very few media outlets that has the balls to tell us this. Most mainstream media corporates would rather tie themselves in knots in an attempt to mislead, appease and capitulate; anything, in fact, to perpetuate false ‘positives’ of the catastrophic diversity myth, rather than fess up to the unpalatable and exposing truth that diversity is our nemesis. Like those in authority who are culpable facilitators in the nation’s grooming scandal, yet another curse visited on us by the twisted desire to uphold the enrichment myth, the collusive concern of mainstream media is with keeping up appearances ~ multiculturalism isn’t it great! ~ rather than admit to the painful ~ and to most of us ~ glaringly obvious truth that it’s all been a terrible failure and that the number-one priority is now to stop the boats, or rather stop their contents from spewing out onto our unguarded shores.
Not that I count, but if I cared to count, I would by now have lost count of the number of times Britain’s media has sought to dodge the issue of the indefensible link between the migrant invasion, multiculturalism, the rising tide of violence raging on British streets and the ever-worsening incidence of terrorism. Nowadays, nearly every reported violent attack in England carries the cynical caveat ‘not terrorist related’, even sometimes when they obviously are, and pathetically there are those amongst us who are all too ready to jump through hoops to swear it’s ‘never migrant related’. But the old tried and tested excuse, the media’s favourite get-out clause, is the ‘don’t panic ~ mentally ill’ routine, which conveniently allows media and government to neatly file attacks away in the ‘not terror related’ cabinet ~ and what a whopper that cabinet is!
Are those who ram cars into innocent people really mad, unhinged? Well, if you consider that over the Christmas period, normal, mentally healthy people, the victims of these killers, were going about their daily business doing no harm to them or for that matter anyone else, then the layman’s answer has to be yes. Those who commit such crimes are unequivocally mentally ill; they are cuckoo, quite deranged, the layman would say, but their mental illness is one brought on by who and where they are, and, when the ‘who’ and ‘where’ are taken as one together, their ‘psychopathic’ behaviour tells us they are exactly where they should not be.
Don’t worry it’s only a madman
The UK media’s brand of obfuscation may be unbelievably brash and simply unbelievable. It is overarching and yet transparent, but in the wider world of disinformation as propagated by liberal sources, it is certainly not alone.
In the wake of the Magdeburg Christmas Market attack, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief deflating like a bout of bad wind through the corridors of power in the liberal media’s yarn department, as the line was quickly grasped that building a psychological profile of whatever it was behind the wheel was as complex as it was baffling and that the motive for the attack could not be readily determined.
The New York Times reported “The authorities said they were struggling to understand the motives behind ramming a car into a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg…” ~ ‘Germany Tries to Untangle Complex Profile of Market Attack Suspect’, (22 December 2024).
It would seem that the German public have an entirely different take on the matter.
Would it be just too cynical to rewrite the headline of that piece to read ‘Liberals struggle to put spin on …?’ Well, hows about this one then: ‘History repeats itself, so why are they letting them still flood in?’
^We very friendly. Just want 5-star hotel and then want work McDonald’s or NHS^
As these copycat killings are copied time and time again, the questions we should be putting to our political leaders are: “Why are these people here? Why are they in our country? But more and most importantly, knowing who and what they are, why are you letting them in, and letting them in in their thousands? “Not all of them are terrorists!” an irate liberal fulminates. No, but if only one of them is, it’s already one too many.
Brits told Be Vigilant ~ look out for him!
The first suspect at which to point an accusatory finger is the darling of the liberal-left, the man they love to describe as a philanthropic billionaire with humanitarian motives. Whenever I hear this man’s name, I see a winged armchair, a man with his back to the camera, identity concealed, and the goal of the plot world destruction.
Real, genuine, authentic philanthropists with hearts of gold and souls of milk and honey, would surely pour their ill-gotten gains into developing those poor countries where development is urgently needed, not devote their over-rich and presumably idle lives to moving third-world jetsam and flotsam around the map of western Europe, as if they are frightened of dying too soon before f*cking the world right up.
But one man, for all his evil intent and disproportionate wealth, cannot hope to succeed without that he works in concert with the pseudo-liberal elite, which only goes to show that were you daft enough to trust them in the past, now is the time to stop. Come the next election, give the two old parties, both Labour and the Cons, the Order of the Boot, the big, the royal, the final heave ho. Push them out, be rid of them. As Elon Musk succinctly puts it, Britain’s last hope is to vote Reform.
In CNN’s ‘Coverage of The Germany Christmas Market Attack’ (21 December 2024), Chancellor Olaf Scholz is quoted as saying, the German people “need to stick together as a country and not let hatred divide us.” Well said that man! But hatred is not the dividing factor; the problem lies unfairly and squarely on the overstressed and wobbling shoulders of hegemonic diversity and the lies by which it is sold to us.
Terrorism in the UK, as in Western Europe generally, is inextricably linked to the failure and collusion of elitist liberal politicians to exercise due diligence in the matter of immigration. The potential threat of migrant terrorism is everywhere and more, and thanks to the ‘small boats’ crisis, the threat grows exponentially. The boats just keep on coming, bringing with them new recruits to ensure that candle-lit vigils retain government-sponsored popularity well into the dark abyss of an unforgiving and nightmarish future.
I cannot begin to imagine, and don’t particularly want to, how difficult it must be to explain to a seven-year old, brought up to perceive the world as the softness of a cuddly toy or the encompassing safety of his mother’s arms, that his little sister or brother has been taken from this world, destroyed by a hoary-faced, crazy-old-imbecile with his heart full of hatred, his mind full of jealousy and whose only escape from himself and his cult is death.
Vigilant we have to be, it is the necessary evil to an unnecessary evil, but it is no more answer to the problem than the repetitive staging of candle-lit vigils. Stopping them coming in and deporting those already here, whilst that may not be the answer either, as things have gone too far, will certainly help to even the odds should it ever come to the civil war that Elon Musk predicts. And as things are going now, it seems, unfortunately, that it might.
Well I’m about to get sick From watchin’ my TV Been checkin’ out the news Until my eyeballs fail to see I mean to say that every day Is just another rotten mess And when it’s gonna change, my friends Is anybody’s guess
So I’m watchin’ and I’m waitin’ Hopin’ for the best Even think I’ll go to prayin’ Every time I hear ’em sayin’ That there’s no way to delay That trouble comin’ every day No way to delay That trouble comin’ every day
Trouble Every Day — Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention
Please don’t misunderstand me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with properly thought-through immigration: immigration properly controlled, immigration carefully administered, but with one unnegotiable qualification: that those who immigrate integrate.
Short of this, it needs to be stopped – yesterday.
31 December 2024 ~ Georgian Restaurant Kaliningrad the Magic of Kavkaz
Like many towns and cities in Christendom, the centre of Kaliningrad undergoes a magical transformation over the festive season. Victory Square becomes a yuletide theatre, a stage of glittering silver motifs, including a life-sized Santa’s sleigh with reindeers and a larger-than-life iconic assemblage of 2025 numerals. A lofty, conical Christmas tree transitions through a dramatic series of illuminating colour contrasts. The commercial buildings that border the square are, for want of a no less appropriate term, all lit up like Christmas trees, whilst the municipal building facing the square takes the Christmas biscuit, with its symmetry of grazing lights gently and slowly ringing the changes in complementary hues through a violet, blue and turquoise spectrum.
We were on our way to the Kavkaz Restaurant, and our route would take us across this bewitching bespangled world. I had one eye on the white magic and one eye on the black. In England, this is de rigueur nowadays, especially during the festive season, for every day and every way is a possible Christmas Market. Happy Christmas (and every day) from Britain’s politicians.
With no discernible goblins grabbing at the ghoulies, I felt safe to take my camera out and shoot some snaps for the folks back home. It was then, at that moment, I saw her: a Christmas angel with very long legs, wearing a skirt that was far too short for winter ~ whatever could she be thinking of? ~ and a pair of black leather boots. As amazing as she was, she was just another stocking filler. The real angel was yet to come. She was waiting for us in Victory Square, silver-white with wings to match, a tribute to the Christmas props with which she was surrounded. She was poised in the centre of Victory Square: a photograph waiting to happen.
“Oh, please take a photograph of me, next to the angel!” Olga pleaded. She knows that I have a limited tolerance to taking smartphone photos for the sake of harvesting ‘likes’ on social media. But that is part of the magic of Christmas, the willingness to make concessions for no other reason than because it is Christmas.
It was hard to resist the angel. She looked the perfect angel, with her voluminous white and silver wings, and here I am confessing that for all my reservations about incessant, gratuitous photo-taking, I myself was beyond redemption to get in on the act. The angel must have had some inkling of her photogenic allurement, as she had thoughtfully brought along with her a second set of wings, not so big and so bold as her own, but like the halos she also carried, convenient and prop sized.
When your halo is a permanent fixture, you have no need for apparatus, but I was chuffed about the wings. I never knew until I watched Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life!, the most highly rated Christmas film of 1946 and notably of all time, that angels have to earn their wings, although I have often paused to wonder why mine are so long coming.
The angel, like angels should be, was only too pleased to oblige when we asked to take a photo with her. But just before we assumed the position, she whispered the secret to us that even angels as endowed as they are with all their celestial powers needed to keep the wolf from the door, so a small charge, a small gratuity, 200 roubles in fact, would stamp the seal on the deal. What is 200 roubles, I thought, in the collection box of Christmas. Is it not better to give than receive!
So, with the contract duly signed, Olga and then myself, encouraged by the angel, adopted various angelic-hugging poses, whilst first one then the other snapped away with my mobile phone.
At the conclusion of our photoshoot, we took out our 200 roubles only to be angelically told that we had run up a bill of 1000 roubles, as the going rate for angels was 200 roubles a photograph and not, as we had thought, 200 roubles a sesh. Well, blow me down with seraphim wings, you do learn something every day.
A thousand roubles lighter, we took three or four more photographs without the angel within the Square, which only cost us our time, and then we muggered off to Kavkaz restaurant.
Kavkaz Restaurant revisited
Cool in the summer, both kinds of cool, Kavkaz is in winter forever warm and welcoming, and now with its twinkling Christmas lights festively fondling the susceptible cockles of a receptive holiday heart, no less tender from having been shared with the angel, we were pulled with the ease of a Christmas cracker into Kavkaz’s spellbinding charm.
In an instant and magnificently, staff within this palatial place are swarming all around you: a small, attractive attentive army, ones very own personal retinue, whose task it is to get your clothes off and get you into a seat.
Once divested of your outer garments, you are ritualistically led away into a cavernous mesmerisation, where upmarket, hip and trendy live together in perfect harmony. You mean like Sir Paul McCartney’s ‘ebony and ivory’? No, I don’t mean that at all.
In a kitchen part exposed to view, white smocked chefs are wocking it up as if there is no tomorrow, whilst waiters hither and thither fly. The voices of the seated, who are already pleasantly wining and dining, form a mood-inspiring background murmur, akin to the sound of soothing white noise blotting out the primordial row of that noisy neighbourhood dog.
If ever the Wizard of Oz had owned a palace like this, it could not have been half as entrancing.
Would we be led to the left, or would we be led to the right? On this occasion we are led to the right and given a table for two. My back is against a solid brick pillar, just the way I like it. Seats in restaurants and bars, just like friends and angels, are meant to be chosen carefully; if you don’t feel comfortable where they’ve put you, you won’t enjoy your meal; in fact, the entire evening could be ruined. If you don’t believe me, ask Wild Bill Hickock.
We had dined at Kavkaz before, and the first reason for returning was that Kavkaz serves good food at value-for-money prices, but I was also there on a mission. We have a project pending, and I could think of no better place than Kavkaz to consolidate our knowledge of shabby chic design. From my vantage point, with my back to the wall, I had a commanding view of all that I wanted to see.
The place was busy this evening, the only available seats were on my left and these, too, would be taken later. A squadron of waiters and waitresses, dressed in their becoming livery of tan trousers and matching waistcoats, flitted swiftly from table to table. The restaurant is so vast that every waiter is wired. Ah, the wonders of the electronic age. Wherever would we be without a plug stuck in our ear or a smartphone in our hands!
The buzz it was a happy one. It had that unmistakeable festive feel that Christmas brings to the better world of Christendom. Long may it prevail. An atmosphere like this, which is to say comfortable, requires a specific beer, and the atmosphere this evening seemed to be calling out for Maisel’s Weisse, but first the waiter brought to our table a complementary carafe of water (you have to drink it sometimes) infused with a sliver of cucumber. That sure was a new one on me!
The beer was fast on its heels, and not long after along came our meals. The restaurant may have been busy, but the service as always was slick and swift.
At half time, who should arrive but Father Frost and his daughter. Shimmering silver and white, they passed from table to table, with a Ho! Ho! Ho! and a Snovam Gordam (Happy New Year), handing out small presents to children, who were wreathed in smiles, with sparkling eyes and amazed and enthralled expressions. Call him Father Frost, Father Christmas, Santa Claus, call him what you will, it’s a non-negotiable fact that the world needs a lot more of him.
To even up the score, there was another, a dark and mysterious figure, wandering amongst us, looking as if he had just stepped off a Roger Corman film set. This sinister apparition, a man we must presume, or something of mortal substance, was dressed from head to toe in black. The hood, or cowl, that he was wearing, completely obscured his face, turning his eyes and thus his soul invisible. If one was to level one’s own eyes to a point at which they strained, one could just make out whatever it was inhabiting concealment, peering out from behind an obfuscating curtain of gauze, an almost impenetrable barrier, which must have dramatically altered the hidden incumbent’s perception of anything outside his inside world.
Perched upon his shoulder, above a hooked, outstretched and angled arm, was an ugly looking so-and-so, which, every now and again, according to its will, would home in on a table of quietly seated innocent folk and invade their zone of comfort. Who was this mysterious stranger? And what was his purpose here, tonight?
Nobody seemed unduly perturbed by the presence of this denizen duo. In fact, wherever the two would wend, which was everywhere, they seemed to raise a smile if not a laugh. But the black veil and swooping creature had an entirely different effect on me. Give me Father Frost and his delightful daughter any day of the week, rather than this Soros hobgoblin and his blighted bedighted funereal future. But I ask you to forgive me. My imagination has a reputation for being overly sensitive and has been known to play tricks before. And yet I did have an auntie called Clair Voyant, and my uncle was blessed with crystal balls … It was enough to make me want to order, in fact I felt I had to order, another pint of Maisel’s Weisse.
When eventually ~ eventually being of no greater duration than possibly two minutes, although to hypersensitive senses it seemed there was nowhere he could not be for any length of unspecified time ~ this ominous be-gauzed spectre of inauspicious things to come, and his malevolent menacing mate, left the spot where they had been preying, my clarity was restored.
I took a gulp of Maisel’s Weisse ~ what nectar! ~ and afforded myself the luxury of staring into the middle distance, freely.
Mirror Mirror on the wall do you tell the truth at all?
Between the wall and the open room, an altitudinous wooden screen of shelving had, in the imaginative Kavkaz manner and by considered intersection, created a narrow corridor, leading away from the dining area down to the gents’ and ladies’ loos. A very important direction.
At the end of this long and narrow walkway, mistaken by some for a models’ catwalk, stands a large, tall, gilt-framed mirror. People walking towards it react to its presence in different ways: some gaze directly into it, in the hope of receiving their own approval; others seem to fall shy of it, briefly looking then looking away, but often casting a sideways glance before they turn the corner, as if by failing to do so, they might lose sight of their very existence; and still others stop in front of it, forced to a halt by their own adoration.
One young lady was so enthralled by whoever it was she wanted to be, whatever it was she wanted to see, that she walked that way several times and even, on one occasion, brought her friends to look in the mirror with her. I wondered what it was that each of them could see and if they saw the same as one another. What was that mirror showing them? Was it their present, their past or their future? And would that mirror still be there, say in 50 years from now, should they ever return to Kavkaz, which reflection would they see: the one they had left behind today or the one which they would bring with them?
The time would come this evening when I would have to walk that way myself, and that time inevitably came halfway through my second pint.
What, I thought, was this mirror up to, so bold, so brash, so strategically placed that in any age more primitive it could have been mistaken for a portal to your soul. In Kavkaz, as in life, this is a mirror you cannot avoid. When you have to go, you have to go. But when it was my turn, I wilfully looked away, not completely sure, however, who or what the mirror had captured, or if that something had looked like me had it been grinning as it went past? Mirrors can be funny things. Things funny be can mirrors. Is it little wonder that vampires seldom use them?
Georgian Restaurant Kaliningrad
Back safely at our table the spirit of Christmas welcomed me in the form of a Georgian special. I found a glass of chacha, a Georgian pomace brandy, sitting next to my pint. I had not yet had the pleasure of sampling such a rare intoxicant and was surprised, as much as a vegetarian can be, that I took to it like a hungry shark in a swimming pool, so much so in fact that I had to have another. The fermentation was truly delicious, but I threw myself a lifebelt after the second glass for fear of becoming a goldfish in my reckless Christmas ocean. Sam Cooke knew a lady who couldn’t do the cha cha cha, but that was his problem, not mine. My problem was that I could, but knowing I could, I shouldn’t.
The one thing that I should be frightened of, but, alas, forsooth, am not, is turning into a pumpkin. It is hard to get me home once I have found a hospitable place. But all good things, as we are told, and told, and told, and told … must, and do, come to an end, even a night at Kavkaz.
Leaving the Kavkaz is never easy, particularly when it is still in motion and more so particularly at this time of year. Yet, like all the best and worst of villains swear when their time is up, “You haven’t seen the last of me! I vow I shall return!”, the same was singing in my ear.
And that’s the way it always is, and that’s the way it should be, whenever you go to Kavkaz.
27 December 2024 ~ Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad
Shame on me! It was one of my brothers who first discovered the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery, ‘hidden away’, he said, close to the foundations of a Kaliningrad Spar. That’s Spar as in supermarket not spa as in Roman baths.
He was right in the first place, the location is unusual, or so it seems to us Brits, but not in the second: A large, illuminated logo-branded sign strapped atop a cylindrical portico, all glass and rather tall, facing a busy road that leads to Kaliningrad’s city centre can hardly relate to something said to be ‘hidden away’. But, if that is so, how come I missed it?
The obvious answer is that, unlike my brother, my whole life does not revolve around hunting out bars and beer (polite cough).
I thanked him for letting me know and assured him that when I could find the time I’d stroll along and check out this bar. Then away he went, and off I rushed.
Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad
Since that pioneering visit, I have returned to the bar under the Spar on three or four occasions, which, given the calibre of the establishment, may not nearly be enough.
My recent tarriance at the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery found it, I am pleased to say, much the same as it was on previous visits. We like things to stay the same, don’t we. How does it go? “If it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it.”
I stood outside for a moment and allowed myself the luxury of admiring the bar’s grand portico, until someone, no doubt wondering what had so arrested me, asked if I needed help. This was really nice of them, but having been beyond help for more years than I care to remember, I politely replied, “It’s much too late,” thanked them for their indulgence, then did all that I could to remove myself before someone else came along and mistook me for Colin Conspicuous.
In any event, there’s only so much portico admiring that one can reasonably do when there are better things to be doing, and beer is one of those better things. The next step was to literally pass through the portico. This is what I did.
The grand portico of the bar below the Spar leads to expectations that bad management could easily upend. Thankfully, no such failure is engendered. After the grand portico comes a grand staircase, which leads to a grand lower floor and to a lady behind a cloakroom counter.
The lights in the entrance hall are dim, mindfully so, and together with the woodwork, of which there is plenty, has a significant impact on first impressions. Would this bar be in England, the dark varnish on the doors, panelling and staircase balusters would peg its origin to the 1980s, but as cultural influences take time to travel, my hunch is that the premises date to the mid-2010s.
The pre-bar experience, in spite of the paintwork’s distressed character, which could be actual or artificial, has rather stately and formal overtones, which carry over into the bar itself. And what a bar it is. Vast is a word that springs to mind: JD Wetherspoon vast.
Size isn’t everything, or so we are led to believe, and this is perfectly true if it fails to work, but in this establishment it does work. In fact, it works rather well, even better than most.
The ratio of seating to open space is well balanced, not at all cramped, packed or crowded. A full complement of seating types is offered, including cubicle, booth, banquet, open table and bar stools. I could run around a place like this all night trying different seats, with a different beer on a different table whilst availing myself of a different perspective. But, of course, I wouldn’t do that, because I look silly enough. Like most of us who are creatures of habit, I usually make for the self-same seat that I have occupied on previous occasions, or find a seat as near as dammit, and these are those that have snob-screened partitions to the left of the entrance facing the bar.
There was one occasion, completely out of character, when feeling oddly adventurous, I went and broke the mold. That’s not quite the same as breaking one’s beer glass, which always is and always has been a tragedy, it’s simply an introduction to saying that I found myself sitting pretty, if ever an idiom of this kind could be used to describe one such as I, elevated high and mighty upon the luxurious centrepiece seating, my foam-frothing formidable pint clasped firmly in my hand, the foam-padded faux-leather ochre beneath my pampered bum, which was, of course, in trousers. This, however, was a one-off move. I suppose I like my regular seat as it looks out over the bar, a regular bar at that, with beer pumps thrusting from it and immediately behind it well-stocked spirit shelves, which add to its British persona.
We have already debunked the myth that Pivovar Restaurant Brewery is hidden away German-bunker style, establishing in the process that this clever bar beneath the Spar packs a surprise in size (notice how I rhymed that!). To that we can now add that there is also nothing in its name that conceals the fact that beers are brewed on the premises and that the grub it serves is rather special.
Almost without exception, internet reviews posted by former Pivovar diners are cock-a-hoop and thumbs-up good. Indeed, I myself have once or twice partaken of the victuals, and though far from being a seasoned gourmet am happy to relate that there was nothing to complain about. So, if you are one of those whose reason for eating out is to give your complaints to the chef, you will need to go elsewhere.
The same advice applies if you are longing for a pint of bad or boring beer, since the beer at Pivovar Restaurant Brewery is consistently applaudable, as much for its quality as it is for variety.
The beer range, though not, for example, as breathtaking as the Yeltsin’s revolving stock, is, nevertheless, not to be sneezed at, with or without your old plandemic mask. Most certainly you will find that in downing one of Pivovar’s beers you will want to sink another, maybe more.
On the occasion of my first visit to Pivovar Restaurant Brewery, I wondered why the waitress had handed me the local newspaper. Did she want me to read the article on the art of looking not quite so obviously English? It was only when I spotted the bar’s distinctive beer vat logo centred within the paper’s masthead that the rouble finally dropped: this was no local rag, it was, in fact, the menu.
I cannot recall in my long and distinguished pub-frequenting career ever coming across something of this nature. It is a simple but effective touch, as the branding remains in your mind. “It’s that bar. You know the one; the big place under the Spar. The one that has menus that look like newspapers.”
There are restaurants and bars in Kaliningrad whose menus are printed in Russian and English. I suspect that this was done to coincide with the World Cup tournaments which Kaliningrad hosted in 2018. Unfortunately, Pivovar Restaurant Brewery did not follow this trend, and since the world we live in today is a lot different than the one we inhabited yesterday, insofar as English-speaking folk are thinner on the ground, the bar’s management must sigh with relief that they saved themselves the extra expense. However, that having been duly noted, I was there on the premises, all alone in the world of written Russian, squinting through my Franklin Splits in an effort to determine which one of their excellent beers they could tempt me with today.
Luckily for me, language has never been a barrier, at least not where beer is concerned, although it doesn’t hurt at all to have a decent memory. I went for a deep, dark beer that cost me 300 roubles. This was not the first time that I had drunk this beer at Pivovar Restaurant; thus, cynics might postulate that working from memory negated the need for further squinting, they might also insinuate that as the beers on the menu’s consecutive pages were rather more expensive than the one I had chosen on the front page, I had gone for the cheapest option.
I was far too preoccupied with practising my reading skills to give a definite account of what it was the waitress said to her colleagues after I had ordered. For all I know, she could have said, “Yes, it’s him, alright, that same old tight-arsed Englishman, disguised by beard as Father Frost. He always goes for the cheapest beers!”
“Happy Cheap Year and down the hatch!”
Beer and beards — they were made for each other.
Foaming around the mouth hair, I did not on this occasion partake of the bar’s cuisine. I had a thousand roubles in my pocket and a calculation in my mind that should I order another beer, I would be left with enough nalichka for a loaf of bread and a tin of baked beans from the Spar above the bar.
Pivovar Restaurant Brewery Kaliningrad
On the evening that I was at Pivovar’s, I was flying solo, so all I needed was a table, a chair, and, of course, a glass of beer. However, the size of the restaurant/brewery and its range of food and beer make it the perfect fit for business lunches and birthday parties. Birthday parties are a Pivovar speciality and are catered for at a 10% discount, whilst business lunches are bookable throughout the working week, from Monday to Friday inclusive, between 12 noon and 4pm.
Another Pivovar humdinger is its Beer to Go service. Carry-outs can be purchased in 1 litre or in convenient 1.5 litre containers at a cost of 320 and 480 roubles respectively. Alternatively, food and beer combinations can be collected in person or delivered to your door (web-page link here).
It would be completely out of character if I failed to mention how much I appreciated the retro signs, wall mirrors and other memorabilia which light up the stairwell and entrance hall to the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery. Not only do we like things to stay the same as they were, as when they do they remain the same as they are, but we also like all things retro. Moreover, we like good beer, which is why we like to like Pivovar Restaurant Brewery.
