С большой грустью сообщаю, что наш дорогой друг Стас (Станислав Коновалов) скончался от послеоперационных осложнений во время лечения в больнице. Мы с женой Ольгой познакомились со Стасом в январе 2019 года. Нас познакомил с ним наш общий друг, художник Виктор Рябинин. Позже Стас рассказывал мне, что Виктор сказал ему: «В Калининград переезжает англичанин. Тебе следует с ним встретиться. Он интересный человек, и я думаю, вы найдете общий язык ». Я не совсем уверен, что заслуживаю быть названным «интересный», но мы нашли общий язык в нашей любви к истории в целом и в частности к истории Кенигсберга- Калининграда и его окрестностей. Важным элементом нашего общего языка было вдохновение, которое мы оба получили от нашего друга и наставника Виктора Рябинина. Вскоре после смерти Виктора Рябинина в июле 2019 года я сказал Стасу, что нашел две картины Виктора среди своих вещей в Англии. Он ответил с присущей ему скромностью, что, хотя у него нет картин Виктора Рябинина с его автографами, ему достаточно того, что у него есть «тайная гордость», заключающаяся в том, что он был «близок к этому великому человеку». «Я был его учеником много лет, – сказал он. Когда я рискнул предположить, что Виктор был его другом, Стас ответил, опять с присущей ему скромностью: «Виктор знал очень многих людей, но он, вероятно, не считал их всех своими друзьями. . Могу сказать, что я был его учеником, что я восхищался им и был счастлив в его обществе… »Затем он сделал паузу, прежде чем сказать:« Но я хотел бы думать, что он считал меня своим другом ». Стас был скромным человеком. Он скромно относился ко всем своим достижениям, даже тогда когда было совершенно очевидно, что у него было столько же, если не больше, прав их превозносить. В знак признания его достижений, я попросил Стаса написать краткий биографический отчет о его работе и жизни, в том числе о его отношениях с Виктором Рябининым, и поместил его очерк, вместе со ссылками на его практику экскурсовода на страницах своего постоянного блога под рубрикой “Виктор Рябинин Кенигсберг”. “Стас Калининград Кенигсберг Путеводитель”https://expatkaliningrad.com/personal-tour-guide-kaliningrad/ Стас очень много работал над своими проектами гида, оттачивая и совершенствуя их, снимая несколько видеороликов на YouTube и всегда спрашивая: «Что ты думаешь об этом аспекте?» “Все в порядке?” «Есть ли в сценарии видеоролика что-нибудь, что, по твоему мнению, требует пояснения?». Как и смерть Виктора Рябинина до него, смерть Стаса лишила Кенигсберг-Калининград еще одного его великого посла. Но нас его смерть лишила гораздо большего. Стас был человеком прямолинейным, открытым, искренним. Он был добрым человеком, всегда готовым помочь, он был сердцем хорошей компании. Вместе, мы делили общий язык прошлого, а я через него – общий, но очень важный язык – человеческий. В общем, Стас был самым ценным арсеналом – он был незаменимым другом, которого мы не могли себе позволить потерять.
It is with great sadness that I report that our dear friend Stas (Stanislav Konovalov) passed away recently from post-operative complications whilst undergoing hospital treatment.
My wife, Olga, and I met Stas in January 2019. We were introduced to him by a mutual friend, Victor Ryabinin the artist. Stas told me later that Victor had said to him, “There is an Englishman moving to Kaliningrad. You should meet him. He is an interesting man, and I think you will find a common language.”
I am not altogether certain that I deserve the appellation ‘interesting’, but we did find a common language in our love of history generally and specifically for Königsberg-Kaliningrad and the surrounding region.
An important element in that common language was the inspiration we both received from our friend and mentor Victor Ryabinin.
A short while after Victor Ryabinin’s death in July 2019, I told Stas that I had found two paintings by Victor among my possessions in England. He replied, with characteristic modesty, that whilst he did not have a signed painting by Victor Ryabinin the artist, it was enough that he had a “secret pride”, which was that he had been “close to this great man”. “I was his student for many years,” he said.
When I ventured to suggest that Victor had also been his friend, he replied, once again with characteristic modesty, “Victor knew a great many people and associated with a great many people, but he probably would not have considered them all to be his friends. I can say that I was his student, that I admired him and enjoyed his company …” He then paused, before saying, “But I would like to think that he thought of me as his friend.”
Stas was a modest man. He was modest about all of his achievements, when it was quite obvious that he had as much right, if not more, to blow his own trumpet with the ‘best’ of them.
Stas worked extremely hard on his tour guide projects, honing and perfecting them, making several YouTube videos and always asking, “What did you think of this aspect?” “Was that alright?” “Is there anything in my tour guide script that you think needs clarification?”.
Like Victor Ryabinin before him, Stas’ death has robbed Königsberg -Kaliningrad of yet another great ambassador.
It has robbed us of so much more.
Stas was a straight-talking, open, sincere individual. He was a kind man, always ready to help and good company.
Together, we shared the common language of the past, and I, through him, the common but all-important language of humanity.
In summation, Stas was that most precious of all commodities ~ he was the indispensable friend that we could ill afford to lose.
A sunny afternoon with Stas Konovalov, ‘Stas’, [right of picture] Kaliningrad Königsberg Guide
16 November 2024 ~Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
The answer to the question is ‘yes’. Yes, it is possible to access Kaliningrad at the Polish-Kaliningrad border and vice-versa. The only caveat is that before you go, stock up on patience.
Not too many months back, the bus from Kaliningrad going to Gdansk was held up at the Polish border for as long as it took to miss a flight at Gdansk ~ a plane-missing seven hours in fact. Whilst this particular case may be the exception to the rule, lengthy delays are not, and in response to this and other inconveniences generally assumed unnecessary, and some infer deliberately obstructive, a petition has been launched, which you, dear reader, can access here: Against the intolerable conditions on the Russian-Polish border (Kaliningrad)! {Note: to read this in English, you will need to click on ‘Translate’ and change the language from German into English.}
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
Not all border crossings are as bad as the last one you experienced, but some can sometimes be worse, and some can be worse but interesting. Take a crossing I made earlier this year, for example.
We cleared the formalities at the Russian border without let or hinderance and trundled off with great expectations, fifteen of us in all, onto Polish territory.
There were no other vehicles in transit, only our bus, and the usual procedures went smoothly enough. We were gawped at, our credentials were examined, we had our mugshots taken (again!) and, after 30 minutes, we were back on the bus.
We took our seats; brum, brum (that’s the sound of the bus starting up); and off we went.
Traditionally, this is the point on the journey when, with the inquisition over, the invisible stays shared by all release themselves collectively, letting relaxation spill palpably out in a sigh-giving rush of relief. The advent of this release is customarily celebrated by proper professional travellers in possession of proper professional travelling cases with a dignified mass unzipping, whilst those of us who own neither proper cases nor dignified travelling standards have to be content with rustling through our carrier bags. The end result is the same, however, stress being given the elbow, it’s time for comfort eating.
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?
I had just begun to tuck into my penultimate cheese sandwich when, ay up mother!; what’s going on? Instead of hitting the open road, our bus was being siphoned off into a fenced and gated compound.
“Ay up?” I thought again. Well, you would think that, wouldn’t you.
I cannot say for certain whether it was my fault or not. Perhaps I want to believe it was for the sake of an impudent ego. But the question kept repeating itself: Were we locked away inside this compound, sitting in front of this big, this bland, this ominous, non-descript building because of something I said?
When the clam-faced female in the Polish border office fired “Cigarettes? Alcohol?” at me, my facetious reply had been, “Yes please?” And then when she did not get the joke (What joke exactly would that be?) and barked the questions again, I had waived them away with an Englishness, simpering yet polite, which Leslie Phillips would have been proud of, but possibly she was not.
Cigarettes? Alcohol? Never touch the stuff!!
Whoever was or was not to blame, there we sat on the bus, and we sat there for a bad 10 minutes, us and this dull, brick, window-less building.
There was something about our situation and the building confronting us that nudged my imagination.
‘Work sets you free’. No, the sign at the entrance to the compound did not state that, but what exactly did ‘Revision Centre’ mean?
The bland building gave nothing away. Indeed, there is nothing much more to say about its external aspect, except that high upon the roof it had a prominent funnel-shaped air vent.
I could not see clearly as the sun was in my eyes, but I am almost willing to swear on anything other than a stack of beer bottles that for one second I saw, or bore the conviction that I saw, poised at the mouth of the air vent, the shadows of two men. They were crouching down at the sides of the vent, leaning in towards it, and each had something in their hands, something that looked like canisters. I had just begun to focus on the labels of these canisters when a shard of light leapt out of the sun temporarily blinding me. Through the eclipsing halo that followed, and with the bus now moving in reverse and altering my perspective, the words on the label were reduced to a blur, and all that I could make of them was a capital ‘Z’ at one end and a capital ‘B’ at the other.
Our bus had not entered the building by the floor-to-apex roller door in front of which we had initially parked. It had taxied around to the back of the building, where it slowly disappeared through a similar portal at that end. Creeping at a snail’s pace, it inched its way gradually in, permitting me to regard at will the character of the chamber into which we were being swallowed. We were saying goodbye to the outside world; one hoped temporarily.
We were passing into an alley, just the right width for the size of the bus. To the left of us was a platform, solid, broad and deep, not unlike one you would loiter upon whilst waiting for a train. It was not the height of the vehicle’s windows, but just a little below it.
At the back of this platform at regular intervals were two or three large doors. They were big doors, metal doors, with handles of such prodigious proportions that the only way to open them would surely be to enlist the brawn of two thick Polish men with arms that did not fit. In a corner close by the doors stood a bag that seemed familiar. It looked like one I had seen before on the lorry of KG Smith & Son, Northamptonshire’s premiere coal merchants.
Until now the bus had been trickling forward, but it suddenly drew to a shuddering halt. The driver got up from his seat, made an announcement I did not catch and opened the doors of the vehicle. Before you could say Polish sausage, especially before you could say it in Polish, a man in paramilitary uniform had bounded up the steps and standing at the front of the bus, all officious-like ~ did I hear someone say ‘full of piss and importance’? ~ was presumably ordering us all to get off. Simultaneously, a larger man armed with a big black dog had stationed himself strategically next to the door at the side of the bus, from which the young and old, couples ~ some with children, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard were struggling to alight laden down with their bags and chattels.
The platform to which this innocuous group had descended was considerably narrower than that on the opposite side. Folk were bumping into each other as, ‘Roust! Roust! Schnell! Schnell!’, they were ordered to take their travelling bags from the hold beneath the bus.
Nobody quite seemed to know what it was that was expected of them. A big man, looking not unlike Hermann Goering’s brother, had already started rummaging through one of the passenger’s bags. He had the item perched on a table placed at the side of the wall and was going through the contents as if he was pulling the entrails out of a late-for-Christmas turkey. He looked much more like a TV villain than a man with respect for the public.
Hermann’s brother had a very loud voice, which he used to good effect. Stopping in mid-rummage, with his hands inside some lady’s lingerie, he bellowed at the meek, the innocent and inoffensive, over whom he lauded ultimate power and whose only crime today was that they wanted to get from A to B. Obediently, one by one, they fell silently in line.
During this demonstration of ‘I’m a man in a uniform’, two other guards had joined the jamboree: a flint-eyed woman in a boiler suit spoilt by its insignia, and one of those strutting cockerel types: ‘I’ve got tattoos on my neck, and I’ve come to throw my weight about’.
The carnival commenced: The man who had the sniffer dog was sniffing; the cockerel was in and out of the bus as if someone had knocked him off his perch; the flint-eyed thing was glaring, ‘Look at those eyes! Those eyes! Those eyes!’; and the mountain man with a skinhead haircut who went by the name of Hermann’s Brother was rifling through one’s personals as if he was mixing cement.
His brawny arms were in there, his paddle hands a-swirling. He had obviously learnt his cultured trade from washing his pants in a tub.
Fortunately for me, no such ignominy would besmirch my person. I was, as they say, travelling light. I only had a carrier bag, in which I had placed my laptop and the sad remains of a pack-up meal prepared for me by my wife.
Most of what had been packed for me, I had already scoffed. All that remained was a lonely sandwich, lolling half in and half out of one of those thin plastic boxes routinely used in supermarkets for the display and sale of cakes.
Although I was not in the least bit hungry, having eaten just minutes before, the thought of the Polish strangler rinsing his mitts about my sandwich, spurred me into action. Better to eat the sandwich now than have it used like a paper towel hanging next to the gents’ urinals. The problem was that fatty arms was getting through those bags like Joe Stink from the Secret Service, and the combination of cheese and bread being not the easiest thing to masticate resulted in a situation of alarming prematurity, an unfortunate occurrence which is not entirely limited to such incidental matters as love, life and death but also, or so it would seem, the crucial business of crossing borders.
Thus, when the big you-know-what turned to me and barked, “Cigarettes? Alcohol?”, it was an effort of no small magnitude for me to reply, “Yes please”.
He glared at me contemptuously ~ well can you blame him really ~ and pulling his girt big shoulders back in a show of manly authority (he had done the same with the 80-year-old standing frail and tired in front of me) said slowly and precisely, “We will wait until you have stopped eating, then you and I will talk!”
““Oh, really, what about?” I spluttered, choking on my sandwich. “The weather? Football? Religion? Politics? ~ er, no, anything but politics.”
The sandwich safely swallowed, he sang the refrain again: “Cigarettes?” and “Alcohol?”
Do you know what I think? I think that he was asking me whether I had such items concealed about my person or stashed inside my laptop. When I answered in the negative, first he looked suspicious then profoundly disappointed.
I took a swig of mineral water. He probably thought the alcohol was hidden in that bottle ~ as if! ~ and that I had hurriedly eaten the cigarettes between two slices of bread. Whatever it was he didn’t know, and I think it was a lot, he was not a happy man, which is hardly surprising really, looking and acting the way he did. But he wasn’t finished yet.
He glanced furtively down at my little one ~ I mean at the bag that I was carrying ~ and a tiny ray of hope shone briefly through his cold pork pies, though it was tinged with disbelief by the answer he anticipated but did not want to hear.
“No big baggage?” he asked.
I could, of course, have just said ‘no’, thus putting him out of his misery, but Bernard Manning answered for me, “Just the wife,” said Bernard, “and she’s at home at present.”
Hermann Rummage pursed his lips, shuffled, scowled and then dismissed me. I climbed back onto the bus.
Ten minutes later, no contraband having been found, we were out on the open road again, steaming towards Gdansk: the young and the old, couples ~ some with children, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard.
Those lovely chaps at the Polish border, I mused, stood more chance of finding a rational thought in a liberal’s head than illicit fags and booze on the God-fearing lot on this bus, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Who of us can say with any degree of certainty what goes on in the cranky minds of liberals?
Yet the trees were green, the sky was blue, and every cloud has a silver lining: after all, we hadn’t been gassed, just inconvenienced and harassed.
It was just another sourpuss day at Checkpoint Proper Charlie.
It turns out that Joe was not such a bad guy after all. He served a useful purpose in keeping Donald’s seat warm for him.
7 November 2024 ~ Welcome Back President Trump to the White House
I don’t often cry Hallelujah, at least not first thing in the morning, but 6th November was an exception. The pseudo-liberal left media on both sides of the pond almost had me believing that all was lost, almost had me believing in their lies, but for all their twists and distortions they had failed to sway the U.S. election: Harris was out of the running; Trump had won the day.
Consequently, what would have been just another grey, dull, overcast morning in damp and soggy England was miraculously transformed into an overwhelming sense of jubilation. The news that barnstormer Trump had, against seemingly insurmountable odds, risen phoenix-like from the ashes of liberal machinations, overcoming conspiracy theories, court cases, investigations, two impeachments, in-party opposition and at least two assassination attempts and then gone on to win the election and make history as only the second president of the United States to serve non-consecutive terms in office is surely a sign from on high that long entrenched liberal-left hegemony can and will be defeated.
Welcome Back President Trump
There are a number of reasons why Trump romped home to victory, but the bedrock of his success is the robust stance he is taking against the greatest liberal-orchestrated evil of our time, engineered mass immigration.
This affirmation by the American people that mass immigration is fundamentally iniquitous and has to be stopped is a cue for the people of Great Britain. If you are going to do it the democratic way, then kick out the Cons and Liebour and, before it is too late, vote in Farage and Reform.
In the aftermath of Trump’s triumph, it is virtually unbelievable that the lefty media are asking questions like why and how did Trump succeed? Are they really that thick? Do they really not get it?
Only pathological liars falling victim to their own psychosis could be bewildered by Trump’s victory. They’ll be asking us to believe next that mass immigration enriches us, rather than admit that it and the wokest drivel by which it is underpinned are the greatest existential threats to Western civilisation since the invention of Tony Blair.
It is reassuring to note that recent political developments show positive indications of the routing of the left: Brexit, Nigel Farage’s accession to Parliament, Viktor Orban’s defiance of EU dictatorship, right-wing political gains in France, anti-immigration riots in the UK and now the Return of Trump.
Trump’s election, his re-election, is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular in U.S. history. That Trump has endured and prevailed against inestimably powerful and pervasive forces of hate, malignancy and corruption, restores faith like nothing else could in a democratic system which, whilst much lauded by posturing liberals, is sadly viewed throughout the world as deeply flawed and bastardised.
Now Trump is back where he should be, there may be hope for the future yet.
4 November 2024 ~ Kaliningrad flea market has moved to a new location
The Kaliningrad flea market that has occupied the pavement area close to the Central Market, and in more recent years spilled over onto a ribbon of disused ground bordering the moat of the Wrangel Tower, has officially moved.
For me, as I dare say for many, the relocation of this sprawling and excitingly chaotic masterpiece of antiques, collectables, curios and junk, marks the end of an era. Not that we did not know that it was coming; plans to move the market on have been in the pipeline for years. Indeed, I wrote about the proposal in a 2022 blog post: What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyer’s Paradise?
Kaliningrad flea market moves to a new location
We all know that nothing stays the same forever; Königsberg can testify to that. Nevertheless, knowing that change is imminent rarely compensates when it comes to pass.
There will be some, of course, who will breath a sigh of relief that most days, but on a Saturday in particular, they will at last be able to stroll without let or hindrance along the sidewalk next to the Wrangel Tower instead of running a zigzag gauntlet through sandwiched lines of dealers’ stalls agog with curious clutter-buggers.
I, for one, however, will miss the incipient urge whenever I visit the city’s Central Market (food market) to detour to the ‘junk’ stalls to see what they have on offer that I cannot live without, such as an old tin bucket, for example.
There have been occasions when travelling by bus on route to somewhere else that I have accidentally alighted at the flea market. Of course, I have only gone to look, not to buy. So imagine how surprised I have been on arriving home to discover that whilst I was only looking a Soviet belt, a Königsberg ashtray, a kitsch ornament and an old German helmet have somehow jumped into my shopping bag.
Kaliningrad flea market has moved
I have not yet had the chance to work out which bus route one should take to get to the market’s new location. Gaidara Street 8 is its new address; a piece of land, I am told, that lies opposite the bridge on the way to Sovetsky Prospekt.
At the time of writing (4 November 2024), the market is not yet functioning. By all accounts, the site is vast, but a great deal needs to be done to bring it up to snuff, to make it seller- and buyer-friendly. News is, however, according to the market organisers, that the site will be ready and the market up and running in a matter of days not weeks.
Now, where did I put my Kaliningrad map? What have I done with my bucket?
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: 387 Osobaya Varka
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
31 October 2024 ~ 387 Osobaya Varka beer in Kaliningrad good or not?
Have you ever wondered why Baltika Breweries number their beers instead of giving them a name, for example Russian Sausage or Yalkee Palki. I read somewhere that it is a hangback to Soviet times when everything was numbered, ie School No. 26, Bakery No. 38, Factory No. 97, but perhaps the real reason Baltika use a number instead of a name is that it is easier to recall. Also, whenever one asks for one of their numerical brands, they have first to refer to the brewery name. I mean you can hardly ask for a ‘9’, can you, without running the risk of buying a pair of 9-sized slippers, or a packet containing a German negative. Nine, I mean no; when you ask for any Baltika beer with a number instead of a name, you have to append the ‘Baltika’ first, and, from a marketing point of view, this is rather clever.
Disregarding the fact that not many people ask for bottles of beer when they take them off the shelf (No theory is perfect!), Baltika may have smugly thought that they had the numbers game sewn up … and they had, until along came this little beauty: a beer that goes by the name of 365, sorry that’s a phone number of an old flame (Old Flame Bitter! That’s a good name for a beer!) I meant to say 387.
387 Osobaya Varka beer
387 (never start a sentence with a number!). Is it a bus? Is it a car? Is it a plane? No, the answer to the riddle lies, as revealed by Svoe Mnenie Branding Agency’s comment on the website packagingoftheworld.com, that this Russian brew was not named after Tyre Repair Centre No. 387, but because of 387’s vital statistics. According to what I have read, each bottle of 387 contains three types of malt – lager, caramel and burnt; it has taken eight hours to brew; and not less than seven days of natural fermentation. Put it together and what have you got? 387. Now that’s rather clever too, is it not!
More clever is the fact that the figures ‘387’ all but completely overwhelm the label and are produced in a clear, strong, attractive typeface with closed counters, thus ensuring that the beer leaps out at you from the multiplicity of brands seeking attention on any one shelf.
The little image of the Kaluga brewery projected in a contrasting orange colour on the collar label is also a nice, effective visual touch.
Heckler: “’ere mate, did you buy this [beep] beer to look at the label or to drink the [beep]?!”
We’ll have less of that, my good man! I thought we said no liberals?
When I first bought and drank this beer on 12 September 2022, it cost me 79 roubles. The average price today for a 0.45 litre bottle would appear to be around 80 to 84 roubles. Can’t complain about that.
Beer 387 Osobaya Varka, to use its full name, weighs in at 6.8 per cent. For an old Englishman like me who is used to drinking beer at strengths between 4.1 and 4.5, that’s quite a hike, but who is complaining? Live dangerously. It’s safer than walking down many a street in London once the night has mugged the day.
As always (“He’s so [beep] predictable!” It’s that [beep] heckler again!), the assessment of a good beer and, indeed a bad beer, starts with hooter appraisal. Tops away and the smell genie that pops out of the bottle is strong, sweet and barley-like, with jostling hoppy undertones. The aroma is not lost between the bottle and the glass, into which the nectar happily settles to give a good mid-amber colour and a head which is ‘now you see it and now you don’t’.
The head fizzling out faster than a TARDIS escaping from Dover [see episode 28,000 of Dr Woke ‘The Invasion of the Third Worlders’] is as significant to me as paying my TV licence. I don’t want to have to shave every time I drink a beer. I don’t get the taste and high-volume foam connection, if, indeed, there is one.
Here we have a mid-hoppy taste; a malty taste; a little bit of fruity taste; culminating in a taste that owns up to its strength. The first sip loses nothing in the making, and there is a nice balance among the flavours. The finish is a ‘back of the tongue’ gripper, and the aftertaste in no hurry to let you down and scarper.
The beer is moreish, which is good news for the brewers and also for you, providing you weren’t so daft as to only buy one bottle!
Patric McGoohan’s Prisoner said, “I am not a number, I’m a free man!”
Beer 387 is a number. It is not a free beer, but, believe you me, it’s worth every rouble.
“AB InBev Efes is currently the biggest player on the beer market in Russia” AB InBev Efes
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: 387 Osobaya Varka Brewer: AB InBev Efes Where it is brewed: Russia Bottle capacity: 0.45 litre Strength: 6.8% Price: It cost me 79 roubles (0.63p) Appearance: Light amber Aroma: Barley with fruit nuances Taste: Starts mild-hop bitter; Finishes with a bite Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Unique Would you buy it again? There’s no reason not to
A brilliant beer with rich and original flavour. Caramel malt gives a rich colour, whereas brown malt adds a rye bread aftertaste. This light beer is slightly stronger than average, which makes its flavour more complex and pronounced.
Wot other’s say [Comments on 387 Osobaya Varka from the internet, unedited] 😊Excellent beer, for lovers of strong foamy drinks, good quality, easy to drink, no alcohol aftertaste! [Comment: No idea where he got the ‘foamy’ from!] 😊Yes, I have been enjoying this beer for a long time. It goes well with pistachios. It is cold and just right in the heat. Not weak and not strong… 😑 The taste is flat a bit sweet, a bit sour with faint malty finish. Too much carbonation along with alcohol make very bad mouthfeel. Really needs some food pairing. Avoid it. [Comment: A bit bitty. Avoid bit.] 😊I forget what it tastes like, but I know I enjoyed it!
25 October 2024 ~ Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk Wired for Quality
“It’s all so confusing,” so says a friend of mine and quite often. He’s a scientist, now retired, so he should know. And he’s referring to life. When I echo his sentiments, “It’s all so confusing,” he invariably replies, “It often is,” and sometimes he will say, “… but it is also often quite exciting.” Sometimes, when reflecting on life, he opines, “It don’t make sense!” And although, ‘it’s all so confusing’ and also ‘often exciting’, it actually does make sense that there are two Telegraphs: one I wrote about recently, which is in Svetlogorsk, and the other of which I am writing now, this one is in Zelenogradsk. The Telegraph in Svetlogorsk is a cafe and an art gallery, whilst the Telegraph in Zelenogradsk a restaurant.
Each Telegraph has a different function, but both are eponymously named after the same function their buildings had when the world was a different place.
The Telegraph Restaurant
The Telegraph restaurant in Zelenogradsk occupies the building of the old German telegraph and post office, which was established in the coastal resort in 1896. It is located at the top end of the high street. However, as the terms ‘top end’ and ‘bottom end’ are absolutely subjective, serving no useful purpose to man or beast, let me qualify its location by adding that it lies at the end of Zelenogradsk’s high street nearest the bus and train stations and not the end where the public park and sand is.
Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk
The old telegraph building is one of those solid, stalwart red-brick affairs, instantly identifiable within the Kaliningrad region as being authentically German. In the summer months, a small area is set aside on the pavement next to the building for al-fresco dining and drinking; in winter, during the festive season, this same area is requisitioned for Telegraph’s contribution to the town’s impressive transformation into an imaginatively lit and magically decorated New Year’s holiday wonderland.
Whilst it occupies the ground floor of the former telegraph office, the contemporaneous Telegraph is accessed by a flight of steps. “It don’t make sense!” “It rarely does!”, with the exception of this region, where ground floors are often elevated above the basements below them to let in light from windows at pavement level.
On entering into the stairwell, the scene is set for the Telegraph experience. The walls are bare, stripped of their plaster, exposing the brick beneath. A black facsimile telegraph pole stands in sharp relief, and further along an illusory hole containing some kind of map twinkles in the muted light from illuminated markers. This introduction tells you in no uncertain terms that the Telegraph’s interior will not be run of the mill. It prepares you for an industrialised look with novel touches of retrospective modernity in keeping with the telegraph legacy from which it takes its thematic cue.
The two rooms, which are actually one room joined but visually separated by a deep, broad arch, continue the bare-brick look. The ceiling has a patchy effect, as though some of the plaster has fallen off, but as none lies on the floor below, we must chalk this up to designer licence. The lightbulbs in the industrial lampshades are the visible filament kind, they compliment the shabby chic, and the untrunked cable which supplies their power openly climb the walls.
The here and now in which we live may be the ‘wireless age’, but back in the day when the Telegraph building fulfilled its original function, the term ‘hard wired’ was literal. Appropriately, therefore, no attempt has been made to conceal the wires that link the bulbs. They travel across the ceiling in an exhibition of bold impunity.
The world of wires and plugs, the working environment of yesteryear’s telegraph offices is captured in some detail in the large, framed black and white photographs arranged around the restaurant’s walls. Study these at your leisure to see just how much times have changed.
The theme of the mechanical age continues in the restaurant’s choice of tables. Old treadle sewing machines dating in manufacture and use from the 19th to mid-20th centuries make attractive tables once the machines have been removed.
The leading manufacturer of hand-operated and treadle machines was a company known as Singer, who suspended the Singer name in the mid-section of a wrought-iron framework, bridging the divide between whilst connecting the table’s end supports. The elaborate nature of the frame’s decoration is what gives the tables their appealing clout, and it is thumbs up to the Telegraph restaurant for retaining the tables’ pivoting foot pedals. Attractive features in themselves, should you be prone to tippy tapping, as in his youth was one of my brothers, these pedals will entertain your feet at the same time as you sit and eat.
Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk
Telegraph is a restaurant, it isn’t really a bar, but it has a bar of sorts, and I like that. I never feel at home and cannot quite get comfortable drinking alcohol in a barless zone. Sitting in a restaurant, seated around a table without a bar in sight just doesn’t do it for me. I liken the experience to sitting in a car which does not have a steering wheel. Without a bar something is missing; most likely it’s the bar.
For all its designer emphasis on the basic nitty gritty, Telegraph is cozy. In the all-important lighting department, which is the principal component in any attempt at coziness, Telegraph scores 11 out of 10. Excuse me, whilst I correct myself, my maths are notoriously weak; I meant to say scores 12.
In one sense, this is not good. Telegraph is so terribly cozy that it’s hard to get me out of there. Thank heavens that buses and trains work to things called timetables, which is something else worth mentioning. Telegraph is but a short walk away from the town’s bus and train stations, making it, if you time it right, and I usually make sure that I do, the perfect stopping-off place on your outward journey and a convenient traveller’s rest at which to pause on your way in.
Talking of food, as we now are, Telegraph’s speciality is the promotion of Baltic cuisine. It must be up to snuff as the restaurant is duly cited in Wheretoeat [in] Russia 2024 and in December 2022 was awarded the regional title of ‘Baltic Cuisine’.
Another award that Telegraph deserves is for its truly handsome website, especially in the category of ‘best designed for ease-of-use’. Navigate to its menu pages for a comprehensive and mouth-watering insight into the range of dishes it has on offer. And just in case you are wondering if I intend to provide you with links to the website and to the restaurant’s menu, wonder ye no more. Here is the link to Telegraph’s website: https://telegraph.rest/ and here is the link to its menu: https://telegraph.rest/menu . And whilst I am at it, here is the link to its page on social media: https://vk.com/telegraph.rest .
Ah, but it’s a grand menu to get lost in, isn’t it? But now that you are back, ask yourselves a question, are you fans of quirky? I most definitely am, particularly when it involves valuing and sustaining dying traditions. Thus imagine my delight on discovering that the present-day Telegraph salutes its earlier namesake by enabling its patrons to buy, write and send postcards directly from its premises to anywhere in the world. Who needs digital messaging and who needs things like WhatsApp when you’ve a pen, a card, a stamp and post box! WhatsUp with that? Nothing!
My scientist friend, the one whom I mentioned at the beginning of this post, has a variety of different catchphrases to suit or not to suit as the case may be the topic of almost every conversation. For example, whenever we discuss Britain’s existential threat, the not-accidental migrant invasion, he will with cynicism and irony ask: “Well, what can we do about it?” When we are feeling philosophical, ruminating together on the mysteries of time, “Where would we be without it?” And when we discuss giants of history ~ politicians, generals, luminaries of the silver screen, pop stars, authors, artists and the figureheads of the American mob ~ his concluding remark is likely to be “And it didn’t do them any good!”
Let’s try to apply these questions and statements to the Telegraph in Zelenogradsk:
What can we do about it? Go there! Where would we be without it? Deprived. It didn’t do them any good! Well, obviously it didn’t. Because they decided to go somewhere else when they should have gone to Telegraph.
You see, when you look at it scientifically, it all makes perfect sense!
14 October 2024 ~ Telegraph in Svetlogorsk Good Coffee Unique Art
Contrary to received wisdom, it is not always necessary or indeed advisable for travellers to stick to the beaten track. Verily, by doing so the chances of missing out on some hidden cultural gem or other, or hitherto unencountered esoteric and unusual experience are magnified manyfold.
Indubitably, there are some parts of the world, some sinister and dubious places, where keeping to the beaten track is less a question of tourism than an action guided by common sense in the interests of survival.
Take London, for example, that patchwork quilt of small towns wherein no boundaries lie. One minute you, the traveller, can almost believe what the travel guides tell you, that London is, indeed, one of the world’s most civilised cities, the next, because you strayed from the beaten track, that you are up S*it Creek without a paddle in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Is it Africa or Pakistan? No point leaving the beaten track to be beaten in your tracks. Best to beat a hasty retreat.
Telegraph in Svetlogorsk
Enrichments of this nature do not apply, thank goodness, to a small secluded backstreet in the seaside town of Svetlogorsk on Russia’s Baltic Coast. Not officially known as ‘Off the Beaten Track’, Street Ostrovskogo (‘Off the Beaten Track’ is easier to say) is a quaint, leafy, meandering avenue that wends its way from Street Oktyabr’skaya (it’s easier just to say ‘Off the ‘Beaten Track’).
In Svetlogorsk, the streets run off from a large, open public space in the centre of the town, which, during clement months, overflow with tourist’s eagerly taking advantage of the outside drinking and eating areas. One of the streets that travels from this lively, bustling hub is Ulitsa Oktyabr’skaya. It is the street you will need to walk to get you to the Telegraph café.
The route is a rewarding one. It takes you past a Svetlogorsk landmark, the 1908 Art Nouveau water tower, past the town’s pretty Larch Park with its copy of Hermann Brachert’s ‘Water Carrier’ sculpture ~ the original is in the Brachert Museum ~ past my favourite and recently renovated neo-Gothic house and onto the Hartman Hotel.
To say that you cannot miss Ulitsa Ostrovskogo would be a silly thing to say, because if your sense of direction is anything like mine … Sorry? Oh, it isn’t. Well then just look for a clothes shop on your right. You won’t be able to miss it, because your sense of direction is better than mine and also because in the summer months some of its garments are hung outside in order to make the shop more visible, and besides it is located within one of those charming old German edifices that have at their gable end an all-in-one veranda-balcony glazed and enclosed in wood. This then is the junction at which you turn for Telegraph. This is the end of the beaten track.
Halfway along this quiet backwater, at the point where streets meet chevron-fashion, stand a permanent cluster of wooden market stalls. These are something you cannot miss also, especially those with roofs, which give them the quaint appearance of modest garden summer houses. Here, artisans working in various materials ~ leather, metalware and ceramics ~ together with artists of paint and palette, regularly gather to sell their goods. The range and novelty of their handmade products really are surprising and the quality of them consistently high.
The location of these stalls could not be better placed, since a little further on the left-hand side, you have reached your destination ~ Svetlogorsk’s former telegraph building, resurrected in recent years as an outlet for arts and crafts, as a coffee shop and art gallery.
Telegraph in Svetlogorsk
In addition to selling coffee of various kinds~ and very good they are too! ~ Telegraph deals in assorted teas, other delicious drinks, a seductive range of desserts, irresistable homemade cakes and pastries you’ll want to leave home for. It is also a cornucopia of distinctive handcrafted wares, including vintage and designer clothes, prints, postcards, vinyl records, decorative items for the home, and original works from local artists.
Its comfy settee and low-slung armchairs, into which one’s body readily sinks, plus the light and airy but cozy ambience, make for a very pleasant environment in which to relax, unwind and shop. If you cannot find a gift in here, something special to treat yourself with or a Baltic souvenir, then there’s definitely something wrong with you.
An introduction to two of Telegraph’s artists
https://vk.com/album55604070_101203993 Lilya Bogatko works in the field of applied arts, designing and decorating ceramic goods with stylised naturalistic images. She prefers to work in monochrome, consigning her line-drawn black motifs to high opacity white grounds on tableware and ornaments. Her distinctive illustrations, many of which have a gentle charm that could grace a children’s storybook, possess an ethereal quality. Indeed, a fair proportion of her subjects, be they man or beast, float above the earth; they take to the air with wings. When her subjects are not animals, real or mythological, or people literally raised to a higher level of spirituality ~ have wings will fly ~ her stock-in-trade motifs are replications of Kaliningrad landmarks, such as the now defunct and liquidated former House of Soviets, the refurbished Zalivino lighthouse overlooking the water’s edge of the Curonian Lagoon and Königsberg Cathedral.
Based in St Petersburg, Lilya is a regular visitor to Kaliningrad and the Kaliningrad region, from which she derives inspiration and consolidates her sales outlets.
https://vk.com/album-30057230_195486413 Pavel Timofeev has an arts and crafts workshop at Telegraph in Svetlogorsk, where he produces, among other things, leather purses and wallets, men’s and women’s leather bracelets with inscriptions on request, ornamented key rings and a range of fashion jewellery.
His speciality is selling watches with watch-face customisation. The face design can be made to order, with the option of a leather strap in traditional classic or novel styles. The straps can also be personalised.
For examples of Pavel’s watches, please refer to the carousel that appears below this profile:
The room opposite Telegraph’s ‘sitting room’ is its designated art gallery, a well-lit exhibition space with enough wall and floor capacity to showcase umpteen works of local artists. On the occasion of my visit, the art form most conspicuous was assemblages ~ 3D compositions created by taking disparate pieces of whatever it is the artist has scavenged and then arranging or assembling them on a backboard of some description so that the configuration that ensues presents itself as a pictorial image or, from impressions of the whole or its parts, invites interpretation.
Victor Ryabinin, our artist friend from Königsberg, was the man who introduced me to assemblages. His interest in the potential of this technique as a medium for symbolism had him unearthing whatever he could from the remains of Königsberg’s past and putting the pieces together so as to excite in the observer a quest to uncover meaning, either the artist’s or their own.
Since Victor was profoundly immersed in and also profoundly disturbed by the eradication of Königsberg, the assemblages that he built from the remnants of destruction often convey a personal sense of irredeemable loss, an inescapable sadness, a wistful but unrequited need for a less tragic end to the city in which he loved to live and which he loved. Victor travelled outside of Königsberg more often and further than Immanuel Kant, but he possibly left it less than Kant or anyone else for that matter.
By contrast, the assemblages gathered together under Telegraph’s roof evinced none of this solemnity. They danced a confident riot of bright, effusive colours, orchestrating lively, often comic, images and energising expressive shapes, some fondly reminiscent of the enchanting kind of illustrations adorning the pages of story books beloved of old-time children, others cleverly more obtuse or playfully cryptographic.
In vivacity of colour and their three-dimensional character the assemblages reminded me of the kind of shop-front sign boards popular in the Edwardian era, and there was much at work in their composition to insinuate a vintage charm. But the incorporation of parts taken from obsolete engines, metal handles, steel rivets, goggles and the like, plus paraphernalia of various kinds possessing mechanical provenance and rigged to suggest articulation, disclosed a contemporary steampunk influence. Intriguing, all bewitching and also fun to boot, take any one of these assemblages, hang them in your home and if until now you have felt that your home lacked a conversation piece, trust me when I tell you that this omission has been rectified.
In the Svetlogorsk we know today, cafes, bars and restaurants and places of interest to view and visit exist in appreciable numbers, but every once in a while one stands out in the crowd: Telegraph is that one.
It may have exchanged its wires and needles for coffee and for art, but the function of the historic building as a centre of communication lives on in its role as a meeting place, and the message that it telegraphs couldn’t be more accommodating: Sit a while, relax, enjoy a beverage and a piece of cake and let your sensibilities flow with the positive vibes that emanate from all that you see and all that you feel around you and from what can be bought and taken home, because the chances are that whatever it is that tickles your fancy in Telegraph, you will never find another like it; the chances are it will be unique.
After browsing, binging, basking and borrowing (borrowing from your friends to pay for the coffee and art, “I’ll see you alright, later …”), especially on those days when the craft-sellers’ stalls are active, when you finally head off home, you will say to yourself with satisfaction, what an enjoyable day I have had. I am so pleased to have visited Telegraph, and it’s all because of that Mick Hart, urging us to get up off of our … ah … to get off of the beaten track.
Telegraph ~ social and cultural space of Svetlogorsk.
Telegraph is a public and cultural space (a centre of urban communities), created by city residents for city residents.
We do not have a director, but we have a working group. We are a community of participants with common goals and values.
Telegraph is located on Ostrovskogo Street in house No. 3 (next to the Post Office).
There are four spaces here:
– a coffee shop (here you can try aromatic fresh coffee) – a living room with an exhibition of works by craftsmen (you can buy local handmade souvenirs) – a gallery (local artists hold exhibitions here) – workshops (pottery and carpentry) – a terrace and a lawn with the longest bench in the city.
Our space regularly hosts meetings of various communities. Any participant can propose an idea for their own project and find like-minded people who will provide the necessary support.
Telegraph exists outside of politics, outside of religion. We are open to new acquaintances/initiatives.
The Telegraph project team deals with city projects and development issues.
Co-working ‘Thoughts’ (Aptechnaya, 10); keys from the barista in the coffee shop; additional conditions by phone +79114839050
30 September 2024 ~ Summer in Kaliningrad and UK as it happened in 2024
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
As summer draws to a close, I made the mistake of accidently retorting, “It’s gone so fast that I hardly knew it was there!” To which came the curt and completely undeserving reply that it’s nothing short of marvellous that I knew it had arrived, the amount of time I spend locked away indoors immersed in antique and history books and spurning the light of day.
Hmm, as the collection of photographs displayed here show, the allegations against me are not entirely true.
It has also been said of me that on those few occasions when I do deign to go out, I am either surrounded by ‘junk’ or wallowing in history, locked out of the present for want of the past. Oh, and when I’m not doing that, I’m sitting and drinking beer.
Unfortunately, by some strange false-impression-giving mischievous quirk of fate, the visuals on this page would appear to lend uncanny credence to the case for the prosecution. I’ll let you, the jury, decide.
Summer in Kaliningrad 2024
Seen, and scene, on a brilliant, bright-blue summer’s day, what is it? If I was 350 years younger, I would, in referencing the shorter structure, have taken one look at the small arched windows nestled within the roof and said, “an octopus.” It isn’t. It is, of course, the Baltic coastal town of Svetlogorsk’s principal landmark (even more so now since they knocked down the Hotel Russ). It is, in fact, a water tower: a rather splendiferous example compared to Britain’s concrete plinths, designed in 1908 by Otto Walter Kukuck when Svetlogorsk was German Rauschen. Constructed in the fairytale style of German Romanticism, the tower and its rotunda meld the key concepts of Art Nouveau with architectural features native to the Königsberg region. You used to be able to have mud baths in this building, but the last I heard it was closed to the public. If they opened it up for business again, I would, wouldn’t you?
Crouching down in a field of dandelions whilst wearing a dandelion headdress may not seem like everybody’s idea of fun, but if in a former life you believe yourself to have been a shaman, have passed through the Art Nouveau stage, dallied with Art Deco and have now thrown in your lot with metaphysics and the 5th Dimension, then who can say what summer means to you?
Now here’s something that you don’t see that often, and why would you want to?: Me, armed with a paper bag not containing beer, standing outside of an avant-garde boutique, framed between some rather nice mauve and lettered heart-shaped balloons. We had, in fact, been out back, sitting at a table drinking coffee and eating biscuits, but the shop, which sells clothing and jewellery, as well as coffee, biscuits and snacks, is different enough in style and the items it has an offer to warrant a visit at any time of the year.
The greater proportion of Königsberg was destroyed in the Second World War, but seek and ye shall find architectural gems of the former German city. The Villa Schmidt, seen here bathed in summer sunlight, is one such fine example. It was constructed as a two-storey home in the Art Nouveau/German Romanticism style in 1909 by the celebrated Königsberg architect Wilhelm Warrentrapp. The villa escaped the worst effects of the Battle for Königsberg but fell foul in the years succeeding the war of the con-block, asbestos sheet and bucket-of-cement mentality by which many buildings suffered for want of sensitive restoration. Fortunately, come the 21st century, Villa Schmidt was acquired by someone who knew his restoration onions, and he has restored the property to its original spec.
Fancy meeting you here! > I was doing the shopping > And I was walking the dog
A mid-summer party, during which Soviet Constructivism’s stalwart ‘Captain Codpiece’ takes a break from renovation to enjoy the company of friends and supporters.
Above^ The technique worked superbly in the film Schindler’s List, so why not here? Enjoying a well-deserved beer (when is it not?) on a warm summer’s evening on the forecourt of a Kaliningrad bar.
Above> Nothing quite beats a late summer Baltic sunset. This one was captured this month (September 2024), location Zelenogradsk. I know it looks as though I took the photograph whilst running to the fallout shelter, but the truth of the matter is that although the sun was radiant, a stiff breeze had sneakily come from nowhere, forcing me into the nearest bar, where I continued to watch them both go down, my beer and the evening sun.
Below> This second sunset, another belter, made its way into my camera lens one late June evening from the new pier in Svetlogorsk. No wonder artists, like Victor Ryabinin, look upon this region with inspirational awe and attempt to capture the feeling using paint palette, brush and canvas.
The message is the sun is out, the skies are blue, I am celebrating, how about you? I did think of joining in, but there was quite a lot of seagulls about and, well, knowing my luck …
Summer in the UK 2024
Flint cottages and pan-tile roofs of a time-honoured street in the village of Walsingham, home of ancient religious shrines and throughout the middle ages a major pilgrimage destination. Both my brother and myself have made many pilgrimages to Walsingham, but since our last foray the chip shop had closed and on our recent visit, we abstained from visiting either of the two pubs, forsaking beer for something that was long overdue, a cup or two apiece of holy water. Just to confuse the pilgrims, and those people whose sole (not ‘soul’) interest is fish ‘n’ chips’, Little Walsingham (there is a larger one, too), is bigger than Great Walsingham, and it is to Little Walsingham the first pilgrims wended and wended again in the 20th century when the act of pilgrimaging was duly revived. Walsingham stands as the epicentre of North Norfolk’s historic and spiritual soul, without a visit to which no trip to the region would be complete.
Below: Scenes on a sunny day at Old Hunstanton. As luck would have it, we were entertained by a rare display of the RNLI hovercraft in action, although this photo captures the moment before the action took place.
You can’t have enough clutter! “Hello, operator, could you transport me back to the 1920s as quickly as possible, thank you.”
A number of pubs in England claim to be the oldest licensed premises in the country, but you have to admit that the Bell Inn, at Finedon in Northamptonshire, looks the part, and supporters of the claim’s veracity are only too willing to draw your attention to a license granted to the inn in 1042 by Edward the Confessor’s wife, Queen Edith. The pub personifies the ancient and traditional, including some of its drinkers.
Below:The tides out and the boats are grounded. A typical view across the North Norfolk mudflats and salt marshes.
Gallery above: The small, unassuming, but atmospheric village of Burnham Thorpe in North Norfolk is, as you were just about to tell me, the birthplace of one of England’s most famous naval heroes, Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson. Here we have a snapshot of the village church where Nelson’s father, Mr Nelson, by all accounts, sometimes known as Edmund, was the vicar from 1750 to 1802. The photo was taken from the forecourt of the village pub (where else!), the eponymous Lord Nelson. The last picture in the gallery is me sitting behind Nelson drinking a pint of Norfolk’s finest, Wherry. And (below decks), there I am again across the field from the pub standing next to Burnham Thorpe’s very own Nelson’s Column ~ a tad shorter than the one that used to stand in Trafalgar Square, London, before they replaced it with a figural composition of a rainbow dinghy bristling with trans-migrants. (If only Nelson was alive today. What an excellent Minister of Immigration he’d make.) From a distance, through the window of the pub (where else!), this Nelson looks as though he has been cast from bronze, but once you’ve staggered over to him you find, in fact, that some enterprising fellow-me-lad has carved him out of a tree trunk. England expects that every man will do his duty … someone did.
Above: Dusk descends over the marshland coastline of Norfolk, an area of outstanding natural beauty, and across the carpark of the vibrant White Horse pub, a pub of outstanding beers of natural beauty, situated in Brancaster Staithe.
22 September 2024 ~ Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us
Have you ever noticed that when you go away for a few weeks, on your return not everything has changed, but some things have and subtly. For example, after my recent sojourn in the UK, I returned to Kaliningrad to find that the vacuum cleaner appliances had strangely disappeared, that someone had half-inched the mat from my office/study/drinking den, that the water jug had vanished, that a small table was where it wasn’t, and that the cat’s bowls had turned from plastic to ceramic. On a not so subtle and more depressing note, I learnt that the neighbour’s cat ~ I used to call her ‘Big Eyes’ ~ had scaled her last plank backwards. She used this technique to descend from a flat roof on the second storey of her owner’s house after her owners cut down the birch tree along whose branches she used to scramble.
Unlike our stay-at-home Ginger, she was an out-and-about sort of cat, a brave and intrepid adventurer, who, alas, was to put too much faith in the mythical tale that cats have nine lives and met with the truth abruptly whilst she was crossing the road.
The old philosophical question is there life after death is problematic enough without appending to that question are cats accorded a similar privilege?
“Of course, cat heaven exists,” cat lovers cry indignantly, but does it follow from this assumption that parity heavens exist for pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and every other animal species that are brought into this world merely to be slaughtered for the tastebud pleasures of carnivores?
Abstractions of this nature, though they may well have once occurred to me in some distant, cynical, cerebral past, found no room in my consciousness on returning to Kaliningrad, for soon I would be fretting about an entirely different dilemma ~ is there life after YouTube?
In the short while I had been away not only had my rug gone west but also YouTube with it, or to be more precise, had thereto been confined. “That’s buggered it,” I thought ~ I am prone to moments of eloquence like this ~ for though I could not give a monkey’s for the loss of Western mainstream media, where would I go with YouTube gone for my daily fix of music, for documentaries of an historical nature and for classic pre-woke TV dramas like 1960s’ Dangerman, filmed in glorious black and white when the use of the term black and white was not endowed with racial undertones and even if it had been nobody British at that time would have given a monkey’s f.ck. Ah, Happy Days indeed!
Sixty minutes searching Google for credible alternatives to the sort of content with which I engage on YouTube was enough to reassure me that whilst life without YouTube was not as we know it ~ YouTube is but one place in the internet’s vast and expanding universe but in itself it seems infinite ~ life without it was not unsupportable.
I found a site I had used in the past which offered a reasonably good selection of archived TV dramas and classic black and white films, and I also upturned a second site which, although containing the sort of stuff I would not touch with a barge polack ~ modern, glossy, tacky and geared to a left-leaning audience ~ tendered the consolation of half a dozen history programmes of a fairly reputable nature.
I was conscious that I was doing something that the so-called entitled millennials are only just coming to terms with in these rapidly changing times: I was having to ‘make do’. The derivation actually precedes the generation to which I belong. It has its origins in wartime slogans, and was born out of the real necessity of making the best of a bad situation, using whatever scant resources were at hand. Making do in the age of misinformation/disinformation, the cast offs and the hand me downs of second- and third-best websites represent a collateral revision of the quid pro quo arrangement of if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine, rehashed by modern politics as so long as you let me show you mine then I’ll let you show me yours.
I sometimes wonder if any of our contemporary politicians have bothered to read Gulliver’s Travels,written and published by Jonathan Swift in 1726, and if the answer is yes, did they find it illuminating. I for one believe that Swift’s seminal work should be made mandatory reading for anyone who is contemplating taking up a career in politics.
Ping Pong You’re Not Wrong
Ping pong, aka table tennis, is a game like many other games, such as cricket, rugby, tennis and football, I can honestly say I have never much cared for. I don’t care much for the tit for tat and the way in which the ball, be it big or small, gets passed back and forth with monotonous regularity between two opposing but rules-based players or carefully hand-picked teams, with no apparent benefit to anyone else outside of the game, give or take a cheer or two, which quickly fade in euphoria’s twilight.
Above: Ping and Pong. It’s batty.
At least in the UK when the sad illusion Democracy has been stripped down naked like the tired old whore she is, which many, out of trained submission or a sense of misplaced respect, shy away from doing, the rules of the game, whose they are and who it is that benefits from them are as transparent as a Nylon negligee (What happened to that in my absence?). Thanks to long experience of the electoral system’s hocus pocus, the who will it be first past the post, we know that whether we make our mark or not, we are guaranteed for the next five years to be saddled with one or the other bunch of ineffectual dunderheads and that, give or take a nuance or two, whichever party claims Number 10 as its prize will be singing, rather badly as usual, from the communal globalist hymn sheet: Money, Money, Money. Please to sing along now. You are all familiar with the refrain.
During my last assignment in the UK, I was treated to the spectacle of this perfectly meaningless political role play, the changing of the old guard ~ ping pong, ping pong … pong, pong, pong. Out with the old and in with the old: the Tories on their way out, Labour on their way in, but significantly rather more out than in and with many of them clearly quite out of it. Bring on the men in white coats. (Sorry I did not mention women; I’m taking a course in misogyny.)
This rotational, completely predictable, seesaw-moment momentum has less to do with change than it does with continuity, as most of the Tories’ acclaimed centre right are so way left of centre that they ought to be in the Labour Party, as many of them effectively are, whilst the Labour party itself knows no longer what it is, what it wants to be and least of all where it is going. Shame it is taking the nation with it. Half of Labour is hard left, half of it is half hearted and the other half is clearly insane (and clearly possess a triple ‘A’ in Maths). Neither Labour or the Cons ever recovered from Tony Blair. Both exhibit incurable symptoms, and the plague they exhale collusively is addling minds and destroying the country.
Nowhere is this emergency better illustrated than when the media cries exultantly that one or other of the old two parties has ‘won it by a landslide’.
The only landslide the public sense is that things are slipping away from them, that things are going from bad to worse. And yet as catastrophic as British life now is, many in the UK are yet to grasp the intelligence that by hook or by crook the old two parties need to be put out to grass. Change is as good as a rest, as they say, and a rest from them is badly needed and, more to the point, excessively overdue.
Above: I think it’s self-explanatory …
To be fair, if that is the same as being honest, Liebour did in its accession usher in some changes, albeit typically hurriedly, typically without much thought and typically in the process breaking most if not at all of its pre-election promises. But as the changes so far instituted are typically Labour in character, they have in the absolute sense changed very little at all. For example, if a Labour government did not raise taxes what a momentous change that would be. But then if Labour did not raise taxes would anybody know they were there?
Whoever it was who thought to dub Labour the party of taxation was a percipient man indeed, so much more than just perspicacious that the chances of him being a woman are nil (Excuse me for being sexist, you see I’m taking this course in misogyny.). But don’t you dare complain, not about being a man when you would rather you were a woman (it’s something you cannot change) and don’t complain about Labour’s tax hikes. You were warned that Liebour would tax you, and tax you into the ground, so why did you vote them in!
It is a fact of life that some things change and some things plainly don’t (Come on now transvestites, don’t get those knickers into a twist!); some things change a lot and others don’t change that much; some things get done for a change, and just for a change some things don’t; and there’s not a lot of change to be had out of six quid for a pint. But there are some things that will never change, though given time they probably will, but by the time they do will it be too late? Let’s talk immigration. Somebody ought to, has to, as it should be abundantly clear by now that that somebody is not Starmer.
Immigration is possibly the one issue that leading up to the General Election the Liebour party did not lie about; perhaps they simply forgot. Those of us who did not vote Labour were right, not far-right mind you, but right that we did not do so, if only for this reason, since with depressing predictability Labour has not done, and has no intention of ever doing, as much as diddly squit to resolve the immigration crisis, a dastardly weaponisation programme which represents the one real threat to the stability of the British nation and the safety of its indigenous people.
Where Labour has excelled itself is channelling more resources into the conflict in Ukraine at a time when we need to squander it least on globalist-led agendas. Do you ever ask yourself what it is that they do with your money which they take in the name of ‘council tax’? Could it be used to foot the bill for conflicts in which we have no legitimate role, even if we started them, and for paving the way for dinghy migrants to live it up in luxury?
Immigration has changed and also it has not. It has not changed in that we still have it, has not changed in that we don’t want it, but has changed inasmuch that want it or want it not, there is a lot more of it than there used to be. Central to this change is that the major EU powers no longer deem it necessary to conceal their complicit role in organising and facilitating the migrant invasion of Britain.
The infectiousness of this invasion is far more virulent and far more lethal than any contrived plandemic could be. Perhaps we should call on dear old Bill. Come on Bill, old boy, whip us up a jab or six to provide the British people with the immunity they so desperately need to protect themselves from Coronomigrant. Violent crime is rampant, acts of terrorism sweep the nation, the police are no longer a force but a branch of the social services and the government is so dismally limp it is crying out for a shot of moral Viagra.
White fight not far right
One thing that was markedly different during recent months in England, which was not necessarily good but understandably necessary as an alternative stay of civil war, was that when the riots came, as come they did and come they will, it was the whiteys on the war path. Now that did make a change!!!
It was no change at Notting Hill Carnival. Yet again it proved to be London’s annual ethnic stab fest. Any other event with a history resembling the mind of an on-the-rampage serial killer would have been banned years ago, as would the Notting Hill Carnival if it was anything other than black. It is patently inconceivable that a white British festival with a similar record of bloodlust would be allowed to continue year on year. Murder or no murder, it would have been denounced from the outset as unfit for ethnic consumption and that without equivocation would have rapidly been the end of that. This year’s Boot Hill incident cost two more people their lives, adding to the festival’s ever increasing death toll. Meanwhile, the Labour government is contemplating doubling down on the British tradition of fox hunting. It seems that rural blood sports must be banned whilst urban ones are tolerated, encouraged one might say. Brrr! it felt as if something just walked over the United Kingdom’s grave. Could that something be two-tier policing?
Over to our new prime minister. He may resemble a disciplinarian, a 1950s’ schoolmaster parachuted strategically in from a time when Britain was really Britain, but as far as ethnics are concerned looks can be deceiving. Did he give the carnival organisers the six of the best he gave the white rioters? Did he give them lines to write, “Thou shalt not stab at the Notting Hill Carnival”? Did he heck as like. He caned himself instead, by forgetting the lines of condemnation the public were waiting to hear from him, either that or the savage events and the fear of being called racist deprived him of his left-wing backbone and left him morally speechless. He eventually did cough something up, but before you could say one rule for them and a different rule for us, and before some impudent scallywag could raise the uncomfortable spectre of policing on a two-tier level, he was banging the same old distraction drum about the number one priority being the need to protect society from the heinous actions of right-wing thugs. As for random knife attacks by men whose names we can’t pronounce and acts of organised terrorism by medieval hostiles (I’ve just had a call from my stockbroker ~ invest in inflatable dinghies), the message from Britain’s political elite is as masters of the hen house they have every right to fill it with as many foreign foxes as the ECHR permits, so just sit back and enjoy your fate.
I began this post from the perspective of change and seem to have moved mesmerically into the realm where déjà vu governs the laws of momentum, and yet not everything in the world is as predictable as we would like to think. Those who live in a certain street in Kaliningrad thought they would never see the day when they would get themselves a brand-new pavement, but that day eventually dawned, despite one woman tutting, “It’s taken thirty years!” and now that vital change for which we had all been waiting seems as though it was always thus, that the pavement has always been there.
The same could be said of a certain sub-post office in a certain UK shire town. The post office seems to have been there for as long as memory itself, and mine is quite a long one, but it’s ‘all change’ when you scratch the surface. I am sure that this has got nothing to do with the fact it is run by Asians ~ which British post office isn’t! ~ but everything to do with the erratic hours it keeps. It is the first post office I have ever encountered that opens when it likes, making it an excellent venue whenever you catch it right, because since nobody trusts its opening hours very few people use it, hence the absence of queues. Not having to stand in line makes such a welcome change from a trip to your average post office, where you need to go armed with a sleeping bag and enough provisions to last you a fortnight, and yet it is such an odd phenomenon that it has you asking the question, could this peculiar post office that is more often shut than not, in fact be a front for something else? Like all these foreign food stores that pop up overnight and the multitude of barber’s shops purporting to be Turkish when the owners and all who work in them look and talk Albanian. Perhaps the owners of these businesses are engaged in some other activity, such as laundering, for example. There’s no hard left sign visible outside the coven of Hope Not Hate, but just because you cannot see the twin tubs does not mean that they are not there and the country is not being rinsed.
Whilst every street in every town and every city in England have fallen forfeit to immigration (you may have heard the phrase ‘Our cities have changed beyond recognition’), the streets of Russian Kaliningrad have decidedly changed for the better, that is to say materially and, with the restitution of law and order and regaining of self-respect, which had been partly laid to waste as a repercussion of perestroika, in matters of social decorum.
Whenever I walk the perimeters of Königsberg’s ancient ponds, this variance in urban life does not leap up and out at me like something dark on a no-go street in Peckham but is inviting enough to assail my senses with what we have lost in Britain. The contrast in the cultural climates is visible, audible, palpable, and it starts with the way in which people dress.
From New York to the South Pole, almost everybody these days is hardwired to dressing casual. I suspect that I am one of the few remaining sartorial standard bearers who espouses cravat, frock coat and top hat ~ not forgetting silver-topped cane ~ rather than wear a pair of trainers.
Above: “I don’t as a rule wear any, but I always make sure not to go out with, or in, a strong wind”
Kaliningradians and Kaliningrad visitors from other parts of Russia tend to follow a smart-casual trend. Whereas, as in every other sphere of cultural life, dress code in the UK has taken a turn for the worse and worst, going from ultra-smart to smart-casual, to trendy casual, to half casual, to dumb-down casual to bags of shit.
Who is not acquainted with that funny old Asian man? Let me point him out to you: that’s him there, there, there, over there and over here … See how he wears all sorts of oddments, everything thrown together: the workshop apron, pantaloon trousers, corny ill-fitting jacket bought from yonder charity shop and, of course, a pair of iridescent trainers ~ what lovely colour combinations, orange, yellow and purple. And he is indisputably the best dressed man in Bedford.
Now turn around and cast your gaze on those beautiful English ladies amorphously squashed in over-tight leggings, all bums and large tums, with cattle rings through their noses, shrapnel embedded in brows and lips and covered in head to foot with tats. Isn’t their language colourful: f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. And what is that pervasive smell, no not that smell, this smell! Pooh! It is the town centre gently marinating in the stench of stale and smoking Ganja. Look up, it’s a live one, and he’s heading in our direction! Time to take evasive action! Cross to the opposite side of the street and quick!
The fundamental difference between Britain’s streets and the streets of Kaliningrad is not confined to sartorial consciousness: manners maketh man (they seem not to maketh UK women). Public behaviour on Kaliningrad’s streets, give or take the inevitable exception, is generally better than it is England. And, with the Russian accent on family values, traditional family groups of traditional Russian heritage freely and with confidence enjoy the streets of their city. Contrast homely scenes like this with the kind of groups you can expect to find, and more’s the pity do, hanging around in England’s cities and degrading its small-town centres.
Lefties would have us believe that the gangs of blacks and Asians, and the johnny-come-lately tribes flooding in on the promise tide of benefits, rights and endless freebies from far-flung parts of the world’s subcontinent are an enriching sight for monocultural eyes. But such postulations are unconvincing even through their glasses. Excelling the attitude and behavioural problems evinced by their white ne’er-do-well counterparts, a pervasive air of ‘up to no good’ hangs above the Ganja cloud and fills the vacuum on Britain’s streets left by the absence of coppers with an ‘at any moment it could all kick off’ incertitude. Menace and apprehension rule. Britain’s streets are not just uncouth, they are gravely infected with passive aggression.
Yes, things have certainly changed from the Britain I once knew and loved. I wonder what the Victorians and Edwardians would make of it. I wonder what those who fought for their country and died in two world wars would make of it. What would Sir Winston Churchill say? We know what Enoch Powell would say, since he said it back in the 1960s. Lord, if only someone had listened to him!
Spare some change, please!
I read somewhere (please tell me that this is not true) that housebreakers in the UK do not qualify for prison sentences until they have been convicted of 26 successive accounts of burglary. It is an indisputable fact that you have got more chance of winning the lottery or stopping the boats at Dover than getting arrested for shoplifting. It’s take your pick skanky ladies and nothing resembling gentlemen, you’ve really nothing to lose. In the unlikely event you get caught in the act, just give the merchandise back and have it away from the shop next door. Nice one, mate: Ha! Ha! Ha! Easy-touch-Britain, innit!
I have no idea if shoplifting is as prevalent in Kaliningrad as it is in every British town and city. I somehow feel it is not. But I do know, as I have witnessed it personally, that Kaliningrad has a boy-racer problem and that those that race are not all boys. Thankfully, however, one of the more applaudable changes has been the city-wide installation of efficacious pedestrian crossings. Gone are the days when we used to huddle in groups of five or more on the opposite sides of the four-lane roads and then, on the count of 10, make a nervous dash for it. Oh, how the drama of youth gives way to prudence in later life!
If someone was to ask me, and I don’t suppose they will, what is the one thing you would like to see changed in Kaliningrad, the answer without a second thought would be the introduction of a law to stamp out dugs that bark incessantly or, better still, to penalise their owners. These must-be mutton-jeff mut-lovers can never have heard of noise pollution, possibly because like the rest of us, they can hear precious little above the row that their barking dugs are making. It’s a dugs life, as someone said, someone who couldn’t spell dogs correctly.
Since the subject of this post is change, I expect that you expect that at some point in the narrative, at this point, for example, the temptation to make some corny remark about change in relation to underpants would finally prove too much for me, but I hate to disappoint you that I am about to disappoint you, because someone might pull them up on me, I mean pull me up on it, and I do not intend to stoop so low, so let’s instead be briefs.
Ringing the changes is happening in a negative way on the Polish border. Always slow and unhelpful, the Polish border authorities are excelling their own track record for putting obstacles in one’s way where none should be encountered, thus holding up one’s journey as though suspending it in empty space by a very strong pair of invisible braces (we’re suspiciously close to pants again!). The object of the exercise appears to be none other than to subject the weary traveller to the torment of terminal boredom or failing in that ambition to simply delay one long enough to make one miss one’s flight. If you have been an unhappy recipient of this apparent change in policy and believe you are being short-changed by conditions of an adverse nature at the Russian-Polish border, here is where you can lodge your complaint:
I was going to finish this post on change by saying something profound, like ‘things change and that’s a fact, and very often not for the better’. And then it suddenly occurred to me that women in leopard print tights rarely change their spots. So, then I revised my ending to read, ‘if it don’t change it will stay the same’, but whilst I know it will not change anything, I went and changed my mind.
Beggar: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/homeless-man-sitting-ground-flat-vector-illustration-desperate-hungry-poor-male-person-sitting-street-near-trash-bin-asking-help-getting-into-financial-trouble-poverty-concept_24644540.htm#query=street%20beggar&position=0&from_view=keyword&track=ais_hybrid&uuid=af6b8f40-80ae-4929-ae9a-94b805e40e71″>Image by pch.vector</a> on Freepik
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
25 August 2024 ~ Bistrampolio Beer in Kaliningrad is it any good?
Bistrampolio! It’s very much a mouthful, isn’t it! To the complacent, or could that be arrogant, English, who expect everyone else to speak their language, it sounds like a cross between a poser’s restaurant in old-time London’s Tooley Street and a disease brought on by inveterate mint eating. But have I got news for you: it’s nothing of the sort!
Bistrampolio is, for want of a better description, a chocolate stout. Its full name is Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus, but we won’t hold that against it.
It is brewed by Lithuanian brewers Aukstaitijos Bravorai, who seem to specialise in my favourite bottles ~ flip top ~ and win countless awards in my mind for best labels in their class, possibly because their labels exist in a class of their own.
The Bistrampolio bottle is dark but not as dark as its contents. If you were to pour it into a glass, and where else would you pour it (?), and then swiftly turn off the lights, you wouldn’t be able to see it. No, honestly, it really is that dark. As black as your hat, which is green.
And even with a miner’s helmet with a torch strapped on the front, which you probably bought from eBay, you would only need to wear it, if you felt you had to.
A full body is easily found, and this beer certainly has one. If you’ve got a girlfriend like that, you’ll know perfectly well what I mean.
Bistrampolio Beer in Kaliningrad
I’m busy at the moment sampling what the brewers of Bistrampolio tell me is a beer containing five types of malts. That’s not one malt! That’s five! Another interesting figure, which ties in like a pair of corsets to the image of full-bodied, is its 6% O.G., making it not just a full body but an appreciably strong body.
The flavour is all there, and believe you me it’s rich, but, unlike many strong, dark beers, its consistency is light, not intensely glutinous, thus giving you, the drinker, the full malty, as it were, but in a rather surprisingly thirst-quenching way. Drunk chilled, as the brewers suggest, Bistrampolio hits the right spot from the top of the glass to the bottom.
Has it a good finish and an aftertaste to match? What sort of question is that? Has a globalist got morals? The first is a yes; the second a no. Bistrampolio is smooth, as smooth as the finest black velvet. Comparatively speaking (why not?), Guinness is to Bistrampolio what a horse-hair blanket is to silk. “On my sainted mother’s life, to be sure, to be sure, to be sure …” In the second place, there is no second place, for if Bistrampolio was a horse and I a betting man, I would be quids in on this one-horse race.
But enough of this idle banter! Switch the light back on and let’s have a proper look at her!
She’s dark, dusky, sultry; she carries the perfume of caramel malts with just the right hint of barley; and boy does she go down well.
With a pedigree like this (woof!) and an O.G. of 6%, she possesses the kind of darkness that I could gladly take a knee for, or anything else for that matter…
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai Where it is brewed: Lithuania Bottle capacity: 1litre Strength: 6% Price: It cost me about 310 roubles (£2.71) Appearance: Dark chocolate Aroma: Rich malty chocolate Taste: Handsome Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Classic Would you buy it again? I want to
“BISTRAMPOLI MANOR unfiltered chocolate dark beer. This 6% ABV beer is brewed with a combination of five malts – Pilsner Light, Munich, Caramel, Dark and Chocolate – which gives this beer a dark mahogany colour and a subtle dark chocolate bitterness and aroma. Serving this beer cool (about 12 ⁰C) reveals its true aroma and taste.”
Wot other’s say [Comments on Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus from the internet, unedited] 😑 Smooth and very drinkable. Just slightly sweet overall. Not a roast bomb. 😐 The taste is sweet, malty with a noticeable rag. [Comment: Is he drinking it through his underpants?] 😊The aroma is persistent and tasty. Damn, really tasty. The aroma is clean and chocolatey. [Comment: Now here is a chap who tells it as it is!] 💪F*ing Handsome! [Comment: My brother! He’s got a way with words, but rarely gets away with them …]
In case you are wondering should you travel to the UK, my advice to you is you’d be safer as the target in a circus knife-throwing act. And it’s nothing to do with the ‘far right’ and all to do with immigration.
12 August 2024 ~ UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Travel Warning Issued: Stay away from the UK
What a great idea! What a cunning plan! Was it the new government’s or the evil far right’s? Apparently, several countries, including the likes of Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, are warning their natives not to travel to the UK as it is a dangerous place. I have to agree with them, but it is nothing to do with the riots. Now all we have to do is to get countries spanning the entire continent of Africa, Pakistan and the whole of the Middle East to issue similar warnings ~ even Rwanda might join in ~ and like stranger things which happen at sea, perhaps the ‘little boats’, which are anything but little, will sail away to somewhere else, like Never Never Land, and never return again. Amen.
After 27 years of being forcefully told that multiculturalism and diversity are the best thing since the Black and White Minstrels disbanded, and you’d better believe it, keep your mouth shut and only say what we want you to say, the lid has finally blown off the UK pressure cooker. Perhaps now at last the UK can stop looking for bogus invasions from fictional enemies abroad and address the home-grown threat from the immigrant invasion. Sorry? What was that? You doubt it? So do I.
The British media and the newly appointed Labour government are at such frenetic odds to divert the British public from the root cause of the riots, the immigration crisis, that if the situation was not so egregiously dire, and as we have seen in the past few days so dangerous, it would make good comedy. The UK is disintegrating and everyone and everything is to blame except for failed multiculturalism, perpetual immigration and an endless sludge pump of stifling woke.
Social media is to blame, especially Musk’s ‘X’ (just because he dismantled Twitter’s left-wing hegemony and then scrapped the platform’s silly name for another silly name); Farage is to blame, because he tells it as it is (I blame it on that suit he borrowed from Tommy Robinson.); GB News is to blame, because it raises questions and highlights issues that the lefty mainstream media would rather not confront and evidently has no answer for; white Britons are to blame because some of their compatriots have taken to the streets to vent their anger and frustration, when they should be playing the white man, complying and capitulating and taking whatever shit is shot in their direction by the establishment’s anti-white fan. It would not be so bad if it was aimed at everyone else, but unfortunately it seems to them that they are the only target.
Who will not be blamed, until history exposes them, is the UK’s political elite and the puppeteers, their globalist masters.
How UK mainstream media plays down and manipulates the truth This is an exercise you can do at home. Go to UK Google News and search on ‘stabbing’. This will give you a list of articles. Read these articles and see if you can find the identity of the person (people) being stabbed and the identity of the person (people) doing the stabbing. This is a simple test for mainstream media obfuscation. Often, the articles seem to be hiding something ~ and we know what that something is!
Also, watch video news reports carefully. For example, some of the mainstream news videos of the alleged assault by two policer officers at Manchester Airport. Here, the bias is often conveyed almost subliminally in the tone of the narrator. It is a weary, sorrowful, injured tone, as if the person doing the talking has contracted a virulent dose of the bed-wetting liberal lefties. Both techniques are employed to a mutual end, but one plays with your focus whilst the other attempts to infect your thoughts like a virus through your feelings. Read. Watch. But above all be sceptical.
Recent things to consider: * What started the ethnic riots in Leeds: Google answer: anti-police sentiment.
* UK serviceman stabbed: A hard left newspaper standfirsts its report with the usual get-out-clause, the attacker could have a mental health issue. Well, yes, all of these enrichers who have nothing better to do in life than roam around stabbing people, blowing people up and, for an encore, blowing themselves up have, by definition, mental health problems. The question you should ask yourself, and your politicians, is, why do we keep importing them?
* Police officer kicks assailant in head: Did you know it happened at Manchester Airport? Airports are prime targets for terrorists. Terrorists fit a certain profile. They could be carrying weapons. When people hit you, you generally hit them back, and after all they are the Police Force.
** Southport dance-class killings: Media focus switches from victims and perpetrator to accusations that ‘false claims about the attacker’ went viral. The riots start, and who, what and why are submerged beneath blanket MSM coverage of the threat we face from the ‘far right’. “I say, Binky old boy, I don’t think I’d know one if I saw one. They must be pretty rare, not like those ethnics and lefties, what! They take to the streets like boats on water!”
Attention: Diversion Ahead! The heartfelt sigh of relief from certain ruling quarters and the leftist MSM when the riots kicked off in the aftermath of the Southport carnage could be heard all over the country, especially in the capital. If you are of a cynical mind you might suspect that this diversion was the one they had been waiting for.
The leftist mainstream media were off the chocks like a 1970s’ streaker on ice: “Far Right Riots!!!” they shrieked. The government seized on this diversionary tactic to condemn the rabble in no uncertain terms, vowing to bring them to justice Edgar J Hoover style (He looks a bit like him, don’t you think?) Strong and stronger words were uttered!
In keeping with the modern idiom, the mainstream media did not report, it ranted, raged and fumed and then it slammed and blasted, and at the height of this hullabaloo the issue of and the evils of relentless immigration were quietly, oh so quietly, swept beneath the liberal-left carpet. Whilst all this was going on, whilst the ‘anti-protesters’, Hope Not Hate, Unite Against Fascism, Stand Up Against Anything That Makes Us Sound Incredibly Virtuous (emphasis on the ‘incredibly’), and all the other touchy-feely left-wing Marxist groups (who seem to act like fascists themselves), were getting the full-praise treatment from an extremely grateful establishment and the nasty far-right fascists the full force of the law, over the Channel in France, gangs of Sudanese cut-throats were swotting up on their riot techniques, using knives and machetes to ensure a place in the boats waiting to bring them to easy-touch Britain, where, once ensconced in their free hotels, they will sleep the sleep of the privileged and awake the following morning to face the full and formidable force of a traditional English breakfast. There! Let that be a lesson to them! It serves them right for coming!
Next stop, Britain’s streets!
How and when did it all go wrong? Queen Victoria asks.
It all started going wrong at the end of the Second World War with cheap imported labour. Then, as now, we were told that immigration was good for us, a bit like eating one’s greens (ay up, that sounds quite racist!). It was beneficial for the economy. Then as now it was beneficial, but only for the few. In the short term, the few cashed in; in the long term the rest of us paid the price. We continue to pay the price today, but the stakes are considerably higher.
Now, several decades later, with the zealous help of the pseudo-liberals, a country of unparalleled excellence, a country to be proud of, has been thrown back into the dark ages, its towns and cities trashed and transformed into something resembling third-world ghettos.
And so the riots start
In the days leading up to the riots, Britain witnessed a series of precipitating events. First there was the ethnic riots in Leeds. Cause, we are told, anti-police sentiments. Don’t like the police much, time to the smash the city up. Then came the stabbing of a UK military serviceman, targeted, it was suggested, because he was in uniform. It has really come to something if you dare not wear your uniform in the country that you serve; is that what I hear you say? Believe it or not, it is policy. Members of His Majesty’s Armed Forces are advised not to wear their uniforms when in public places. Yep, Britain really is that dangerous. I have even stopped wearing my Girl Guides’ uniform.
The next provocation to hit the mainstream headlines was the Manchester Airport incident, in which a police officer was accused of kicking a man in the head. A video taken at the time shows that he and his colleagues had been assaulted. The attack was violent and sustained, and the officer fought back. One tends to do so when assaulted, and besides he has a job to do. He works in the British police force. That’s ‘force’, spelt f-o-r-c-e, for those who are liberal dyslexic.
The officer accused was suspended pending investigation, a thousand apologies issued, and the ethnics and their lefty chums took to the streets in force on the evidence of a video selectively edited and quickly posted on social media platforms purporting to show police brutality.
The final spark to the tinder box that set a montage of riots in motion was the brutal killing of three young white girls at a community centre in Southport.
Police at airports Whilst we wait with anticipation on the verdict of the police officers’ conduct at Manchester airport that sparked ethnic protests that we don’t hear much about, I must say that it is reassuring to know in a country like ours, soft-touch Britain (soft for some), where the green light is routinely given for access to all kinds of people about which we know next to nothing, that our airports, which are prime targets for ruthless terrorist maniacs ~ Killers with a capital ‘K’ ~ are protected day and night by brave police and security forces, who have an extremely difficult and dangerous job to do. The last thing any of us want, who would rather not be obliterated whilst waiting in the departure lounge, is an airport overseen by demoralised, disempowered police, who, if and when the balloon goes up, are hamstrung when they need to act by the disconcerting thought that pillocks might be filming them on smartphones, and what will be the consequences if, heaven forbid, they have to use force. Let us hope and pray, therefore, that the result of the inquiry into the conduct of the officers protecting Manchester Airport does not jeopardise all of our lives by rendering airport police, and all police for that matter, even less effective than they have become in recent years through the disservice done to us all by the imposition of social media and winging wokist policies.
Much was made by the leftist media in response to the riots that followed in the wake of the Southport atrocity that false claims on social media relating to the stabman had triggered public disorder. But citing misinformation spread by social media as the definitive cause of the riots is a bottom-scraping exercise. As tragic and catalytic as the barbaric act in Southport is, the significance of this incident in relation to the riots is commensurate with the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
The riots, strictly speaking, are not a manifestation solely of recent events, as one-sided and tragic as they unequivocally are, but stem from an accumulation of deep, of bitter frustration, conjoined with a sense of national unease, that free-for-all immigration and the woke by which it is enforced is rotting British culture, contributing to the country’s crime wave, making the streets unsafe, advantaging foreign terrorists and turning British subjects into second-class citizens in their own country.
Since the on-stage debut of Tony Blair, Britons have been forced to accept wide and penetrating cultural changes, none of which they asked for, did not want and do not want; forced to pretend they are being ‘enriched’ ; forced to live in a shadowy world of rising crime and terrorism to which the only official answer is go home, hold hands and have candle-lit vigils. The end result, to coin a phrase, are riots waiting to happen.
It is understandable why one faction of the pseudo-liberal cabal refuse to exit their little world and admit that it’s all gone terribly wrong. These are those who simply need to feel good about themselves, who crave the accolade of being enlightened, who refute the perils of mass immigration because every now and then Mrs Patel, from the house next door, makes them onion bhajis, and Mr Bingbongo, on the opposite side, speaks to them of religious conversion. Better get to it quick, I say! These are the liberal lefties who, though many of them mean well, have proven themselves to be as daft as they are insufferably gullible, who swallow, hook, line and sinker, the misinformation fed to them by those who owe them no greater allegiance than whatever it takes to exploit their simple childlike naivety.
At the command end of this miserable chain there exists a more insidious, a more invidious clan ~ you know who you are! ~ who will be rubbing their hands with glee as they witness the breakdown of law and order and the scenes of devastation playing out on Britain’s streets.
They, the ones in the shadows, the ones that pull the strings, have worked long and hard for things to go this way. They have lusted after division, and now at last they’ve got what they craved for. Like the average useful idiots, they sing the praises of multiculturalism, the wonders of diversity, but for them they have a different meaning in which peace and harmony play no part.
The newly elected Labour government and the usual media outlets which continue to push this far left agenda, as powerful as they are, are clearly out of their depth. Using the old distraction technique, they blame the riots on far-right thugs, thus focussing on the symptom rather than the cause, and in the process deliver the threatening message, ‘speak out of turn about immigration and we’ll slap an extremist label on you!’
When they speak they preach to the converts of old, Guardian and Independent readers, who, like drug addicts craving their daily fix, need to hear those magic words ‘far right’, and hear them loud and often. It binds them to their fantasy. For the rest of us, however, the truth is plain to see. Ninety-nine per cent of the British population are not, as a leftist journalist recently claimed, happy with mass immigration and the radical changes it has brought to our country. In fact, each and every one of us face a riot every day, a sad, a sickening, emotional one, which we struggle to contain, as we angrily watch from the sidelines a country that once had no equal being fly tipped into the swamp.
Allow me to put this in context: A few days ago, I attended a classic car show, where I met and spoke to a lot of English people. Car talk apart, the conversation inevitably shifted into a higher gear when someone mentioned the riots and from there into top gear when the state of the country was broached.
“It [the country’s] gone to the dogs,” one man spat. (I think he said the ‘dogs’.)
“I no longer think of it as ‘my’ country,” another cursed. I think this man was Indian.
And still another asserted, and he did not mince his words: “The UK is a s*it hole!”
A man who purported to be a former officer of the law, recently retired, got wind of our conversation. Standing in front of the fatty-fry van where we all were queuing, he swore an oath on the sign that said ‘Fish ‘n’ Chips the Great English Meal’, which was backed by a union jack, that he had to leave the police force as it was systemically anti-white British and sabotaged by the ‘yoke of woke’. I asked him to pass the vinegar. I believe he already had.
In the three hours I spent talking to people at this event, if there was anybody there who harboured a Guardian, Independent or Observer point of view that mass immigration is a wonderful thing and that the Britain we live in today is a safe, morally stable, decent, civilised liberal utopia then no one was letting on.
No one condoned the riots, but they evidently understood, more than the government wants to, the reason why they happened, and none were willing to buy the snake oil pedalled by mainstream media.
One person to whom I spoke did confess, reluctantly, with an air of self-conscious shame, as if he was looking for absolution, that he voted Labour at the last election, because there was something wrong with him. But when he came to his senses, he realised his mistake. Labour, he had realised, is the party of immigration. The Tories were simply inept, but Labour have an agenda, which is to flood the country with undesirables. “We’ve got enough of our own,” he declared, “So why do we want to import them?”
Another chap, who was busy observing a T-shirt printed with ‘Bald Lives Matter’ ~ My brother, between a mouthful of chips, looked self-consciously down at his stomach, no doubt wondering if ‘Fat Lives Matter’, whilst a friend wondered, or should have been wondering, if a case could be made for ‘Tight Lives Matter’, as he hadn’t paid for his chips, I had ~ declared, philosophically, in a broad Northamptonshire accent, “They [the establishment] are frit of ‘them’. ‘Them’ being you know who. That’s why we have this two, er, what do you call it, two-tyre policing and why hardly anyone gets arrested when foreigners go on the rampage.” He was actually more specific in naming who these foreigners are, and his expressions were liberally [pun intended] peppered with lots of f*cks and c*nts.” Now, if I had been a ‘counter-protester’ an ‘anti-fascist’ or (God forbid!) a craven apologist for Black Lives Matter (wait a minute whilst I take a knee ~ what a twat he looks!), I might have dismissed this impudent white man as a raging f*cking fascist and ignored whatever he had to say, riot or no riot!
I looked away at that point, as though I was trying to find in the not too distant but mythical future a T-shirt with the caption, “British White Views Matter”, but I must have been looking in the wrong direction, towards London and onto Downing Street, because no matter how I strained my eyes, my hopes and my imagination, the only thing that seemed to matter was that it no longer mattered to me, at least not as much as it will for those who though they are young today won’t be young tomorrow, and for those, the most unfortunate, the waiting-to-be-born, who will never know anything but the horror of tomorrow. Perhaps this is their silver lining: for them it will be as it is; not as for us, as it was.
I looked again and what I could see, as plain as the House of Commons, was an awful lot of bullshit, the sort that could easily nurture the roots of the UK’s civil war, as predicted by Elon Musk.
Civil War in the UK: Will there or won’t there be?
I, personally, do not think there will be a civil war, at least not in the accurate sense of the term, because a civil war presupposes two opposing sides each identifying with itself as distinct from one another, and this is unlikely to happen in the situation we have in Britain, because diversity has done away with absolute cohesion, which is, as I am sure you know, one of the more subversive reasons for engineered diversity.
Moreover, the people who really count, or should stand up and be counted, the British white middle class, have their ‘I’m alright Jack’ arses firmly and forever perched upon the non-comital fence, preferring to hide in the dangerous belief that saying and doing nothing is the better part of valour. Besides, they, in the mind they inhabit, are far enough removed in their leafy suburbs and quiet rural backwaters to be spared the worst of whatever goes down in Britain’s towns and inner cities, and their take on the situation is that as long as they keep on looking anywhere rather than where they should be looking, never revealing what they think, never saying what they feel and on no account what they fear, this, they keep their fingers crossed, will be the saving of them. They are wrong.
As for the left-wing faithful, the useful voting idiots, they will still be parroting the same old simpleton mantras with which they have been indoctrinated even when it is all too late, when, like the obedient sheep they are, they are led away to the slaughter. And even then as the curtain descends, the truth will refuse to occur to them that the ‘far right’ was never their nemesis. They betrayed themselves with their own ideology, poisoned themselves in the end with the lies with which they had poisoned the country for years.
No, I see the UK ending up somewhere between the twilight world of dystopias Sweden and South Africa, with the chauffeur-driven rich ring-fenced and body guarded inside their gated compounds, whilst out there on the streets, the no-go areas echo nightly to gunfire, screams and wailing sirens, and should you really have no option but to walk from A to B, you do so at your peril and never without your stab vest.
Already when dusk descends on Britain’s towns and upon its cities, we bolt the windows and bar the doors. The zombies are out on the streets at night. Has anyone seen a copper?
(By the way, has anyone else, I wonder, noticed that the countries worst impacted by ‘come one and all’ immigration are those that traditionally see themselves as paragons of liberalism? Just saying …) Sectarian violence, lawless streets, an escalation of knife crime, gang warfare by race and religion, flashes of inter-ethnic conflict, the dirty business of vigilantes and an endless cycle of civil disorder and riots policed by robo-cops, possibly even standing armies, this could well be Britain’s future, but civil war, not yet.
UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Mr Starmer’s answer to this apocalyptic vision is to form a ‘standing army’, a militia ~ er, but where is the money coming from to fund this standing army? We cannot even afford more coppers. (And the way we treat our coppers, will anyone want to do the job?) I feel a tax hike coming on. But I do not see that standing army.
The UK’s New ‘Standing Army’
The task of this new yeomanry, be it fictious or not, is to ensure that Britain’s rioters ~ rioters of a particular type ~ feel ~ make no mistake ~ ‘the full force of the law’ (PC women Melons and Bristols, this is the news you’ve been waiting for!). So, does that mean, may I ask, that this is the end of policing as we know it: “Now let’s sit down, have a nice cup of tea and discuss the problems you might be having?” “Thank you Mr Whitey Policeman, wait a moment whilst I adjust my machete. Do you think you could hold it for me?”
In case it has escaped the new prime minister’s notice, may I gently remind him that Britain already has a standing army, it’s called the British police force. They do a lot of standing, particularly during pro-Palestine rallies, at Black Lives Matter riots and at stab-fest events like Notting Hill Carnival. They also do a lot of standing whenever they cannot avoid anti-social behaviour ~ which is every day and everywhere. I hasten to add that it is not their fault; it is not what police officers want to do; it is what they are told to do. The thin blue line has never looked thinner.
“It’s a sh*t hole!” cried the Englishman. For once, it was not his country to which he was referring but the town in which he lived. “We don’t have to wait for a riot in [name of town withheld], we have one almost every night. The town centre is plagued by gangs of nasty little shits kitted out in hoodies and ski masks. They dig the flowers out of the planters and chuck them at passing cars. A few weeks back, they were up there, up there on the roof, slinging mud and masonry down into the High Street. The police arrived. Did nothing. They just stood in the street and watched!”
Police officers are not to blame for ~ excuse me whilst a borrow a phrase ~ this non-two-tier passivity. Like teachers, with whom they balance precariously on the literal knife-edge of Britain’s frontline, they are victims of insuperable woke and ultimately the lightening rods for all of society’s liberal left ills.
A funny thing is happening The government, using the mainstream media’s trumpet, keep blowing hot with riots that never materialise. The ‘expected riots’ are named by area, large crowds of ‘peaceful protestors’, ethnic and seen-to-be-doing-the-right-thing whiteys, invade the areas named and stand there on their own for hours with no one to be peaceful with. What a waste of banner-making time! Well, it keeps them off the streets … Oh, wait a minute. Then, the next day, or even shortly afterwards, along from the 1950s comes that stern school master Mr Starmer and takes the credit for backing the rioters down, who, apparently, dare not show in case they become the hapless recipients of the ‘full force of the law’.
I imagine the police are wondering what exactly the full force is, as, for the past 30 years, they have been schooled to deal with offenders with the kid gloves of a social worker and the diplomacy normally reserved for a job in public relations. However, you would do well to remember this, that if you are taking part in a riot and your shirt is brown and moustache faintly similar to that of Mr Hitler’s, then the rules of the game are likely to change and definitely not in your favour.
So, what we need, my dear Mr Starmer, what we desperately need, is not a ‘standing army’ but a competent, well-equipped, non-woke-manacled nationwide series of riot squads, and we need them fast and everywhere, up and down the country. But we need them to be impartial. It is essential they are fair, because if the only arses they kick are white ~ and remember YouTube is watching ~ then Mr Elon Musk’s prediction of the imminence of civil war may well be brought to fruition quicker than you anticipate, and if that day doth suddenly dawn, then we’ll all be standing by Liz Truss Door, ready to follow her example, preferably wearing full-force roller skates that will guarantee our exit like, if you’ll pardon my use of colloquialism, shit off a shiny shovel. Play it again, Harry Corbett: “Bye, Bye, Country, Bye, Bye.”
It may already seem to Mr Starmer, who, and let’s be fair about this, has not been in the hot seat long, just long enough to get his trousers scorched ~ and how! ~ that he finds himself in a rather bad place: the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, why did he give up that paper round! But nothing could be further from the truth. If he did but know it, the place he is in is the right one, and the timing could not be better. He has been given a first-class opportunity to rise to the challenge of statesman, to address the ills of the country, to strike a humanist balance, to patch up divisions across communities (where they can be patched), to become a prime minister like those of the past who dealt with the present in terms of the future, one who puts the people first, all of the people first and fairly. Would you rather go down in history as the man who got it right, or join your political peers and predecessors, ineffectual and out of touch, who one by one have fizzled, or are in the process of fizzling, out, leaving the political table, as though everyone knew it was them who farted and never did anything else. Or, even more damning than this, be remembered as that man who, when given the chance to save his country, blew it. He locked himself in the liberal mindset and, ignoring the value of those people whose forbears built this country (Can people such as these really be replaced by hoards of swarthy young men who come bouncing rudely into England mounted on top of inflatables?] effectively signed the UK’s death warrant.
Try listening. It might help!
The key to stopping the riots and the general sense of unease that is spreading like a rampant pestilence across this once great Christian land is to use it to close and lock the gates at Dover. Stop the boats. Stop the immigrants. Listen to what it is that legacy Britons are saying. Ditch the Machiavellian creeds of disgraced Prime Minister Tony Blair. Withdraw the UK from the ECHR, tear up that beguiling document the Convention on Human Rights, return to police their pre-woke powers, rid the streets of crime, tackle the sprogs who blight our neighbourhoods, stop and search regardless of colour, stand as firm against ethnic rioters and the PC blackmail that oils their cogs and defends them from arrest as you would against those nasty far whites, show the country as a whole that the day of the limp-wristed, bed-wetting lefty and his media misinformation network has run its evil course, come to an end, is finished, kaput, is over. It sounds like an awful lot, but it really is not that difficult. All you need is love for your people and, unlike your immediate predecessors, to be a proper prime minister.
Over to you, Mr Prime Minister, it really is your call.
Right Wing Thugs, Political Prisoners, Martyrs or Robin Hoods? The only way to restore real law and order in the UK, as distinct from soundbite law and order, is to ensure that it is applied fairly and without prejudice right across the board. Calling white rioters the ‘far right’ and then banging them up with disproportionate sentences is a sure-fired way of turning them into martyrs. As it is, a good many of the anti-immigrant protestors will wear their prison sentence with pride and will be regarded throughout the prisoner fraternity as patriots, political prisoners, ordinary people wrongly, unjustly convicted for standing up for their families and the preservation of their sovereign country against what they, and a good many like them, see as a repressive socio-political system out to destroy all they hold dear.
If they are to ‘feel the full force’ of the law, then come the next ethnic riots, as come they surely will, the same condemnation and same stiff sentences had better be applied, or off we will go again on the embittered and violent merry go round, with more rhetoric, more harsh sentences, nothing gained and everything lost. It is advisable to consider that those involved in the riots who are facing the law’s ‘full force’ have brothers, family, friends, compatriots, colleagues, and that everyone of these, together with YouTube and social media addicts, will be watching very closely to see if the accusation of two-tier policing can be equally applied to the country’s judicial system.
If a partisan link can be established between government, police and the courts, they, the ones subjected to the full force of the law, may begin to see themselves, as may the voting white majority, as latter-day Robin Hoods, come to save, at the risk of their personal liberty, white tattooed English maidens from an embarrassing fate worse than death (For heaven’s sake think of the pups!), pitting themselves heroically against the evil wiles of the Sheriff of Shock-it-to-them: “The full force of the law, I tell you!” [An elastic band twangs off stage] and his globalist boss King John, aka Big George Sorryarse, the most philanthropic of migrant traffickers the world has ever known (and Hungary disowned). Where will it all end? Usually, after crossing the Channel, in luxury five-star hotels. Cheap at half the price, I say; only £8 million a day.
Meanwhile, not in hotels but languishing in Britain’s prisons is the country’s heritage population, who, before they made a name for themselves as ‘facing the full force’ rioters, were only guilty of thinking and stating, “The migrant invasion has to stop. They really should go home.” They really do have a point, don’t they.
