Category Archives: DAILY LIFE in KALININGRAD

Daily Life in Kaliningrad

Daily Life in Kaliningrad is a category of my blog expatkaliningrad.com. It is, as the title suggests, devoted to observations, thoughts and opinions of what it is like to live in Kaliningrad, and it is written from the point of view of an expat Englishman. Unlike my diary category, Kaliningrad: Mick Hart’s Diary, the posts featured in this category are not necessarily linked to any specific timeline or date but are topic or theme oriented. For example, at the time of writing this brief description the category DAILY LIFE IN KALININGRAD contains the following posts:

A Day at the Dentists
One of the first reactions I received when I divulged to friends and colleagues my intention to move to Russia, apart from perhaps the obvious one, was what is the health service like? A not unusual preoccupation, especially with older people, because, let’s face it, as we grow older we fall to bits. I wrote this article about a trip to a Russian dentist’s partly in response to this question and partly because the experience surprised me. Well, we all have our prejudices; take real-ale drinkers and Watney’s.

International Women’s Day Kaliningrad
Now you would not think that an old and proud chauvinist like me would want to go on record as saying that I enjoy something as seemingly PC and ism-oriented as International Women’s Day, but in these days of tats, butch, Its, Others and Old Uncle Tom Cobbley, Russia’s nationwide display of affection and sentimentality traditionally symbolised by the giving of flowers to the fairer sex pulls wonderfully at one’s conservative heartstrings. Whether flower power and a kind heart were influential enough to pull at my wallet strings with regards to treating my better half to flowers is revealed in this article.

Self-isolating in Kaliningrad
Rather self-explanatory don’t you think? This, I believe, was my first article as the world entered the coronavirus maelstrom, since when expressions like ‘self-isolating’, ‘social distancing’, ‘lockdown’, ‘masks’, ‘vaccines’, ‘New Normal’ and so on have become the defining lexicon of the 21^st century. I want my money back! When I was young, and I was once, I subscribed to a Sci-Fi magazine called TV 21. It was, as the title suggests, a preview of what it would be like to live in the 21^st century. It was all about cities on stilts, suspended monorails, hover cars, people with metallic-looking hair and all-in-one shimmering silver jumpsuits. I, as with my entire generation, have been had! There was nothing in this magazine’s Brave New World prediction of open borders, social engineered societies, political correctness, sect appeasement, streets too violent to walk down, globalisation and global warming, anti-patriotism, revisionist history, stage-managed free speech or coronavirus. We were had! And, as we continue to self-isolate, there are those out there who believe that we are still being had. But I prefer to self-isolate …

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Daily Life in Kaliningrad

I am aware that Daily Life in Kaliningrad is not exactly overpopulated with articles. You can blame this on coronavirus ~ I do. Since making its debut, I, like almost everyone else who writes things, has had their focus ~ nay their lives ~ shanghaied by the why’s, what’s and therefores of this life- and lifestyle-changing phenomenon. This, let us hope it is only a, detour, is reflected in the disproportional number of posts that appear in my Kaliningrad: Mick Hart’s Diary category (sub-categories Diary 2000 & Diary 2019/2020) and my exposition category, Meanwhile in the UK, which is devoted to events in my home country, England, oh and sometimes the other bits: analysis, comment and exposés on UK media content together with cultural, historical and nostalgic subjects which appeal to my idiosyncrasies or are taken from the barely legible pages of my old and initially handwritten diaries.

We live in peculiar and interesting times, and as I consider myself to be first and foremost a diarist, it is as impossible not to be waylaid by events as they unfold as it is not to time travel. When you take the two together and place it within the context of somebody’s life, in this case mine, the impetus to write expatkaliningrad.com is not difficult to understand.

Kaliningrad and things that go clank in the night

Lifting the lid on Kaliningrad’s nocturnal noises

Published: 25 January 2023 ~ Kaliningrad and things that go clank in the night

From the same wonderful chap who brought you Kaliningrad’s midnight leaf suckers (that wonderful chap is me, by the way, just in case you failed to recognise me by the accuracy of the description), we have something at 2am …?

I was just off into slumberland, lulled into this blissful state, which is an exotic and privileged condition for a confirmed and inveterate insomniac, by a series of smiles set in motion by a composition of novel remarks discovered in the perusal of a news report on Yandex.

In this report*, the Press Secretary of the President of Russia, Dmitry Peskov, was responding to the head of the Kiev regime, Vladimir Zelensky (you know him, he’s the man with whiskers who perpetually wears a green T-shirt) who said, when addressing the World Economic Forum (you know them, the Davos cartel, a super-rich globalist gang obsessed with resetting the world for their benefit at everyone else’s expense), that he doubted the existence of Vladimir Putin. Peskov replied: “It is clear that purely psychologically, Mr Zelensky would prefer that neither Russia nor Putin exist, but the sooner [that] he realizes ~ the sooner the Ukrainian regime realizes ~ that Russia and Putin are and will be, the better for … Ukraine.”

As a roll-call of ghastly phantom-like images, including Tony Blair, Bill Gates, George Soros and other nightmare villains, such as might have been applicably cast in the 1970s’ pot-boiling series the Hammer House of Horror, slipped mercifully from my mind, I was suddenly dragged, hauled out as it were, from the luxury of impending sleep into a yet to be expunged existence, where the Davos set still are but hopefully soon will not be, by disturbing sounds in the street of an incomprehensible nature.

Kaliningrad and things that go clank in the night

It is a selfish but incontrovertible fact that people in my age group can afford to entertain, with less regret than the young, sounds that could be mistaken for a global nuclear incident, but the sounds outside my window seeming rather less than might be imagined for an event on such a scale, had more to do with engines running, metal wotnots clanging together and men calling out to each other in a distinctly blokey and workman-like fashion.

Whatever was occurring it could not be truthfully said to be keeping me awake, as I had mislaid the art and science of sleeping many years ago. No, it was the presence of these perplexing sounds at this fairy-tale-time of the morning that had me all agog.

It was not very long before fantasy overtook me ~ you know how it is in the early hours ~ suggesting I believe that in response to my recent post on pavements some receptive spark in authority acting on the hint had decided to ship the requisite materials needed for renovation, and that even as we slept ~ and even whilst some of us didn’t ~ shipments of hardcore and other materials ferried in by moonlight were being deposited on the grassy knoll in the centre of the street.

This theory had a near-firm basis in a previous early-morning chorus of indefinable noises, the source of which it transpired was a working party busily engaged in the not unreasonable occupation of vacuum-cleaning the grass gone midnight.

The fallen leaves of autumn having been whisked away, it was a small step for an imagination accustomed to leaps of fancy to envision the wartime bunker lurking below the knoll earmarked for refurbishment, contingent on the unlikely event that should the sirens go off all would never hear them, because someone up our street delights in keeping a witless dog that hardly ever stops barking.

Unable to contain myself, and my curiosity, any longer, I slid out from my bed and made my way to the window. I had it in my hand, my camera, and you’ll never give me credit for it, but with it, it was I that took this unreasonably awful photo, which ~ and you’ll have to take my word for this~ shows two or several men mingling with the morning shadows at a time when every abnormal person, those without guilty consciences, are snoring and farting deep in their sleep; they were busy, were these men, busy thrusting big thick pipes down drainholes, sucking stuff out with gusto as if their very jobs depended on it. Yes, there they were, I am tempted to say, waking up the entire street, but that would be a fallacy, as often there is that shitty dog (with an owner whose name must be Mutton Jeff) that barks and barks and barks and barks. And if you can sleep through that, then presumably you’ll sleep through anything: “Did you hear that siren?” Woof! “Did you hear that burglar?” Woof! Did you hear that …? What? Woof! … Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! What did you say? I said “Woof”!

I consider it fortunate that I’m an insomniac, or I could have trouble falling asleep.

Pleased to look out the window and see things going on which in my youth, that is my very young youth, would fill me with fascination ~ drain suckers, dustbin men, bucket men, tarmac gangs ~ oh, and Robert Brothers’ Circus’ lorries cavalcading for winter quarters ~ I crawled back into the pit, thinking now that I know what it is they are up to should I block out those naughty men’s sounds by recourse to soothing ‘White Noise’ (and just how racist is that!), but before you could say ‘you’re a strange bugger’ and before I could ‘take a knee’, I had bucked the insomnia trend. I was slipping faster than soap on ice into a hallelujah dream fest, a film noir, They Worked by Night! starring noises of a nocturnal nature, hundreds of Königsberg manhole* covers and the gangs of men who go around in the dark lifting those covers up when we are fast asleep or, when we are not, we should be. What more can we say at the end of the day than bring on the ZZZ…

Source:
*Peskov responded to Zelensky, who doubted the existence of Putin – RIA Novosti, 19.01.2023

**Manhole: This is one of those words that we need to be particularly careful of when sycophantically brown-nosing woke in an absurd aberration for gender inclusiveness.

Kaliningrad Pavements Pave the Way for the Better

On the right path in Kaliningrad

Published: 15 December 2022 ~ Kaliningrad Pavements Pave the Way for the Better

Tratooraree, said Mick in his bestest Russian. Nobody quite understood him, but that’s the story of his life, so he pressed on regardless, translating the word into English, “Pavements!” he said, triumphantly, and everyone went back to sleep.

No one talks pavements in the UK, after all pavements, and the conditions of them, are one of the reasons why we pay our council tax. They are lumped together with such essential but taken-for-granted services as emptying our bins, clearing litter from the streets (although the council rarely get round to this) and policing by consent (ie you and the police agree that when you are mugged or have your house burgled the police will give you a crime number and that anything that you say, meaning ‘mean tweets’ on Twatter, will be taken down, twisted round and used in evidence against you). Council tax, the get-out-clause for Maggie Thatcher’s controversial poll tax, has risen so high in Britain in recent years that it represents a second mortgage, so Brits expect to see as much done as is civically possible in return for the confiscation of their hard-earned cash, and that, amongst other things, takes care of pavements.

In Kaliningrad pavements are, or can be, a controversial subject* and one that has persistently percolated to the top of the restoration agenda since the dissolution of the USSR.

When does our street get its much needed and long overdue pavement renovation? ~ is not something that residents of Kaliningrad discuss on a daily basis, but it does come up in conversation, occasionally, from time to time.

When I say, ‘our street’, I use the term to imply a general anxiety and impatience amongst those residents who live in certain areas where pavement reform sits at the top of their collective bucket list as distinct from the pavement up ‘our street’, meaning the street in which we specifically live. And yet, to coin a phrase, if ‘the cap fits …’.

My wife asked someone about the situation regarding ‘our’ pavement and was told that it was not likely to happen this year, but maybe next year. Her inquiry was made in 2021, when next year was 2022 (It would be funny if it was 2023, wouldn’t it?) but next year has almost gone. I know this because when I first began to write this post snow was falling but not in sufficient quantities to entirely exorcise the pavement problem, but snow is now falling snow on snow and ‘what the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve about’.

For people like me, who have the ability and choreographic instincts of Fred Astaire (Mum, who’s he talking about?), the pavement problem, though not in itself altogether inconsequential, has me reach out sympathetically to others who are more affected by the inconvenience and its negative impact.

From my window, which I look out from, from time to time ~ they are good for that, aren’t they? ~ I watch the world go by, and in the process typically think to myself, how on earth is that young couple going to pilot that pram of theirs across the assault course which now confronts them? Wheels are good but tank tracks would be better. And then there’s the senior citizens, of which I count myself one, many of whom avoid the path and take to the cobbles instead. Königsberg’s road cobbles may also not be an easy terrain, but at least to trip is a trip into history.

Kaliningrad pavements

Whilst the pavement can be treacherous, especially on the way back from the bar late at night, and especially where lack of light adds to the problem, I have got round this one, partially by memorising the pavement on both sides of the street. I am not going to go so far as to say that ‘I know this pavement like the back of my hand’, because the last time I heard that expression it was back in 1983 on a dark and dank November evening when fate was in a playful mood.

At the time, we were flying along the country roads at 80 miles an hour in my Ford Cortina when, replying to an admonition from me, my brother, who was driving, said: “Ahh, you worry so much. I know this road like the back of my hand!”

It would seem, however that his hand did not have a sharp bend at the bottom of a hill and a tight grass verge on either side, which, when clipped at the speed we were doing, sent us spinning backwards through the hedge, left us hanging momentarily, headlights pointing towards the sky, and then brought us down like a spinning top bluntly to rest in a wet ploughed field.

Whilst there’s little fear of a similar thing happening as I traverse Kaliningrad’s pavements at considerably less speed in my Wrangler boots, I have been known to work up a good head of steam when steering a course to the local shop to replenish my beer supplies.

To be fair, the pavement on the left side of our street is not that unnegotiable until, that is, you reach the point where it meets the junction. Here there is an interesting piece that looks lunar in its construction, or do I mean destruction? By the way that’s lunar, with the stress on ‘ar’ in Russian. ‘We interrupt this discussion on pavements to bring you a surreptitious lesson on stress in the Russian language’. No stress and no sweat with this moon, however, because I know this patch of the lunar landscape well, yet woe betide you if you don’t, because it is precisely at this spot that in the absence of adequate street lighting the dark side of the moon begins.

A pavement in need of care — **“That’s one *small step for man*, one giant leap for children.”**

I remember (Oh lord, there he goes, reminiscing again!), when we returned to Kaliningrad in the winter of 2018. At that time, we were renting a flat in the Kaliningrad district close to the radio mast. Believe you me, the radio mast is something you cannot miss; a welcome beacon on a stormy night to guide you safely home after one to many in the Francis Drake.

We were walking back one evening, the radio mast towering above us in all its multicoloured splendour, my wife grumbling about the state of the pavement, the deep pits and iced-over puddles, when Victor Ryabinin, whose company we were in, showed us, with characteristic insouciance, how literally one can get round this problem. “Like this!” he said, with a giggle. And he hopped and skipped and jumped, still laughing, first around the one obstacle and then around or over the next, treating them all as lightly as if they were nothing more than mirages.

With his usual gift for doing so, Victor had taken an everyday problem and made a moral out of it, namely that there’s more in life to worry about than pavements or more to life than pavements to worry about or, as Leonard Cohen put it, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in …” {Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: let’s dedicate it to Victor’s pofik!}

Kaliningrad Pavements

The pavement in our street on the opposite side of the road earns itself the reputation of being an obstacle course of sorts and, therefore, compared with its parallel relation, demanding of greater navigation skills and sense of co-ordination. Once again, for some unknown reason, the most challenging aspect of it lies at the end of the street closer to the junction. Some way from this, it is mainly earthen, then tarmacadam before becoming, albeit briefly, spanking new and modern.

Incongruously, but only in looks not reason, this updated portion of pavement made from very nice decorative blocks has been laid down privately, and at personal expense, by the owner of a large house ~ impressively designed as a mediaeval fortress ~ for the express purpose of aiding both the ingress and egress of his personal vehicles and also, and understandably, as an improvement to the appearance of the frontage of his property.

Whenever I arrive at this particular section of pavement, the thought that I am about to walk across it christens me with guilt. I feel intuitively that I ought to change my boots for my carpet slippers or, at the very least, pay a toll for the privilege of crossing. Now then, now then, don’t go putting ideas into certain people’s heads!

Unfortunately, however, after this magic carpet ride, it’s downhill all the way. The configuration of a worn and rutted entrance to a private commercial carpark, not much more than hardcore in construction, pocked with serious cavities and craters on either side, which in the rainy season fill with water, makes for a treacherous path indeed. But force of habit and the challenge that it presents has, over a period of time, deluded me into thinking that I can almost walk on water, using the stepping-stone techniques learnt when we were children for crossing fords and streams.

Knowledge is king, as they say (who does?) and as with everything in life the difference between a safe passage and one you should not have attempted (there’s a lot of those in Brixton) is knowing where to put your foot without putting your foot inadvertently in it (innit, man!).

Mick Hart Kaliningrad — **Where’s Sir Walter Ralegh with his cloak when you need him**?

As a not-too-young person, whenever I return from the shop with five pints of beer and a tomato, I pick and mix my pavements ~ sometimes hopping on this one, sometimes skipping on that, sometimes weaving around that section, sometimes straddling this, just as Victor taught me or rather like the tightrope walker at Robert Brothers’ Circus that I almost but never eventually became.

I go to these lengths because (a) it tests my memory (which is important as you get older, for you would not want to run the risk of forgetting what you went to the shop for: “Sorry, dear, I forgot the tomato.”); and (c) (having problems remembering the alphabet), it helps in honing the essential skills of balance and agility.

You might think that the topic of this post is right up my street, and you’d be right, but there’s a good chance that if you live in Kaliningrad, you are streets ahead of me, for this city has some wonderful streets, many with wonderful pavements, and with pavements that as each year passes are clearly on the mend.

Kaliningrad Pavement to be proud of — **In step with everything …**

But if the pavements on your street are still waiting on the waiting list, console yourself with the image of how things used to be! Those of you who are old enough should be able to cast your mind back to earlier times, when the mean streets of Kaliningrad were very mean indeed!.

Way back when, in the formative years of the 21^st century, a pastime that I quickly cultivated whenever I visited Kaliningrad was to watch the women as they walked by. For purely scientific purposes naturally, I observed the tall, leggy women in short skirts and six-inch stilettos teetering precariously ~ but never tripping, mind! ~ strut their stuff as confidently as any model on the catwalk could across the pits, crevices and uneven ground where, prior to perestroika, Kaliningrad’s pavements once would have been but sadly were no more.

It may come as a surprise to you, but I never tired of watching these ladies; I suppose because they were so adept.

But times, as they say, have changed: the skirts are not so short, the heels are not so high and the pavements, though not as exciting, have attained for the greater part an air of respectability and those that haven’t are getting there! Sigh, progress can be a lot like love: it depends on the beholder.

Reference
* Anton Alikhanov: “Problems with sidewalks are ignored in Kaliningrad” – MK Kaliningrad (mk-kaliningrad.ru)

Former posts
What I like about Kaliningrad
Our friend, the late Victor Ryabinin, used to refer to Kaliningrad and its surrounding territory as ‘this special place’, and I am with him on that. Whether it is because I see Kaliningrad through his eyes and feel it through his heart, I cannot rightly say. Certainly, his outlook and philosophy on life influenced me and my intuition bears his signature, but I rather imagine that he perceived in me from the earliest time of our friendship something of a kindred spirit, someone who shared his sensibility for the fascination of this ‘special place’.

Why I left the UK and moved to Kaliningrad
I did not decide to leave the UK and give up the country where I was born and everything I had ever known simply because it would furnish me with a first-class opportunity to laugh at the way the UK media brainwashes people.

Hedgehog in the Fog seen in Kaliningrad

A kind, charming, thought-provoking and sentimental animation

Published: 2 December 2022 ~ Hedgehog in the Fog seen in Kaliningrad

Before setting off to London/Bedford England last month, we were walking back from a coffee in the café gardens (Soul Garden) by the Upper Pond, Kaliningrad, when we were thrilled to discover that some artistic person or other had painted the perfect impression of the star (Yorshik) from the famous 1970s’ animation, Hedgehog in the Fog. Normally, or abnormally, depending upon your personal prejudice, I am unable to accept painted or spray-canned text or images plastered on public or private property as anything else but what it truly is ~ a brazen example of vandalism. But, as with most things in life, exceptions to the rule exist, and this, I have to admit, is as true of graffiti as it is of anything else, providing that you want it to be.

Hedgehog in the Fog is a highly acclaimed Soviet-Russian multiple award-winning animated film. It was written by Sergei Grigoryevich Kozlov [Серге́й Григо́рьевич Козло́в] and animated and directed by Yuri Norstein [Ю́рий Норште́йн]. It is both an animation and intellectual masterpiece, capable of myriad interpretations, but whose ultimate message is as simple as it is sublime as is it sentimental: that we all need someone in this world with whom we can count the stars.

Once seen never forgotten, the majority of Russians would recognise Yorshik’s likeness instantly, certainly as unmistakeably as they would the stars of such classic Soviet films as Irony of Fate and Office Romance.

The portrait was also discovered and recognised by Kaliningrad’s administration department, and before we left for England, I caught sight of a media report in which the administration was asking the public to cast their vote ~ with the proviso that the paint used was harmless to the tree ~ on whether the image should be removed or be allowed to remain.

Since I have not walked that part of Kaliningrad recently, I have no idea what the fate of Yorshik might be, although I for one would hope that when the votes were counted, they favoured Yorshik’s continued presence.

Not only does the composition capture Yorshik’s appearance perfectly, but the artist has also located him within a beautiful blue graduated background, where he shares space romantically with twinkling stars and fairies.

Whether Yorshik has survived or not, if the artist would like to contact me, I have a canvas, an interior wall, which is just crying out for this work of art to be replicated!

Hedgehog in the Fog

Hedgehog in the Fog is a Soviet-Russian animated film about a hedgehog (Yorshik) who sets off on foot to visit his friend, a bear cub (Meeshka), and finds himself lost in the fog. As in folklore, fairy tales and fantasy and in Gothic and psychological suspense genres, fog as a literary/cinematographic device is typically employed in the film to deviate objective reality, turning the world as we know it ~ or think we do! ~ into a claustrophobic and distorted realm where the heightened possibility of supernatural occurrences amplifies the vicissitudes encountered in everyday life.

In this state of altered consciousness, Yorshik’s imagination supersedes logic, creating a new and unnerving reality in which, for example, an owl and white horse ~ one commonplace the other rare but possible ~ take on puzzling and sinister shades of meaning.

When Yorshik stumbles into the river he assumes that he will drown, but carried along by the current he relaxes into his situation, resigning himself to the journey wherever it may take him.

His ordeal culminates when a mysterious submersible benefactor, a ‘Someone’ as the subtitles tells us, lifts him onto his back and conveys him safely to the water’s edge.

Once on dry land, Yorshik hears his friend, Meeshka, calling out to him through the fog and by following the direction of his friend’s cries the two are at last united.

Hedgehog in the Fog is a simple story, but one which arguably manages to achieve what no other comparable animation has in its simultaneous creation of an atmosphere of dread tempered by quiescence. The kinetic tempo has a lot to do with this, as does the steady, hushed and neutral tone of the omniscient narrator, but the fundamental appeal of the film and the extent to which it engages us lies in its ‘seen through the eyes of a child’s perspective’, its lilting dream-like quality and its effortless ability to invoke and mirror the childhood world which we all once inhabited, with its troublesome symbols and shadows, its half-open doors to what, where and who, its many unanswered questions and its never completely understood what may lie within and beyond.

In following the classic tradition of all that is best in fantasy motion pictures ~ The Haunting (original version), Night of the Hunter and, with one or two exceptions, the complete canon of Hitchcock’s works ~ the key to Hedgehog in the Fog’s allure is that just below the surface of fairy tale enchantment it taps profoundly and incisively into our childhood psyche.

It calls upon the fog and the river for their habitual literary symbolism: the first for its incarnation of a supernatural milieu where anything is possible, the second for its depiction of life as a predetermined current against whose superior will we are powerless to resist, and it besets the journey with downstream dangers, credible menace, innate fears and the almost tangible presence of death. All the things that we learn about living as we are hurried along by the current of life.

The still frames from Hedgehog in the Fog are every bit as resoundingly emotive as the narrative in flux. Single static images such as the looming face of the owl, the white horse, apparition-like and luminescent, the bewildered expression on Yorshik’s face and, most memorable of all, the concluding frames of the film where the re-united Yorshik and Meeshka sit on the log together, with their jam, tea and samovar and the scent from the burning juniper twigs, counting the stars in the heavens, are each and every one blissfully indelible.

Hedgehog in the Fog works, even for we adults, not only because the artwork, the cinematography, pace and timbre are as spot on as they can be, but because the overarching feel of the film is unashamedly affectionate and applaudably sentimental.

However unnerving the fog may be, the narrator takes us by the hand and, like the dreamy river of life upon which the hapless Yorshik floats, albeit with philosophical tranquility, he leads us reassuringly from opening credits to heartfelt conclusion.

If you have the samovar, the juniper twigs and the raspberry jam, all you need to count the stars ~ as the stars are always above you ~ is the log on which to sit and that special someone next to you for whom those stars shine as brightly and mean the same to them as they do for you.

Toast Making in Russia an Important Tradition

There’s more to it than Na zdorovye!

Published: 19 October 2022 ~ Toast Making in Russia an Important Tradition

One of the great joys of making friends in Russia is the party invitation. Birthday, anniversary, public holiday or simply a get together in someone’s home, whatever the occasion and scale, you can always be assured of a warm welcome, tasty food, plenty of vodka and good company.

Like any party should be, Russian parties are a celebratory experience, an opportunity to bring family and friends together in an atmosphere of goodwill and conviviality. But Russian parties are more than that. They enable the participants to express their feelings openly to the person or persons to whom the event is devoted, and to pledge their admiration, esteem and/or love for them before and in front of the company present.

Toasts, personal speeches in someone’s honour culminating in the act of drinking to their health and good fortune are, you might be surprised to learn, even more traditional and realistically Russian than bears, snow and furry hats with ear flaps. No matter where you are or who you are with in Russia, once the drinking starts a toast or several is unavoidable.

As someone who has no difficulty saying ‘cheers’ before I raise my glass (don’t even think of it!) but is by no means qualified as an after-dinner speaker, the seemingly natural public-speaking faculty of ordinary Russians never ceases to amaze me. If anything exceeds this skill, then it can only be the speaker’s ability to thoroughly bare his or her soul to the loved one or dear friend to whom the toast is pledged.

Toast making in Russia is an important tradition

I was once inclined to believe that Russians must spend ages learning, rehearsing and polishing their toasts but, having witnessed toasts every bit as touching and verbally accomplished at impromptu gatherings as at pre-planned ones, I am driven to conclude that the Russian nation is endowed with a certain remarkable and natural propensity for oratorical genius. It is a national characteristic that tends to belie the notion that the only toast you need to know in Russia is the one that hardly anyone uses, Na zdorovye! ~ which literally means ‘To health!’ But if you are lost for anything better to say, then this is better than nothing.

It is expected of all party guests that at some point in the proceedings a toast will be presented. Sometimes toasts are organised on a formal, rotational basis but mostly toasts are performed ad hoc, when and as occasion dictates.

It is to be reasoned that the necessity of committing oneself to such a public undertaking is not to be relished by shrinking violets, a plant with which I am personally acquainted and one to which I am most endeared, but if long experience has taught me anything it is that necking sufficient vodka before you take centre stage is often conducive to a fair result. If you are more than a trifle self-conscious, it helps considerably to make your debut at a later rather than earlier spot in the course of the festivities, by which time, it is to be hoped, you will have accumulated enough Russian Courage (which is not dissimilar to the Dutch variety) to impress yourself and the rest of the room. And even if you do muck it up, chances are by then that most everyone around you will be safely in the same squiffy boat and your falling headlong overboard won’t be particularly noticeable.

The art of toast making in Russia

There’s a very good chance that if you have been called upon to make speeches at UK parties and have developed a knack for it, that it won’t help you in Russia at all. Unlike in the UK, where short party speeches err towards the frivolous or are laced with suggestive digestives and saucy innuendo, the intimacy of Russian toasts tend to be pitched on a quite different level.

Some may be intellectual, some political, some artistic, but almost all Russian toasts, whatever form they take, are philosophical, frank, open and sincere, and resonate with the quality of unalloyed genuine feeling. When Russian relatives and friends toast fellow relatives and friends, they do so from the bottom of their heart. They do so with unreserved emotion and a poetry of the soul that is the touchstone of love and integrity. There is nothing to ask and nothing to doubt. The sentiments expressed emanate from and reaffirm the importance of traditional values, the core values of family and friendship, and their intimate public disclosure strengthens inter-family and community ties on which social cohesion depends.

Good Russian parties, like everything else in life, eventually come to an end, but the feel-good factor lives on, not just in the individual in whose honour the party has been held but in each and everyone who has attended and contributed to and embraced the ethos of kinship and camerarderie.

A play acted at a Russian birthday party

Olga Hart Mick Hart & Inara at party in Kaliningrad

The photographs included within this post are from a recent party of innumerable toasts. I could have lost count of the number of toasts and could have remarked, had I been sober, on the emotional, poetic and linguistic integrity with which these toasts were delivered, but I was too busy raising my glass (there he goes again!) between taking turns on the dance floor.

Mick Hart spanked for raising his glass too often. — Six of the best for raising my glass too often!

Mick Hart toast — Toast at undercover Soviet Spy Centre UK

Note the retrospective Soviet theme and the wonderful, old, industrial building in which this event took place!

Links to posts recent and not so recent
Remembering Victor Ryabinin an artist from Königsberg
Eastward expansion of the West ~ the real reasons
What makes Kaliningrad fleamarket a junk buyer’s paradise?
Kaliningrad leaves autumn to the leaf suckers

Image attribution
Toasting statue to Love: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Toasting-to-statue/82009.htmlain vectors

Bochkarev British Amber Beer in Kaliningrad

**Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)**

Published: 31 August 2022 ~ Bochkarev British Amber Beer in Kaliningrad

Article 22: Bochkarev British Amber

My wife bought this beer for me.

“What have I done to deserve this?” I asked.

Then, when I had drunk it, I asked the same question: “What have I done to deserve this?” ~ but in a different tone.

The important thing is that we wouldn’t be allowed to drink it in the UK, at least not unless we wrapped the bottle in a flag of a different country, as the Union Jack has been radicalised by oversensitive ethnics operating under the auspices of liberal-left self-culture loathers.

Recalling how racist it was to fly the national flag during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I wasted no time in removing the cap from the bottle, took a quick whiff, made a couple of notes, decanted it into my beer glass and hid the bottle behind a nearby chair. And then I remembered that I was not in the UK but drinking beer in Russia, where, oddly enough, nobody seemed to mind if my bottle displayed a Union Jack or not.

I must say that whenever I see bottled beers which are flag- or otherwise-affiliated with countries of distant origin, particularly western countries and more specifically England, I tend to avoid them or, failing that, buy them out of curiosity but rarely make the mistake again.

Thus, I remind you that it was not I who purchased this ‘anglicised’ beer, but my wife. Not that I am complaining: Wives who buy husbands beer are why they are wives in the first place, not left on the shelf like Watneys; they exhibit a finely tuned awareness of the status quo and a responsibility to it that makes anything, even anything vaguely feministic, almost acceptable and often excusable. But as redeemable as such commendable actions are, what wives don’t know about beers you couldn’t fit into Biden’s mind, so let that be an end to the matter.

Relying on the same nose that I was born with, rather than a sex-changed appendage, whilst making allowances for its toxic masculinity, it had me know that the Beer that I was smelling was a hoppy thing overly mixed with blackberries and infused with the essence of Vimto.

The mixture poured into the glass rapidly. I was thirsty. It gave a froth and then quickly took it back again, like a present I didn’t deserve, and what was left on the sides of the glass couldn’t be bothered to stay.

The first sip was like thrusting your head into a mixed bag of fruit in search of hops ~ “Come out with your hops up, we know you’re in there!” And sure enough, after some coaxing the hops came out, yet not with a white but purple flag. Can you drink a colour? The chemical fruit intensifies as it descends in the gullet, yet although the hue is a faint light amber your mind is fixed on purple. I believe it’s what’s called a trick of the light.

Bochkarev British Amber Beer in Kaliningrad

At a very sensible 4.3% OG, alcohol content can play no part in delivering the firm impression that you are consuming a very sweet energy drink packed with glucose and fructose or that, whilst you were looking the other way in search of a real beer, someone snuck up behind you and stuck a stick of rock in your glass. Similar things can happen, I’m told, if you turn your back in Brighton.

With this exception noted, I have to say that Bochkarev British Amber is possibly the most unBritish beer that I have ever tasted, and if this is Heineken at its best then thank the lord that they have Fd off from Russia (ie, Finally decided to go).

I do not pretend to speak for everyone, since your taste is probably different to mine and mine is probably better. Nevertheless, Bochkarev British Amber could explain why certain Russian celebrities took European holidays at the coincidental times that they did and that when Heineken took a similar holiday they returned to the safety of a decent beer. Like the death of Freddie Mills in 1960s’ London, Bochkarev British Amber ~ what it is made of, why they bother to stew it and why they call it British ~ may forever remain a mystery.

😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS
Name of Beer: Bochkarev British Amber
Brewer: Heineken Brewery
Where it is brewed: St Petersburg
Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre
Strength: 4.3%
Price: It cost me about 187 roubles (£2.53 pence) [at time of writing!]
Appearance: A shade amberish
Aroma: It doesn’t smell like beer
Taste: It doesn’t taste like beer
Fizz amplitude: 4/10
Label/Marketing: Counterfeit British
Would you buy it again? No
Marks out of 10: 2

*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.

Cesky Kabancek Beer in Kaliningrad

**Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)**

Published: 5 August 2022 ~ Cesky Kabancek Beer in Kaliningrad

Article 21: Cesky Kabancek (Czech Boar)

Before we start, take a look at the photograph that follows.

I know what you’re thinking. Well, that’s a rum way to introduce a post that purports to be a beer review. But what do you see on the table, apart from that lovely old biscuit tin from England? You see a bar of chocolate, two sachets of meaty cat food, two packets of crunchy cat biscuits, a 1000 rouble note and a pile of medications. My wife, olga, left these for me before setting off for a weekend at the dacha, knowing that in her absence I would be sedulously embarking upon another rigorous research project into the variegated world of beer tastes and qualities. The contents of the table represent a weekend’s survival kit. Not that I was about to sit down with a beer and two plates of cat’s grub. I’m odd like this: I much prefer peanuts, olives and cheese myself, but the moggy needs his food as much as I need my beer. He also likes the odd piece of chocolate. He’s a most extraordinary cat: a ginger version of Tomcat Murr.

The 1000 rouble note would eventually be exchanged for a beer from the local supermarket, along with carefully selected not-for-cats snacks and as for the Gaviscon and Omeprazole, well I should think they are self-explanatory.

The beer that was given to me in exchange for that piece of paper with the figure 1000 printed across it, comes wrapped in a brown paper bag. The bottle within the bag has no commercial label, just one describing the contents, where the beer is made, who it is who makes it and other official trading stuff. All this is written on a small, plain label and in print the size of a pin head, so once the bottle is out of the bag, without the aid of a microscope, you won’t know what you’re drinking.

The bag says it all, however, and in a rather cute and attractive way.

Working purely from presentation, initially I could not make up my mind whether this beer fitted comfortably into my ‘bog standard beers from supermarkets’ category or whether it should be included in a new series on which I am currently ‘working’ (ah, hem) titled craft and speciality beers.

Eventually, and rapidly, pressured by the desire to sup not think, I decided to go ahead and review it within the beers purveyed through supermarkets’ category, justifying my verdict on the grounds that since it was bought in such an establishment who could argue otherwise.

However, not wanting to expose myself for the guzzler that I am, before whipping the top off and splashing the beer eagerly into my glass, I took a calculated moment to observe the packaging ~ sort of thoughtfully like ~ as if by doing so I would exculpate myself from all and any accusations of being nothing more than a beer-swilling lush.

Ye of little faith might consider my brief excursion into the world of packaging to be nothing more than a rather crude and obvious workaround, but the benefit of the doubt seems to lie in my favour. At least I am inclined to think so. Why else would I linger lovingly at the sight of a pig with a snarled snout and two curling tusks when I could be getting it down my neck? I believe that this particular method of beer drinking, of ‘getting it down one’s neck’, is reserved for the benefit classes (formerly working class) who populate Northern England, some perilously close to Haggis country where goodness knows where they ‘get it’, possibly up their kilts!

But of tartans and tarts there were none. The brown bag into which the bottle is dunked has a big-toothed porker (Does she come from Rushden? Check for tats!) standing proudly above a foaming tankard of beer (I suppose she must.) beneath which is written ‘Live’ ‘Nonfiltered’. This tells you that the beer is made from natural substances with no additional additives and/or preservatives, which also tells you that it has a lower shelf-life threshold than its filtered counterparts, so you’d better get it down you, one way or another, as swiftly as you can.

Above: It’s worth buying the beer for the packaging!

I’d looked at the bag for long enough (Am I still in Rushden?) Now it was time to dispose of the beer.

For this purpose, I selected one of the Soviet tankards given to me by Stas, which once occupied the little drinks cabinet in Victor Ryabinin’s Studio. Beer and sentiment go well together.

The first whiff of Cesky Kabancek does not go against the grain, but it is definitely and robustly grainy. It smells like a brew with tusks, but with an OG of 4.4%, which is pretty tender in this here drinking neck of the woods (Get it down your neck!), the aroma belies the alcohol content. Intermingled with the boar musk, subtle scents of an aromatic nature rise but struggle to the surface adding a touch of Je ne sais quoi. But who cares what it smells like when you are showing off in French?

Cesky pours into the glass in a light ambered way and because it is unfiltered, it is naturally hazy. After a couple of bottles most beers look hazy; after seven so is everything else.

“Excuse me, do you have the time?”

“For what?”

“I mean the time!” pointing at my watch.

“Yes, I do thanks.” Relenting and looking at watch: “It’s seven pints past sobriety …”

As a beer connoisseur, not a lager lout, I would only be drinking one litre of Cesky, and after another would call it a night. Or anything anybody wants me to.

I said, before everything went silly, that on taking the top off the bottle the beer had thrown a grainy aroma, which was no word of a lie, but the taste had a lot more going for it. It was fruity, zesty with a clean refreshing finish and a mellow aftertaste. It had palate appeal and, at 4.4% strength, recommended itself as a good session beer.

Nevertheless, if it is a real Czech beer that you are after or even expecting, Caveat Emptor!

Just because I was satisfied with it, does not mean that everybody, or even anybody else, shares the same opinion. Beer reviewers far more accomplished than myself appear to have ganged up on Cesky Kabancek and are telling the world via the internet that it is not all that one would want it to be.

First off, what is all this with Czech and boar! When did Czech and boar ever go together? You’ll be naming British beer Brit Mountain Goat from the Fens next! Thus, the consensus has it that Cesky Kabancek masquerades as Czech only insofar as the packaging allows. Once inside the bag, all you’ve got is a plain PET bottle and once inside the bottle you’ve got a ‘beer drink’ as distinct from beer. Why is this? Because the mix is said to contain ‘fragrant additives’ and has loosely attributed wheat beer characteristics.

For all this ~ what would you call it, skullduggery or effective marketing? ~ the brew is easy to drink, satisfying and has no definable flavour drawbacks or repercussive faults. And if I was not to tell you the truth, then I would be lying, for I consider Cesky Kabancek to be one of the better brands from Baltika Brewery that I have drunk so far.

As they say in beer-drinking circles, and even somewhere outside of them, there’s no accounting for taste!

😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS
Name of Beer: Cesky Kabancek
Brewer: Baltika Brewery
Where it is brewed: St Petersburg
Bottle capacity: 1litre
Strength: 4.4%
Price: It cost me about 187 roubles (£2.53 pence) [at time of writing!]
Appearance: Hazy amber
Aroma: I’m working on it!
Taste: A little bit of this and that
Fizz amplitude: 4/10
Label/Marketing: A convincing paper bag
Would you buy it again? It depends on the competition
Marks out of 10: 6

Family, Love and Loyalty in Russia

Russia’s Day of Family, Love and Loyalty

Updated: 8 July 2022 ~ First published: 8 July 2020 ~ Family, Love and Loyalty in Russia

On 28 June 2022, it was reported that President Vladimir Putin signed a decree officially establishing 8 July as the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity. The day is devoted to the preservation of traditional family values and encompasses the spiritual and moral education of Russia’s children and teenagers.

Each year, on 8 July, Russia celebrates family, love and loyalty. The celebration coincides with an ancient Orthodox holiday dating back almost 800 years, which is devoted to the saints Pyotr and Fevronia, who became symbols of devotion and family harmony.

Various events are held throughout Russia to mark the occasion. Cultural institutions, such as museums and libraries, run special programmes, which include lectures and thematic exhibitions. Interactive activities range from learning how to paint souvenirs to participating in yoga classes and, in the larger cities, concerts and firework displays are held. Medals for love and loyalty are awarded to those families whose marriages exemplify love, strength, devotion and family unity. Whatever the character or the scale of the event each embodies the same belief, which is that individual and societal stability, their moral and spiritual foundation, are inextricably linked to the conservation and promotion of traditional family values.

Family, Love and Loyalty in Russia

As a token of today’s emphasis on family, love and harmony, our neighbours left us a gift on the window sill this morning: chamomile flowers, which, according to the ancient tradition, represent innocence and fidelity, along with other garden produce of a more physically sustaining nature ~ which I was pleased to have with my dinner!

Whilst I can safely say that in the UK traditional family values share something in common with the Invisible Man (sorry, person), take heart! ~ in the UK we do celebrate International Women’s Day (from a purely feminist angle, mind), are tickled pink during Gay Pride Month and, oops, how could I possibly forget, Black Lives Matter. Time do you think, for a rethink?

Reference
Putin signed a decree establishing the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity on July 8 Russian news EN (lenta-ru.translate.goog)

Life in Kaliningrad Russia under threats and sanctions

Do I detect an air of Pofik!?

Published: 3 July 2022 ~ Life in Kaliningrad Russia under threats and sanctions

With Lithuania threatening to blockade Kaliningrad by restricting transit of goods from mainland Russia by train, the Latvian Interior Minister gleefully announcing that this proved that the West was poised to ‘take Kaliningrad away from Russia’¹ and the Prime Minister of Poland making so much noise that it is difficult to tell whether it is his sabre rattling, his teeth chattering or something else knocking together, it looked as though once again the storm clouds had begun to gather over the former region of the Teutonic Order.

I cannot say with any semblance of sincerity that, as the shadow slowly dispersed, the Kaliningrad populace breathed a sigh of relief for, quite frankly, and with no flippancy intended but wanting as always to tell it how it is, nobody ~ at least nobody that I am acquainted with ~ seemed to give a fig.

You can put it down to whatever you like: the Russian penchant for c’est la vie, faith in themselves and their country, a growing immunity to the West’s mouth and trousers or perhaps the absence of a corporate media that makes its fortune by pedalling fear. But whatever you ascribe it to, if the residents of Kaliningrad were supposed to feel afraid, it didn’t happen.

Perhaps it was because we were all too busy laughing at Boris Johnson’s jokes, the ones about the situation in Ukraine never occurring had Vladimir Putin been a woman, which, Boris woked, was “the perfect example of toxic masculinity’ (By the way, what is the definition of non-toxic masculinity? Is it where you rove around without your pants on having painted your gonads rainbow colours? Or when go into hiding like President Turdeau whenever you hear a trucker’s horn?) and his suggestion at the G7 Summit that the leaders of the ‘free’ world (free with every packet of neoliberal dictatorship) should take off their clothes to equal the manliness of Vladimir Putin, to which Mr Putin replied, and I think this is something we can all agree on, “I don’t know how they wanted to undress, waist-high or not, but I think it would be a disgusting sight either way.”² Er, I assume that Boris was joking ~ wasn’t he? ~ and joking on both accounts?

Alack-a-day if he wasn’t, they just might be some of the most stupid things he has ever said. That’s a close call, because occasionally, but very seldomly and most likely accidentally, Boris can say things that make some sense, not much and not often, but it does happen, which is more than can be said for anyone in the Labour party ~ or about any and all of their supporters. But you must admit, Boris, that the things you are blurting out of late do have a rather silly public schoolboy wheeze about them. Were you the President of the United States at least you could plead senility or, failing that, insanity. But beware! Keep on behaving like this and you’ll make yourself the perfect candidate for filling Biden’s boots when Biden’s booted out.

I suppose we should all just take a step backwards and feel thankful that in the pre-bender-gender days of Winston Churchill, the great man himself was endowed with more than his fair share of so-called ‘toxic masculinity’, had he not been, we’d all be speaking German now. Mein Gott!

We don’t. And the storm over Kaliningrad and the storm in a teacup, the G7 Summit, both failed in their endeavours.

Actually, I have been rather parsimonious with the truth, I mean about the storm in Kaliningrad. It did break and when it did, it surprised everyone. After a glorious week of sun, sand and sea weather, Kaliningrad and its region were suddenly plunged into the most frightful and persistent series of electric storms that I have ever experienced.

For three days and nights, the firmament’s guts growled, sheets of livid light flashed across the sky, and lying there in bed listening to it, as we didn’t have much choice, it was easy to imagine that the entire world was forked ~ forked with lightning!

Olga was in a right old tizz. To her it was a celestial sign, a sign that her tarot-card readers and crystal-ball gazers, whose predictions she believes implicitly and to whom she refers collectively as the esoterics, and whom I call snake-oil salesmen, had got it right: change was in the air, tumultuous change. This was the start, the new beginning, the tip of the dawn of a different world. As strange as it may seem, Gin-Ginsky our cat did not appear to have any opinion on it at all, or, if he did, he was saying nothing. He is a very diplomatic cat. He might also be a very crafty cat.

Considering him to be a little less slim than he used to be, Olga recently changed his food to a product branded ‘Food for Fat Cats’. This and the use of the word ‘light’ on the packet obviously implying dietary benefit. Our cat Ginger loves it. He scoffs it twice as fast as his usual food and in ever-increasing quantities. Every now and again he will look up from his bowl between mouth fulls and fix you with his ginger eyes as if to say, “I’ll show you!” Perhaps, the ‘Food for Fat Cats’ tag line is meant to read ‘Food to make cats fatter’? I must remember to warn him, if he ever attends a G7 Summit, not to take his shirt off!

Those of you who in the West, especially those of you who changed your avatars and are now ashamed you did so (but will never admit to it!), are dying to hear, I know, how badly the sanctions are biting here in Kaliningrad. That’s why I mentioned the cat: he’s biting his grub. But I would be Boris Johnson should I say that the price of cat’s grub has not gone up. But what other things have gone up (ooerr Mrs!), or are we all eating cheaper brands of cat food?

I know that an interest in this exists because lately a lot of people have been tuning into my post Panic Buying Shelves Empty. I can only presume that this is down to Brits kerb-crawling the net in search of hopeful signs that western sanctions are starting to bite. In a couple of instances, we, like our cat, are biting into different brand-named foods than those we used to sink our gnashers into, the reason being, I suppose, because the brands that we used to buy belong to manufacturers who have been forced into playing Biden’s spite-your-nose game: Exodus & Lose Your Money. Also, in some food categories, price increases have been noted. Pheew, what a relief. If these concessions did not exist then the whole sanctions escapade would be more embarrassing than it already is for leaders of western countries who are ruining their own economies by having introduced them.

Were we talking about beer? Well, we are now. Some beer brands are absent, although the earlier gaps in shelves have since been filled with different brands from different companies and from different parts of the world. Those that are not the victims of sanctimonies, which is to say those that still remain, do reflect a hike in price, but as prices fluctuate wildly here at the best of times it is simply a matter of shopping around as usual.

So, there you have it. Not from the bought and paid for UK corporate media and their agenda-led moguls but from a sanctioned Englishman living in Kaliningrad, Russia, who is willing to swear on a stack of real-ale casks, honestly, one hand on heart and the other on his beer glass, that life in Kaliningrad under threat and sanctions has changed so little as to be negligibly different to life as it was in the days of pre-sanctioned Kaliningrad.

If I have disappointed your expectations, I’m sorry.

References
1. Russia threatened NATO with a “meat grinder” when trying to take Kaliningrad Russian news EN (lenta-ru.translate.goog)
2. https://www.rt.com/russia/558107-putin-boris-johnson-response/

Image attributions
Thunderbolt: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Mr-Thunderbolt-cloud-vector-image/31288.html
Fat man: http://clipart-library.com/clipart/fat-man-clipart_4.htm

Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer in Kaliningrad

**Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)**

Published: 30 June 2022 ~ Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer in Kaliningrad

Article 20: Lidskae Staryi Zamak

Note: Many thanks to Mr … er, I think his name was Mr Sober, who wrote to inform me that the bottle photographs originally included in this post bore no connection whatsoever to the beer that I was writing about. What better recommendation for Lidskae Staryi Zamak beer could you ask for!

Needing an excuse to drink beer is not an affliction from which I personally suffer, but with all these articles in the UK media obsessing on the possibility of WWIII and nuclear strikes, I thought it would be prudent of me to take cover in my local shop and dodging incoming sanctions come out with a bottle of beer, or two.

Leonard Cohen named his valedictory album, You want it darker. But I didn’t. I was looking for a light beer, which is to say a light-in-colour beer. The strength was of no importance, but I did want something with taste.

Having enjoyed the Belarus-brewed beer Lidskae Aksamitnae, I opted to try the light version, Lidskae Staryi Zamak. If I had wanted a strong beer, I would not have been disappointed, as Staryi Zamak weighs in at an impressive 6.2%, which is higher in alcohol content than its ‘black as the ace of spades’ brother.

They tell me that this is a bottom fermenting beer, which could mean different things to different people, but for beer afficionados and brewing types, this information has important implications, which neither you nor I will dwell on because we are far too busy taking off the bottle top and smelling.

“Hello, is that Nose?”

“Hello, Nose here.”

“Tell me Nose, what do you detect?”

“Beer!”

“Yes, well, that’s a good start. Anything else?”

“It’s pungent …”

“Still talking about the beer?”

“Yes. No, wait a minute, it’s grainy; yes, definitely grainy. No, hold hard, its … it’s fragrant, a teeny-weeny bit fragrant … Oh, what a to do! It’s so hard to smell anything with the wokist stench of fear rising from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter …”

“What’s that, Nose. You’re cracking up. Did you say musky or melon?”

“Bottom fermenting …”

“We’ve done that one. I know, what about all three?”

“Ay?”

“Pungent, grainy and fragrant?”

“If you like. But he’s still a transphobe!”

Hmm, must be a liberal-left nose.

We won’t ask liberal-left tongue about taste. It will be far too busy in the coming weeks now that Elon Musk is taking over Twatter.

Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer

To recap: here we have a 6.2% pale-straw coloured, bottom-fermenting lager, with a pungent, grainy, fragrant liberal-left nose.

Moving on to taste, all these things are present (except the liberal left, thank heavens). Lidskae Staryi Zamak is an interesting blend of flavours, sweet and bitter at one and the same time but rhapsodically blended with no ragged edges. The finish is light and hoppy, although the aftertaste becomes, owing no doubt to the strength, substantial, not heavy exactly but mature and rounded ~ shaped largely like most women after they’ve gone through the menopause.

Corsets nice to drink with food, but have you noticed how irritating some beer reviewers can be in this respect? It’s all very well to say that this beer or that beer goes well with whole roasted peacock, stuffed venison and absent McDonald’s but unless you are Henry the Eighth such lightweight delicacies may not be at hand (which is especially true of McDonald’s). I’ll settle for saying that you won’t go far wrong with a big bag of nuts, a packet of flavoured crisps and a bowl of olives.

Lidskae Staryi Zamak, not to be confused with You Big Hairy Wassock, which is a beer that is drunk in the North of England whilst wearing a pigeon and fancying flat caps (latterly scarves more likely), is a good strong and full-bodied beer but not so overpowering that it does not possess the potential to bring out the best in good-flavoured foods and selected piquant snacks.

Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer in Kaliningrad — Lidskae Staryi Zamak Beer

I like this beer as much if not more than I liked its black sister (or was that it’s black brother?), Lidskae Aksamitnae. I enjoyed it. It clung to the glass, as I did, and after a couple of bottles I also clung to the stair rail.

I was head over heels, with delight that is, which is a big improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree, on the alternative arse over head. And the overheads are by no means bad at 197 a bottle (we are talking payment in roubles, of course!).

😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS
Name of Beer: Lidskae Staryi Zamak
Brewer: Leedska piva
Where it is brewed: Lida, Belarus
Bottle capacity: 1.5 litre
Strength: 6.2%
Price: It cost me about 197 roubles (2.20 pence) [at time of writing!]
Appearance: Pale
Aroma: Subtle mix of grain and herbs
Taste: Full bodied, rounded
Fizz amplitude: 3/10
Label/Marketing: Traditional
Would you buy it again? I am quite sure I will
Marks out of 10: 8

OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad

**Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)**

Published: 30 March 2022 ~ OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad

Article 19: OXATA

I have often seen it, but I’ve never tried it, but when I saw a chap in front of me paying for two bottles of it at the local supermarket checkout, I decided that it was high time that I did. I’m talking about Ohota Krepkoye beer (OXOTA beer), a strong Russian beer from the Heineken Brewery* in St Petersburg with an OG of 8.1% and a label affirming real men, and now me, drink it.

The bottle looks as though its 1.5 litres, but when you check the small print you find that it is 0.15 litres short of the full 1.5. I know a lot of people like that.

The label tells you straight away that this is no namby-pamby, Nancy-boy brew. The bold shadow-highlighted 3-D typeface charges across the bottle against a deep red sash and above it is a man who has an awesome chest with a rifle slung over his shoulder. If you have ever harboured a secret desire to appear really incongruous, try carrying a bottle of this beer whilst attending a gay parade!

Before I had taken my first sip, I knew instinctively that this was the sort of beer that you could very easily get pissed on but not take the piss out of. Excuse my professional beer critic’s language.

The aroma struck me initially as though possessing a spicey, citrus twang, but, before decanting into my trusty Soviet glass, I paused a moment, a little affectedly I thought, took another whiff and changed my mind. It was now, I opined, decidedly sweet and disconcertingly antiseptic.

It poured into the glass with a disappointingly weak head which dissipated rapidly. Once out of the bottle, I was relieved to find that the clinical smell had gone, replaced and overpowered by the sweeter notes.

Not the dark, deep colour I had anticipated but a mid-amber, the beer had, I was surprised to find, not a rich sweet taste but a sweet tart taste laced with a touch of burnt charcoal.

OXOTA Beer in Kaliningrad

The quite glutinous finish gives way to a strong throaty aftertaste, which is not at all unpleasant, and, whilst you secretly wonder how it received a World Beer Award in the ‘Silver’ category, as the medallion on the front of the bottle signifies, there is no doubt in your mind, and also in your mouth, that the brew is persuasively moorish.

Affirmation that this is a real man’s drink is not backward in coming forward. I could feel my liver shrinking and my ego getting bigger with each successive sip.

The heady aftertaste taps into your long-term memory, summoning vague recollections of cautionless drinking sessions undertaken in the first flood of youth. How much of that memory would survive intact should you overdo an OXOTA session really does not bear thinking about.

One thing’s for certain, OXOTA is a good buy if you want to say goodbye and rather quickly to that irritating condition otherwise known as sobriety.

Footnote:🦶 I picked up the rumour from somewhere that the Heineken Brewery is one of those companies that virtue signalled their allegiance to the United States-led globalist war on Russia by buggering off. But take heart, Hart, I said. Buggering-off breweries mean a larger share of the market for those that are smart and don’t budge and a chance to expand and diversify for those that seize the initiative.😁

😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS
Name of Beer: OXOTA (Ohota Krepkoye)
Brewer: Heineken
Where it is brewed: St Petersburg
Bottle capacity: 1.35 litre
Strength: 8.1%
Price: It cost me about 137 roubles (1.06 pence)
Appearance: Mid-amber
Aroma: Predominantly sweet
Taste: Tart, not excessively sweet
Fizz amplitude: 3/10
Label/Marketing: A big strapper with a large rifle
Would you buy it again? If the need so takes me
Marks out of 10: 6