Category Archives: Kaliningrad: Mick Hart’s Diary

Kaliningrad a Green City

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees

Revised 1 May 2025 | First published 23 May 2020 – Kaliningrad a Green City

Apprehensive that May may not be the merry, merry month that it is cracked up to be? Put your memory in reverse gear and trip back to the coronavirus spring of 2020. I cannot guarantee that things can only get better. I cannot guarantee that they could hardly be worse. But, relatively speaking … {This post originally published May 2020 | Revised 2 May 2025}

Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather; nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind, ignore the restrictions and warnings and go wassailing off for a day at the coast. It is true that in the past few days Kaliningrad has been granted a nominal hike in temperature, pushing it up to 15 degrees, and this long-awaited blessing combined with a light but still fresh breeze in association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that has condescended to at last come out from behind the clouds, were sufficiently alluring to prise myself from self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.

To effect our home exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three weeks or more, our house, and those around us, have been subject to ‘trench warfare’.

**The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …**

Cable-laying has been going on. A narrow but deep trench, hazardous enough to dislocate or break something vital should a miscalculated step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our property and, running at right angles to it, extends along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which, you might care to know, sits a very large dog.

From the vantage point of my bedroom window, I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind), this cable work in progress and mentally bookmark whilst doing so the differences that might exist between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with similar tasks undertaken in the UK.

From the outset, and for most of the initial period of work, the workforce has consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with two spades, two shovels and the indispensable trusty wheelbarrow. The blokes have been doing most of the digging, whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves neatly folded and tucked to dangle professionally from her jeans’ back pocket, appears to have had an overseeing role, an inference later corroborated when a clipboard suddenly sprung into her hand. Praise where praise is due, however: at one stage in the laborious game, she, too, rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.

Weather conditions ~ cold and raining ~ have been generally unsympathetic, hardly conducive to the job in hand, but this small group of sappers, equipped with nothing more mechanical than the arms that God has given them, unless you include the wheelbarrow, struggled valiantly on alone until, after a week’s hiatus, the cavalry arrived.

The reinforcements are a hardy bunch of chaps, not only are they seasoned trenchers but also capable cable layers. The cables they are laying had been deposited along with piles of aggregate prior to their arrival. They now reside on the oval island, a compelling grass-covered landmark at the centre of confluent streets, which marks the spot of a German bunker constructed in World War Two.

The temptation at this juncture to go off on a historic tangent and waffle on about the many wartime installations surviving in Kaliningrad and across its Prussian region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has some way to go before it can get back on its feet from the damage done by coronavirus, I will wait for a more propitious moment to elaborate on this and continue for the present with my narrative.

Kaliningrad a Green City

We had crossed the trench in front of the house and this delicate feat accomplished were now walking along, as if coronavirus was not our shadow, the original cobbled streets that once were Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was essentially a myth. Königsberg, he said, at least the oldest parts of the city, never had been green.

The streets were narrow, the buildings high and the order of the day had been red brick and grey cobbles. The city’s outlying districts, those laid down in the early years of the 20^th century and expanded in the 1920s through to the mid-1930s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and plots on which they stand have their English equivalent in the UK’s 1920s’ suburbs, whose properties sold on the back of the clever and catchy advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect.

Every home in Britain’s new suburbs came complete with a small front garden and a larger plot at the rear, and on the wide and curving streets where these airy houses stood, a row of trees lined either side, augmented, where space allowed, with narrow but neat grass verges, demarcating pavement from road and bringing a little more green into the urban environment.

In Königsberg’s equivalent districts, as contemporary photographs and postcards show, though most new streets of the day were tree-lined like their English counterparts, such trees as there were, were, of course, but saplings, which doubtlessly formed visually graceful vistas but with nothing like the leafy foliage that adorn those self-same streets today, now that these trees, like me, have reached maturity.

You see, what happens to you when you subject yourself to self-isolation: every simple detail, every once commonplace thing, every taken-for-granted and overlooked minutiae undergoes a process of scrutinised amplification, so acutely rendered to senses locked away indoors that before you can wryly say ‘I believe in coronavirus’, you cannot see the wood for the trees — or, in my particular case, the trees for Kaliningrad’s leaves.

Should old acquaintance be forgot

Our leafy walk through Kaliningrad’s suburbs, along the canopied tree-lined streets with their flower and foliate burgeoning gardens, had brought us after a while within viewing distance of a most eccentric sight — that peculiar waterside café, that semi-abandoned confection, which, with its facsimile rooftop lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the balcony doing I don’t know what and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something that sneaked into Russia during the 1970s from an amusement park in Skegness.

Cafe near pond in Kaliningrad now in 2025 demolished

I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here in earlier times. Admittedly, it, as with the pond and everything around it, was saturated monochrome — obviously in the 1910s the world was waiting for colour — but even in this black and white existence (things used to be black and white before coronavirus was invented) the former Königsberg building had all the ennobling features that Gothicity could bestow and was, in its waterside setting, a proverbial sight for sore eyes rather than an eyesore for eyes reduced by its sight to tears, which, omitting novelty out of context, is as good as it gets today. [Note, although Captain Ahab went down with his ship two years after this photo was taken, the demolition pirates have failed to launch their own version, which stands as forlorn and half-built in a spot which Heaven reserved for a restaurant, but which seems to have become Kaliningrad’s ghost ship graveyard.]

Kaliningrad a Green City

Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, which in spite of my reaction I have a sneaky affection for, we wended our way, notwithstanding, happier now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the pond’s perimeter.

Old photographs demonstrate that on both sides of the lake (my apologies purists, I know I should say ‘pond’, but ponds are so small in England and Königsberg’s ponds so large that the appelation seems incongruous) the banks had, for the most part, been left to their own devices, accumulating vegetation and fringed throughout with wetland trees. In the black and white world of old photography atmosphere reigns supreme, but detail can in time, and as a result of time, often call for magnification. I had thus to resort to a lens to pick out from these old photographs the presence of a narrow winding path, most probably gravel surfaced, curling in the early 1900s, through the ribbon of trees and foliage skirting the edge of the pond.

Subsequently lost, this beaten track is now hard paved and in a character and colours favoured by, and thus typical of, 21^st century urban planners. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has long since been dug out, substituted with mown grass lawns and carefully tended municipal flowerbeds. But whilst block paving of every kind, in all its imaginative shapes, its patterns and its sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, a skateboard space and even an exercise quadrangle, has colonised the past, the Königsberg trees that form a boundary along the side of the adjacent road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the later additions, some Soviet others millennial, endorse the attribution that Kaliningrad unlike Königsberg is as green a city as a city can get.

As much as I was enjoying and being overly distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at — daydreaming — today had its objectives, and this meant putting my dreams on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on it. Not that this endeavour would prove difficult in Kaliningrad. Graffiti is just one, sadly, of a number of contagious viruses that has made its way from the West.

Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins in Kaliningrad — **Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins and Nadezhda Rumyantseva in Kaliningrad**

The graffiti we were looking for was not one of your run-of-the-mill, deface, vandalise, spoil, degrade and then talk it up as ‘urban art’ jobs. It was truly an original piece, a bona fide work of art, featuring the actor Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter and the Russian actress, Nadezhda Rumyantseva, star of The Girls, a classic Soviet romantic-comedy drama — but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.

Kaliningrad: Not all graffiti is equal — **There is graffiti and graffiti …**

Work of an anonymous but talented Kaliningrad artist — **Mine’s a vegetarian**

And then she said, For old times’ sake.” What could she be suggesting?

She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ referred to recent history, but a recent history which in the New Normal was as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Ah, those glorious days — so happy and carefree — when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or stroll down on an evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of those days? More to the point, will they ever return?

Like every other bar, Flame was a victim of coronavirus. There it stood, shrouded in darkness, doors barred, patronless and yet for all this desertion not quite extinguished. A nice and reassuring touch was that in keeping with its tradition, Flame, though closed to the public, continued to project music into and across the surrounding recreation area via external hi-fi speakers stationed on its alfresco forecourt. In these grim and troubled times, the music struck a chord that resonated inside one’s soul. It was the bittersweet sound of the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.

Now that the shops — some of the shops — had officially opened their doors again, we had a small chore to fulfil, which was to buy a part for the vacuum cleaner. We might fall foul of coronavirus and die as a result, but heaven forbid we would do such a thing in a house with a mucky carpet.

As we crossed the road from the pond, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had been doing no such thing. The shopping centre that has been taking shape at the end of the city market had gone, in the space of days, from a shell of incomplete concrete pieces into an impressive three- or four-storey series of ascending profiled platforms.

Ordinarily, way back when in the Old (and familiar) Normal, something as mundane as this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, self-imposed or otherwise, seems to have the tendency to sharpen the edge of the mind, so much so in my case that in regarding this evolving building, its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle, or rather an affinity with the bemusement he had felt on waking from a sleep of hitherto unknown proportion.

Vacuum cleaner part in pocket, we set off on our homeward journey, not by retracing our steps — having to pass Flame again now that it was clam-tight shut would be more than the drinker in me could withstand — but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the pond. This route would necessitate, however, walking past yet another well-frequented, landmark bar: the one in historic Rossgarten Gate — CLOSED … just like the rest!

Fortunately, by way of profound distraction, on the opposite side of the road, in one of Kaliningrad’s public squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck, playing his hose in the sun over some of the city’s prettiest flower beds. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”

Watering the flowers in the green city of Kaliningrad — **A lovely day on which to have your hose out**

Kaliningrad a Green City

Our walk back around the lake had proven itself a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty to be found in strolling back and forth days and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s be honest about it, the water features of bath and bog, though unarguably indispensable, hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling pond under a clear blue sky.

On this side of the pond as upon the other, trees in abundance abide, and in such variety and of such different ages that they did not have to ask me twice to indulge my obsessive passion for retrospective reverie, inviting me to determine which of them had been planted during Kaliningrad’s Soviet era and which belonged to Königsberg. I suppose you’d do the same if you were me.

The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad

Trees, ponds, brand-new shopping centres rising up from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, bars with no people inside them, sepia memories of long ago, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of civic truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly and almost back home; just the trenches to cross.

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

30 March 2025 ~ Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

Once upon a time, whilst wandering lonely as a cloud (has anybody else done this?) along Bedford’s magnificent Victorian Embankment, I found myself recalling photographs of this elegant tree-lined vista as it had been in a previous existence, namely in Edwardian days and later in the 1920s.

The quality of gracefulness in the apparel and deportment of those people in whose ghostly footsteps I now presumed to tread romanced me by their disappearance. I felt as though I walked among them, that they were all around me but nowhere to be seen.

The vanishing act was like, or so it seemed to me, a carnival trick gone wrong, which nothing now it had been played could rectify. We are all of us in the Western world walking along such wistful vistas; sleep walking in the washed-out footprints of those who walked before us; shuffling robotically into Caligari’s cabinet, or should that be Count Kalergi’s cabinet?; hiding in the dark of it; preferring the suffocation of denial and inaction rather than exit through the back; knowing that all that is waiting for us is the end of civilisation.

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

In the meantime (whatever the meantime is), enveloped by the past and evasive of the future, I had walked as far as the monument to Britain’s dead of two world wars, and pausing there for a moment or two, or it could have been 80 years, Time is a terrible trickster, I smiled the smile that people smile when they have very little to smile about.

“I’m not afraid of you!” I said, addressing my own mortality.

Mortality smiled back at me, a knowing, sad and secret smile.

We shared the embrace of mutual sorrow, and I was on my way.

“It’s not the dying,” I explained, as I walked along the side of me, “it’s the ephemerality of what you were, what you are becoming but which you actually won’t become since by the time you have become it, you will in every conceivable way have become what you least expected and most certainly never wanted. It really is as fast as that.”

Victorian Suspension Bridge, Bedford, UK

I stopped, hoping no doubt to suspend my animation, upon the Embankment Suspension Bridge (where better?) and gazed, for who knows how long, steadily into the water; the fast, the flowing, relentlessly fluid, the ceaslessly wet and willing water.

A young man of the present time was scorching down towards me, his arms a going at it like two strong steam ship pistons. He passed beneath the bridge, he and his canoe, and by the time I’d turned my head to look, he’d gone. I wondered if I’d gone too, for now I was quite alone.

The river’s rivulets rolled on. The riveted bridge resisted. But I was quite alone, apart from a little touch of rust, which would not, I reasoned, have been there once, when the bridge was built, but which seemed the more I focussed on it to be getting larger by the minute. The rust and I were in each others company.

I gazed along the river, this way and then that, but as for the boat and the young man in it, both had vanished into nothing and were nowhere but a memory.

As I alighted from the stone slab steps, some of which were crumbling ~ it would not have been crumbling when the bridge was built ~ the word ephemerality was bouncing around inside my bonce as if sprung by a pinball wizard. Had that been Roger Daltrey flashing by in that canoe, his hope to die before he grew old could well be the propulsion that has moved him on so fast; so fast we can barely equate the OAP he is today with the youthful figure whose ironic lyrics have been used in evidence against him for the better part of his life.

Overwhelmed by the stammer (and underwhelmed by Starmer) of Daltrey’s My Generation, I had to put myself down, purely in a manner of speaking, and nowhere could be better than on one of the many benches dotted around Bedford’s Mill Meadow.

Benches wih plaques on in Mill Meadows, Bedford, UK

There used to be a mill here once, a real working mill, until time, short-sighted foresight, the love of money and poor town planning (ask Richard Wildman, he will tell you) took everything it had except its name.

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

Sitting there in a mill-less state looking at the swans, painfully aware of the amorphous shapes hobbling by in the shadows of their predecessors, to which not even those who were spotlessly white could ever hold a candle, I thought of the many celebrities that age had been unkind to.

All things being as they are ephemeral, the great facilitator of fame and spectacle, I refer, of course, to the internet, is a double-edged sword to the public figure. TV personalities (devoid of such as they often are), Hollywood moguls, celebs, statesmen and the women who try to emulate them but never quite succeed and show themselves up in the process, have a back-stabbing friend in the internet.

In the temple to temptation, all it takes is two or three clicks to move visually and effortlessly through every successive degenerative stage of an individual’s life. The ‘before and after’ comparison can be truly quite disturbing, especially if, like Michael Jackson, attempts by plastic surgery to arrest the natural ageing process (and Buttox doesn’t help) have only succeeded in making it more grotesque. Disintegration and decay flash before your eyes. Yesterday’s sex bomb has gone off bang, and all that remains is a smouldering ruin. Whatever else the internet may be, and we know it for what it is, a fulsome, fatuous, flatterer, it is the last gallery here on earth to which you would want to entrust your ego.

Look at me, I thought, sitting here on this riverside bench, here in Mill Meadow, Bedford, the very embodiment of morbidity. Pull yourself together man! But Roger Daltrey’s balls were too insistent. They were swinging low like chariots, and though I really should have gone home, which is where they should have carried me, retreated from the Edwardian parasols and boaters of the 1920s, they carried the ‘E’ word with them, and I, like the buffers on a pinball table, could not avoid them striking me time and time again. The bells rang, the lights flashed, the scoreboard registered ‘Lucky 13’, the name of the game ‘Ephemerality’ turned gold and then lurid black, and ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.

But now I was growing tired of it, or afraid of what it was leading me to. Like bananas from Lidl’s and Aldi’s, nothing stays fresh for long. I’d dearly like to shop at Sainsbury’s or be seen in town with a Waitrose bag, but who at my ephemeral age would be willing to give me a mortgage?

The soliloquy between myself was nearing a crucial stage. I was revelling in impermanence, whilst taking from my carrier bag a going-brown banana. It was then that temporality took me by the hand, not the one with the banana in it, and led me off chariot fashion to that Victorian villa across the river, yes, that one over there, for a privileged peep in a young lady’s boudoir.

Said the chariot in dulcet tones, which I recognised immediately as those of the Standard Quartette, “Take that gorgeous young woman …” (Who wouldn’t, without a second thought, were it not for those horrible tats and piercings.) “Take that young woman, for example. Here before the mirror she stands believing that she holds the present tightly in her pretty manicured hand, when all she has is a glove that slips easily from her fingers. These are the minutes and their minion seconds, which, in the dazzle of self-adoration, fall cleverly from her grasp. She is so impressed with the here and now that she cannot see beyond her current reflection, which, if she looked a little more honestly, she could recognise as changing with each diminishing beat of her ageing heart.

It starts with that straight, that perfect chin, which even as we look is turning into a double act, and then travels down to those full, firm breasts, soon to resemble John Wayne’s saddle bags, and next the midriff on display. It’s all of it destined to go south, from the tip of her powdered nose to her proudly pedicured toes.

“Avalanche!” I cried.

“Bugger!” someone else responded.

“And take this young man,” (I’d rather not, said I.) (We had moved from the boudoir to an upmarket gym.) (I never knew before today, or could it be tomorrow, that chariots had the ability not to mention audacity, to swing low wherever they wanted and whenever the mood so took them.) “See how he works those weights,” said the Chariot, “pumping up his muscles to make them look like Popeye’s, only to end up rather cockeyed: an awesome-chested arse-less wonder desperately searching for Arthur J. Pye.

Temporality does this to us, no matter who we think we are. It reads from the Book of Ephemerality, the penultimate chapter of which reminds young women of the age-old proverb that beauty is skin deep and says to young men who body build that by the time they reach the age of 40 younger men will point at them and say, “That’s a magnificent body you’ve built for yourself … shame about the bay window!”

Do you ever have the feeling that you continually wake from a beautiful dream into a carnival freak show?

How I ever got back to my seat overlooking the River Great Ouse, I suppose I will never know, and neither will you unless I lie. But whilst I had been away, someone had stuck a plaque on the back of my seat, which said, “Here sits a right silly Tw..!” I am sorry to disappoint you, but the plaque in question had always been there; always. In fact, almost every park bench in the meadow bore a memorial plaque.

The inconsolability that follows the loss of a loved one creates the need to make material a memory that one can reach out and touch. My encounter with my own mortality had reminded me of this, that the fear of ephemerality is for most, not all but most, not so much the loss of ourselves but the loss of someone close to us, someone so dear, so precious that the thought of being left alone in a world of utter indifference is the thought that is unthinkable.

In fairy tales, heroes and heroines frequently die of a broken heart. Yet for us in our ephemeral world where everything ends but not that easily, we have to endure our broken hearts and somehow learn to live with them. They are perhaps, after all, all that there is in our fleeting lives which seem to go on and on and on and probably do forever.

Requiescat in pace.

Bedford Mill Meadow memorial plaques on park benches

Poignant memorial plaque Bedford Mill Meadow

Moving memorial plaque in Bedford Mill Meadow

More Bedford

> Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

> It’s that man in the Russian hat in Bedford! – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

> Bedford more to like than not – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Surviving New Year’s Eve: If I can so can you

Would you Adam and New Year’s Eve it!

12 December 2024 ~ Surviving New Year’s Eve: If I can so can you

Oh no, it’s that time of year again: what are we going to do at Christmas and where are we going to go on New Year’s eve?

I’ve heard tell that some party people are so far ahead of those like me who are not that they begin planning how they will spend their Christmas and New Year almost before the last one is over. I don’t disbelieve it. Do you know that there are people who actually plan their summer holidays!

Retrospectively> How to deal with a vaccinated liberal family member at Christmas

Yesterday, when I was young, planning Christmas was not an issue. It was taken for granted that Christmas Day, and often Boxing Day, would be spent at home with the family. Thereafter, I would traditionally mosey along to catch up with my friends in Rushden, Northants, for some inter-New Year’s pubbing.

I enjoyed those family Christmases. Ours was quite a large family, which permitted us to indulge in a circuit of Christmas parties held consecutively at the homes of aunties and uncles.

New Year, however, was a different basket of presents altogether. Had I have owned a kilt, a set of bagpipes and a large hairy sporran, then I might have seen in the New Year in style ~ if you can call such fetishes that ~ but within my family circle Christmas was the favourite. New Year’s either trailed in second or sometimes never ran.

Looking back, it would not be too far-fetched to say that I have endured more disastrous, that is to say anticlimactic, New Year’s Eves than I have experienced successful ones.

I recall one New Year’s Eve, when I lived in London, trying to evade the issue of where to be doing what at midnight by drinking with friends during the day and then, come 9pm, scooting off home double quick and diving under the bed sheets.

Hah, fooled it this year! Problem was that I had forgotten to tell the rest of the world to do likewise. On the stroke of midnight all hell let loose. Fireworks flashed and blasted, the club up the road cranked out music at fever pitch, there was merriment in the street ~ blast it! ~ with people crying ‘Happy New Year’ and mawkish peels of auld lang syne came kilting through the letterbox.

Nearly midnight. A clock on New Year's Eve

I never got back to sleep that night, and my New Year’s day was like everyone else’s: faded, jaded and tired. I never went to the party, but I reaped the rewards of it second hand.

Surviving New Year’s Eve

Deriving what your average extrovert might see as a perverse pleasure in being on my lonesome whilst everyone around me obeys the 11^th Commandment, “Thou shalt party”, appears to be a forte of mine.

For example, I am probably one of the very few people, if not the only person, to have surprised himself and the organisers by not turning up to a surprise 21^st birthday party which was in fact his own. Now let that be a lesson to me!

One year’s New Year’s Eve was deliciously more disastrous than even the best of the worst. I had been left on my own in Rushden ~ What a place to be left on your own! What a place to be with someone! (Dear old Rushden, I love you really …). My wife, having received an invitation to spend New Year’s Eve in Paris, snook off with my blessing. And that was a lesson for her.

For some reason, an idealised one I suspect, she seemed to harbour the strange misconception that the Paris she was going to would be the Paris of the 1920s and 30s, which sadly it is not. I blame Humphrey Bogart and his Casablanca’s “We’ll always have Paris …”, when it is evident we wont and obvious we don’t. It’s like singing anachronistically, “There’ll always be an England …” when there isn’t anymore and will never be again.

My good lady wife returned from her New Year’s jaunt jaundiced by the revelation that Paris no longer possessed the style and panache of its glory years but resembled in parts a ghetto from some dark subcontinent back of beyond; and talk about aggressive begging, it was worse than the streets of Kolkata!

Whilst she had been busy upending a dream, I was sitting alone in the office of our antiques emporium, watching Christmas unfold through the lens of the CCTV camera. Almost every house along the street had friends or relatives calling, all of whom were in party mood. For me, with a Christmas dinner of beans on toast, listening to the festive strains of Leonard Cohen’s Christmas Hits, it felt as though the world was having a party to which my invitation had arrived too late. Yes, that must be the answer; my invitation was still in the post.

I am sure that anyone normal would have been distressed by this exclusion, but somehow it seemed a perfect fit for my innate sense of Gothic melancholy, and I have to admit, hand on heart, that I have never enjoyed a Christmas like it. The only way to have gone one better would have been to put the cat out.

Surviving New Year’s Eve

You’ve probably guessed by now that I am not the world’s most enthusiastic party goer. I don’t go a bundle on them, and I care for crowds even less. This could explain why during the 20 years I lived in London, I never attended the fireworks display held in the capital on New Year’s Eve and have no inclination still to this day to patronise large-scale events whatever they are and wherever they may be.

New Year’s Eve at a pub, waking up the following morning aching from head to toe, having slept it off in the back of a car, now that would be a New Year’s to remember. If only I could remember. I must have the details written down somewhere.

Retrospectively> Why Happy New Year?

There was one year in London when the New Year’s festivities ended up in a pub brawl worthy of John Wayne. It was not my fault, I hasten to add, I was an innocent bystander, but I was carted away with the rest of them and with them sat out the early hours of a hazy New Year’s Day down at the local cop shop. As luck would have it, however, the venue we were taken to happened to be in Bethnal Green, where I knew of several pubs. So, after they’d booted us out with a caution, it was the hair of the East London dog for us, even though the rest of the dog was rather bruised and battered.

Mick Hart New Year party, Russia, 2000/2001. Surviving New Year’s Eve.

^: My first New Year in Kaliningrad, 31 December 2000: an introduction to party games

In Russia, New Year’s Eve is the big one, the ultimate annual celebration and most eagerly awaited public holiday. At this time of year, every year, Russians push the boat out, and they manage to do it impressively, even without a kilt. (“Excuse me, is it true that you don’t wear swimming trunks under your kilts?” “Not to the office, no. But we do when pushing the boat out.”)

One thing I wasn’t prepared for at Russian New Year’s parties was the obligatory playing of games. Playing games, not one but many, is an integral, unavoidable part not only of Russian New Year’s parties but any Russian party. I couldn’t abide them at first, but twenty-four years on, I seem to have acquired a satisfactory adaptive immunity to the professional and self-appointed maestros who it seems will stop at nothing to get you up on your feet and jump you around the room. With irrepressible party spirit, they hoik you onto the dance floor, where they make you perform embarrassing feats or assign a comedic role to you in an improvised mini-drama.

It cannot be said that these masters of ceremonies, self-styled or otherwise, are not good at what they do. They create a tempo, maintain engagement and prevent the party from flagging, but turbo-charged with extroversion and, in professional cases, the additional lure of fees, they give no concessions and take no prisoners. Woe betide the shrinking violet, the carefully cosseting introvert, the poor self-conscious soul should they fall into the sphere of influence controlled by these unrelenting cheerleaders.

Retrospectively> New Year’s Eve at the Hotel Russ, Svetlogorsk

I have heard it said about people, and I am sure that you have too, that they can adapt to anything in the fullness of time. I am not so sure about that, but a word in your shell-like if you please on the subject of party games. You have doubtlessly heard that a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, well, three or four shots of vodka does for party games what sugar does for medicine. Neck two or three at the start of the party and before the evening is out, your chaperone Self-Consciousness will have left you to your own devices and, mark my words and make no mistake, you will be up their strutting your stuff with the rest and the best of the extroverts. By the end of the evening, you might even believe that you have been speaking Russian fluently and even if you haven’t, nobody will have noticed. That’s the beauty of sugar. Trust me! Your razzling-dazzling party-game prowess will have knocked them all for six.

^: Mick Hart finding rhythm at a Russian party with the help of vodka and a fancy hat

This time last year I had no need to prep myself on vodka or brush up on my party games act, I was on my own again. (It can be addictive.) This bothered me not a jot. I togged myself up and tootled off to Kaliningrad city centre. The proposition was to have one or two libations in town, have a nightcap on my return, shout Happy New Year to myself too early, as my watch is always wrong, and then immediately hop into bed. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t happen that way. Forgetting that New Year’s eve is Russia’s most important holiday, no allowances had been made for every bar and restaurant being fully booked. Beer and vodka everywhere and not a drop to drink. Luckily for me, our neighbours came to the rescue, as they have before on New Year’s Eve. They invited me to join them, and I spent a pleasant evening in their company.

Not only did they save me from the Billy No Mates stigma, sitting alone on New Year’s Eve, but they also gave me access to a telly, something we don’t have, and whilst I am more than happy to do without a telly for 364 days of the year, on the 365th a telly comes in handy.

I am not keen on the stage-crafted jollity, the forced frivolity and razzamatazz of celeb-laden New Year’s Eve shows, but my enduring fascination with our allotted place in the slipstream of time magnetises my interest in counting down the seconds to midnight, besides which I have a thing for the Russian national anthem and the New Year’s presidential address.

Mick Hart surviving New Year's Eve. Thankfully the neighbour's invited him to spend New Year's with them.

^: Midnight New Year’s Eve, Kaliningrad

During the period when we owned and ran our UK antique emporium, we held a succession of New Year’s parties in the adjoining barns at the back of the building. They were, of course, not my idea, but I must confess, with barely disguised astonishment, that most went off successfully, with the unforgettable exception of one, when we all came down with the flu. A quick recovery was necessary, as racked in the room where the party never took place, perched a 72-pint barrel of ale with a shelf life of five days. Downing it before the deadline was not an easy task, but the commitment and enthusiasm with which we went about it was a remarkable example of collaboration at its best. We may have missed New Year’s Eve but only to make it last for a week rather than one evening. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill.

Surviving New Year’s Eve

These back-of-the-building New Year’s parties were always much of a stamina tester, since given our Russian connections, respect for our Russian guests and a sentimental attachment to Kaliningrad, first we would celebrate Moscow’s New Year, an hour later Kaliningrad’s and finally at midnight GMT, we would raise a glass (or several) to our own UK New Year.

We didn’t have a TV, but with the aid of a projector and a slice of white brick wall, we would screen recorded videos of a patriotic nature, belting out Russia’s National Anthem to coincide with two Russian New Year’s and ‘God Save the Queen’, the Royal Salute, on the stroke of UK’s midnight ~ or sometimes at 30 seconds to midnight or 30 seconds past, as nobody had the exact right time; in the depths of our party bunker nobody’s smartphone worked. These sequential celebrations led to three volleys of popping champagne corks in as many hours. We even played some Russian games and added a few of our own. Who said that it couldn’t be done! And me not a party animal!

Holding these parties at the back of the shop from which we sold vintage clothes meant we were never short of a prop or two, so should someone have the secret desire to see New Year in as Lenin, or transform himself into Winston Churchill, the fulfilment of their fantasies was not beyond their grasp.

A 1920s' themed New Year's Eve party at Station109 Vintage

^: 1920s’ New Year’s Eve party in the back room of the antiques/vintage emporium

These parties would typically stretch into the wee kiltish hours, so that the full effect of the hangover would not be felt until late afternoon, the antidote for which was either to wend one’s weary way to the pub or sit at home feeling dreadful, reciting next year’s resolution, ‘never, ever again!’

Older now and wiser, such casting caution to the wind is over. No more shall I encounter the sort of reckless New Year’s Eves outlined in this post and certainly not the kind that occurred in 2002, when we arranged to meet Victor Ryabinin after a New Year’s party.

Arriving at 1am, we left Victor’s Kaliningrad art studio at 9 o’clock in the morning, having conversed and drunk through the twilight hours. The snow was thick underfoot and a blizzard up and blowing, and yet in spite of the hour and all we had drunk the memory of that morning trudging back to our flat is as clear as if it had happened yesterday. I can see the snow and I can see my boots mechanically tromping up and down, but only through one eye. I had one eye open, and one eye shut. Autopilot is not recommended, but it got me back safely that morning.

When all is said and done, surviving New Year’s Eve is small potatoes. It is the 365 days that follow which pose the greater challenge. The big issue is not what are you going to do on New Year’s Eve, but how are you going to spend the rest of the year. What are you going to do with it? What is it going to do with you? Perhaps if you set your mind on making New Year’s Eve not quite so happy as you have in the past, the year to come may be brilliant. We’ve had a lot of practice, but will we ever get it right? In the last analysis, does it matter? The countdown has begun: 2024 is quickly slipping away from us.

Whatever you do, Good Luck!

Below: The ghosts of New Years’ past. Hotel Russ, Svetlogorsk,
since demolished …

The ghost of New Year's past. The Hotel Russ, Svetlogorsk, now demolished

Welcome Back President Trump to the White House

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.

All our yesterdays > Is Biden their Last Straw?

Image attribution
Red carpet: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Red-carpet-vector-drawing/15058.html

Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us

Change, Spare Change, All Change, Why Change?

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.

The Labour and Conservative parties: two old horses out to grass

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.

Spare Some Change for immigration: the elephant in the political room

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.

Immigration: the Fox in the UK hen house

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!

UK's city centres are filling up with Zombies

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:

Against the intolerable conditions on the Russian-Polish border (Kaliningrad)!

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.

Something for the weekend, sir?

UK Anti-immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Lies & Democracy are they now the same thing?
Don’t Kill Cash
Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

Image attributions

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

Suit: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Wedding-suit-on-a-stand-vector-clip-art/20642.html

Outline map UK: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/UK-silhouette/55420.html

Playing table tennis: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Kids-play-table-tennis/87262.html

Scotsman: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Orator-in-black-and-white/77202.html

Two horses grazing: https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net/media/two-horses-grazing-3dbc66?action=download&size=1024 [Arthur B. Davies (American, Utica, New York 1862–1928 Florence)]

Elephant: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Elephant-contour-vector-clip-art/7929.html

Empty room: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Empty-room/70655.html

Fox in the hen house: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Fox-in-hen-house/81729.html

Zombie silhouette: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/zombie-silhouettes_805714.htm#fromView=keyword&page=1&position=8&uuid=31cda339-13bb-4ae8-b7a7-d96bb5b9b834″>Image by freepik</a>

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

23 April 2024 ~ Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!

Note (added 9 May 2024): Booking.com asked me several times to leave a review of my ‘hotel room experience’. It was a tad difficult, as I never got inside of it, but, anyway, I left a review. When I checked the reviews on Booking.com’s page for Tawerna Rybaki, I found mine via the link, but when I checked again using their ‘slider’ on the page, only positive reviews appeared. So, it’s ‘magnificent’, ‘wonderful’, ‘the best ever’ … as I intimate in my post headline, “a warning to the unwary”. Perhaps I should have included the word ‘collusion’ 🤔

This story is sad but true. Its main protagonists are the world’s largest online travel agency, a so-called ‘apartment’ in Gdansk and last, but by all means least ~ or so it would seem ~ me, the customer.

A few weeks ago, I was returning from the UK to Kaliningrad. As you will know if you have read my earlier post, the journey is an onerous one: early morning, 4am start; Wizz Air to Gdansk; taxi to Gdansk bus station; three hours of loitering in Gdansk waiting for the bus connection; two-hour bus journey to the Polish-Russian borders; one-and-a-half-hours processing time at the borders (if you are lucky); forty-five minute journey to Kaliningrad.

“I know,” I thought, in an excited moment of uncharacteristic exhilaration, “I’ll break the journey up. I’ll stay overnight in Gdansk and catch the bus to Kaliningrad refreshed the following morning. What a spiffing idea!”

Intoxicated (it’s those English ales, you know!) by the cunningness of my plan, specifically the chance it would avail me of spending an afternoon sight-seeing around Gdansk Old Town and thereafter a relaxed evening dining out in a restaurant of my choice, I was on Google before you could say ‘you will only end up on Booking.com’, and two minutes later, having keyed ‘Hotels in Gdansk’ into the browser, there I was, on Booking.com.

Now Gdansk, like any other large tourist city, is not short of a hotel or two, and before I could apply one of the many Booking.com filters, I had been directed to the most expensive hotels in the city. My stay was an out-of-season booking, when £120+ seemed a tad extravagant for crashing out for the night. The in-season prices, or rather open season on gullible punters’ bank accounts, are beyond a profligate’s dream.

Screenshots from hotel-booking websites taken on, appropriately, April Fool’s Day, 2 April 2024 (April Fool!), show that the in-season prices for almost all accommodation in Gdansk has trebled. If you are a real mug, you can even pay in excess of £600 a night just to slide between the sheets.

I personally, could never justify paying anything like that, even if I had a name like Elon Muskrat, after all a bed’s a bed, and unless you’ve got a nice bit of totty with you and don’t mind being sexist by saying so, what’s the point of stumping up more dosh than you would if you accidently went to a brothel. And you would; wouldn’t you!

No, I was looking for somewhere perhaps not exactly as cheap as chips or for the price of a shish kebab from fatty Abdul’s burger bar, but at least pegged at a price so that I would not cry come the morning after, “They should really invent a pill for this! Oh why, oh why did I open my wallet last night!”

Applying Booking.com’s filters, but sparingly (one can have quite enough of a silly thing), their search engine unearthed several hotels that accorded with my budget and requirements, namely rooms at 40 to 60 pounds a night and a hotel in easy walking distance of the city’s bus station. Clapped-out, Gdansk bus station is the hole in the crown where the jewel never was, and so say all of us.

Within seconds I was faced with a series of affordable options, including something that I had never used before, rentable apartments. Apartment is such a wonderful word, is it not? It certainly beats ‘flat’ or ‘bedsit’ or a single room with no hotel lobby and no staff on hand to help you out in the unlikely event that something goes wrong, and some of these apartments in Gdansk, when taken out of season, are as cheap as the paper we used to wrap chips in before the EU ruled that we couldn’t.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

Always one for adventure ~ I bought a new cravat last week ~ I latched onto an interesting place, the exotic name of which, appealing photographs and exquisite reviews plastered over the net were surely too good to be true. Let me just repeat that, ‘Too good to be true!’

The place in question, and I had no question to ask, after all wasn’t I about to book this ‘apartment’ via one of the net’s most acclaimed online accommodation booking sites, Booking.com, was called Tawerna Rybaki Old Town. I repeat: Tawerna Rybaki Old Town.

“Let’s do it!” I said, saying it out loud, as if somebody else was with me, a party to my decision. There’s confidence for you!

And by Jove, I did it!

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town

At 39 quid for the night, and as Booking.com’s receipts rolled into my email inbox (and don’t they just!), I do not mind admitting, I was feeling rather smug. But that was because at that point in time I assumed I was all booked up, rather than being something else that inconveniently rhymes with that phrase.

A couple of days rolled by (I probably went to the pub in between.), when, for some inexplicable reason, possibly prompted by that fate-tempting phrase, ‘in the unlikely event that something should go wrong’, I returned to my booking receipt.

It was all looking self-explanatory, until I spotted something that I thought was rather odd.

In a box within the tabulation, a third of the way down the page, a statement appeared in English ~ ‘A door code is needed’ ~ and beneath it a longer sentence, but this was written in Polish. I copied the sentence in Polish and pasted it into Google’s translator, but it did not tell me anything that I did not already not know, such as where was the code that was needed?

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

I searched through the plethora of booking receipts but found nowt. So, I emailed the apartment owners using the email link on the form and left it at that. Two days passed ~ nothing. I emailed again, ensuring that my second email was flagged ‘urgent’. As before, I received no reply.

It was surely time to get in touch with Booking.com and ask for clarification. If only life was as easy as it was before the internet!

Booking.com ~ Is there anybody there?👻

Booking.com had sent three or four automated emails to me regarding my booking, none of which, as far as I could see, contained their contact information.

A Google search for Booking.com’s telephone number or a live chat option unearthed several dud numbers and no live chat.

With a sense of intense foreboding, fuelled by déjà vu (we’ve all been here on the net), I turned to their website — nothing.

“Perhaps,” I mused, “they want me to open an account so that they can fill my email inbox with a load of shitey ads.” I was already running out of time and patience, so I placed my trust in my email spam box and signed up as they wanted.

And here is where the nightmare truly began. Next stop the Twilight Zone.

We all know, or should know from hard and frustrating experience, that many, far too many, online-only trading companies, large, exclusive and monopolistic, demonstrate unparalleled expertise in the art of concealing their contact details.

The irony of this is that we are supposedly living in the so-called information age; communication made easy!

Booking.com are by no means the only organisation whose website is constructed like a maze, with lots of circuitous paths, junctions and dead ends guaranteed to flummox anyone impudent or desperate enough to try to speak to someone or message a real human entity, something preferably in human form, possessing eyes, ear holes, a voice, and maybe even a brain, with which to reply to queries.

I appreciate, of course, that Booking.com is an aggravator, sorry, I meant to say aggregator, and as such does not want to encourage every Tom, Dick and Ikmar to swamp the lady at customer support with a lot of unnecessary questions. But when accommodation proprietors who have already taken your dough shun your attempts to contact them, then, to quote the telephone ad of old, it really is “nice to talk”.

The slideshow below illustrates how well hidden Booking.com’s contact details are. Apologies for the ‘misty’ images, but symbolically speaking they capture perfectly the obscurantism encountered in searching for what could and should be a simple highlighted click away, ie ‘Contact Customer Support’.

Booking.com: Welcome to the Help Centre
Booking.com:Fill in the booking details
Booking.com: How to open the next window?
Booking.com: You must type in something, ie 'Key'. Click on 'Other topics' at the end of the list.
Booking.com: Click on 'Something else'.
Booking.com: Click on ‘More Options’
Booking.com: There's the Contact options: fingers crossed!!!
Booking.com: Believe it or not ...

As soon as you are directed to ‘Please read our FAQs’ (Frequently Asked Quackery), you can be sure that you are dealing with a company that will stop at nothing to thwart your outrageous ambition to speak to someone human. Rest assured, that you will never find what you are looking for by reading FAQs — an abbreviation that should be changed under the Trades Description Act to reflect what it actually stands for. I suggest FKUs.

Finding the means by which to communicate directly with Booking.com requires the patience of Gungadin ~ perhaps it was he who designed the site. “Hello, can I speak to Mister Mykel Hart, please…” to be said in a sing-songy Asian voice.

But, as it applied to my experience, there was no one there to talk to, not from India, from Pakistan not even from Asian Leicester.

I had signed up to Booking.com; I had spun the internet roulette wheel: round and around and around we go, where we’ll end up nobody knows.

Having entered an Edgar Allan Poe nightmare world, I eventually find a link to the ‘HELP (for Pity’s Sake Help Me, Somebody!) Centre!!!!’ But it does not end there!

I click on the Help Centre link and am taken to a Welcome to the Help Centre window. ‘Send us a message’ or ‘Call us’ does not take you anywhere. The options are to ‘Sign into your account’ or ‘Continue without an account’. I had already had a brief whizz around the signed-in account and had whizzed out of it again, having found nothing that I wanted and lots of what I could do without, so I decided to plump for the ‘Continue without an account’ option.

I am then asked to fill in my booking details, which I did with gratitude.

The next window asks: ‘How can we help?’ Beneath this there is a whole list of fob-off things that you do not want help with. But no visible means by which to talk to or to message someone. So, I click on ‘More’, which is at the bottom of the list. Note, however, that in order not to go around and around and around on the seemingly never-ending carousel, you must type something in the search box, even if it is only ‘arseholes!’ I refrained and typed in ‘key’.

In the next window the name and dates of my apartment appeared with a little picture next to it, and below this another lost, sorry, I meant to type ‘list’, headed ‘Things you can do’, which looked very much the same as the list two pages back, except, perhaps, for the option ‘Please Commit Suicide, which was not included, since the site designer was no doubt convinced that by the time you reached this window you would instinctively want to jump out of it.

Not wanting to oblige, I clicked instead on ‘Other topic’ at the end of the list (where else?!). The last of three options in this list was the intentionally vague, ‘Something else’. Heaven forbid that they might indicate that this was where you might find a telephone number or a messaging option.

Are you still with me at this point? I know the feeling!

The next window was called ‘Get in touch!’

“Yu don’t say!!’

But the recommended option was to contact the owners of the property. This was an absolute ‘No No’, as I had already received no replies to two emails and did not want a third.

So, we click on ‘More contact options’.

Once again, the drowning man instead of getting a life raft is thrown a straw, as you are siphoned off again down the dead-end direction of the never-answering property owners. But here, at last, is a chance to communicate. You’ve ducked and dived and weaved and woven and at last more by luck than design you find yourself at the core of the puzzle. The options open to you are to telephone customer service or send them a type-written message. I opted for the latter, as I wanted them to respond in writing.

And so it was, having travelled in my mind to the very antipodes of Distress and Despair, I wrote:

“I note in my booking there is reference to a key code to access the property. However, it is not clear whether there will be someone at the property to provide this code, or if the code should have been included in the booking confirmation. I have contacted the property twice by email for clarification, but they have not replied. Please advise.”

I did get a response. I wondered if I would. But I wasn’t convinced. Here it was stated that the owners of Twanky Dillo apartment would send me by telephone or email the entry code for the apartment on the morning of my booking. I did not like it, but I left it like that. ‘Don’t hold your breath!’ was the maxim that sprang to mind.

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town

Now, I’m not the world’s most cynical guy … but, come the day, there I was, extremely tired after my early-morning flight, standing in this beautiful, aged-like-a-fine-wine street in Gdansk’s Old Town, having just been deposited by an airport taxi, the driver of which confessed that even using his sat-nav, he was having trouble locating the address that I had given him ~ the address of my lovely apartment.

Let me reiterate the name of that apartment and the apartment’s address in case you have missed my previous references:

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

There I stood with my laptop case in hand, a weary traveller in Old Town Gdansk.

And a more enchanting, bohemian street you could not wish to be standing in. Now, all that was needed was to find your room, deposit your case, freshen up and sightsee until you drop. Little did I know that I would walk … and walk … and walk, but devoid of all enjoyment, and by the end of the day I would be more than ready to drop.

Not comfortable still ~ I am a pragmatic pessimist ~ I strolled slowly up the street peering at the property numbers, more than certain that I would not find the apartment I was looking for. And would you Adam and Eve it, there was a 7/8, and next to it an 11/12, but as for 9/10 it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they forgot to rebuild it after Hitler blew it up?

I will not say that I did not believe it. I did believe it, but wished to be proven wrong. I walked that same stretch of street three times, as though by doing so the missing numbers would miraculously make themselves known to me, but no such luck and more of the same eventually had me pop inside a café and ask the people therein if they knew the mysterious whereabouts of mislaid numbers 9 to10.

Nice people but no idea. They suggested I try the alley next door.

This little street fanned out into a wide rectangle with flats on either side, but number 9/10 was not among them. I walked to the end of the street and back again, but, as the song goes, on completion of this exercise ‘I still hadn’t found what I was looking for’.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

I retraced my steps, peered up and down the street that traversed the one I was walking, and then, none the wiser, returned to the café where I had asked directions before.

It may strike you as strange, but the café people did not know any more than they did 20 minutes previously.

Over another coffee, I tried to telephone the apartment which did not exist and whose owners never reply to their customers, but my O₂ roaming was roaming somewhere else, and the café had no wireless internet with which to connect my laptop. As I said earlier, we expect too much; this is the age of communication. Now, had there been a telephone box …

But this would not have helped either. Four or five streets later (I had begun looking for alternative accommodation), somehow I manged to make a phone call, but the number for apartment Twanky Wanky returned the message, ‘unrecognised’. So, their email is unmanned, and their phone number is a false one.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

By now, I had drunk three more coffees in as many cafes, none of which had wireless internet, neither customer toilets, and this, the latter, let me tell you, is a real problem in Zloty land: public loos are few and far between and when you do eventually find one, if indeed you do, you either pay up or pee yourself.

As I trudged moodily through the very streets that I thought I would enjoy, my laptop bag crammed with presents, which made it all the heavier, I wondered if I was the victim of a cynical and sadistic trick that had me following signs to the loo only to be taken around and around in circles. Perhaps the loo signs were Booking.com sponsored and soon I would come to FAQs?

As luck would have it, I remembered the subterranean bogs on the little side street where I was told Twinky Winky apartment might be, so I detoured back there, disturbed the female bog attendant who was sucking on a fag (ah, hem), gratefully used the loo and upon emerging from it, happened to cast a glance into a gated compound, and guess what it was I saw there locked away and hidden? Yes, you’ve got it right: the elusive numbers 9/10. This astonishing discovery, as elucidating as it was, mattered not a jot, since I neither had the code which would allow me to access the gated compound or the code for the door of the property.

F.ck! F.ck! F.ck!

All I wanted now was to find a hotel, dump my case and secure a room for the night. I was exhausted; bear in mind that I had been up since 4am and had undergone the cattle-market of travelling discount airways.

I wanted a hotel desperately, but I was not prepared to pay silly money, even in my beleaguered state.

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

A young lady in a bar (where else!) after telling me that I looked much younger than I was (I told her I used Buttocks.) offered to put me up for the night (I think that’s what she said?) for nothing. But as I am rather fussy about who it is I get mugged by, I politely declined her offer, and me and my trusty laptop took to the streets again.

In another bar, I met a young lady (I don’t make a habit of this … Trust me, I’m an antique dealer), who would have been speaking perfect English if she could lose her American accent. She sympathised with my plight. “Have you been had?” she asked. “Well, not recently and not as much I’d like,” I Frankie Howard replied (for the edification of deprived millennials, Frankie was a camp comedian). She then asked me where I was going, and when I replied Kaliningrad, an ominous hush fell over the bar. She then treated me to a diatribe about Russia and the Russians, before admitting that she wasn’t too fond of most of western Europe either, and couldn’t stand the globalists. But she had been drinking all night long and had the very English female habit of saying F.ck! a lot.

Having enjoyed my brief encounter with Miss F.ckalot, off I trudged, completely in the wrong direction to the one in which I wanted to go, but with the applaudable compensation that I ended up on the historic side of the river.

The sky was a complementary blue and the air crisp with the first flirtation of spring. As tired as I was, I made time to make love to the scenery. I even unzipped my camera. But I shied away from the top-price hotels with their fancy names and liveried doormen.

Swish hotel in Gdansk. Not Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk

There are very few places in the world as distressing as the immediate area that borders Gdansk’s bus station, and it was quite far on foot for a senior citizen who had already spent two hours plodding the cobbled pavements to drag himself to, but I reckoned that close to the bus station there must be a cheap hotel.

I reckoned wrong. There wasn’t. At least a visible one.

I stopped and asked a taxi driver if he knew of a budget hotel? He didn’t. Why should he? He was only a taxi driver. In the golden age of communication an impediment indeed.

I walked and walked, and based on the same hypothesis that travel stations were associated with hotels, ended up at the city’s central railway station. Here, as everywhere else, there was no hotel in sight. But then it happened. The man up there answered my prayers, either that or it pays to advertise. Lit up, like a beacon of hope, white, bright, refulgent and gloriously unmissable, it could have been a mirage but thankfully was not. Two simple but adorable words on top of a high-rise building: here is the ‘Mercure Hotel’, they said.

Locked out of Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk, the Hotel Mercure should be called Haven Hotel!

Mercure Hotel Gdansk Website

With blisters on my feet and soul, I hopped into the nearest taxi and dismissing as a fait accompli the taxi driver ripping me off, 10 Euros for a four-minute trip, I asked the delightful man, whom my feet regarded as their saviour, to part the waters of my discontent and take me to the Mercure.

Could it have been the height of the Mercure or its grand, perpetual revolving door that made me think ‘too costly’? This we will never know. But I went in all the same. Went in! I actually just went in! I didn’t need a door code? All I had to do was walk through the open door — the revolving door that never closes — and there was a reception desk and someone there to talk to! Don’t you just love a proper hotel?! Asking the price of a room for a man dead on his feet, the reply came back ‘sixty quid’. Good enough! Job done!

Yes, the electronic door card did not work the lift the first time I tried to use it, no matter how I waggled it! Yes, the toilets were also electronic door-card operated. Yes, the lighting system in the hotel room only came on if one shoved the card in the reader attached to the wall. And yes, wasn’t it all, in spite of this, wasn’t it all so lovely!

My stay at the Mercure, which I would like to write about later, was a blessing and would have been no less so had I not been led a merry dance by the owners of an apartment in Poland, which might have been just the ticket if, after I had paid the tariff, they had simply provided the codes I needed to get me through the door.

Pay heed to my experience. It is a warning to the unwary.

It was bad enough as it was, but imagine how worse it could have been had I not been travelling light! I only had a laptop case, not a 35kg bag!

The moral of this story is, if you are going to run the risk of booking an apartment room instead of a proper hotel, ie a place which has a front desk with staff that you can talk to, make sure you get your key code early. Otherwise, take a burglar with you, a ladder and a battering ram.

Think this is a joke? It’s not so funny when it happens to you!

Tawerna Rybaki Old Clown
Pillock 910, Sodyou, Gdwańks, blank blank, Poland

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

NOTE> Booking.com: Once I had alerted Booking.com to my plight, they were quick to respond to me and quick to issue a refund for the booking, which included the difference between the price of the non-accessible apartment and the cost of a night at Mercure Hotel. I am grateful to them for this.

Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

What goes up must come down, but it took 50 years to do so

29 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

I go away for four weeks, and this is what happens! In my absence, someone has nipped off with three-quarters of the House of Soviets!

I must confess (no, it wasn’t me), as I sat on a bench with my coffee and sandwich, looking across the Lower Pond, that the sight of the House of Soviets dwindling into nothing plucked in my nostalgic heart a sentimental chord.

Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

Like it or not, the great concrete monolith has dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline for more than 50 years. Photographed arguably more times and from every conceivable angle than any other structure in Kaliningrad, in spite of itself and for all the wrong reasons, the towering, bulky edifice, with its plethora of empty windows achieved cult status, most notably, ironically and cynically, as a prime example of the best in Soviet architecture, and with its unfortunate reputation for being the house that never was occupied, haunted itself and the city with the cost of taking it down.

Its huge rectangular cross-bridged frame, which had incongruously, but none the less defiantly, replaced the splendour of Königsberg Castle in all its baroque and historical glory, had idled away the years as an unlikely city-centre successor to the 13^th century Teutonic castle, later residence of choice for the region’s Prussian rulers, which eventually became the point of convergence for the city’s cultural and spiritual life.

Conversely, the House of Soviets never became anything more than an object of curiosity and a convenient hook for western media on which to hang derogatory.

In my 23 years of visiting and of living in Kaliningrad, I have to say I have never heard anyone admit to loving the House of Soviets, and yet, to balance that out, likewise, nobody ever committed themselves to hating it

In its lifetime ~ fairly long lifetime ~ I suppose we can conclude that the inhabitants of Kaliningrad neither revered nor reviled the building. It was simply there and where it was, and very soon it won’t be.

<It’s Curtains for the House of Soviets>

Published 2021: It is official: 51 years after its construction and the same number of years of non-occupation, arguably one of Kaliningrad’s most iconic buildings, and ironically one of its most lambasted, especially by the western press, is about to be demolished. I am, of course, referring to the House of Soviets, ninety per cent of which was completed in 1985 on a site close to where once stood the magnificent Königsberg Castle, the East Prussian city’s jewel in the crown, which was extensively damaged in the Second World War and then, in 1967, dynamited into oblivion.

Kaliningrad Victory Square Flowers of Condolence

24 March 2024 National Day of Mourning

24 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad Victory Square Flowers of Condolence

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared 24 March to be a national day of mourning.

As the death toll from Russia’s worst terrorist attack for almost two decades reaches 137, moving scenes in Kaliningrad today see residents of the Kaliningrad region lay flowers, light candles and place toys at the base of the monument in Victory Square.

I share the grief and sorrow of my Russian friends.

Kaliningrad Victory Square Flowers of Condolence

Death of the House of Culture

When it’s gone, it’s gone …

Updated 5 March 2024 | First published: 16 September 2021 ~ Death of the House of Culture

Remembering Zalivino’s House of Culture. The space once occupied by the House of Culture is now just a bed of hardcore and thistles. Here is what it was like before they made a ghost of it. [First written in 2022; revised 2024]

We first noticed that there was more traffic than usual whilst we were sitting in the garden drinking tea. Although the road through the village goes nowhere, in other words the village is the end of the road, there is some light industry here, and so the odd truck or two passing by is understandable.

It was not until we walked to one of the two village shops, the one that is furthest away from us, that the reason for more trucks became startingly apparent. They were knocking down the House of Culture!

Atlas Excavator demolishes House of Culture — Death of the House of Culture

News had been leaked to us some time ago that the days of the House of Culture were numbered and that a demolition team was waiting in the wings. But it is one thing to know and another to see.

The House of Culture may have struck me as a depressing eyesore ~ an ugly great lump of concrete that simply did not fit, made worse by the mud and gloom of winter ~ but it was what it was; and, suddenly, now, it wasn’t.

Where once had stood the concrete behemoth ~ aged, stained, neglected, pitifully dilapidated and inconsolably boarded-up ~ there was just a pile of rubble.

Death of the House of Culture

Some people say that my whole life has been built on demolition. I worked in demolition in my youth, demolishing airfields from the Second World War. Of course, being me, obsessed with the past and history, tearing up the runways and pulling down the buildings was a truly heart-breaking task, and yet, to coin a phrase, someone had to do it.

Besides, doing it gave me the opportunity to daydream of the lives and times of those who had lived on the airfields and all that had gone before, and yet, whilst I fully acknowledged this privilege, I could not quite elude the nagging thought that I was committing an act of cultural vandalism, which, of course, I was. Guilty as charged, as they say: guilty of destroying history, of wiping out the past, of erasing the nostalgic flags from the charts of people’s memories, the charts they would use in later life to navigate back to the days of their youth, and all I could say in my defence: “I was only following orders”. Now, who does that remind you of!

For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to derelict buildings: the pathos and melancholy, the silent history, the ghosts of their past inhabitants. And the House of Culture was no exception. In the short time I had known it, I had developed an affection for this victim of the concrete age.

And why not? What it was and where it was, was no fault of its own. It had no more claim to responsibility than we have on the bodies we inhabit and no more say on location than we have when we are thrown, without consultation or mercy, into a world we cannot disown.

Even so, the architecture of the 1960s is not easy to love. It is concrete dominated and imaginatively challenged, no matter where in the world it is, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the Soviet Union, where both reinforced and pre-cast concrete were the darlings of the day.

The House of Culture was a progeny of its time: conceived, gestated and born into concrete. For a diminutive backwater village, built on bricks and wood and consisting of humble dwellings, this new community hall was both far too big and remarkably out of place, and all that it had to say for itself in answer to aesthetics was that it had some height and angular difference built into it at roof level.

Death of the House of Culture: a Zalivino landmark

What the House of Culture certainly was not was the rural equivalent of Kaliningrad’s House of Soviets. Indeed, not. For whilst both structures had concrete in common, in so far as each epitomised the architectural limitations that would later define an era, one was redundant before completed, whilst the other played a dynamic, indeed a vital, cultural and social role at the heart of the small community for which it had been expressly built.

Back in its day, in the 1960s, the House of Culture had literally been the cultural centre of the village. We heard tell of myriad uses, of concerts, parties, important civic meetings, dances, educational classes, theatrical and film performances; even the Moscow Ballet Company had played at the House of Culture!

But by the time we arrived on the scene, all of this was little more than a rapidly fading memory. The biography of the House of Culture was already out of print; all that was left was the cover.

‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is a fortunate proverb for the House of Culture, since its cover was ruined beyond redemption ~ scarred, torn, split, coming apart at the seams, ruined by time and human indifference.

And yet to judge it from its exterior would be to do it a great disservice. In its later, neglected years, it would be easy to confuse it with the building that it wasn’t, the House that Knew No Culture, but what remained of its spent interior told an entirely different story, as I shall now reveal.

Gaining access to the House of Culture was the proverbial piece of cake. The windows had been boarded over, but where there’s a will there’s a way, and wilful people on gaining access had hardly bothered to put the boarding back. Inside it was discovered that in spite of the natural decay and the inevitable wanton damage inflicted by the corrosive action of the human virus vandalism, remnants of the House of Culture’s former interior glory were all too poignantly evident.

Many of its original three-quarter-glazed wooden doors were for the most part still intact, including the grand, tall double doors that opened into the building’s central hall. They were even in full possession of their brass and fluted handles. The embossed Art Deco plasterwork, rising from floor to ceiling on the walls of the main auditorium, had retained the splendour of its sweeping curves. And many of the building’s functional attributes had survived degradation: original light fittings, lampshades, seats, benches and other abandoned items from the forgotten realm of everyday use had somehow weathered the storm that neglect and dereliction slowly but surely unleash.

Door House of Culture Russia — Doors passed through & passed over in the House of Culture

Doors passed through & passed over in the House of Culture

But these items, as remarkable as their longevity was, palled into insignificance with the discovery of the grand artwork and bold embellishments bestowed on the House of Culture, partly in recognition of its importance to the community but more so as emblematic reminders that the village owed its existence to its long marine and maritime heritage.

I have already mentioned that the walls in the auditorium were decorated in relief curves of an Art Deco nature, that the doors stood tall and strong, their brass handles large and fluted, but now came the pièce de résistance. In the rear of the building, away from the road, it looked when viewed from a distance as though the windows had been fitted with stained glass. Only on closer inspection did it become apparent that the starfish, whale, octopus and other sea-dwelling creatures had been lovingly painted by hand onto each of the separate panes.

Painted window in the House of Culture Russia. Death of the House of Culture.

The naïve artistry exhibited in this work, which, please do not misinterpret me, was priceless to behold, transcended into excellence in a full-scale bas relief that occupied an entire wall, and which had as its choice of composition emblematic motifs intended as celebrations of the concept of harmonic unity between the resources of the natural world and the ordained and natural order of traditional family life.

Within this tableaux of interdependence is the mother tending to her child and the fisherman at work. The sea, a mythical figure rising out of itself, is drawing a bow across a stringed instrument, thus invoking art and culture, and in the act of doing so completes an ideological circuit that has nature in its purest sense, proletariat toil, family and spiritual harmony symbiotically unified. The fisherman, not merely rewarded for his hard and honest graft but moreover for his familial devotion, trawls a net that is symbolically more than a commonplace tool of labour. It is integral and organic to the supportive world to which he is wed in his role as natural provider.

The artistic oeuvre almost reached its apotheosis in the bas relief of Poseidon, who, in spite of his fall from grace and imminent doom, winked wryly and philosophically like the silent sentinel he surely was.

Poseidon in Death of the House of Culture

As evocative as these compositions were, it was the ceiling in the auditorium that brought home the full extent of the impending tragedy about to unfold, namely that in a very short time from now more than sixty years of talent, inspiration and history would be lost to the world forever, would irreversibly cease to exist.

And embodied within that tragedy was the loss of the sea itself, since they, the architects of the House of Culture, had turned the ceiling into the sea.

Sea ceiling House of Culture Kaliningrad Region

In looking up to the ceiling, you looked as one would have looked, were it humanly possible, from the bottom of the ocean, gazing up from the briny depths below to the bright blue waves and foam above. The ceiling was a masterpiece, an indisputable triumph. Even without the presence of the other artistic accomplishments, all of which in their own right verged on cultural splendour, the ceiling alone possessed the power to transform this chunk of non-descript concrete into a monumental cathedral, a place to come and give heartfelt thanks to the life-sustaining godsend that was the sea, upon whose heavenly beneficence the small community, which the House of Culture had faithfully served, had depended for its livelihood for centuries.

In the 1960s, and for many years thereafter, the House of Culture had been a place where people came to give thanks for all that they had been given, for all that they had worked for and for the community in which they lived, and really, although it all devolved to the sea, or, to be more precise, to the sustenance that the sea provided, the House of Culture was, in the last analysis, according to Soviet thinking, a proletariat’s palace.

Nevertheless, for all its worth, its forsaken and forgotten grandeur and its build like a nuclear bunker, the Atlas excavator had made short work of bringing the House of Culture down and turning what once had been the heart and soul of the village into a sorry heap of shattered bricks, twisted metal and slabs of concrete.

As we sat in the garden sipping tea now in the late afternoon, another lorry went rumbling by, carrying away from the village not just a tangle of metal and masonry, chunks of concrete and shattered brickwork, but an irreplaceable, irretrievable piece of the village’s Soviet past.

R.I.P., and in affectionate memory, Zalivino House of Culture.

Zalivino links

Support the restoration of Zalivino Lighthouse
Zalivino Lighthouse flashes again after 36 years
Zalivino Lighthouse restoration reaches new heights

Why Happy New Year?

You said it last year, you’ll say it again … probably

31 December 2023 ~ Why Happy New Year?

Hardly a year goes by without somebody saying, and I believe that I have said it myself, “Thank God that 1987, 1999, 2020 (whatever the year) is over. It’s been an awful year for me. Let’s hope that the next one will be better.” So off we go to the New Year’s party, drink copiously, leap around, get wildly and uncontrollably drunk ~ don’t you! ~ pop the champagne corks, countdown the minutes to 12 and on the strike of midnight shout ‘Hooray and Happy New Year’. In short, we do everything we are supposed to do. We play it by tradition.

Come the next morning, nothing has changed. It’s just as grey, cold and wet outside as it was the day before. The holidays are over, and in a day’s time it will be back to the treadmill of work. The New Year stretches before us, not the Yellow Brick Road of the night before but a long, bumpy, uneven track seemingly heading nowhere. And to add to the disconsolation, there’s also the terrible hangover.

Nihilistic, is that what you say? Or perhaps, what a miserable bugger!

Why Happy New Year?

Let’s roll back the decades and take a look at the event-grabbing headlines that defined the ‘Happy New Years’ of those specific years.

Happy New Year: 2014
1. Global Bola epidemic
2. Malaysian airline disaster
3. Rise of the terror group ISIS
4. Black Riots in America

Happy New Year: 2002
1. Mount Nyiragongo erupts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
2. President George Bush delivers his ‘Axis of Evil’ speech
3. Two Snipers in Washington DC kill and injure people
4. Terrorists detonate bombs in two nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, killing more than 200 people

Happy New Year: 1992
1. Black riots in Los Angeles
2. Pro-abortion demonstrations in Washington
3. Major earthquake in Turkey
4. First McDonalds in China

Happy New Year: 1982
1. Argentina invades the Falkland Islands
2. Tylenol capsules impregnated with potassium cyanide kill 7 people in Chicago
3. Genetic Engineering is used commercially for the first time
4. IRA bombing campaign in London

Happy New Year: 1972
1. Watergate {death by boredom}
2. The Munich Olympics Massacre by Palestinian terrorists
3. Northern Ireland, the Bogside Massacre
4. Vietnam War drags on

Of course, newsworthy calamities such as those listed above pertain to world events. On the scale of our own lives, we have to back-peddle somewhat to bring together the recollections of all that was said and done over the months preceding the New Year bash.

Happy New Year from a rather strange potato

Now there’s an exercise for you. If you don’t keep a diary, and you jolly well should, grab a pen and a piece of paper and jot down a list of events and incidents that define in your opinion the past 12 months of your life. When done, back-track through the list and mark the incidents and events that gave and brought you happiness with a smiley-faced emoji and those that caused you harm or grief with, if you happen to have one handy, a two-fingered ‘V’ sign. Next, just tot them up and compare the ‘Happy’ to ‘F..K Off!’ score to determine what sort of year you have had and the quality of life you are having. At the end of this simple exercise, hopefully but most unlikely, you should be able to say, “What a stonking good year that was. If 2024 is anything like its predecessor, my life going forward is right on track”. Have you been able to say this? Welcome to the minority.

You could say, if you belonged to a certain generation, that ‘it’s being so cheerful that keeps me going’ and that’s why my New Year’s resolution for 2024 is going to be ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’. I’ll let you know how my new business venture, ‘Rent a Life & Soul of the Party’ is doing 12 months from now, if I’m still doing time here on Earth.

Meanwhile, enjoy yourselves, and I hope you’ll be able to say this time next year that 2024 was the best year of my life. (snigger).

Happy New Year!

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees

Kaliningrad a Green City

Should old acquaintance be forgot

Kaliningrad a Green City

Kaliningrad a Green City

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

More Bedford

Would you Adam and New Year’s Eve it!

Surviving New Year’s Eve

Surviving New Year’s Eve

Surviving New Year’s Eve

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.

Welcome Back President Trump

Change, Spare Change, All Change, Why Change?

Ping Pong You’re Not Wrong

White fight not far right

Spare some change, please!

Something for the weekend, sir?

Image attributions

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town

Booking.com ~ Is there anybody there?👻

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town

What goes up must come down, but it took 50 years to do so

Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

24 March 2024 National Day of Mourning

When it’s gone, it’s gone …

Death of the House of Culture

Zalivino links

You said it last year, you’ll say it again … probably

Why Happy New Year?

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland