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.
22 September 2024 ~ Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us
Have you ever noticed that when you go away for a few weeks, on your return not everything has changed, but some things have and subtly. For example, after my recent sojourn in the UK, I returned to Kaliningrad to find that the vacuum cleaner appliances had strangely disappeared, that someone had half-inched the mat from my office/study/drinking den, that the water jug had vanished, that a small table was where it wasn’t, and that the cat’s bowls had turned from plastic to ceramic. On a not so subtle and more depressing note, I learnt that the neighbour’s cat ~ I used to call her ‘Big Eyes’ ~ had scaled her last plank backwards. She used this technique to descend from a flat roof on the second storey of her owner’s house after her owners cut down the birch tree along whose branches she used to scramble.
Unlike our stay-at-home Ginger, she was an out-and-about sort of cat, a brave and intrepid adventurer, who, alas, was to put too much faith in the mythical tale that cats have nine lives and met with the truth abruptly whilst she was crossing the road.
The old philosophical question is there life after death is problematic enough without appending to that question are cats accorded a similar privilege?
“Of course, cat heaven exists,” cat lovers cry indignantly, but does it follow from this assumption that parity heavens exist for pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and every other animal species that are brought into this world merely to be slaughtered for the tastebud pleasures of carnivores?
Abstractions of this nature, though they may well have once occurred to me in some distant, cynical, cerebral past, found no room in my consciousness on returning to Kaliningrad, for soon I would be fretting about an entirely different dilemma ~ is there life after YouTube?
In the short while I had been away not only had my rug gone west but also YouTube with it, or to be more precise, had thereto been confined. “That’s buggered it,” I thought ~ I am prone to moments of eloquence like this ~ for though I could not give a monkey’s for the loss of Western mainstream media, where would I go with YouTube gone for my daily fix of music, for documentaries of an historical nature and for classic pre-woke TV dramas like 1960s’ Dangerman, filmed in glorious black and white when the use of the term black and white was not endowed with racial undertones and even if it had been nobody British at that time would have given a monkey’s f.ck. Ah, Happy Days indeed!
Sixty minutes searching Google for credible alternatives to the sort of content with which I engage on YouTube was enough to reassure me that whilst life without YouTube was not as we know it ~ YouTube is but one place in the internet’s vast and expanding universe but in itself it seems infinite ~ life without it was not unsupportable.
I found a site I had used in the past which offered a reasonably good selection of archived TV dramas and classic black and white films, and I also upturned a second site which, although containing the sort of stuff I would not touch with a barge polack ~ modern, glossy, tacky and geared to a left-leaning audience ~ tendered the consolation of half a dozen history programmes of a fairly reputable nature.
I was conscious that I was doing something that the so-called entitled millennials are only just coming to terms with in these rapidly changing times: I was having to ‘make do’. The derivation actually precedes the generation to which I belong. It has its origins in wartime slogans, and was born out of the real necessity of making the best of a bad situation, using whatever scant resources were at hand. Making do in the age of misinformation/disinformation, the cast offs and the hand me downs of second- and third-best websites represent a collateral revision of the quid pro quo arrangement of if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine, rehashed by modern politics as so long as you let me show you mine then I’ll let you show me yours.
I sometimes wonder if any of our contemporary politicians have bothered to read Gulliver’s Travels,written and published by Jonathan Swift in 1726, and if the answer is yes, did they find it illuminating. I for one believe that Swift’s seminal work should be made mandatory reading for anyone who is contemplating taking up a career in politics.
Ping Pong You’re Not Wrong
Ping pong, aka table tennis, is a game like many other games, such as cricket, rugby, tennis and football, I can honestly say I have never much cared for. I don’t care much for the tit for tat and the way in which the ball, be it big or small, gets passed back and forth with monotonous regularity between two opposing but rules-based players or carefully hand-picked teams, with no apparent benefit to anyone else outside of the game, give or take a cheer or two, which quickly fade in euphoria’s twilight.
Above: Ping and Pong. It’s batty.
At least in the UK when the sad illusion Democracy has been stripped down naked like the tired old whore she is, which many, out of trained submission or a sense of misplaced respect, shy away from doing, the rules of the game, whose they are and who it is that benefits from them are as transparent as a Nylon negligee (What happened to that in my absence?). Thanks to long experience of the electoral system’s hocus pocus, the who will it be first past the post, we know that whether we make our mark or not, we are guaranteed for the next five years to be saddled with one or the other bunch of ineffectual dunderheads and that, give or take a nuance or two, whichever party claims Number 10 as its prize will be singing, rather badly as usual, from the communal globalist hymn sheet: Money, Money, Money. Please to sing along now. You are all familiar with the refrain.
During my last assignment in the UK, I was treated to the spectacle of this perfectly meaningless political role play, the changing of the old guard ~ ping pong, ping pong … pong, pong, pong. Out with the old and in with the old: the Tories on their way out, Labour on their way in, but significantly rather more out than in and with many of them clearly quite out of it. Bring on the men in white coats. (Sorry I did not mention women; I’m taking a course in misogyny.)
This rotational, completely predictable, seesaw-moment momentum has less to do with change than it does with continuity, as most of the Tories’ acclaimed centre right are so way left of centre that they ought to be in the Labour Party, as many of them effectively are, whilst the Labour party itself knows no longer what it is, what it wants to be and least of all where it is going. Shame it is taking the nation with it. Half of Labour is hard left, half of it is half hearted and the other half is clearly insane (and clearly possess a triple ‘A’ in Maths). Neither Labour or the Cons ever recovered from Tony Blair. Both exhibit incurable symptoms, and the plague they exhale collusively is addling minds and destroying the country.
Nowhere is this emergency better illustrated than when the media cries exultantly that one or other of the old two parties has ‘won it by a landslide’.
The only landslide the public sense is that things are slipping away from them, that things are going from bad to worse. And yet as catastrophic as British life now is, many in the UK are yet to grasp the intelligence that by hook or by crook the old two parties need to be put out to grass. Change is as good as a rest, as they say, and a rest from them is badly needed and, more to the point, excessively overdue.
Above: I think it’s self-explanatory …
To be fair, if that is the same as being honest, Liebour did in its accession usher in some changes, albeit typically hurriedly, typically without much thought and typically in the process breaking most if not at all of its pre-election promises. But as the changes so far instituted are typically Labour in character, they have in the absolute sense changed very little at all. For example, if a Labour government did not raise taxes what a momentous change that would be. But then if Labour did not raise taxes would anybody know they were there?
Whoever it was who thought to dub Labour the party of taxation was a percipient man indeed, so much more than just perspicacious that the chances of him being a woman are nil (Excuse me for being sexist, you see I’m taking this course in misogyny.). But don’t you dare complain, not about being a man when you would rather you were a woman (it’s something you cannot change) and don’t complain about Labour’s tax hikes. You were warned that Liebour would tax you, and tax you into the ground, so why did you vote them in!
It is a fact of life that some things change and some things plainly don’t (Come on now transvestites, don’t get those knickers into a twist!); some things change a lot and others don’t change that much; some things get done for a change, and just for a change some things don’t; and there’s not a lot of change to be had out of six quid for a pint. But there are some things that will never change, though given time they probably will, but by the time they do will it be too late? Let’s talk immigration. Somebody ought to, has to, as it should be abundantly clear by now that that somebody is not Starmer.
Immigration is possibly the one issue that leading up to the General Election the Liebour party did not lie about; perhaps they simply forgot. Those of us who did not vote Labour were right, not far-right mind you, but right that we did not do so, if only for this reason, since with depressing predictability Labour has not done, and has no intention of ever doing, as much as diddly squit to resolve the immigration crisis, a dastardly weaponisation programme which represents the one real threat to the stability of the British nation and the safety of its indigenous people.
Where Labour has excelled itself is channelling more resources into the conflict in Ukraine at a time when we need to squander it least on globalist-led agendas. Do you ever ask yourself what it is that they do with your money which they take in the name of ‘council tax’? Could it be used to foot the bill for conflicts in which we have no legitimate role, even if we started them, and for paving the way for dinghy migrants to live it up in luxury?
Immigration has changed and also it has not. It has not changed in that we still have it, has not changed in that we don’t want it, but has changed inasmuch that want it or want it not, there is a lot more of it than there used to be. Central to this change is that the major EU powers no longer deem it necessary to conceal their complicit role in organising and facilitating the migrant invasion of Britain.
The infectiousness of this invasion is far more virulent and far more lethal than any contrived plandemic could be. Perhaps we should call on dear old Bill. Come on Bill, old boy, whip us up a jab or six to provide the British people with the immunity they so desperately need to protect themselves from Coronomigrant. Violent crime is rampant, acts of terrorism sweep the nation, the police are no longer a force but a branch of the social services and the government is so dismally limp it is crying out for a shot of moral Viagra.
White fight not far right
One thing that was markedly different during recent months in England, which was not necessarily good but understandably necessary as an alternative stay of civil war, was that when the riots came, as come they did and come they will, it was the whiteys on the war path. Now that did make a change!!!
It was no change at Notting Hill Carnival. Yet again it proved to be London’s annual ethnic stab fest. Any other event with a history resembling the mind of an on-the-rampage serial killer would have been banned years ago, as would the Notting Hill Carnival if it was anything other than black. It is patently inconceivable that a white British festival with a similar record of bloodlust would be allowed to continue year on year. Murder or no murder, it would have been denounced from the outset as unfit for ethnic consumption and that without equivocation would have rapidly been the end of that. This year’s Boot Hill incident cost two more people their lives, adding to the festival’s ever increasing death toll. Meanwhile, the Labour government is contemplating doubling down on the British tradition of fox hunting. It seems that rural blood sports must be banned whilst urban ones are tolerated, encouraged one might say. Brrr! it felt as if something just walked over the United Kingdom’s grave. Could that something be two-tier policing?
Over to our new prime minister. He may resemble a disciplinarian, a 1950s’ schoolmaster parachuted strategically in from a time when Britain was really Britain, but as far as ethnics are concerned looks can be deceiving. Did he give the carnival organisers the six of the best he gave the white rioters? Did he give them lines to write, “Thou shalt not stab at the Notting Hill Carnival”? Did he heck as like. He caned himself instead, by forgetting the lines of condemnation the public were waiting to hear from him, either that or the savage events and the fear of being called racist deprived him of his left-wing backbone and left him morally speechless. He eventually did cough something up, but before you could say one rule for them and a different rule for us, and before some impudent scallywag could raise the uncomfortable spectre of policing on a two-tier level, he was banging the same old distraction drum about the number one priority being the need to protect society from the heinous actions of right-wing thugs. As for random knife attacks by men whose names we can’t pronounce and acts of organised terrorism by medieval hostiles (I’ve just had a call from my stockbroker ~ invest in inflatable dinghies), the message from Britain’s political elite is as masters of the hen house they have every right to fill it with as many foreign foxes as the ECHR permits, so just sit back and enjoy your fate.
I began this post from the perspective of change and seem to have moved mesmerically into the realm where déjà vu governs the laws of momentum, and yet not everything in the world is as predictable as we would like to think. Those who live in a certain street in Kaliningrad thought they would never see the day when they would get themselves a brand-new pavement, but that day eventually dawned, despite one woman tutting, “It’s taken thirty years!” and now that vital change for which we had all been waiting seems as though it was always thus, that the pavement has always been there.
The same could be said of a certain sub-post office in a certain UK shire town. The post office seems to have been there for as long as memory itself, and mine is quite a long one, but it’s ‘all change’ when you scratch the surface. I am sure that this has got nothing to do with the fact it is run by Asians ~ which British post office isn’t! ~ but everything to do with the erratic hours it keeps. It is the first post office I have ever encountered that opens when it likes, making it an excellent venue whenever you catch it right, because since nobody trusts its opening hours very few people use it, hence the absence of queues. Not having to stand in line makes such a welcome change from a trip to your average post office, where you need to go armed with a sleeping bag and enough provisions to last you a fortnight, and yet it is such an odd phenomenon that it has you asking the question, could this peculiar post office that is more often shut than not, in fact be a front for something else? Like all these foreign food stores that pop up overnight and the multitude of barber’s shops purporting to be Turkish when the owners and all who work in them look and talk Albanian. Perhaps the owners of these businesses are engaged in some other activity, such as laundering, for example. There’s no hard left sign visible outside the coven of Hope Not Hate, but just because you cannot see the twin tubs does not mean that they are not there and the country is not being rinsed.
Whilst every street in every town and every city in England have fallen forfeit to immigration (you may have heard the phrase ‘Our cities have changed beyond recognition’), the streets of Russian Kaliningrad have decidedly changed for the better, that is to say materially and, with the restitution of law and order and regaining of self-respect, which had been partly laid to waste as a repercussion of perestroika, in matters of social decorum.
Whenever I walk the perimeters of Königsberg’s ancient ponds, this variance in urban life does not leap up and out at me like something dark on a no-go street in Peckham but is inviting enough to assail my senses with what we have lost in Britain. The contrast in the cultural climates is visible, audible, palpable, and it starts with the way in which people dress.
From New York to the South Pole, almost everybody these days is hardwired to dressing casual. I suspect that I am one of the few remaining sartorial standard bearers who espouses cravat, frock coat and top hat ~ not forgetting silver-topped cane ~ rather than wear a pair of trainers.
Above: “I don’t as a rule wear any, but I always make sure not to go out with, or in, a strong wind”
Kaliningradians and Kaliningrad visitors from other parts of Russia tend to follow a smart-casual trend. Whereas, as in every other sphere of cultural life, dress code in the UK has taken a turn for the worse and worst, going from ultra-smart to smart-casual, to trendy casual, to half casual, to dumb-down casual to bags of shit.
Who is not acquainted with that funny old Asian man? Let me point him out to you: that’s him there, there, there, over there and over here … See how he wears all sorts of oddments, everything thrown together: the workshop apron, pantaloon trousers, corny ill-fitting jacket bought from yonder charity shop and, of course, a pair of iridescent trainers ~ what lovely colour combinations, orange, yellow and purple. And he is indisputably the best dressed man in Bedford.
Now turn around and cast your gaze on those beautiful English ladies amorphously squashed in over-tight leggings, all bums and large tums, with cattle rings through their noses, shrapnel embedded in brows and lips and covered in head to foot with tats. Isn’t their language colourful: f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. And what is that pervasive smell, no not that smell, this smell! Pooh! It is the town centre gently marinating in the stench of stale and smoking Ganja. Look up, it’s a live one, and he’s heading in our direction! Time to take evasive action! Cross to the opposite side of the street and quick!
The fundamental difference between Britain’s streets and the streets of Kaliningrad is not confined to sartorial consciousness: manners maketh man (they seem not to maketh UK women). Public behaviour on Kaliningrad’s streets, give or take the inevitable exception, is generally better than it is England. And, with the Russian accent on family values, traditional family groups of traditional Russian heritage freely and with confidence enjoy the streets of their city. Contrast homely scenes like this with the kind of groups you can expect to find, and more’s the pity do, hanging around in England’s cities and degrading its small-town centres.
Lefties would have us believe that the gangs of blacks and Asians, and the johnny-come-lately tribes flooding in on the promise tide of benefits, rights and endless freebies from far-flung parts of the world’s subcontinent are an enriching sight for monocultural eyes. But such postulations are unconvincing even through their glasses. Excelling the attitude and behavioural problems evinced by their white ne’er-do-well counterparts, a pervasive air of ‘up to no good’ hangs above the Ganja cloud and fills the vacuum on Britain’s streets left by the absence of coppers with an ‘at any moment it could all kick off’ incertitude. Menace and apprehension rule. Britain’s streets are not just uncouth, they are gravely infected with passive aggression.
Yes, things have certainly changed from the Britain I once knew and loved. I wonder what the Victorians and Edwardians would make of it. I wonder what those who fought for their country and died in two world wars would make of it. What would Sir Winston Churchill say? We know what Enoch Powell would say, since he said it back in the 1960s. Lord, if only someone had listened to him!
Spare some change, please!
I read somewhere (please tell me that this is not true) that housebreakers in the UK do not qualify for prison sentences until they have been convicted of 26 successive accounts of burglary. It is an indisputable fact that you have got more chance of winning the lottery or stopping the boats at Dover than getting arrested for shoplifting. It’s take your pick skanky ladies and nothing resembling gentlemen, you’ve really nothing to lose. In the unlikely event you get caught in the act, just give the merchandise back and have it away from the shop next door. Nice one, mate: Ha! Ha! Ha! Easy-touch-Britain, innit!
I have no idea if shoplifting is as prevalent in Kaliningrad as it is in every British town and city. I somehow feel it is not. But I do know, as I have witnessed it personally, that Kaliningrad has a boy-racer problem and that those that race are not all boys. Thankfully, however, one of the more applaudable changes has been the city-wide installation of efficacious pedestrian crossings. Gone are the days when we used to huddle in groups of five or more on the opposite sides of the four-lane roads and then, on the count of 10, make a nervous dash for it. Oh, how the drama of youth gives way to prudence in later life!
If someone was to ask me, and I don’t suppose they will, what is the one thing you would like to see changed in Kaliningrad, the answer without a second thought would be the introduction of a law to stamp out dugs that bark incessantly or, better still, to penalise their owners. These must-be mutton-jeff mut-lovers can never have heard of noise pollution, possibly because like the rest of us, they can hear precious little above the row that their barking dugs are making. It’s a dugs life, as someone said, someone who couldn’t spell dogs correctly.
Since the subject of this post is change, I expect that you expect that at some point in the narrative, at this point, for example, the temptation to make some corny remark about change in relation to underpants would finally prove too much for me, but I hate to disappoint you that I am about to disappoint you, because someone might pull them up on me, I mean pull me up on it, and I do not intend to stoop so low, so let’s instead be briefs.
Ringing the changes is happening in a negative way on the Polish border. Always slow and unhelpful, the Polish border authorities are excelling their own track record for putting obstacles in one’s way where none should be encountered, thus holding up one’s journey as though suspending it in empty space by a very strong pair of invisible braces (we’re suspiciously close to pants again!). The object of the exercise appears to be none other than to subject the weary traveller to the torment of terminal boredom or failing in that ambition to simply delay one long enough to make one miss one’s flight. If you have been an unhappy recipient of this apparent change in policy and believe you are being short-changed by conditions of an adverse nature at the Russian-Polish border, here is where you can lodge your complaint:
I was going to finish this post on change by saying something profound, like ‘things change and that’s a fact, and very often not for the better’. And then it suddenly occurred to me that women in leopard print tights rarely change their spots. So, then I revised my ending to read, ‘if it don’t change it will stay the same’, but whilst I know it will not change anything, I went and changed my mind.
Beggar: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/homeless-man-sitting-ground-flat-vector-illustration-desperate-hungry-poor-male-person-sitting-street-near-trash-bin-asking-help-getting-into-financial-trouble-poverty-concept_24644540.htm#query=street%20beggar&position=0&from_view=keyword&track=ais_hybrid&uuid=af6b8f40-80ae-4929-ae9a-94b805e40e71″>Image by pch.vector</a> on Freepik
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.
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.
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 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.
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 13th 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Happy New Year UK! It’s at the end of that rainbow!
30 November 2023 ~ Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
The last man to leave the sinking ship; the last man to go to the Isle of Man before they change the name to the Isle of Person; the last man to be the fourth man, as you know there was a third; the last man out at the wickets; the last man to be allowed to be called a man; the last man to play the white man; the last man behind the penultimate man; the last man ~ real man~ to win the lottery; the last man on Earth; the last man in Islington (even more rare than the last man on Earth) ~ you probably wanted to be, if not all of these, at least one of them, in the same way that I had led myself to believe that I was and would be the last man without a mobile phone. I didn’t plan things to be that way, neither did I design my phoneless status, as rumour has it, according to some highfalutin principal. It just happened. I never had a mobile phone, because I never had a mobile phone.
As with being a vegetarian (I became one of those in the 1970s.), I discovered, and I must confess with some delight, that not possessing a mobile phone became other people’s problem not mine, but when those around me who were most effected by my not possessing a mobile phone began to turn up the morality and invoke the strains of guilt, viz that my not having a mobile phone did not prevent me from using theirs, I had to agree, they did have a point.
There cannot be many of us who do not realise that the mobile phone (and I use this term generically to also include the smartphone) is, as with every other technological communication system, a tool for mass surveillance. Whenever you use a smartphone, they know where you are, what you are doing, what you are saying, and, once they have compiled that electronic dossier on you, you can bet your life they presume to know what is on your mind, even how it works, if indeed, it does work after you have enlisted yourself into the ranks of the twiddling masses. So, there it is, the smartphone, but for whom is the smartphone smart? ‘The Spy in Your Pocket’ my brother calls it.
Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
Mass surveillance is the price we pay for our addiction to technology. Some of us rail against it; some of us accept it; most of us ignore it. I, personally, am not so much bothered about Big Brother as ending my life as the Lone Ranger to become one of the twiddling cattle-driven.
Not having a smartarsephone is a little like not being saddled with children. Without both, you can sit back at comfort’s distance and watch with a heartfelt sigh of relief as it passes you by. But as Nature and habitualisation dupes us into doing things that others think we ought to do, so William Gates and his band of silicons coerce and cajole us, hunt us out, hound us down and round us up until, with no place left to hide, the last stop is the twiddler zone. Remember, just because your paranoid does not mean that they’re not out to get you!
Whilst having children is not so much of a stigma as a life sentence, having a mobile phone is incalculably stigmatic. As soon as you pull out that phone and twiddle, an arrow seems to flash out of the ether, pointing the caption at you, “One of the brainwashed masses!” Tell me, in some American states is it still a felony not to guzzle alcohol inside of a brown paper bag? Taking this as my cue, I was thinking of disguising my phone as a sandwich or rubber duck, but that would never do, because twiddlers who twiddle their lives away do so as if by self-enslavement, they are wearing a badge of honour. All for one and look like all! WTF! (The World Twiddling Forum).
It astonishes me how inveterate twiddlers, who twiddle whilst they walk, do not meet with a horrible accident. An acquaintance of mine, an elderly gentleman, has seen fit to turn this banal practice into a source of entertainment.
Whenever a pedestrianised twiddler is heading in his direction deaf and blind to all around them, he takes up position on the pavement, having first worked out their approximate trajectory, and stands there whilst they collide with him. Judging by the average response, it would seem that even the demigod smartphone, with all its apps, bells and whistles, is powerless to resist when it comes to timely embarrassment.
My personal favourites of the twiddling fraternity are pub twiddling couples. I have seen couples come into pubs twiddling, buy drinks whilst twiddling and then spend the entire evening sitting next to each other, never saying a word, just twiddling. Are they beyond repair, or do they actually ‘talk to each other’, for example on the WhatsArse messaging system?
“What an interesting evening, darling. Time to twiddle back home.”
You’ve probably guessed by now where all this is leading. Correct, no matter how much I might rail against it, and in the process vainly hope that somehow, somewhere along the way, I will exonerate myself, the indisputable fact remains that crumpling under umpteen pressures, I eventually succumbed. Yes, I went out and bought a twiddler (‘Arrrggghhh!’)
So, whatever could have gone wrong to have brought about this extraordinary U-turn?
For all its social and psychological evils, whilst it irrefutably is an implement for mass surveillance, the smartphone also doubles as a cloak of invisibility.
Before the smartphone and its mass uptake, going to the pub on one’s tod was a peculiar exercise in self-consciousness. If you hadn’t got a newspaper to hide behind, and even if you had you might end up reading it cover to cover, upside down and back to front, all you could do was to stare into space. Thankfully, the days have gone, except in some up-North benefit-class clubs, previously ‘working man’s’, when a knuckle-dragging neanderthal clocking how you were sitting there with seemingly nothing better to do than letch would adopt a confrontational tone: “Are you looking at my girlfriend?” which obviously you were, or, if he hadn’t got a girlfriend, which usually he hadn’t because he was far too stupid to have such a thing: “Are you looking at me mate?” The temptation to reply, “Given any number of variables, I would rather look at a piece of s_ _t!” was often too hard to resist, even though as a means of closure, it often ended in fisticuffs and sometimes a trip to the local nick.
Today, pubs, in the main, are much more civilised. Possibly because they are more food, and therefore family, orientated, and also because some of the ‘men’ who frequent them would be positively miffed if they didn’t catch you looking at them. You can usually tell who these men are. You’ve seen them on the adverts. They’re always winning the lottery.
How many men have stopped doing the lottery since adverts like that appeared is a question for another day. It does not alter the fact that sat there in the boozer looking like Billy No Mates, constantly checking your watch, as if someone you had arranged to meet is late, or coddling the delusion that after you have finished that long, that slow, that lonely pint you are going on somewhere else, are no longer ruses you have to resort to in an age where everyone looks and acts as if they are everyone else.
Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
As long as you are a paid-up member of the Zombified Smartphone Club, nobody is going to bother you, nobody is going to question you. With that little (not so little and also rather heavy) rectangular glass-front phone, a voyeur’s window on the world, not so different from Pandora’s Box, flings itself open to you. You can kerb-crawl the net at will, take as many selfies as you like ~ hundreds if it floats your boat ~ before seizing on that magic one that looks not remotely like you. As long as it hides those sags and wrinkles and makes you believe you look 20 years younger (Likes and Followers! Likes and Followers!), you’ll kiss the ass of your mobile phone until all the old cows come home. Ahh, shrine to delusion, vanity, narcissism, thy name is social media!
I instinctively knew that to take a selfie of myself was something I should avoid. And was I ever right. But for the sake of historical record, I took that selfie. Good heavens, I thought, when I looked at my selfie, what on earth do I think I’m doing wearing the nose of Charles de Gaulle?
This first sorte into the realm of selfie-taking taught me in no uncertain terms that there is obviously more than meets the eye (and nose) when it comes to taking fawning photos for mass consumption on Facebook, especially abracadabra ones that transform you from what you really are into the oil painting you never can be. Indeed, every photo on Facebook is intrinsically an art form, art meaning ‘artificial’, and not everyone can master it. The trick (and what a trick!) is to make your faithful believe that the life your photos say you are living is primarily better than theirs and certainly better than yours.
Look out! Selfie in Victory Square!
My next trick was to put the smartfun away, cease repeating “He nose you know!” and shoot off on my solo run into Kaliningrad’s city centre, where, it embarrasses me to confess, that in front of the monument in Victory Square the compulsion took me again. I had to try for another selfie! (You can see the way it goes, can’t you?)
This time I would bring into play the much loved sucked-in cheeks and ubiquitous silly pout. At the very last minute, however, drawn in cheeks were dropped (they tend to do that, don’t they?), as I had noted in my dotage that my impression of Peter Cushing was already quite advanced and that to remodel my cheeks into two squeezed lemons might prove a bridge too far. If only I’d have stuck in my youth to murdering animals and eating them, by now my cheeks would be lovely and round like two plump rolls of prime pink brisket!
Even though my lips had not been enhanced, pumped up so that they looked like slugs, and I had no Frankenstein’s bolt through my snout, which given its size on my debut selfie could easily have accommodated any number of scrapyard pieces, this was destined to be my first (and also my last, I might add) outdoor-taken selfie. All that I succeeded in doing by pouting my lips like a retard was to convey the regrettable impression that although I was out on the town tonight my false teeth had not come with me. They were probably still in the gherkin jar into which they had landed when I let out that sneeze.
“Well, bugger that!” I said to myself, and shoved my Toosmart phone deep within my inside pocket, and I did not take it out again until I was standing outside the bar to which my feet had been programmed to take me. (Blame it all on the technocrats!)
Here are some facts for you. There are two bar/restaurants in the centre of Kaliningrad which are joined at the hip: one is Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka. The only pubs in the UK I know which had a similar arrangement, occurred in London’s Greenwich. They were the Richard I and The Greenwich Union (since vandalised by Young’s Brewery, which, with typical corporate disregard for social history and heritage, knocked them into one).
How embarrassing it was that on one occasion when a group of us had gone to the Richard I, I somehow ended up halfway through the evening accidentally in The Greenwich Union. I had stepped outside the front of the Richard for a quick puff (that’s right, I said ‘puff’!) on my King Edward cigar and when I went to return inside unknowingly entered The Union. Thinking I was in the Richard and that my friends were playing a silly joke, ie they had gone into hiding somewhere, I took the pint I had freshly ordered and went and sat in the beer garden to ponder on what I should do. It was only when I heard my friends chatting away behind the fence in the Richard garden next door that I realised my folly: it wasn’t my friends who had played a joke; it was beer and navigation!
“Well, that’s nothing to be proud of. Is it!” Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one.
Out of the two Kaliningrad bars mentioned, my first bar tonight would be the Bavarian one, an establishment where, if you are lucky, you get to sit down the centre of the room inside a make-believe beer barrel. Unfortunately, my luck was out this evening ~ it had probably gone to Maxims ~ and I was shown to a line of seats and tables that ran along the perimeter of the room. Good! A young couple sitting together at right angles to my table would provide the perfect opportunity for testing the cloaking function of that recently purchased gadget that was jumping out of my pocket.
A businessman, to the left of me, who had obviously not just bought his phone, was so absolutely invisible to everyone in his orbit, with the exception of himself, that had his skills at twiddling not been so well endowed (which seemed to beg the question, was he born with his smartarse in his hand?), I would never have thought to notice him.
He was a pro, I was a novice, and I have to say it showed. My first message on WhatsArse was an all fingers and thumbs job. It took me 20 minutes to compose a reasonably legible paragraph which, had I been working on a laptop, would have taken perhaps a minute or less. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns, and over the next 40 minutes, managed to shoot three messages into and across cyberspace complete with photos attached. During those 40 minutes, the young couple facing my profile (and thinking “It’s Peter Cushing!”), and whatever it was the man was doing down the other end of the room with his Bavarian sausage, were so plainly indistinct as to issue the suspicion that I had come as close to vanished as Davos had to resetting the world. Had I been any more gone, I would have been shaking hands with H.G. Wells!
Next door, in the Czech bar, I was again unlucky. The best seats had been taken, and I ended up perched upon a sponge-filled leather-look bench, which was, I suppose, alrightish, except that being so high off the ground it left one’s little legs dangling with nothing to rest one’s feet on, rather like sitting in the barber’s chair when you were six-years old. How fortuitous and kind of fate that she had arranged a stool in front of me so that I could use its stretcher as a foot rest.
In this bar, I tried out my phone with an email or two. Fine, although when it came to attaching images, the process became a tad mysterious. Exit quickly and onto Google. I had never opened websites using a smartarsephone before, and now that I have, I cannot say that I found the experience particularly positive: yards and yards of constant scrolling. It’s like an electronic version of bog roll. But twiddling and swiping go hand in glove, and for me, the man with the reputation for being the Last Man on Earth to Own a Smartphone, the gauntlet had been thrown.
In the bar up in the clouds (the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery) overlooking the spot where I shouldn’t have taken my second selfie, and now on my third beer, not only had I become more confident in my twiddling and more comfortable with my twiddler, but my Russian language had improved no end. Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo (“Good Moaning”) may well have had good reason to feel proud of me, but could his approval be half as rewarding as thinking you’re getting it right, whilst most likely you are not, or rather not quite, but not knowing nor either caring because sitting snuggly in your pocket, if you haven’t already lost it, is your little spy and pie in the sky, your customised, very own smartphone ~ ahhhh.
By the end of the evening I was able to say two things. No, I had not drunk so much that I could only say two things, I mean two things pertinent to my smartphone experience. The first was something I had always suspected: Never take a selfie and, if you have to think again, never take a selfie. The second was that my expectations of the smartphone as an instrument of lonely-guy concealment when sitting alone in a bar or pub was vindicated. And yet, the keeping-tracks-on-you downside that inevitably comes with owning a smartphone, unless you keep it switched off, continues not to sit easily with me.
In more recent years, I have heard people say that the Silicon Valley Mob have turned up the heat in their racket to enslave people and to extort as much personal information about everyone on Earth as completely as they can. Like the Capone organisation, which, after Al’s demise, moved with the help of Sam Giancana into the labour rackets, the Silicon Outfit found a new racket in 2-step verification.
Conspiracy theory or not, with the roll-out of 2-step verification for online banking, as a sign-in function for websites and blogs and as the only option for identifying yourself on ecommerce sites, such as eBay for example, the message is loud and clear, either get a smartphone or else be bolloxed.
The one-step further exploitation than 2-step verification is fingerprint and/or eye recognition. Now it’s getting personal. Where will it all end? The clue may lie in the word ‘end’. In other words and words more plain, is Anus Authentication already passing from science fiction into the realms of science fact? It is too much of a coincidence that AI (Anal Intelligence) is the state of the art abbreviation on the tongue of every news editor. AI is everywhere, so there must be something in it, as I’m sure there must be someone out there, in a small secluded brick-looking building in Silicon Valley’s back yard, who is poised with the paperwork in his hand for the biggest breakthrough yet. Zappa may have the answer …
Image attributions
Man with phone on couch: Image by <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/character-playing-videogame_7734013.htm#query=clipart%20sitting%20using%20a%20smartphone&position=17&from_view=search&track=ais&uuid=00c57546-c79e-4db8-a98c-c064c40ce15e”>Freepik</a>
12 October 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Toilet Door is a thing of Beauty
Has it ever crossed your mind that one day you might be famous and, if so, in what capacity? Many dream of fame when they are young at a time when the reason is unimportant. This is one of youth’s luxuries: the dream of fame for fame itself.
But fame can strike at any time, when you least expect it, in the most unexpected way and for the most unexpected reasons. Take me [Frank Zappa: “Take me, I’m yours …”], for example, how could I have possibly predicted twenty years ago, when I was 14🙂, that fate would have me knock on the door of fame, or would have had me knock on the door of fame had there been a door to knock on.
When I was young, I staked my claim to fame, or so I would have them believe, on the publication of my first toilet wall. What an imagination! Yet even I, as fanciful as I was, could never have envisioned that it was not a wall but a toilet door that one day would consign me to the annals of posterity.
I can hear you asking, although you are rather faint, how such an extraordinary set of circumstances ever came to be and, considering its phenomenal nature, have I thought of contacting TheGuinness Book of Records? Answer, in reverse order, I shall wait for them to contact me, but, whilst we wait in suspense together, the very least I can do is let you in on the noble act to which my fame is owed.
Kaliningrad Toilet Door
Not so long ago, the president of the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club acquired a property which the club could use as a base for its activities and as a classic car museum. An historically interesting building, which, in the days of German Königsberg, had been used as an aircraft parts repository for Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, it was otherwise perfect in every sense for what the club required, except in one respect ~ an important one, I thought. For this public venue where people would meet, attend lectures, be taken on tours and, if they so desired, could hire for private parties was lacking in one essential ~ it had no toilet door!
It is monumentally inconceivable that during the Third Reich’s reign the bog in the Luftwaffe building would have been doorless. I have it from a reliable source, a man who’s devoted his life to toilets ~ he majored in them at Cambridge ~ that, to quote his words verbatim, “They made very good doors those Germans did, and very good toilet doors!” We are left to conclude, therefore, that in the days when defeat was imminent, as well as destroying their vital papers, either the Germans destroyed the toilet door or hid it where no one could find it. We cannot put it past them. It is a typical Gerry trick, I’d say; the sort of thing they went round doing just to be awkward and spiteful.
However, to give credit where credit is due, the fact that the door was missing had not escaped the notice of the club. And it was patently clear to everyone that something had to be done about it, not the absence of German decorum but the absent toilet door. Then came the question, what exactly?
In the Club
As with all complex organisations presided over by reams of committees, reliant on detailed reports from antithetical think tanks and subject to the dislocation of interdepartmental interests, the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club faced a difficult dilemma. The knock-on effect, or no knock-on effect, as there was nothing to rap one’s knuckles on, of having no door to your toilet became one of those gritty [spelling correct] seemingly endless issues, destined to be shuffled about from one desk to another, until at last worn down and out by the suspenseful acrobatics of over-careful toilet timing, it fell on me, to coin a phrase, to roll out an initiative. “Why don’t I buy a door,” I said, “and have someone fill the hole with it!” The motion was passed unanimously.
Job done, you think. I can tell you that it wasn’t. Where would we find that fix-it person now Jim was no longer with us. He fixed a lot of things did Jim, including over-generous posthumous payouts for a herd of out-of-the-woodwork women now minted in their retirement years.
When, at last, we did find someone ~ and, of course, at last we did ~ it felt like every toilet trouble wherever it was in the world was nought but a poof in the wind. The handyman he fitted the door quicker than Brand got fitted up ~ he certainly knew his angles from his elbows ~ and before you could say ‘engaged’ or ‘vacant’ or ‘here’s another perfect example of a bum-wrap by the leftist state’, the club was no longer one door short of a toilet.
Some of you may feel that the saga of our toilet door was all a storm in a Portacabin, whilst the rather less polite amongst you might think it a load of c..p! And I am willing to concede that some of the visitors to the club may miss the thrill of sitting there whilst a friend or colleague stands guard for them, but I have to say from my point of view, it all looked rather cheeky. Bringing a bottle to an event is something not unheard of, but come on, really, deary, deary me, bring your own toilet door!
As the intelligence of my philanthropy leaked out far and wide, eventually reaching St Petersburg, my friend and colleague, Yury Grosmani, writer, author, journalist and latterly film producer, flushed with excitement at the news, immediately reached for his keyboard and wrote this moving tribute to me, which he posted on VK:
Вообще, музей без туалета, а равно как и музей с туалетом, но без двери, заведение абсолютно бесперспективное. Очень приятно, что известный журналист, писатель, а теперь мы уже знаем, что и киноактер, Мик Харт, выступил спонсором такого важного, нужного и благородного дела. Теперь музей АвтоРетроКлуба имеет на одно преимущество больше, чем самые известеые музеи мира. Например, на дверях туалета Британского музея такой таблички нет. Лично подтверждаю! А у нас она есть! Передаю слова огромной благодарности моему другу и коллеге МИКУ ХАРТУ 🇬🇧🇷🇺👍
And now in English:
“ [computer translation] In general, a museum without a toilet, as well as a museum with a toilet, but without a door, is an absolutely hopeless establishment. I am very pleased that the famous journalist, writer, and now we already know that film actor, Mick Hart, sponsored for such an important, necessary and noble cause. Now the AutoRetroClub Museum has one more advantage compared to the most famous museums in the world. For example, there is no such sign on the toilet doors of the British Museum. I personally confirm! And we do have it! I convey my deep gratitude to my friend and colleague MICK HART 🇬🇧🇷🇺👍
Whether I fully deserve this accolade, I will leave that up to you decide. As for the British Museum’s pitifully Mick Hart plaqueless status, there may be some truth in this; I can neither confirm nor deny. But should that august establishment ever find itself taken short by the urgent need to have one, then I’m the man for their big job.
For my own part, now that the door is up and the paperwork is done, I am happy to rest on my laurels, content in the certain knowledge that although my simple toilet door has not converted this lowly loo into anything close to a cistern chapel, it fulfils the function, as nature intended, to stop the things that shouldn’t come out from coming out of the closet. Small things in life, perhaps, but if by my private motion I have achieved some good in the public realm and in the process of doing so prevented the club’s reputation from hitting the skids big time and going down the pan, then per angusta ad augusta. It is just something we often say (as well as going ‘ahhh’) in the world of toilet-door sponsorship!
Note: The door sponsored by Mick Hart is available for viewing, and not least using, at the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club Museum. To avoid disappointment, advanced booking is advisable.
23 September 2023 ~ Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine
Whilst London’s Notting Hill Carnival, which should have been banned years ago, was erupting into its usual frenzy of violence, with, as the Daily Mail* depicted, odious-looking behoodied things running amuck in the streets brandishing knives and machetes, we, I am happy to say, were over the hills and far away, somewhere on the brighter side of proper English culture.
Resisting the temptation to allow ourselves to be dragged down by the Daily Mail’s depressing but not delusional strapline, ‘ … Britain Now Feels Like a Third World Country*’, but pondering on what Plod will do in the unlikely event they apprehend the Notting Hill Carnival misfits (‘Come on now, don’t be naughty. How about a cup of tea. Let’s sit and discuss your problem.’), we escaped the gruesome subspace that London has become by joining a lot of nice English people at one of the county’s late ‘summer shows’.
Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine
You may recall in a previous post on ‘summer shows’ that I happened to remark upon the tragic disappearance of the greatest big band leader the world has ever known, Glenn Miller. In this post I postulated that at the time of his disappearance he may have had in his pocket a list of English garden fetes to which he was rather partial. It cannot be confirmed, but neither can it be dismissed.
The whereabouts of such a list, if indeed there ever was one, deserves a trial by academia. I am assured by its ambiguity that for someone craving a PhD it would give them something to waffle about for the three small years it takes to secure a job for life within the ivory-tower equivalent of an overpaid Alice’s Wonderland.
As for us real folks, who have ‘to move those microwave ovens … got to shift those colour TVs’, the historical mishap that was Glenn Miller’s fate and the mishap of the present, as signified by the mud-hut happenings in Britain’s capital city, which will themselves one day be judged by history, if today’s generation can get off their phones long enough to realise what the establishment has in store for them (I hear the sound of sheep!) were insufficient reasons not to struggle into the Aston ~ jumping in and out of it is not as feasible as once it was when we were twenty years younger ~ and go tootling classically off to yet another local village fete, which prefers, by academic licence, to rebrand itself as a ‘summer show’.
As we were pulling out of the gate on the spoked wheels of the Aston, our senses were regaled with the inspirational sight of a lady with whom we are acquainted (She works behind the bar (but only on Mondays and Wednesdays) of a pub we know and to which we go.). She was trumping past on a vintage tractor, with a cute little trailer in tow. She was, and in this we were not mistaken, off to the same show as us.
It is hardly surprising that here in the sticks, agricultural relics command the same respect and attention as vintage and classic cars. True village folk, as distinct from Johnny-come-latelys, have all had a taste of agriculture sometime in their lives, and these days even women, when not playing at football, are trying their hand at driving tractors. And some, it must be said, appear more suited to this task than butching it up on a football pitch. Just remember not to get too close when you are behind them and, when they are coming directly towards you, always give them a very wide berth.
The last of the summer wine
One of the lasting joys of my personal summer, this summer, give or take local garden fetes and the odd summer show or two, is the privilege it bestowed upon me to witness from my bedroom window the impressive extent and degree to which British agriculture has progressed.
It is years since I participated in the yearly rural ritual of ‘bringing in the sheathes’, and, needless to say, things have moved on. The good old days, so called, characterised by pitchforks, sore, blistered, split and chafed hands, jumpers out at elbow and trousers out at arse, tied at the waist with bailer twine, have gone to be replaced by farm machinery the likes of which is so fantastic that my generation could never imagine it outside of the realms of science fiction.
Young farm operatives now drive these fabulous machines, not crusty, gnarled old farm-hands. They cruise around in comparative luxury ~ fitted cabs, music systems, heaters for the winter, air conditioning in summer and everything satellite navigated. Sporting the latest haircuts, trendy country-wear jerkins and smart regulation high-vis jackets, the young who work on Britain’s farms often look better turned out than the lords and masters for whom they work. “Where will it all end?!” I ask. It’s new, but it’s not Notting Hill!
The farm machinery of today, the combine harvesters and the tractors, are vastly larger than they used to be and so much smoother in their operation ~ their engines no longer ‘chug’, they glide. They are also more sophisticated, even excessively comfortable; capable of getting things done in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to do them using our often second-hand, tired, worn out, prone to breakdown, cronky and battered old kit.
Good examples of how much things have changed is the paper sack stuffed with straw, which we used to cushion the bumpy ride and to prevent our arses from icing up on the notorious raw metal tractor seats, and how through the winter months we went, chugging and bouncing across the plough, in gloves, jumpers, jackets, top coats and with balaclavas wrapped round our heads. Men were men in those days and boys expected to do a man’s work, often without so much as a thank you let alone a proper wage and, if you were really unlucky, as frequently we were, a boot up the arse for your troubles. It was angry farmers who ruled the earth then; ‘uman rights and children’s rights and the global-warming industry were just a twinkle in the collective eye of your preposterous liberal-lefty.
A better example of ‘how things have changed’, that is to say a less emotive one, is captured in a photograph, taken from my bedroom window, which juxtaposes yesteryear’s farm implements with their plush and powerful modern counterparts.
At today’s garden fete, sorry, I meant to say summer show, I would be given the chance to see tractors pre-dating my farming years as well as those that were contemporary to the time I spent on the farm. In other words, I would be looking back in awe, and not with a little disbelief, at tractors old and classic which, only the blink of an eye ago, were objects to be marvelled at in spite of their myriad defects. To us they were acceptable; we didn’t know anything else.
Fortunately, time softens sensibility and mellows troublesome memories, turning what was once a bitch to work with into something we never imagined it could be, an icon of nostalgia, deserving of affection bordering almost on abject reverence.
To one side of these veterans of the land, these old tractors which were lined up on the field like so many members of the Home Guard, stood something cute and dinky. We had met its owner the night before in the local village pub, who, in response to my revelation that I had in my youth one just like his, corrected me forthwith, saying whilst it was certainly true that Dinky had made a road-roller, the toy was not the full-sized model parked outside the front of the pub. His was a mark ‘blah blah’ with an ‘oops, ay now and what-do-you-call-it?’ and what is more with an engine capacity that was ‘fart de-lah-de-lah-lah-lah!) … The trouble with vintage vehicle owners is they really know their stuff.
It was a similar situation when I accosted the owner of a Ford Zodiac Mark IV. He had no difficulty rattling off the engine capacity and build, top speed, fuel consumption and a whole lot of other technical and historical stuff, including, I was amazed to learn, that the reason, as I had stated, ‘you don’t see many of these’ was that in spite of the hundreds of thousands of Mark IV Zodiacs produced less than 300 have survived!
My uncle ~ let’s call him ‘L’ ~ owned a Mark IV Zodiac back in the 1970s. When I expressed an interest in it, he told me he bought it because (a) it holds a lot of ‘stuff’ and (b) it can accelerate faster from a standing start than the average police car.
At his funeral a few years ago, I was walking with my mother behind my uncle’s coffin as the pallbearers bore it from church to cemetery when suddenly, from around the corner, a police car hoved into view.
Casting a wry glance at the car, I heard my mother whisper, “I’m afraid you’re just too late”.
Dean Show 2023 ~ Fast Cars
The Ford Zodiac Mark IV was not the only now classic car that could outrun Britain’s rozzers. During the 1960s, the villains’ vehicle of choice was more often than not the Jag. Not only were Jags fast, they were also incredibly flash, seeming to possess for the raffish and the rakish just the right combination of tasteful class, wheel appeal and polished disreputable charm.
A Jag Mark II was with us at the show today, as was one of the 1960s’ most iconic vehicles, the unmistakeable E-type Jag, a masterpiece of curvaceous chic, both the hardtop and convertible versions. Also on display was a 1970’s Mustang, a Citroen from the 1930s’, a lovely coach-built red Rolls Royce and umpteen variations on the nippy sports car models which, individually and collectively, left an irrepressibly glamorous signature on the 1960s and 1970s.
So, where and how did it all go wrong? Whatever happened to classic car design, with its emphasis on strikingly different, instantly recognisable and once seen never forgotten? Whatever happened to walnut dashboards, numerous dials, must-click switches, leather seats and glittering chrome. Wherever the good times went, the good cars must have gone with them.
It was all too much. We decided to explore the stalls, were disappointed when we could not find one catering in old-fashioned junk and swung away in protest for my brother to try his luck on the tombola. (Who on earth is Tom Bola?)
At a previous event, which had been called a garden fete, not show, my brother had had the good fortune to win a bottle of wine on the tombola and a bottle of brandy in rapid succession. Would his luck hold out today? Did it heck as like!
“I said it would be a tin of beans, and it was!” he matter-of-facted. But the little spin of clairvoyancy in which he had couched his statement did nothing to hide his deep disappointment. It isn’t winning, it’s playing the game that counts. What a load of old nonsense!
What you lose on the tombola, you might win on the circus skills, and in this respect my brother fared better, I must say remarkably better, in tightrope walking and juggling. Not that this came as a great surprise. There are those who would say that he has walked a tightrope and juggled his way through life. But today it was for real. Admittedly, the tightrope was only two feet off the ground, and he was juggling bean bags not clubs, but I’ve got to hand it to him, I did not need to hand it to him: he succeeded in both endeavours.
One of the supreme joys of attending English garden fetes, and shows, is not the inevitable dog exhibition. To like dug shows, you have first to like dugs. Some don’t.
Today’s dug show was all about gun dogs and the obedience they learn through training, but as most of the bitches were in heat there were one or two near unfortunate incidents which threatened to turn a family show into something rather embarrassing. This was just the excuse we needed to head back to the Aston, drag the folding chairs from the boot and get stuck into the old, packed lunch, which I washed down eagerly with a refreshing pint of English ale.
Picnic over, it was time to circulate; to say hello to people whom you knew, who you knew had been trying all day to avoid you, and to avoid those people you knew, who you knew had been trying to say hello. You don’t understand the rules? It’s a quintessentially ‘English thing’.
No English garden fete or English village show could be considered complete without the proverbial cup of tea and slice of cake. To enjoy it at its best, you should be able to sit outside in the sun under a Panama hat, preferably wearing a day cravat. Such attire is also good for drinking beer in the evening. Consider it done.
And so, another garden fete, sorry, village show, and indeed another garden fete season (with the exception of Riseley show) inevitably came to an end. Whatever it wants to call itself, it had been a pleasant experience, as had all the local garden fetes that I have attended this summer, prompting the reflection that the UK can be an enjoyable place when free of the unwanted enrichment that Sorryarse and his motley crew seem to have forgotten previous British generations did very well without. “Not today, thank you (or any other day!)!”
As we all know, however, the good old days were not all that: there was no woke, no PC, a lack of sexual harassment payouts, certainly nothing LGBT and sadly no global warming to melt the frost on your tractor seat. Nevertheless, when all is said and done (a lot is said but not a lot done) the good old days in hindsight seem a darned sight better, infinitely better in fact, than what we have at present and what is yet to come. You ain’t seen nothing yet, but consolation has it that the reset they have planned for us will not endure for long. Across the political West, pseudo-liberal doctrines have already begun the slow, the painful, the inevitable process of rupture and unravelling. In the long term it will be brutal, but right will prevail as it always does.
In the short term, however, the story will be different. All that will remain to fill the echoing void left by garden fetes, Sunday cricket and good old English pubs will be foreign food stores, Turkish barbers, one or two Indian corner shops (whatever happened to Arkwright?) and, last but by no means least, the never pleasant, totally unnecessary, no-excuse-for-it Notting Hill Carnival.
