Burgh Island and Greenway: on the Agatha Christie trail
25 July 2025 – Agatha Christie’s Burgh Island and Greenway House
Burgh Island
Going over the hill, especially when the term is used figuratively to describe the juncture between youth and old age, is not recommended. Likewise, when you reach the top of the hill on the approach road to Bigbury-on-Sea, I suggest that you step on the brakes and stop. From this point your first spectacular view of Burgh Island is likely to be not much different to the one offered to Agatha Christie, Noel Coward, Winston Churchill and Mick Hart.
You see that large building fronting Burgh Island, the white one in the striking Art Deco style, well that’s the Burgh Hotel. It was first constructed in 1929, modified and improved in the early 1930s and, as that decade unfurled, rapidly established itself as one of England’s most in-vogue venues for socialites and celebrities, a premier destination for those with money, those with influence and for those in search of inspiration.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, one of England’s most prolific and arguably most famous literary figures, was so taken by the inspirational ethos of the island, the sophistry of its hotel and the fictional source material offered by its top-drawer patrons that the hotel built her a beach house to use exclusively as a writer’s retreat. There, she is reputed to have written two of her greatest novels, And Then There was None and Evil Under the Sun, the latter extensively filmed on Burgh Island and in and around its hotel as part of the David Suchet series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot.
Burgh Island and Greenway House: on the trail of Agatha Christie
Before Agatha Christie made it her own, Burgh Island, known in ancient times as Borough Island and thereafter variously as Burr and Bur Isle, had a colourful reputation for smuggling, pirates and wrecking — where coastal in Cornwall and Devon does not? On a more prosaic level, the island in the 18th century was a base for Pilchard fishing.
That small, ruined structure sitting on the island’s summit, the one you can see with your naked eye and in more detail through your trusty binoculars, is not a Victorian folly but the remains of a one-time monastery, the remnants of a chapel and what is left of a ‘huers’’ post — a place where ‘huers’ kept watch on the sea. When shoals of pilchards came in sight, the huers would kick up a ‘hue and cry’, alerting the fishermen at shore level that it was time to knock back their beers, exit the Pilchard Inn and put out to sea in their fishing boats.
The Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island
Burgh Island’s Pilchard Inn, unmissable from the mainland even had its name not been emblazoned across its front in welcoming large black letters, is reputed to have made its debut in the fourteenth century. How much of the fourteenth century remains of it today is a matter of conjecture — something to keep you occupied whilst you sit there sipping your beer, gnarled oak beams above your head, much-trodden flagstones beneath your feet and, without a pilchard in sight, without a care in the world.
^ Mick and Joss Hart outside the Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island
The Pilchard Inn, the Art Deco hotel, Agatha Christie’s beach house, a couple of private houses, oh, and not forgetting the huers’ hut, plus a garden shed or two, these are the sole structural occupants of the island’s-built environment.
The island’s natural environment, criss-crossed as it is with a cobweb of tiny footpaths, is a dream of a place for ramblers. It offers spectacular views across a beautiful seascape to the mainland’s rugged and ragged cliffs and on the island itself imparts to the roving explorer awesome sights of precipitous drops into the foaming surf of the ocean below. Rumour has it that someone, mention no corporate names, took the legal route in an attempt to prevent the public from enjoying this gift from God, but thankfully for once on this occasion when money talked no one wanted to listen and justice came out on the side that it should. So gleefully put on your walking shoes and celebrate the ‘right to roam’.
^^ “It’s not true that we wish to deter people from walking across the island. Just follow the line of the fence and you’ll be fine …”
Burgh Island and Greenway House: on the trail of Agatha Christie
Burgh Island is a tidal island, meaning that at certain times of the day the sea recedes like so many hairlines, leaving behind a stretch of sand, similar to a widow’s peak, across which, if the mood so takes them, prospective visitors can plod.
When the tide is in, reaching the island by Shank’s Pony is still a possibility, providing you like wet trousers, but staying with the majority, it is easier and more fun to pay the two-quid passage and make the crossing on the Burgh Island sea tractor.
This intriguing shallow-water machine has been thrilling and ferrying passengers from Bigbury-on-Sea to Burgh Island and back since the 1930s. You may recall Poirot and Hasting travelling on the tractor across the causeway at high tide as guests of the Burgh Hotel in the TV adaptation of Christie’s Evil Under the Sun. On June 25 (2025, that is), we followed in their wheel tracks.
The current tractor, I have been told, is not the original 30s’ model, but the carriage and its application differ very little. I have scant regard for boats but enjoyed the trip to Burgh on this unusual four-wheeled vehicle. It may not be the exact same tractor that ferried Agatha from A to B, but the view of the island that it provides from its elevated platform of the historic Pilchard Inn and what is described consistently as the island’s iconic landmark, the mainland-facing Art Deco hotel, cannot be substantially different from the scene with which the famous writer would have been familiar.
Restored and refurbished in such a manner as to replicate the glamour of its 1930s’ heydays, today’s Burgh Island Hotel is widely regarded to be a faithful representation of what it would have been before it entered a period of slow but steady decline after the Second World War.
The hotel’s golden years are also said to be echoed in the many period events hosted there on an annual basis, with their observance of the sartorial elegance for which the thirties is famous and their ‘take you back to the time’ music of hot jazz, swing and Lindy hop.
A flick through the pages of the hotel’s website should be enough to convince you that no punches are being pulled in guaranteeing paying guests refinement, luxury and exclusivity on an unprecedented Art Deco scale.
It is said that to stay at the Burgh Hotel is a ‘Once in a lifetime experience’, and this is hardly surprising. It is difficult to ascertain what exactly a bed for the night will set your wallet back, but £480, £650 and climbing seem to be the ballpark figures, with afternoon tea ringing the till at £110 for two. At these prices ‘once in a lifetime’ is perfectly understandable’; staying there twice, highly unlikely; and never, more likely than that. However, should you win the lottery …
Whether extortionate hotel tariffs are an evil under the sun, a sure-fired way of keeping the riff-raff out (it’s odd that I’ve never stayed there?) or just an unpredictable gamble on a typical English coastline, often chilly, frequently windswept and not uncommonly pelted with rain, are points on which you may wish to ponder before you part with your hard-earned cash.
Agatha Christie beach house
Ardent fans of the Art Deco period and of Agatha Christie alike may take comfort in the knowledge that what you pay for is what you get. Recent refurbishments at the Burgh Hotel are said to have been made with utmost care and consideration for heritage authenticity. However, I wonder how true this is of Agatha Christie’s beach house?
It is written almost everywhere that Agatha Christie thought of the Burgh Hotel as a ‘home away from home’. What she would make of it now, now that her once authorial haven has been turned into – I quote – “One of the sexiest hotel rooms in the UK …” is difficult to say.
I cannot help feeling that this rebranding, as well as being vaguely tasteless, is a rather short-sighted move. Think about it, if you will. Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE, celebrated author of 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, creator of the world-famous Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, the best-selling fiction writer of all time, conceived and wrote at least two of her novels at the Burgh Island beach house, and now that beach house is being promoted as a place for potentially unwanted conceptions.
You would have thought, would you not, that this made-sacred-by-Agatha place would have better been preserved as a museum to her memory or alternatively restored to the inspirational model it was, no matter how basic by modern standards, so that those in search of the ultimate Christie experience, to whom it seems money is rarely an object, would unconditionally flock. Either of these two options have a more in-keeping ring, don’t you think, to the hotel’s glittering past, than words that would seem to cast it as a 21st century bordello. But then who knows what the future holds for England’s imperilled heritage?
Greenway House
Our personal ultimate Christie experience was to follow up our excursion to Burgh Island, with a visit to the much-loved author’s South Devon summer home, Greenway.
Greenway House, a late Georgian mansion enclosed within extensive grounds on the River Dart near Galmpton in Devon, had been Christies’ dream house since childhood. It came on the market in 1938 at a time when Christie and her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, were masterminding their escape from Torquay, which, as early as the 1930s, was rapidly falling from grace. [Visiting Cornwall and Devon: Is it a good idea? – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia]
Christie refers to the house and grounds as “beautiful” and her summer home as “cozy”. There’s no argument to be had that architecturally the house excels in every respect, but of all the grand English properties that I have visited (the invites are overwhelming!), my take on Greenway House, or to be more precise its location, or to be more precise than that its singular isolation, is that it leans a little on the eerie side.
Greenway’s isolation is one of a particular kind. It owes much to the lay of the land and the place it occupies within that landscape. Yet, its sense of exclusion begins a mile or two before being vetted and admitted at the gatehouse. Once you have crossed this threshold, the perception of leaving the world behind intensifies immensely, growing proportionally stronger as you wind your way along the shadowy woodland lane to arrive at Greenway itself.
Unlike many English homes of its stature, Greenway House does not possess a sweeping, open driveway with statement views of itself and of a customised, limitless landscape. Closed in on arrival by the estate’s former stable block, since converted by the National Trust into a tea room and specialist shops, at the back and to the opposite side, the house is a claustrophobia, albeit an attractive one, of landscaped rock and foliate banks. A short gravelled forecourt, embroidered with a strip of lawn, lies at the front of the property, from which the ground slips steeply away under a formidable curtain of woodland interspersed with thickets of shrubbery down an eye-squinting awesome descent to a wide plateau of water belonging to the River Dart.
I have read reviews that claim that from Agatha’s former bedroom window lovely views are to be had across the Greenway estate, when, in actual fact, the view is restricted to the sliver of lawn that borders the house at the front, and below, way down below, through the mire of trees and bushes, the wide expanse of the River Dart, which, resembling a barrier moat, consolidates the feeling of being locked away and locked within. The seclusion is extraordinary, and its effect upon a fanciful mind more extraordinary still.
Not by choice but by fate decreed, the day that we had chosen to pay our respects to Greenway was the wettest day of the week. No sooner had we entered the house than the heavens poured forth its contents. Trapped within the house, which is trapped within the grounds, whilst trapped within one’s imagination, with the rain streaming down the windows in an endless succession of tears, it was easy to comprehend how vulnerability might find a mind encircled by circumstances such as these susceptible to its intimidation, and then inhabit it and haunt it with scenes of unspeakably brutal murder. In their own different but similar ways, Burgh Island and Greenway House are made to measure locations for the propagation and proliferation of such disturbing thoughts.
There’s a little of each of these locations in a good many Christie novels and considerably more of both in And Then There Were None’s Soldier Island: the inescapable reckoning ground where Christie’s helpless, hapless victims are lured to share a collective fate of serial execution.
As for the house itself, with the exception of the library, I would stop short of calling it cosy, at least with respect to the way in which the word is routinely applied: imposing, yes; interesting, certainly; intriguing, delightfully so; imbued with singular Christie character, of that you can be sure; but if cosiness, the ordinary cosy, the commonplace cosy, the little, the cute and the cushioned cosy, had ever made its home here, then someone or something had come along whilst we were busy splitting hairs on the nuanced notion of ‘cosy’, and quietly done away with it.
I think that it was done in the Max Mallowan dressing room, either with the fax machine or the script of Dead Man’s Folly signed by David Suchet.
Below – literary genius: A copy of the script from Dead Man’s Folly, filmed at Greenway House, inscribed and signed by David Suchet, the eponymous Hercule Poirot, together with first editions of Agatha Christie’s masterpiece novels.
Below – antiques & collectables: Agatha Christie and her husband Max Mallowan were keen collectors. They loved antiques and curios. Greenway House is full of them. Even if the house hadn’t belonged to one of the most famous writers of all time, there is enough heritage on display to warrant more than one visit.
Below – over-fertile imagination:Quite easy to imagine any number of assailants lurking in the seclusion of the walled gardens, the undergrowth, in every nook and cranny, of which there are inconceivably many, and likewise behind every tree.Look at her, for example!
Below – bogged down in thought: If I lived at Greenway, I would thank the Lord every day that unlike the house I was brought up in, Greenway has an inside toilet. Would you want to venture late at night, outside, in the dark at Greenway! Thus, here I am on the Greenway throne, not exactly rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, but feeling rather cheeky all the same.
Below – Greenway library:During the Second World War, Greenway House was requisitioned by the US Coast Guard. The library, then the recreation room, became the canvas for a unique series of 13 murals, which travel across the frieze of all four walls.
The murals, which gain maximum impact from the four restrained shades used to create them — black, white, blue and khaki — tell the story of the US Coast Guard’s 11-month’s journey to England in preparation for the D-Day Landings.
When the property was decommissioned, Agatha Christie admitted that she had been “somewhat surprised” to discover on her library walls Lt. Marshall Lee’s ‘graffiti’. Fortunately, however, as well as writing masterpiece novels, she also seems to have possessed a highly developed sense of respect for our national heritage. She rejected the offer by the commanding officer of the US Coast Guard to have the frieze painted out, preferring to preserve it for posterity as another chapter in Greenway’s history, a memento of the Coast Guard’s stay and for its significance as a wartime record.
Above – Greenway library:Important point: During WWII, when Greenway library became the US Coast Guard’s recreation room, the bar was in the alcove.
Below – echoes of a past life:It is said that in taking on Greenway House the National Trust strove to preserve as much as was humanly possible of the home as it was when the Christies lived there. In this they did achieve, for you enter the property as a guest not in spirit as a paying visitor.
And then there was one (isn’t there always) who couldn’t find the pet cemetery As the rain eased off and the chance of getting soaked diminished, I finished soaking up the pre- and Agatha-Christie atmosphere of Greenway House, and, consulting the ground map of the estate given to me with my entrance ticket, went in search of, and never found, the Christie family pet cemetery. We did locate certain walled places, such as the tennis courts, the peach house, the croquet lawn and allotment, but the cemetery was not in the place where the map told me it would be. I knew I should have taken that course in elementary map reading.
As the appointed time rolled round to rendezvous with my brother — he hadn’t been prepared to pay Greenway’s 17-quid admission and had gone instead in search of fish and chips, which he found but never bought because they were too expensive — Olga wandered off to meet him where we had prearranged, leaving me alone with my map in the befuddling network of gardens.
With a few minutes to spare, I decided to explore further, wending my way at a pace through a series of narrow paths between the gardens’ dividing walls, which, without familiarity to tell me otherwise, took upon a maze-like character. Time conscious, I hurried along, passed beneath an old brick archway, found myself in a sunken garden alone with a trickling fountain, twisted my way through a rock ravine buried in ferns and backed with bushes, which hissed at me in the wind like rattled snakes in a steam iron, and, at one point having popped out briefly where I didn’t really want to be behind a garden gazebo, eventually materialised on a hard-surfaced lane wide enough for vehicular use and good enough for me.
You would have thought that being alone on a National Trust estate would hardly, if ever, be possible, but I was alone, quite alone, or was I? The strong winds rushing like panic through nature’s leafy and bowered confinement seemed to come from every direction, including the fourth dimension, instilling vulnerability, which I am sure our Agatha would have approved of, in my gathering sense of predicament.
There and then, I should have retraced my steps, should have headed off back to the rendezvous point, but the sight of an enormous tree stopped me in my tracks. It was a terrible magnificence, the scene of its uppermost branches spinning and writhing in wind-propelled ecstasy, that I felt the need at once to capture the wanton graphics of it, and, since the tree had no objections, or was otherwise preoccupied, I stooped as low to the ground as I could go (surely not at your age, Mick!) and took some lousy photographs. Alas, my smartarse camera proved itself insufficiently clever to adapt the lens to the angle wanted.
Fast developing cramp, and because the wind cried Mary, thrashing through the boughs of the trees and charging through the bushes like a machete wielding migrant let loose on the streets of London – it seemed to be a someone or failing that a something (a country, for example) descending into liberal madness – or was I merely thinking of my tumble drier at home (?), I gave up with a vengeance on my lonely pet-cemetery quest.
Having no desire to be remembered as victim number one in the unsolved case of the Greenway Murders (which, it would be postulated later, were committed by a psychopath, or psychopaths unknown, who, mesmerised by Agatha Christie’s 66 murder mysteries, all of which had been solved, had decided they would go down in history for getting away with the perfect murder at Agatha Christie’s home), I reviewed my situation with greater urgency than hitherto.
I wanted no part in this drama, that is to say the specific part that my predicament seemed to have singled me out for, so, with a furtive glance around me, and the wind in the trees growing louder than ever, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and nipped off rather sharpishly, not the way I had come, but back to Greenway’s ticket office via the tiny zig-zag path that runs down the bank at the side of the house. And do you know to this very day I couldn’t begin to tell you, even if I was that person who continually makes things up, where, exactly, on Greenway estate, Agatha Christie buried her pets. So, there’s another mystery for you; granted not a whodunit as such, more of a whereisitat, but a teasing, taunting mystery all the same.
You may wish to visit Greenway to solve the mystery of the missing pet cemetery and to reach those parts of Greenway, the famous boating house for instance, which the conspirators of rain and time prevented us from seeing — a good excuse for us to return again. You may also want to prove me wrong that, in contradiction of touristy websites, Greenway doesn’t do cosy, although, in its defence, I doubt that any house of its imposing size ever could or does. What Greenway has, however, is a lurking, lingering aura, which is as close a clue to homeliness as it gets.
The family photos on the grand piano, the umbrella in the hallway stand, the trilby on the table, the linen on the beds, there to create an effect you might say, but then how would you account for that essence of something else, that something quite intangible? The feeling that the house is waiting for those with whom it shared so many years of history, they who loved it and lived in it, to make their way back home again. It’s a persuasive sentiment and that’s a fact, yet is it a red herring? Do any of us ever leave the homes we really love?
Perhaps it really is true that ‘Time is just a mode of thought’. Perhaps this is the concept that holds the key to almost all life’s mysteries, including those we find ourselves in and find inside ourselves when we enter the gardens and beloved home of Agatha Christie’s Greenway.
Those of you who are authentic English – that rules out a good many – will not be unaware of one of England’s most famous children’s story writers, Enid Blyton. She wrote a series of successful adventure novels in the 1940s and 50s about five going somewhere or doing something. For example, Five Go Down to the Sea, Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five on a Hike Together. Without Enid Blyton’s consent, but I am certain she approves (as this is not a woke rewrite), we did something similar in Five Head off to Cornwall.
For those of you who didn’t know that Cornwall is in Kaliningrad, you’re right. It isn’t. But this account finds itself in my cunning ‘Diary’ category, in which I can write about almost anywhere and, failing that, almost anything, even when it isn’t in or relevant to Kaliningrad, so you haven’t caught me out yet.
The Five that went to Cornwall in June of this year (2025) consisted of my not-so-good self, my good lady (I left the bad one at home.), my youngest brother Joss, a venerable Old Gentleman and our version of End Blyton’s Timmy the dog, Kiera. How did we all fit into a Messerschmitt bubble car? The obvious answer to that is we didn’t. We bombed off from Bedfordshire in a large and comfortable Land Rover.
Visiting Cornwall and Devon: What to expect
This is that story, in words and pictures:
Five Use Airbnb Airbnb is a Godsend, isn’t it? It’s also a pain in the arse. Five used it to pick their ideal holiday home, because rumour has it that it’s the best place in cyberspace to track down self-catering accommodation at a reasonable price. To join Airbnb’s happy-go-lucky community, in addition to the usual written particulars, you need to provide a mugshot of yourself and also attach a document, such as a copy of your passport, to prove you are who you say you are.
One of the two cottages in which we stayed also asked for a statement to be written explaining why their cottage was a ‘good fit’. I wanted to write, “Because it reminds me of a pair of underpants”, but refrained from doing so and wrote instead, because we are the Famous Five, who go to places and do things.
Five Go to Briar Fisherman’s Cottage There are no shortage of fisherman’s cottages in Cornwall, perchance because there was a time when there was no shortage of Cornish fishermen. In fact, every fisherman had a cottage, the vast proportion of which today have been converted into holiday lets, presumably because it is an easier way of making money than to go bobbing about on the briny early at the crack of hangover in all kinds of English weather.
Briar Cottage (let’s leave the fisherman out (Oh, that dripping sow wester!)), the one in which we stayed, is located in Boscastle. If you like low ceilings, gnarled beams, lots of original nooks and crannies and plenty of old-world feel – and we most certainly do – then fall in love at first sight with Briar Cottage you most certainly will.
Briar Cottage is chocolate-box picturesque. It is tucked away in a truly sequestered spot, cozily contained within a Victor Matured two-tiered garden, with all the right dimples in all the right places. It is clad, adorned and surrounded by flowers and invested with foliage and shrubbery so perfect in their natural complement that even Enid Blyton’s pen would have struggled to make it more idyllic.
In the near distance, as the rise of the land precludes sight of any other, the sort of landscape that children draw — steep and rolling hills with little toy cows in pocket corners — reach up into the sky and touch the sun with their eyebrow hedgerows, and if you get to sleep in the room that is furnished with two single beds, this is the scene that will greet you, each new dawn as you draw back the curtains. Think character cottage enclosed in a lushly planted garden retreat, and your thoughts will lead you to Briar in Boscastle.
This is how we rated Briar Fisherman’s (Hello, he’s back!) Cottage nestled in Boscastle: Plus 😊 Location: Excellent for touring, not so easy for the local pubs at port level, for which you need to be an accomplished mountain climber or own a funicular railway. Facilities: Everything you could possibly need is there, including the most important thing, which, as you know, is a beer-bottle opener. Condition and Comfort: A+ The cottage cannot be faulted. In fact, it is even better than the owners, described.
Minus 🤔 Parking: If you are spoilt by off-road parking at home, you may feel inconvenienced by the fact that there is no off-road parking at Briar Cottage or designated parking space. There is a small layby just up from the cottage where you can unload your gear, but pay heed that this is a privilege and one that comes with a warning, namely that should you leave your car there unattended for any length of time, they, whoever they are, possibly the Boscastle Mafia, will block it in for a month of Sundays, as this is a private parking spot. The owners of the cottage claim that parking space is usually available a little further down the road. This turned out to be true, and we were happy with that. {Briar Fisherman’s Cottage, Boscastle, is listed on Airbnb and other online holiday-letting websites. Just enter the name in Google😊}
Five Go to Boscastle Remote, rugged, secluded, the village of Boscastle, location of an ancient but still working fishing port, is a treasure trove of antiquity and character. It is a pilgrimage destination for fans of the famous novelist Thomas Hardy and for stout-hearted fellows and gals of the outdoor hiking and trekking variety.
Plus 😊 Location: No better for landscape sightseers, especially those who like it rugged and brooding Amenities: Boutique shops; tourist-oriented cafes and souvenir outlets; three pubs; cafes Places to visit: The Museum of Witchcraft; The Grave of Joan Wytte (White Witch) — if you can find it!; St Juliot Church (Thomas Hardy connection) Atmospheric: Very Pubs: (see Five Review Pubs section)
Minus 🤔 Location: Steep, multiple-hairpin road. The walk from the top of Boscastle village to the port below is not for the faint hearted. This is a double-plus positive, if you like that sort of thing, but not so appealing if you are unsteady on your pins and are wanting in the lungs department when making the uphill journey. Parking: Pay and display only (well, what did you expect) Pubs: (see Five Review Pubs section) #
Postscript: I did not walk from the top end of Boscastle to the port below. I almost flew. My little legs and tippy-toe feet went down those snake-twisting roads as though someone had shoved a firework up my ah …, er, shirt. The time was early evening. The sky was grey and overcast. I was on my own. From one end of the village to the other, there was not a living soul. Or was there? If you like it close and eerie, Boscastle is the place to be.
Five Go to Newquay (but pass straight through it) Footnote (so to speak) The original title for this story was ‘Five Go to Newquay But Wished They Hadn’t’, but I’ve reserved that one for Five Go to Torquay.
Plus 😢 Nothing obvious
Minus 😢😢 Almost everything, without the ‘almost’ Location: Newquay is located southwest of Boscastle (now where did I put my compass?). It is about 20 miles away and, in our opinion, is only worth the trip to assure yourself that you wished you hadn’t gone there. Amenities: Lots of pubs, but, by the looks of them and by the looks of everything else, you wouldn’t want to use them. #
Postscript: We only got out of the car to buy something from one of Newquay’s shops and, even then, whilst leaving the place at speed, were worried about contamination. I checked myself for tattoos, looked in the mirror for rings in my snout and wondered if the soles of my shoes were as down and out as the buildings.
The best thing about visiting Newquay is the sigh of relief as you leave it.
Five Go to Somewhere Special (if only I could remember what it is called. I think it is between Widemouth Bay and Upton.) Location: We are talking here about a dramatic cliff-top view on a section of spear-pointed headland that looks out one side on a ragged coastline of craggy coves weaving and curving as far as the eye can see and, on the opposite side, upon and across a cove prodigious in its proportions, hemmed in either end by jagged wedges of sea- smashing rock.
My name for this dramatic headland is Commemoration Peak, since the top is dotted with slate-slab benches, each one personalised with the names of loved ones no longer of this world. There is also a curious monument, a man-made formation of rocks, where painted pebbles have been deposited bearing poignant tributes to those who were but are no more. The stillness of their lost presence on this wild and windy outcrop, high above the rolling waves, is amplified, and in order to escape the noise of loss, you instinctively cast your eyes to that faraway point on the distant horizon, the place where people across the ages have always gone to look, vainly for comfort and/or meaning, to the edge of comprehension where the sky embraces the sea. It’s an introspective journey, which starts at the end of everything but which, in the end, never arrives there. Practicalities: There is a layby you can park in and a van on the side of the road, where, instead of standing too close to the edge of the cliff, you can come down to earth with a portion of burger and chips.
Five Go to Tintagel The only one among our famous five who could pronounce this settlement properly was our very own Old Gentleman, but as he was once a scientist, it is perfectly logical that he could, n’est-ce pas?
Plus 😊 Location natural: Sublime, in the true sense of the word, as defined by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,1757.
If ever there are two words that have earnt their respective places in Hubert Conspicuous’ Guide to Travel Bloggers’ Cliches, then those two words must assuredly be first ‘breathtaking’ and secondly ‘stunning’. So, let’s go ahead and use them, as we could do a great deal worse in attempting to describe the stunning Tintagel headland and the breathtaking views therefrom: first inland, looking up to Tintagel Castle, then looking down from cliff top to sea and then gazing out to that mystical hinge where water shakes hands with the skyline.
Small man-made paths about the width of rabbit runs, rove up and down and around the grassy and rock-jutting promontories and across the dipping troughs, the highest point of which consists of two tall peaks linked for human passage by a simple scaffold bridge. From a distance, this looks so dangerous that you feel the urgent need to cross it as much as you do the compulsion to venture as close to the edge of the cliffs as you can and hurl yourself right off them. Yes, Tintagel is that sort of place. But it’s also good for the thighs and calves (Do I hear a wolf whistle?), and for wondering out loud for any seagull that cares to answer, how old is Tintagel Castle? Not the remains on the outcrop of rock, but the one that towers in liveable form above the coastal epic, the one which is now a hotel. Without cheating recourse to Google, I bet it dates to Victorian times.
Minus 🤔 If you watch telly a lot, Tintagel is the sort of place that is destined to make your legs ache.
Location town: Plus 😊 & Minus 🤔 Tintagel town is a lovely little place with a meandering main street containing all sorts of shops selling interesting but overpriced stuff for tourists. And why not! Come on, loosen that wallet! You’re on holiday!
It was in one of these shops, not the whisky-tasting one or the one selling pseudo-antiques, that I bought and sampled my first genuine Cornish pasty in years. My advice, as I’m not a carnivore, is to go for the cauliflower, lentil and curry option, and then park yourself on a free civic bench and enjoy! The cafes and restaurants in Tintagel are a ‘cost an arm and a leg’ job, and the pubs, though Cornish kosha once, of that I have no doubt, have, through injudicious gentrification, lost too much spit to too much polish. There are lots of great pubs in Cornwall but none, I’m afraid, in Tintagel.
Five go to Portwenn and find themselves in Port Isaac Phew! Didn’t my brother go on! If I had a rouble for every time he mentioned ‘Doc Martin’, I’d have saved enough to buy myself … not a lot, I should imagine? Location: It’s where they filmed Doc Martin, silly!
Plus 😊 Doc Martin is, I am told, a highly successful, long-running TV comedy drama set in the fictional Cornish port of Portwenn, whose real name is Port Isaac.
Put off by razzamatazz of any kind, I was at the outset loathe to go there, but once we had driven down its impossible narrow streets, along its tiny house-hemmed lanes, missing the sign completely warning ‘Unsuitable Road for Vehicles’, almost mowing three people down, nearly taking out a bay window and arriving much surprised back where we had started still unable to find a space to park in, and could that be with a painter and decorator attached to the Land Rover door handle, I grew immediately fond of the place.
Port Isaac is picturesque today because yesterday its commercial and residential properties were sandwiched together up hill and down dale, twisting, weaving and winding, in order to squeeze as much as possible into the natural lie of the land. Thus, the functional of yester-year becomes the historical quaint of our present. Bless ‘em all, bless ‘em all, the long and the short and the tall, not forgetting their crooked walls, their wonky roofs and their great slate floors …
My brother wasted no time in familiarising me with all the Doc Martin landmarks, particularly Martin Clune’s’ surgery (not the suspected ear job but the fictional office of Doc Martin fame).
After well-deserved refreshment in the Golden Dragon pub, which is painted blue not gold, we walked the sloping harbour road to the house made famous in the Doc Martin series. Judging by the ‘polite’ notice in the window of the property, the conclusion may be drawn that the property’s owners learnt the hard way that fame comes with a price. Respecting their privacy as requested, we refrained from peering through the windows as countless Doc Martin fans must have done, the fiction so bewitching them that it must have escaped all probability that the interior shots of the doctor’s surgery might possibly have been made somewhere in a studio as far away from Portwenn as Portwenn is from Port Isaac.
I am sure that at some time in their never-ending childhood Enid Blyton’s Famous Five visited Port Isaac and whilst there did discover many a smuggler’s haunt, secret passageways by the score and more ripping things going on than ever were conceived in the wildest Doc Martin plots. Unfortunately, however, during our time in Port Isaac, we were exposed to no such shenanigans but were happy to have been given the chance to embrace Port Isaac’s timeless past and pleased by virtue of our visit to have become a small part of its history and it an unforgettable part of our own.
Minus 🤔 The most significant downside to visiting Port Isaac is its dearth of parking. The official pay-and-display car parks sit at the top of the hill, some considerable distance on foot from the village. If the residents wish to put tourists off, and the regional attitude would suggest that they do, then the lay of the land of Port Isaac definitely works in their favour. With car park corrals far away from the port and with streets too narrow and steep to accommodate on-road parking, it would seem that Port Isaac’s structural history contains an inherently grockle-proof element.
Five Go to Padstow Location: Approximately 45 miles from Boscastle Known for: Historic harbour and seafood restuarants
Plus 😊 For me, taking into consideration that I am not a boating type, Padstow is as described above. It has a pleasant, centralised harbour surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fish and chip shops and a network of narrow streets embroidered with speciality shops. Hit it right, mid-afternoon, for Cornish pasties reduced in price. Apparently, if boating is your game, you pays your money and off you float to various destinations.
Minus 🤔 £8.90 for a jacket spud and 19 quid for fish ‘n’ chips. Hmm? Perhaps I have just lost touch with the UK’s inflated cost of living.
Five Go to South Devon
Unable to marry the prerequisites of our trip to Cornwall, which were, not necessarily in this order – a base with pubs in walking distance, accommodation on a reasonable budget, somewhere preferably in Boscastle or as near as dammit for touring purposes for the duration of five or six days – we decided to split the destination in two and, after spending an exorbitant time trawling through Airbnb, alighted on a cottage in the small South Devon town of Modbury, which would thus become phase two of our holiday destination.
Five go to Applecot Cottage in Modbury Applecot, another Airbnb find, is one of a parallel series of 19th century town houses forming Modbury’s Brownstone Street, aptly named once I’m sure, notwithstanding that the street today is predominantly white in colour. No matter to us, however, as Five Go Off with a Satnav.
Plus 😊 Location: Excellent as a home base for exploring South Devon by car
Brownstone Street connects with Modbury high street and in it (not to be confused with ‘innit!’) if you don’t find almost everything you want and almost more than everything you need, then you must be after something else. Amenities: Applecot is dug-friendly and also textile oriented: fitted carpets reign throughout, along with comfortable sink-in armchairs and a highly relaxing settee. You even have a choice of what to use for privacy: will it be curtains, blinds or both?
If I was to compare our first holiday cottage, Briar in Boscastle, with our second in Modbury, Applecot, the defining difference would be that whereas Briar, with its low oak-beamed ceilings and Cornwall trademark slate-stone floor has a masculine feel (ooh, missus!), Applecot, with its accent on soft-furnishings, it’s fitted carpets and comfy chairs, its patterned curtains, art-studio ornaments and all that it contains all in its thought-out place has a feminine personality. But let’s don’t get too gender. Here I am mindful of floaty feminine not frenetically, fearlessly feminist! I wouldn’t want to put you off.
A nice touch at Applecot is the information and welcome pack. Personalised by the host and her husband, this mine of useful information also serves to remind guests that Applecot is not first and foremost a strictly commercial enterprise but a loved and cherished home. It has that lived-in, cared-for feeling, as though the owners have gone on holiday, and you have faithfully promised to look after their home whilst they are away.
My good lady wife professed to be completely in tune with the unspoken essence of Applecot. From the naturalistic ornaments to the ideas expressed in the prints on the walls, both the aesthetic and esoteric ethos vibrated through her energy chords, whilst the rest of us, including the dog, were satisfied to say the least that this well-appointed property was less than a minute’s walk away to Modbury’s nearest pub. One for one and all for ourselves, a win-win situation.
Minus 🤔 It would be remiss of me — and you know that for all my faults, this is not one of them — if I failed to bring to your attention that, as with Briar Cottage in Boscastle, parking at Applecot is problematic. Whilst the inclines in Modbury are nowhere near as mountainous as they are in Boscastle, Brownstone Street is brownstone steep, and once you’ve unloaded your vehicle, which you have to do on double yellows, you must remove it and take potluck that you’ll find a place to put it somewhere at the top of the street. We have Potluck to thank, for he was on our side.
Another consideration, which may or not be important to you, is that since Applecot is a terraced property belonging to a certain age, it does not possess a garden, but in my opinion, be it ever so humble, in terms of overall comfort, its nearness to the pubs and to other high-street facilities, Applecot more than makes up for its parking and garden deficits. Moreover, I should add, the rental price is right! {Applecot, Modbury is listed on Airbnb and on other online holiday-letting websites. Just enter the name in Google😊}
Five Swan Around Modbury Location: Twenty minutes from the South Devon coast; twenty minutes to Dartmoor
Is Modbury a large village or is it a small town? Great imponderables such as this do not detract from the fact that it is darn pretty and quintessentially English. The high street, aka Church Street (or is that Poundwell Street?) meanders gracefully from a steep incline opposite the parish Church of St George down to a dip at the crossroads, wherein stands the Co-op, before becoming a rural road, rising out of site and drifting into the great beyond.
Described widely as a historic market town, in the same way that a renowned English figure couldn’t see any ships, I could see no market in Modbury.
What I did lo and behold was an attractive series of boutique shops, art galleries, delicatessens and a wonderful half-framed timber pub.
Everything in this little place evokes a sense of style and culture redolent of its English past. From the floral wreathes on shop doors, the trailing plants above them and the potted plants which flank them to the brightly coloured bunting connecting the shops both sides of the street, Modbury is a bright and beautiful place. Is it a village? Is it a town? I don’t think it cares that much. I think it is simply content being cosy and complete and being whatever you want it to be. For more information, see> https://www.visitmodbury.co.uk
Plus 😊 I think I may have already brushed upon some of its good points, but an additional feather in Modbury’ positive cap is that its beautiful rural location is in easy day-trip reach of many must-see places, including the golden sandy beaches of Bigbury-on-Sea and the wild expanse of Dartmoor.
Minus 🤔 Give me time, and I might come up with something.
^^^^Bollards!More than a hat trick in Modbury.
^^^^Ringrose, a recommended shop in Modbury. Fun, fabulous and friendly service.
*****Another recommended Modbury shop isMackgill’s Delicatessen : I Just couldn’t stop scoffing their Cornish pasties.
Five Go to Bigbury-On-Sea Location: Bigbury-on-Sea isn’t very big at all. It is a village in the South Hams district on Devon’s south coast about seven miles from Modbury. Even without an Arthur Daley-bought satnav do not expect to cover the seven miles distance in the time it would normally take by car, since the roads are devilishly narrow, are up and down like a roller coaster, maze-like in their twists and turns and claustrophobic in their impenetrable banks of foliage. Does this warrant a minus? I for one don’t think so. I consider it more of a plus on life’s roadmap of unique experiences.
Plus 😊 Bigbury-on-Sea boasts the largest sandy south-facing beach in South Devon and is a popular destination for surfing, kitesurfing, windsurfing, and wing-foiling types. On the day of our visit, although the sun was out, a stiff, cold breeze belted across the Atlantic, coming in such gusts that I had to hang onto my Königsberg hat! One man’s meat is a vegetarian’s poison, thus what to me was a state of inclemency was to the surfers a joy to behold.
Minus 🤔 The coastal view of Bigbury-on-Sea seen from nearby Burgh Island has been spoiled from what in the 1930s would have been an acceptable, even attractive, sprinkling of dwellings into an overcrowded jibbly-jobbly mess, primarily due to lax planning laws and, perhaps, who knows, the odd greased palm or two (are we talking butter or lard?). I particularly dislike the new fad and fashion for those horrible, huge plate-glass-windowed, so-called eco-friendly, wood-stuck, virtue-signaling, steel-framed holiday chalets that have in recent years the frequent and awful propensity for popping up around Cornwall and Devon like a nasty dose of ‘Whilst no one’s looking, we’re bound to get away with it.’ It is my considered opinion that a reprised version of Agatha Christie’s conclusive Then There Were None would do this stretch of South Devon’s coastline a purging power of good.
The other minus box ticked categorically by Bigbury-on-Sea is the old familiar bugbear, nowhere free to park. OK, there are too many people and too many cars, and life is a hustle anyway. But £8.50 pay and display for parking your tin for a measly four hours! Rip-off Britain strikes again. I would willingly cough up double if the local council would guarantee that they would use the money to put to rights the blot which they have failed to protect this beautiful landscape from.
Bigbury-On-Sea has a big, modern, pay-and-display unit, one of those which accepts all kinds of payments, including touch-card and QR-code-by-phone. The only problem is that not many people, including us, seem au fait with its usage. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a piece of proverbial p*ss, but should you be rushing to catch the tractor before it leaves for Burgh Island, give yourself plenty of time, for even if you are savvy with this irritating P&D system, all it takes is that one person to non-comprehendee in front of you, and you may need to roll up your trousers and make the trip to Burgh on foot! Not so very stylish if you are dressed black tie and evening jacket. (I always travel to Burgh this way, complete with a pair of wellies.)
Postscript: Anybody into Art Deco, which includes the 1940s’ clientele of our former Northamptonshire vintage shop, and every living soul who has ever read Agatha Christie, will be cognisant of the fact that Burgh Island is home to, and also privately owned by, the iconic Art Deco hotel dominating its frontal perspective.
It had never been our intention that Modbury would become a springboard for an Agatha Christie experience, the holiday merely evolved that way, thanks mainly to my wife, Olga, who decided when we arrived at Modbury to take a look at the map. Whilst we were in South Devon, we made the Christie-Deco pilgrimage by celebrated sea tractor to the romantic setting of Burgh Island, treading in the footsteps of other great celebrities, such as Noel Coward, Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson and Winston Churchill. Bitten by the Christie bug on Burgh, we later went on to visit Agatha Christie’s summer retreat, her Georgian mansion, Greenway, an account of which I will attempt to cover in a subsequent post next month.
Five Go to Torquay (and wished they hadn’t) Minus 🤔Minus 🤔 Often described with a wicked sense of humour as the ‘English Riviera’, apart from visiting Torquay as part of our impromptu ‘tread in the footsteps of Agatha Christie’, having been to Torquay before, back in the 1990s, I wanted to see for myself if it was as bad as my memory told me it was. It wasn’t. It was worse.
Torquay started its journey long ago and has now completed it, and every step of the way has been downhill. I presume that they call it the English Riviera as a means of circumventing the possibility of anyone going to its counterpart in France. If it’s a cunning ploy by the British Tourist Board, someone should tell them it doesn’t work. It may be Froggy France, but when the French finally wake up and kick posturing Macron out, go and compare for yourself!
Torquay town couldn’t look more rundown than if it was a road-killed rabbit. Urban decay and grubby dilapidation set a perfect scene for pavement sprawling outs and downs and winos. Meanwhile on the shore front, the flowers in the municipal gardens and what remains of Torquay’s famous palm trees, shiver not only in the cold June breeze but at the surrounding sight of commercialisation that is at once and impressionably stark and tacky. Blame it on a snide satnav or an act of gross perversion, but can anyone tell me, please, is Torquay twinned in any way with Newquay and Great Yarmouth? It was foot down hard on the gas pedal and back inland post haste!
Five and the Mystery of the Ever-Arsey Cornish Locals Are the Cornish locals friendly? In a word, no. In another word, ‘grockles’.
A grockle is a derogatory term that has been in circulation in Cornwall since the year dot. It is a means of identifying and disenfranchising tourists by those who consider themselves true Cornish born and bred; brought up, I expect, on a strict diet of pasties and clotted-cream scones. It is a well-publicised fact that those who subscribe to this traditional bigotry can sometimes come across as churlish and unwelcoming, but at the end of the day, it’s all a storm in a Cornish teacup and should be taken with a pinch of salt.
My personal way of getting around this straw-in-the-mouth and smock-frock attitude is by comparing it to those ‘hicks in the sticks acting strangely’ films. You know the ones to which I refer, where strangers come to town and the locals instantly all clam up, as if they’ve suddenly been stricken by a collective dose of Cornish piles.
The way to deal with this legendary hangback is much the same as with any other: Do not take offence; simply take the piss. After all, you are on holiday! That inimitable welcome in the hillsides is one of the reasons I go to Cornwall!
How we laughed😂: Instances of rudeness and unfriendliness that we encountered on our stay in Cornwall — and notice I reference Cornwall and not South Devon — ranged from rudeness in pubs and shops to snidey whispers and muttered remarks.
One glorious moment occurred when on sitting down at an outside pub table whilst one of us went inside the pub to check the interior out, a red-faced old piss artist, who had obviously spent a lifetime overdoing it on the jam and cream scones, warned us not to allow our much larger Akita dog to stray anywhere close to his mongrel pooch or his totally tiny and indifferent dug would ‘’ave her!’ Did he mean bite or sexually? When we rose to leave, he fired back sarcastically, “Thanks for sitting at my table!”, for which we thanked him in return. We assured him the honour had all been his, but on this occasion there would be no charge.
Another instance of unprovoked abuse, even more amusing than the first, took place outside Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft. For one moment, I thought one of the museum’s exhibits had escaped. A tall chap in a black sweatshirt suddenly turned on me: “F*ck off!” he bellowed and then just as quickly added, “Sorry, I’ve got Tourette’s …”
“Think nothing of it,” I replied. “Everyone tells me to F*ck Off! including myself.”
I believe my brother added: “If he’s not told to f*ck off at least once a day, he imagines somethings wrong …”
I am not altogether certain whether this gentleman really had Tourette’s or had discovered the perfect Cornish means of exercising abuse without fear of reciprocation. He did have a badge with ‘Tourette’s’ written on it, and his sweatshirt carried the slogan ‘Swear, Swear, Swear’, but anyone can wear a badge just as anyone can wear a sweatshirt. “It’s a blessing he’s not multilingual,” I thought. But then I remembered the shores of Dover, and every city in Britain, and strategically changed my mind.
Five Review Pubs in Cornwall and South Devon Cornwall Boscastle 👎👎👎 Legend has it that there was once 22 pubs in Boscastle; we found three: Two we used and one we did not, having been steered away from the third by scary tales of a stupendous revamp, which had resulted in the imposition of exorbitant recoup prices.
Cobweb Inn The Cobweb Inn, Boscastle, is prominently situated in the port area of Boscastle itself. It is a great slate-stone slab of a building, five stories tall with an 18th-century history, which evolved into a public house by way of a corn mill, grain store, and off-licence. The Cobweb is a survivor. It survived the devastating Boscastle Flood of 2004 and later, in 2024, a landslip, which brought part of the cliff above crashing down upon it. Its greatest threat to continued success today is its shifty opening times and tourist-unfriendly bar staff.
The Cobweb Inn’s website reassuringly states that the pub closes at 11.30pm. On the evening of our first visit, we were turfed out at 11pm and come the following evening at 10.30am. On neither occasion did those tending the bar forewarn of this impending doom and never the bell for last orders did toll.
On our second visit, the two XXL ladies manning the pumps kept loitering near the bar or peeping around the wall of the bar from the adjacent room, presumably reconnoitring to see how much beer we had left in our glasses, poised for the first opportunity to snatch them away and close the pub. Then came the corny routine of standing the chairs on the table tops and bringing out the furniture polish.
When I rose to buy a pint at approximately 10.30, I was abruptly told, “We’re closing!”
Could they have heard us farting? Except that we didn’t. Well, not this evening.
My brother, being less shy about coming forward than I am, piped up from his seat:
“This pub closes earlier every night. Last night it was 11, tonight it is 10.30, on your website it’s 11.30. Which is it?”
“We’ve got no customers,” came the tart reply.
“We’re here,” my little bruv replied. “What do you think we are?”
It was a good job that the large lady was not a quick thinker or an honest replier.
“You might as well pour me a pint,” I reasoned. “After all, it’s all money.”
She sullenly acquiesced.
Brother wasn’t finished.
“If you carry on treating your customers like this, the pub will end up as an Indian restaurant.”
“I doubt that very much!” snapped the hostess with much, much more than the mostest, thrusting my pint towards me as if she had just removed the pin and was off to take cover again.
We didn’t eat at The Cobweb. We couldn’t. The kitchen was always closed (snigger). But they say the grub is good. Let’s hope for all concerned it surpasses the Cornish greeting. Cobweb Inn, Boscastle website>https://cobweb-boscastle.co.uk/
Napoleon Inn Napoleon Inn, Boscastle: On the second evening of our visit, we were treated to one of the more surreal experiences of our trip to Cornwall: Let’s play it down and call it vernacular. We’ve all seen those films where the main protagonists walk into a remote and secluded inn expecting refuge and hospitality only to discover that there is something amiss with the locals: something odd, something strange, something secretive, something suspicious, something not quite right. Welcome to the Napoleon, Boscastle.
The setting could not be better for a stage play of this kind. An ancient inn off the beaten track: oak beams, flagstone floors, deep dark wooden settles; a number of rooms on different levels; a locals’ not a tourists’ pub; somewhat rundown, faded and jaded; an honest pub in its way, but a pub with something to hide.
We entered the pub via the short steep path that runs at the back of the building and, having been unable previously to use the smaller bar, as it was crammed to the rafters with locals pretending that they could sing, we swerved left yet again into the larger room. However, on this particular evening, the seats lining three walls of this room, and the stools fronting the bar, were occupied by locals who could sing. In fact, all harmonised perfectly, delivering sentimental ballads to do with their native county and singing wistful folk songs about sailing home to Cornwall. As there was nowhere for us to sit, we sailed off into the lower bar at street side, returning to the upper room when the choral troop had gone.
We had barely raised our second pint of Hicks up to our thirsting lips than the hicks from the sticks descended upon us; the first in the buxom form of a woman who introduced her personage as the landlady of the pub. She plonked herself down at the end of the table and began to ask us the usual questions: Where did we come from? What were we doing here? Why were we staying in Boscastle? Switching into banter mode, we soon had this rather stout lady in stitches. But then, just as it does in the films, the mood changed quite abruptly, and slowly, but with stealth, we found our table surrounded. The questions kept on coming, but more insistently now and noticeably with a warmth that seemed to be cooling rapidly. A chap, on whom we had never set eyes and didn’t really want to, was suddenly summoned behind the bar. He was a cross between Rolf Harris and Gerry Adams, with an attitude positively hostile. We had the buxom one to the left of us, some young fellow-me-lad sprawled half on half off his bar stool opposite, a good-looking bint perched on the bar stool next to him, a non-descript innocent bystander (they always get hurt, do they not?) and to my left, seeming to guard the exit, but possibly only loitering, a little Chinky Chinese chappie. To say that I suddenly saw myself on the Jon Huston set of the film The Maltese Falcon would be putting it mildly. Was it all about to kick off? I clasped my pint glass firmly. But then almost collapsed into tears, as it was roughly put to us that we looked like undercover authorities, possibly the police!
Whatever else the Napoleon wasn’t, and what it wasn’t was welcoming, it was a lovely piece of pub-goer’s theatre.
As for the Sunday roast and the tastiness of the Yorkshire puddings. You’ll have to see Trip Advisor if you want to know about that. Napoleon Inn, Boscastle website>https://www.napoleoninn.co.uk/ NB: Due to the escalating level of paranoia, we refrained from taking photographs 😁
The Golden Lion The Golden Lion, Port Isaac, calls you by your name. If you are a pub-going person, (and if you are not, you should seriously consider jumping into a rubber dinghy and trumping off to another country, as pubs are a part, an important part, of our heritage) Port Isaac’s Golden Lion, which is incongruously painted blue, is too irresistible not to frequent.
I’ve never seen any of the Doc Martin programmes, but I’d wager my penny to your pint that in the making of the drama, the Golden Lion must have featured in one or two of the episodes. The pub’s location in the port’s layout demonstrates how successfully town planners in days of old got their priorities right. Where better to put a pub than on a sharp bend at the bottom of a great big hill? Coming down, you need to stop for a pint to put a brake on your speed; going up, you need to stop for a pint to make the uphill journey more of a struggle, so as to blame it on the beer rather than too little exercise. Inside, the pub is as wooden as any old port pub should be. It has a much oversubscribed to veranda facing the sea and the cliffs, and out back, down a narrow alley, a stone-walled seating area that sits above the ancient harbour below. Within this welcoming walled-in wedge stands something you may have failed to install in your garden: a sea-salvaged ship’s cannon, the history of which you can acquaint yourself with here: https://www.portisaacheritage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/The-Gun-in-the-Bloody-Bones-Yard.pdf
South Devon
Modbury The White Hart Hotel Modbury’s historic coaching house, now a gastropub with rooms to let, is conveniently just across the road from Brownstone Street. I say conveniently, for if you are staying in Brownstone Street, as we were, it’s just across the road. The inn may be credited with a long history but, like many pubs in the UK, all that it had has been lost to an over-zealous and unimaginative revamp, which has robbed the pub of its past and turned it into an echo chamber. The older chaps at the bar were real, proper English chaps, one and all gifted by God with hospitable natures and senses of humour. The younger ones were yawpers, and it was their incessant grating cacophony that drove us from the pub to the Exeter Inn across the road. We noted in the brief time that we were on the premises that the White Hart stocks a range of beers more exciting than the standard fare of most pubs in the area, many of which are dominated by bog-standard brews from St Austell Brewery, but sadly when we called in, the beer selection was down to one. Catch it on a night when the yappers and yawpers are absent, or fitted with a silencer, and when all the pumps are fully loaded, and maybe the pub would be worth a more protracted visit.
The Exeter Inn The Exeter Inn in Modbury is billed as a 14th century coaching inn. The outside is a medievalist’s architectural dream and without question the jewel in Modbury’s high street crown. I wonder, however, if the half-timbered structure is less Middle Ages in origin and more a 1930s’ folly?
Peeping through at the diners in the window seat, we got the impression that inside the Exeter Inn would be the Talbot Hotel Oundle and were rather relieved, therefore, that having left our black-tie attire at home, the interior turned out to be anything other than we expected. Deep sigh of relief, also, came with the discovery that unlike Modbury’s White Hart Inn, The Exeter Inn had not been unwisely ‘got at’ — at least not yet!
The Exter inn, in Modbury, is unspoilt. There is plenty of wood, and it’s painted black – snob-screen divisions, low oak beams, wall supports – all painted black. There is a multiplicity of nooks and crannies and other age-old features, such as sections of dark slate paving, which can easily be likened to the in-floor tombstones found in Britain’s churches and cathedrals.
If it wasn’t for the lack of good beer and a woman behind the bar with little or no interpersonal skills, I would nominate this pub as a contestant for what a pub should be. Alack-a-day, however, good beer and a variety of it, together with a congenial welcome, were conspicuous for their absence. The woman behind the bar had an unfortunate way of addressing her customers. She sounded and she looked like she had entered the licensing trade by way of being a sergeant major, a matriarch of a 19th- century workhouse and the governor of a Victorian prison. Appropriately, the only beer on offer was the aptly named Jail Ale, which was perfectly in keeping since service at the bar was like admission to the nick — empty your pockets and just keep quiet!
Contrary to its external image, the pub’s interior is a trifle worn out, even to the extent that the down-the-yard outside gents has a wall painted black to pee up and the proverbial ‘plink, plink’ water cistern. This was fine by me, to whom such nostalgic details are hallmarks of propriety. An old pub should be what it is: not a pastel-washed, block-wood furnished waiting room, pandering to the whims and caprices of the arty-farty three-course meal and ‘mine’s a red wine’ brigade. If you would like to know what the food was like, the crisps are quite expensive. The Exeter Inn (which is not in Exeter but in Modbury) website> http://theexeterinnmodbury.com/
The Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island Almost every old tavern is Britain’s oldest tavern in the same way that almost every old tavern in Britain is haunted. Nobody has yet told me whether Pilchard’s pirate Tom Crocker haunts its 14th century cellar, but if he doesn’t, he should. The pint of Otter Ale that we bought in the unspoilt upstairs bar overlooking the sea was one of the best we savoured in Cornwall and in Devon. And even if it hadn’t been, the Pilchard is worth the trip, either on foot or by sand tractor, just to take in the historic patina of all that has gone on, been thought, felt and said within its time-sanctified, oak-beamed and ancient-walled interior.
The Journey’s End, Ringmore, South Devon You won’t find the pub immediately, but the pub sign is unmissable. It is a finely crafted work of art. The carpark is opposite Ringmore’s All Hallows Church. Pop inside and confess your sins (you know a confession is overdue), take a stroll in the graveyard as a timely reminder of what one day will be and then head off on mortal foot into the charming chocolate-box lanes of this tiny, seclusive hamlet. The pub is directly in front of you, there at the foot of the hill, built into the verdant landscape like the cottages that surround it as though there was never a time in history when they were never where they are now.
The Journey’s End is said to have started life in the 13th century and is a wood and flagstone memorial to the origins of its ancestry. It is all antiquity, abundantly layered with atmosphere and, on the occasion of our visit, gets a big gold star for having the friendliest and most accommodating host of all the pubs that we experienced whilst touring Cornwall and Devon. Thank you, Mr Publican, for taking the time, even though the pub was busy, to grant our party access to, and for apprising us of the history of, the building’s old armoury room! It was a pleasure to make both your, and its, acquaintance! The Journey’s End, Ringmore, website>https://www.thejourneysendinn.co.uk/
The Warren Inn Historically, and due to its isolated location high up there on Dartmoor, The Warren House Inn has got an awful lot going for it. I’ve stopped off here twice, this holiday’s visit making it three times, just to experience the odd phenomenon of walking out of a pub onto a magnificent rooftop wilderness.
The Warren House has many claims to fame, one being that it’s fire has been burning since 1845. Great Galloping Expenses Batman! “Shh, don’t tell anyone, but I forgot to stoke it up last night!”
I love the aged-in-the-wood and stone interior as much as I love studying the old framed photos that capture The Warren through decades of its history. It was such a shame, therefore, that the woman behind the bar got a bit of a bark on when she learnt we weren’t in the offing for a five-course meal. “They’re all reserved!” she rasped, alluding to the tables. Whereas, in point of fact, they weren’t. The Warren House Inn website> http://www.warrenhouseinn.co.uk/history.html
Five Go to Dartmoor Returning to Dartmoor after a 40-year hiatus, I was struck, as many have been before me, by the sudden change that occurs on leaving the green chequered meadows of the South Devon countryside for the rugged, rolling expanse of this inspirational landscape. The change is not purely one of visual contrast, it cuts much deeper than that. There is a permeating quality to Dartmoor, its wild moorland, formations of granite rock, lack of a new-build housing estate, its unexpected yet perfect isolation, that penetrates the psyche and sets the Romantic spirit free.
Dartmoor’s erratic climate has been well-documented over time, and, I am pleased to say, it did not disappoint. Within minutes of leaving the sunny climes of the rolling South Devon countryside and climbing into the moorland wilderness, the sun we had left behind was peremptorily replaced by a brooding panoply of seven, or maybe even more, non-erotic shades of grey. A fine wet mist descended. It carried in the breeze, bringing with its murkiness unforgettable images of Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing. Our very own Hound of the Baskervilles, except that she came from Bedfordshire, was, with her powerful shoulders and grey-white beast-like fur, as close as I had come in years to a real, live, snarling werewolf. “Stick to roads!” I heard a voice say. Luckily for us, the chances of doing anything less were slim. Not forgetting that we had in our possession the most reliable satnav money could buy, we also had new friends: several helpful Dartmoor ponies, who knew the moors like the back of their hooves.
Five Keep Out of Dartmoor Prison As soon as I mention Magwitch, you’ll think big man with a bald head and a bent nose, and before you know it the puzzle will have fallen into place: Dartmoor+Dartmoor Prison+Magwitch+Charles Dickens = Great Expectations.
Dartmoor was also the prison from which the infamous London gangsters, the Krays, were alleged to have sprung Frank Mitchell, alias ‘The Mad Axeman’, whom, it was also alleged, they later went on to murder.
To appreciate Dartmoor prison, preferably from the outside, in all its harsh Victorian glory, Dartmoor needs to be dank and bleak. As it is often, it seldom fails to press all the right emotive buttons.
Five Went to Other Places in Cornwall and Devon They did, indeed.
In conclusion, there isn’t one (Dr Towlson: “As you go through life, you often find that there seldom is.”): Devon and Cornwall are two counties in England where social and cultural history, ancient history, scenic and sublime landscapes and thought-provoking sensorial seascapes converge to offer the visitor an almost infinite range of experiences that will keep you coming back for more even before you leave.
Visiting Cornwall and Devon: Is it a good idea? Can you think of a better one?
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees
Revised 1 May 2025 | First published 23 May 2020 – Kaliningrad a Green City
Apprehensive that May may not be the merry, merry month that it is cracked up to be? Put your memory in reverse gear and trip back to the coronavirus spring of 2020. I cannot guarantee that things can only get better. I cannot guarantee that they could hardly be worse. But, relatively speaking … {This post originally published May 2020 | Revised 2 May 2025}
Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather; nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind, ignore the restrictions and warnings and go wassailing off for a day at the coast. It is true that in the past few days Kaliningrad has been granted a nominal hike in temperature, pushing it up to 15 degrees, and this long-awaited blessing combined with a light but still fresh breeze in association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that has condescended to at last come out from behind the clouds, were sufficiently alluring to prise myself from self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.
To effect our home exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three weeks or more, our house, and those around us, have been subject to ‘trench warfare’.
The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …
Cable-laying has been going on. A narrow but deep trench, hazardous enough to dislocate or break something vital should a miscalculated step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our property and, running at right angles to it, extends along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which, you might care to know, sits a very large dog.
From the vantage point of my bedroom window, I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind), this cable work in progress and mentally bookmark whilst doing so the differences that might exist between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with similar tasks undertaken in the UK.
From the outset, and for most of the initial period of work, the workforce has consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with two spades, two shovels and the indispensable trusty wheelbarrow. The blokes have been doing most of the digging, whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves neatly folded and tucked to dangle professionally from her jeans’ back pocket, appears to have had an overseeing role, an inference later corroborated when a clipboard suddenly sprung into her hand. Praise where praise is due, however: at one stage in the laborious game, she, too, rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.
Weather conditions ~ cold and raining ~ have been generally unsympathetic, hardly conducive to the job in hand, but this small group of sappers, equipped with nothing more mechanical than the arms that God has given them, unless you include the wheelbarrow, struggled valiantly on alone until, after a week’s hiatus, the cavalry arrived.
The reinforcements are a hardy bunch of chaps, not only are they seasoned trenchers but also capable cable layers. The cables they are laying had been deposited along with piles of aggregate prior to their arrival. They now reside on the oval island, a compelling grass-covered landmark at the centre of confluent streets, which marks the spot of a German bunker constructed in World War Two.
The temptation at this juncture to go off on a historic tangent and waffle on about the many wartime installations surviving in Kaliningrad and across its Prussian region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has some way to go before it can get back on its feet from the damage done by coronavirus, I will wait for a more propitious moment to elaborate on this and continue for the present with my narrative.
Green & cobbled streets of Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad a Green City
We had crossed the trench in front of the house and this delicate feat accomplished were now walking along, as if coronavirus was not our shadow, the original cobbled streets that once were Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was essentially a myth. Königsberg, he said, at least the oldest parts of the city, never had been green.
The streets were narrow, the buildings high and the order of the day had been red brick and grey cobbles. The city’s outlying districts, those laid down in the early years of the 20th century and expanded in the 1920s through to the mid-1930s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and plots on which they stand have their English equivalent in the UK’s 1920s’ suburbs, whose properties sold on the back of the clever and catchy advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect.
Every home in Britain’s new suburbs came complete with a small front garden and a larger plot at the rear, and on the wide and curving streets where these airy houses stood, a row of trees lined either side, augmented, where space allowed, with narrow but neat grass verges, demarcating pavement from road and bringing a little more green into the urban environment.
In Königsberg’s equivalent districts, as contemporary photographs and postcards show, though most new streets of the day were tree-lined like their English counterparts, such trees as there were, were, of course, but saplings, which doubtlessly formed visually graceful vistas but with nothing like the leafy foliage that adorn those self-same streets today, now that these trees, like me, have reached maturity.
You see, what happens to you when you subject yourself to self-isolation: every simple detail, every once commonplace thing, every taken-for-granted and overlooked minutiae undergoes a process of scrutinised amplification, so acutely rendered to senses locked away indoors that before you can wryly say ‘I believe in coronavirus’, you cannot see the wood for the trees — or, in my particular case, the trees for Kaliningrad’s leaves.
Should old acquaintance be forgot
Our leafy walk through Kaliningrad’s suburbs, along the canopied tree-lined streets with their flower and foliate burgeoning gardens, had brought us after a while within viewing distance of a most eccentric sight — that peculiar waterside café, that semi-abandoned confection, which, with its facsimile rooftop lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the balcony doing I don’t know what and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something that sneaked into Russia during the 1970s from an amusement park in Skegness.
I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here in earlier times. Admittedly, it, as with the pond and everything around it, was saturated monochrome — obviously in the 1910s the world was waiting for colour — but even in this black and white existence (things used to be black and white before coronavirus was invented) the former Königsberg building had all the ennobling features that Gothicity could bestow and was, in its waterside setting, a proverbial sight for sore eyes rather than an eyesore for eyes reduced by its sight to tears, which, omitting novelty out of context, is as good as it gets today. [Note, although Captain Ahab went down with his ship two years after this photo was taken, the demolition pirates have failed to launch their own version, which stands as forlorn and half-built in a spot which Heaven reserved for a restaurant, but which seems to have become Kaliningrad’s ghost ship graveyard.]
Across Kaliningrad’s lakes (ponds)
Kaliningrad a Green City
Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, which in spite of my reaction I have a sneaky affection for, we wended our way, notwithstanding, happier now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the pond’s perimeter.
Old photographs demonstrate that on both sides of the lake (my apologies purists, I know I should say ‘pond’, but ponds are so small in England and Königsberg’s ponds so large that the appelation seems incongruous) the banks had, for the most part, been left to their own devices, accumulating vegetation and fringed throughout with wetland trees. In the black and white world of old photography atmosphere reigns supreme, but detail can in time, and as a result of time, often call for magnification. I had thus to resort to a lens to pick out from these old photographs the presence of a narrow winding path, most probably gravel surfaced, curling in the early 1900s, through the ribbon of trees and foliage skirting the edge of the pond.
Subsequently lost, this beaten track is now hard paved and in a character and colours favoured by, and thus typical of, 21st century urban planners. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has long since been dug out, substituted with mown grass lawns and carefully tended municipal flowerbeds. But whilst block paving of every kind, in all its imaginative shapes, its patterns and its sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, a skateboard space and even an exercise quadrangle, has colonised the past, the Königsberg trees that form a boundary along the side of the adjacent road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the later additions, some Soviet others millennial, endorse the attribution that Kaliningrad unlike Königsberg is as green a city as a city can get.
As much as I was enjoying and being overly distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at — daydreaming — today had its objectives, and this meant putting my dreams on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on it. Not that this endeavour would prove difficult in Kaliningrad. Graffiti is just one, sadly, of a number of contagious viruses that has made its way from the West.
Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins and Nadezhda Rumyantseva in Kaliningrad
The graffiti we were looking for was not one of your run-of-the-mill, deface, vandalise, spoil, degrade and then talk it up as ‘urban art’ jobs. It was truly an original piece, a bona fide work of art, featuring the actor Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter and the Russian actress, Nadezhda Rumyantseva, star of The Girls, a classic Soviet romantic-comedy drama — but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.
There is graffiti and graffiti … Mine’s a vegetarian
And then she said, For old times’ sake.” What could she be suggesting?
She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ referred to recent history, but a recent history which in the New Normal was as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Ah, those glorious days — so happy and carefree — when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or stroll down on an evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of those days? More to the point, will they ever return?
Like every other bar, Flame was a victim of coronavirus. There it stood, shrouded in darkness, doors barred, patronless and yet for all this desertion not quite extinguished. A nice and reassuring touch was that in keeping with its tradition, Flame, though closed to the public, continued to project music into and across the surrounding recreation area via external hi-fi speakers stationed on its alfresco forecourt. In these grim and troubled times, the music struck a chord that resonated inside one’s soul. It was the bittersweet sound of the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.
Now that the shops — some of the shops — had officially opened their doors again, we had a small chore to fulfil, which was to buy a part for the vacuum cleaner. We might fall foul of coronavirus and die as a result, but heaven forbid we would do such a thing in a house with a mucky carpet.
As we crossed the road from the pond, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had been doing no such thing. The shopping centre that has been taking shape at the end of the city market had gone, in the space of days, from a shell of incomplete concrete pieces into an impressive three- or four-storey series of ascending profiled platforms.
Ordinarily, way back when in the Old (and familiar) Normal, something as mundane as this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, self-imposed or otherwise, seems to have the tendency to sharpen the edge of the mind, so much so in my case that in regarding this evolving building, its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle, or rather an affinity with the bemusement he had felt on waking from a sleep of hitherto unknown proportion.
Vacuum cleaner part in pocket, we set off on our homeward journey, not by retracing our steps — having to pass Flame again now that it was clam-tight shut would be more than the drinker in me could withstand — but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the pond. This route would necessitate, however, walking past yet another well-frequented, landmark bar: the one in historic Rossgarten Gate — CLOSED … just like the rest!
Fortunately, by way of profound distraction, on the opposite side of the road, in one of Kaliningrad’s public squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck, playing his hose in the sun over some of the city’s prettiest flower beds. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”
A lovely day on which to have your hose out
Kaliningrad a Green City
Our walk back around the lake had proven itself a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty to be found in strolling back and forth days and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s be honest about it, the water features of bath and bog, though unarguably indispensable, hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling pond under a clear blue sky.
On this side of the pond as upon the other, trees in abundance abide, and in such variety and of such different ages that they did not have to ask me twice to indulge my obsessive passion for retrospective reverie, inviting me to determine which of them had been planted during Kaliningrad’s Soviet era and which belonged to Königsberg. I suppose you’d do the same if you were me.
The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad
Trees, ponds, brand-new shopping centres rising up from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, bars with no people inside them, sepia memories of long ago, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of civic truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly and almost back home; just the trenches to cross.
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Revised 31 July 2025 | first published 30 March 2025 ~ Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
Once upon a time, whilst wandering lonely as a cloud (has anybody else done this?) along Bedford’s magnificent Victorian Embankment, I found myself recalling photographs of this elegant tree-lined vista as it had been in a previous existence, namely in Edwardian days and later in the 1920s.
The quality of gracefulness in the apparel and deportment of those people in whose ghostly footsteps I now presumed to tread romanced me by their disappearance. I felt as though I walked among them, that they were all around me but nowhere to be seen.
The vanishing act was like, or so it seemed to me, a carnival trick gone wrong, which nothing now that it had been played could rectify. We are all of us in the Western world walking along such wistful vistas; sleep walking in the washed-out footprints of those who walked before us; shuffling robotically into Caligari’s cabinet, or should that be the cabinet of Count Kalergi?; hiding in the dark of it; preferring suffocation through denial and inaction rather than exit through the back; knowing that all that is waiting for us on the other side of the next door to open is the end of Western civilisation.
Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
In the meantime (whatever the meantime is), enveloped by the past and evasive of the future, I had walked as far as the monument to Britain’s dead of two world wars, and pausing there for a moment or two, or it could have been 80 years, Time is a terrible trickster, I smiled the smile that people smile when they have very little to smile about.
“I’m not afraid of you!” I said, addressing my own mortality.
Mortality smiled back at me, a knowing, sad and secret smile.
We shared the embrace of mutual sorrow, and I was on my way.
“It’s not the dying,” I explained, as I walked along the side of me, “it’s the ephemerality of what you were, what you are becoming but which you actually won’t become since by the time you have become it, you will in every conceivable way have become what you least expected and most certainly never wanted. It really is as fast as that.”
I stopped, hoping no doubt to suspend my animation, upon the Embankment Suspension Bridge (where better?) and gazed, for who knows how long, steadily into the water; the fast, the flowing, relentlessly fluid, the ceaslessly wet and willing water.
A young man of the present time was scorching down towards me, his arms a going at it like two strong steam ship pistons. He passed beneath the bridge, he and his canoe, and by the time I’d turned my head to look, he’d gone. I wondered if I had also gone, for now I was quite alone.
The river’s rivulets rolled on. The riveted bridge resisted. But I was quite alone, apart from a little touch of rust, which would not, it stood to reason, have been there once, when the bridge was built, but which seemed the more I focussed on it to be getting larger by the minute. The rust and I were good together. We were made for each others company.
I gazed along the river, this way and then that, but as for the boat and the young man in it, both had vanished into nothing and were going nowhere but in my memory.
As I alighted from the stone slab steps leading to and from the bridge, some of which were crumbling ~ they would not have been crumbling when the bridge was built ~ the word ephemerality was bouncing around inside my bonce as if sprung by a pinball wizard. Had that been Roger Daltrey flashing by in that canoe, his hope to die before he grew old could well be the propulsion that has spent his life so quickly; so unbelievably fast that we can barely equate the OAP that he is today with the youthful figure whose ironic lyrics have been used in evidence against him since he tempted fate and sang them.
Overwhelmed by the stammer of Daltrey’s My Generation (and underwhelmed by Starmer and his sentence of death for this generation), I had to put myself down, purely in a manner of speaking, and nowhere could be better than on one of the many benches dotted around Bedford’s Mill Meadow.
There used to be a mill here once, a real working mill, until time, short-sighted foresight, the love of money and poor town planning (ask Richard Wildman, he will tell you) took everything it had except its name.
Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon
Sitting there in a mill-less state looking at the swans, painfully aware of the amorphous shapes hobbling by in the sepia shadows of their heritage predecessors, to which not even he or she or those who are spotlessly white could ever hold a candle, I thought of the many celebrities that age had been unkind to.
All things being as they are, ephemeral, that great facilitator of fame and spectacle, I refer, of course, to the internet, is a double-edged sword to the public figure. TV personalities (devoid of such as they often are), Hollywood moguls, celebs, statesmen and the women who try to emulate them but never quite succeed and show themselves up in the process, have a back-stabbing friend in the internet.
In the temple to temptation, all it takes is two or three clicks to move visually and effortlessly through every successive degenerative stage of an individual’s life. On the internet and in the flesh, the ‘before and after’ comparison of plastic surgery is truly quite disturbing, take Michael Jackson for example. Attempts by plastic surgery to arrest the natural ageing process (and Buttox doesn’t help) only succeed in making it more grotesque. Disintegration and decay flash before your eyes. Yesterday’s sex bomb has gone off bang, and all that remains is a smouldering ruin. Whatever else the internet may be, and those with our wits about us know it for what it is, a fulsome, fatuous, flatterer, it is the last gallery here on earth to which you would want to entrust your ego.
Look at me, I thought, sitting here on this riverside bench, here in Mill Meadow, Bedford, the very embodiment of rank morbidity. Pull yourself together man! But Roger Daltrey’s silver balls, ah, they were too insistent. They were swinging low like chariots, and though I really should have gone home, which is where they should have carried me, retreated from the Edwardian parasols and boaters of the 1920s, they carried the ‘E’ word with them, and I, like the buffers on a pinball table, could not avoid them striking me time and time again. The bells rang, the lights flashed, the scoreboard registered ‘Lucky 13’, the name of the game ‘Ephemerality’ turned gold and then lurid black, and ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.
But now I was growing tired of it, or afraid of what it was leading me to. Like bananas from Lidl’s and Aldi’s, nothing stays fresh for long. I’d dearly like to shop at Sainsbury’s or be seen in town with a Waitrose bag, but who, at my ephemeral age, would be willing to give me a mortgage?
The soliloquy between myself was nearing a crucial stage. I was revelling in impermanence, whilst taking from my carrier bag a going-brown banana. It was then that temporality took me by the hand, not the one with the banana in it, and led me off chariot fashion to that Victorian villa across the river, yes, that one over there, for a privileged peep into a young lady’s boudoir.
Said the chariot in dulcet tones, which I recognised immediately as those of the Standard Quartette, “Take that gorgeous young woman …” (Who wouldn’t, without a second thought, were it not for those horrible tats and piercings.) “Take that young woman, for example. Here before the mirror she stands believing that she holds, like she holds the gaze of men, the time we call the present in her pretty manicured hand, when all she has is a glove that slips easily from her fingers. These are the minutes and their minion seconds, which, in the dazzle of self-adoration, fall cleverly from her grasp. She is so impressed with the here and now that she cannot see beyond her current reflection in the mirror, which, if she looked at a little more honestly, she would clearly see is changing with each relentless tick of the clock and with each diminishing beat of her ageing heart.
It starts with that straight, that perfect chin, which even as we look is turning into a double act, and then travels down to those full, firm breasts, soon to resemble John Wayne’s saddle bags, and next the midriff on display, which is making way for two spare tyres. It’s all of it destined to go south, from the tip of her powdered nose to her proudly pedicured toes.
“Avalanche!” I cried.
“Bugger!” someone else responded.
“And take this young man,” (I’d rather not, said I.) (We had moved from the boudoir to an upmarket gym.) (I never knew before today, or could it be tomorrow, that chariots had the ability, not to mention audacity, to swing low wherever they wanted and whenever the mood so took them.) “See how he works those weights,” the Chariot said of the sweaty young man, “pumping up his muscles to make them look like Popeye’s, only to end up rather cockeyed: an awesome-chested arse-less wonder desperately searching for Arthur J. Pye.”
Temporality does this to us, no matter who we think we are. It reads from the Book of Ephemerality, the penultimate chapter of which reminds young women of the age-old proverb that beauty is skin deep and says to young men who body build that by the time they reach the age of 40 younger men will point at them and say, “That’s a magnificent body you’ve built for yourself … shame about the bay window!”
Do you ever have the feeling that you continually wake from a beautiful dream into a carnival freak show?
How I ever got back to my seat overlooking the River Great Ouse, I suppose I will never know, and neither will you unless I lie. But whilst I had been away, someone had stuck a plaque on the back of the seat on which I was sitting, which said, “Here sits a right silly Tw..!” I am sorry to disappoint you, but the plaque in question had always been there; always. In fact, almost every park bench in the meadow bears or bore, depending on the time you think you know you are living in, a plaque in memory of someone or something.
The inconsolability that follows the loss of a loved one creates the need to make material a memory to which one can reach out and touch. My encounter with my own mortality had reminded me of this, that the fear of ephemerality is for most, not all but most, not so much the loss of ourselves but the loss of someone close to us, someone so dear, so precious that the thought of being left alone in a world of utter indifference is the thought that is unthinkable.
In fairy tales, heroes and heroines frequently die of a broken heart. Yet for us in our ephemeral world where everything ends but not that easily, we have to endure our broken hearts and somehow learn to live with them. They are perhaps, after all, all that there is in our fleeting lives which seem to go on and on and on and probably do forever.
12 December 2024 ~ Surviving New Year’s Eve: If I can so can you
Oh no, it’s that time of year again: what are we going to do at Christmas and where are we going to go on New Year’s eve?
I’ve heard tell that some party people are so far ahead of those like me who are not that they begin planning how they will spend their Christmas and New Year almost before the last one is over. I don’t disbelieve it. Do you know that there are people who actually plan their summer holidays!
Yesterday, when I was young, planning Christmas was not an issue. It was taken for granted that Christmas Day, and often Boxing Day, would be spent at home with the family. Thereafter, I would traditionally mosey along to catch up with my friends in Rushden, Northants, for some inter-New Year’s pubbing.
I enjoyed those family Christmases. Ours was quite a large family, which permitted us to indulge in a circuit of Christmas parties held consecutively at the homes of aunties and uncles.
New Year, however, was a different basket of presents altogether. Had I have owned a kilt, a set of bagpipes and a large hairy sporran, then I might have seen in the New Year in style ~ if you can call such fetishes that ~ but within my family circle Christmas was the favourite. New Year’s either trailed in second or sometimes never ran.
Looking back, it would not be too far-fetched to say that I have endured more disastrous, that is to say anticlimactic, New Year’s Eves than I have experienced successful ones.
I recall one New Year’s Eve, when I lived in London, trying to evade the issue of where to be doing what at midnight by drinking with friends during the day and then, come 9pm, scooting off home double quick and diving under the bed sheets.
Hah, fooled it this year! Problem was that I had forgotten to tell the rest of the world to do likewise. On the stroke of midnight all hell let loose. Fireworks flashed and blasted, the club up the road cranked out music at fever pitch, there was merriment in the street ~ blast it! ~ with people crying ‘Happy New Year’ and mawkish peels of auld lang syne came kilting through the letterbox.
I never got back to sleep that night, and my New Year’s day was like everyone else’s: faded, jaded and tired. I never went to the party, but I reaped the rewards of it second hand.
Surviving New Year’s Eve
Deriving what your average extrovert might see as a perverse pleasure in being on my lonesome whilst everyone around me obeys the 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt party”, appears to be a forte of mine.
For example, I am probably one of the very few people, if not the only person, to have surprised himself and the organisers by not turning up to a surprise 21st birthday party which was in fact his own. Now let that be a lesson to me!
One year’s New Year’s Eve was deliciously more disastrous than even the best of the worst. I had been left on my own in Rushden ~ What a place to be left on your own! What a place to be with someone! (Dear old Rushden, I love you really …). My wife, having received an invitation to spend New Year’s Eve in Paris, snook off with my blessing. And that was a lesson for her.
For some reason, an idealised one I suspect, she seemed to harbour the strange misconception that the Paris she was going to would be the Paris of the 1920s and 30s, which sadly it is not. I blame Humphrey Bogart and his Casablanca’s “We’ll always have Paris …”, when it is evident we wont and obvious we don’t. It’s like singing anachronistically, “There’ll always be an England …” when there isn’t anymore and will never be again.
My good lady wife returned from her New Year’s jaunt jaundiced by the revelation that Paris no longer possessed the style and panache of its glory years but resembled in parts a ghetto from some dark subcontinent back of beyond; and talk about aggressive begging, it was worse than the streets of Kolkata!
Whilst she had been busy upending a dream, I was sitting alone in the office of our antiques emporium, watching Christmas unfold through the lens of the CCTV camera. Almost every house along the street had friends or relatives calling, all of whom were in party mood. For me, with a Christmas dinner of beans on toast, listening to the festive strains of Leonard Cohen’s Christmas Hits, it felt as though the world was having a party to which my invitation had arrived too late. Yes, that must be the answer; my invitation was still in the post.
I am sure that anyone normal would have been distressed by this exclusion, but somehow it seemed a perfect fit for my innate sense of Gothic melancholy, and I have to admit, hand on heart, that I have never enjoyed a Christmas like it. The only way to have gone one better would have been to put the cat out.
Surviving New Year’s Eve
You’ve probably guessed by now that I am not the world’s most enthusiastic party goer. I don’t go a bundle on them, and I care for crowds even less. This could explain why during the 20 years I lived in London, I never attended the fireworks display held in the capital on New Year’s Eve and have no inclination still to this day to patronise large-scale events whatever they are and wherever they may be.
New Year’s Eve at a pub, waking up the following morning aching from head to toe, having slept it off in the back of a car, now that would be a New Year’s to remember. If only I could remember. I must have the details written down somewhere.
There was one year in London when the New Year’s festivities ended up in a pub brawl worthy of John Wayne. It was not my fault, I hasten to add, I was an innocent bystander, but I was carted away with the rest of them and with them sat out the early hours of a hazy New Year’s Day down at the local cop shop. As luck would have it, however, the venue we were taken to happened to be in Bethnal Green, where I knew of several pubs. So, after they’d booted us out with a caution, it was the hair of the East London dog for us, even though the rest of the dog was rather bruised and battered.
^: My first New Year in Kaliningrad, 31 December 2000: an introduction to party games
In Russia, New Year’s Eve is the big one, the ultimate annual celebration and most eagerly awaited public holiday. At this time of year, every year, Russians push the boat out, and they manage to do it impressively, even without a kilt. (“Excuse me, is it true that you don’t wear swimming trunks under your kilts?” “Not to the office, no. But we do when pushing the boat out.”)
One thing I wasn’t prepared for at Russian New Year’s parties was the obligatory playing of games. Playing games, not one but many, is an integral, unavoidable part not only of Russian New Year’s parties but any Russian party. I couldn’t abide them at first, but twenty-four years on, I seem to have acquired a satisfactory adaptive immunity to the professional and self-appointed maestros who it seems will stop at nothing to get you up on your feet and jump you around the room. With irrepressible party spirit, they hoik you onto the dance floor, where they make you perform embarrassing feats or assign a comedic role to you in an improvised mini-drama.
It cannot be said that these masters of ceremonies, self-styled or otherwise, are not good at what they do. They create a tempo, maintain engagement and prevent the party from flagging, but turbo-charged with extroversion and, in professional cases, the additional lure of fees, they give no concessions and take no prisoners. Woe betide the shrinking violet, the carefully cosseting introvert, the poor self-conscious soul should they fall into the sphere of influence controlled by these unrelenting cheerleaders.
I have heard it said about people, and I am sure that you have too, that they can adapt to anything in the fullness of time. I am not so sure about that, but a word in your shell-like if you please on the subject of party games. You have doubtlessly heard that a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, well, three or four shots of vodka does for party games what sugar does for medicine. Neck two or three at the start of the party and before the evening is out, your chaperone Self-Consciousness will have left you to your own devices and, mark my words and make no mistake, you will be up their strutting your stuff with the rest and the best of the extroverts. By the end of the evening, you might even believe that you have been speaking Russian fluently and even if you haven’t, nobody will have noticed. That’s the beauty of sugar. Trust me! Your razzling-dazzling party-game prowess will have knocked them all for six.
^:Mick Hart finding rhythm at a Russian party with the help of vodka and a fancy hat
This time last year I had no need to prep myself on vodka or brush up on my party games act, I was on my own again. (It can be addictive.) This bothered me not a jot. I togged myself up and tootled off to Kaliningrad city centre. The proposition was to have one or two libations in town, have a nightcap on my return, shout Happy New Year to myself too early, as my watch is always wrong, and then immediately hop into bed. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t happen that way. Forgetting that New Year’s eve is Russia’s most important holiday, no allowances had been made for every bar and restaurant being fully booked. Beer and vodka everywhere and not a drop to drink. Luckily for me, our neighbours came to the rescue, as they have before on New Year’s Eve. They invited me to join them, and I spent a pleasant evening in their company.
Not only did they save me from the Billy No Mates stigma, sitting alone on New Year’s Eve, but they also gave me access to a telly, something we don’t have, and whilst I am more than happy to do without a telly for 364 days of the year, on the 365th a telly comes in handy.
I am not keen on the stage-crafted jollity, the forced frivolity and razzamatazz of celeb-laden New Year’s Eve shows, but my enduring fascination with our allotted place in the slipstream of time magnetises my interest in counting down the seconds to midnight, besides which I have a thing for the Russian national anthem and the New Year’s presidential address.
^:Midnight New Year’s Eve, Kaliningrad
During the period when we owned and ran our UK antique emporium, we held a succession of New Year’s parties in the adjoining barns at the back of the building. They were, of course, not my idea, but I must confess, with barely disguised astonishment, that most went off successfully, with the unforgettable exception of one, when we all came down with the flu. A quick recovery was necessary, as racked in the room where the party never took place, perched a 72-pint barrel of ale with a shelf life of five days. Downing it before the deadline was not an easy task, but the commitment and enthusiasm with which we went about it was a remarkable example of collaboration at its best. We may have missed New Year’s Eve but only to make it last for a week rather than one evening. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill.
Surviving New Year’s Eve
These back-of-the-building New Year’s parties were always much of a stamina tester, since given our Russian connections, respect for our Russian guests and a sentimental attachment to Kaliningrad, first we would celebrate Moscow’s New Year, an hour later Kaliningrad’s and finally at midnight GMT, we would raise a glass (or several) to our own UK New Year.
We didn’t have a TV, but with the aid of a projector and a slice of white brick wall, we would screen recorded videos of a patriotic nature, belting out Russia’s National Anthem to coincide with two Russian New Year’s and ‘God Save the Queen’, the Royal Salute, on the stroke of UK’s midnight ~ or sometimes at 30 seconds to midnight or 30 seconds past, as nobody had the exact right time; in the depths of our party bunker nobody’s smartphone worked. These sequential celebrations led to three volleys of popping champagne corks in as many hours. We even played some Russian games and added a few of our own. Who said that it couldn’t be done! And me not a party animal!
Holding these parties at the back of the shop from which we sold vintage clothes meant we were never short of a prop or two, so should someone have the secret desire to see New Year in as Lenin, or transform himself into Winston Churchill, the fulfilment of their fantasies was not beyond their grasp.
^:1920s’ New Year’s Eve party in the back room of the antiques/vintage emporium
These parties would typically stretch into the wee kiltish hours, so that the full effect of the hangover would not be felt until late afternoon, the antidote for which was either to wend one’s weary way to the pub or sit at home feeling dreadful, reciting next year’s resolution, ‘never, ever again!’
Older now and wiser, such casting caution to the wind is over. No more shall I encounter the sort of reckless New Year’s Eves outlined in this post and certainly not the kind that occurred in 2002, when we arranged to meet Victor Ryabinin after a New Year’s party.
Arriving at 1am, we left Victor’s Kaliningrad art studio at 9 o’clock in the morning, having conversed and drunk through the twilight hours. The snow was thick underfoot and a blizzard up and blowing, and yet in spite of the hour and all we had drunk the memory of that morning trudging back to our flat is as clear as if it had happened yesterday. I can see the snow and I can see my boots mechanically tromping up and down, but only through one eye. I had one eye open, and one eye shut. Autopilot is not recommended, but it got me back safely that morning.
When all is said and done, surviving New Year’s Eve is small potatoes. It is the 365 days that follow which pose the greater challenge. The big issue is not what are you going to do on New Year’s Eve, but how are you going to spend the rest of the year. What are you going to do with it? What is it going to do with you? Perhaps if you set your mind on making New Year’s Eve not quite so happy as you have in the past, the year to come may be brilliant. We’ve had a lot of practice, but will we ever get it right? In the last analysis, does it matter? The countdown has begun: 2024 is quickly slipping away from us.
Whatever you do, Good Luck!
Below:The ghosts of New Years’ past. Hotel Russ, Svetlogorsk, since demolished …
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.
