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.
