An Englishman's Experiences of Life in Kaliningrad
Category Archives: Meanwhile in the UK
MEANWHILE IN THE UK
Meanwhile in the UK by Mick Hart, an expat Englishman living in Kaliningrad. A category of the blog expatkaliningrad.com
Meanwhile in the UK is a category of my blog expatkaliningrad.com. At its inception, I had fully intended it to be a minor category, allowing me to comment from time to time on UK current affairs but mainly to include innocuous pieces of a nostalgic or historical nature pertaining to life in the UK, possibly more as it was then than as it is now, and then along came coronavirus which, as we know, changed everything. At the time of writing (3 June 2020), thanks to coronavirus, this category would appear to contain as many if not more posts than some of the categories that I had envisaged would be salient, with due deference to my Diary category (2019/2020) which, again influenced by coronavirus, has expanded through my ‘Diary of a Self-isolator’ articles, a series that focuses specifically on Covid-19 in the Kaliningrad region and how the legal rules and social obligations enacted here to better control the virus have impacted our daily life.
MEANWHILE in the UK contains too many entries to preview in this category post, but as of 3 June 2020, the contents of this category comprise the following articles, arranged chronologically:
[caption id="attachment_1339" align="alignnone" width="225"] Hello! Hello! Hello![/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1228" align="alignnone" width="300"] UK Lockdown ~ a new board game to take your mind off lockdown[/caption]
I am aware that the tone and, indeed, the very composition of these pieces may not be to everybody’s taste. Quite obviously they are not supposed to be, so I shall not waste anybody’s time pretending that I feel in the least bit sorry about that. England is a great country ~ and the other chunks attached to it are not that bad either ~ BUT … (could this be an acronym for Britain Undermined Totally? Or is the only thing missing …TOCK?). He sang, didn’t he, ‘Let me take you by the hand I’ll lead you through the streets of London’. Well, yes, mainly London but also almost any and every UK city and town. Still, as the man who never deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature said (no, I am not referring to Obama, that was the Nobel Peace Prize, or Noble Appeasing Prize or something like that ~ but if the hoody fits, so to speak), ‘Times they are a-changing’. Let’s hope so, because for the UK at this present moment in time it is very much Paul McCartney, ‘Yesterday …’
Published: 5 December 2020 ~ Will Boris’ Bubble be Pricked this Christmas?
Back in the UK, meaning England, as no one has the foggiest what’s happening the other side of Hadrian’s Wall this Christmas, although it may involve whisky drinking and wearing a kilt ~ ask the Bubbling Jock ~ the dissent over bubbles that has been bubbling just below the surface ~ hubble bubble trolls and trouble! ~ and looked as if it would bubble over into a row the size of the South Sea Bubble has been blown away by bubbly Boris’ double bubble of allowing bubbles from one household to get together with other bubbles in other households, thus removing the risk of getting bubbled by the neighbours ~ a process known as bubbled and squeak ~ meaning that you will not have to think of ways of beating the bubblewrap for bubbling about at home with other people’s bubbles. The bubbliness of this is that depending on the size of your house, you will be able to have as many bubblechums in it as you like, even big bubblies with enormous bubblegums, and, if it is that kind of Christmas party, blow bubbles to your hearts content. Don’t mention the bubble car and the air bubble in its tyre! What does this mean, well it means that we will all be able to bubble off this Christmas, even support bubbles, those wearing stays and trusses, instead of sitting lonely at home eating mounds of bubbles sprouts and blowing bubbles in the bath. You will be able to eat more, drink more, get sloshed more and afterwards, with Alka Seltzer and Andrews Liver Salts bubbling up your glass, be prepared for the bubble to burst in 2021.
Whether this is good news for people in the UK, we are not altogether sure, but it is very good news if you happen to be a bubble or feel that you have been trapped inside a bubble for the last 10 months due to contradictory coronavirus cluelessness from bureaucratic bubbleheads.
Oh, and by the way, Happy Christmas!
Will Boris’ Bubble be Pricked this Christmas?Olga getting the support she needs from a Bubble Car.
Surely, the irony cannot have escaped anybody’s attention, that is to say the date on which Boris Johnson proposes to submit England to a new round of severe lockdown restrictions. When? November the 5th. Talk about pissing on your fireworks! Let’s hope that Guy Fawkes doesn’t own a time machine!
For me, personally, the sudden but by no means unexpected surge in coronavirus cases has solved one puzzle. It has ended my indecisiveness as to whether or not I should change the title of one of my post series from ‘self-isolation’ to ‘social distancing’.
Would I be resident in the UK, the choice would no longer be mine to make. The new title would be lockdown. But here, in Kaliningrad, Russia, no such lockdown exists and, as at the time of writing, there is no intimation of one being implemented sometime soon.
Nevertheless, this seemingly clear-cut situation compared to that in the UK has done nothing to ease the difference in opinion that persists between myself and my friend and sparring partner, Ginger Cat Murr, about how we approach life now that coronavirus is once again in the ascendancy.
The difference is a nuanced one. Both of us are batting from the same wicket when it comes to lockdown. We share the belief that any benefits derived from such draconian measures, and there aren’t any, at least proven ones, are offset by the detrimental psychological impact that lockdown is having in its breakdown and fragmentation of normal human relationships ~ proof of which there is plenty.
We both believe, therefore, that the role of those in authority should be to guide and not dictate, and that the decision to what extent he or she decides to isolate themselves should be a matter of individual choice.
Admittedly, at the outset of coronavirus, earlier this year, I fully supported lockdown, as it was, without doubt, a sensible precaution to take as we travelled into the unknown. But that was then and now is now. In moving on we would do well to consider the almost 100-year-old maxim: adapt, adopt and improve.
Thus, as much as I balk against using such media catchphrases as New Normal, if it has taught us anything it is that Covid-19 is here to stay and that there is not only no quick fix but at the moment no fix, full stop.
Less than three months ago, the media was awash with vaccine-race stories, the implication being that at any moment the Lone Ranger would be riding on down to rescue us from Black Hat Corona. Now, we are told that although the vaccine, or myriad vaccines, are on course and will be rolled out soon, there is no silver bullet. It makes you think that someone should be given the bullet, and that it would not be a bad thing if whoever it is fired at it should ricochet a while throughout the world of science and the media.
That being as it should, back to our argument; I mean the debate between Ginger Cat Murr and myself on the pros and cons of lockdown.
Where our opinions diverge is that whilst we are both anti-enforced lockdowners, I have no problem at this point in time of entertaining a limited period of house arrest in order, if it works, to take pressure off the NHS and to give the science community and pharmaceutical companies time to test, develop, produce and distribute the once-vaunted vaccines/drugs, even if, as realists suggest, the end result will be less of a precision hit as we have been led to believe and more like the discharge from a sawn-off shotgun. Well, better hit and miss than no hit at all.
Ginger Cat Murr, on the other hand, sticks like glue to the mantra that the policy should be to protect the vulnerable as best we can and allow the rest, those who do not fit into this category, the freedom and intelligence of individual choice, taking up the logic cudgel that shutting some venues, like pubs and restaurants, whilst keeping other places open is a bit like being in first gear and reverse at the same time. In other words, Ginger Cat Murr is firmly behind the Great Barrington Declaration.
England Lockdown Déjà Vu Scare
In the UK, the debate appears to be going the way Brexit went. The country is becoming polarised into two distinct camps: those that want and welcome lockdown and those that don’t. And here there is a funny (as in bizarre) thing happening. Take a look at these headlines from the UK’s online media:
The Independent [2 November 2020] ~ ‘We need better leadership to beat the virus – not more of Boris Johnson’s false promises’
The Guardian [2 November 2020] ~ ‘The Guardian view on a second lockdown: what took him so long?’
The Independent [1 November 2020] ~ ‘This lockdown is better late than never, but it would have been even better in September’
Making allowances for the usual, and inevitable, ‘party political broadcast on behalf of …’ does it appear to you that it is primarily the liberal left who are rooting for lockdown? If so, how strange? I would have thought that the very word ‘lockdown’ would be sufficient to ignite cries of totalitarian agenda from the usual suspects, and that any government, but particularly a Tory government, advocating such policies would be condemned out of hand for launching an assault against our sacred ‘uman rights! But then, as we all know, liberalism and rationale …?
England Lockdown Déjà Vu Scare
The insult-to-injury kernel of this nut, the lockdown debate, not partisan politics, and what I would hazard a guess will prove to be the enduring symbol of early 21st century angst, by which history will judge our governments, scientists and media, has to be the face mask.
Who would have thought, before coronavirus came along, that this little piece of material slapped across your face would be such a bone of contention? It alone defines the division between those who do as they are told and those who do otherwise? But it represents more than that, a great deal more.
The mask symbolises the confused messages that have launched a thousand conspiracy theories; obfuscated the issue like no other; completely and totally undermined our trust, not only in politicians but also, and more importantly, in the credibility of our scientists, whose case for and against mask wearing veers from claims that masks can trap the virus to masks are perfectly useless, with the disturbing caveat that in the worst case scenario the improper use of masks can aid and abet viral transmission.
What is the proper way of using and wearing a mask? Don’t ask, because once you have the answer you will realise that unless you are a walking ‘laboratory condition’ living in a hermitically sealed sterile environment, your chances of success are about as odds-on as winning the lottery.
Do I personally wear a mask? Don’t we all? [Leonard Cohen: “And if you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you.”] Well, that all depends, of course, on what I am doing and where I am. But in the ongoing struggle against coronavirus, I do just as much as the rules necessitate, albeit without conviction (in both senses!)
To end on a more personal note, I must confess that I do derive a certain degree of amusement from observing the relationships between individuals and their masks.
Whilst there are some people whose masks seem to have become a sort of never-to-be-removed fungus that they have assiduously adhered to their mug, others do seem to have adopted a loose, indeed very loose, definition of what mask-wearing entails and, by default, what they expect to achieve by it. The best example of this are those that plaster their masks about their mouth but have their noses hanging out, as if the proboscis during this particular pandemic has ceased to play any meaningful part in the respiratory process.
I remember seeing something on Facebook that compared wearing a mask in this way to the unlikely practice of men wearing their pants with their willy over the waistband. (I’m sorry? Have you something you wish to confess to, comrade?)
It would appear that coronavirus mask-wearing has led some of us to completely reinvent our faculty for breathing; why else would anyone wear their mask on their chin or tuck it into their throat as if it is a cravat? And what of those naughty people who in spite of ‘rules are rules’ deliberately flout them and do not wear a mask. Are they rebels? Selfish anti-social miscreants? People who have a justifiable grievance against mask-wearing, ie they believe that they facilitate viral transmission rather than prevent, or cannot wear a mask for medical reasons? Or, in the last analysis, could they be mask wearers of an unconventional kind, ie wearing a mask but not on their face!
Ask yourself this question: Every time you see someone without a mask, is he or she really maskless or have they got one secreted about their person, wearing it in the most unlikely of places? So far, I have not seen any authoritarian rules about how to wear your mask, only that you must wear one! So, where and how you wear it is open to interpretation. And there are cases, of course, where people should be exempt. Take The Invisible Man, for example, there would be as much logic in him wearing a face mask as, er, repetitive bouts of lockdown?
Updated: 12 March 2022 | Published: 23 October 2020
Warning! In response to Russia’s special operation aimed at ‘demilitarising and de-Nazifying Ukraine’, the UK media has embarked upon and is actively pursuing an intensive propaganda programme which is resulting in widespread anti-Russian sentiment and Russophobia. Aimed at cancelling Russian culture and demonising Russian citizens at every level, incidents of verbal abuse and physical aggression towards Russian nationals have been reported in various western countries, including the UK. This comes against the backdrop of reports suggesting that Facebook is greenlighting hate speech against Russians on its social media platform. You are advised to travel to the UK only for essential reasons and whilst there to exercise caution.
UNLESS you are a Russian oligarch, and reading this humble blog you most likely are not, moving to the UK is not a decision that should be taken lightly*. As with emigrating anywhere, there is a number of important considerations to chew over, especially with regard to where you would want to live, where you can afford to live, and where you can afford to live and most definitely would not want to live unless you are very adventurous or there is something wrong with your head.
In this article, we will focus purely on where you most likely want to live and the cost of living there.
Russians Moving to London: Costs / Jump to Section
Most Russians, when moving to the UK, understandably head for London for three reasons: it is where the money is, the action is and it is probably the only place in the UK that you know very much about.
Let us assume then that the majority of you who are heading to the UK optionally will invariably have your sites fixed on London, unless, of course, you are being sent to the UK on a company relocation scheme, in which case the choice may not be yours.
For the sake of argument, this article will suppose the former, that you are moving on your own volition, are in it for the money and that as you know little or nothing about the UK, London is your destination: you know that the Queen lives there, that the buses are red, the cabs black and that there is an awful lot of nightlife in the West End.
What you are probably not aware of is that London, albeit the capital city of the UK, the seat of government and centre of finance, is, in terms of attitudes, political prejudices, behaviour and mindset, the least representative place of the UK as a whole. In fact, London, economically, socio-politically and demographically, is so removed and distant from the rest of the UK that if it took off tomorrow and landed somewhere on Mars, not a lot of people would be surprised and some might not even miss it.
As the celebrated English comedian John Cleese stated, London is no longer an English city. It is claimed that white ethnic Britain’s are now a minority ethnic group in London. The division is reinforced further when you consider the fact that most London boroughs voted to remain in the EU in contradiction of the socio-political bias of the rest of the country, which mostly ran in favour of Brexit.
All things considered, the best way to consider London in its relationship to England and the UK in general is as a state within a state.
It thus follows that your experience of UK life, of living in London, will be an entirely different one than if you were to reside, say, in Scunthorpe. Where? Precisely!
Thus, for the purpose of this article, I have intentionally dealt with London and England as two separate entities. Why? Because they are.
I have also narrowed the geographical scope to include only London and England, as I have never been to Ireland, visited Scotland once on a flying visit and know very little of Wales, except for its shape on the map. So, let’s stick to what we know.
Russians Moving to London: Costs (Photo credit: George Hodan / publicdomainpictures.net; https://www.freeimg.net/photo/1484282/bank-broken-break-pig)
Russians Moving to London: Costs ~ Money
In this post we will consider that all important criterion, ‘Money’, taking into account the cost of renting or buying a flat/house and the cost of living when living in the capital, and how much you will need to earn to live comfortably. I know that there are guides out there, viz ‘How to holiday/live in London on a budget’. Forget them. If you are visiting London and, more importantly, planning to live and work there, you will want to enjoy the experience, and for this you will need money. If you want England on a budget, forget London and try somewhere else, like Wellingborough instead.
By far the greatest drain on your financial resources on moving to London will be the cost of accommodation. Is it expensive? No. It is extortionate. Whether renting or buying, you can expect to rob yourself of at least one-third of your monthly wage just in providing yourself with a roof over your head.
Let’s look at renting first, and some of those jolly statistics.
Russians Moving to London: Costs ~ Renting property in London
The amount you are willing to spend, or can afford to spend on renting, will determine the nature of the accommodation you rent and its location. Obviously, the financial outlay for a bedsit (everything sandwiched into one room), a house share (who’s nicked my milk from the fridge?), a self-contained flat or a whole house to yourself will attract different tariffs, as will where you live, ie renting a self-contained flat in the City will cost significantly more than, say, one in Brixton (you hope!).
Before starting out, remember that in addition to one month’s rent in advance and a whacking great deposit, you are going to need references, usually at least a character reference, ie from someone senior in the company where you work and from your bank.
Invostepedia.com1, states that “Housing costs are normally one of, if not the, largest expense in any budget. This is particularly true in London.”
It goes on to exemplify that a two-bedroom flat in the centre of London will set you back, on average, $2500 per month. The article is obviously addressing the American market, but at the time of writing this translates into approximately £1940, give or take a few pence. The same article goes on to say that outside of the centre, the cost of accommodation falls, and uses the expression to as “low as $1,400 dollars per month” ~ which in my book is still a substantially high £1083 per month ~ remember, we are talking about a two-bedroom flat, not a family residence.
Metro.co.uk2 tells us that the cheapest average rent to be found is in the Upper Edmonton district, and says that in the second quarter of 2020 the average rent was £538 a month. Now, at first sight, this seems to fare well with rented accommodation in other parts of the UK, until you read on and find that for £538 a month you get a room in a shared house (please, turn that music down!!)
The same article cites the St Paul’s area (EC4) as being the most expensive to rent at £1,316 per month, followed by South Kensington/Knightsbridge at £1,110 per month. How’s that for a room in a shared house! What did you say, where is Wellingborough? Don’t ask, or I might just tell you!
So, what will it cost you to rent a two-bedroom flat in the cheapest part of London ~ let’s forget about Knightsbridge!
According to comparemymove.com3 you can rent yourself a two-bedroom flat in Bexley for £1,152 a month.
So what is Bexley like. According to finder.com4 “The borough with the second-highest crime rate increase is Bexley, with an average increase of 7% over the last six years. Despite the increase in the number of crimes, Bexley still has a low number of crimes compared to other boroughs.” [article updated Aug 18, 2020]
Make of that what you will, but, from a purely economic point of view, remember that high-crime rates areas are reflected in the price for home insurance.
Thus, the cost of the area in which you choose or, indeed, can afford to live should not only be measured in £££s. The website ilivehere.co.uk5 has this to say about Bexley: “There were a total of 319 street level crime incidents in Bexley in August 2020. The largest category was Anti-Social Behaviour, followed by Violent Crime.”
So much for renting a flat in London. What about buying a home?
Russians Moving to London: Costs ~ Buying a property in London
The most desirable, and therefore the most expensive, boroughs in London are continually cited as Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Camden. Kensington and Chelsea appear to be in the lead as a place where most people cannot afford to live, with the price of an average home now in excess of £1.5 million6.
Conversely, the cheapest borough in London is said to be Woolwich, with the average price of a house around £322, 0007. (Presumably a three-bedroom house?)7.
What’s Woolwich like? I could tell you, as I lived nearby when I first moved to London, but that was quite some time ago ~ perhaps it has improved?
If you are looking to buy a house in London on a mortgage basis, which you would only be able to do after a rigorous assessment of your means to support that mortgage, including your credit rating, how much cash will you have to put down?
The lowest down-payment that you can expect to make is 5% of the mortgage loan, but 15% is considered to be a more reasonable figure. The simplest way of approaching the issue is to bear in mind that the larger the deposit you are able to afford the more certain you can be of obtaining a mortgage and the more favourable the interest rates will be8.
There are various ‘schemes’ to assist you in purchasing a home in London, such as the appropriately named London Help to Buy scheme, Shared Ownership, Rent to Buy, First Dibs for Londoners and the Starter Homes Initiative. But in the end, it all comes down to £££££££. This article by which.co.uk9 should either help you or help to put you off. In here, you will also learn about the option and pitfalls of buying a property not too far from London and commuting into the city each day. The upside is that you will get more property for your money and the mortgage is likely to be significantly less; and the downside? Any advantages that you are likely to accrue from a lower property purchase price, and therefore a lower mortgage, will, given the inflated cost of rail travel, be lost on your monthly travel fare. Drive into London? Only if you are a stress junky, like sitting in traffic and have no qualms about paying for those out-of-this-world parking fees, oh, and don’t forget the congestion charges!
For the time being, however, let us hypothesise that you have found a place to call home, have stumped up the down-payment and acquired a mortgage. The next thing on the money hit list is council tax.
Russians Moving to London: Costs ~ London council tax
Council tax is a tax levied on domestic property, in other words a tax on your home (and any other domestic properties that you may own). It is demanded by and paid to your local council, the administrative body for the area where your property is located. It is said that the revenue collected, which is paid to the council in monthly instalments, usually spread over a 10-month period for each year, is used to finance local services, such as schools, rubbish collection, road maintenance, street lighting and so on. That is all well and good, but rent and mortgage payments aside, or included, council tax takes a not inconsiderable chunk out of your monthly pay packet.
In London, every property is allocated a council tax band according to the property’s capital value. There are 8 bands in all, identified alphabetically from A to H, with ‘A’ being the lowest rated band and ‘H’ the highest.
In Barking and Dagenham, for example, if your property is valued as falling within the ‘A’ band, you can expect to pay £1,077.91 a year, and if it should fall in the ‘H’ band, a whopping great £3,233.74 a year10,11 .
By comparison, in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, if your property has been evaluated as a Band A property, you will be charged £824.55 a year and for Band H, 2,473.76 per year12.
But, wait a moment, isn’t Kensington & Chelsea supposed to be one of the most expensive boroughs in London in which to buy and rent a property? Yes. You’ve tumbled it ~ council tax just does not make sense. To understand it properly, you need to know all about ‘stealth taxes’13?
The irony is, of course, that if your property falls into Band H in Kensington and Chelsea, your £2,473.76 charge is not likely to worry you too much, as you would not be living there if you did not have the means to do so, whereas the £3,233.74 for a Band H property in Barking and Dagenham would no doubt be seen as an horrendous expense, wherever you live ~ never mind Barking and Dagenham!
Suspect you are being ripped off? Take heart, it’s the name of the boat we all are in.
If you think this ‘extra mortgage’ is bad, don’t ~ it gets worse. Next on the wage-packet mugging list comes your monthly or quarterly utility bills.
Russians Moving to London: Costs ~ Utility bills & living expenses
According to bystored.com, the average monthly cost for gas, electricity and water is about £160, so £1920 a year14. If you need Wi-Fi, then you should factor in an additional £20–£40 per month. In fact, utility bills are quite competitive in London compared to other areas in the UK ~ which is a blessing, because in some areas they are crippling.
And now we come to the nitty-gritty: everyday living expenses.
How much will I spend each month whilst living in London on everyday necessities, such as food and little luxuries, that is on going out for a drink or a meal? How long is a piece of string?
However long that piece of string is, you do not want to throttle yourself with it. Your monthly expenditure all depends, of course, on your habits and expectations. How much you eat, where you eat, how much booze you put away, do you like to go clubbing or are you a sit at home type ~ which you might have to be, if you have not got the ackers!
There are many websites out there that will give you a blow-by-blow account of how much specific things cost, from food prices to entertainment, two of which you will find in the reference section at the end of this article. And although London is one of the most extortionate cities in the world today, like anywhere else, you can budget yourself.
But, to give you a taster, so to speak, let us confront the most important things first. The average price of a pint of beer in a public house in London is around £4.60, but beware! ~ in some swanky eating and drinking places you can get really ripped off and pay as much as £22 a pint!
Russians Moving to London: Costs ~ Cost of travel around London
One of the greatest drains on your everyday resources is the dreaded cost of travel. Driving around London is a mugs game. You simply cannot get anywhere quickly and the difficulty of finding convenient parking is as ridiculous as the cost. Oh, and do not forget that nice Mr Sadiq Khan’s save-the-planet congestion charges!
It is generally agreed that the cheapest way to zip around London is to purchase an Oyster card. This will allow you to keep costs down at the same time as giving you travel access to all parts of London, whether you are travelling on the Underground, using the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), by overground rail, some river boats and on London’s buses.
To give you some idea of what you will have to fork out for an Oyster card covering Zones 1–6 in London that can be used at any time, it will cost you £12.80 per day15.
How much do I need to earn to live in London?
So, in conclusion, the all-important question is, how much do you need to earn before tax to live comfortably in London? If you trawl the internet on the basis of this question you will find the accumulative answer to be about £50,000 a year before tax. Of course, the definition of ‘living comfortably’ is a subjective one, and at the end of the day ~ at the end of everyday ~ it all depends upon what you call living and the lifestyle you aspire to.
Summary about cost of living inLondon, United Kingdom: Source of data highlighted below: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/London {acessed: 23/10/2020}
Four-person family monthly costs: 295,573.04руб (2,975.49£) without rent (using our estimator). A single person monthly costs: 83,347.81руб (839.05£) without rent. Cost of living index in London is 173.46% higher than in Kaliningrad. Rent in London is, on average, 899.30% higher than in Kaliningrad. Cost of living rank 41st out of 573 cities in the world. London has a cost of living index of 82.60.
*I should not have to say it, but I will. This series of articles is based upon the ever diminishing hope that some day soon our Covid-infected world will assume some sort of acceptable normalcy. Obviously, given the catastrophic Covid situation in London, and the UK in general, at the time of writing, any right-minded person would be better off avoiding it. For the time being, Robinson Crusoe and the lonely guy orbiting the Earth in a space station would seem to have it all! But, as they say, Hope dies last!
Stay tuned for my next post on moving to the UK, as distinct from moving to London.
Additionalreferences Comprehensive tabulated data on cost of living in London. No publishing date, but it appears to be current! [accessed: 23/10/2020] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/London
Pubs and homes made illegal in four new coronavirus regions including Beatlesville
Health Secretry Mel Hotcock announced emergency lockdown changes for Beatlesville, Whoreington, Hilterpool and Mindlessborough as loss of common sense continues to surge
Health Secretry Mel Hotcock announced today that if you don’t live together, then you can’t mix together. From one minute past half-past three today, give or take thirty seconds, non-mixing, other than between consenting mixers in the same home, will be legally banned from mixing ~ which includes cakes and cement ~ in private homes, private gardens or indoor venues in the afore-named regions. Mixing in communal areas, on street corners, in air balloons, on the side of the Great North Road, or anywhere else where the police can’t catch you and fine you 200 quid, has been cited as a jolly good alternative to everyone moving in together and mixing willy-nilly.
Beatlesville and Whoreington already have laws in place to prevent people meeting in private homes, which has led to a lot of crowded doorsteps, and there is strict guidance about meeting in pubs and restaurants, although this has not affected the ‘lonely guy’ who sits on his own in the corner.
So, how does it work?
Do you really expect an answer?!
Offenders face £200 on-the-spot fines, which is bad news for exhibitionists who like to keep their curtains open. However, people who share a bubble car or have childcare needs are exempt, as are schools and workplaces, as it has been scientifically proven that coronavirus only targets non-home mixers and people in pubs and restaurants in groups of more than six.
However, mixing in parks or beer gardens, whilst breaking guidance but not the law, is acceptable, as long as there is only six of you. What to do with the seventh is not clear but will suit some who are having an affair and want to get rid of the wife or return to those good old days at school where bullying by exclusion is a veritable institution. No government advice has been forthcoming about getting into beer gardens if going to pubs is made illegal, but by parachute is not illegal providing you drop in no more than six at a time. Anymore will break guidance rules but not necessarily the law.
Not attending sports matches is recommended, and no more than six players are allowed on the field at any one time, providing that they are living together and observing the one-metre distancing rule. {The FA, RFU and England and Wales Cricket Board were all available for comment, but we simply dare not publish what they had to say. Here is a hint: the FA said FA, the RFU said FU and the England and Wales Cricket Board cried middle wicket and bails.}
Mixing in pubs & home illegal
Good news! You can visit care homes, but only in ‘exceptional circumstances’ (whatever they are?) but take care not to break ‘non-essential’ travel rules. If you must travel then it is possibly best not to, unless you are a celeb whose star is fading fast and is desperate for publicity, whether good or bad. Of course, travelling to work or school 60 to a bus, or packed like sardines in a rail carriage, is quite permissible.
Stop press (and mixing!): We understand that local authorities in the four areas effected will be given £7 million, but we have not been told why? Do they know something we don’t? And who is going on holiday?
A Labour MP for Mindlessborough made a completely silly statement about mixing being the ‘root cause’ of everything ~ and no one listened to him, and probably won’t vote for him again. And the mayor of Mindlessborough, smitten suddenly by what the Daily Shunter described as another mysterious symptom of coronavirus, told the government to go and do one.
The introduction of a new ‘traffic light’ system, whilst it may not have the slightest chance of ending the confusion, will, it is confidently believed, add substantially to the confusion that already exists, and, besides, it just sounds good.
The three tier system, which will be applied to towns and cities according to all sorts of things — ie tier 1 very tight restrictions; tier 2 not so tight restrictions; tier 3 restrictions about as tight as a pair of pants with no elastic — have come under fire from people who just don’t get it ~ or haven’t got it yet ~ with Liebour questioning whether people in tier 1 and 2 towns will simply flout non-essential travel bans, drive to tier 1 towns and move in with other people — a ‘highly likely’ scenario (thank you Mrs May) if the pubs are open late.
Mixing in pubs & home illegal
Concern that the new pub curfew is piling people onto public transport at the same time — where social distancing is impossible to adhere to, non-essential travel questionable (what’s the point of going home where you can only mix with people you don’t want to) and where you can be fined £200 for mixing in an indoor venue, ie a bus — has invoked the logic that if there was no curfew people could just enjoy themselves and catch coronavirus in the pub instead of on the buses, or could easily catch it later were the pubs to close at normal times.
Liberal activists have accused the government of discrimination, arguing that in deciding where and when the public can and cannot catch coronavirus is a clear violation of virus’ rights.
So far there has been no legislation to combat the allegation that coronavirus is selectively racist or that the virus places men more at risk of fatality than women. It is hoped, however, that if the first finding leads to riots, that riot mixes will be limited to crowds of six, preferably from the same household. The government has already taken the precaution of hiding all statues behind giant face masks. As for the man thing, any suggestion that the virus could be sexist has been effectively dealt with under the Positive Discrimination Act.
Whilst everyone should do their utmost to obey the letter of the law ~ known by most as the ‘C’ rate ~ the public are advised to beware of scams, such as where policemen disguised as policemen try to fine you 200 quid.
Remember, there is a subtle difference between breaking the guidelines and breaking the law (200 quids worth of subtlety), but one thing the government has not made clear (amongst the many other things) is whether breaking wind is exempt or not, but laughing about it certainly is, unless you are breaking wind with others in your own household group, where, after several months of lockdown, it has probably ceased to be funny.
In summary, what we think, but don’t know exactly, is now happening in the four areas:
What was previously lockdown is now more lockdown than previously
Previously you could be breaking guidance, but now you can break the law instead (£200 please)
Previously it was illegal to mix with people in private homes and gardens, now we are all related and have much larger extended families
You can go to the pub with everyone from the same household with whom you have been rowing and getting on each other’s nerves for months, but if you mix with others, such as the man or woman behind the bar, you risk a fine of £200
You can mix in parks or beer gardens if there is no more than six of you, but the government advises against it in case the man sweeping up leaves or the girl collecting the beer glasses gets too close, thus making it seven people (£200 please!)
Exemptions for people in bubble cars, saying that they are childcare supporters, or working from home in pubs or parks must not look like MPs or else they will have to resign
Non-essential travel, which does not include trips to the outside toilet where no more than six from the same household are allowed to congregate for fear of contracting a social stigma, is at ‘guidance’ stage, but just when you get used to it, it could suddenly change at half-past-four-and-a-half and become a criminal offence (£200 please)
If in doubt don’t be an amber gambler, consult the government’s traffic-light system!
Red ~ you must not go anywhere or do anything, but you must go to work
Amber ~ you can go somewhere, but we are not sure where, but if you go, go in sixes
Green ~ go now, and go quickly before the lights change to red!
Updated: 12 March 2022 | Published 29 September 2020
Warning! In response to Russia’s special operation aimed at ‘demilitarising and de-Nazifying Ukraine’, the UK media has embarked upon and is actively pursuing an intensive propaganda programme which is resulting in widespread anti-Russian sentiment and Russophobia. Aimed at cancelling Russian culture and demonising Russian citizens at every level, incidents of verbal abuse and physical aggression towards Russian nationals have been reported in various western countries, including the UK. This comes against the backdrop of reports suggesting that Facebook is greenlighting hate speech against Russians on its social media platform. You are advised to travel to the UK only for essential reasons and whilst there to exercise caution.
It is not easy for Russians to emigrate to the UK, although it has been cynically suggested that possession of an extremely large bank account might go some way to oiling the wheels. Failing that, you could always apply the right shade of make-up, throw away identification and thumb a lift on one of those little boats that roll daily into Dover. However, if you are not into making things up and have no desire to be treated as a VIP, you could always try the normal route, which is? At the end of this article, you will find a reference section containing a list of UK Government websites outlining the daunting process which you must undergo should you wish to enter the UK, apply for Leave to Remain and possibly later citizenship.
Not that I am trying to put you off or anything, but the following account is taken from my diary. It is a personal record of what we had to go through, my wife and I, in order for her to live with me in the UK. Admittedly, all this took place a long time ago, back in 2000/2001, but I have no doubt that the process today is no less turgid, complex and frustrating.
Advice for Russians moving to the UK
As outlined in my first post I met my wife to be, Olga, when, as an English language teacher, she brought a group of Russian students to London for a month’s cultural visit.
I visited Olga in Russia, Kaliningrad, during the Christmas holidays and New Year celebrations at the end of 2000, and I returned to Kaliningrad again in 2001, staying twice for a month at a time.
A few days later we separated, and I returned to the UK to prepare for my interview at the British Embassy in Moscow, where I would have to go in order to obtain a British visa for my wife.
For Olga this meant a long train journey from Kaliningrad to Moscow; for me, it meant flying back to Russia about two weeks after returning to England.
Advice for Russians moving to the UK
From the time we decided to wed until mid-September 2001, I had spent six months or more compiling a dossier on Olga and myself which I would need to present to the British authorities in Moscow as proof that our relationship was ‘kosher’, in other words that our marriage was legit and not an arranged immigration scam.
As well as the official bumph, for help on which I had engaged the services of an immigration solicitor, it was necessary to include documents and evidence of a more personal nature, such as photographs of us together on outings and social occasions with family and friends, as well as copies of our private correspondence. It was a labour-intensive, costly and time-consuming task, and once completed the documents assembled easily filled one of those large Lever Arch files.
On my flight to Moscow, I could not resist comparing my situation with the thousands of so-called asylum seekers that Tony Blair & Co were importing into the UK on an almost daily basis. The irony was inescapable. Here was I, a British citizen, my English lineage stretching back over hundreds of years, having to go cap in hand to the British Embassy in Moscow to beg them to allow my wife to join me in England, whilst immigrants from every corner of the globe were being shipped in wholesale to shore up Tony’s indigenous electoral base, which was destined to collapse once the Socialist faithful tumbled that New Labour was in fact nothing to do with old Labour at all. The irony made me smile. I felt that I had been left on the shelf to make way for Labour’s ‘Buy into it now and get another thousand free’ policy.
Notwithstanding, I made the most of my time in Moscow. I had never been to Russia’s capital city, and I had furnished myself with the luxury of taking a few days off from work to ‘see the sites’ and recuperate once the ordeal was over.
It was an ordeal, make no mistake of that, but, like most things in life, it had its satirical moments.
We arrived at the British Embassy in Moscow at the appointed time. Outside and inside the doorway there was a group of Asian-looking fellows being corralled by three or four military-looking personnel touting automatic weapons. I rather stood out from the crowd as I was wearing a blue suit with a needle-point pinstripe and carrying a black briefcase. One of the soldiers, espying me at the back of the horde, came forward and asked, “Can I help you?” I showed him my British passport and explained that I had an appointment at 4 o’clock. He must have presumed that I was some sort of official diplomat or other, for he and his colleagues suddenly became extremely polite. A route was cleared for us through the crowd and, with a cheery and civil “Come this way, sir”, we were taken past the stairway, shown into a lift and saluted most decorously as we took off.
Well, you know what they say ~ every dog must have its day!
It was a different kettle of bureaucratic fish when we arrived in the vast open-plan waiting room upstairs. Once we had ‘booked in’, we were sat there for one hour before our interview and almost one hour afterwards. As with all bureaucratic institutions, making the public wait seems to be de rigueur. Admittedly, this protraction gave us plenty of time in which to get our story straight. What I mean by that is that we had been alerted to the fact that it was standard practice for the Embassy authorities at some point in the interview to split couples up, and whilst one person went back to the waiting area, the remaining person would be asked various personal questions about the other. Then, the role was reversed: the waiting person would be wheeled in and asked the same questions about himself or herself to see if the answers tallied.
You are no doubt familiar with the axiom that ‘it is the waiting that is the worst’, and our two hours waiting at the British Embassy proved the rule not the exception.
Down one side of the waiting area there was a series of doors leading to the interview rooms. The appointments worked on a numeric system, in other words you were issued with a ticket with a number on it and when your number was up ~ so to speak ~ as shown on the electronic indicator boards, off you not so merrily went.
During our wait, we saw several people enter the rooms. I am not sure whether they went in merrily, but what I can say categorically is that most of them came out looking anything but: at least one woman came out in tears and another looking distraught.
It was something akin to being at the dentists, with the patients ahead of you screaming whilst you nervously waited your turn
And then, suddenly, just when we had begun to suspect that they had forgotten us, it was our turn!
The little interrogation, sorry, interview room, could just about hold three people; there were four in ours ~ us and two interviewers ~ a man and woman. It was terribly claustrophobic.
Having witnessed the condition of interviewees prior to ourselves we were both ready for the third degree, but it never happened. From the moment we entered the room to the moment we left, the interviewers, contrary to our expectations, were the epitome of good humour, even joining in with and complementing my quips ~ which, I instinctively knew, I should not be indulging. There were formalities, with regard to the visa application and checking of sundry documents, but my Lever Arch file, so painstakingly compiled, hardly received a glance, and I was rather put out that they did not want to scrutinise it.
The questions that they asked each of us about each other individually were also taken in good part and raised a few laughs in the process.
At the end of the interview, we were not exactly told that Olga’s visa would be granted, but we were confident that things had gone well and reassured that we were on the right track from the advice that we were given on what we could expect officially when Olga arrived in the UK.
Whilst our visas application story has a happy ending, contrary to popular belief legal entry into and settlement in the UK is by no means guaranteed, and I cannot emphasise enough the need for assiduous preparation and the importance of taking legal advice.
In fairness, the UK is not alone in this: there are very few countries where legal entry with intention to remain is not onerous; it has certainly been no cakewalk for me moving to Kaliningrad, but like everything else in life, you must do your homework first.
In my follow-up article I will try not to deter you even more by outlining how much it costs to live in the UK ~ in London in particular ~ how much you need to earn to live, where your money will go and how fast your money will go.
A warning to the Curious (apologies to Peter Vaughan)
Updated: 12 March 2022 | Published: 24 September 2020
Warning! In response to Russia’s special operation aimed at ‘demilitarising and de-Nazifying Ukraine’, the UK media has embarked upon and is actively pursuing an intensive propaganda programme which is resulting in widespread anti-Russian sentiment and Russophobia. Aimed at cancelling Russian culture and demonising Russian citizens at every level, incidents of verbal abuse and physical aggression towards Russian nationals have been reported in various western countries, including the UK. This comes against the backdrop of reports suggesting that Facebook is greenlighting hate speech against Russians on its social media platform. You are advised to travel to the UK only for essential reasons and whilst there to exercise caution.
Part 1
An article in The Moscow Times (12 February 2016), ‘ Russian Women — They’re Just Not That Into You’, tells the disheartening tale that Russia’s “fascination with foreignness” is over and that Russian girls no longer fantasise about being “whisked away by a foreign prince in Levi’s”. (How about a foreign knave in a pair of ‘skinnies’ cut-price from Peacocks?).
As a long-time married man of a respectable senior age, I really could not tell you whether this is true or not. However, an inveterate Facebook commentator, a Facebook friend of my wife’s, who never misses an opportunity to respond negatively to my wife’s more political Russian posts, has asserted on more than one occasion that Russian’s are queuing to leave Russia and live in the UK and America. Allowing for the obvious hyperbole, an interesting question nevertheless emerges from this statement: Do Russian citizens still want to emigrate to the UK?
I use the word ‘still’ purposefully, based on my own observations that the Russia of today is considerably different from the one I encountered twenty years ago, which was reeling from the fallout of perestroika and was a time therefore when the quality-of-life divide between the East and West was at its most dramatic. Then, it was understandable that people, especially young people, were looking for a way out and that the West, with all its lauded material trappings and projected hedonism, was not simply a land of opportunity but a seductive Lady Bountiful ~ Shangri La personified.
You can imagine the banner advertisement, ‘Move to the UK ~ a better way of life awaits you!’ But life in the fast lane has a funny way of slowing down, and it could be argued, with no small degree of credibility, that since then Russia has caught up with, if not in many instances, overtaken the UK, where almost every citizen is heavily in debt, young people outpriced from the housing market, too many people and not enough jobs, and where political, social and ethnic division, moral malaise and gratuitous violence has replaced the cohesion and respect of the past.
Advice for Russians emigrating to UK part 1
Nevertheless, the answer is ‘yes’. Of course, there are Russians, predominantly younger Russians, who continue to be attracted by the lure of the West, but the allure is no longer the promise of a substantially better or more stable life. The internet has put paid to that naivety. Today, the internet offers a window on the world and however the media spins it, the other side of the so-called western democracies, like Jekyll’s Hyde, is continually surfacing.
As life on the edge and the chance to become embroiled in the left vs patriot battles are ‘No Sale’, I think we can conclude that what allure there is, is strictly financial. The old sheen may have worn off the good-times chimera with the insurgence of unserviceable credit cards and unsafe streets, but the financial remuneration from certain jobs and professions continues to pull and, you never know, there is always the chance you will beat the House no matter how fixed the wheel.
This post, therefore, and those that follow in this series, are dedicated to those of you in Russia who are considering and/or seriously contemplating emigrating to the UK. You may still be wondering, should I really do this? Or you may already have made up your mind that you are off; either way, I trust that by shedding some light on what you can expect to find in the UK economically, socially and politically, that this series of articles will serve to alleviate any delusions and misconceptions that you may have adopted. And whilst these articles are primarily intended as a guide for prospective or potential emigrees, some sections may prove useful for those amongst you who are travelling to the UK on an international secondment or for the purpose of tourism.
Advice for Russians emigrating to UK part 1
In the following posts I will consider the bureaucratic, economic and social ramifications of moving to London/moving to England, and in it I will explain why I have deliberately chosen to deal with London as a separate entity to England as a whole.
“Wokey, Wokey!!” No, that can’t be right. Sorry Nigel, what was that? “A bunch of metro-liberals …” and? Sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m being shouted down by a rabble of Extinct Liberals. Wait whilst I close the window. Ahh that’s better. Thank heavens I paid the extra £33,000 and had Everest fitted.
The question I wanted to ask before I was so rudely deplatformed was, what was Billy Cotton’s TV show catchphrase? Oh, it was ‘Wakey, Wakey!!’
OK, so the next question is not so much whatever is happening in the UK but who is letting it happen? I knew I should never have left the country when it needed me, but I had no idea that the government left as well?
10 Downing Street is anyone at home?
Putting aside for the moment that the coronavirus crisis was placed in the hands of the Arse & Elbow Committee, we have seen Churchill’s statue and the Cenotaph vandalised, public statues chucked hither and thither, Black Laughs Matter rampaging through the streets virtually unchallenged and unchecked, Extinction Rebellion blocking newspaper printing presses … If the government is not responsible for giving the loony left a hall pass, who is? Now look here Mr S ….
But such decline is not without its humorous side. Take the Mail Online’s article ‘Furious row over appointment of Tony Abbot …’ An indepth analysis of the accusation that Tony Abbot is a transgressor of all PCisms. He is a ‘misogynist, he is sexist and a climate change denier’, so something from up North claims. Forget the fact that he has secured significant trade deals for the UK. Here is a man (that will work against him to be sure!) who had he a statue would be well advised to strap on its lifebelt quickly. But wait a moment, wasn’t the left’s anti-Brexit campaign almost entirely predicated on economic repercussions? Mind you, race, sexism and gender issues have always been Labour’s safety net. If in doubt, denounce it about. After all, the last thing leftist opponents to Brexit want to see are those good old trade deals coming in thick and fast.
British universities get a Phd in Predictability
On the BLM front the ball keeps rolling and gathering, er, snow. News is that British Universities are falling over themselves to issue solidarity statements. No news is good news and there is no news here. As everybody knows, the British education system is an industrial canning factory for liberal-left hobby horses.
The silver lining is that whilst we are young we tend to read The Guardian but later, when we leave university, when life becomes just that bit more real, and we have jobs to keep, houses to buy, children to look after, mortgages to pay, we wake (present tense of woke) up and suddenly find ourselves becoming more and more conservative, until we finally reach the stage where we are reading The Daily Mail. Well, you know what they say about liberalism, it is like a bad case of acne: some grow out of it and some are scarred for life.
It must matter to someone … surely?
Top of the amusement pops has to be the announcement by a young, black, female activist, a BLM leader, that she is planning to form the first black-led political party in Britain. Allegedly, whitey will be excluded from leadership roles and there has been some suggestion on Twatter of white enslavement. Someone should advise this young lady that the UK does not end at Lewisham and that if she intends to all-aboard the UK political bandwagon the first thing she needs to learn is the art of concealing her party’s true intentions behind a smoke and mirrors manifesto.
As for taking control of the country by the political route, all I can say is good luck with that one. Nobody else has ever pulled it off. And my advice to anyone attempting it, short of don’t bother, is if you ever clear the starting blocks watch out for that last minute election hurdle, the old ‘don’t throw your Labour or Conservative vote away on a small party’ trick. It works for the old two-party combo every time. As for slavery, I thought we were already slaves ~ slaves to political correctness. Time for a quick burst of the Rule Britannias!
It’s a funny old world, innit!
At this point I suck my teeth ~ that is one solidarity I learnt years ago ~ and it should stand me in good stead as we also learn that in the United States out of ‘respeck’ the most important association for teaching English in higher education has adopted the resolution that black students can ditch ‘standard English’ and focus exclusively on ‘Black language’ instead. I know I am now referring to the good old US of A, but as we saw with the BLM riots things tend to skim across the pond these days a good deal faster than they used to. It’s enough to make ‘me eddy at me’ (which is, to you, ‘make my head hurt’).
And finally (if only it was), again in the USA, but you can buy it in the UK through Amazon, is the latest solidarity act in the form of a new book called In Defense of Looting. No, this is not me attempting to be satirical. Like a man accused by the left as being unsuitable for the role of UK trade envoy, even though he has already secured ‘huge trade deals’, because he is ‘sexist’ and has said some naughty things, this book and the rest of the madness is actually, really out there, which only goes to show that if nothing at all else matters Political Correctness most assuredly does.
10 Downing Street is anyone at home? ‘Wakey, Wakey!!’
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Evening in Bruges Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad 15 December 2025 – Evening in Bruges beer Would you trust a man with a clip-on black beard, wearing a dark bowler hat with a cherry stuck on top? Oh, you would. Well, actually, I did too, or… Read more: Evening in Bruges Beer: what’s it like?
A glance over my Christmas shoulder 8 December 2025 – Christmas past: roundup of Xmas and New Year posts Rolling back the years to revisit comments and observations on Christmases past, looking back particularly on those coronavirus specials, no matter how grim we may feel about the world today and the game of blind man’s… Read more: Christmas past: roundup of Xmas and New Year posts
Once you understand Ded Moroz (Дед Моро́з) and yolka (елка), you’re halfway there 4 December 2025 – Celebrating New Year in Russia: Different but Familiar They do things slightly differently in Russia at Christmas, or rather, they do things the same but at different times and with different names. In Russia, Christmas falls on the… Read more: Celebrating New Year in Russia: Different but Familiar
I don’t often see double before I start drinking 28 November 2025 – Zötler Bier Kaliningrad: Buy One and Get One Free! There is a place in New Orleans, but I bet you can’t buy one beer there and get one free, whereas, in Kaliningrad there is, and you can. Not that the prospect of… Read more: Zötler Bier Kaliningrad: Buy One and Get One Free!
Leaf it to me 25 November 2025 – Kaliningrad in Autumn: Turning over an old leaf From the earliest time of recollection, autumn has been for me my favourite season. In the days before real climate change, as distinct from the racketeering kind championed by the EU (achieve Net Zero or else!), I remember encountering… Read more: Kaliningrad in Autumn: Turning over an old leaf
A modest proposal (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)
In the land of wokes and snowflakes Hope & Glory are to liberals what a crucifix is to Count Dracula. Demolishing the BBC and sowing the ground with salt might help.
Published: 28 August 2020 by Mick Hart
‘Come on now, play the white man!’ Now, there is an expression that you do not hear every day. Back in the 60s, my friend’s father, who never passed up a chance to remind us what a true ‘English gentleman’ he was, often used to say this in circumstances where standards were lax or propriety compromised. It always produced a good titter from we children.
‘Ooohhhh, but you couldn’t say it these days!’. Well, I’ll let you into a secret, we do now and again, and it still raises a chuckle or too. The laugh comes not from the so-called racist connotation but from the jingoisticism of it. It is funny because it echoes and epitomises the arrogance, stuffy, and overbearing colonial mentality in which it is rooted. It is, in short, like many such sayings, a delightful and whimsical anachronism.
John Cleese, a master of satire, exploits similar examples of the British colonial mindset in the award-winning comedy series Fawlty Towers. The humour lies in the fact that it is self-deprecating, self-effacing. It demonstrates how the British, the English in particular, are able to send up their own national foibles and laugh at them. As our friend Victor Ryabinin would say, if you can laugh at yourself then you can laugh at others. Poking fun at one’s own national character is as British as a pint at the local and the age-old tradition of Yorkshire pud and roast beef on a Sunday. So, hoorah for the likes of Cleese and hoorah for Fawlty Towers.
Thus it was sad, nay deplorable, to learn on 12 June 2020, that the ‘gutless and cowardly’ BBC, as John Cleese called it, had removed an episode from the Fawlty Towers series for what The Guardian referred to as featuring ‘racial references’. Although, he was perfectly right ~ it was gutless and cowardly ~ it was not entirely unexpected, as more and more people agree that the BBC is the most institutionally liberal organisation in the UK, second only perhaps to the UK education system.
Fawlty Towers is just one of many classic TV programmes that have come under the BBC’s prissy PC scrutiny of late, although it is worth remembering that a lot of these condemned programmes are readily available on DVD. I recently watched a wonderful episode from Steptoe and Son on DVD in which old man Steptoe sings ‘Enoch’s dreaming of a white Christmas’, and, believe it or not, you can still buy the liberal anti-Christ of all 1970s’ comedy series Love Thy Neighbour and watch it at home in your Englishman’s castle. “Sssshhh, is the drawbridge up, Ethel?”
Knowing what the BBC is, knowing how it operates but wondering why anyone who does not read The Independent pays its license fee, it came as no great surprise when I heard this week that its latest PC purge was a suggestion to drop Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope & Glory from its televised account of the Last Night of the Proms from the Royal Albert Hall. Apparently, the BBC lovies had been impelled to consider this in fear of reprisals from the Black Lives Matter mob. What was it John Cleese called the BBC? Aaahh yes, ‘cowardly and gutless’. Thankfully, the response of the real British public to this blatant publicity stunt was such that the BBC did a double-fast U-turn. Had it not, I think we could safely say that the writing, which is already on the wall for it, would have been summed up in two short words ‘F… Off!!’
It is appropriate that the BBC, which is at the forefront of historical revisionism, advocates that Land of Hope & Glory is dropped from the Last Night of the Proms, as revisionism and PC-groveling has been a cornerstone of its programming philosophy for some time now. I believe it must have a slogan on its foyer wall, soon to become an integral part of the BBC logo, which reads, ‘If the left don’t like it we’ll rewrite it!’ They are particularly assiduous in this respect when it comes to creating parallel worlds, especially out of historical dramas; who recalls their not so finest hour with the sad and sorry remake of that superb old series Upstairs, Downstairs?
Why not just call it a day? Give away your heritage, history and ancestral home in one fell swoop; commit cultural suicide and become second-class citizens in your own country; anything has to be better than this slow, painful and humiliating death via cringing appeasement and craven capitulation.
Oh, dear, who is really sick to death of all this liberal-left diversity-inspired political correctness gunk? Alright, let’s rephrase that question, who isn’t?
For years now the poor old tolerant, long-suffering British nation has had to sit back and watch as this once great country of ours is dragged into oblivion by two-party seesaw politics and the self-interested jobs worths and subversive lobby groups who run it ~ or rather, who are running it into the ground. No wonder the bods in Westminster did nothing when the adherents of BLM tried to remove Churchill’s statue. I should think it is a constant reminder to them of how gutless they have become. Come on lads (and the lady quotas) Tony’s been gone a good while now!
Anyone who was naïve enough to believe that things might change when the Conservative party got back into power need look no further than the humiliating paralysis that settled over Westminster during the BLM riots to prove how wrong they were? Was it not Nigel Farage who asked, what is it that the conservatives are conserving? I mean if the BBC is as anti-conservative as it is constantly claimed to be, then why does not the Conservative government do something about it, and, whilst it is at it, why not replace Ofsted for Instead (Investigating Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills), a department tasked with rooting out the liberal bias entrenched in the UK education system?
Ahhh, somewhere over the rainbow. It is obviously far easier, and possibly agenda fulfilling, to back down, give in and accommodate ~ I mean, think of what might happen at the ballot box! But the sad truth is that each time a concession is made in the false names of tolerance, fairness and equality, because one ethnic group or another demands it, another little piece of British history and its way of life is chipped and scraped away.
When terrorists attacks occur in the UK we are immediately told by the powers that be and their ideologically motivated media, that a few individuals, a minority, are trying to drive a wedge between us ~ ‘us’ being some fantasy co-operative who all live happily together in Pleasantville. The usual community leaders are rolled out, inadequate apologies muttered and, before you know it, we are off down another candle-lit vigil road.
As a friend of mine once said, he was surprised some budding entrepreneur had not cashed in on this process. Considering the way this country is going, someone could make a fortune selling candle-lit vigil kits wholesale.
This wedge, sometimes referred to as the thin end, is, in fact, the fat end. It is up there with the numerous acts of street violence, murders, muggings and the latest moped crime trend that has earned London the unenviable sobriquet of stab-fest capital of the world, and which plague many other big cities and towns in the UK.
The thin edge of the wedge is reflected in the fact that the old British way of life is extinct. It is goodbye to leaving your front door unlocked and evenin’ all Sergeant Dixon, and hello to bolts and barricades and where’s that bloody SWAT team when you need it!
The thin end of the wedge, which is more like a very annoying and painful wedgie done whilst wearing Y-fronts, can be estimated from the following occurrences and their psychological and societal impact on a nation that has never been more unsure of itself, more identity insecure, more unstable and more divided.
Let’s roll some of these thin wedgies out:
😆We must rename the Christmas holiday to Winter Lights because as Christmas is a Christian holiday it might offend the sensibility of certain migrant groups
😆We must not fly the Union Jack, because to do so is racist
😆We must not fly the Union Jack, because it is a fascist symbol
😆We must not fly the English flag, the St George flag, because it is racist, and because it is a symbol of colonialism
😆Serving members of our armed forces, who risk their lives in defence of the realm, are spat at in the streets by certain migrant groups
😆Serving members of our armed forces are refused service in shops run by people of particular migrant origin
😆Serving members of our armed forces are told that they must not wear their uniforms in public for fear of violence from certain migrant groups
😆State-run institutions and some private companies instruct their staff to remove crucifixes as it may offend migrant sensibilities
😆Remembrance Day poppies are burnt by sensibility-challenged migrants; liberals on social media urge for the poppy symbol to be dropped
😆Individuals who cry racism are awarded very large sums of money, often from the taxpayer’s purse
😆 Every day, the printed, televised and internet media is saturated with tales of a politically correct nature
This is a just a handful of rather unpopular and perennially irritating issues that clutter up and weigh heavily upon the life of every Briton. Perhaps you would like to add more of your own.
Until Nigel Farage burst upon the scene, one mention of immigration and you were immediately branded as racist. In fact, you are still branded as racist whatever you say. For example, if you were to say, I don’t think much of this engineered society of ours perhaps we’d all be better off if immigration was controlled, what would that make you? Concerned about your country, your traditions, way of life and a stable future for your children? Of course not. You would obviously be a racist, fascist, extreme right wing, far right, intolerant, a Nazi … in other words a threat to the liberal status quo.
On the opposite side of the coin, the liberal-owned and democracy-managing media continually refer to the extreme left, the neo-marxist and the various brownshirt organisations that masquerade as humanitarian groups fighting for ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ as anti-fascists and counter-protesters. Sounds good, does it not, if not a tad one-sided?
In 2016, the leader of Britain First, Paul Golding, narrowly avoided jail having being convicted for wearing a political uniform. Was he wearing full body armour like the black Forever Family activists that marched through Brixton this month (did anybody get arrested for that?) ~ no, he was wearing a fleece with a Britain First logo on it. I see so many T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces adorned with logos and slogans which, if there was any justice, should get the wearers sectioned, but hey ho and freely around they go, why? Because it is one rule for one and one for another, depending, of course, on the establishment’s patronage.
The internet, that once-trumpeted doyen of free speech, of which it was famously said could never be governed or censored, is governed and censored in the UK~ only the British establishment, who have always done a good line in misnomers, whenever they take down someone’s ~ wait for it! ~ social media account, explain the act of censorship away by stating that the person concerned, predominantly white British, was inciting racial or religious hatred. And watch out for those mean tweets, you could have plod at your door! But only some doors and not others …
The list of politically correct follies goes on and on and on, and yet still the UK has the gall to present itself to the rest of the world as the crucible of democracy, where freedom of speech is sacrosanct. The reality is, however, that freedom of speech in the UK is a lot like rights, ie there are rights for some and not for others. In other words, there is freedom of speech for some, as long as you stick to the establishment script, but woe betide you if you stray from it!
How many of you are old enough to remember Britain as it really was, in the days before PC-enforced diversity? Be honest, when you think of it, does it not make you want to sing, “Oh, but it was all so simple then …”?
How complicated, stifling, suffocating, tumultuous, frustrating and just downright stupid it has all become. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to round up all the racisms, tolerances, civil liberties, freedoms of this and that, rights, discriminations, equalities and all the other infectious isms and bin them, and then make further references to them unlawful! Imagine the tables turned ~ found guilty of being politically correct. Good stuff, ay!
When you stop to think about it ~ and they would rather you did not ~ how awful it is that Great Britain, which was once as its name suggests Great, has been reduced to this. And whilst you are at it, spare a moment to commiserate with the hapless lot of legacy Britons, those Britons whose families go back generation upon generation. What have these legacy Britons had to put up with? ~ the oppression, the intimidation, double-standards, bullying. The only people who believe they have benefitted from so-called progressive liberal values are those who are, bless them, really nice but naive people who want desperately to be thought of as tolerant or enlightened, and are used as democracy fodder as a result, or self-culture loathing anarchists.
Whenever I see or hear the phrases celebrate diversity, champion diversity, show more tolerance, or hear references to ever-increasing levels of enrichment, I am reminded of the conditioned response of the villagers in Patrick McGoohan’s TV series The Prisoner. The villagers, the brainwashed citizens of the Village, run around with rainbow-coloured umbrellas like performing poodles, pretending that life is harmonic, whilst Number 6 warns them through a megaphone that “Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages”.
What do you want to be a rotten cabbage with a rainbow umbrella or a realist? Either respect the history of your country and uphold its importance and rule of law or else denounce it once and for all. You cannot have your Yorkshire pud, roast beef, tats and eat it. Either value your traditions and celebrate them, set them in stone and let those who want to live here know that if they do not want to live by the rules and values of the host country don’t bother coming (or even better, just close the borders) and for those already here who violate our laws demand that your government take suitable punitive action. It really is time to draw the line and to say that this line must not be crossed. If not, simply cave in, admit defeat, wave the white (oh, sorry) flag and give the country away.
I understand that we are going to hell in a handcart, and the trick is to leave the brake on just enough so that hopefully the complaining oldies drop off naturally one by one, thus leaving the way open for the softened generations processed in the jelly mould of the liberal left’s compliance factory, otherwise known as the British education system, to carry the future can. But, if that is the plan, why wait?
Why not just call it a day? Give away your heritage, history and ancestral home in one fell swoop; commit cultural suicide and become second-class citizens in your own country; anything has to be better than this slow, painful and humiliating death via cringing appeasement and craven capitulation.
It really is time gentleman please, or as dear old Leonard Cohen might say: “It’s come to this, yes it’s come to this and wasn’t it a long way down …”
Either play the white man and resuscitate the patient or switch off the life support machine, and then perhaps whoever is left can get on with their lives. Perhaps … Land of Hope & Glory? Hope, as they say, dies last!
Once upon a time there were two towns, one called Decadence and the other Tradland. Although the children who lived in each were much the same as children everywhere, the two towns, and the way they were run, were altogether different.
The children who lived in Decadence were told by their prefects that they lived in a blessed land, a land of plenty, full of endless supplies of sweets, chocolates and ice cream and to get this endless supply they need do nothing. In Decadence, there was precious little in the way of laws, except for those that related to credit and borrowing, and all mention of good behaviour or, heaven forbid, morality had been swept under the globalist carpet donkeys’ minds ago.
The children of Decadence had ‘rights’ and all they needed to do to ensure these rights, which in turn ensured an endless supply of sweets, chocolates and ice creams ~ or so they were led to believe ~ was to go the betting office once every five years and put a cross on one of the betting slips. To make it easy for the children, who to be honest did not understand much about high-stakes gambling, the National Democracy Race had always been a two-horse fix. There were no winners only losers; no matter who you placed your bet on, you always got more of the same. Most of what you got was promises, but as the children of Decadence had been taught from primary school to the time that they left university, usually with a triple first in banner carrying, what was the point of promises? They were only there to be broken.
Nevertheless, Decadence was sold to the children who lived in it and to the rest of the world as such a bountiful place that people flocked there from every forsaken corner of the world. It did not matter that thrown together in this way these poor unfortunates despised one another with a vengeance, squabbled, fought, and grappled for power, as the prefects just kept on telling them that Decadence was Utopia and everybody in it one big happy family. And the more they repeated this, the more the children who lived there, who let me say dear reader did not know any better, wanted to, or were made to, believe that what they were told was the truth .
A Fairy Tale for the End of Summer 2020
Meanwhile, whilst the children were getting fat, indolent and lazy on too many sweets, ice creams and chocolates, the prefects, who had carefully schooled them in the art of looking the other way, were busy plundering the world of its wealth and resources. From the children’s point of view, this good life was a life without end. They really did believe that ice creams, sweets and chocolates grew on Rights trees, firstly because the prefects told them so and secondly because those same kind prefects were always willing to grant them credit, as long as they paid the interest, of course.
A few miles away, down the road from Decadence, there was another town, a very large town indeed. In this town the children were not much different from the children in Decadence. They, too, liked ice cream, sweets and chocolate, but they had been taught that in order to have these luxuries they had to work for it. In Tradland, rights were not enough to get ice cream, also to be considered was respect, social responsibility and a very old-fashioned and out-dated idea by Decadence’s standards, morality.
The prefects in Tradland were not as bad as they were painted by those in Decadence, who, as one old sage from Decadence remarked, “Decadence is ‘frit’ of sovereign values, and therefore ‘frit’ of Tradland itself” (The parish magazine promptly labelled him as the village idiot. He was excommunicated by the high priest of the Internet, Facebook, and never heard of again.). But in Tradland sponsored-egotism, waywardness and the continual free-for-all mentality that was worn like a badge of honour in Decadence was not encouraged. Neither did the prefects of Tradland support a World and Its Wife attitude with regard to who came to their town and who lived there. In short, they wanted their town to be lawful and safe, to be proud of its history and conserve its way of life.
Whilst Tradland did not care too hoots how Decadence was run, the prefects in Decadence had been brought up on the nasty belief that you could never have enough. Gangs in Decadence had sprung up and these gangs, such as Hope for More Ice Cream and Hate for Traditional Values, were bent ~ as were many of their followers ~ on whipping up trouble in their own town, and the prefects, whilst never admitting it, supported them in this quest and used words like free toffee apples and equal candy floss opportunities as a pretext for bullying other towns to adopt their ice-cream-on-credit mentality.
As Tradland had more bows and arrows than Decadence, the only way Decadence could get the upper hand was to attempt to change it from within. To help them to do this they enlisted the assistance of the men with bent noses who owned and ran the parish magazine. Using a language which a lot of the children understood, Sheep, they produced endless articles calling the prefects of Tradland all sorts of nasty names and promoted the lawlessness and bad behaviour that epitomised Decadence as a natural product of freedom whilst disparaging the rule of law and order and conservative values in Tradland as a sorry old state of affairs ~ a bit like a shop where you couldn’t steal sweets.
One day, quite unexpected, a stranger climbed over Bills Gate and ended up in both towns, and more besides, at once. In Decadence, where there were many strangers, and no one was allowed to question him on pain of having their ice cream tubs removed, he passed among the children like a peculiar shepherd. Dressed from head to toe in black, and carrying a strange kind of crook, he wove back and forth among his flock, who were far too boisterous and self-obsessed to even know how close he was to them ~ certainly less than a metre (cough! cough!).
In Tradland, the stranger was spotted at once, but although Decadence’s parish magazine, Gardnonsense, reported that Tradland’s evil prefects had immediately deprived him of his lollipop, he had in fact been placed in quarantine, as the elder prefects of Tredland, being wise men, suspected who he was. And do you know who he was children? He was the man from Pestilence!
Some children later chanted the ancient rhyme, “Never on a Saturday, Never any day, Here comes the bogeyman send Sorryarse away”, the same rhyme was sung by a minority of rebellious children in Decadence, but they were soon shut up by the prefects and parish magazine, which threatened them with inciting hatred against harlequin ice cream, which was a state-ordained brand rolled out and force fed from early-years school, through doctored GCSE grade to a university first in PCism.
In spite of the best efforts in Tradland and none in Decadence, the contagion spread ~ or, at least, appeared to spread! Some of the more selfish children thought that it was simply an excuse to stop them going to the shops to glut on ice cream, whilst still others cried that the Pills & Potions Gang were masterminding a protection racket called Vaccine.
Whatever anyone believed or did not believe, Decadence declared a race: who could develop the vaccine quickest. It was all a matter of more sweets, chocolates and ice cream, and their reputation as Freeloadersville (as some wags called Decadence) depended on it.
About the same time as all this was taking place, a pantomime came to town. It was a spiffing wheeze in which the main jape was to accuse people of things that were done centuries ago and then pull their statues down. The prefects, anti-farcists, and other street gangs loved it. Decadence’s police force, which had long ago had its force forcibly removed, dutifully ignored it and the prefects of the town clapped furiously from the front rows as they did absolutely everything in their power to do absolutely nothing about it. It was such high jinks, this pantomime, that it was not long before the game had spilled out onto the streets. Children were running amok. Choc ices became an overnight best seller and statues of the great and good were coming down faster than you could sing “Roll me over, more from Dover, Roll me over, take them down and my country away”. Talk about knees up Mother Brown! It was all jelly, ice cream, sticky buns, sweets, chocolate and …. yes, children, you’ve got it ~ it made one sick to the stomach.
Just when tears before bedroom looked imminent, it was announced in Tradland that a vaccine had been found. What a calamity! Unless something was done about it quickly all bets would be off! As luck would have it, luck for Decadence that is, at about this time a small village that lay between Decadence and Tradland, Agoodexcuse, developed a serious problem. The man who ruled the village was looked upon by some not as a guiding prefect but a stern and strict headmaster. A good many of those he ruled, began to call for change. Some believed that this call for change had been aided and supported by the ice cream salesmen from Decadence, but Decadence’s parish magazine painted an entirely different story, with tales of ice-cream deprivation and sweets-withholding practices contrary to the natural laws of Hedonism (which was a large and frivolous amusement arcade owned and operated by the Obama Fence-Sitting Company ~ those who spoke Sheep adored it!).
The parish magazine was a gay parade of encouragement, urging the prefects of Decadence and towns of a similar ilk to intervene, ‘More sweets! More Ice cream! More sticky buns!’ it cried, whilst at the same time, terrified of true conservatism, throwing out more than a hint here and there that the prefects of Tradland were up to no good.
And then, just at this point of time ~ when pestilence and conspiracy theories were at their most contagious, when the children were out of control, the police and prefects powerless, the vaccine race lost, the ice creams melting, the sweets getting sticky and a man who would not stop taking about boats coming in ~ an incident occurred that enabled the prefects of Decadence to resort to the old tried and tested distraction routine, ‘Look out … he’s behind you!’ A staple of all good pantomimes!!
Someone, a free-ice-cream advocate, who did not like the prefects of Tredland, had suffered an accident, but the prefects of Decadence, who never missed an opportunity to put Tredland down, aided and abetted by the parish magazine, Gardnonsense, was bellowing that someone in Tredland had tripped him up!
The Twice-Daily Blackmail, a parish magazine that appealed to older children who loved parrots, had a parrot field day and, before you knew who you were or who you were standing next to, although you knew you had been here a lot longer than them, although they wanted you to believe that you were a stranger in your own town and they were the best thing since boats and Dover, the preface had been written ~ Tradlandaphobia had come round again.
Now, should Tradland attempt to help in any way the village of Agoodexcuse to heal its wounds, Decadence will roar that anyone who is naughty enough to trip someone up will not think twice about regulating ice cream in a small and vulnerable village! And, this dear, children is their despicable plan. They have merely written a preface to the narrative that they have already written.
But take heart! Like all good fairy tales this story has a moral subtext. See that man over there, the one in the long dark robes lurking by the school gates. See the bag of sweeties in his swarthy hand. If he offers you one resist it, resist it at all costs, because it comes with a hidden price, the most expensive price you will ever pay ~ culture. Because come the day when the ice cream melts, and it will, all that he will leave you with is the wafers of your memory.
There is more to life than ice creams, sweets and chocolates, and it is not what you cannot take with you that matters (WYCTWY Matters), it is what you leave behind, such as heritage, history, ancestral home, for future generations.
If Decadence was writing this story, even though tradition means nothing to it anymore, it would fall back on the traditional fairy tale ending, and say of itself and its peculiar admixture “And they all lived happily ever after!”
Coronavirus & the Fear of Conservatism ~ but whose fear is it?
Published: 16 August 2020
Pinch me, wake me up, please tell me that I have been dreaming. I will not go so far as to say that the BBC has plumbed new depths of depravity, but could we say stupidity? Once renowned for its incisive journalism, for producing some of the finest English historical dramas ever to cross the airwaves, not to mention some of the finest comedies, the beeb has allowed itself to become so completely enslaved to the revisionism and foppery of liberalism and its politically correct mantra that it is fast becoming a parody of their worst excesses. Consider this article, if you will: ‘The fear of coronavirus is changing our psychology’.
There now follows a series of quotes, please look away if you are not up for a giggle:
“Due to some deeply evolved responses to disease, fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity. Our moral judgements become harsher and our social attitudes more conservative when considering issues such as immigration or sexual freedom and equality. Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations.” {Oh no, Ha! Ha!}
“The recent reports of increased xenophobia and racism may already be the first sign of this” {Ha! Ha! Ha!}
“In the same study, a reminder to wash their hands led participants to be more judgemental of unconventional sexual behaviours. They were less forgiving of a woman who was said to masturbate while holding her childhood teddy bear, for example, or a couple who had sex in the bed of one of their grandmothers”. {Ha! Ha! He! He! Others, Its and all … er, and so what?}
“… the threat of disease can also lead us be more distrustful of strangers. That’s bad news if you’re dating.” {… guffaw! and good news if you are not as cautious as you should be}
“… it can result in prejudice and xenophobia … fear of disease can influence people’s attitudes to immigration.” {snort, well, yes?}
Where’s Michael Palin when you need him! Oh yes, most likely virtue-signalling by calling for a new politically correct design for the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George. We’ll press on without him.
At one level, the nonsense in this article is reassuring, for instance you may have been labouring under the false apprehension that your conservative view on the world and the renewed trust placed in less ‘eccentricity’ and more social and moral stability is the onset of coronavirus itself (one of those media-alleged new symptoms) or alternatively has been brought about by me, in Kaliningrad, hacking into your juice blender.
No connection, but as for the sex bit, I would think that your lust affair with your teddy bear, Action Man model or Obama doll is your business, and as for grandma’s bed, well it is the same as gay parades, it is all very colourful, isn’t it, but do we really have to applaud every time?
As for strangers, generation upon generation of grandpops and grandmas (all suspicious about ‘whose been sleeping in my bed’ (wasn’t that something to do with teddy bears? Or did that happen at their picnic?) have been warning the young about the dangers of strangers ~ “If you go down to the woods today you’ll be in for a big surprise …” ~ there you are, it’s those teddy bears again! Admittedly, it is not good for dating, and we no longer have Cilla Black to reassure us it is all safe fun.
And what about, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Fear of coronavirus ‘can result in prejudice and xenophobia … fear of disease can influence people’s attitudes to immigration’”.
Presumably, when in lockdown you would welcome the chance to see more people, is not that the reason why when lockdown was eased hordes of Brits, both legacy and in name only, threw away their masks like women’s libbers of old discarding their burnt bras, and shooting off to Skeggy and Brighton for the day, showed the world, whilst showing themselves up, just how tolerant they were to every piece of space invasion. The same could be said about Brit attitudes to immigration, unless of course you realise that the country is over-populated, that the NHS cannot cope and as the economy is at the lowest ebb it has been for years there is little sense in encouraging thousands of illegals to land upon these shores and put them up for free in Kent hotels. But then that’s not xenophobia, that is common sense.
So, we can see from this article that the definitive message is do not worry about catching coronavirus and feeling ill, do not worry about catching coronavirus and feeling very ill, do not worry about catching coronavirus and it killing you, the main concern is that the fear of coronavirus may wake you up from the PC nightmare inflicted upon you for the past 30 years and make you want life to be normal again ~ a return to Britain the way it was.
Rest assured, this is not your fear, but the fear of it happening is sure terrifying someone.
Quick, bring on the ‘vaccine’!!
You’ll just have to wait until you’ve had the vaccine!
Hello! Hello! Hello![/caption]
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UK Lockdown ~ a new board game to take your mind off lockdown[/caption]
