It turns out that Joe was not such a bad guy after all. He served a useful purpose in keeping Donald’s seat warm for him.
7 November 2024 ~ Welcome Back President Trump to the White House
I don’t often cry Hallelujah, at least not first thing in the morning, but 6th November was an exception. The pseudo-liberal left media on both sides of the pond almost had me believing that all was lost, almost had me believing in their lies, but for all their twists and distortions they had failed to sway the U.S. election: Harris was out of the running; Trump had won the day.
Consequently, what would have been just another grey, dull, overcast morning in damp and soggy England was miraculously transformed into an overwhelming sense of jubilation. The news that barnstormer Trump had, against seemingly insurmountable odds, risen phoenix-like from the ashes of liberal machinations, overcoming conspiracy theories, court cases, investigations, two impeachments, in-party opposition and at least two assassination attempts and then gone on to win the election and make history as only the second president of the United States to serve non-consecutive terms in office is surely a sign from on high that long entrenched liberal-left hegemony can and will be defeated.
Welcome Back President Trump
There are a number of reasons why Trump romped home to victory, but the bedrock of his success is the robust stance he is taking against the greatest liberal-orchestrated evil of our time, engineered mass immigration.
This affirmation by the American people that mass immigration is fundamentally iniquitous and has to be stopped is a cue for the people of Great Britain. If you are going to do it the democratic way, then kick out the Cons and Liebour and, before it is too late, vote in Farage and Reform.
In the aftermath of Trump’s triumph, it is virtually unbelievable that the lefty media are asking questions like why and how did Trump succeed? Are they really that thick? Do they really not get it?
Only pathological liars falling victim to their own psychosis could be bewildered by Trump’s victory. They’ll be asking us to believe next that mass immigration enriches us, rather than admit that it and the wokest drivel by which it is underpinned are the greatest existential threats to Western civilisation since the invention of Tony Blair.
It is reassuring to note that recent political developments show positive indications of the routing of the left: Brexit, Nigel Farage’s accession to Parliament, Viktor Orban’s defiance of EU dictatorship, right-wing political gains in France, anti-immigration riots in the UK and now the Return of Trump.
Trump’s election, his re-election, is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular in U.S. history. That Trump has endured and prevailed against inestimably powerful and pervasive forces of hate, malignancy and corruption, restores faith like nothing else could in a democratic system which, whilst much lauded by posturing liberals, is sadly viewed throughout the world as deeply flawed and bastardised.
Now Trump is back where he should be, there may be hope for the future yet.
4 November 2024 ~ Kaliningrad flea market has moved to a new location
The Kaliningrad flea market that has occupied the pavement area close to the Central Market, and in more recent years spilled over onto a ribbon of disused ground bordering the moat of the Wrangel Tower, has officially moved.
For me, as I dare say for many, the relocation of this sprawling and excitingly chaotic masterpiece of antiques, collectables, curios and junk, marks the end of an era. Not that we did not know that it was coming; plans to move the market on have been in the pipeline for years. Indeed, I wrote about the proposal in a 2022 blog post: What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk Buyer’s Paradise?
Kaliningrad flea market moves to a new location
We all know that nothing stays the same forever; Königsberg can testify to that. Nevertheless, knowing that change is imminent rarely compensates when it comes to pass.
There will be some, of course, who will breath a sigh of relief that most days, but on a Saturday in particular, they will at last be able to stroll without let or hindrance along the sidewalk next to the Wrangel Tower instead of running a zigzag gauntlet through sandwiched lines of dealers’ stalls agog with curious clutter-buggers.
I, for one, however, will miss the incipient urge whenever I visit the city’s Central Market (food market) to detour to the ‘junk’ stalls to see what they have on offer that I cannot live without, such as an old tin bucket, for example.
There have been occasions when travelling by bus on route to somewhere else that I have accidentally alighted at the flea market. Of course, I have only gone to look, not to buy. So imagine how surprised I have been on arriving home to discover that whilst I was only looking a Soviet belt, a Königsberg ashtray, a kitsch ornament and an old German helmet have somehow jumped into my shopping bag.
Kaliningrad flea market has moved
I have not yet had the chance to work out which bus route one should take to get to the market’s new location. Gaidara Street 8 is its new address; a piece of land, I am told, that lies opposite the bridge on the way to Sovetsky Prospekt.
At the time of writing (4 November 2024), the market is not yet functioning. By all accounts, the site is vast, but a great deal needs to be done to bring it up to snuff, to make it seller- and buyer-friendly. News is, however, according to the market organisers, that the site will be ready and the market up and running in a matter of days not weeks.
Now, where did I put my Kaliningrad map? What have I done with my bucket?
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: 387 Osobaya Varka
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
31 October 2024 ~ 387 Osobaya Varka beer in Kaliningrad good or not?
Have you ever wondered why Baltika Breweries number their beers instead of giving them a name, for example Russian Sausage or Yalkee Palki. I read somewhere that it is a hangback to Soviet times when everything was numbered, ie School No. 26, Bakery No. 38, Factory No. 97, but perhaps the real reason Baltika use a number instead of a name is that it is easier to recall. Also, whenever one asks for one of their numerical brands, they have first to refer to the brewery name. I mean you can hardly ask for a ‘9’, can you, without running the risk of buying a pair of 9-sized slippers, or a packet containing a German negative. Nine, I mean no; when you ask for any Baltika beer with a number instead of a name, you have to append the ‘Baltika’ first, and, from a marketing point of view, this is rather clever.
Disregarding the fact that not many people ask for bottles of beer when they take them off the shelf (No theory is perfect!), Baltika may have smugly thought that they had the numbers game sewn up … and they had, until along came this little beauty: a beer that goes by the name of 365, sorry that’s a phone number of an old flame (Old Flame Bitter! That’s a good name for a beer!) I meant to say 387.
387 Osobaya Varka beer
387 (never start a sentence with a number!). Is it a bus? Is it a car? Is it a plane? No, the answer to the riddle lies, as revealed by Svoe Mnenie Branding Agency’s comment on the website packagingoftheworld.com, that this Russian brew was not named after Tyre Repair Centre No. 387, but because of 387’s vital statistics. According to what I have read, each bottle of 387 contains three types of malt – lager, caramel and burnt; it has taken eight hours to brew; and not less than seven days of natural fermentation. Put it together and what have you got? 387. Now that’s rather clever too, is it not!
More clever is the fact that the figures ‘387’ all but completely overwhelm the label and are produced in a clear, strong, attractive typeface with closed counters, thus ensuring that the beer leaps out at you from the multiplicity of brands seeking attention on any one shelf.
The little image of the Kaluga brewery projected in a contrasting orange colour on the collar label is also a nice, effective visual touch.
Heckler: “’ere mate, did you buy this [beep] beer to look at the label or to drink the [beep]?!”
We’ll have less of that, my good man! I thought we said no liberals?
When I first bought and drank this beer on 12 September 2022, it cost me 79 roubles. The average price today for a 0.45 litre bottle would appear to be around 80 to 84 roubles. Can’t complain about that.
Beer 387 Osobaya Varka, to use its full name, weighs in at 6.8 per cent. For an old Englishman like me who is used to drinking beer at strengths between 4.1 and 4.5, that’s quite a hike, but who is complaining? Live dangerously. It’s safer than walking down many a street in London once the night has mugged the day.
As always (“He’s so [beep] predictable!” It’s that [beep] heckler again!), the assessment of a good beer and, indeed a bad beer, starts with hooter appraisal. Tops away and the smell genie that pops out of the bottle is strong, sweet and barley-like, with jostling hoppy undertones. The aroma is not lost between the bottle and the glass, into which the nectar happily settles to give a good mid-amber colour and a head which is ‘now you see it and now you don’t’.
The head fizzling out faster than a TARDIS escaping from Dover [see episode 28,000 of Dr Woke ‘The Invasion of the Third Worlders’] is as significant to me as paying my TV licence. I don’t want to have to shave every time I drink a beer. I don’t get the taste and high-volume foam connection, if, indeed, there is one.
Here we have a mid-hoppy taste; a malty taste; a little bit of fruity taste; culminating in a taste that owns up to its strength. The first sip loses nothing in the making, and there is a nice balance among the flavours. The finish is a ‘back of the tongue’ gripper, and the aftertaste in no hurry to let you down and scarper.
The beer is moreish, which is good news for the brewers and also for you, providing you weren’t so daft as to only buy one bottle!
Patric McGoohan’s Prisoner said, “I am not a number, I’m a free man!”
Beer 387 is a number. It is not a free beer, but, believe you me, it’s worth every rouble.
“AB InBev Efes is currently the biggest player on the beer market in Russia” AB InBev Efes
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: 387 Osobaya Varka Brewer: AB InBev Efes Where it is brewed: Russia Bottle capacity: 0.45 litre Strength: 6.8% Price: It cost me 79 roubles (0.63p) Appearance: Light amber Aroma: Barley with fruit nuances Taste: Starts mild-hop bitter; Finishes with a bite Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Unique Would you buy it again? There’s no reason not to
A brilliant beer with rich and original flavour. Caramel malt gives a rich colour, whereas brown malt adds a rye bread aftertaste. This light beer is slightly stronger than average, which makes its flavour more complex and pronounced.
Wot other’s say [Comments on 387 Osobaya Varka from the internet, unedited] 😊Excellent beer, for lovers of strong foamy drinks, good quality, easy to drink, no alcohol aftertaste! [Comment: No idea where he got the ‘foamy’ from!] 😊Yes, I have been enjoying this beer for a long time. It goes well with pistachios. It is cold and just right in the heat. Not weak and not strong… 😑 The taste is flat a bit sweet, a bit sour with faint malty finish. Too much carbonation along with alcohol make very bad mouthfeel. Really needs some food pairing. Avoid it. [Comment: A bit bitty. Avoid bit.] 😊I forget what it tastes like, but I know I enjoyed it!
25 October 2024 ~ Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk Wired for Quality
“It’s all so confusing,” so says a friend of mine and quite often. He’s a scientist, now retired, so he should know. And he’s referring to life. When I echo his sentiments, “It’s all so confusing,” he invariably replies, “It often is,” and sometimes he will say, “… but it is also often quite exciting.” Sometimes, when reflecting on life, he opines, “It don’t make sense!” And although, ‘it’s all so confusing’ and also ‘often exciting’, it actually does make sense that there are two Telegraphs: one I wrote about recently, which is in Svetlogorsk, and the other of which I am writing now, this one is in Zelenogradsk. The Telegraph in Svetlogorsk is a cafe and an art gallery, whilst the Telegraph in Zelenogradsk a restaurant.
Each Telegraph has a different function, but both are eponymously named after the same function their buildings had when the world was a different place.
The Telegraph Restaurant
The Telegraph restaurant in Zelenogradsk occupies the building of the old German telegraph and post office, which was established in the coastal resort in 1896. It is located at the top end of the high street. However, as the terms ‘top end’ and ‘bottom end’ are absolutely subjective, serving no useful purpose to man or beast, let me qualify its location by adding that it lies at the end of Zelenogradsk’s high street nearest the bus and train stations and not the end where the public park and sand is.
Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk
The old telegraph building is one of those solid, stalwart red-brick affairs, instantly identifiable within the Kaliningrad region as being authentically German. In the summer months, a small area is set aside on the pavement next to the building for al-fresco dining and drinking; in winter, during the festive season, this same area is requisitioned for Telegraph’s contribution to the town’s impressive transformation into an imaginatively lit and magically decorated New Year’s holiday wonderland.
Whilst it occupies the ground floor of the former telegraph office, the contemporaneous Telegraph is accessed by a flight of steps. “It don’t make sense!” “It rarely does!”, with the exception of this region, where ground floors are often elevated above the basements below them to let in light from windows at pavement level.
On entering into the stairwell, the scene is set for the Telegraph experience. The walls are bare, stripped of their plaster, exposing the brick beneath. A black facsimile telegraph pole stands in sharp relief, and further along an illusory hole containing some kind of map twinkles in the muted light from illuminated markers. This introduction tells you in no uncertain terms that the Telegraph’s interior will not be run of the mill. It prepares you for an industrialised look with novel touches of retrospective modernity in keeping with the telegraph legacy from which it takes its thematic cue.
The two rooms, which are actually one room joined but visually separated by a deep, broad arch, continue the bare-brick look. The ceiling has a patchy effect, as though some of the plaster has fallen off, but as none lies on the floor below, we must chalk this up to designer licence. The lightbulbs in the industrial lampshades are the visible filament kind, they compliment the shabby chic, and the untrunked cable which supplies their power openly climb the walls.
The here and now in which we live may be the ‘wireless age’, but back in the day when the Telegraph building fulfilled its original function, the term ‘hard wired’ was literal. Appropriately, therefore, no attempt has been made to conceal the wires that link the bulbs. They travel across the ceiling in an exhibition of bold impunity.
The world of wires and plugs, the working environment of yesteryear’s telegraph offices is captured in some detail in the large, framed black and white photographs arranged around the restaurant’s walls. Study these at your leisure to see just how much times have changed.
The theme of the mechanical age continues in the restaurant’s choice of tables. Old treadle sewing machines dating in manufacture and use from the 19th to mid-20th centuries make attractive tables once the machines have been removed.
The leading manufacturer of hand-operated and treadle machines was a company known as Singer, who suspended the Singer name in the mid-section of a wrought-iron framework, bridging the divide between whilst connecting the table’s end supports. The elaborate nature of the frame’s decoration is what gives the tables their appealing clout, and it is thumbs up to the Telegraph restaurant for retaining the tables’ pivoting foot pedals. Attractive features in themselves, should you be prone to tippy tapping, as in his youth was one of my brothers, these pedals will entertain your feet at the same time as you sit and eat.
Telegraph Restaurant Zelenogradsk
Telegraph is a restaurant, it isn’t really a bar, but it has a bar of sorts, and I like that. I never feel at home and cannot quite get comfortable drinking alcohol in a barless zone. Sitting in a restaurant, seated around a table without a bar in sight just doesn’t do it for me. I liken the experience to sitting in a car which does not have a steering wheel. Without a bar something is missing; most likely it’s the bar.
For all its designer emphasis on the basic nitty gritty, Telegraph is cozy. In the all-important lighting department, which is the principal component in any attempt at coziness, Telegraph scores 11 out of 10. Excuse me, whilst I correct myself, my maths are notoriously weak; I meant to say scores 12.
In one sense, this is not good. Telegraph is so terribly cozy that it’s hard to get me out of there. Thank heavens that buses and trains work to things called timetables, which is something else worth mentioning. Telegraph is but a short walk away from the town’s bus and train stations, making it, if you time it right, and I usually make sure that I do, the perfect stopping-off place on your outward journey and a convenient traveller’s rest at which to pause on your way in.
Talking of food, as we now are, Telegraph’s speciality is the promotion of Baltic cuisine. It must be up to snuff as the restaurant is duly cited in Wheretoeat [in] Russia 2024 and in December 2022 was awarded the regional title of ‘Baltic Cuisine’.
Another award that Telegraph deserves is for its truly handsome website, especially in the category of ‘best designed for ease-of-use’. Navigate to its menu pages for a comprehensive and mouth-watering insight into the range of dishes it has on offer. And just in case you are wondering if I intend to provide you with links to the website and to the restaurant’s menu, wonder ye no more. Here is the link to Telegraph’s website: https://telegraph.rest/ and here is the link to its menu: https://telegraph.rest/menu . And whilst I am at it, here is the link to its page on social media: https://vk.com/telegraph.rest .
Ah, but it’s a grand menu to get lost in, isn’t it? But now that you are back, ask yourselves a question, are you fans of quirky? I most definitely am, particularly when it involves valuing and sustaining dying traditions. Thus imagine my delight on discovering that the present-day Telegraph salutes its earlier namesake by enabling its patrons to buy, write and send postcards directly from its premises to anywhere in the world. Who needs digital messaging and who needs things like WhatsApp when you’ve a pen, a card, a stamp and post box! WhatsUp with that? Nothing!
My scientist friend, the one whom I mentioned at the beginning of this post, has a variety of different catchphrases to suit or not to suit as the case may be the topic of almost every conversation. For example, whenever we discuss Britain’s existential threat, the not-accidental migrant invasion, he will with cynicism and irony ask: “Well, what can we do about it?” When we are feeling philosophical, ruminating together on the mysteries of time, “Where would we be without it?” And when we discuss giants of history ~ politicians, generals, luminaries of the silver screen, pop stars, authors, artists and the figureheads of the American mob ~ his concluding remark is likely to be “And it didn’t do them any good!”
Let’s try to apply these questions and statements to the Telegraph in Zelenogradsk:
What can we do about it? Go there! Where would we be without it? Deprived. It didn’t do them any good! Well, obviously it didn’t. Because they decided to go somewhere else when they should have gone to Telegraph.
You see, when you look at it scientifically, it all makes perfect sense!
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
25 August 2024 ~ Bistrampolio Beer in Kaliningrad is it any good?
Bistrampolio! It’s very much a mouthful, isn’t it! To the complacent, or could that be arrogant, English, who expect everyone else to speak their language, it sounds like a cross between a poser’s restaurant in old-time London’s Tooley Street and a disease brought on by inveterate mint eating. But have I got news for you: it’s nothing of the sort!
Bistrampolio is, for want of a better description, a chocolate stout. Its full name is Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus, but we won’t hold that against it.
It is brewed by Lithuanian brewers Aukstaitijos Bravorai, who seem to specialise in my favourite bottles ~ flip top ~ and win countless awards in my mind for best labels in their class, possibly because their labels exist in a class of their own.
The Bistrampolio bottle is dark but not as dark as its contents. If you were to pour it into a glass, and where else would you pour it (?), and then swiftly turn off the lights, you wouldn’t be able to see it. No, honestly, it really is that dark. As black as your hat, which is green.
And even with a miner’s helmet with a torch strapped on the front, which you probably bought from eBay, you would only need to wear it, if you felt you had to.
A full body is easily found, and this beer certainly has one. If you’ve got a girlfriend like that, you’ll know perfectly well what I mean.
Bistrampolio Beer in Kaliningrad
I’m busy at the moment sampling what the brewers of Bistrampolio tell me is a beer containing five types of malts. That’s not one malt! That’s five! Another interesting figure, which ties in like a pair of corsets to the image of full-bodied, is its 6% O.G., making it not just a full body but an appreciably strong body.
The flavour is all there, and believe you me it’s rich, but, unlike many strong, dark beers, its consistency is light, not intensely glutinous, thus giving you, the drinker, the full malty, as it were, but in a rather surprisingly thirst-quenching way. Drunk chilled, as the brewers suggest, Bistrampolio hits the right spot from the top of the glass to the bottom.
Has it a good finish and an aftertaste to match? What sort of question is that? Has a globalist got morals? The first is a yes; the second a no. Bistrampolio is smooth, as smooth as the finest black velvet. Comparatively speaking (why not?), Guinness is to Bistrampolio what a horse-hair blanket is to silk. “On my sainted mother’s life, to be sure, to be sure, to be sure …” In the second place, there is no second place, for if Bistrampolio was a horse and I a betting man, I would be quids in on this one-horse race.
But enough of this idle banter! Switch the light back on and let’s have a proper look at her!
She’s dark, dusky, sultry; she carries the perfume of caramel malts with just the right hint of barley; and boy does she go down well.
With a pedigree like this (woof!) and an O.G. of 6%, she possesses the kind of darkness that I could gladly take a knee for, or anything else for that matter…
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai Where it is brewed: Lithuania Bottle capacity: 1litre Strength: 6% Price: It cost me about 310 roubles (£2.71) Appearance: Dark chocolate Aroma: Rich malty chocolate Taste: Handsome Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Classic Would you buy it again? I want to
“BISTRAMPOLI MANOR unfiltered chocolate dark beer. This 6% ABV beer is brewed with a combination of five malts – Pilsner Light, Munich, Caramel, Dark and Chocolate – which gives this beer a dark mahogany colour and a subtle dark chocolate bitterness and aroma. Serving this beer cool (about 12 ⁰C) reveals its true aroma and taste.”
Wot other’s say [Comments on Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus from the internet, unedited] 😑 Smooth and very drinkable. Just slightly sweet overall. Not a roast bomb. 😐 The taste is sweet, malty with a noticeable rag. [Comment: Is he drinking it through his underpants?] 😊The aroma is persistent and tasty. Damn, really tasty. The aroma is clean and chocolatey. [Comment: Now here is a chap who tells it as it is!] 💪F*ing Handsome! [Comment: My brother! He’s got a way with words, but rarely gets away with them …]
In case you are wondering should you travel to the UK, my advice to you is you’d be safer as the target in a circus knife-throwing act. And it’s nothing to do with the ‘far right’ and all to do with immigration.
12 August 2024 ~ UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Travel Warning Issued: Stay away from the UK
What a great idea! What a cunning plan! Was it the new government’s or the evil far right’s? Apparently, several countries, including the likes of Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, are warning their natives not to travel to the UK as it is a dangerous place. I have to agree with them, but it is nothing to do with the riots. Now all we have to do is to get countries spanning the entire continent of Africa, Pakistan and the whole of the Middle East to issue similar warnings ~ even Rwanda might join in ~ and like stranger things which happen at sea, perhaps the ‘little boats’, which are anything but little, will sail away to somewhere else, like Never Never Land, and never return again. Amen.
After 27 years of being forcefully told that multiculturalism and diversity are the best thing since the Black and White Minstrels disbanded, and you’d better believe it, keep your mouth shut and only say what we want you to say, the lid has finally blown off the UK pressure cooker. Perhaps now at last the UK can stop looking for bogus invasions from fictional enemies abroad and address the home-grown threat from the immigrant invasion. Sorry? What was that? You doubt it? So do I.
The British media and the newly appointed Labour government are at such frenetic odds to divert the British public from the root cause of the riots, the immigration crisis, that if the situation was not so egregiously dire, and as we have seen in the past few days so dangerous, it would make good comedy. The UK is disintegrating and everyone and everything is to blame except for failed multiculturalism, perpetual immigration and an endless sludge pump of stifling woke.
Social media is to blame, especially Musk’s ‘X’ (just because he dismantled Twitter’s left-wing hegemony and then scrapped the platform’s silly name for another silly name); Farage is to blame, because he tells it as it is (I blame it on that suit he borrowed from Tommy Robinson.); GB News is to blame, because it raises questions and highlights issues that the lefty mainstream media would rather not confront and evidently has no answer for; white Britons are to blame because some of their compatriots have taken to the streets to vent their anger and frustration, when they should be playing the white man, complying and capitulating and taking whatever shit is shot in their direction by the establishment’s anti-white fan. It would not be so bad if it was aimed at everyone else, but unfortunately it seems to them that they are the only target.
Who will not be blamed, until history exposes them, is the UK’s political elite and the puppeteers, their globalist masters.
How UK mainstream media plays down and manipulates the truth This is an exercise you can do at home. Go to UK Google News and search on ‘stabbing’. This will give you a list of articles. Read these articles and see if you can find the identity of the person (people) being stabbed and the identity of the person (people) doing the stabbing. This is a simple test for mainstream media obfuscation. Often, the articles seem to be hiding something ~ and we know what that something is!
Also, watch video news reports carefully. For example, some of the mainstream news videos of the alleged assault by two policer officers at Manchester Airport. Here, the bias is often conveyed almost subliminally in the tone of the narrator. It is a weary, sorrowful, injured tone, as if the person doing the talking has contracted a virulent dose of the bed-wetting liberal lefties. Both techniques are employed to a mutual end, but one plays with your focus whilst the other attempts to infect your thoughts like a virus through your feelings. Read. Watch. But above all be sceptical.
Recent things to consider: * What started the ethnic riots in Leeds: Google answer: anti-police sentiment.
* UK serviceman stabbed: A hard left newspaper standfirsts its report with the usual get-out-clause, the attacker could have a mental health issue. Well, yes, all of these enrichers who have nothing better to do in life than roam around stabbing people, blowing people up and, for an encore, blowing themselves up have, by definition, mental health problems. The question you should ask yourself, and your politicians, is, why do we keep importing them?
* Police officer kicks assailant in head: Did you know it happened at Manchester Airport? Airports are prime targets for terrorists. Terrorists fit a certain profile. They could be carrying weapons. When people hit you, you generally hit them back, and after all they are the Police Force.
** Southport dance-class killings: Media focus switches from victims and perpetrator to accusations that ‘false claims about the attacker’ went viral. The riots start, and who, what and why are submerged beneath blanket MSM coverage of the threat we face from the ‘far right’. “I say, Binky old boy, I don’t think I’d know one if I saw one. They must be pretty rare, not like those ethnics and lefties, what! They take to the streets like boats on water!”
Attention: Diversion Ahead! The heartfelt sigh of relief from certain ruling quarters and the leftist MSM when the riots kicked off in the aftermath of the Southport carnage could be heard all over the country, especially in the capital. If you are of a cynical mind you might suspect that this diversion was the one they had been waiting for.
The leftist mainstream media were off the chocks like a 1970s’ streaker on ice: “Far Right Riots!!!” they shrieked. The government seized on this diversionary tactic to condemn the rabble in no uncertain terms, vowing to bring them to justice Edgar J Hoover style (He looks a bit like him, don’t you think?) Strong and stronger words were uttered!
In keeping with the modern idiom, the mainstream media did not report, it ranted, raged and fumed and then it slammed and blasted, and at the height of this hullabaloo the issue of and the evils of relentless immigration were quietly, oh so quietly, swept beneath the liberal-left carpet. Whilst all this was going on, whilst the ‘anti-protesters’, Hope Not Hate, Unite Against Fascism, Stand Up Against Anything That Makes Us Sound Incredibly Virtuous (emphasis on the ‘incredibly’), and all the other touchy-feely left-wing Marxist groups (who seem to act like fascists themselves), were getting the full-praise treatment from an extremely grateful establishment and the nasty far-right fascists the full force of the law, over the Channel in France, gangs of Sudanese cut-throats were swotting up on their riot techniques, using knives and machetes to ensure a place in the boats waiting to bring them to easy-touch Britain, where, once ensconced in their free hotels, they will sleep the sleep of the privileged and awake the following morning to face the full and formidable force of a traditional English breakfast. There! Let that be a lesson to them! It serves them right for coming!
Next stop, Britain’s streets!
How and when did it all go wrong? Queen Victoria asks.
It all started going wrong at the end of the Second World War with cheap imported labour. Then, as now, we were told that immigration was good for us, a bit like eating one’s greens (ay up, that sounds quite racist!). It was beneficial for the economy. Then as now it was beneficial, but only for the few. In the short term, the few cashed in; in the long term the rest of us paid the price. We continue to pay the price today, but the stakes are considerably higher.
Now, several decades later, with the zealous help of the pseudo-liberals, a country of unparalleled excellence, a country to be proud of, has been thrown back into the dark ages, its towns and cities trashed and transformed into something resembling third-world ghettos.
And so the riots start
In the days leading up to the riots, Britain witnessed a series of precipitating events. First there was the ethnic riots in Leeds. Cause, we are told, anti-police sentiments. Don’t like the police much, time to the smash the city up. Then came the stabbing of a UK military serviceman, targeted, it was suggested, because he was in uniform. It has really come to something if you dare not wear your uniform in the country that you serve; is that what I hear you say? Believe it or not, it is policy. Members of His Majesty’s Armed Forces are advised not to wear their uniforms when in public places. Yep, Britain really is that dangerous. I have even stopped wearing my Girl Guides’ uniform.
The next provocation to hit the mainstream headlines was the Manchester Airport incident, in which a police officer was accused of kicking a man in the head. A video taken at the time shows that he and his colleagues had been assaulted. The attack was violent and sustained, and the officer fought back. One tends to do so when assaulted, and besides he has a job to do. He works in the British police force. That’s ‘force’, spelt f-o-r-c-e, for those who are liberal dyslexic.
The officer accused was suspended pending investigation, a thousand apologies issued, and the ethnics and their lefty chums took to the streets in force on the evidence of a video selectively edited and quickly posted on social media platforms purporting to show police brutality.
The final spark to the tinder box that set a montage of riots in motion was the brutal killing of three young white girls at a community centre in Southport.
Police at airports Whilst we wait with anticipation on the verdict of the police officers’ conduct at Manchester airport that sparked ethnic protests that we don’t hear much about, I must say that it is reassuring to know in a country like ours, soft-touch Britain (soft for some), where the green light is routinely given for access to all kinds of people about which we know next to nothing, that our airports, which are prime targets for ruthless terrorist maniacs ~ Killers with a capital ‘K’ ~ are protected day and night by brave police and security forces, who have an extremely difficult and dangerous job to do. The last thing any of us want, who would rather not be obliterated whilst waiting in the departure lounge, is an airport overseen by demoralised, disempowered police, who, if and when the balloon goes up, are hamstrung when they need to act by the disconcerting thought that pillocks might be filming them on smartphones, and what will be the consequences if, heaven forbid, they have to use force. Let us hope and pray, therefore, that the result of the inquiry into the conduct of the officers protecting Manchester Airport does not jeopardise all of our lives by rendering airport police, and all police for that matter, even less effective than they have become in recent years through the disservice done to us all by the imposition of social media and winging wokist policies.
Much was made by the leftist media in response to the riots that followed in the wake of the Southport atrocity that false claims on social media relating to the stabman had triggered public disorder. But citing misinformation spread by social media as the definitive cause of the riots is a bottom-scraping exercise. As tragic and catalytic as the barbaric act in Southport is, the significance of this incident in relation to the riots is commensurate with the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
The riots, strictly speaking, are not a manifestation solely of recent events, as one-sided and tragic as they unequivocally are, but stem from an accumulation of deep, of bitter frustration, conjoined with a sense of national unease, that free-for-all immigration and the woke by which it is enforced is rotting British culture, contributing to the country’s crime wave, making the streets unsafe, advantaging foreign terrorists and turning British subjects into second-class citizens in their own country.
Since the on-stage debut of Tony Blair, Britons have been forced to accept wide and penetrating cultural changes, none of which they asked for, did not want and do not want; forced to pretend they are being ‘enriched’ ; forced to live in a shadowy world of rising crime and terrorism to which the only official answer is go home, hold hands and have candle-lit vigils. The end result, to coin a phrase, are riots waiting to happen.
It is understandable why one faction of the pseudo-liberal cabal refuse to exit their little world and admit that it’s all gone terribly wrong. These are those who simply need to feel good about themselves, who crave the accolade of being enlightened, who refute the perils of mass immigration because every now and then Mrs Patel, from the house next door, makes them onion bhajis, and Mr Bingbongo, on the opposite side, speaks to them of religious conversion. Better get to it quick, I say! These are the liberal lefties who, though many of them mean well, have proven themselves to be as daft as they are insufferably gullible, who swallow, hook, line and sinker, the misinformation fed to them by those who owe them no greater allegiance than whatever it takes to exploit their simple childlike naivety.
At the command end of this miserable chain there exists a more insidious, a more invidious clan ~ you know who you are! ~ who will be rubbing their hands with glee as they witness the breakdown of law and order and the scenes of devastation playing out on Britain’s streets.
They, the ones in the shadows, the ones that pull the strings, have worked long and hard for things to go this way. They have lusted after division, and now at last they’ve got what they craved for. Like the average useful idiots, they sing the praises of multiculturalism, the wonders of diversity, but for them they have a different meaning in which peace and harmony play no part.
The newly elected Labour government and the usual media outlets which continue to push this far left agenda, as powerful as they are, are clearly out of their depth. Using the old distraction technique, they blame the riots on far-right thugs, thus focussing on the symptom rather than the cause, and in the process deliver the threatening message, ‘speak out of turn about immigration and we’ll slap an extremist label on you!’
When they speak they preach to the converts of old, Guardian and Independent readers, who, like drug addicts craving their daily fix, need to hear those magic words ‘far right’, and hear them loud and often. It binds them to their fantasy. For the rest of us, however, the truth is plain to see. Ninety-nine per cent of the British population are not, as a leftist journalist recently claimed, happy with mass immigration and the radical changes it has brought to our country. In fact, each and every one of us face a riot every day, a sad, a sickening, emotional one, which we struggle to contain, as we angrily watch from the sidelines a country that once had no equal being fly tipped into the swamp.
Allow me to put this in context: A few days ago, I attended a classic car show, where I met and spoke to a lot of English people. Car talk apart, the conversation inevitably shifted into a higher gear when someone mentioned the riots and from there into top gear when the state of the country was broached.
“It [the country’s] gone to the dogs,” one man spat. (I think he said the ‘dogs’.)
“I no longer think of it as ‘my’ country,” another cursed. I think this man was Indian.
And still another asserted, and he did not mince his words: “The UK is a s*it hole!”
A man who purported to be a former officer of the law, recently retired, got wind of our conversation. Standing in front of the fatty-fry van where we all were queuing, he swore an oath on the sign that said ‘Fish ‘n’ Chips the Great English Meal’, which was backed by a union jack, that he had to leave the police force as it was systemically anti-white British and sabotaged by the ‘yoke of woke’. I asked him to pass the vinegar. I believe he already had.
In the three hours I spent talking to people at this event, if there was anybody there who harboured a Guardian, Independent or Observer point of view that mass immigration is a wonderful thing and that the Britain we live in today is a safe, morally stable, decent, civilised liberal utopia then no one was letting on.
No one condoned the riots, but they evidently understood, more than the government wants to, the reason why they happened, and none were willing to buy the snake oil pedalled by mainstream media.
One person to whom I spoke did confess, reluctantly, with an air of self-conscious shame, as if he was looking for absolution, that he voted Labour at the last election, because there was something wrong with him. But when he came to his senses, he realised his mistake. Labour, he had realised, is the party of immigration. The Tories were simply inept, but Labour have an agenda, which is to flood the country with undesirables. “We’ve got enough of our own,” he declared, “So why do we want to import them?”
Another chap, who was busy observing a T-shirt printed with ‘Bald Lives Matter’ ~ My brother, between a mouthful of chips, looked self-consciously down at his stomach, no doubt wondering if ‘Fat Lives Matter’, whilst a friend wondered, or should have been wondering, if a case could be made for ‘Tight Lives Matter’, as he hadn’t paid for his chips, I had ~ declared, philosophically, in a broad Northamptonshire accent, “They [the establishment] are frit of ‘them’. ‘Them’ being you know who. That’s why we have this two, er, what do you call it, two-tyre policing and why hardly anyone gets arrested when foreigners go on the rampage.” He was actually more specific in naming who these foreigners are, and his expressions were liberally [pun intended] peppered with lots of f*cks and c*nts.” Now, if I had been a ‘counter-protester’ an ‘anti-fascist’ or (God forbid!) a craven apologist for Black Lives Matter (wait a minute whilst I take a knee ~ what a twat he looks!), I might have dismissed this impudent white man as a raging f*cking fascist and ignored whatever he had to say, riot or no riot!
I looked away at that point, as though I was trying to find in the not too distant but mythical future a T-shirt with the caption, “British White Views Matter”, but I must have been looking in the wrong direction, towards London and onto Downing Street, because no matter how I strained my eyes, my hopes and my imagination, the only thing that seemed to matter was that it no longer mattered to me, at least not as much as it will for those who though they are young today won’t be young tomorrow, and for those, the most unfortunate, the waiting-to-be-born, who will never know anything but the horror of tomorrow. Perhaps this is their silver lining: for them it will be as it is; not as for us, as it was.
I looked again and what I could see, as plain as the House of Commons, was an awful lot of bullshit, the sort that could easily nurture the roots of the UK’s civil war, as predicted by Elon Musk.
Civil War in the UK: Will there or won’t there be?
I, personally, do not think there will be a civil war, at least not in the accurate sense of the term, because a civil war presupposes two opposing sides each identifying with itself as distinct from one another, and this is unlikely to happen in the situation we have in Britain, because diversity has done away with absolute cohesion, which is, as I am sure you know, one of the more subversive reasons for engineered diversity.
Moreover, the people who really count, or should stand up and be counted, the British white middle class, have their ‘I’m alright Jack’ arses firmly and forever perched upon the non-comital fence, preferring to hide in the dangerous belief that saying and doing nothing is the better part of valour. Besides, they, in the mind they inhabit, are far enough removed in their leafy suburbs and quiet rural backwaters to be spared the worst of whatever goes down in Britain’s towns and inner cities, and their take on the situation is that as long as they keep on looking anywhere rather than where they should be looking, never revealing what they think, never saying what they feel and on no account what they fear, this, they keep their fingers crossed, will be the saving of them. They are wrong.
As for the left-wing faithful, the useful voting idiots, they will still be parroting the same old simpleton mantras with which they have been indoctrinated even when it is all too late, when, like the obedient sheep they are, they are led away to the slaughter. And even then as the curtain descends, the truth will refuse to occur to them that the ‘far right’ was never their nemesis. They betrayed themselves with their own ideology, poisoned themselves in the end with the lies with which they had poisoned the country for years.
No, I see the UK ending up somewhere between the twilight world of dystopias Sweden and South Africa, with the chauffeur-driven rich ring-fenced and body guarded inside their gated compounds, whilst out there on the streets, the no-go areas echo nightly to gunfire, screams and wailing sirens, and should you really have no option but to walk from A to B, you do so at your peril and never without your stab vest.
Already when dusk descends on Britain’s towns and upon its cities, we bolt the windows and bar the doors. The zombies are out on the streets at night. Has anyone seen a copper?
(By the way, has anyone else, I wonder, noticed that the countries worst impacted by ‘come one and all’ immigration are those that traditionally see themselves as paragons of liberalism? Just saying …) Sectarian violence, lawless streets, an escalation of knife crime, gang warfare by race and religion, flashes of inter-ethnic conflict, the dirty business of vigilantes and an endless cycle of civil disorder and riots policed by robo-cops, possibly even standing armies, this could well be Britain’s future, but civil war, not yet.
UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Mr Starmer’s answer to this apocalyptic vision is to form a ‘standing army’, a militia ~ er, but where is the money coming from to fund this standing army? We cannot even afford more coppers. (And the way we treat our coppers, will anyone want to do the job?) I feel a tax hike coming on. But I do not see that standing army.
The UK’s New ‘Standing Army’
The task of this new yeomanry, be it fictious or not, is to ensure that Britain’s rioters ~ rioters of a particular type ~ feel ~ make no mistake ~ ‘the full force of the law’ (PC women Melons and Bristols, this is the news you’ve been waiting for!). So, does that mean, may I ask, that this is the end of policing as we know it: “Now let’s sit down, have a nice cup of tea and discuss the problems you might be having?” “Thank you Mr Whitey Policeman, wait a moment whilst I adjust my machete. Do you think you could hold it for me?”
In case it has escaped the new prime minister’s notice, may I gently remind him that Britain already has a standing army, it’s called the British police force. They do a lot of standing, particularly during pro-Palestine rallies, at Black Lives Matter riots and at stab-fest events like Notting Hill Carnival. They also do a lot of standing whenever they cannot avoid anti-social behaviour ~ which is every day and everywhere. I hasten to add that it is not their fault; it is not what police officers want to do; it is what they are told to do. The thin blue line has never looked thinner.
“It’s a sh*t hole!” cried the Englishman. For once, it was not his country to which he was referring but the town in which he lived. “We don’t have to wait for a riot in [name of town withheld], we have one almost every night. The town centre is plagued by gangs of nasty little shits kitted out in hoodies and ski masks. They dig the flowers out of the planters and chuck them at passing cars. A few weeks back, they were up there, up there on the roof, slinging mud and masonry down into the High Street. The police arrived. Did nothing. They just stood in the street and watched!”
Police officers are not to blame for ~ excuse me whilst a borrow a phrase ~ this non-two-tier passivity. Like teachers, with whom they balance precariously on the literal knife-edge of Britain’s frontline, they are victims of insuperable woke and ultimately the lightening rods for all of society’s liberal left ills.
A funny thing is happening The government, using the mainstream media’s trumpet, keep blowing hot with riots that never materialise. The ‘expected riots’ are named by area, large crowds of ‘peaceful protestors’, ethnic and seen-to-be-doing-the-right-thing whiteys, invade the areas named and stand there on their own for hours with no one to be peaceful with. What a waste of banner-making time! Well, it keeps them off the streets … Oh, wait a minute. Then, the next day, or even shortly afterwards, along from the 1950s comes that stern school master Mr Starmer and takes the credit for backing the rioters down, who, apparently, dare not show in case they become the hapless recipients of the ‘full force of the law’.
I imagine the police are wondering what exactly the full force is, as, for the past 30 years, they have been schooled to deal with offenders with the kid gloves of a social worker and the diplomacy normally reserved for a job in public relations. However, you would do well to remember this, that if you are taking part in a riot and your shirt is brown and moustache faintly similar to that of Mr Hitler’s, then the rules of the game are likely to change and definitely not in your favour.
So, what we need, my dear Mr Starmer, what we desperately need, is not a ‘standing army’ but a competent, well-equipped, non-woke-manacled nationwide series of riot squads, and we need them fast and everywhere, up and down the country. But we need them to be impartial. It is essential they are fair, because if the only arses they kick are white ~ and remember YouTube is watching ~ then Mr Elon Musk’s prediction of the imminence of civil war may well be brought to fruition quicker than you anticipate, and if that day doth suddenly dawn, then we’ll all be standing by Liz Truss Door, ready to follow her example, preferably wearing full-force roller skates that will guarantee our exit like, if you’ll pardon my use of colloquialism, shit off a shiny shovel. Play it again, Harry Corbett: “Bye, Bye, Country, Bye, Bye.”
It may already seem to Mr Starmer, who, and let’s be fair about this, has not been in the hot seat long, just long enough to get his trousers scorched ~ and how! ~ that he finds himself in a rather bad place: the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, why did he give up that paper round! But nothing could be further from the truth. If he did but know it, the place he is in is the right one, and the timing could not be better. He has been given a first-class opportunity to rise to the challenge of statesman, to address the ills of the country, to strike a humanist balance, to patch up divisions across communities (where they can be patched), to become a prime minister like those of the past who dealt with the present in terms of the future, one who puts the people first, all of the people first and fairly. Would you rather go down in history as the man who got it right, or join your political peers and predecessors, ineffectual and out of touch, who one by one have fizzled, or are in the process of fizzling, out, leaving the political table, as though everyone knew it was them who farted and never did anything else. Or, even more damning than this, be remembered as that man who, when given the chance to save his country, blew it. He locked himself in the liberal mindset and, ignoring the value of those people whose forbears built this country (Can people such as these really be replaced by hoards of swarthy young men who come bouncing rudely into England mounted on top of inflatables?] effectively signed the UK’s death warrant.
Try listening. It might help!
The key to stopping the riots and the general sense of unease that is spreading like a rampant pestilence across this once great Christian land is to use it to close and lock the gates at Dover. Stop the boats. Stop the immigrants. Listen to what it is that legacy Britons are saying. Ditch the Machiavellian creeds of disgraced Prime Minister Tony Blair. Withdraw the UK from the ECHR, tear up that beguiling document the Convention on Human Rights, return to police their pre-woke powers, rid the streets of crime, tackle the sprogs who blight our neighbourhoods, stop and search regardless of colour, stand as firm against ethnic rioters and the PC blackmail that oils their cogs and defends them from arrest as you would against those nasty far whites, show the country as a whole that the day of the limp-wristed, bed-wetting lefty and his media misinformation network has run its evil course, come to an end, is finished, kaput, is over. It sounds like an awful lot, but it really is not that difficult. All you need is love for your people and, unlike your immediate predecessors, to be a proper prime minister.
Over to you, Mr Prime Minister, it really is your call.
Right Wing Thugs, Political Prisoners, Martyrs or Robin Hoods? The only way to restore real law and order in the UK, as distinct from soundbite law and order, is to ensure that it is applied fairly and without prejudice right across the board. Calling white rioters the ‘far right’ and then banging them up with disproportionate sentences is a sure-fired way of turning them into martyrs. As it is, a good many of the anti-immigrant protestors will wear their prison sentence with pride and will be regarded throughout the prisoner fraternity as patriots, political prisoners, ordinary people wrongly, unjustly convicted for standing up for their families and the preservation of their sovereign country against what they, and a good many like them, see as a repressive socio-political system out to destroy all they hold dear.
If they are to ‘feel the full force’ of the law, then come the next ethnic riots, as come they surely will, the same condemnation and same stiff sentences had better be applied, or off we will go again on the embittered and violent merry go round, with more rhetoric, more harsh sentences, nothing gained and everything lost. It is advisable to consider that those involved in the riots who are facing the law’s ‘full force’ have brothers, family, friends, compatriots, colleagues, and that everyone of these, together with YouTube and social media addicts, will be watching very closely to see if the accusation of two-tier policing can be equally applied to the country’s judicial system.
If a partisan link can be established between government, police and the courts, they, the ones subjected to the full force of the law, may begin to see themselves, as may the voting white majority, as latter-day Robin Hoods, come to save, at the risk of their personal liberty, white tattooed English maidens from an embarrassing fate worse than death (For heaven’s sake think of the pups!), pitting themselves heroically against the evil wiles of the Sheriff of Shock-it-to-them: “The full force of the law, I tell you!” [An elastic band twangs off stage] and his globalist boss King John, aka Big George Sorryarse, the most philanthropic of migrant traffickers the world has ever known (and Hungary disowned). Where will it all end? Usually, after crossing the Channel, in luxury five-star hotels. Cheap at half the price, I say; only £8 million a day.
Meanwhile, not in hotels but languishing in Britain’s prisons is the country’s heritage population, who, before they made a name for themselves as ‘facing the full force’ rioters, were only guilty of thinking and stating, “The migrant invasion has to stop. They really should go home.” They really do have a point, don’t they.
Thoughts on the fifth anniversary of the death of Victor Ryabinin
18 July 2024 ~ Königsberg Artist Beyond the One in a Million
I am asked by the curious both in my native country, England, and in Russia, why my blog is dedicated to Victor Ryabinin.
Surely, a blog written in English whose target audience is presumably English people could have been dedicated to any one of a number of English friends or colleagues with whom I am close or hold in high esteem?
To answer this question, I turned to the many people whom I have crossed paths with, and some with whom I have crossed swords, and drew the conclusion that outside of my family circle only three people, excluding Victor, qualified. One is my friend of 44 years, Mel (Melbourne) Smith; the other his brother, Rolly Smith; and the last, but by no means least, Mr Richard Oberman, my former English literature tutor, who taught at Kettering Technical College, aka Tresham College.
Mel and Rolly Smith are two of my life’s most colourful characters. They were an investment in experience which paid dividends in friendship. Without them I would have foregone so much by way of excitement and laughter that an omission of this magnitude would have been nothing short of criminal. Looking back, with the help of my diaries, the exploits that we shared have taken on a legendary status, made more so by the retelling of them. Of all the things in life that cannot be overvalued, friendship, laughter and camaraderie are difficult to compete with. Theirs is the currency in which we trust: the gold standard.
Richard Oberman was a master of his vocation. Dry humoured, slightly off the wall but always in control, he would play his classes like a fiddle. As good a psychologist as he was a teacher, he would deftly juggle his act using the stick and carrot approach to win his students over. He was our general, we were his troops, and like every astute and accomplished leader he brought us on by steady degrees to trust, obey and admire him. Displaying an in-depth knowledge of and an absolute love for his subject, better than any who would teach me later at university level, by the encouragement he gave and the respect that he engendered, he opened up a future for me to which before I had been oblivious and in the process of doing so changed the course of my life forever.
Set against this exquisite triumvirate, Mel, Rolly and Richard Oberman, who and what was Victor Ryabinin?
Königsberg Artist Victor Ryabinin
Victor Ryabinin was born in Königsberg, where, like the great German philosopher Emmanuel Kant before him, he worked, lived out his life and died. He shared with Emmanuel Kant a genuine, singular love for the city, and though he travelled quite extensively whereas Emmanuel Kant did not, he shared the convictions of the city’s academia that Königsberg was a spiritual magnet drawing into its centre intellectual and artistic excellence from the highest minds and most sentient hearts and from every sphere of imaginable talent.
Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, charmed all who came in contact with him. His professional and bohemian side possessed an aura of mystique and an intuited profundity. Like most creative minds, a managing ego must have been working somewhere behind the scenes, but wherever he kept it hidden it never got the upper hand and through all the years I knew him, he was never anything less than open, honest, affable, modest and perfectly unassuming. Indeed, Victor Ryabinin, the man, epitomised the best that human nature can offer. He was everything you could want and more than you could hope for. He was an ambassador for humankind.
Victor had a gentle heart, a warm welcome, and no edge to his character. He had a wonderful sense of humour that was often self-effacing (he said that those who could laugh at themselves had a right to laugh at others). He was endowed with a gravitational presence, a generous sense of spirit and had the most enchanting art studio, where I, for one, never painted but sat with him for hours on end, talking history, eating gherkins, smoking cigars of a cherry flavour and drinking beer and vodka.
Victor’s company never grew old. Victor himself never grew old. He collected years like the Königsberg relics with which he adorned his studio, but the years, like all who knew him, respected his ageless spirit. Driven and sustained by an endless curiosity and an endearing fascination for everybody and every new thing, this was perhaps the secret elixir by which he kept himself ever young.
The grim irony of his dying just nine short months from the time when he, more than anyone else, brought me to Kaliningrad, and the way in which his death, inconceivable and unexpected, swept away the blueprint of my future, came as a stark reminder, as it had with the death of my friend Mel Smith, that whilst we may all be unique and some of us exceptional, those most precious to us are simply irreplaceable, so that when they up and leave arm in arm with death a sizeable chunk of our present and more, much more, of our future leaves the table with them.
Victor Ryabinin disclosed that he would reach out to such people who possessed the qualities that he lacked. This statement alone reveals the modesty and humility that endeared him to so many, for it is difficult to imagine what those qualities could have been that he failed to see in himself whilst everyone around him saw them with such clarity.
If throughout my life I had taken a leaf from Victor’s book and leant towards those people whose qualities I lack, I would, to paraphrase my old friend Cohen, have “leant that way forever”.
In retrospect, my choice of friends would appear to have been determined on criteria not dissimilar to that adopted by Molly Fox, my former boss at a publishing house, who once confided in me that she no longer filled job placements on applicant suitability but according to their eccentricity, interest value and personality.
If ever a man could tick these boxes, and the many more besides by which exceptionality can be measured and companionship appreciated, then Victor Ryabinin was that man.
I have yet to meet another like him. I know I never will.
“I first met Victor Ryabinin in the spring of 2001. A friend of my wife’s, knowing how much my wife liked art and how fascinated I was with anything to do with the past, suggested that we meet this ‘very interesting’ man, who was an artist and a historian.” ~ by Mick Hart
“The first year of Victor Ryabinin’s life could have been his last. There was an epidemic in Königsberg which wiped out hundreds of children, both German and Russian. The military doctor who came to visit the Ryabinin family broke Victor’s parents’ heart when he delivered the verdict that there was nothing to be done to help their child. ‘A day, perhaps two,’ he said, ‘and the child will die’.” ~ by Boris Nisnevich
“At first sight, from a teenager’s point of view, he was this small and funny man, but very soon our attention was attracted to his methods of teaching. He was a breath of fresh air in my understanding of art. He was so alive in comparison with many of the other teachers. He ignited our imagination” ~ by Stanislav Konovalov ~ student and friend of Victor Ryabinin
Updated: 30 June 2024 | First Published: 29 January 2023 ~ Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony
I’m sure, almost certain, that it was not there 18 months ago when I last visited Zelenogradsk (doesn’t time fly!), but it was there now. I am talking about a new restaurant ~ new to me ~ that sits smack bang at the midway point of Zelenogradsk’s serpentine high street: a large, impressive, luxurious establishment set back from the street inside a broad paved plaza, its plate-glass single-storey extension forming a scaled juxtaposition against the taller four-storey building to which it is attached, the latter meticulously refurbished to a grand and imposing standard.
In the winter months when we were in town, the first impression of this restaurant from the outside looking in was PC; that’s not politically correct, but plush and cosy.
It was bitterly cold that day, and if the hallmark of a successful bar or restaurant is principally defined by the pulling power it possesses to tempt one off the street, then rest assured Balt restaurant has it.
Oh, did I forget to tell you? The name of the restaurant is Balt.
The first impression from the exterior of the building, which is so categorically bourgeoisie that Lenin had turned his back to it, was swish. I made a mental note, a simple equation: plush+posh+impressive+coastal-resort-town-centre = expensive. So, let’s jump to the bill. We had three dishes, nothing elaborate, a speciality tea and a glass of beer. It didn’t break the bank.
The second impression the Balt conveys is ‘big’. “It’s so big!” say your senses, when perhaps what they should be saying is not that it’s so ‘big’ but “It’s so tall”! In keeping with the modern trend in bar and restaurant design, the Balt is undeniably big, but, initially and accurately, the spaciousness perceived is confined to the height of the ceiling. In fact, the seating area which leads away from the entrance hall is limited to the perimeter of the extended part of the building; it forms the letter ‘L’, being a long, but slightly wider than the word implies, corridor. This is because, once again conforming to popular predilections, the restaurant is built around the kitchen, in other words built to a plan in which a centralised kitchen is King.
In the olden days, restaurants concealed their kitchens as though they were the black sheep of the family, the philosophy seeming to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This closeted mentality was an excellent way of keeping patrons on edge, since they never knew come the following morning, having enjoyed their meal the night before, whether their friends would be ready and waiting to scream, “You didn’t eat there, did you!” and then hamming it up with relish, proceed to recount in lurid detail the latest hygiene scandal.
Today, there is no need to be told by the ‘well-meaning’ ~ friends, family or the media ~ what goes on in restaurant kitchens, because everything is on display and laid out for the eyes to see. Restaurant kitchens have come of age. They are open, accessible, uninhibited, something to be admired, something to be proud of, not hidden away like a seedy back room in the depths of a mucky book shop. Restaurant kitchens have been emancipated, and a large part of that liberation lies in the transformation from an observance of cautious propriety to out-and-out exhibitionism.
True, some bar and restaurant designs tend to over-egg the soufflé. Displaying a kitchen eagerly in all its stainless steel, hygiene-oriented, busy, industrious, functioning glory is one thing, but it is quite another and quite inexcusable to overdo the exposure. Thankfully, Balt’s kitchen is a far more sophisticated and in-keeping centrepiece, enabling it to escape comparison with a man in a mac on a hill surrounded by too little foliage. I think the word I am searching for is ‘subtle’.
In fact, everything about Balt, not in its individual accoutrements but taken as a job lot, regarded in its entirety, is the epitome of subtle. How this works exactly is rather clever, because Balt is far and away not without a surprise or two, not undernourished in novelty.
Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT
We were able to appreciate both the component parts of this dichotomy and its overarching effect from the favourable location of the table to which we had been escorted. The seats to which we had been shown occupied the latter portion upon the longer extension of the ‘L’ shaped room, almost at its inflection, thus availing us of a first-class view of each and all the different elements, which, when assembled as a whole, add up to the Balt experience.
First off, we were close to the kitchen, just a few feet away from the serving area: a long, curved counter on which chefs add the finishing touches to the dishes they are preparing before popping them into the tandoor oven, and from which attentive waiters pick up meals that are ready to go.
From our vantage point, we had a privileged view of the kitchen and the floor-to-ceiling tandoor, a large cylindrical-shaped oven used for baking unleavened flatbreads and for roasting meat. Once the open oven door and blazing fire beyond had ceased to remind me of crematoria, it was fun to watch the chef at work, sliding the various dishes and breads into the wood-fired oven with the help of a peel, a long-handled shovel-like implement with a flat metal pan attached to its furthest extremity.
Looking straight ahead, I noted with satisfaction the high-backed wooden chairs belonging to the nearest table. The back rests consisted of two vertical ebonised planks slightly angled toward one another. Close to their highest point a pair of semi-circles had been cut out so that in alignment they formed a circle. The only other concession to decoration was the seemingly random inclusion of small, pierced motifs ~ simple shapes which donated a touch of mystique without disturbing the minimalist balance.
My forward view also provided examples of ingenious lighting styles, including a heavy, orange tassel-roped pendant and lampshades mimicking small sheaths of straw.
The tables to the left and behind me were objects to be marvelled at. The tops were made of marble, the ends scalloped to give an uncut look. They were supported on a cluster of angled posts, recycled wave-breaking poles, some of which had been allowed to protrude through the table’s surface, and hovering above them with remarkable pendulosity was a clump or cluster of shell-like bowls, off-white in shade and in shape asymmetrical, which had me wondering, out loud as it happens, if they were really made from the pumpkin skins I imagined they were or from moulded papier-mâché
Every item in the Balt’s atmospheric makeup is an imagistic letter in the word and concept of ‘Natural’: wood, stone, fire, rope, straw, vegetables. At one end of the subtle spectrum, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble would not look out of place, but the Balt’s natural is a polished natural that borrows as much for its appeal on the application of chic sophistry as it does from down-to-earth and back-to-nature.
For all its emphasis on the natural world, Balt’s designers’ have hedged their bets, choosing not to preclude but include the fashionable tried and tested, omniprevalent in bar and restaurant, distressed industrial look.
This approach has become so widespread that it has gone beyond ‘must have’ to ‘can’t do without’. In the Balt, it has gone one further, becoming ‘Would you Adam and Eve it, the concept actually works!’: rocks, marble, stoneware vases, corn plants, vegetables and pieces of tree, rub along quite nicely, thank you, with gnarled brickwork, whitewashed slat-board, old beam ceilings, exposed ventilation ducts and suspended arty farty spots.
It is a tribute to Balt’s interior designers that they have managed to pull off a subtle, seamless fusion of modern chic and reclaimed-rundown and then wrap it all up in an eco-friendly ethnicity.
In a nutshell ~ and I am sure that Balt would approve of the use of such natural imagery ~ the key word to Balt’s come-hither and dine-within appeal is harmony. Everything, including things that would normally be at odds with each other, are wedlocked. It might be a marriage of convenience, but one that is no less perfect for it. Even the ethnic music, with its emphasis on tom-tom beat and repetitive chanting, is low-key, Sade-like and subtle.
At the centre and everywhere else of this is lighting. I’ve said it before; I’ve said it again; I’ll say it again and keep on saying it: from Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris to The Four Seasons B&B in Brightlingsea, if the lighting is not right everything else will be wrong. Lighting is the magic drawstring that pulls everything together.
Balt’s lighting is soft, suffused and artistically modulated: a harmonising integration of ambient-sensitive ceiling spots and downlighters, overhead table pendants ~ each paired with its own novel shade ~ soft-glow wall lights, natural fire and candles. It’s good, because it works. It works because it’s good.
At this juncture, I know what you are thinking: So much for the Balt’s design; what about the grub?
Those of you who have read any of my bar/restaurant reviews will know that when it comes to food I’m hopeless. Why do I go to bars? To drink. Why do I go to restaurants? Usually because the company I’m in wants to go to restaurants, and so I tag along, but also because, as you may have deduced, I am an ardent fan of interior design and a connoisseur of atmosphere.
As a baked-beans-on-toast man, a man who likes simple food, I cannot provide you with a gourmet breakdown of the range of food Balt has to offer or the quality of its meals, and neither shall I try. However, a quick twirl around the internet should satisfy your curiosity. It might even tell you all you need to know.
Our order at the Balt amounted to a snackette: a spicey vegetable platter on oven-baked bread ~ a white leavened flatbread similar in texture and taste to naan ~ and some exotic-looking poppadoms. It was not in the least expensive, but I will say that presentation took precedence over quantity. Now, were you to indulge in a main meal, the situation may be completely reversed or, like everything else at Balt, a happy medium struck.
I had a beer, naturally. It was palatable but served up in one of those peculiar ‘neither here nor there’ glasses, ie glasses that are neither small nor large, which frankly I find irritating. Half a litre, fine; half a half litre, fine; anything else exceeds my mathematical ability (see Soul Garden post).
The Balt, I am told, offers a range of dishes based on Indian subcontinent fare, which is something of a luxury in this part of the world. The prices are so-so, but not so expensive that they will tear the lining out of your pocket, and the carefully choreographed atmosphere, which is as restful and relaxing as it gets, beats anything I have experienced anywhere else in the Kaliningrad region or for that matter in the UK. Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could!
The main thing Balt (restaurant) Kurortny Prospekt, 16, Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad region
Angel Park Hotel > An inspirational rural recreation centre on the site of an East Prussian settlement Amber Legend Restaurant > Amber Legend Yantarny, a jewel in the coastal town of Yantarny Fishdorf Country Guest Complex > A family-oriented retreat, secluded and steeped in nature Fort Dönhoff (Fort XI) > An evocative 19th century redbrick fortress, part of Königsberg’s labyrinth defence network Polessk Brewery > Beer, history and German-Gothic architecture (that’s my personal order of preference!)
What goes up must come down, but it took 50 years to do so
29 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past
I go away for four weeks, and this is what happens! In my absence, someone has nipped off with three-quarters of the House of Soviets!
I must confess (no, it wasn’t me), as I sat on a bench with my coffee and sandwich, looking across the Lower Pond, that the sight of the House of Soviets dwindling into nothing plucked in my nostalgic heart a sentimental chord.
Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past
Like it or not, the great concrete monolith has dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline for more than 50 years. Photographed arguably more times and from every conceivable angle than any other structure in Kaliningrad, in spite of itself and for all the wrong reasons, the towering, bulky edifice, with its plethora of empty windows achieved cult status, most notably, ironically and cynically, as a prime example of the best in Soviet architecture, and with its unfortunate reputation for being the house that never was occupied, haunted itself and the city with the cost of taking it down.
Its huge rectangular cross-bridged frame, which had incongruously, but none the less defiantly, replaced the splendour of Königsberg Castle in all its baroque and historical glory, had idled away the years as an unlikely city-centre successor to the 13th century Teutonic castle, later residence of choice for the region’s Prussian rulers, which eventually became the point of convergence for the city’s cultural and spiritual life.
Conversely, the House of Soviets never became anything more than an object of curiosity and a convenient hook for western media on which to hang derogatory.
In my 23 years of visiting and of living in Kaliningrad, I have to say I have never heard anyone admit to loving the House of Soviets, and yet, to balance that out, likewise, nobody ever committed themselves to hating it
In its lifetime ~ fairly long lifetime ~ I suppose we can conclude that the inhabitants of Kaliningrad neither revered nor reviled the building. It was simply there and where it was, and very soon it won’t be.
Published 2021: It is official: 51 years after its construction and the same number of years of non-occupation, arguably one of Kaliningrad’s most iconic buildings, and ironically one of its most lambasted, especially by the western press, is about to be demolished. I am, of course, referring to the House of Soviets, ninety per cent of which was completed in 1985 on a site close to where once stood the magnificent Königsberg Castle, the East Prussian city’s jewel in the crown, which was extensively damaged in the Second World War and then, in 1967, dynamited into oblivion.
Fisherman’s House Museum Zalivino: a must for social history buffs
27 March 2024 ~ Fisherman’s House Museum Zalivino Kaliningrad region
If you are planning on visiting Zalivino lighthouse or taking a day trip to Zalivino, you should take the time to stop off at Zalivino marine and maritime museum, aka Fisherman’s House. Although it is tucked away, if you head to the sandy cove at the far end of the village, a short walk from the village’s second bus stop, and follow the road to the left, you will find you are almost there. Now, just look for a white building with a painted seascape mural on its wall.
Zalivino’s museum is dedicated to the village’s fishing heritage. It provides an unforgettable insight into the working lives of the people who lived there across successive eras and subsequent generations from when it was German Labagienen, then Haffwinkel, throughout its Soviet years.
The museum, or rather how it came to be a museum, has an interesting history of its own. During the perestroika years, Zalivino, a once thriving community, which relied on the water for its livelihood, had declined so substantially that even access to the lagoon had been rendered virtually impossible. Left to its own devices, the coastline had clogged itself with vegetation, turning the erstwhile open shore into a dense and impenetrable forest, choked with invasive reeds, wetland plants and willows.
In 2015, local residents, some of whom personally remembered the coastline’s former glory from their childhood days, got together to form a group to action the shoreline’s reclamation.
Calling themselves ‘Clean Coast’, the group’s hard work won them recognition in a fund-raising competition. The proceeds from this competition enabled the group to launch an assault on the stifling shoreline foliage. They trimmed back trees and bushes, removed strewn rubbish and, when the clearing job was done, used its remaining funds to purchase planks with which to make public benches.
Inspired by their success, the group’s next venture was to establish a museum, which would tell Zalivino’s story as a working fishing village. The property in which the museum is now housed came to fruition following the Clean Coast’s group successful application for a charitable foundation grant, which once obtained was used to develop both the building and the site.
Research suggests that in German times the renovated building was less likely to have been a private dwelling than a warehouse or stable. Personal recollections from the Soviet period see it as a sawmill and a wood-working shop, turning out an array of goods from oars and boat boards to coffins, and later, in the 1990s, when the sawmill was relocated, as the village’s communal bathhouse.
From bathhouse to social history museum, the first exhibit to mark the transition was a sleigh of German origin dragged from the lagoon. According to those in the know, such sleighs in Soviet times were given a new lease of life. Come winter, they were attached to and drawn by horses to trawl the ice-bound waters across the bay for fish.
Zalivino’s museum may be small, but it is also neat and compact, every space having been carefully utilised to bring the story of the settlement’s past to life. Photographs, display boards and documents intermesh successfully with the exposition’s tell-tale artefacts ~ the fishing lines, nets, floats, waders, kerosene lamps and household items ~ all of which have a part to play in the biography of the village.
But whilst they aid the visitor to reconstruct a picture of what life was like in the village many years ago, the museum’s greatest assets are by far its guides, who, because of their palpable love for their subject, enthuse and infuse in equal measure, turning the pieces the past has left for us into a thought-provoking dynamic.
In days of old a fisherman’s life was hard ~ some would say, still is. Relying for your livelihood on the quantity and quality of fish caught in the surrounding waters, and fishing those waters come rain or shine, day in, day out, and often at ungodly hours, was no faint-hearted occupation. The photographs in the museum’s collection underscore this hardship. But they also reveal expressively in the gnarled and weathered faces, in the look of determination, in the brightness of the villager’s eyes and the smiles upon their lips, a satisfaction almost bucolic, deriving from sometimes aligning with, sometimes doing battle with but always being respectful of the laws and forces of nature. After all, to coin a phrase, every villager was in the same boat.
Overall, there is nothing in the Fisherman’s House museum that fails to captivate. But if I was asked to select from the many exhibits one that hits the unusual spot, then the one I would be inclined to choose would be the weathervane.
I am not talking about a wrought iron something that typically spins in the wind high above a chimney pot but of an intricately carved and brightly painted sign-board made of wood which, whilst effectively showing the wind’s direction as any weathervane should, had as its primary function to identify the sailing ship to which it was attached together with the details of its owner. All Curonian sailing ships would be marked by such a device, and those who were acquainted with the lexicon of their symbols would be able to decipher them without a second glance.
Museum Fisherman’s House, Zalivino, is not just a venue for examining relics from a sepia-coloured bygone age, as entrancing as they are, it is a meeting place for the past and present, which will take you into a world and introduce you to a way of life made obsolete by the tides of time and the undercurrents of ‘progress’.
The world it preserves was different then and life in its way much harder, but, as the exposition depicts, it was strong in kinship and fellowship ties. Visiting this museum will help you to understand that it is also Zalivino’s social history as much as its natural landscape that infuses it with allurement and awakens the senses to timeless mystery.
The main thing
Fisherman’s House Zalivino, Kaliningrad region, 238633
Tel: 8 (962) 266 44 57
Opening times Monday to Friday 3pm to 5pm Saturday and Sunday 11am to 4pm