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Reform Mass Deportation Bill is the Way to Save UK

As Starmer does the hokey cokey with one migrant in and one migrant out, Nigel Farage has a better solution: Mass Deportation

14 September 2025 – Reform Mass Deportation Bill is the Way to Save UK

Fabulous news. When the UK’s Reform Party, with Nigel Farage at its helm, wins the keys to Number 10 in the next general election, and be sure to vote for them because the old Labour-Cons duopoly is well past its sell-by date and has nothing left to offer, then not only will you get a patriotic government that puts British people and their interests first, but, as a cornerstone of this assurance, you will also receive the bonus prize of the Mass Deportation Bill.

A Migrant-free hotel in the UK after Reform UK come to power

According to Reform, more than 180,000 illegal migrants have crossed the English Channel since 2018, bringing the number of people with no lawful right to remain in the UK to approximately 1,000,000, and the boats just keep on coming! Pause a while and think about that.

Responsible British people are not happy:
110,000 join anti-migrant London protest | Reuters

Farage gets it right:
Nigel Farage vows to deport 600,000 illegal migrants

Starmer’s vow to ‘smash the migrant smuggling gangs’ sounded good when he said it (a bit like beating on an empty oil drum with a rolled-up manifesto), but, when all is said and done, it’s all been said, but nothing’s been done. The only thing that Starmer has smashed is the final remnant of trust in him and the clunky, past-it, inadequate party that he represents.

Keir Starmer is on the side of international treaties and foreign courts. We are on the side of the British people — Nigel Farage

Reform Mass Deportation Bill

Clues as to why the migrant invasion will never be stopped at Britain’s shores, at least not by Labour or their bedfellows, the Cons, are detectable in the importance that Farage attaches to leaving the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) and in repealing and replacing the manipulative Human Rights Act. These two institutions more than any other are used by our elected officials, by liberal-lefty lobby groups and self-serving immigration solicitors to keep the third world flowing unobstructed into our country whilst at the same time frustrating attempts to fast-track them out again.

What does it all add up to? Although confusing for the left, for those of us who are not self-delusional, the outcome is elementary:

EU + Human Rights = Never-Ending Flow of Migrants = Loss of cultural Identity = Loss of Cultural Cohesion = More Woke Enforcement = More Rochdale-style Cover-ups = More Vicious and Unsafe Streets = More acts of Terrorism.

We’ll stop short of the net conclusion, which is indigenous population cleansing, although this is not an illogical step after relegation as second-class citizens.

Reform Mass Deportation Bill

With the implementation of the Mass Deportation Bill, swanning across Europe to get into soft-touch Britain will immediately lose its appeal, and once the boats have been stopped, we can then begin the second phase of getting rid of those illegals who never should have been allowed to pollute the streets of our country. “Who are you? And what are you doing here? Papers, if you please!”

Conspiracy theories

Those of you who pride yourselves on your ability to join the dots whenever anyone mentions ‘progressive liberalism’ might be inclined to believe that a link exists between the existential need for mass deportation and the recent call by President Trump to prosecute George Soros, the doyen of the left, the man that their media loves to refer to as that ‘philanthropic billionaire’. You can read about it here: https://www.rt.com/news/623582-trump-calls-soros-criminal-prosecution/
[Note: The UK establishment has blocked RT News, so in order to read this article, you will need to resort to that VPN, which you recently and very wisely installed 😉]

Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) has also provided funding to civil rights and activist groups across the US, including organizations involved in Black Lives Matter and other protest movements, some of which have been linked to violence – RT News

George Soros is not directly involved in mass migration to the West, but rather funds humanitarian organizations and pro-democracy groups through his Open Society Foundations (OSF). Claims that Soros orchestrated migration flows are part of conspiracy theories – Google’s AI Overview

There are those, naturally all to a man far right and all to a man conspiracy theorists (no gender bias here), who regard Soros and Soros junior as instrumental kingpin proponents, fanatical supporters and principal bankrollers of the West’s ongoing migrant crisis. The less charitable among these theorists, or, depending upon your personal bias, you might define them as enlightened factions, tend to concur with Trump, leading some to hypothesise that ‘billionaire philanthropy’ is an anagram for anarchy, with broader subversive undertones involving weapons of mass migration.

Soros’s name has also recently resurfaced in connection with the 2016 “Russiagate” smear campaign. Earlier this month, the US Senate Judiciary Committee released a report alleging that OSF had links to the Clinton campaign’s efforts to promote the debunked claims of collusion between Trump and Russia – RT News

Mr Soros has a son – you may call him Sonny Soros — who, according to ‘far-right conspiracy theorists’, is a chip off the old, chip-on-the-shoulder block. Presumably, this heir apparent is waiting in the wings to take up the yoke of absolute power if and when old pappy ever decides the time is right to leave this wicked world. The devil may not look after his own, but who is to say that the Deep State doesn’t? You would have to be a conspiracy theorist to dip your toe into that one.

“I always thought Soros & Son was a wholesale immigrant shipping company.” – a seven-year-old from Pakistan with multiple aunts and uncles

If these terrible ‘right-wing conspiracy theories’ have even a grain of truth in them, then the EU’s special offer of ‘take a third-world migrant and get a million free’ is planned to continue unabated until it reaches the point at which our tiny overcrowded island capsizes into the sea which, as we can see from the White Cliffs of Dover, can be violently black and stormy.

I wonder, hypothetically speaking, what the last words would be of someone who had orchestrated such a philanthropic outcome. Something along the lines, perhaps, of “I’ve f*cked it up good and proper; there’s no world left worth living in; now is the time to say goodbye.”

Bye-bye, Mr Soros, 'philanthropic billionaire'.

Let’s not let that happen. Liberalism is on its way out; Migration needs to follow. Reverse the inward trend. Halt the invasion in its tracks. Return the boats to France complete with unwanted contents. Save yourselves whilst you can from the deplorable fate of second-class citizenship. Save the UK for your children’s sake.

Vote Reform. Vote for Britain. Vote for Mass Deportation.

Reform Mass Deportation Bill is the Way to Save UK. Save our children's future.

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Spaceship leaving Earth: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Spaceship-leaving-a-planet/74224.html
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Now see here 👉 Brits told to be vigilant as boats sail in on tide of terror

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Three Bears Crystal beer in Kaliningrad, Russia

**Mick Hart’s totally biased review of bottled beers* in Kaliningrad (or how to live without British real ale!)**

Article 9: Three Bears Crystal beer

Updated 28 July 2025 | First Published 27 November 2020 – Three Bears Crystal beer in Kaliningrad, Russia

Whenever I see a beer bottle or can in a Russian supermarket with three bears (tree meeshkee) on the label, I am smitten by a wave of nostalgia, as this brand of bottled beer was quite possibly the first I drank on my inaugural trip to Kaliningrad.

Memory is a fallible thing, for mine suggests that my first Three Bears was consumed in the winter of 2000, whereas internet research indicates that Three Bears made their Russian debut later in 2002.

Be this as it may, there is no denying the fact that the brand has successfully established itself as quintessentially Russian, and with bears in name and bears in logo, it could hardly have failed to do otherwise. For example, if the beer had been Russian Hat, they could have achieved a similar effect by using an ushanka label — come now, of course you know what I mean; an ushanka is one of those furry hats with a flap down either side.

Typically Russian in appearance, the Three Bears brand was originally part of the Heineken portfolio but is now produced by United Breweries. [source: AI Google]

Three Bears Crystal beer in Kaliningrad Russia

The Three Bears brand has four exciting variants: Three Bears Classic; Three Bears Light; Three Bears Crystal; and Three Bears Strong. At 8.3% ABV, the Three Bears Strong obviously speaks for itself: it sort of makes a deep ‘Grrrr’ sound; the Classic at 4.9% is not so ‘Grrrr’, but still is ‘Grrr’; the Three Bears Crystal, which is 4.4%, is by no means a purring pussycat; but, as you would expect, Three Bears Light is only 4.7% — er, wait a moment, am I missing something? Perhaps when they use the word ‘Light’, the allusion is to colour?

Three Bears Crystal beer in Kaliningrad, Russia

I chose to buy Three Bears Crystal because whenever I have a session, I will normally drink a couple of 1.5-litre bottles of beer in what is referred to as one sitting. How much of a lush you judge me to be by supping this amount will be predicated entirely on your own consumption criteria, namely, “Woah, that’s far too much!” or “I’d get that down before breakfast!” The difference in definition lies somewhere between one’s understanding of the difference between broadcast and boast, prohibition and politician, and promise and perversion — all three tinged by the maxims ‘men will always be men’ or ‘men will always be boys’. Such connotations could cause a stir of controversy by the time they have reached the end of the UK rainbow but could equally garner butch-like brownie points with feminists on the way.

Sorry, all this has about as much to do with Three Bears Crystal beer as Biden’s implanted view of the world had with facts and reality. My advice to you is, unless you are absolutely sure that Goldilocks is female, don’t go down to the woods today, or you could be in for a big surprise.

I stayed in with Crystal, and was I in for a Big Surprise!

In the bottle and in the glass, Three Bears Crystal has an attractive amber tone, making it an empathic ale for amber-lands consumption. Its hoppy, bitter fragrance tends to waft away a few minutes after decantation, which was enough in coronavirus times to alarm you with the question, “Am I losing my sense of smell?” but, needing no better excuse to quickly take the taste test, as soon as it hit your tongue, you breathed a sigh of relief: “Aha,” you went. “Worth every rouble!” Of course, during coronavirus, I always wore my face mask whenever I drank Three Bears or anything else.

Three Bears Crystal has, what I like to refer to, as a ‘straw taste’ — and I do not use this term derogatively. I know that it does not sound nearly as chic as shampers or as manly as scotch on the rocks and is probably a rustic hangback from my days as a teenage farmer, but whatever its derivative status, ‘straw’ is a term that captures for me a specific beer experience in which the initial bitter sharpness is offset by a blunting edge, a saturating mellow taste.

This is not to say that Three Bears Crystal does not pack a zing, although I have my suspicions that this is down to its carbonation, which, I also believe, is instrumental in producing the lingering bitter tang, which remains well after the product has been consumed. But for all that zinging and tanging, the essence of this beer is decidedly Matt Monro — an easy-on-the-palate version of easy listening on the ears.

Three Bears Crystal beer is a session beer

In words that every beer-quaffing Englishman will readily understand, Three Bears Crystal is, in my judgement, as sound as a pound (and as right as a rouble). It is what is known in drinking circles as a ‘session’ beer.

It goes down famously well with a traditional packet of crisps and a handful of salted peanuts, neither of which you can currently enjoy in any English pub due to the recent virus curfew laws*. These laws seem to suggest that coronavirus hides in pubs and waits to pounce on people who prefer to snack with their pint rather than eat a “substantial meal,” such as a big plate of greasy burgers, lashings of frozen peas, and a disgusting pile of fatty fries made from reconstituted mashed potatoes.
[*At the time when this post was first published (2020), UK coronavirus laws outlawed drinking in pubs without the coronavirus passport of having purchased a ‘substantial meal’.]

Conclusion: The message is Crystal clear. You don’t need a Vaccine Passport, then fly to the UK to suffer a plate of infamous pub grub just to enjoy a decent beer. Three Bears Crystal beer is sold in most of Kaliningrad’s supermarkets in handy 1.5-litre bottles at a price you cannot growl at. Why not buy two bottles! Should you overdo it, there is always the hair of the bear!

Three Bears Crystal beer in Kaliningrad — Three Bears Crystal beer

😁TRAINSPOTTING & ANORAKS
Name of Beer: Three Bears Crystal
Brewer: United Breweries
Where it is brewed: St Petersburg and in other Russian locations
Bottle capacity: 1.5 litres
Strength: 4.4%
Price: It cost me about 125 rubles (£1.23) in 2000
Appearance: Light amber
Aroma: Not much
Taste: Light bitterness, the equivalent of a British light or pale ale
Fizz amplitude: 5/10
Label/Marketing: Traditional Russian
Would you buy it again? I have, on several occasions

*Note that the beers that feature in this review series only include bottled beer types that are routinely sold through supermarket outlets and in no way reflect the variety of beer and/or quality available in Kaliningrad from speciality outlets and/or through bars and restaurants.

Proshkola School Kaliningrad Inspiration in Action

We aim to develop the best personal qualities in students, by Olga Korosteleva-Hart, English Teacher

25 May 2025 – Proshkola School Kaliningrad Inspiration in Action

In Proshkola school, Kaliningrad, teachers practise the humane pedagogy of Shalva Amonashvili, the ethos of the school being to evolve free-thinking minds, stimulate imagination and exercise inventiveness.

At Proshkola, teachers strive to establish mutual respect. Each student’s self-esteem is seen as a valued asset, an essential prerequisite for academic success and a foundation on which to build a sense of personal confidence, which will hold them in good stead as they journey from their school life into the adult world beyond.

Towards this end, therefore, there are no clichéd lessons and unproductive moralizing, no stultifying and exhausting homework, no terrifying, fearful tests and checks. At Proshkola, personal development, creativity and the cultivation of spiritual values are encouraged every step of the way. Here, students are given the faith they need to become the best versions of themselves.

For example, recently my seventh-grade students were given the opportunity to cast themselves in the role of island sovereigns, invested with the power to, among other things, legislate laws, promote food production, devise national costumes and establish national symbols with which to express the island’s unique identity.

The holistic nature of this project required students to explore their imaginative resourcefulness, harnessing creativity to the challenging but fun task of designing a fully functional island society with all that this entails, from workable economics to cultural norms and mores.

The results and satisfaction deriving from fun proactive tasks like this transcend mere education. They bring out the best in students. They empower and inspire.

[ProSchool] Proshkola School Kaliningrad

It is this creative spirit, this ethos of mutual engagement that sets our school apart. It is not a school of learning by rote, but a school that places the greatest emphasis on inspiration, interaction and results from collaborative teamwork. Our students’ aspirations and what they go on to achieve is how we, as a school, define ourselves. We never forget as teachers that success is symbiotic.

Olga Hart receives thank you message from student at Proshkola School Kaliningrad

Thank You letter to Olga Hart from her students in Kaliningrad

^During my last lesson with Year 7, I asked students to write a thank you letter to their classmates for something they had done for them during the school year. Two of them wrote to me. I finished the drawing which they had started. It’s times like this that make teaching so worthwhile – Olga Korosteleva-Hart

At ProSchool ~ https://vk.com/proschool39 ~ we strive to develop the best personal qualities in students.

Published with the kind permission of Alyona Pusko, Director, Proshkola School, Kaliningrad

ProSchool Kaliningrad: Can Mick Hart Make the Grade?

> Художник Виктор Рябинин Кёнигсберг

Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics

There’s hope for the old country yet!

Published 8 May 2025 [VE Day] – Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics

Congratulations to Nigel Farage and Reform for their spectacular success in the local elections.

Reform, led by charismatic leader Nigel Farage, has stunned the British establishment yet again. In last week’s local elections, Britain’s fastest growing political party, Reform, took an impressive 677 seats across all contested councils, won two mayoralties and gained another MP.

Mainstream media could not have got it more wrong when they dubbed Reform the ‘Upstart Party’. ‘The Up-and-Coming Upending Party’, or the ‘Most In-touch with the People Party’, that would have been more like it, with Reform having positioned itself as the leading voice in British politics and a real contender for Number 10.

Tapping into years of deep-seated frustration over the relentless loss of its nation to pro-migrant tub-thumping liberals, Reform is making significant gains on all political fronts as liberalism’s flawed and dismal dictates crumble and disintegrate from one side of the Atlantic to the other.

Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics

The big losers on election day were unanimously the Conservatives. It was they, unsurprisingly, that took the hardest hit. After 14 dreadful, shambolic years in office, which opened the door to Labour, the only wonder is that anyone bothered to vote for them at all, and one suspects that those who did were the vote-by-rote fraternity, those who have developed over time a nasty stuck-in-the-rut compulsive kind of voting habit, which they know they ought to quit but, as with any other entrenched addiction, is easier said than done.

The Cons deserve no sympathy; they have reaped what they have sown. Their 14 years of faulty governance were some of the most embarrassing, some of the most chaotic in British political history.

Split down the middle by pseudo-liberal influencers, the Cons were far too busy fighting amongst themselves to deliver on their promises, paving the way for the pro-migrant left to exploit this lack of leadership and fill the moral void with its woke-obsessed agenda.

It certainly did not help the Cons when instead of returning to grassroot principles they sold out to the woke vote by installing Mrs Badenoch (bless her old cotton socks), who, should she eventually lead the party to victory, would wear the gilded crown of being the first woman of colour to hold the office of British prime minister. How’s that for ticking Labour’s box first!

You would think that the Cons would have learnt their lesson from the fall and fall of Rishi Sunak, but no. The quickly invented Badenoch was a Dr Who regenerative moment for the likes of the party’s liberal faction, but for the dyed-in-the-wool blue rinse brigade, it was yet another broken string on the old Conservative fiddle; another act of betrayal in a long series of similar acts, gambling on the premise that in order to survive, the Cons need to emulate Labour and ultimately beat them at their own game. Whata mistaka to makea …

As for Labour, what you can say? Labour has been Starmered, well and truly Starmered. If Tony Blair has gone down in history as a nail in the UK’s coffin, Starmer could be remembered — if remembered he is at all — as the Labour party’s undertaker and grave digger in chief: the man who laid the party out and then went on to bury it.

Well Done Reform A Great Week in British Politics

Returning to the voters of habit who have yet to understand the existential crossroads that Britain has been driven to, the collapse of the vote for both Cons and Labour translated in some areas, predictably ivory tower areas and those which for the moment are the least effected by immigration, into gains for Jeremy Thorpe’s old crew, the faded jaded Liberal Democrats

For disaffected voters frightened to think outside the box, it was time to fall back on the old switcheroonee. If they could not vote for Liebour or Cons, and conscience said they couldn’t, then they would have to vote LibDem! What a terrible farce. What a tragic mistake.

The Liberal Democrats as the name suggest are little more than orange squash Labour — full of sugar and diluted down — which, in terms of immigration and the woke that provides its life support, offers more of the same but worse. But look here let’s be frank, Cyril, some of the LibDem politicians and even some of its supporters come across as nice mean-wells — enlightened Tims-Nice-But-Dims. True, many are wishy washy and still others namby pamby, but whatever they are individually taken as a party, they are still the problem not the solution.

LibDems are like an old broken horse, not worth backing. But Well Done Reform in the local elections.

What a naga to backa …

If you think about it, and it isn’t really rocket science, to steal a march on Reform all that Labour and the Cons need do is to stop the boats from romping in, take control of Britain’s borders and, as in Russia, where Russians come first, restore faith in blighted Britons that the government is their government, that the country is their country and that it is their culture and they who come first.

The fact that the old political parties will not control immigration and will not withdraw from the ECHR, the thorn in the side of sovereignty, not even to save themselves, is an out-and-out admission that they have not the slightest intention of observing and upholding the primary responsibility of that of any government, which is to ensure the safety and security of the citizens of the country who voted them into office on this mandate.

So, under the rule of the two old fogeys, the long-since past their sell by dates Labour and Conservatives, what has Britain got to look forward to? Both of the two old past-it parties will keep on letting the migrants in and letting them in their thousands. They will blather on about net-zero policies whilst concreting over the countryside. They will turn the other cheek on escalating utility bills and, with nothing else up their sleeves, inflate the cost of houses. There will be more boats, more migrants, a more divided society, more deaths and broken lives, more candle-lit vigils, more and more and more and more stultifying woke and with each year that passes less of the Britain we knew and loved. Is this what you want for your children’s future? That’s what you’ve got and that’s what you’ll get if you vote for the same old cronies.

Take your country back, now, whilst you have the chance, for it may well be your last chance.

Vote for the future of Britain. Vote Reform.

“Only Reform will stand up for British culture, identity and values. We will freeze immigration and stop the boats. Restore law and order. Repair our broken public services. Cut taxes to make work pay. End government waste. Slash energy bills. Unlock real economic growth.

“Only Reform will take back control over our borders, our money and our laws. Only Reform will secure Britain’s future as a free, proud and rich nation.” — https://www.reformparty.uk/

Meanwhile in the UK links

UK utility bills: What a gas freezing is
UK Zelensky tour is a charity gala performance
Brits told to be vigilant as boats roll in on tide of terror
UK anti-immigration riots herald a new dystopian era
Don’t kill cash!

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Bye Bye: https://clipart-library.com/terms.html

Old Nag: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Old-nag-silhouette/58275.html

Kaliningrad a Green City

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees

Revised 1 May 2025 | First published 23 May 2020 – Kaliningrad a Green City

Apprehensive that May may not be the merry, merry month that it is cracked up to be? Put your memory in reverse gear and trip back to the coronavirus spring of 2020. I cannot guarantee that things can only get better. I cannot guarantee that they could hardly be worse. But, relatively speaking … {This post originally published May 2020 | Revised 2 May 2025}

Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather; nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind, ignore the restrictions and warnings and go wassailing off for a day at the coast. It is true that in the past few days Kaliningrad has been granted a nominal hike in temperature, pushing it up to 15 degrees, and this long-awaited blessing combined with a light but still fresh breeze in association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that has condescended to at last come out from behind the clouds, were sufficiently alluring to prise myself from self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.

To effect our home exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three weeks or more, our house, and those around us, have been subject to ‘trench warfare’.

**The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …**

Cable-laying has been going on. A narrow but deep trench, hazardous enough to dislocate or break something vital should a miscalculated step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our property and, running at right angles to it, extends along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which, you might care to know, sits a very large dog.

From the vantage point of my bedroom window, I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind), this cable work in progress and mentally bookmark whilst doing so the differences that might exist between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with similar tasks undertaken in the UK.

From the outset, and for most of the initial period of work, the workforce has consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with two spades, two shovels and the indispensable trusty wheelbarrow. The blokes have been doing most of the digging, whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves neatly folded and tucked to dangle professionally from her jeans’ back pocket, appears to have had an overseeing role, an inference later corroborated when a clipboard suddenly sprung into her hand. Praise where praise is due, however: at one stage in the laborious game, she, too, rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.

Weather conditions ~ cold and raining ~ have been generally unsympathetic, hardly conducive to the job in hand, but this small group of sappers, equipped with nothing more mechanical than the arms that God has given them, unless you include the wheelbarrow, struggled valiantly on alone until, after a week’s hiatus, the cavalry arrived.

The reinforcements are a hardy bunch of chaps, not only are they seasoned trenchers but also capable cable layers. The cables they are laying had been deposited along with piles of aggregate prior to their arrival. They now reside on the oval island, a compelling grass-covered landmark at the centre of confluent streets, which marks the spot of a German bunker constructed in World War Two.

The temptation at this juncture to go off on a historic tangent and waffle on about the many wartime installations surviving in Kaliningrad and across its Prussian region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has some way to go before it can get back on its feet from the damage done by coronavirus, I will wait for a more propitious moment to elaborate on this and continue for the present with my narrative.

Kaliningrad a Green City

We had crossed the trench in front of the house and this delicate feat accomplished were now walking along, as if coronavirus was not our shadow, the original cobbled streets that once were Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was essentially a myth. Königsberg, he said, at least the oldest parts of the city, never had been green.

The streets were narrow, the buildings high and the order of the day had been red brick and grey cobbles. The city’s outlying districts, those laid down in the early years of the 20^th century and expanded in the 1920s through to the mid-1930s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and plots on which they stand have their English equivalent in the UK’s 1920s’ suburbs, whose properties sold on the back of the clever and catchy advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect.

Every home in Britain’s new suburbs came complete with a small front garden and a larger plot at the rear, and on the wide and curving streets where these airy houses stood, a row of trees lined either side, augmented, where space allowed, with narrow but neat grass verges, demarcating pavement from road and bringing a little more green into the urban environment.

In Königsberg’s equivalent districts, as contemporary photographs and postcards show, though most new streets of the day were tree-lined like their English counterparts, such trees as there were, were, of course, but saplings, which doubtlessly formed visually graceful vistas but with nothing like the leafy foliage that adorn those self-same streets today, now that these trees, like me, have reached maturity.

You see, what happens to you when you subject yourself to self-isolation: every simple detail, every once commonplace thing, every taken-for-granted and overlooked minutiae undergoes a process of scrutinised amplification, so acutely rendered to senses locked away indoors that before you can wryly say ‘I believe in coronavirus’, you cannot see the wood for the trees — or, in my particular case, the trees for Kaliningrad’s leaves.

Should old acquaintance be forgot

Our leafy walk through Kaliningrad’s suburbs, along the canopied tree-lined streets with their flower and foliate burgeoning gardens, had brought us after a while within viewing distance of a most eccentric sight — that peculiar waterside café, that semi-abandoned confection, which, with its facsimile rooftop lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the balcony doing I don’t know what and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something that sneaked into Russia during the 1970s from an amusement park in Skegness.

Cafe near pond in Kaliningrad now in 2025 demolished

I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here in earlier times. Admittedly, it, as with the pond and everything around it, was saturated monochrome — obviously in the 1910s the world was waiting for colour — but even in this black and white existence (things used to be black and white before coronavirus was invented) the former Königsberg building had all the ennobling features that Gothicity could bestow and was, in its waterside setting, a proverbial sight for sore eyes rather than an eyesore for eyes reduced by its sight to tears, which, omitting novelty out of context, is as good as it gets today. [Note, although Captain Ahab went down with his ship two years after this photo was taken, the demolition pirates have failed to launch their own version, which stands as forlorn and half-built in a spot which Heaven reserved for a restaurant, but which seems to have become Kaliningrad’s ghost ship graveyard.]

Kaliningrad a Green City

Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, which in spite of my reaction I have a sneaky affection for, we wended our way, notwithstanding, happier now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the pond’s perimeter.

Old photographs demonstrate that on both sides of the lake (my apologies purists, I know I should say ‘pond’, but ponds are so small in England and Königsberg’s ponds so large that the appelation seems incongruous) the banks had, for the most part, been left to their own devices, accumulating vegetation and fringed throughout with wetland trees. In the black and white world of old photography atmosphere reigns supreme, but detail can in time, and as a result of time, often call for magnification. I had thus to resort to a lens to pick out from these old photographs the presence of a narrow winding path, most probably gravel surfaced, curling in the early 1900s, through the ribbon of trees and foliage skirting the edge of the pond.

Subsequently lost, this beaten track is now hard paved and in a character and colours favoured by, and thus typical of, 21^st century urban planners. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has long since been dug out, substituted with mown grass lawns and carefully tended municipal flowerbeds. But whilst block paving of every kind, in all its imaginative shapes, its patterns and its sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, a skateboard space and even an exercise quadrangle, has colonised the past, the Königsberg trees that form a boundary along the side of the adjacent road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the later additions, some Soviet others millennial, endorse the attribution that Kaliningrad unlike Königsberg is as green a city as a city can get.

As much as I was enjoying and being overly distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at — daydreaming — today had its objectives, and this meant putting my dreams on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on it. Not that this endeavour would prove difficult in Kaliningrad. Graffiti is just one, sadly, of a number of contagious viruses that has made its way from the West.

Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins in Kaliningrad — **Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins and Nadezhda Rumyantseva in Kaliningrad**

The graffiti we were looking for was not one of your run-of-the-mill, deface, vandalise, spoil, degrade and then talk it up as ‘urban art’ jobs. It was truly an original piece, a bona fide work of art, featuring the actor Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter and the Russian actress, Nadezhda Rumyantseva, star of The Girls, a classic Soviet romantic-comedy drama — but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.

Kaliningrad: Not all graffiti is equal — **There is graffiti and graffiti …**

Work of an anonymous but talented Kaliningrad artist — **Mine’s a vegetarian**

And then she said, For old times’ sake.” What could she be suggesting?

She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ referred to recent history, but a recent history which in the New Normal was as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Ah, those glorious days — so happy and carefree — when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or stroll down on an evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of those days? More to the point, will they ever return?

Like every other bar, Flame was a victim of coronavirus. There it stood, shrouded in darkness, doors barred, patronless and yet for all this desertion not quite extinguished. A nice and reassuring touch was that in keeping with its tradition, Flame, though closed to the public, continued to project music into and across the surrounding recreation area via external hi-fi speakers stationed on its alfresco forecourt. In these grim and troubled times, the music struck a chord that resonated inside one’s soul. It was the bittersweet sound of the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.

Now that the shops — some of the shops — had officially opened their doors again, we had a small chore to fulfil, which was to buy a part for the vacuum cleaner. We might fall foul of coronavirus and die as a result, but heaven forbid we would do such a thing in a house with a mucky carpet.

As we crossed the road from the pond, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had been doing no such thing. The shopping centre that has been taking shape at the end of the city market had gone, in the space of days, from a shell of incomplete concrete pieces into an impressive three- or four-storey series of ascending profiled platforms.

Ordinarily, way back when in the Old (and familiar) Normal, something as mundane as this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, self-imposed or otherwise, seems to have the tendency to sharpen the edge of the mind, so much so in my case that in regarding this evolving building, its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle, or rather an affinity with the bemusement he had felt on waking from a sleep of hitherto unknown proportion.

Vacuum cleaner part in pocket, we set off on our homeward journey, not by retracing our steps — having to pass Flame again now that it was clam-tight shut would be more than the drinker in me could withstand — but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the pond. This route would necessitate, however, walking past yet another well-frequented, landmark bar: the one in historic Rossgarten Gate — CLOSED … just like the rest!

Fortunately, by way of profound distraction, on the opposite side of the road, in one of Kaliningrad’s public squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck, playing his hose in the sun over some of the city’s prettiest flower beds. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”

Watering the flowers in the green city of Kaliningrad — **A lovely day on which to have your hose out**

Kaliningrad a Green City

Our walk back around the lake had proven itself a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty to be found in strolling back and forth days and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s be honest about it, the water features of bath and bog, though unarguably indispensable, hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling pond under a clear blue sky.

On this side of the pond as upon the other, trees in abundance abide, and in such variety and of such different ages that they did not have to ask me twice to indulge my obsessive passion for retrospective reverie, inviting me to determine which of them had been planted during Kaliningrad’s Soviet era and which belonged to Königsberg. I suppose you’d do the same if you were me.

The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad

Trees, ponds, brand-new shopping centres rising up from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, bars with no people inside them, sepia memories of long ago, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of civic truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly and almost back home; just the trenches to cross.

UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is

A swarthy face and a dinghy, the only way left to keep warm in Britain

26 April 2025 – UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is

The cost of heating one’s home in the UK is a joke — a sick one. It’s alright if you’re an entitled millennial, as most likely you are still living at home with mum, and, given the prohibitive cost of striking out on your own, most likely will still be living with mum when you are in your 50s. For us old fogeys, however, who belong to a generation who would never have dreamt of living at home with mum, and who left the nest at the age of 15, heating one’s home is past a joke — it’s a travesty wrapped in catastrophe.

I returned to the UK from Russia, where I had been enjoying affordable gas central heating 24/7, to a rambling old Victorian house so cold that I wondered if, in my absence, I should have let the Cryonics Institute use it for cold meat storage. Birds Eye would have had no difficulty in hiding its fish fingers here. And this was during a winter which, once again, was unseasonably mild. Let’s clasp our hands together brothers (many times may help) and thank the heavens for global warming!

Gas fire with bird that died from cold, as in Britain we can't afford the heating ...

Disinclined to hand over my hard-earned cash to insult-to-injury utility companies, who unashamedly explain away the reason for their extortionate tariffs by boasting about the part they play in planet-saving strategies – we invest in renewable energy! – but then go rather schtum at the mention of corporate virtue signalling or shoot-yourself-in-the-foot back-firing Russian sanctions, I, like many other Brits, spent three uncomfortable UK months surviving on rationed gas and electric.

Swaddled in two fleeces, one of which is a British-army thermal, with long johns under my jeans and four pairs of socks on my feet (OK, so I bought them from Primark), I thought of renting the icy house out to special forces operatives training for cold-climate combat. I’m fairly certain that Sir Edmund Hillary and the adventurer Robert Falcon Scott used my house for training purposes before setting off respectively, one to climb Mount Everest and the other to meet his maker in the Antarctic.

As I sat in the smallest room in the house, the easiest to heat, with a hot water bottle shoved up my jumper, I thought how perspicacious it had been to bring with me to chilly Britain a pair of those splendid thick Russian socks, the sort traditionally knitted by winter-savvy and wise babushkas. I put them on over my Primark’s and said hello to my toes again.

Free with every packet of Yester Years’ Crisps:
Woke and Hypocrisy: It really is God Save the King!
Brits told Be Vigilant! As boats roll in on Tide of Terror!
2023 UK Woke Hits an All-Time High!
UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance

Things will get worse before they get worse

Things may seem bad in the UK now, as bad as they can get, but under the lefty jackboot doctrine of ‘tax them to the hilt and raid their hard-earned pension pots’, Starmer’s rip-em-off Britain can only get progressively worse.

As it is, I was forced to set the coordinates and dash off in my way-back machine into the 19^th century to enjoy the luxury of a real coal fire, which I cannot do in present England at £13 a bag. Actually, to give the local coal merchant, Cagey Smythe, his due, his smokeless save-the-planet coal does belt out some heat — but at £13 a bag! That’s almost as bad as British pub beer prices, which in some pubs have already reached, and in others are nudging slyly towards, a shameful £6 a pint, or as bad as a farting packet of crisps, which can cost anything in British pubs from £1.50 to £1.90.

Double Diamond may not have worked wonders as the adverts claimed it would, but in 1976, it was 15 pence a pint and a packet of Golden Wonder crisps cost something like 3p. Everything is relative, so they say, and they also lie. Quick, back into the time machine! Take off!

Double Diamond never worked wonders but it didn't hurt your wallet

My next time-travelling stop will most probably be Edwardian Britain for a good shave and a haircut by a barber who isn’t Turkish when he really might be Albanian, and whose hairdressers may not be a front for laundering money from his nearby Grow Shop.

UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is

The compelling need to cut my hair and to trim my beard now that winter is on the wane, derives from the uneasy feeling that I am beginning to look like Rasputin would, had he been permitted to continue his natural journey into the later years of his life.

Mick Hart, with silly beard, in the UK utility bills fiasco

Some self-overrating practitioner of the proverbial art of piss-taking was thrilled to liken me recently to Merlin the Mad Magician.

If that is who I am, I thought, I would go to Dover, go directly to Dover, surpass myself by shouting ‘Go’, and, waving my magic wand, I’d litter the English Channel with row upon row of very sharp objects, dinghy-puncturing objects, adding for good measure the odd sea serpent or two.

What else could we do with a magic wand? I know! We could wave it over Number 10 and transform our Judas government from something disturbingly anti-white British into a patriotic force of old.

But what if the spell was to go wrong, turning our !!*£!-! government into EU-pandering clowns, lovers of Macron and Turdo, driving the country like Edward Smith steered his ill-fated ship towards an unthinkable destiny, its passengers, mum’s millennials and the unfortunate not-yet-borns, passing obliviously up Shit Creek into the blade of the mugging iceberg (Innit!), the tip of which, I have to say, is thrusting its way, in a most rude manner, into my front living room, where I cannot afford to turn up the gas or switch my electric light on. But hey ho and wait a mo! — it would seem as though the dreadful spell has already been tragically cast. ‘It must be the Russians that dun it!’ chorus the British media, led by their Portland Place choir leader, the baton-wielding BBC.

UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is

Turning up the heat these days, the heat that comes from the ring of truth, must be done whatever the cost, if you want to prevent your country from slipping into a leftist ice age. Scott and his brave companions, Dr Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers, are moving into warmer waters, and we must do the same, but preferably whilst our minds, in harness with our collective will, are still above the surface.

I know that it is no easy feat. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy, especially when your jumper has a water bottle up it. There’s more at risk than you first might think, unless you read The Guardian — and then you probably just don’t think. For, in ‘Watch Whatever You Say UK’, it only takes an honest remark posted on social media to get your collar felt:

“Oh, officer, I say, what big strong masculine hands you have!”

“Don’t you masculine me, you heterosexual breeder!”

My country’s gone
My feet are cold
But I must think
What I am told — Net Zero Common Sense

Mick Hart from Kaliningrad's cat, Ginger

Do you ever have the feeling that somebody’s watching you? >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESdkAsBCZlo

One way of escaping UK woke culture and eluding the big freeze that’s burning a hole in your wallet is to pack your bags and move to Russia. It’s warmer in Siberia in more ways than one than it is in Britain’s Home Counties.

The other way is to build a TARDIS and waft wantonly back in time to those halcyon days when Britain’s coal mines proudly and productively fuelled the fires of every British home; back to the days before net zero, which were days of common sense, when we had more warmth in our homes, considerably more warmth in our hearts and, before Labour got into office, a lot more money in our pockets.

Olg Hart with TARDIS. A means of escape from UK Utilty Bills Fiasco

Read my A to Z of how to build a TARDIS, and once you have mastered the art of not turning woman or black, and ruining a very good TV programme, zip back old-days Dr Who fashion to your nearest polling booth and wipe out Labour by voting Reform.

Stopping the boats coming in will stop the migrant hotel bill. There’s an awful lot that could be done with the £7 million that curtailing the boats would save each day. You could build a couple of power stations, squander some on renewable energy and still have enough in reserve to give everyone in the British Ilses £6 for a pint of beer, £1.90 for a packet of crisps, a bobble hat, a pair of gloves and a pink hot water bottle called Cassandra.

No one’s ever said it before, but do these things and do them quickly and we might never have it so good!

NB: Cassandra, the hot water bottle, as seen in the feature image of this post, may well be available from all good adult shops. Keep warm next winter without the risk of gender issues.

Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?

If it’s highly recommended by Mick Hart, you know it must be good!

9 April 2025 ~ Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?

As a follow-up to my series of posts ‘How to get from Kaliningrad to the UK and vice versa’, I bring you Hotels by the Airport!

Having been held up at the Polish border more times than Dick Turpin held up the overland stage, I decided that a good contingency plan when travelling to the UK from Kaliningrad would be to bed down for the night in Gdansk and then proceed to the airport the next day. “But,” said a relative, “as your flight to the UK requires you to get out of bed at the godforsaken hour of 3am, why not stay at a hotel close to the airport itself?” “Hmm,” I said, “I’m not sure about that.” And then she said, some have bars, and suddenly I couldn’t be surer.

Relative to this post
How to get to Kaliningrad from the UK
Russia Kaliningrad Visa Information
Is the Poland to Kaliningrad Border Open?
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival
Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!
Hotel Mercure Gdansk: Reasons to Stay There!

Sleep and Fly Gdansk What More Could You Ask For?

A search on Google under ‘Gdansk Airport Hotels’ quickly rummaged out a handful of places that were too expensive to contemplate. Paying over the odds for a room is OK when sliding beneath the sheets with a delectable bit of totty, but just for the sake of crashing out, it simply isn’t worth it.

Besides, I did not need to stay at the Hilton just to impress everybody, all I had to do was lie. And, of course, it works out cheaper!

The out-of-season price for a bed at Gdansk Airport Hampton by Hilton was, at the time of booking, £117 a night; the Hi Hotel Gdańsk Airport Lotnisko was £64 a night; not bad as hotel tariffs go in this extortionate era. But, unless I am much mistaken, this hotel is one of those self-service jobs, meaning it does not have a reception desk, or, even if it does, the desk is unmanned, unwomaned and everything else in between, which we will not dwell upon here, because we do not wish to propagate woke. I imagine, without validation, that it must be one of those impersonal places where access is determined solely by an electronic code, with not a human or anything vaguely like one neither in sight nor on site. For me, this proposition was out of the question, as you will understand better if you read my post Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!

That left but one more option, a hotel near the airport, which, as luck would have it, the travelling relative I spoke of earlier stayed at on her outward journey after visiting us in Kaliningrad. “It’s comfortable,” she said. “It’s very close to the airport, and it has a bar.”

Sleep and Fly

The sixty quid price tag for a one-night stand, sorry, for a one-night stay, at the hotel she referred to is a lot easier on the pocket than the £100+ at the Hitler ~ Hilton ~ almost half the tariff in fact. Being almost twice the price, perhaps if you booked at the Hilter, they would allow you to stay there twice in one night. This complication appealed to me, ‘stay one night get the same night free’, but the deal breaker with Sleep and Fly was the name of this hotel. Perhaps if they have a step ladder, I could cross the word ‘Sleep’ out or change the name of the hotel slightly to one that suited my lifestyle, viz ‘No Sleep Then Fly’. As long as it did not prove to be ‘No Sleep No Fly’, there would be nothing for me to worry about, a most unlikely scenario as I have a knack of finding something, however elusive it may be.

Hmm, Sleep and Fly? I mused. I liked the name a lot. It was perfect for an insomniac.

^Journey starts: Kaliningrad Central Bus Station^

The fact that on the occasion of my leaving Kaliningrad recently we passed through both the Russian and Polish borders without let or hinderance, whilst mildly ironic in and of itself, since the time before and the time before that, we had been kicking our heels for hours, did not in any way invalidate my decision to split the journey across two days. On the past two travelling occasions, the long inevitable interval between arriving at the airport and the flight, which is a painful seven hours, was extended by delays from seven hours to 10 hours and to 15 hours respectively, which rather takes the Wizz out of flying with Wizz Air. Never mind editing ‘Sleep and Fly’, how about adding an ’S’ to ‘Wizz’!

In the unlikely event that the flight is delayed the morning after the night before, having stayed at the airport hotel, at least the disruption will occur when most who sleep are rested, and with any luck you might still get home when the buses and trains are running during daylight hours.

Apart from these considerations and the precautions they invoke, if the truth be known, I was looking forward to the novel experience of staying close to the airport and strolling at my leisure to the terminal in the morning.

Ice Cold in Gdansk

As there had been no holdups on our journey through border control, the bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk rolled up at the airport at the time advertised.

On alighting from the bus, I was glad, mighty glad that I had worn my thermal-lined Russian coat. It was cold, mighty cold, and there was a nasty, razor-sharp, fingers-freezing gusting wind whipping across the hillock on which Gdansk Airport proudly perches. I tell you, without a word of a lie, it was enough to blow a moustache right off, even a big important one such as that belonging to Lech Walesa.

Now, either the directions given to me by word of toe on how to get to Sleep and Flies had not been given correctly or my interpretation of them had not been up to snuff, as, after wandering up and down a little, I ended up where no one wants to be, somewhere in no-genders land, stuck beneath the pillar of a large concrete flyover, just me, a suspicious rucksack and, crammed inside two cars, a herd of Polish security men, none of whom, by the way, took a blind bit of notice of me, even though my frozen fingers resembled glowing red sticks of dynamite. (‘Ere, whoever said that dynamite is red?” “La de la, de da, de la ~ Shut up!”)

Gdansk Airport on a cold, cold evening — ^**Gdansk Airport on a cold evening: In there somewhere is my motel**^

A half-glass-empty man at best, I had already convinced myself that I would never find my hotel and would be forced to spend the night inside the airport terminal, before it up and occurred to me that airports have information desks, where you can get answers to rareified questions like does my hotel exist? Gdansk has an excellent desk, behind which a young man sits with a beard as silly as mine.

Fortunately, not only could this bewhiskered fellow converse quite well in English, but he was multilingual enough to understand the language of chattering teeth. His assistance was par excellence. No sooner had I mentioned Sleep and Fly than he said, “What?” I suppose he could hardly hear me above the sound of my knocking knees. “Sleeep and F-f-flies” I said, and he leaned over the counter a mite to see if they were undone. As they weren’t, thank heavens (think icicles, but large ones), it dawned on him, like tomorrow morning, that here was a silly old fart of an Englishman without a hapeth of directional sense who was having the utmost difficulty in telling his Sleep and Fly from his elbow.

Quickly, he whipped out a folder ~ his beard was larger than mine ~ and proceeded to show me patiently, on the nicest map imaginable, something on a street in Naples, and then, swiftly finding the right page, but showing it not to the quite right person, Captain Horatio Compassless, he said, like Studebaker Hoch, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”. Shucks, no he didn’t say that at all, that’s what Macron tells the migrants as he waves them on to Dover. No, what the young man said was, to get to the end of the rainbow, I would need to follow the long blue line. And sure enough, there in his folder was this long blue line.

Leaning over his desk, as he might a castle parapet, he pointed at the ground. We had already done the one about flies, so I wondered what he was getting at, and then I saw it for myself. I was actually standing on top of it! The blue line was beneath my feet. This young man didn’t lie. How could he with that beard! I thanked him for putting up with me, pointed myself in the right direction, that certainly made a change, and was off like a shot from a peashooter.

(In case you didn’t get it, by coincidence, or through someone using their brains, the blue line was right beneath me as I stood at the information desk.)

Being the sort of man whose glass is always more than empty when it’s someone’s turn to fill it up, I was already of the conviction that the blue line would peter out before I got to where I was going, and cuh, huh, would you believe it, if I hadn’t been right, I’d be wrong. However, all was not entirely lost and neither, I am relieved to say, was I.

Before leaving home I had taken the wise precaution of memorising what the hotel looked like from a photo on its website. Now you might say, why bother? Why not use your smartphone and look it up on Google? Ah, now then, now then, now … that’s because you’ve got a smartphone, and I’ve got a phone that is not so smart, at least not as smart as I’d like it to be. My Russian Tele-2 sim card doesn’t function in Gdansk. You might say, that’s understandable, but neither does O2. Thus, whenever I switch on roaming, I am free to roam wherever I want without knowing where I’m going, since every time I visit Gdansk, I can never ever ever, and never ever ever get an internet connection. (Take out a two-year rolling contract, which O2 continually steers you toward, you will be able to roam as you’ve never roamed before! But I don’t want their two-year contract!)

Anyway, on this cold and bitter evening, all was saved by my impeccable memory. I was standing on a small eminence at the side of a little round roundabout about to give up the ghost and sit in the airport terminal when, lo and behold, there it was ~ the On-The-Fly Hotel!

Sleep and Fly Gdansk. A motel convenient for the airport.

From a distance, and the closer I came even more so, the little hotel, which is deceptively large ~ larger on the inside than it appears to be on the out (fingers crossed it will be William Hartnell and not a regenerate blackman wearing a fixed silly smirk), the warmer and more inviting it became. With my teeth knocking and my knees chattering, I hoped it was not a mirage. (“You get those in warm places, don’t you? Such as in deserts and the like.” “Be quiet and just clear off!”)

But it looked warm, and it was warm. Thank heavens, this was not England, where the only places that are warm are centrally heated migrant hotels. The rest of us simply cannot afford to switch the heating on. If ever I finish my time machine, I will guarantee Napoleon wins. Only then perhaps will the historically beaten, Macron-bound BREXITed French cease offloading their migrant surplus onto an ECHR-compromised Britain.

My hands were so cold, seriously, that I had begun to get the hots. But then who wouldn’t, I ask you, exposed, in a manner of speaking, to a gorgeous young lady like that. She stood behind the reception desk as though she was a blowlamp, her comely presence alone enough to thaw an iceberg. On the 14^thof April 1912, had they stood her on the bows of the ship she could have averted a tragedy.

Seriously though, how nice it was, especially on a night like this, to book in face to face and not be forced to place one’s trust in a series of memorised digits.

Sleep and Fly Gdansk

Going back to my booking experience, whilst perusing Sleep and Fly’s website, I noted that the room of my choice had in several different places ‘small’ written next to it, leaving me in no doubt that the room I had booked would not be large, but was I prepared for titchy?

I did not take photos of the bedroom since for one thing my mitts had not recovered from the icy Polish air, and there was insufficient elbow room by which to angle my camera, and even if there had been, my phone, the non-connection type, most likely was not equipped with a suitable lens which could function adequately in a diminutive space like this. Funny thing, however, was that the room containing the shower and bog was almost as big as the bedroom.

Now let me stop right there. Yes, it’s true, the room was small: but it was clean; it was warm; it was snug. The bed, I would find out later, lacked no conceivable comfort and, crucially for one like me, whose slumbers can be broken by the fluttering of a moth’s wing, peace and serenity reigned, which, to a man like you, means quiet. To put it rather more succinctly, for the one evening I needed to be there, it fitted the bill like a bobby’s hat.

Though Sleep and Fly had a bar of its own, making it Sleep, Drink and Fly, I wanted the experience, the very surreal experience, of sitting late at night within the airport’s cavernous interior whilst sipping thoughtfully on a pint of beer.

Never known to be keen on flying (understatement) but reformed partly by my age (I recall the words of the swing song, “Too old to die young now …’), I always find the word ‘terminal’ when used in conjunction with scareports somehow grimly amusing. Sleep and Fly for tomorrow we …, now whatever rhymes with ‘fly’, ah, obviously, its ‘sigh’, which is exactly what I did.

I was standing at the reception desk, before the attractive young lady, whom I believe I might have mentioned earlier, asking if she would be so kind as to give me an early morning call, when it dawned on me (dawn being rather too close for comfort) that there was no phone in my motel room, so how could she possibly ring me? Don’t be so silly, Silly, they would ring you on your smartarsephone, which, of course, Old Silly, though it may sound silly, would not be able to make a sound as my phone had no connection. When I tried to explain the glitch, Beauty incarnate, the young receptionist, clearly did not understand me ~ but then whoever does? ~ and took my number anyway.

I consoled myself with the fact that the degree I had awarded myself in The Use of Mobile Phones that Refuse to Connect in Gdansk had taught me how to set the alarm. My wife is fond of over-stating that “Michael has a problem to every solution.” Not this time it would seem. Sleep and Fly it would be.

Despite the cold, I plucked up courage and walked to the bar in the airport terminal, where I drank a pint of ice-cold beer whilst lapping up the peculiarity. There must have been about 40 people scattered around the gargantuan space, but they and the sounds they emitted appeared to me as if in a dream, like phenomena and apparitions swallowed whole in Jonah’s Whale.

The near psychedelic contrast between drinking in the airport terminal and the next stop Sleep and Fly had shades of the Twilight Zone about it. The stark difference in spatial parameters made me feel like Lemuel Gulliver, who had nothing much to boast about whilst he was in Brobdingnag, but when he got to Lilliput was naturally having it large.

A view of the bar at the Sleep and Fly Gdansk

My relative, the one who had stayed at Sleep and Fly the week before I travelled and had apprised me of its amenities, had reported to me then that the motel had a bar but that there was nobody in it. There was only me on this occasion, but that was fine with me, because if nobody else enjoys your company, you can always pretend to enjoy it yourself. Besides, what can be better than loneliness when you have no choice but to be on your own.

Since I was their only customer, and the young receptionist had nothing much else to do but double as a bar person, I bestowed the honour upon her of serving me a second beer and then, looking at the time, as midnight was fast approaching, I thought I had better go to bed. I only had three hours to kill, or, if I could not sleep, which I generally can’t, the case would be vice versa. Each Dawn I Die. That’s a very good film, almost as good as The Lost Weekend. I suggest you watch them both.

Mick Hart at Sleep and Fly ponders on going to bed — It’s that ‘Finish that last beer and go to bed’ look!

Either way there was not much time, and as much as parting with Sleep and Fly’s bar whilst it was still in motion was a rum-un and a wrench, if I did not leave it now, I would be passing myself on the stairs in the morning when going up them to bed at night.

So, take it from a man who has stayed in a very small room where everything looked larger, should you be travelling, Gulliver, to or from Kaliningrad via Gdansk, unless transiting all the way by taxi, you could do very much worse than stay in Gdansk overnight and finish the last leg of your journey the following morning or afternoon by bus, if heading towards Kaliningrad, or, if going the opposite way, by taxi to the airport.

Gdansk Old Town is beautiful, packed to the rooftops with atmosphere. There’s oons of historic architecture waiting for you to soak up, together with splendiferous beers, and an enticing array of grub from an eclectic range of restaurants.

On your return journey from Kaliningrad to the UK, if your flight is an early one, I advocate you take a room in a hotel next to the airport. You could, of course, elect to stay overnight in Gdansk again, but accommodation close to the airport mitigates potential meltdown in the unlikely event in the wee small hours your taxi-to-airport fails to show.

Should you go for the airport option, if, like I, you are somewhat sensitive when it comes to paying through the nose or through any other part of your anatomy, I would go for Sleep and Fly. Its pleasant and its comfortable. It’s got a bar where you can sit and drink, which is extremely convenient for a first-thing hangover, and, as its less than 10 minutes walk to the airport, if you like your sleep you’ll get more of it, since you wont have to factor in the time it takes to prepare for the taxi and the time it takes for the taxi to run you to the airport. In plain speaking, it’s a simpler option, with less risk and less hassle.

Plus, if like mine your phone is duff and and no morning call is forthcoming, back in the bar downstairs or even from your bedroom window, you will be able to see the plane you’ve missed taking off without you. And what could be nicer than that!

The Main Thing

Sleep & Fly
Spadochroniarzy 12, 80-298 Gdańsk, Poland

Tel: +48 604 746 077

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Revised 31 July 2025 | first published 30 March 2025 ~ Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

Once upon a time, whilst wandering lonely as a cloud (has anybody else done this?) along Bedford’s magnificent Victorian Embankment, I found myself recalling photographs of this elegant tree-lined vista as it had been in a previous existence, namely in Edwardian days and later in the 1920s.

The quality of gracefulness in the apparel and deportment of those people in whose ghostly footsteps I now presumed to tread romanced me by their disappearance. I felt as though I walked among them, that they were all around me but nowhere to be seen.

The vanishing act was like, or so it seemed to me, a carnival trick gone wrong, which nothing now that it had been played could rectify. We are all of us in the Western world walking along such wistful vistas; sleep walking in the washed-out footprints of those who walked before us; shuffling robotically into Caligari’s cabinet, or should that be the cabinet of Count Kalergi?; hiding in the dark of it; preferring suffocation through denial and inaction rather than exit through the back; knowing that all that is waiting for us on the other side of the next door to open is the end of Western civilisation.

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

In the meantime (whatever the meantime is), enveloped by the past and evasive of the future, I had walked as far as the monument to Britain’s dead of two world wars, and pausing there for a moment or two, or it could have been 80 years, Time is a terrible trickster, I smiled the smile that people smile when they have very little to smile about.

“I’m not afraid of you!” I said, addressing my own mortality.

Mortality smiled back at me, a knowing, sad and secret smile.

We shared the embrace of mutual sorrow, and I was on my way.

“It’s not the dying,” I explained, as I walked along the side of me, “it’s the ephemerality of what you were, what you are becoming but which you actually won’t become since by the time you have become it, you will in every conceivable way have become what you least expected and most certainly never wanted. It really is as fast as that.”

Victorian Suspension Bridge, Bedford, UK

I stopped, hoping no doubt to suspend my animation, upon the Embankment Suspension Bridge (where better?) and gazed, for who knows how long, steadily into the water; the fast, the flowing, relentlessly fluid, the ceaslessly wet and willing water.

A young man of the present time was scorching down towards me, his arms a going at it like two strong steam ship pistons. He passed beneath the bridge, he and his canoe, and by the time I’d turned my head to look, he’d gone. I wondered if I had also gone, for now I was quite alone.

The river’s rivulets rolled on. The riveted bridge resisted. But I was quite alone, apart from a little touch of rust, which would not, it stood to reason, have been there once, when the bridge was built, but which seemed the more I focussed on it to be getting larger by the minute. The rust and I were good together. We were made for each others company.

I gazed along the river, this way and then that, but as for the boat and the young man in it, both had vanished into nothing and were going nowhere but in my memory.

As I alighted from the stone slab steps leading to and from the bridge, some of which were crumbling ~ they would not have been crumbling when the bridge was built ~ the word ephemerality was bouncing around inside my bonce as if sprung by a pinball wizard. Had that been Roger Daltrey flashing by in that canoe, his hope to die before he grew old could well be the propulsion that has spent his life so quickly; so unbelievably fast that we can barely equate the OAP that he is today with the youthful figure whose ironic lyrics have been used in evidence against him since he tempted fate and sang them.

Overwhelmed by the stammer of Daltrey’s My Generation (and underwhelmed by Starmer and his sentence of death for this generation), I had to put myself down, purely in a manner of speaking, and nowhere could be better than on one of the many benches dotted around Bedford’s Mill Meadow.

Benches wih plaques on in Mill Meadows, Bedford, UK

There used to be a mill here once, a real working mill, until time, short-sighted foresight, the love of money and poor town planning (ask Richard Wildman, he will tell you) took everything it had except its name.

Bedford Mill Meadow on an Ephemeral Afternoon

Sitting there in a mill-less state looking at the swans, painfully aware of the amorphous shapes hobbling by in the sepia shadows of their heritage predecessors, to which not even he or she or those who are spotlessly white could ever hold a candle, I thought of the many celebrities that age had been unkind to.

All things being as they are, ephemeral, that great facilitator of fame and spectacle, I refer, of course, to the internet, is a double-edged sword to the public figure. TV personalities (devoid of such as they often are), Hollywood moguls, celebs, statesmen and the women who try to emulate them but never quite succeed and show themselves up in the process, have a back-stabbing friend in the internet.

In the temple to temptation, all it takes is two or three clicks to move visually and effortlessly through every successive degenerative stage of an individual’s life. On the internet and in the flesh, the ‘before and after’ comparison of plastic surgery is truly quite disturbing, take Michael Jackson for example. Attempts by plastic surgery to arrest the natural ageing process (and Buttox doesn’t help) only succeed in making it more grotesque. Disintegration and decay flash before your eyes. Yesterday’s sex bomb has gone off bang, and all that remains is a smouldering ruin. Whatever else the internet may be, and those with our wits about us know it for what it is, a fulsome, fatuous, flatterer, it is the last gallery here on earth to which you would want to entrust your ego.

Look at me, I thought, sitting here on this riverside bench, here in Mill Meadow, Bedford, the very embodiment of rank morbidity. Pull yourself together man! But Roger Daltrey’s silver balls, ah, they were too insistent. They were swinging low like chariots, and though I really should have gone home, which is where they should have carried me, retreated from the Edwardian parasols and boaters of the 1920s, they carried the ‘E’ word with them, and I, like the buffers on a pinball table, could not avoid them striking me time and time again. The bells rang, the lights flashed, the scoreboard registered ‘Lucky 13’, the name of the game ‘Ephemerality’ turned gold and then lurid black, and ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.

But now I was growing tired of it, or afraid of what it was leading me to. Like bananas from Lidl’s and Aldi’s, nothing stays fresh for long. I’d dearly like to shop at Sainsbury’s or be seen in town with a Waitrose bag, but who, at my ephemeral age, would be willing to give me a mortgage?

The soliloquy between myself was nearing a crucial stage. I was revelling in impermanence, whilst taking from my carrier bag a going-brown banana. It was then that temporality took me by the hand, not the one with the banana in it, and led me off chariot fashion to that Victorian villa across the river, yes, that one over there, for a privileged peep into a young lady’s boudoir.

Said the chariot in dulcet tones, which I recognised immediately as those of the Standard Quartette, “Take that gorgeous young woman …” (Who wouldn’t, without a second thought, were it not for those horrible tats and piercings.) “Take that young woman, for example. Here before the mirror she stands believing that she holds, like she holds the gaze of men, the time we call the present in her pretty manicured hand, when all she has is a glove that slips easily from her fingers. These are the minutes and their minion seconds, which, in the dazzle of self-adoration, fall cleverly from her grasp. She is so impressed with the here and now that she cannot see beyond her current reflection in the mirror, which, if she looked at a little more honestly, she would clearly see is changing with each relentless tick of the clock and with each diminishing beat of her ageing heart.

It starts with that straight, that perfect chin, which even as we look is turning into a double act, and then travels down to those full, firm breasts, soon to resemble John Wayne’s saddle bags, and next the midriff on display, which is making way for two spare tyres. It’s all of it destined to go south, from the tip of her powdered nose to her proudly pedicured toes.

“Avalanche!” I cried.

“Bugger!” someone else responded.

“And take this young man,” (I’d rather not, said I.) (We had moved from the boudoir to an upmarket gym.) (I never knew before today, or could it be tomorrow, that chariots had the ability, not to mention audacity, to swing low wherever they wanted and whenever the mood so took them.) “See how he works those weights,” the Chariot said of the sweaty young man, “pumping up his muscles to make them look like Popeye’s, only to end up rather cockeyed: an awesome-chested arse-less wonder desperately searching for Arthur J. Pye.”

Temporality does this to us, no matter who we think we are. It reads from the Book of Ephemerality, the penultimate chapter of which reminds young women of the age-old proverb that beauty is skin deep and says to young men who body build that by the time they reach the age of 40 younger men will point at them and say, “That’s a magnificent body you’ve built for yourself … shame about the bay window!”

Do you ever have the feeling that you continually wake from a beautiful dream into a carnival freak show?

How I ever got back to my seat overlooking the River Great Ouse, I suppose I will never know, and neither will you unless I lie. But whilst I had been away, someone had stuck a plaque on the back of the seat on which I was sitting, which said, “Here sits a right silly Tw..!” I am sorry to disappoint you, but the plaque in question had always been there; always. In fact, almost every park bench in the meadow bears or bore, depending on the time you think you know you are living in, a plaque in memory of someone or something.

The inconsolability that follows the loss of a loved one creates the need to make material a memory to which one can reach out and touch. My encounter with my own mortality had reminded me of this, that the fear of ephemerality is for most, not all but most, not so much the loss of ourselves but the loss of someone close to us, someone so dear, so precious that the thought of being left alone in a world of utter indifference is the thought that is unthinkable.

In fairy tales, heroes and heroines frequently die of a broken heart. Yet for us in our ephemeral world where everything ends but not that easily, we have to endure our broken hearts and somehow learn to live with them. They are perhaps, after all, all that there is in our fleeting lives which seem to go on and on and on and probably do forever.

Requiescat in pace.

Bedford Mill Meadow memorial plaques on park benches

Poignant memorial plaque Bedford Mill Meadow

Moving memorial plaque in Bedford Mill Meadow

More Bedford

> Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

> It’s that man in the Russian hat in Bedford! – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

> Bedford more to like than not – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track

Mick Hart’s one-track mind takes him to Art Depot

17 March 2025 ~ Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track

Of all the roles I have played, or wanted to play, I never considered myself to be a second Bruce Reynolds. But here I was, about to pull off in my mind the world’s Second Great Train Robbery.

Everything was set; planned to the very last detail. Nothing had been left to chance. The moment my accomplice hit the switch, the moment the lights went down, it would happen; unbeknown to and unseen by everyone, history would repeat itself. And when the lights came up again, as they would on cue, the train and its trucks would still be there, but as for its valuable cargo, all that would remain of that was the empty space where it once had been.

This was me then, watching intently as the train and its freight wagons loaded down with beers trundled past at eyebrow height, but with my mind at a lonely railway bridge tucked away in rural Buckinghamshire, which, in the summer of 1963, was about to enter the annals of criminal history.

When they finally caught up with Bruce Reynolds, they thought that they had collared the mastermind behind the most audacious heist of all time, but how mistaken they must have been. For had they got it right, I could hardly have been sitting here, in Kaliningrad’s Art Depot Beer Bar, free to monitor the freight cars of booze as they passed mesmerically before my eyes.

Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad is right on track

The less dramatic but no less novel circumstances in which I found myself was that of watching beer and other intoxicants being delivered to customers’ tables by way of a model train. Although it may seem that I am merely substituting a long-held boyhood fantasy for something from Alice in Wonderland, I am firmly back from both, biding my time in a world where the cliché ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ was beginning to make me wonder why my entire life had been challenged by a second-hand lie detector.

A model train full of beer in Kaliningrad

I was actually sitting beneath the Gothic-vaulted red-brick ceiling of a series of interconnecting catacombs. Whoops, there it goes again! My imagination wandering at will where it will wilfully wander. Not exactly catacombs, but a subterranean space occupied long ago by an elaborate network of beer cellars belonging to Ponart Brewery, which, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was the largest brewery in Königsberg. This environment met my every requirement, blending the architectural style I love with social history, brewery history and my personal history of drinking beer.

And yet I had not imbibed sufficiently for me to invent the existence of a scaled-down railway that permitted drinks to be conveyed direct from bar to customer.

Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad

The train-delivery concept is as intriguing, as it is entertaining as it is educational. The train leaves Königsberg station, passes through the suburbs of Kaliningrad as they are today and from there heads out into the past across the Königsberg countryside.

To achieve this effect, models detailed in construction mark the route of the train and the settlements at which it stops, the old German names of which fastened to the wall, by corresponding to the booth-style seating, act like table numbers, enabling the bar staff to literally keep tabs on customers and their tariffs. The miniature version of Kaliningrad’s Central Station (once Königsberg Hauptbahnhof) from which the beer train leaves, stands proudly and unmistakeably, thanks to the accurate portrayal of its 1930s’ postmodern façade, at the point where all good beer journeys start, which is, of course, the bar.

Zelenogradsk at a bar in Ponart Brewery complex

To announce the departure of the train and the onset of one’s drinks, a bell is heard to ring, and the train carrying its valuable cargo steams urgently out of Central Station, travelling via Zelenogradsk ~ observable by its Ferris wheel ~ and off across East Prussia, except in this particular instance, it is charging along the side of the wall heading in one’s direction.

Being a beer and bar enthusiast but knowing nowt about model railways, except that they make good money at auction, I am unable to enlighten those who are interested in such things as to the track gauge of the railway, but presume that I can safely say that since the train is hauling lovely big pint glasses, the track width must be considerably larger than a Hornby Double O.

I bet that even Bruce Reynolds couldn’t have told you that.

Seating beer bar restuarant in Kaliningrad

The positioning of the bar’s booth seats at 90 degrees to the wall enables the train to divert to them as a full-sized locomotive would into a railway siding. The train and its precious cargo come to rest on a platform ramped up ‘viaduct’ style across the length of each table at a height above the seated occupants’ heads. This all goes to make the arrival of one’s eagerly awaited beverages infinitely more exciting, even, from the angle viewed, spectacular, the only drawback being that the supports on which the train track rests tend to get in visions way of normal social interaction with others in your group sitting on the opposite side of the table. This disadvantage, however, may be one concealing a hidden advantage, should, for example, the company you are in necessitate some subtle moves on the social evening’s chessboard, viz ‘Amanda Woke is a bit of a lefty, we’ll hide her behind that strut!’

The novelty of Art Depot Restaurant’s train network and the modern predilection for photographing everything, whether it moves or not, is not without an intrinsic risk, for should you be distracted and not act quickly enough to remove the cargo on arrival, the train can suddenly reverse, causing more than a mild hysteria as it makes off with your drinks back to the bar from whence it came.

Mick Hart with beer arrived by train at Art Depot Restaurant Kaliningrad

Mick Hart reaching for beer from model train

It may strike you as rather odd that a beer bar housed in a former beer cellar located beneath a former brewery is not thematically predisposed to the matter of beer production, but the railway as a feature is not without connection both to the brewery itself and to the district in which the brewery stands.

A long while ago … and now

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, Ponart was little more than a village waiting to be subsumed by the expanding city of Königsberg. During this dynamic period, the district’s major employers were Schifferdecker’s Ponart Brewery and, from the 1860s to the 1900s, the Prussian Eastern Railway, which eventually came to be known as the Royal Prussian State Railways. The development of the railway system in East Prussia and Russia significantly impacted Königsberg’s commerce, stimulating demand for enlargement of the workforce.

The resultant influx of labourers generated a need for the provision of homes close to the industries the workforce would be servicing. The high-density living created by these converging influences can effectively be quantified from an observation of the housing stock type, which predominantly comprises three-storey flats built as a series of uniform terraces, and also from an estimation of the close proximity of the Pomart Brewery to the railway’s rolling-stock marshalling yard, which is crossable by a through-truss Bridge, acting as the gateway from the centre of the city to this erstwhile working-class neighbourhood.

So let that be a lesson to you!

Also go to: Tolstoy Art Cafe

If you think that a model train delivering beer to your table is a whimsy of a thing, it will do you no harm to know that at Art Depot Restaurant the railway theme ends not at your table but follows you into the toilets. Not the train itself, or the station master or the ticket collector, but piped noises you would expect to hear at a busy railway station.

Now, toilets are hallowed places with particular sounds of their own, so it is vitally disconcerting to hear the outside world inside of them; indeed extremely difficult when it’s “All aboard!” and the whistle blows to divorce yourself from the governing fantasy that you are actually in a station loo. Blast! I thought, having heard the whistle shrilling, the carriage doors slamming and the train a chuff, chuff, chuffing as it left without me down the tracks. I had only gone and missed the 8.30 to Nowhere! There was nothing more that I could do. Well, what else could I do? I would have to go back to the waiting room, sink another beer or two and hope that anyone watching me would mistake me for being anyone else but the man they thought I wasn’t: “That’s him! That’s not Bruce Reynolds!”

The main thing

Art Depot Restaurant
Kaliningrad, Sudostroitelnaya st., 6-8
(on the territory of the historical quarter ‘Ponart’)

Tel (reservations): +7 (963) 295 74 95

Opening times
Mon to Fri: 11am to 10pm
Sat & Sun: 12pm to 11pm

Website: Art Depot Restaurant

UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance

The fool stands where he’s told to

6 March 2025 ~ UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance

Having watched the spat in the White House recently, where Trump missed the opportunity to stick one on a man widely regarded as the world’s biggest scrounger but couldn’t really do such a thing whilst he was talking peace, I predicted that when the Great Z rolled into Britain, the Disunited Kingdom under the worst government since Noddy Blaire would really show us up. I hoped that this humiliation would not go further than a cuddle or two with Starmer, as cringing as that was, but no, we had to go the whole hog: a propagandist photoshoot with the King of England taking tea in the totally incompatible company of a T-shirt wearing erstwhile actor looking less like the person he is purported to be and more like one of those things ~ though considerably less well dressed ~ that keep rolling into Britain on the back of a rubber dinghy.

Taking peace on the chin UK Zelensky Tour

In a show of absolute disregard for the declining prosperity of the UK and as an insult to the intelligence of its populace (did I say intelligence?), its Davos-orchestrated media flooded airwaves, newspapers and the internet with a fulsome display of stage-managed rejoicing. With a single flick of the media switch almost every Brit in Hatebook land was once again changing their avatars and standing with Ukraine. Not that this has any significance, they would stand in a bucket of shit if that was where they were told to stand. Snap! Snap! went the whip: the Zelensky circus was back in town.

Even in these cash-strapped times, when the majority of Brits and even some migrants, but not the ones in 5-star hotels, cannot afford to heat their homes, Mr Starmer’s government, or rather the forces that control it, is pledging to donate an additional £2.26 billion to a conflict which the West should never have provoked and, as Trump is at pains to point out, if not soon brought to a halt could plausibly precipitate World War III.

In jingoistic and sanctimonious language reminiscent of that which, let’s hope not prophetically, heralded the dawn of the First World War, on the 1 March 2025 (it could be a day that will live in infamy), the UK Government issued this self-congratulatory statement, clearly intended to justify its phenomenal overspending folly whilst proclaiming itself to be the saviour of national security and the champion of democracy.

Rachel Reeves, christened by Katie Hopkins as ‘the woman with the Lego hairstyle’, and some other bod with a name that I cannot pronounce (whatever happened to Smith and Jones?), were poised to sign the grandiloquently titled Ukraine Bilateral Agreement.

Cutting through prose that reads like an extract from a classic Dad’s Army script (I mean, just look at it! I ask you!), the best of British from the worst of people is impressive but meretricious:

“A safe and secure Ukraine is a safe and secure United Kingdom. This funding will bolster Ukraine’s armed forces and will put Ukraine in the strongest possible position at a critical juncture in the war. [Fanfare of heraldic trumpets!!!]

“It comes as we have increased our defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, which will deliver the stability required to keep us safe and underpin economic growth.” ~ said Lego

What this bilateral agreement means is that instead of going for peace, Britain is going for broke. In order to keep the Zelensky show on the road and perpetuate the hostilities in Ukraine at any price, and that includes the cost in human terms, the UK Government is now pledging a whopping great £2.26 billion ‘loan’ on top of the £3 billion it already throws away each year (that’s where your tax money’s going) for Ukraine to spend on bombs and bullets. That’s an awful lot of money to give to a man with no dress sense; let’s hope he uses some of it to buy himself a suit.

[Quote:] “The Prime Minister has been clear that a strong Ukraine is vital to UK national security.” [Unquote].

How and also Why? After that statement from the PM, even those who didn’t regard him as a bit of a prat, because their fathers have always voted Labour, may hopefully have a change of heart.

Moving on swiftly from this stupendous tax on the UK’s coffers at a time when we can least afford it, the government statement is keen to head up the recently announced, but for some lefties controversial, increase in the UK defence budget.

“… to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with an ambition to spend 3% of GDP on defence in the next parliament as economic and fiscal conditions allow.” ~ notice the qualification. Hand over your piggy banks, kids! Tax! Tax! Tax!

Let’s just pause for one brief moment and think this document through. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a government, indeed successive UK governments, who do not give a flying fart about destroying the country they represent by endorsing and encouraging the immigrant invasion, should so solemnly be concerned with and so unswervingly devoted to the sovereignty of a country, I refer, of course, to Ukraine, which until social media exhorted Britain’s Arsebook sheep to change their pretty avatars, not one man Jack of them, or dinghy-arriving Abdul, knew Ukraine existed. According to popular rumour, neither did Liz Truss. Liz who? Allow me to jog your memory: She entered Number 10 like a queen and vanished like a magician’s assistant through the back of a magic box.

Trussed-up-like-a-Turkey had no idea where Ukraine is and, let’s be frank and honest, neither do 90 per cent of avatar-changing Brits. “Duh, let’s change our avatars. You click ‘Like’, I’ll click ‘Like’, we’ll all click ‘Like’ together.”

Brits stand with Ukraine. They will stand anywhere the media tells them to

Giving billions of pounds a year to Mr Zelensky’s T-shirt fund has nothing to do with UK national security. We compromised that years ago when we opened the migrant floodgates, and what little we have left of it is being trampled underfoot by thousands of happy migrant feet that are wearing the welcome mat threadbare as our politically correct two-tier coppers bus them off to plush hotels.

The real threat in the UK to every man, woman and child and thus to national security is the one that nobody, except Reform, is willing to confront: catastrophic immigration. Thousands, literally thousands, of young men of fighting age, migrants from the third world, are languishing at the taxpayers’ expense in hotels and hostels up and down the country. Thanks to the loony left, bolstered by Brownshirt organisations that masquerade as equality heroes ~ who mentioned Antifa and Hope Not Hate? ~ but which are really infested with anarchists, hardly any of these aliens will be sent packing to whence they originally came. Hundreds of thousands of these lovely items are poised to be unleashed onto the wretched streets of Britain, ushering in a dark new age where holding hands and candle-lit vigils, already a British tradition, is steadily replacing all that our forbears worked for and all that they believed in: “Get your candle-lit vigil kits here!”

Of course, I could be wrong. The experiences of the past few years may be nothing at all to go by. They may simply want to hold hands with us and, like the Coke advert of old, sing in ‘Happy Harmony’.

In a further demonstration of liberal social media’s stranglehold on UK freedom of speech, Facebook, aka Hatebook, is quick to delete all and any comments that do not align themselves with the West’s ‘I stand with Ukraine’ narrative. The comments of attackers and haters are preserved in liberal vinegar; the comments of all who challenge them are swiftly siphoned away.

Two sides of the jolly old argument, ay chaps.
“It is essential for democracy to listen to what other people are saying (Goodin, 2003).”

The Russian point of view:
“We continue to operate on the premise that a truly just and durable peace is not possible unless the root causes of the Ukraine crisis are completely eliminated. The main ones among them include the West breaking its promises not to expand NATO and the alliance’s absorption of Europe’s entire geopolitical space all the way up to Russia’s borders, as well as the Kiev regime’s systematic elimination of everything Russian, including language, culture, and church, just like the German Nazis did in the past. The demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as recognition of existing realities on the ground remain Russia’s unchanged objectives. The sooner Kiev and the European capitals in question come to realise this, the closer to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis we will be.” ~ Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s comment on Vladimir Zelensky’s voyage to Washington, D.C., 1 March 2025

Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s comment on Vladimir Zelensky’s voyage to Washington, D.C. – The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

The idea that the Western World’s survival hinges upon propping up the ultranational regime of Ukraine is a feebly spurious and egregious premise. The West’s proxy war with Russia has failed, so why continue the virtue signalling by showering Zelensky with false praise and filling the bottomless pit of his unaudited war chest. Bankrolling Zelensky is nothing more than a face-saving exercise, an immoral funding of loss of life destined to ensure that Ukraine ends up like a lunar landscape.

Instead of hoodwinking gullible Brits with jingoistic soundbites and huggy huggy Zelensky time ~ quick, let’s change our avatars ~ a responsible, grown-up government, if only we had such a thing, would admit that national security is a net-zero migration issue and would be doing all that it could to slam the porous borders shut and combat the hostile hoards that are already within our midst. After all, it is they that shipped them in; the indigenous British people never went online and ordered them from Amazon.

UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance

The only real potential threat that Britain faces today to its national security, indeed to its very existence, is the Trojan Horse of third-world migration. It is here, now; here and happening. An insidious ticking timebomb waiting to explode. All talk of old-style threats, of invasions from abroad, are as convincing as telling a country bumpkin that if he pisses against the wind the world will be a better place. The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! What would they want to come here for? Such megaphonic announcements are opium for the bewildered masses, many of whom are yet to wake up to the terrible state that Britain is in. Please, pass me one of their sleeping pills!

Tales from 21st century Britain
> Brits Told to be Vigilant as Boats Roll in on Tide of Terror
> UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
> Lies and Democracy: Are they now the same thing?
> Tracking World Vaccination with the Prickometer

The only positive thing to come out of Britain throwing its money away and the avatar-changing farce is that Trump by word and deed has been unequivocally vindicated. By advocating a path for peace, he has already proved to the world that contrary to the deriding image that mainstream media painted of him during his first term in office, the crazed war monger never was him; it was, and always has been, the backsliding liberal left. Biden was a stooge; Obama was a black bum sitting on a fence, though they claim he played good golf; Trump, though not a peaceful man ~ he is not a lefty wimp or a wokist pushover ~ is a man who believes in peace. The clamouring desire for war, for never-ending, relentless war is an obsession exclusively liberal.

Indeed, Trump’s defiant stand for peace contrasts strongly in his favour against the liberal craving for war, which reverberates hysterically on both sides of the Atlantic. If you couldn’t see it before Trump’s sincere endeavours for peace, your vison should now be clearing. The real war mongers of the West are the pseudo-liberal cabal, the elitist globalist clan, who hide behind tired old slogans that project them as the patron saints of democracy and humanity but really who are perfectly willing to spill the blood of others in their relentless pursuit of hegemony.

These are the goons who want you to ‘Stand with Ukraine’, or rather the last thing that they want to happen is for Trump to broker a peace plan. They do not want peace full-stop, especially peace by a peace-making Trump, as this will only cement his glory, expose them for what they are, and spur him onto greater things, none of which they have no doubt will be in their globalist interest.

Standing for Ukraine, as defined by British policy, means perpetuating warfare, which, as Trump has laid on the line, could edge us closer to World War III.

UK Zelensky Tour is a Charity Gala Performance

If war does break out in Europe, and let’s fervently hope this day will never dawn, it will surprise an awful lot of idiots who repeatedly spout the mantra that nuclear war will not effect us, as the UK has its own deterrent. This might be an appropriate juncture to remind the lefty lot that it was not so long ago that they wanted to scrap our nuclear deterrent and use the money instead for welfare handouts and to fund migration.

Britain's nuclear subs do not necessarily guarantee survival in a nuclear war

Sing along now: ‘We can’t all live in a yellow submarine …’

Our politicians, whose only skill seems to lie in their remarkable ability to never tell the truth, should nevertheless make it abundantly clear to the obfuscated British public, particularly those who ‘Stand by Ukraine’, that the first casualty of a war that goes nuclear will be the United Kingdom. In the first seconds of a nuclear war, our little, bitty, titchy island and all who reside upon it will unfortunately but effectively be evaporated. There’s not enough room on our two nuclear subs for Britain’s ever-increasing migrant army, let alone the rest of us.

The West breaking its promises not to expand NATO and the alliance’s absorption of Europe’s entire geopolitical space …

The Cuban Missile Crisis ~ a lesson from history
In May 1962, the Soviet Union began shipping missiles and technicians to Cuba. The yanks were none too pleased about this. It was the closest brush with World War III since the end of World War II.

The irresponsible to the extent of insane notion to billet NATO missile bases in Ukraine capable of carrying nuclear payloads within easy reach of Moscow is comparable to Russia siting missile bases on the Isle of Man. You just don’t do it, do you?

Forget about the government (Oh, you already have!), forget about Ukraine (You can’t! You’ve gone and changed your avatars!), what we need, and urgently, is a bomb-disposable expert, one who will leave other countries to manage their own affairs and who will focus his mind exclusively on dismantling the clear and present threat of Britain’s Migrant Doomsday Bomb.

Do I stand with Ukraine? No! I stand for Trump and peace. The rationale of my thinking being that it is hard to stand almost anywhere in a pair of smouldering boots.

Reference
*UK reinforces support for Ukraine with £2.26 billion loan to bolster Ukrainian defence capabilities

Image attribution:

Green T shirt
https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Green-t-shirt-vector-image/11653.html

Face punch
https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/free-download.php?image=face-punch&id=378916

Circus
https://loc.getarchive.net/media/the-barnum-and-bailey-greatest-show-on-earth-20-mad-cap-merry-makers-grotesque

Suit
https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-graphics-of-mustachioed-man-in-suit/26871.html

Man pointing
https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-graphics-of-mustachioed-man-in-suit/26871.html

Man on cliff edge: https://unsplash.com/@leio :
https://unsplash.com/photos/person-standing-near-cliff-nGwhwpzLGnU

Yellow submarine
https://clipart-library.com/clipart/bpiqAoAc9.htm

Dunces cap
https://clipart-library.com/clipart/n319724.htm

Time Bomb
<a href="/ru/”https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/time-bomb”/" title="”time" bomb icons”>Time bomb icons created by Freepik – Flaticon</a>
https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/time-bomb_2099753

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