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Kaliningrad Toilet Door is a thing of Beauty

Herman Brachert Museum Königsberg Sculptor

A unique museum in Otradnoye, Kaliningrad region

8 October 2023 ~ Herman Brachert Museum Königsberg Sculptor

Otradnoye [German: Georgenswald] is a small, unspoilt seaside enclave on Kaliningrad region’s Baltic Coast. It sits, relatively obscurely, on a wooded escarpment between the region’s two main resorts, Svetlogorsk (German: Rauschen) and Zelenogradsk (German: Cranz).

Otradnoye is worth discovering for its wonderful woodland walks, late nineteenth and early twentieth century German architecture and its small but white sandy beach (now smaller still, since a couple of thousand boulders have been netted there to tackle coastal erosion).

Herman Brachert Museum

Another reason for visiting Otradnoye is to acquaint yourself with one of its most famous and charismatic former occupants, the German sculptor Herman Brachert (1890~1972), whose home and studio has been faithfully preserved as a biographical record of his life and as a museum for his works of art.

Herman Brachert, who originated from Stuttgart, worked in Königsberg and the Königsberg region for 25 years. From 1933 to 1944, he lived and worked in the country retreat of Otradnoye.

The Brachert’s family home was built in 1931 by architect Hans Hopp. It was renovated in 1992 and became a museum the following year.

Much of Brachert’s work perished during World War II and/or was destroyed in the postwar years. Even so, the museum contains more than 700 exhibits, more than enough to be highly representational of the concepts, materials, forms and compositions with which Brachert is associated.

The museum’s curators continue to track down original Brachert items, aided in their quest by photographs, letters, documents and diaries from the sculptor’s family archive. Fortunately, Brachert’s wife, Maria, was an accomplished photo-artist, and many of her photographs are included in the museum’s display.

Herman Brachert Museum

Herman Brachert was particularly adept in the creation of small items, as evidenced by the museum’s collection of plaques and medals, arguably the most valued being the 1924 medal to the 200th Anniversary of the Unification of Königsberg. He also worked with plastics and jewellery.

The quality and detail of his work also shines through his larger projects, of which perhaps the most impressive, or at least most loved, is the figural sculpture Carrier of Water. This forlorn but beautiful woman rising from her knees clasping a pitcher of water upon her head is said to be the Goddess of Fate.

Carrier of Water, Hermann Brachert, Sculptor — *Carrier of Water*. Herman Brachert Museum.

In the winter of 2000, I made the lady’s acquaintance. She was quietly and gently decaying beneath the snow-capped trees of Svetlogorsk’s Larch Park.

Two years passed before a rescue party came and whisked her away to St Petersburg, where, at the State Hermitage Museum, under the direction of artist-restorer VN Mozgov, she was lovingly restored and later transferred to the Brachert Museum.

Another favourite among the Brachert exhibits is the goddess Demeter. A two-third figural composition of a young nude woman, produced by Brachert in 1939 and donated to the museum by patron of the arts BN Bartfeld, Demeter is said to personify strength, equanimity and feminine beauty.

In addition to free-standing figural sculptures, Brachert was also an expert in the field of bas-reliefs, fine examples of which can still be seen upon the surviving buildings of Königsberg.

In 2015, the Brachert Museum acquired two rare plaques, dating to the early 1930s, produced by students from the Königsberg School of Arts and Crafts, where Herman Brachert taught.

Herman Brachert Museum

The exhibits of the House Museum of Herman Brachert echo a golden era of Germanic sculpture and architectural embellishment, many strongly influenced by the Art Deco design concepts that were prevalent during the 1930s.

The same artistic principals resonated throughout the interior design of the Brachert family home. Structurally, the house is uncannily presented in almost every architectural detail, and though the fixtures and fittings that graced the original abode have long since disappeared, it is yet possible, using numerous family photographs within the museum’s collection, to see exactly what the interior looked like when the Brachert family lived there.

Brachert's room as it was when he lived there in the 1930s

One photograph in particular [see above] opens a poignant window into the past. Stand next to this photograph and look towards the far end of the room in the direction of the Carrier of Water, and you can easily reconstruct the entire room as it appeared during the Brachert era, locating with pin-point accuracy every piece of furniture and even Brachert himself sitting at his desk.

Female nude sculpture, Brachert, East Prussia

For time travellers, this is one of those ‘hairs standing up on the back of your neck moments’. A similar sensation can be replicated by gazing upon the portrait bust of the great sculptor himself.

Hermann Brachert, Sculptor, Konigsberg 1930s

The bust’s likeness of Brachert is so finely executed that his features seem to come alive before your very eyes, inviting you to think, ‘Here, indeed, is a man possessed of singular intellectual depth and charismatic intensity.’ He has the face of someone you would have liked to have known in person.

During their time in Otradnoye, not only did the Brachert’s have a modern country home nestled above the Baltic Coast, but they were also the fortunate owners of a large and pleasant garden, which follows the fall of the land to the edge of the wood beyond. Poignant photographs in the museum’s collection reveal the Brachert family in their natural setting: a woman leaning casually out of the ground-floor window and a boy with a sleeping dog, sitting and laying respectively, upon the garden terrace. Today, the garden is a quiet oasis, a green and tranquil backdrop for a cornucopia of widely differing sculptures, donated over the years by various artists.

Herman Brachert home in Otradnoye. Herman Brachert Museum.

**Former Brachert home as it is today [October 2023]**. **Herman Brachert Museum**.

Wandering recently through this exotic landscape, I wondered perchance would I meet again with my old friends Lenin and Stalin. Eighteen years ago, on a very wet and very cold day in January, I thrilled to the sight of them languishing incongruously in a hedge at the side of the Brechert Museum. Sure enough we were reunited, but now they had a proper station among the other exhibits. The plaque, which shows the ensemble before it succumbed to distress and decay, presents an ennobling tableau.

Lenin & Stalin statues in the grounds of the Brachert Museum

Plaque Lenin and Stalin statue in Otradnoye

Plaque (above): ‘Lenin and Stalin in Gorkah’. Fragments of sculptural group, constructed in 1949, were discovered during building work in Svetlogorsk. Donated to the Brachert Museum in 2003.

Skull sculpture in the grounds of the Brachert Museum, Otradnoye — Skull sculpture in the grounds of the Herman Brachert Museum by Evgeniy Dolmator and Gregory Bogachuk, Moscow, Russia (2016). A symbol of the continuity of life and a reminder that life should not be wasted.

Olga Hart with bull in Brachert museum garden

The House Museum of Herman Brachert

The House Museum of Herman Brachert showcases the work of a highly talented individual who produced legendary sculptures and architectural plaques in a wide range of materials and on scales both large and small.

In spite of Königsberg’s fate, examples of Brachert’s work live on, reminding us of the important role he played in the architectural heritage of the city and its provinces. In all, he was the progenitor of more than 20 outstanding sculptures made in and for the region of East Prussia.

Whatever material Brachert worked in, his breadth of imagination, elaborate detail and the innate energy of his compositions, exerts a signature brilliance.

I will stop just short of using a word like genius as through frequency of use it is fast becoming an unsustainable concept, and besides far too many of us today are deserving of the appellation. Perhaps, we should simply say that Herman Brachert, Königsberg sculptor, is the exception to our rule.

Mick Hart & Daniel Hart with Brachert's Svetlogorsk sculpture, Nymph — **Mick & Daniel Hart with Brachert’s bronze Nymph statue, Svetlogorsk (2004)**

Svetlogorsk, on Kaliningrad’s Baltic Coast, contains a number of Brachert’s works, the most celebrated being his bronze Nymph statue, which is framed in a giant shell surrounded by different coloured mosaic in a prominent place on the sea-front promenade.

(Above:) This gatefold advertising leaflet for the Herman Brachert Museum was produced in 1992, making it a collector’s item in its own right!
The calligraphic script featured on the front page is the work of our friend and artist Victor Ryabinin.
Victor introduced us to the museum in the winter of 2005, to be precise on the 12^th January 2005, as written in his inscription to us by hand in memory of that occasion.

Posts relating to Victor Ryabinin

Victor Ryabinin Königsberg Kaliningrad
Victor Ryabinin Königsberg Artist-Historian
Victor Ryabinin Artist Four Years Out of Time

Posts relating to Kaliningrad’s Baltic Coast

The Natural Beauty of the Baltic Coast
Amber Legend Yantarny is a jewel in the coastal town
Architectural surprises along the Zelenogradsk Coast
Amazed at the Museum of Skulls and Skeletons in Zelenogradsk
Whenever I need a lift, I go to Svetlogorsk

The Main Thing

The Herman Brachert Museum caters for individual and group excursions. It plays host to exhibitions by Kaliningrad, Polish, and Lithuanian artists as well as from the collections of Russian and foreign museums, and has established itself as a favourite venue for concerts and creative plenaries.

House-Museum of Herman Brachert
Svetlogorsk, pos. Otradnoe, Tokareva Street, 7

Web: www.hbrachert.ru

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brachertmuseum/?fref=ts

Opening times
September–May: 10am to 5pm
June–August: 10am to 7pm

Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine

Not in Notting Hill ~ Thank Heavens!

23 September 2023 ~ Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine

Whilst London’s Notting Hill Carnival, which should have been banned years ago, was erupting into its usual frenzy of violence, with, as the Daily Mail* depicted, odious-looking behoodied things running amuck in the streets brandishing knives and machetes, we, I am happy to say, were over the hills and far away, somewhere on the brighter side of proper English culture.

Resisting the temptation to allow ourselves to be dragged down by the Daily Mail’s depressing but not delusional strapline, ‘ … Britain Now Feels Like a Third World Country*’, but pondering on what Plod will do in the unlikely event they apprehend the Notting Hill Carnival misfits (‘Come on now, don’t be naughty. How about a cup of tea. Let’s sit and discuss your problem.’), we escaped the gruesome subspace that London has become by joining a lot of nice English people at one of the county’s late ‘summer shows’.

Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine

You may recall in a previous post on ‘summer shows’ that I happened to remark upon the tragic disappearance of the greatest big band leader the world has ever known, Glenn Miller. In this post I postulated that at the time of his disappearance he may have had in his pocket a list of English garden fetes to which he was rather partial. It cannot be confirmed, but neither can it be dismissed.

The whereabouts of such a list, if indeed there ever was one, deserves a trial by academia. I am assured by its ambiguity that for someone craving a PhD it would give them something to waffle about for the three small years it takes to secure a job for life within the ivory-tower equivalent of an overpaid Alice’s Wonderland.

As for us real folks, who have ‘to move those microwave ovens … got to shift those colour TVs’, the historical mishap that was Glenn Miller’s fate and the mishap of the present, as signified by the mud-hut happenings in Britain’s capital city, which will themselves one day be judged by history, if today’s generation can get off their phones long enough to realise what the establishment has in store for them (I hear the sound of sheep!) were insufficient reasons not to struggle into the Aston ~ jumping in and out of it is not as feasible as once it was when we were twenty years younger ~ and go tootling classically off to yet another local village fete, which prefers, by academic licence, to rebrand itself as a ‘summer show’.

As we were pulling out of the gate on the spoked wheels of the Aston, our senses were regaled with the inspirational sight of a lady with whom we are acquainted (She works behind the bar (but only on Mondays and Wednesdays) of a pub we know and to which we go.). She was trumping past on a vintage tractor, with a cute little trailer in tow. She was, and in this we were not mistaken, off to the same show as us.

It is hardly surprising that here in the sticks, agricultural relics command the same respect and attention as vintage and classic cars. True village folk, as distinct from Johnny-come-latelys, have all had a taste of agriculture sometime in their lives, and these days even women, when not playing at football, are trying their hand at driving tractors. And some, it must be said, appear more suited to this task than butching it up on a football pitch. Just remember not to get too close when you are behind them and, when they are coming directly towards you, always give them a very wide berth.

The last of the summer wine

One of the lasting joys of my personal summer, this summer, give or take local garden fetes and the odd summer show or two, is the privilege it bestowed upon me to witness from my bedroom window the impressive extent and degree to which British agriculture has progressed.

It is years since I participated in the yearly rural ritual of ‘bringing in the sheathes’, and, needless to say, things have moved on. The good old days, so called, characterised by pitchforks, sore, blistered, split and chafed hands, jumpers out at elbow and trousers out at arse, tied at the waist with bailer twine, have gone to be replaced by farm machinery the likes of which is so fantastic that my generation could never imagine it outside of the realms of science fiction.

Young farm operatives now drive these fabulous machines, not crusty, gnarled old farm-hands. They cruise around in comparative luxury ~ fitted cabs, music systems, heaters for the winter, air conditioning in summer and everything satellite navigated. Sporting the latest haircuts, trendy country-wear jerkins and smart regulation high-vis jackets, the young who work on Britain’s farms often look better turned out than the lords and masters for whom they work. “Where will it all end?!” I ask. It’s new, but it’s not Notting Hill!

The farm machinery of today, the combine harvesters and the tractors, are vastly larger than they used to be and so much smoother in their operation ~ their engines no longer ‘chug’, they glide. They are also more sophisticated, even excessively comfortable; capable of getting things done in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to do them using our often second-hand, tired, worn out, prone to breakdown, cronky and battered old kit.

Good examples of how much things have changed is the paper sack stuffed with straw, which we used to cushion the bumpy ride and to prevent our arses from icing up on the notorious raw metal tractor seats, and how through the winter months we went, chugging and bouncing across the plough, in gloves, jumpers, jackets, top coats and with balaclavas wrapped round our heads. Men were men in those days and boys expected to do a man’s work, often without so much as a thank you let alone a proper wage and, if you were really unlucky, as frequently we were, a boot up the arse for your troubles. It was angry farmers who ruled the earth then; ‘uman rights and children’s rights and the global-warming industry were just a twinkle in the collective eye of your preposterous liberal-lefty.

A better example of ‘how things have changed’, that is to say a less emotive one, is captured in a photograph, taken from my bedroom window, which juxtaposes yesteryear’s farm implements with their plush and powerful modern counterparts.

At today’s garden fete, sorry, I meant to say summer show, I would be given the chance to see tractors pre-dating my farming years as well as those that were contemporary to the time I spent on the farm. In other words, I would be looking back in awe, and not with a little disbelief, at tractors old and classic which, only the blink of an eye ago, were objects to be marvelled at in spite of their myriad defects. To us they were acceptable; we didn’t know anything else.

Fortunately, time softens sensibility and mellows troublesome memories, turning what was once a bitch to work with into something we never imagined it could be, an icon of nostalgia, deserving of affection bordering almost on abject reverence.

To one side of these veterans of the land, these old tractors which were lined up on the field like so many members of the Home Guard, stood something cute and dinky. We had met its owner the night before in the local village pub, who, in response to my revelation that I had in my youth one just like his, corrected me forthwith, saying whilst it was certainly true that Dinky had made a road-roller, the toy was not the full-sized model parked outside the front of the pub. His was a mark ‘blah blah’ with an ‘oops, ay now and what-do-you-call-it?’ and what is more with an engine capacity that was ‘fart de-lah-de-lah-lah-lah!) … The trouble with vintage vehicle owners is they really know their stuff.

It was a similar situation when I accosted the owner of a Ford Zodiac Mark IV. He had no difficulty rattling off the engine capacity and build, top speed, fuel consumption and a whole lot of other technical and historical stuff, including, I was amazed to learn, that the reason, as I had stated, ‘you don’t see many of these’ was that in spite of the hundreds of thousands of Mark IV Zodiacs produced less than 300 have survived!

My uncle ~ let’s call him ‘L’ ~ owned a Mark IV Zodiac back in the 1970s. When I expressed an interest in it, he told me he bought it because (a) it holds a lot of ‘stuff’ and (b) it can accelerate faster from a standing start than the average police car.

At his funeral a few years ago, I was walking with my mother behind my uncle’s coffin as the pallbearers bore it from church to cemetery when suddenly, from around the corner, a police car hoved into view.

Casting a wry glance at the car, I heard my mother whisper, “I’m afraid you’re just too late”.

Dean Show 2023 ~ Fast Cars

The Ford Zodiac Mark IV was not the only now classic car that could outrun Britain’s rozzers. During the 1960s, the villains’ vehicle of choice was more often than not the Jag. Not only were Jags fast, they were also incredibly flash, seeming to possess for the raffish and the rakish just the right combination of tasteful class, wheel appeal and polished disreputable charm.

A Jag Mark II was with us at the show today, as was one of the 1960s’ most iconic vehicles, the unmistakeable E-type Jag, a masterpiece of curvaceous chic, both the hardtop and convertible versions. Also on display was a 1970’s Mustang, a Citroen from the 1930s’, a lovely coach-built red Rolls Royce and umpteen variations on the nippy sports car models which, individually and collectively, left an irrepressibly glamorous signature on the 1960s and 1970s.

So, where and how did it all go wrong? Whatever happened to classic car design, with its emphasis on strikingly different, instantly recognisable and once seen never forgotten? Whatever happened to walnut dashboards, numerous dials, must-click switches, leather seats and glittering chrome. Wherever the good times went, the good cars must have gone with them.

It was all too much. We decided to explore the stalls, were disappointed when we could not find one catering in old-fashioned junk and swung away in protest for my brother to try his luck on the tombola. (Who on earth is Tom Bola?)

At a previous event, which had been called a garden fete, not show, my brother had had the good fortune to win a bottle of wine on the tombola and a bottle of brandy in rapid succession. Would his luck hold out today? Did it heck as like!

“I said it would be a tin of beans, and it was!” he matter-of-facted. But the little spin of clairvoyancy in which he had couched his statement did nothing to hide his deep disappointment. It isn’t winning, it’s playing the game that counts. What a load of old nonsense!

What you lose on the tombola, you might win on the circus skills, and in this respect my brother fared better, I must say remarkably better, in tightrope walking and juggling. Not that this came as a great surprise. There are those who would say that he has walked a tightrope and juggled his way through life. But today it was for real. Admittedly, the tightrope was only two feet off the ground, and he was juggling bean bags not clubs, but I’ve got to hand it to him, I did not need to hand it to him: he succeeded in both endeavours.

One of the supreme joys of attending English garden fetes, and shows, is not the inevitable dog exhibition. To like dug shows, you have first to like dugs. Some don’t.

Today’s dug show was all about gun dogs and the obedience they learn through training, but as most of the bitches were in heat there were one or two near unfortunate incidents which threatened to turn a family show into something rather embarrassing. This was just the excuse we needed to head back to the Aston, drag the folding chairs from the boot and get stuck into the old, packed lunch, which I washed down eagerly with a refreshing pint of English ale.

Picnic over, it was time to circulate; to say hello to people whom you knew, who you knew had been trying all day to avoid you, and to avoid those people you knew, who you knew had been trying to say hello. You don’t understand the rules? It’s a quintessentially ‘English thing’.

No English garden fete or English village show could be considered complete without the proverbial cup of tea and slice of cake. To enjoy it at its best, you should be able to sit outside in the sun under a Panama hat, preferably wearing a day cravat. Such attire is also good for drinking beer in the evening. Consider it done.

Mick Hart expatkaliningrad with Panama hat and beer

And so, another garden fete, sorry, village show, and indeed another garden fete season (with the exception of Riseley show) inevitably came to an end. Whatever it wants to call itself, it had been a pleasant experience, as had all the local garden fetes that I have attended this summer, prompting the reflection that the UK can be an enjoyable place when free of the unwanted enrichment that Sorryarse and his motley crew seem to have forgotten previous British generations did very well without. “Not today, thank you (or any other day!)!”

As we all know, however, the good old days were not all that: there was no woke, no PC, a lack of sexual harassment payouts, certainly nothing LGBT and sadly no global warming to melt the frost on your tractor seat. Nevertheless, when all is said and done (a lot is said but not a lot done) the good old days in hindsight seem a darned sight better, infinitely better in fact, than what we have at present and what is yet to come. You ain’t seen nothing yet, but consolation has it that the reset they have planned for us will not endure for long. Across the political West, pseudo-liberal doctrines have already begun the slow, the painful, the inevitable process of rupture and unravelling. In the long term it will be brutal, but right will prevail as it always does.

In the short term, however, the story will be different. All that will remain to fill the echoing void left by garden fetes, Sunday cricket and good old English pubs will be foreign food stores, Turkish barbers, one or two Indian corner shops (whatever happened to Arkwright?) and, last but by no means least, the never pleasant, totally unnecessary, no-excuse-for-it Notting Hill Carnival.

Be careful what you didn’t wish for.

Now that’s what I call a country fate!

Reference
Daily Mail* [Wednesday August 30, 2023]

A Birthday Fairytale with Love

Dedicated to You

1 September 2023 ~ A Birthday Fairytale with Love

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A YORSHIK, who lived in the fifth dimension and worshipped Beautiful Nature. Although she could be prickly, she was not a nasty Yorshik. She loved the fields, gardens, flowers, lakes, suns, skies and trees ~ most of all she loved the trees.

One day, whilst walking by the side of the lake in the footsteps of the Teutonics, she espied a tree that she liked very much. It was an old tree, a tree that had stood for centuries. This tree had seen so much of life and of countless people’s lives.

How many people have admired this tree? thought the Yorshik. How many people have sketched or painted it? How many people have written poems about it. How many people have sat beneath it ~ daydreamers, lovers, people in need of shelter, people in need of support, people in need of a tree?

Whenever Yorshik found a tree, especially a great old tree like this one, she felt the need to hug it. She would throw her arms around the tree and say, “I long for the day when your inner strength will be my strength also.” And the trees that she hugged would hug her back, and each would sigh with happiness.

And so, she hugged the mighty tree before her. But the tree neither hugged her in return nor sighed a happy sigh. It clung to her. It trembled, and its sigh was a groan of fear and despair.

“Whatever is the matter, tree?” asked the Yorshik.

“They are coming to cut me down tomorrow,” sobbed the tree.

“But why?” Yorshik asked. “You are so big and strong and healthy!”

The tree it sobbed some more until regaining its composure, said: “Because I have a fairy in my boughs.”

Yorshik looked up and sure enough, sitting in the branches of the tree, there was a fairy.

Yorshik had seen many things, such as flowers, hedges, clouds and trees, but never a fairy before. She had, of course, seen drawings of fairies but never of one so round.

“What?” Yorshik asked the tree, “has a fairy in your branches got to do with cutting you down?”

The tree sniffled: “The fairy has cast a spell, and tomorrow at daybreak the men will come with saws and axes, and I will be cut down.”

“I didn’t want to cast the spell,” then spoke the fairy in a quavering voice, “truly I didn’t. But I am trapped between Heaven and Earth, and if I place my feet voluntarily on Terra-Ferma, I shall be forced to exist in a limbo state for the rest of all eternity.”

And now the fairy was crying, too.

“But if the tree is cut down,” the fairy sobbed (and the tree let out a wail) “I shall descend to earth, but not by my own volition, and I will be saved.”

The fairy was weeping, the tree was weeping and Yorshik was at a loss for what to do. She could not bear to see the tree cut down, but neither could she bear to imagine the fairy trapped between Heaven and Earth in a state of immortal torment.

A Birthday Fairytale with Love

She thought and thought until she could think no more, whereupon, in a paroxysm of despair, she threw herself on the ground and hugging the trunk of the tree, implored and prayed to the Gods for an answer.

As she prayed, her tears fell to the ground, and the tears of the tree and the fairy followed, mingling together until they had formed a stream that trickled into the lake. At that moment, the clouds, which had settled upon the sky, parted, and a ray of sunlight soft and luminous travelling from the Heavens landed gently at the point where the river of tears held hands with the lake. Still embracing the tree, the Yorshik watched the light as it danced upon the water. She followed its vibration along the beam, into the sky and back to the water again.

At the water’s edge, where a moment ago no one had been, she thought she saw a figure, the figure of a man. She could not be certain of this, because her eyes were so full of tears; they had become twin ponds from Königsberg.

She peered again at the water’s edge. Sure enough, there was a man. His detail was lost to her, but she could feel the warmth of his presence and the kindness in his heart.

“Who are you?” the Yorshik asked.

“I’m an artist,” he replied. “I have come to paint a picture of you. To paint it upon this tree.”

And setting down an easel, this is exactly what he did.

When he had finished the picture, which seemed to be of a moment’s work, he turned to the Yorshik and smiling said: “Don’t worry, Yorshik. Don’t fret. Everything in this universe has its finite place and everything will fall into place when the time is right for it to do so.”

He had hardly finished speaking, in a voice like balm to the Yorshik’s soul, when a second beam of light breaking through the clouds momentarily dazzled her, and when she could see again, the artist he had gone.

A Birthday Fairytale with Love

It was then that she saw his painting on the tree. She gasped in amazement. Her likeness was so lifelike, the colours so strong, so vibrant, altogether alive and everything so beautiful that she felt as if everything good had been given to her forever. And even the fairy and the tree, on beholding the artist’s magic, forgetting guilt, regret and fear, also forgot that they should be crying.

Spoke the fairy from the tree on high: “I cannot let this kind old tree that has given me hope and shelter, and which now has such a beautiful picture of Yorshik painted on it, be cut down. Tonight, I shall climb from the branches myself and take my chances as predetermined.”

It was a frightful night for Yorshik. There was a full moon that shone through the crack in the bedroom shutters and danced around in her half-sleep in an endless succession of mutated forms and apparitions most ghastly. She felt the bite of the woodman’s axe and turned away from that horror only to be confronted by the dreadful sight of the screaming fairy descending into a fiery hell.

No sooner had dawn broke, than, with bleary eyes and in a cold sweat, Yorshik scampered from her woodland house and hurried towards the lake and the tree. She was so afraid of what she might see, and even more afraid of what she wouldn’t, that she thought of running backwards, but very few Yorshiks have reverse gear, so she had to proceed as always and make the best of a very bad job. At least it wasn’t foggy.

As she rounded the corner where she knew the tree would be, if indeed it would be, she took her hands away from her eyes and, rubbing the bruises on her body, which, unfortunately, one tends to get when one attempts to run with their eyes closed, stared at where she thought she’d see nothing, or perhaps just a pile of logs. But Saints preserve and Hallelujah, the tree it was still standing!

Alas, of the tree-bound fairy, however, there was not the slightest sign.

Falling to her knees by the side of the tree and hugging its mighty trunk, the Yorshik cried: “You are safe, thank the Gods that you are safe, but what has become of the fairy? I cannot bear to imagine the pain and the suffering which, through her most noble act, she has brought upon herself!”

But why was the tree not crying! Heartless, ungrateful tree! The heartless, ungrateful tree was smiling!!

“Shh, shh,” said the tree, “Do not cry! Be still! Dry your eyes! Look at the painting, Yorshik! Look at the painting!”

Bewildered, understanding not, but drying her eyes as instructed, the Yorshik did as she had been bidden and looked towards the painting. At first, she could see nothing but herself, as a reflection might see itself on the opposite side of the mirror. But when she rubbed her eyes again and took a second look, there, in a moment of joy and rapture, she saw in the painting by her side the fairy smiling back at her. The fairy was alive! The fairy was alive!

And above and around the Yorshik in the painting on the tree, and above and around the Yorshik kneeling on the ground, not one but a host of fairies danced and laughed, embraced and sang and loved.

This time when the Yorshik hugged the tree, the Universe hugged back, and since that day to this, no one in the world and anywhere else beyond has ever had to suffer the pain of being alone again.

Post links
An Autumn Walk in Kaliningrad
The Natural Beauty of the Baltic Coast
Englishman Chilling in Zelenogradsk with a Bear and a Beer
Kaliningrad Green and Adorned with Flowers

Image attributions:
Scenery Bats & Tree: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-illustration-of-scenery-with-bats-and-tree/14960.htm
Zombie: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-graphics-of-zombie-with-an-exposed-brain-and-axe/21889.html
Bed: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Child-in-bed/58663.html
Tree: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Tree/89793.html
Fairy on Crescent Moon: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Fairy-sitting-on-a-crescent-Moon/63695.html

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

It never rains but it pours!

24 August 2023 ~ Britain a nice place to live on the telly

As coronavirus begins to look more and more like an unsolved crime, leaving many people wondering if they should really have had those jabs, and now that the conflict in Ukraine has passed its media sell-by date, thanks mainly to the British public’s notorious attention-span deficit, the climate-warming bandwagon has taken to the road again, strapped to which is a dubious sidecar, artificial intelligence. Billed by UK media as the greatest threat to humanity since Britain’s extended opening hours (licensed premises or the country’s borders?), an arguably greater threat to us all than artificial intelligence must surely be our national failure to use the intelligence with which we were born when defining our relationship with truth and what we see on the telly.

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

You might ask what I, the Chairman of the TV Temperance Society, is doing sitting in front of the telly, and you would be right to do so. The answer is simple: During my recent tour of duty here in the UK, my predicament is one in which I have found myself exposed, and not infrequently, to the TV set of a friend, who, for reasons only known to himself, insists on ‘catching the news’.

Catching the news in the UK is a little like catching coronavirus, catching the adverts is worse, the only difference being that those we never believed or trusted before the onset of coronavirus and anti-Brexit hype, and whom we believe and trust a whole lot less in hindsight, have no desire to protect us from these twin pestilences with a vaccine false or otherwise. Thus, when we watch the news, or watch anything on British TV, it is our own immune system, our God-given common sense, in which we must rely, not Big Pharma.

I must say (why?) that having not ‘watched telly’ for a considerable period of time, 17 years in fact, from a purely academic perspective, the experience is quite an interesting one. For example, take the conmercials.

As well as attempting to persuade us to buy something and/or fork out for a service that we do not need and would better do without, TV adverts have become an integral part of the media’s, and by default the British Government’s, perpetual drive to convince us that all is hunky dory; that the UK has at last become the happy, harmonic multicultural melting pot that Enoch Powell predicted it could never be. To a lesser extent, yet creeping through the woke back door left open, LGBTQ is also ideologically embedded in British TV advertising, suggesting that all to a man are firmly behind the movement … so to speak.

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this, in fact it is essential, dramatically essential, that however disingenuous the product they are pushing, we are willing to buy into it. As it happens (thank you Jim!), we really have no choice. Having made our multicultural bed without the permission of due democratic process, it is the job of our string-pulled political classes to make sure that we quietly lie in it … innit!

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

So, there is an awful lot more foreigners floating around in the adverts than there was when I last watched television 17 years ago. The people pecking order is blacks first, then Asians and here and there the odd oriental, which, again, is fine, in the sense that, like it or not, this is where we are at in modern-day Britain, give or take a few Albanians and also half of Ukraine.

At a cursory glance, for example over the top of your mobile phone, the inference could be that it is a red letter and rainbow day for the concept of inclusivity. But look again; all is not well. The British-on-paper-only folk, as distinct from Britons by lineage, are not stereotyped by characteristics universally associated with who they are and where they hail from, all of which would be jolly liberal if not for the ironic fact that the TV remodelled version is more like ‘us’ than we are ourselves.

Becoming ‘more like us’ is a strange, strangely controversial and also amusing phenomenon, why? Because nobody on our TV adverts and nobody’s lifestyle as portrayed on TV bears the slightest resemblance to ‘us’ ~ to our lifestyles, to what we think, to what we say and the way we feel, least of all to what we think and feel about our reconstituted, repackaged country.

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

TV adverts would have us believe, and it is make-believe pure and simple, that everyone in the UK inhabits a star-spangled realm where, regardless of background and ethnicity, we are middle-class, upwardly mobile, swanking it up in des-res properties (warm and with the lights all blaring, and don’t forget incessantly grinning, irrespective of soaring utility costs ), united by shared cultural values and generally ‘’avin’ it large” together. Naturally unnaturally, this televised illusion of what and who as a nation we are is complete and utter fiction, but when all is said and done the fiction is a nice one.

‘Nice’ is something that in my absence, British TV has almost mastered. Not entirely, however, as it continues to churn out sleazy, violent, tacky programmes, front and centre of which are a plethora of films and dramas which, in the days before life went virtual, would never have got past the censor. But cut through the sleaze and primeval viciousness, the woke blancmange and PC tripe, and the overall impression is (please sing along together now) ‘we all live in a rainbow submarine’. It is finely tuned, perfectly balanced, well-adjusted and ~ this is the all-important bit ~ effortlessly inclusive.

This kudos, or a fair proportion of it, must be ascribed to the hand-picked newsreaders and the sterling performance they give. My favourites, but then I am bias because of my personal, historic connections with Norwich, are those nice people who present Anglia Regional News. A more affable bunch of English people you would be very hard-pushed to find, especially off the telly ~ think needle in a haystack. How could you not help warm to them, this rare and endangered species?

Admittedly, it does not harm Norwich any that its geographic location puts a fair distance between it and some of our country’s less salubrious cities and that the Norfolk and Suffolk regions are some of the finest examples of Englishness the nation has yet to lose. Thus, give or take the odd exception ~ since the country as a whole is nowhere near as nice as the make-believe one served up on the box and certainly not as safe and stable ~ the news from rural regions can often be more palatable than the horror seeping daily out from those manky NO-GO Areas, which, we are officially told, do not exist in Britain. Stand by to ‘pull the other one’!

Another feather in the media’s illusory cap (Do you recognise it? It hangs down limply with bells on.) are, without question, the weather forecasters. This little band of interluders, are such a welcome breath of fresh air ~ even when it isn’t windy ~ that they can make the weather in Britain seem nice when in fact it has not stopped piddling with rain since summer was announced.

Torrential rain, gale-force winds, perpetually overcast skies, temperatures like the arctic, however bad it may be, our presenters keep on smiling. Land heaves, earthquakes, asteroid apocalypse, whatever the state of play (Look up! It’s a nuclear strike!) the face of the British weather forecaster always wears a smile.

And this is as right as alright can be, because in a country the social stability of which grows more precarious day by day, a country in which it is virtually impossible to stay in a hotel without sharing a room with an Albanian drug dealer, a country where the political classes are more obsessed with woke than ensuring safety on the streets, a country in which its police force says ‘blame it on your politicians’, a country where no one dare switch on the heating since the cost of gas and electric has spiralled out of control, a country where millions of pounds are squandered on financing futile conflicts in faraway lands which are none of its business, especially whilst legacy Britons sleep rough on our streets and the NHS is imploding due to egregious immigration indifference, more than ever before we, as a nation, are in dire need of solace, comfort and reassurance from the traction-gaining realisation that it is all going terribly wrong and that if we continue on the present trajectory it can only get much worse.

If television can work a miracle and make our country feel ‘nice’, then no matter how it does it, the BBC could honestly say, ~ if it remembers how to honestly say ~ that the risk of not paying your TV licence is worth the money it costs them to keep sending investigation letters that the world and its wife ignores.

I myself believe, however, that apart from being a very bad habit, lack of funds to do anything else and the exhaustion that naturally accrues from the daily lot of a wage slave, the flawed mentality of those who incessantly watch the box and take it all as gospel lies somewhere between ‘Don’t touch that dial!’ and TV’s shining, happy people.

Nice to see you, to see you nice, but anything more than that is so far from the truth as to make it powder-keg dangerous.

Here comes the intermission! Best go and make a cup of tea.

Cultura Kaliningrad a World-Wide Beer Bonanza!

Cultura Bottle Shop in Kaliningrad

10 August 2023 ~ Cultura Kaliningrad a World-Wide Beer Bonanza!

The beer reviews that I have written to my blog number in the region of twenty five. That I have managed to fit these in between drinking beer is astonishing, but somehow they have taken shape. In these reviews I have dealt exclusively with beers sold through supermarkets, predominantly in PET bottles in regulated volumes of 1.35 to 1.5 litres, but the fact that I have homed in on this category of beer does not mean that during the course of my beer-drinking lifestyle, I have not permitted myself the pleasure of quaffing offerings of a more specialised nature, beers which by their craft or import status are generally considered more exotic and, as a consequence, more expensive.

Thus, in addition to my reviews of the best and the worst of Kaliningrad’s ‘run of the mill’ bottled beer, I give you fair warning that I am now about to embark on the no less difficult appraisal of craft and speciality imported beers.

As in my last series of highly professional and sensible reviews, it is my intention to stick to beers purchased through supermarkets and/or specialist beer-selling outlets, in other words from what we call in England off-sales rather than licensed premises, such as bars, cafes, restaurants and hotels or, to be more precise, beers sold in bottles as distinct from barrel-stored, tap-dispensed beverages.

Whilst supermarkets and smaller shops in Kaliningrad may stock one or two more exotic brands of beers supplementary to their standard fare, such commodities are typically to be found in greater abundance and choice in specialist retail outlets. A number of such establishments abound in Kaliningrad, but one of the best by virtue of its diverse selection and quality has to be Cultura.

Cultura Kaliningrad

Cultura’s pedigree is accredited by discerning beer-buying and drinking afficionados, whose approving comments feature regularly on various beer-tickers’ websites.

Cultura is situated on one of Kaliningrad’s busy city thoroughfares, Prospekt Mira. As with many other shops in Kaliningrad, it is located on the ground floor of a three or four storey block of flats, whose size and scale dwarfs its presence and understates its potential. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the fact that seasoned beer drinkers are like seasoned hunters — they have a nose for their quarry — the shop and its myriad delights could easily be passed by. True, the Russian word for beer (peeva) is large enough not to be missed, but the back-to-basics look, which may or may not be designer inspirited, is a little too convincing when viewed against the backdrop of the tired old flats in which it is framed. However, first impressions can be deceptive, and don’t we drinkers know it, and any misgivings and apprehensions that may be unjustly inferred are swept away immediately once you have wassailed inside.

In fact, once inside Cultura one’s senses positively reel! The shop has an awful lot of beer, an awesome lot of different beers, and even after closing your eyes, opening them again, rubbing them and pinching yourself, the notion that you might have died and gone to beer-shop heaven is delightfully ineffaceable.

Cultura Kaliningrad

I am not much of a traveller, so Cultura is my compensation. Its beers, sourced from around the world, enable me to globe trot at will. I can be in Germany one minute and Belgium the next. I can even be back in Great Britain, no passport or visa required, all that is needed is cash and in the globalist era of touch-card technology even that is not an impediment ~ or so they would have us believe!

Cultura is like a library, and whilst not all drinkers are readers and not all readers are drinkers, who could resist working their way through the legion of beer-bottle labels that line Cultura’s shelves. Volumes and volumes of labels and each label speaking volumes; talk about spoilt for choice! Where on earth does one start?

A good starting point could be strength, country of origin, dark beer or hoppy light, bottle size and cost. Alternatively, you could invite your curiosity to take you where it will, which is more or less the path that I took. As I travelled around the world in my own inimitable way, marvelling at the exhibits, as unique and individual as anything in an art gallery, price became a factor, albeit a not defining one, in the process of selection.

Mick Hart samples Kaliningrad imported beers

Above: Mick Hart in Cultura: one photo was taken during the Plandemic; the other later. Bet you can’t guess which is which?!

Translating roubles into pounds based on the exchange rate on any given day is never easy; performing the calculation as an aid to purchasing beer is analogous to acrobatics, and whilst it may not, and often does not, provide the safety net you hope it will, price variations in Cultura are sufficiently dramatic to make falling back on this methodology an imperfect reassurance.

On my first visit to Cultura at the height of the Plandemic in November 2021, the exchange rate was such that it allowed me to cut some slack, and I was not particularly concerned about paying 350 to 400 roubles for a litre bottle of beer (then about £4.50) even though in those days the average price for a 1.5 litre bottle available from supermarkets was under £1.50. “Treat yourself!” I thought, and so I did.

Come 2023, however, I was less complacent. This was the time when the rouble was billed as the ‘best performing currency in the world’, thanks to the fiscal measures taken to equalise the impact of western sanctions. The resultant disparity in the price and value of craft and imported beers had me effectively sanction myself. Unlike the big sanctions, however, whose efficacy are questionable, my little, private sanctions were not so ill conceived that they would come back later to bite my arse; they were modest in proportion and tenable in their application, working on the kind of budget that the Bank of England can only dream of. Even so, speciality beers, particularly imported ones, have always come with a higher price tag wherever you might be domiciled, and those in Cultura are no exception. I will leave you to decide whether or not you would be prepared to pay £15 or more for a litre bottle of beer.

“Ay up, mother, I think it’s off to the working man’s club!” (Note: Working Men’s Clubs are no longer permissible in British society: (a) because we no longer have a ‘working class’ and Benefit Class does not sound near as 21^st century as politicians would like, and (b) to have a man’s club or a man’s thing of any kind in the UK is impermissible under the ‘Everyone has to be Queer Act’ [source: Winky’s Guide to British Law by N.O. Balls])

That having been said, and I am sorry that it has been, but things do have a habit of popping out (when you least expect them to) [source When I Was Young by Y. Fronts], the price range in Cultura is flexible enough to ease the stays on your wallet without making you walk lop-sided. And once everything is paid for, it all fits snugly in a nice paper bag.

There are red flags and red lights: one is to a bull which the other is to need, and there are green lights that mean Go. Which is why I went to Cultura. No one should court seduction until it becomes a vice, but every once in a while passion needs an outing. Remember the words that your maiden aunt should have listened to but didn’t: ‘a little of what you fancy does you good!’

Cultura has a lot of that little and plenty more besides. You won’t be sorry you went there!

More beer delights in Kaliningrad
The London Pub
Sir Francis Drake
Four great Kaliningrad bars
Dreadnought

The main thing

Cultura Bottle Shop
Prospekt Mira, 46-48, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, 236022
Tel: +7 911 860-78-50

Opening times
Fri & Sat 11am to 1pm
Sun to Thurs 11am to 10pm

Website
https://vk.com/culturabottleshop/

Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke

“I don’t see it like that!”

All it took was a bag of frozen peas left on the end of the checkout conveyor belt, my public spiritedness and up went the balloon. And it was high drama at the local supermarket.

1 August 2023 ~ Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke

I had just arrived at the local supermarket checkout with my week’s shopping ~ six bottles of beer, a can of cheap beans and a pound of liver, which I will need to replace mine if I carry on drinking like this ~ when I espied a lonely bag of frozen peas beached on the metallic rim at the end of the conveyor belt.

There was only one person in the queue in front of me, an elderly black lady.

“Are these yours?” I politely asked her, nodding towards the peas.

“No,” she replied, in a strong Jamaican accent, then, whistling through her teeth, asked “Why do people do such things?”

“A sign of the times,” I replied.

I began to unload my purchases from the basket to the conveyor belt, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

A lady, unusually large for the time of year, one of those scarred for life by the coronavirus Plandemic who cannot escape from her facemask, was asking me: “Are these your frozen peas?”

“No,” I answered. “I asked the lady in front of me the same question.”

A public-spirited person, ie me, then sought to bring the lonesome bag of peas to the attention of the foreign gentleman manning the checkout (‘manning’, we are not supposed to say that, are we?’).

“It’s OK,” he said, in a strong foreign accent, “Lady has gone to get something.”

That told me. But hardly had he finished speaking than he began to take a peculiar interest in something at the checkout opposite. He continued to look in that direction, calling as he did so, “Lady, lady, your things here!”

I looked where he was looking. The ‘lady’ to whom his comments were addressed, presumably she who had left the frozen peas, was standing in the opposite queue. She was big and black with a face resembling something that Buffalo Bill Cody would have been familiar with. Just then we, the elderly black lady who had spoken to me earlier and who was in the process of paying for her goods, glanced at each other. A second earlier she had turned her head to look at the culprit who had abandonned her frozen peas. The elderly lady seemed embarrassed. Hurriedly stuffing her last purchase into her bag, she scurried off, leaving me to mull over her question, “Why do they do it?” Why, indeed?

The foreign white gentleman manning the checkout was still appealing to the foreign black lady’s responsibilities, trying to get her to take the frozen peas back to the refrigerator, but whilst the peas were rapidly thawing, she was frozen within her ignorance.

“They [the peas] will defrozen,” called the checkout man, “defrozen, and then we will have to throw them in the bin.”

At long last, the ‘lady found her voice: “I don’t see it like that,” she retorted.

Now there’s an answer for you!

Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke

It was evident by now that the checkout man was flogging a dead horse, buffalo or something. He got up, strode down to the end of his conveyor belt, grabbed the peas and headed towards the fridge.

“It’s all happening at Fiddles today,” said I. “Such drama!”

The mask-wearing woman looked the other way, just in case her mask was not as foolproof as they had made her believe. The little middle-class lady standing behind her ~ and you don’t get a lot of them in Fiddles, come to think of it, you don’t see many of them in Bedford town centre ~ sniggered but did not utter a word.

The white checkout man from who knows what country strode back, resumed his seat and staring into the middle distance said, with an expression of incredulity, “Lady got same products but leave these, why?”

“Cuh,” I chimed, “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

And it didn’t, particularly as he was white and the frozen-pea leaver was black.

I half expected her to suddenly burst into a tirade of, “Yu wacist! Yu wacist, yu are!” and dash from the shop.

She would then complain online to her friends, who would then alert the authorities, who would then contact Fiddles’ management and demand an apology. The Guardinistan and the BBC would get wind of the situation and commence a campaign on the black woman’s behalf, reporting that she had been so terribly traumatised by the outrageous request to return the peas to the fridge that it had caused her to lose her self-esteem, not to mention her self-respect, and that, as a result, she could no longer go to the supermarket unless she was accompanied either by her grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews or nieces, preferably all of them together, which is why they are currently bobbing about in an inflatable dinghy on the English Channel, soon to dock at Dover from whence they will be V.I.P. driven to a nice five-star hotel, providing there are any left that are not already full.

Frozen Peas in Bedford

Shortly, a solicitor, one of those who specialises in just these sorts of cases, would volunteer to represent her. Her case would go to court. Naturally, the LLJUK (Liberal Left Judiciary UK) would award her compensation ~ a frozen packet of Fiddles’ peas for life to be delivered every week by hand by Fiddles’ CEO and in addition, and just for good measure, a handout of two million quid.

As for the white foreign gentleman, who had been totally out of order for calling the woman’s attention to the bag of peas she had ditched, he would be sacked forthwith, and his bank, The Cashless Globalist Inc., would immediately close his account Nigel Farrage-style, and wouldn’t that serve him white! What would he do? Where would he go? No lifetime’s guarantee of frozen peas for him. How would he survive in an overpriced country dominated by profiteering supermarkets, greedy utility companies, extorting financial institutions and totally in-the-pocket-of-George-Sorryarse MPs? There would be nothing for it but to turn gay, join the British Army, sue them for being beastly to him, or perhaps not beastly enough (pass the mascot, ‘Woof!’), and leave the service with his own compensation.

It’s not what you do; it’s the way that you do it … and in the UK that’s a fact!

Pass the peas, please!

Links to ….

Three Kaliningrad babushkas in a bread shop
Secret Weapon in Kaliningrad
Russia’s love of cakes differs from the UKs‘
It’s that man in the Russian hat in Bedford!

Don’t Kill Cash!

Don’t Let Them Get Away with It!

Don’t Kill Cash. They have tried terrifying and jabbing you into submission, they have weaponized immigration and now the banks are putting the boot in.

24 July 2023 ~ Don’t Let Them Kill Cash

When the news broke about Farage having been turned into a martyr by the pseudo-liberal banking system, I kept an open mind. It was only when the BBC, that organisation to which you are forced to pay a licensing fee for stuff you do not want to see or hear, the same organisation for which Jimmy Saville used to work, was mentioned in the same breath as the bank in question and soon afterwards a flurry of responses appeared in the liberal-left controlled media refuting Nigel’s claim that he had been politically shafted, and the usual suspects on social media and the establishment media lackies claiming that Farage’s accounts had been closed as his wealth had dropped below a certain threshold, that I began to grow suspicious.

Then, on 10 July, Farage announces on Twatter that he has proof that the bank lied to him and that he, the man who had single-handedly wrested us from the grasping clutches of the Evil Union, was polishing up his crusade whistle in order to expose the machinations of a woke-oriented banking system, the same system, the same people, behind the covert operation to replace cash completely in favour of electronic transactions, which, as every schoolboy knows, is not just a means of financial control but a giant stride towards totalitarian tyranny, the perfect model, in fact, for tracking, surveillance, threat and extortion.

OTT? Think Justin Turdeau and the control template he gave to his globalist chums, when the only way he could stop his country’s patriotic truckers, whose gallant siege exposed him for what he was ~ a very horrible Turdeau ~ was to weaponise the banks.

WOKE WATCH UK!

Don’t Kill Cash!

I hadn’t heard of the Don’t Kill Cash campaign until I tuned into Farage’s bank debacle; in fact, I think a great many other people were most likely oblivious to it ~ so thank you the globalist banking system for victimising Nigel Farage and bringing this latest plot of yours to everyone’s attention.

It’s bad enough to be incessantly told that we live in a democratic society where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, when every time we open out mouths we have to say in a whisper, whilst taking a backwards glance, “We’re not supposed to say that!” Imagine what it will be like if the globalist banking system gets you by the balls (LGBTQ Z It Others + ??? WTF included, where physically applicable.).

‘I’m sorry we’ve closed your account because you did not “take a knee” (although we, the bank, will give you one!); because you resisted the globalist jab; because you used the expression bum bandit; because you complained about the State-facilitated third-world invasion; because you don’t believe a word the UK media says about Ukraine; because you won’t roll over and accept socially engineered multiculturalism, which would not be so bad if it worked, but it doesn’t; because you are not a fan of woke; because you like the expression ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’; because you suspect that the climate-change industry is just that ~ an industry; because you believe that the UK establishment is using ‘unstoppable immigration’ as an excuse to rejoining the Evil Union; because you oppose woke at every level; because you want to see law and order restored on the streets; because you ardently support the abolition of political brainwashing in the British education system; because you don’t want to pay the BBC license fee because the BBC is politically biased; because you cannot bear to watch television anymore, especially the commercials; because you don’t want to pay £4 for a packet of breakfast cereal, £3.90 for a bottle of brown sauce and thousands of pounds to greedy, profiteering utility companies; and, most of all, because you love the country you had and hate the mess that it has become. Er, did I forget to mention because up every glove-puppet UK politician you can see the hand of the super-rich?’

“I’m sorry, we’ve closed your bank account because you refused to wear a Zelensky T-shirt!”

“But I’m wearing Ukrainian flag-coloured underpants, and I changed my avatar to ‘I’ll stand where I’m told too’, rather than use my brain cell!”

“That’s not good enough! We need to see evidence of total compliance!”

Don’t KIll Cash campaign

The GB News Don’t Kill Cash campaign is said to be one of the fastest-growing campaigns in UK history.

‘Whether it’s confusing parking apps, educating children about money, giving a quid to a busker or leaving a tip in a restaurant, the rise of the surveillance society or just your local pub suddenly insisting on card payments only, more and more people are getting in touch to tell us why they’re infuriated by ‘cashless’ Britain and support our stand.’ ~ GB News Don’t Kill Cash campaign

Don’t let them get away with it! Add your name to the Don’t Kill Cash petition today: https://www.gbnews.com/cash

It is gratifying to see the BBC and other confederates of the lefty media not so much climbing down from their high-ground perches as being knocked off them yet again by Nigel Farage. Even more gratifying to hear Nigel Farage say that he is not going to let it rest there. The media, certain factions of it, is changing its underwear faster every minute as it struggles to free itself from the straightjacket inevitability of having to issue a formal apology to Nigel Farage, following its disingenous kneejerk response to Farage’s victimisation.

The following quotes have been taken from the Reform Party email letter.

Extracts from a newsletter from Nigel Farage as UK Honary President of the political party Reform UK
“Without a bank account you are a non-person in the digital age. Decent people are living in fear. I am going to fight this all the way.

Hundreds of thousands more people live in fear of cancel culture. Whether in their jobs or on social media, they might also begin to fight back against woke bullying. In fact millions of people around the country have had enough of being told what they can and can’t say.

The old mainstream parties have betrayed us. It is because of them that our most basic freedoms are being destroyed.

Labour and the Tories had no intention of controlling immigration or delivering on Brexit. I despise what they have done to our country.

Reform UK are now the only party who are prepared to fight for our freedom and I am proud to be our party’s Honorary President. “

The task ahead is even bigger than Brexit. It is only just beginning, and we have an enormous opportunity to take our country back. I’m standing with you as I have always done, against an establishment determined to tear our country down. Together, I know we can Make Britain Great.”

Link to REFORM UK

😮 Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

Image attributions:
Bank building: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Bank-vector-clip-art/6595.html
Devils’ face: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Devil-head-vector-clip-art/15602.html
No Exit Sign: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/No-exit-vector-sign/10341.html

Victor Ryabinin Artist Four Years Out of Time

Victor Ryabinin left Königsberg in 2019 to go back there. There is so much presence in his absence that it is hard to say if he ever went at all.

18 July 2023 ~ Victor Ryabinin Artist Four Years Out of Time

Featured image: Victor Ryabinin with Mick Hart, The London Pub, Kaliningrad, 2015

Our friend, artist, philosopher and local historian, VIctor Ryabinin, who lived out his entire life in Königsberg, died on 18 July 2019. He was, as I and others have written, a most unassuming, but in spite of and because of this, most remarkable man, both intellectually and on the level of humanity.

This is the first year that I will be unable to make the annual homage to his grave, as I am in England at present doing all the things that we people have to do whilst we are alive and which, when we die, mean very little if nothing to anyone. “Is it worth it?” sang Elvis Costello.

Such is not the case with Victor: Victor left behind a concatenation of friends and colleagues who filled the hall at his funeral to pay their last respects to him, who have written heart-felt eulogies to him, enough to fill a book, and who continue to speak of him with great affection and reverence. This is the yardstick of a worthwhile life: to have people remember you for the essence of the person you were and the light that you brought to their life.

It was a small affair, my funeral: There was the vicar, who begrudgingly turned out on a wet afternoon when the pubs were open, Ginger the cat, who had nothing better to do, and two professionals from Rent A Mourner. No one could be asked to dig the grave, so they used a post-hole digger and buried me standing up. My brother, the one who is a carpenter, made the coffin from MDF, his stock-in-trade material and, in order to keep things cheap, cut corners literally so that my feet stuck out one end. Happily ~ purely for the sake of appearances, mind, nothing to do with respect ~ someone found an old pair of wellies, so that took care of that.

Leonard Cohen was played throughout, and a man, chosen because of his serious face and the fact he cost a fiver, read an excerpt from my favourite short story, Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, and then the graveside bystanders, muttering “He always was a miserable bugger.” ~ Ginger the cat said “Meow!” ~ off they went to the nearest pub at a gallop and by the time their first pint had been downed they had forgotten I ever existed.

Victor Ryabinin Artist

Something as ignominious as this could never happen to the likes of Victor Ryabinin, because he was a truly likeable man: admired, respected, loved, revered, warm of company and generous in spirit.

In 2022, we privately and officially celebrated Victor’s life and commemorated his death with a plaque that we had commissioned, and which is now attached to the wall of our dacha. There was talk once, there always is a lot of talk full of good intentions immediately after someone dies, of erecting a plaque in Victor’s honour on the wall of the building where his studio once was. It is a great pity that this idea has never been brought to fruition, as many people ~ poets, architects, historians, artists, museum curators and me ~ were privileged to sit with him there, surrounded by relics from Königsberg and the artworks created in his own hand, artworks which these relics, these haunting pieces of the past combined with his personal memories, had assigned him to compose and pass on for posterity.

Another building that deserves to be endowed with a plaque in memory of Victory Ryabinin is the Kaliningrad Art School, where Victor worked as an art teacher for many years. His former students speak warmly of him, both of the man and the teacher, and it is gratifying to discover that the inspiration that he instilled shines through their sketches and paintings, which are displayed at various times in solo exhibitions and with the works of other artists in Kaliningrad’s art museums.

Today, I am far away and unable to make my annual trip to Victor’s graveside. When he died, I vowed this would never happen, but show me the man who is master of his destiny and we’ll sit together and talk of lies. Fortunately, our minds are capable of travelling far greater distances than any machine, and special people and unique places never stray far from our thoughts. They are a source of great comfort in its ever having been and a source of equal pain in its never to be again.

What happens to the heart? Leonard Cohen asks. And well he might. Whatever it is, we have no choice but to live with it, if only, thankfully, for a little while longer ~ somehow.

Victor Ryabinin
Arrived in Königsberg 17^th December 1946
Returned to Königsberg 18^th July 2019

Victor Ryabinin Königsberg Artist-Historian: A biographical essay by author Boris Nisnevich

Victor Ryabinin Königsberg Kaliningrad: Mick Hart recalls how fortunate he was to have met and to have known Victor Ryabinin

“Through Victor, I learnt many things that I had seen throughout my life in Königsberg but had never really thought about.“ ~ Stanislav Konovalov, student and personal friend of Victor Ryabinin

Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

Nigel Farage Warns Don’t Bank on it!

10 July 2023 ~ Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

You don’t have to look very far in the UK to find another pitiful example of Woke, or political correctness as it used to be known. The media landscape has more examples dotted around its internet sites and corporate TV outlets than there are small boats of smiling immigrants disembarking on Dover’s shores. But you may have been surprised to learn that Nigel Farage, no less, has been singled out for special treatment by the western globalist banking cartel, which has withdrawn his banking facilities.

WOKE WATCH UK!

Now, picking on a high-profile figure like Nigel Farage at a time when trust in the UK political establishment is at an all-time low is probably not the smartest thing to do. Of course, we cannot say without a shadow of a doubt that Farage’s banking difficulties are ideologically motivated, but when you delve a little deeper suspicion begins to accrue. And if the smoke is not without fire, then someone in the world of banking has really gone and shot themselves in their ideological hoof.

Woke UK Banks

According to Mr Farage, the bank, with whom he had been a customer for years, suddenly and without explanation, closed down his account. So go and open an account elsewhere. Well, this is what he tried to do, but the first bank he approached refused him, the second bank refused him and so on and so on and so on … (Nigel Farage YouTube).

Katie Hopkins, who is very good at grasping the nettle of truth, because she has learnt the hard way, reviews the ‘noise around Farage’ in the context of her own experience and the experience of others like her (Katie Hopkins, YouTube).

It is obvious from Katie’s videos and the commentary that accompanies them that there is a firm and growing belief among UK legacy Britons, who are far from happy with the ‘liberal’ status quo, that the UK’s answer to the Chicago Outfit, the super-rich elite, syndicates with other globalist lynchpins ~ political establishment + corporate media + partisan judiciary + banking institutions ~ to exert their collective power, and whilst they casually talk the talk of democracy subvert it to its lowest level by robbing those individuals of whom they are afraid of the right to freedom of speech and by depriving and dispossessing them of their socio-economic existence.

Katie Hopkins, who asserts that she was turned into a ‘non-person’ by the machinations of the powers that be, acknowledges the many unsung heroes of Britain’s growing Resistance, the ordinary people with no public voice, who have fallen foul of the cancel culturists and their ideological programme.

Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

So how credible is it that Nigel Farage woke up one morning and found himself in bed with Katie and Tommy Robinson? Providing the closing of his accounts are ideologically motivated, which by all accounts ~ and closed accounts ~ it appears they may have been, then sadly the answer is incontrovertibly. We know stranger things happen at sea. Just think of the Royal Navy escorting rubber dinghy after rubber dinghy daily into Dover.

Now, as everybody knows, none more so than the liberal left, Nigel Farage is not a man to provoke. He is the man who took on the EU octopus and beat it single handedly. Look out naughty banks! Another irony is that closing down his bank account could not have come at a less propitious moment for the woke-obsessed establishment.

Breaking News!

For hot on the heels of the Farage story, came the sensational revelation that a clergyman living in Yorkshire had suffered a similar fate. The vicar’s (There’s something so delightfully English about ‘vicar’, don’t you think?) building society whipped away its welcome mat from beneath his reverence’s feet simply because he was straight talking ~ perhaps because he is straight? Believing naively in the corny old mantra that he lived in the land of free speech ~ hadn’t the political establishment and BBC been telling him this for years? ~ instead of holding back like many people do (We are not supposed to say that, are we?), he criticised the building society of which he had been a client for years, for promoting gender issues.

For this unforgiveable sin, he was promptly given the bumsrush. He was stripped of his pieces of plastic. The bank pulled down his accounts and, finding himself in Queer Street, a very unpleasant place to be, almost as bad as Radio 3, he was given a proper defrocking, if only in the financial sense. When the Mail Online latched onto this, it and its readers went ballistic, and then, as usual, they made some tea and quietly went back to the crossword.

Seven across: Every shirt has a silver lining, even a lifted shirt.

The dual plights of Mr Farage and the vicar of Wake-up-Call, serve to remind us yet again of the financial tsars central role in pushing the pseudo-liberal agenda.

It is bad enough that all of us are expected to change our avatars to the colours of the Ukrainian flag, when most of us have no idea where exactly Ukraine is or what we are changing our avatars for. What next? Compulsory membership of the Fudge Packers’ Union and mandatory Gay Pride jabs? Thank heavens for the prophesy that Pride comes before a fall and that still strong countries like Russia are determined to make a stand, acting as a bulwark against the rising tide of Western woke.

As the political elite and banking institutions push us towards a cashless society to achieve their tripartite goal of surveillance, tracking and control, the daunting realisation that it is no longer politicians but super-rich globalist bankers who run our western countries and who are sufficiciently confident and arrogant enough to go way beyond cancelling culture to rubbing you out completely, is a sobering thought indeed.

I now have proof of being lied to by @CouttsandCo over PEP status.

They are dishonest in the extreme and above all else breached privacy. I am considering my options.

Closing bank accounts, and a cashless society, means complete control. We must fight these corporate forces. pic.twitter.com/sPvOutn2cH
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 10, 2023

The time is coming fast when the only way to thrive and prosper in UK Plc is to sit on a sunbed for a week, wrap yourself in a blanket, grab the latest hi-tech phone, jump an inflatable dinghy and steam across the channel with the aid of the Royal Navy to be given a nice, free comfortable room in a top UK hotel.

No need to hurry; no need to rush; no need to have a bank account as the trip is all-inclusive. And the offer is ending no time soon.

Oh Hokey Wokey Cokey
Woke and Hypocrisy: it really is God Save the King!
Woke Watch PC UK!
Colston Woke Statue 4 Scratch the Itch of History
Keep Woke out of Football!

Image attributions
Credit card: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Golden-Credit-Card-Vector/2843.html
Parrot: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Stylized-Parrot/44695.html

Further reading
British building society admits closing accounts …
Banks free speech blacklisted accounts …