16 November 2024 ~Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
The answer to the question is ‘yes’. Yes, it is possible to access Kaliningrad at the Polish-Kaliningrad border and vice-versa. The only caveat is that before you go, stock up on patience.
Not too many months back, the bus from Kaliningrad going to Gdansk was held up at the Polish border for as long as it took to miss a flight at Gdansk ~ a plane-missing seven hours in fact. Whilst this particular case may be the exception to the rule, lengthy delays are not, and in response to this and other inconveniences generally assumed unnecessary, and some infer deliberately obstructive, a petition has been launched, which you, dear reader, can access here: Against the intolerable conditions on the Russian-Polish border (Kaliningrad)! {Note: to read this in English, you will need to click on ‘Translate’ and change the language from German into English.}
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open Yes But?
Not all border crossings are as bad as the last one you experienced, but some can sometimes be worse, and some can be worse but interesting. Take a crossing I made earlier this year, for example.
We cleared the formalities at the Russian border without let or hinderance and trundled off with great expectations, fifteen of us in all, onto Polish territory.
There were no other vehicles in transit, only our bus, and the usual procedures went smoothly enough. We were gawped at, our credentials were examined, we had our mugshots taken (again!) and, after 30 minutes, we were back on the bus.
We took our seats; brum, brum (that’s the sound of the bus starting up); and off we went.
Traditionally, this is the point on the journey when, with the inquisition over, the invisible stays shared by all release themselves collectively, letting relaxation spill palpably out in a sigh-giving rush of relief. The advent of this release is customarily celebrated by proper professional travellers in possession of proper professional travelling cases with a dignified mass unzipping, whilst those of us who own neither proper cases nor dignified travelling standards have to be content with rustling through our carrier bags. The end result is the same, however, stress being given the elbow, it’s time for comfort eating.
Is the Poland-Kaliningrad Border Open?
I had just begun to tuck into my penultimate cheese sandwich when, ay up mother!; what’s going on? Instead of hitting the open road, our bus was being siphoned off into a fenced and gated compound.
“Ay up?” I thought again. Well, you would think that, wouldn’t you.
I cannot say for certain whether it was my fault or not. Perhaps I want to believe it was for the sake of an impudent ego. But the question kept repeating itself: Were we locked away inside this compound, sitting in front of this big, this bland, this ominous, non-descript building because of something I said?
When the clam-faced female in the Polish border office fired “Cigarettes? Alcohol?” at me, my facetious reply had been, “Yes please?” And then when she did not get the joke (What joke exactly would that be?) and barked the questions again, I had waived them away with an Englishness, simpering yet polite, which Leslie Phillips would have been proud of, but possibly she was not.
Cigarettes? Alcohol? Never touch the stuff!!
Whoever was or was not to blame, there we sat on the bus, and we sat there for a bad 10 minutes, us and this dull, brick, window-less building.
There was something about our situation and the building confronting us that nudged my imagination.
‘Work sets you free’. No, the sign at the entrance to the compound did not state that, but what exactly did ‘Revision Centre’ mean?
The bland building gave nothing away. Indeed, there is nothing much more to say about its external aspect, except that high upon the roof it had a prominent funnel-shaped air vent.
I could not see clearly as the sun was in my eyes, but I am almost willing to swear on anything other than a stack of beer bottles that for one second I saw, or bore the conviction that I saw, poised at the mouth of the air vent, the shadows of two men. They were crouching down at the sides of the vent, leaning in towards it, and each had something in their hands, something that looked like canisters. I had just begun to focus on the labels of these canisters when a shard of light leapt out of the sun temporarily blinding me. Through the eclipsing halo that followed, and with the bus now moving in reverse and altering my perspective, the words on the label were reduced to a blur, and all that I could make of them was a capital ‘Z’ at one end and a capital ‘B’ at the other.
Our bus had not entered the building by the floor-to-apex roller door in front of which we had initially parked. It had taxied around to the back of the building, where it slowly disappeared through a similar portal at that end. Creeping at a snail’s pace, it inched its way gradually in, permitting me to regard at will the character of the chamber into which we were being swallowed. We were saying goodbye to the outside world; one hoped temporarily.
We were passing into an alley, just the right width for the size of the bus. To the left of us was a platform, solid, broad and deep, not unlike one you would loiter upon whilst waiting for a train. It was not the height of the vehicle’s windows, but just a little below it.
At the back of this platform at regular intervals were two or three large doors. They were big doors, metal doors, with handles of such prodigious proportions that the only way to open them would surely be to enlist the brawn of two thick Polish men with arms that did not fit. In a corner close by the doors stood a bag that seemed familiar. It looked like one I had seen before on the lorry of KG Smith & Son, Northamptonshire’s premiere coal merchants.
Until now the bus had been trickling forward, but it suddenly drew to a shuddering halt. The driver got up from his seat, made an announcement I did not catch and opened the doors of the vehicle. Before you could say Polish sausage, especially before you could say it in Polish, a man in paramilitary uniform had bounded up the steps and standing at the front of the bus, all officious-like ~ did I hear someone say ‘full of piss and importance’? ~ was presumably ordering us all to get off. Simultaneously, a larger man armed with a big black dog had stationed himself strategically next to the door at the side of the bus, from which the young and old, couples ~ some with children, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard were struggling to alight laden down with their bags and chattels.
The platform to which this innocuous group had descended was considerably narrower than that on the opposite side. Folk were bumping into each other as, ‘Roust! Roust! Schnell! Schnell!’, they were ordered to take their travelling bags from the hold beneath the bus.
Nobody quite seemed to know what it was that was expected of them. A big man, looking not unlike Hermann Goering’s brother, had already started rummaging through one of the passenger’s bags. He had the item perched on a table placed at the side of the wall and was going through the contents as if he was pulling the entrails out of a late-for-Christmas turkey. He looked much more like a TV villain than a man with respect for the public.
Hermann’s brother had a very loud voice, which he used to good effect. Stopping in mid-rummage, with his hands inside some lady’s lingerie, he bellowed at the meek, the innocent and inoffensive, over whom he lauded ultimate power and whose only crime today was that they wanted to get from A to B. Obediently, one by one, they fell silently in line.
During this demonstration of ‘I’m a man in a uniform’, two other guards had joined the jamboree: a flint-eyed woman in a boiler suit spoilt by its insignia, and one of those strutting cockerel types: ‘I’ve got tattoos on my neck, and I’ve come to throw my weight about’.
The carnival commenced: The man who had the sniffer dog was sniffing; the cockerel was in and out of the bus as if someone had knocked him off his perch; the flint-eyed thing was glaring, ‘Look at those eyes! Those eyes! Those eyes!’; and the mountain man with a skinhead haircut who went by the name of Hermann’s Brother was rifling through one’s personals as if he was mixing cement.
His brawny arms were in there, his paddle hands a-swirling. He had obviously learnt his cultured trade from washing his pants in a tub.
Fortunately for me, no such ignominy would besmirch my person. I was, as they say, travelling light. I only had a carrier bag, in which I had placed my laptop and the sad remains of a pack-up meal prepared for me by my wife.
Most of what had been packed for me, I had already scoffed. All that remained was a lonely sandwich, lolling half in and half out of one of those thin plastic boxes routinely used in supermarkets for the display and sale of cakes.
Although I was not in the least bit hungry, having eaten just minutes before, the thought of the Polish strangler rinsing his mitts about my sandwich, spurred me into action. Better to eat the sandwich now than have it used like a paper towel hanging next to the gents’ urinals. The problem was that fatty arms was getting through those bags like Joe Stink from the Secret Service, and the combination of cheese and bread being not the easiest thing to masticate resulted in a situation of alarming prematurity, an unfortunate occurrence which is not entirely limited to such incidental matters as love, life and death but also, or so it would seem, the crucial business of crossing borders.
Thus, when the big you-know-what turned to me and barked, “Cigarettes? Alcohol?”, it was an effort of no small magnitude for me to reply, “Yes please”.
He glared at me contemptuously ~ well can you blame him really ~ and pulling his girt big shoulders back in a show of manly authority (he had done the same with the 80-year-old standing frail and tired in front of me) said slowly and precisely, “We will wait until you have stopped eating, then you and I will talk!”
““Oh, really, what about?” I spluttered, choking on my sandwich. “The weather? Football? Religion? Politics? ~ er, no, anything but politics.”
The sandwich safely swallowed, he sang the refrain again: “Cigarettes?” and “Alcohol?”
Do you know what I think? I think that he was asking me whether I had such items concealed about my person or stashed inside my laptop. When I answered in the negative, first he looked suspicious then profoundly disappointed.
I took a swig of mineral water. He probably thought the alcohol was hidden in that bottle ~ as if! ~ and that I had hurriedly eaten the cigarettes between two slices of bread. Whatever it was he didn’t know, and I think it was a lot, he was not a happy man, which is hardly surprising really, looking and acting the way he did. But he wasn’t finished yet.
He glanced furtively down at my little one ~ I mean at the bag that I was carrying ~ and a tiny ray of hope shone briefly through his cold pork pies, though it was tinged with disbelief by the answer he anticipated but did not want to hear.
“No big baggage?” he asked.
I could, of course, have just said ‘no’, thus putting him out of his misery, but Bernard Manning answered for me, “Just the wife,” said Bernard, “and she’s at home at present.”
Hermann Rummage pursed his lips, shuffled, scowled and then dismissed me. I climbed back onto the bus.
Ten minutes later, no contraband having been found, we were out on the open road again, steaming towards Gdansk: the young and the old, couples ~ some with children, two or three middle-aged gents and a peculiar sort of Englishman with a grey and straggly beard.
Those lovely chaps at the Polish border, I mused, stood more chance of finding a rational thought in a liberal’s head than illicit fags and booze on the God-fearing lot on this bus, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Who of us can say with any degree of certainty what goes on in the cranky minds of liberals?
Yet the trees were green, the sky was blue, and every cloud has a silver lining: after all, we hadn’t been gassed, just inconvenienced and harassed.
It was just another sourpuss day at Checkpoint Proper Charlie.
14 October 2024 ~ Telegraph in Svetlogorsk Good Coffee Unique Art
Contrary to received wisdom, it is not always necessary or indeed advisable for travellers to stick to the beaten track. Verily, by doing so the chances of missing out on some hidden cultural gem or other, or hitherto unencountered esoteric and unusual experience are magnified manyfold.
Indubitably, there are some parts of the world, some sinister and dubious places, where keeping to the beaten track is less a question of tourism than an action guided by common sense in the interests of survival.
Take London, for example, that patchwork quilt of small towns wherein no boundaries lie. One minute you, the traveller, can almost believe what the travel guides tell you, that London is, indeed, one of the world’s most civilised cities, the next, because you strayed from the beaten track, that you are up S*it Creek without a paddle in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Is it Africa or Pakistan? No point leaving the beaten track to be beaten in your tracks. Best to beat a hasty retreat.
Telegraph in Svetlogorsk
Enrichments of this nature do not apply, thank goodness, to a small secluded backstreet in the seaside town of Svetlogorsk on Russia’s Baltic Coast. Not officially known as ‘Off the Beaten Track’, Street Ostrovskogo (‘Off the Beaten Track’ is easier to say) is a quaint, leafy, meandering avenue that wends its way from Street Oktyabr’skaya (it’s easier just to say ‘Off the ‘Beaten Track’).
In Svetlogorsk, the streets run off from a large, open public space in the centre of the town, which, during clement months, overflow with tourist’s eagerly taking advantage of the outside drinking and eating areas. One of the streets that travels from this lively, bustling hub is Ulitsa Oktyabr’skaya. It is the street you will need to walk to get you to the Telegraph café.
The route is a rewarding one. It takes you past a Svetlogorsk landmark, the 1908 Art Nouveau water tower, past the town’s pretty Larch Park with its copy of Hermann Brachert’s ‘Water Carrier’ sculpture ~ the original is in the Brachert Museum ~ past my favourite and recently renovated neo-Gothic house and onto the Hartman Hotel.
To say that you cannot miss Ulitsa Ostrovskogo would be a silly thing to say, because if your sense of direction is anything like mine … Sorry? Oh, it isn’t. Well then just look for a clothes shop on your right. You won’t be able to miss it, because your sense of direction is better than mine and also because in the summer months some of its garments are hung outside in order to make the shop more visible, and besides it is located within one of those charming old German edifices that have at their gable end an all-in-one veranda-balcony glazed and enclosed in wood. This then is the junction at which you turn for Telegraph. This is the end of the beaten track.
Halfway along this quiet backwater, at the point where streets meet chevron-fashion, stand a permanent cluster of wooden market stalls. These are something you cannot miss also, especially those with roofs, which give them the quaint appearance of modest garden summer houses. Here, artisans working in various materials ~ leather, metalware and ceramics ~ together with artists of paint and palette, regularly gather to sell their goods. The range and novelty of their handmade products really are surprising and the quality of them consistently high.
The location of these stalls could not be better placed, since a little further on the left-hand side, you have reached your destination ~ Svetlogorsk’s former telegraph building, resurrected in recent years as an outlet for arts and crafts, as a coffee shop and art gallery.
Telegraph in Svetlogorsk
In addition to selling coffee of various kinds~ and very good they are too! ~ Telegraph deals in assorted teas, other delicious drinks, a seductive range of desserts, irresistable homemade cakes and pastries you’ll want to leave home for. It is also a cornucopia of distinctive handcrafted wares, including vintage and designer clothes, prints, postcards, vinyl records, decorative items for the home, and original works from local artists.
Its comfy settee and low-slung armchairs, into which one’s body readily sinks, plus the light and airy but cozy ambience, make for a very pleasant environment in which to relax, unwind and shop. If you cannot find a gift in here, something special to treat yourself with or a Baltic souvenir, then there’s definitely something wrong with you.
An introduction to two of Telegraph’s artists
https://vk.com/album55604070_101203993 Lilya Bogatko works in the field of applied arts, designing and decorating ceramic goods with stylised naturalistic images. She prefers to work in monochrome, consigning her line-drawn black motifs to high opacity white grounds on tableware and ornaments. Her distinctive illustrations, many of which have a gentle charm that could grace a children’s storybook, possess an ethereal quality. Indeed, a fair proportion of her subjects, be they man or beast, float above the earth; they take to the air with wings. When her subjects are not animals, real or mythological, or people literally raised to a higher level of spirituality ~ have wings will fly ~ her stock-in-trade motifs are replications of Kaliningrad landmarks, such as the now defunct and liquidated former House of Soviets, the refurbished Zalivino lighthouse overlooking the water’s edge of the Curonian Lagoon and Königsberg Cathedral.
Based in St Petersburg, Lilya is a regular visitor to Kaliningrad and the Kaliningrad region, from which she derives inspiration and consolidates her sales outlets.
https://vk.com/album-30057230_195486413 Pavel Timofeev has an arts and crafts workshop at Telegraph in Svetlogorsk, where he produces, among other things, leather purses and wallets, men’s and women’s leather bracelets with inscriptions on request, ornamented key rings and a range of fashion jewellery.
His speciality is selling watches with watch-face customisation. The face design can be made to order, with the option of a leather strap in traditional classic or novel styles. The straps can also be personalised.
For examples of Pavel’s watches, please refer to the carousel that appears below this profile:
The room opposite Telegraph’s ‘sitting room’ is its designated art gallery, a well-lit exhibition space with enough wall and floor capacity to showcase umpteen works of local artists. On the occasion of my visit, the art form most conspicuous was assemblages ~ 3D compositions created by taking disparate pieces of whatever it is the artist has scavenged and then arranging or assembling them on a backboard of some description so that the configuration that ensues presents itself as a pictorial image or, from impressions of the whole or its parts, invites interpretation.
Victor Ryabinin, our artist friend from Königsberg, was the man who introduced me to assemblages. His interest in the potential of this technique as a medium for symbolism had him unearthing whatever he could from the remains of Königsberg’s past and putting the pieces together so as to excite in the observer a quest to uncover meaning, either the artist’s or their own.
Since Victor was profoundly immersed in and also profoundly disturbed by the eradication of Königsberg, the assemblages that he built from the remnants of destruction often convey a personal sense of irredeemable loss, an inescapable sadness, a wistful but unrequited need for a less tragic end to the city in which he loved to live and which he loved. Victor travelled outside of Königsberg more often and further than Immanuel Kant, but he possibly left it less than Kant or anyone else for that matter.
By contrast, the assemblages gathered together under Telegraph’s roof evinced none of this solemnity. They danced a confident riot of bright, effusive colours, orchestrating lively, often comic, images and energising expressive shapes, some fondly reminiscent of the enchanting kind of illustrations adorning the pages of story books beloved of old-time children, others cleverly more obtuse or playfully cryptographic.
In vivacity of colour and their three-dimensional character the assemblages reminded me of the kind of shop-front sign boards popular in the Edwardian era, and there was much at work in their composition to insinuate a vintage charm. But the incorporation of parts taken from obsolete engines, metal handles, steel rivets, goggles and the like, plus paraphernalia of various kinds possessing mechanical provenance and rigged to suggest articulation, disclosed a contemporary steampunk influence. Intriguing, all bewitching and also fun to boot, take any one of these assemblages, hang them in your home and if until now you have felt that your home lacked a conversation piece, trust me when I tell you that this omission has been rectified.
In the Svetlogorsk we know today, cafes, bars and restaurants and places of interest to view and visit exist in appreciable numbers, but every once in a while one stands out in the crowd: Telegraph is that one.
It may have exchanged its wires and needles for coffee and for art, but the function of the historic building as a centre of communication lives on in its role as a meeting place, and the message that it telegraphs couldn’t be more accommodating: Sit a while, relax, enjoy a beverage and a piece of cake and let your sensibilities flow with the positive vibes that emanate from all that you see and all that you feel around you and from what can be bought and taken home, because the chances are that whatever it is that tickles your fancy in Telegraph, you will never find another like it; the chances are it will be unique.
After browsing, binging, basking and borrowing (borrowing from your friends to pay for the coffee and art, “I’ll see you alright, later …”), especially on those days when the craft-sellers’ stalls are active, when you finally head off home, you will say to yourself with satisfaction, what an enjoyable day I have had. I am so pleased to have visited Telegraph, and it’s all because of that Mick Hart, urging us to get up off of our … ah … to get off of the beaten track.
Telegraph ~ social and cultural space of Svetlogorsk.
Telegraph is a public and cultural space (a centre of urban communities), created by city residents for city residents.
We do not have a director, but we have a working group. We are a community of participants with common goals and values.
Telegraph is located on Ostrovskogo Street in house No. 3 (next to the Post Office).
There are four spaces here:
– a coffee shop (here you can try aromatic fresh coffee) – a living room with an exhibition of works by craftsmen (you can buy local handmade souvenirs) – a gallery (local artists hold exhibitions here) – workshops (pottery and carpentry) – a terrace and a lawn with the longest bench in the city.
Our space regularly hosts meetings of various communities. Any participant can propose an idea for their own project and find like-minded people who will provide the necessary support.
Telegraph exists outside of politics, outside of religion. We are open to new acquaintances/initiatives.
The Telegraph project team deals with city projects and development issues.
Co-working ‘Thoughts’ (Aptechnaya, 10); keys from the barista in the coffee shop; additional conditions by phone +79114839050
30 September 2024 ~ Summer in Kaliningrad and UK as it happened in 2024
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
As summer draws to a close, I made the mistake of accidently retorting, “It’s gone so fast that I hardly knew it was there!” To which came the curt and completely undeserving reply that it’s nothing short of marvellous that I knew it had arrived, the amount of time I spend locked away indoors immersed in antique and history books and spurning the light of day.
Hmm, as the collection of photographs displayed here show, the allegations against me are not entirely true.
It has also been said of me that on those few occasions when I do deign to go out, I am either surrounded by ‘junk’ or wallowing in history, locked out of the present for want of the past. Oh, and when I’m not doing that, I’m sitting and drinking beer.
Unfortunately, by some strange false-impression-giving mischievous quirk of fate, the visuals on this page would appear to lend uncanny credence to the case for the prosecution. I’ll let you, the jury, decide.
Summer in Kaliningrad 2024
Seen, and scene, on a brilliant, bright-blue summer’s day, what is it? If I was 350 years younger, I would, in referencing the shorter structure, have taken one look at the small arched windows nestled within the roof and said, “an octopus.” It isn’t. It is, of course, the Baltic coastal town of Svetlogorsk’s principal landmark (even more so now since they knocked down the Hotel Russ). It is, in fact, a water tower: a rather splendiferous example compared to Britain’s concrete plinths, designed in 1908 by Otto Walter Kukuck when Svetlogorsk was German Rauschen. Constructed in the fairytale style of German Romanticism, the tower and its rotunda meld the key concepts of Art Nouveau with architectural features native to the Königsberg region. You used to be able to have mud baths in this building, but the last I heard it was closed to the public. If they opened it up for business again, I would, wouldn’t you?
Crouching down in a field of dandelions whilst wearing a dandelion headdress may not seem like everybody’s idea of fun, but if in a former life you believe yourself to have been a shaman, have passed through the Art Nouveau stage, dallied with Art Deco and have now thrown in your lot with metaphysics and the 5th Dimension, then who can say what summer means to you?
Now here’s something that you don’t see that often, and why would you want to?: Me, armed with a paper bag not containing beer, standing outside of an avant-garde boutique, framed between some rather nice mauve and lettered heart-shaped balloons. We had, in fact, been out back, sitting at a table drinking coffee and eating biscuits, but the shop, which sells clothing and jewellery, as well as coffee, biscuits and snacks, is different enough in style and the items it has an offer to warrant a visit at any time of the year.
The greater proportion of Königsberg was destroyed in the Second World War, but seek and ye shall find architectural gems of the former German city. The Villa Schmidt, seen here bathed in summer sunlight, is one such fine example. It was constructed as a two-storey home in the Art Nouveau/German Romanticism style in 1909 by the celebrated Königsberg architect Wilhelm Warrentrapp. The villa escaped the worst effects of the Battle for Königsberg but fell foul in the years succeeding the war of the con-block, asbestos sheet and bucket-of-cement mentality by which many buildings suffered for want of sensitive restoration. Fortunately, come the 21st century, Villa Schmidt was acquired by someone who knew his restoration onions, and he has restored the property to its original spec.
Fancy meeting you here! > I was doing the shopping > And I was walking the dog
A mid-summer party, during which Soviet Constructivism’s stalwart ‘Captain Codpiece’ takes a break from renovation to enjoy the company of friends and supporters.
Above^ The technique worked superbly in the film Schindler’s List, so why not here? Enjoying a well-deserved beer (when is it not?) on a warm summer’s evening on the forecourt of a Kaliningrad bar.
Above> Nothing quite beats a late summer Baltic sunset. This one was captured this month (September 2024), location Zelenogradsk. I know it looks as though I took the photograph whilst running to the fallout shelter, but the truth of the matter is that although the sun was radiant, a stiff breeze had sneakily come from nowhere, forcing me into the nearest bar, where I continued to watch them both go down, my beer and the evening sun.
Below> This second sunset, another belter, made its way into my camera lens one late June evening from the new pier in Svetlogorsk. No wonder artists, like Victor Ryabinin, look upon this region with inspirational awe and attempt to capture the feeling using paint palette, brush and canvas.
The message is the sun is out, the skies are blue, I am celebrating, how about you? I did think of joining in, but there was quite a lot of seagulls about and, well, knowing my luck …
Summer in the UK 2024
Flint cottages and pan-tile roofs of a time-honoured street in the village of Walsingham, home of ancient religious shrines and throughout the middle ages a major pilgrimage destination. Both my brother and myself have made many pilgrimages to Walsingham, but since our last foray the chip shop had closed and on our recent visit, we abstained from visiting either of the two pubs, forsaking beer for something that was long overdue, a cup or two apiece of holy water. Just to confuse the pilgrims, and those people whose sole (not ‘soul’) interest is fish ‘n’ chips’, Little Walsingham (there is a larger one, too), is bigger than Great Walsingham, and it is to Little Walsingham the first pilgrims wended and wended again in the 20th century when the act of pilgrimaging was duly revived. Walsingham stands as the epicentre of North Norfolk’s historic and spiritual soul, without a visit to which no trip to the region would be complete.
Below: Scenes on a sunny day at Old Hunstanton. As luck would have it, we were entertained by a rare display of the RNLI hovercraft in action, although this photo captures the moment before the action took place.
You can’t have enough clutter! “Hello, operator, could you transport me back to the 1920s as quickly as possible, thank you.”
A number of pubs in England claim to be the oldest licensed premises in the country, but you have to admit that the Bell Inn, at Finedon in Northamptonshire, looks the part, and supporters of the claim’s veracity are only too willing to draw your attention to a license granted to the inn in 1042 by Edward the Confessor’s wife, Queen Edith. The pub personifies the ancient and traditional, including some of its drinkers.
Below:The tides out and the boats are grounded. A typical view across the North Norfolk mudflats and salt marshes.
Gallery above: The small, unassuming, but atmospheric village of Burnham Thorpe in North Norfolk is, as you were just about to tell me, the birthplace of one of England’s most famous naval heroes, Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson. Here we have a snapshot of the village church where Nelson’s father, Mr Nelson, by all accounts, sometimes known as Edmund, was the vicar from 1750 to 1802. The photo was taken from the forecourt of the village pub (where else!), the eponymous Lord Nelson. The last picture in the gallery is me sitting behind Nelson drinking a pint of Norfolk’s finest, Wherry. And (below decks), there I am again across the field from the pub standing next to Burnham Thorpe’s very own Nelson’s Column ~ a tad shorter than the one that used to stand in Trafalgar Square, London, before they replaced it with a figural composition of a rainbow dinghy bristling with trans-migrants. (If only Nelson was alive today. What an excellent Minister of Immigration he’d make.) From a distance, through the window of the pub (where else!), this Nelson looks as though he has been cast from bronze, but once you’ve staggered over to him you find, in fact, that some enterprising fellow-me-lad has carved him out of a tree trunk. England expects that every man will do his duty … someone did.
Above: Dusk descends over the marshland coastline of Norfolk, an area of outstanding natural beauty, and across the carpark of the vibrant White Horse pub, a pub of outstanding beers of natural beauty, situated in Brancaster Staithe.
22 September 2024 ~ Spare Some Change Makes Beggars out of All of Us
Have you ever noticed that when you go away for a few weeks, on your return not everything has changed, but some things have and subtly. For example, after my recent sojourn in the UK, I returned to Kaliningrad to find that the vacuum cleaner appliances had strangely disappeared, that someone had half-inched the mat from my office/study/drinking den, that the water jug had vanished, that a small table was where it wasn’t, and that the cat’s bowls had turned from plastic to ceramic. On a not so subtle and more depressing note, I learnt that the neighbour’s cat ~ I used to call her ‘Big Eyes’ ~ had scaled her last plank backwards. She used this technique to descend from a flat roof on the second storey of her owner’s house after her owners cut down the birch tree along whose branches she used to scramble.
Unlike our stay-at-home Ginger, she was an out-and-about sort of cat, a brave and intrepid adventurer, who, alas, was to put too much faith in the mythical tale that cats have nine lives and met with the truth abruptly whilst she was crossing the road.
The old philosophical question is there life after death is problematic enough without appending to that question are cats accorded a similar privilege?
“Of course, cat heaven exists,” cat lovers cry indignantly, but does it follow from this assumption that parity heavens exist for pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and every other animal species that are brought into this world merely to be slaughtered for the tastebud pleasures of carnivores?
Abstractions of this nature, though they may well have once occurred to me in some distant, cynical, cerebral past, found no room in my consciousness on returning to Kaliningrad, for soon I would be fretting about an entirely different dilemma ~ is there life after YouTube?
In the short while I had been away not only had my rug gone west but also YouTube with it, or to be more precise, had thereto been confined. “That’s buggered it,” I thought ~ I am prone to moments of eloquence like this ~ for though I could not give a monkey’s for the loss of Western mainstream media, where would I go with YouTube gone for my daily fix of music, for documentaries of an historical nature and for classic pre-woke TV dramas like 1960s’ Dangerman, filmed in glorious black and white when the use of the term black and white was not endowed with racial undertones and even if it had been nobody British at that time would have given a monkey’s f.ck. Ah, Happy Days indeed!
Sixty minutes searching Google for credible alternatives to the sort of content with which I engage on YouTube was enough to reassure me that whilst life without YouTube was not as we know it ~ YouTube is but one place in the internet’s vast and expanding universe but in itself it seems infinite ~ life without it was not unsupportable.
I found a site I had used in the past which offered a reasonably good selection of archived TV dramas and classic black and white films, and I also upturned a second site which, although containing the sort of stuff I would not touch with a barge polack ~ modern, glossy, tacky and geared to a left-leaning audience ~ tendered the consolation of half a dozen history programmes of a fairly reputable nature.
I was conscious that I was doing something that the so-called entitled millennials are only just coming to terms with in these rapidly changing times: I was having to ‘make do’. The derivation actually precedes the generation to which I belong. It has its origins in wartime slogans, and was born out of the real necessity of making the best of a bad situation, using whatever scant resources were at hand. Making do in the age of misinformation/disinformation, the cast offs and the hand me downs of second- and third-best websites represent a collateral revision of the quid pro quo arrangement of if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine, rehashed by modern politics as so long as you let me show you mine then I’ll let you show me yours.
I sometimes wonder if any of our contemporary politicians have bothered to read Gulliver’s Travels,written and published by Jonathan Swift in 1726, and if the answer is yes, did they find it illuminating. I for one believe that Swift’s seminal work should be made mandatory reading for anyone who is contemplating taking up a career in politics.
Ping Pong You’re Not Wrong
Ping pong, aka table tennis, is a game like many other games, such as cricket, rugby, tennis and football, I can honestly say I have never much cared for. I don’t care much for the tit for tat and the way in which the ball, be it big or small, gets passed back and forth with monotonous regularity between two opposing but rules-based players or carefully hand-picked teams, with no apparent benefit to anyone else outside of the game, give or take a cheer or two, which quickly fade in euphoria’s twilight.
Above: Ping and Pong. It’s batty.
At least in the UK when the sad illusion Democracy has been stripped down naked like the tired old whore she is, which many, out of trained submission or a sense of misplaced respect, shy away from doing, the rules of the game, whose they are and who it is that benefits from them are as transparent as a Nylon negligee (What happened to that in my absence?). Thanks to long experience of the electoral system’s hocus pocus, the who will it be first past the post, we know that whether we make our mark or not, we are guaranteed for the next five years to be saddled with one or the other bunch of ineffectual dunderheads and that, give or take a nuance or two, whichever party claims Number 10 as its prize will be singing, rather badly as usual, from the communal globalist hymn sheet: Money, Money, Money. Please to sing along now. You are all familiar with the refrain.
During my last assignment in the UK, I was treated to the spectacle of this perfectly meaningless political role play, the changing of the old guard ~ ping pong, ping pong … pong, pong, pong. Out with the old and in with the old: the Tories on their way out, Labour on their way in, but significantly rather more out than in and with many of them clearly quite out of it. Bring on the men in white coats. (Sorry I did not mention women; I’m taking a course in misogyny.)
This rotational, completely predictable, seesaw-moment momentum has less to do with change than it does with continuity, as most of the Tories’ acclaimed centre right are so way left of centre that they ought to be in the Labour Party, as many of them effectively are, whilst the Labour party itself knows no longer what it is, what it wants to be and least of all where it is going. Shame it is taking the nation with it. Half of Labour is hard left, half of it is half hearted and the other half is clearly insane (and clearly possess a triple ‘A’ in Maths). Neither Labour or the Cons ever recovered from Tony Blair. Both exhibit incurable symptoms, and the plague they exhale collusively is addling minds and destroying the country.
Nowhere is this emergency better illustrated than when the media cries exultantly that one or other of the old two parties has ‘won it by a landslide’.
The only landslide the public sense is that things are slipping away from them, that things are going from bad to worse. And yet as catastrophic as British life now is, many in the UK are yet to grasp the intelligence that by hook or by crook the old two parties need to be put out to grass. Change is as good as a rest, as they say, and a rest from them is badly needed and, more to the point, excessively overdue.
Above: I think it’s self-explanatory …
To be fair, if that is the same as being honest, Liebour did in its accession usher in some changes, albeit typically hurriedly, typically without much thought and typically in the process breaking most if not at all of its pre-election promises. But as the changes so far instituted are typically Labour in character, they have in the absolute sense changed very little at all. For example, if a Labour government did not raise taxes what a momentous change that would be. But then if Labour did not raise taxes would anybody know they were there?
Whoever it was who thought to dub Labour the party of taxation was a percipient man indeed, so much more than just perspicacious that the chances of him being a woman are nil (Excuse me for being sexist, you see I’m taking this course in misogyny.). But don’t you dare complain, not about being a man when you would rather you were a woman (it’s something you cannot change) and don’t complain about Labour’s tax hikes. You were warned that Liebour would tax you, and tax you into the ground, so why did you vote them in!
It is a fact of life that some things change and some things plainly don’t (Come on now transvestites, don’t get those knickers into a twist!); some things change a lot and others don’t change that much; some things get done for a change, and just for a change some things don’t; and there’s not a lot of change to be had out of six quid for a pint. But there are some things that will never change, though given time they probably will, but by the time they do will it be too late? Let’s talk immigration. Somebody ought to, has to, as it should be abundantly clear by now that that somebody is not Starmer.
Immigration is possibly the one issue that leading up to the General Election the Liebour party did not lie about; perhaps they simply forgot. Those of us who did not vote Labour were right, not far-right mind you, but right that we did not do so, if only for this reason, since with depressing predictability Labour has not done, and has no intention of ever doing, as much as diddly squit to resolve the immigration crisis, a dastardly weaponisation programme which represents the one real threat to the stability of the British nation and the safety of its indigenous people.
Where Labour has excelled itself is channelling more resources into the conflict in Ukraine at a time when we need to squander it least on globalist-led agendas. Do you ever ask yourself what it is that they do with your money which they take in the name of ‘council tax’? Could it be used to foot the bill for conflicts in which we have no legitimate role, even if we started them, and for paving the way for dinghy migrants to live it up in luxury?
Immigration has changed and also it has not. It has not changed in that we still have it, has not changed in that we don’t want it, but has changed inasmuch that want it or want it not, there is a lot more of it than there used to be. Central to this change is that the major EU powers no longer deem it necessary to conceal their complicit role in organising and facilitating the migrant invasion of Britain.
The infectiousness of this invasion is far more virulent and far more lethal than any contrived plandemic could be. Perhaps we should call on dear old Bill. Come on Bill, old boy, whip us up a jab or six to provide the British people with the immunity they so desperately need to protect themselves from Coronomigrant. Violent crime is rampant, acts of terrorism sweep the nation, the police are no longer a force but a branch of the social services and the government is so dismally limp it is crying out for a shot of moral Viagra.
White fight not far right
One thing that was markedly different during recent months in England, which was not necessarily good but understandably necessary as an alternative stay of civil war, was that when the riots came, as come they did and come they will, it was the whiteys on the war path. Now that did make a change!!!
It was no change at Notting Hill Carnival. Yet again it proved to be London’s annual ethnic stab fest. Any other event with a history resembling the mind of an on-the-rampage serial killer would have been banned years ago, as would the Notting Hill Carnival if it was anything other than black. It is patently inconceivable that a white British festival with a similar record of bloodlust would be allowed to continue year on year. Murder or no murder, it would have been denounced from the outset as unfit for ethnic consumption and that without equivocation would have rapidly been the end of that. This year’s Boot Hill incident cost two more people their lives, adding to the festival’s ever increasing death toll. Meanwhile, the Labour government is contemplating doubling down on the British tradition of fox hunting. It seems that rural blood sports must be banned whilst urban ones are tolerated, encouraged one might say. Brrr! it felt as if something just walked over the United Kingdom’s grave. Could that something be two-tier policing?
Over to our new prime minister. He may resemble a disciplinarian, a 1950s’ schoolmaster parachuted strategically in from a time when Britain was really Britain, but as far as ethnics are concerned looks can be deceiving. Did he give the carnival organisers the six of the best he gave the white rioters? Did he give them lines to write, “Thou shalt not stab at the Notting Hill Carnival”? Did he heck as like. He caned himself instead, by forgetting the lines of condemnation the public were waiting to hear from him, either that or the savage events and the fear of being called racist deprived him of his left-wing backbone and left him morally speechless. He eventually did cough something up, but before you could say one rule for them and a different rule for us, and before some impudent scallywag could raise the uncomfortable spectre of policing on a two-tier level, he was banging the same old distraction drum about the number one priority being the need to protect society from the heinous actions of right-wing thugs. As for random knife attacks by men whose names we can’t pronounce and acts of organised terrorism by medieval hostiles (I’ve just had a call from my stockbroker ~ invest in inflatable dinghies), the message from Britain’s political elite is as masters of the hen house they have every right to fill it with as many foreign foxes as the ECHR permits, so just sit back and enjoy your fate.
I began this post from the perspective of change and seem to have moved mesmerically into the realm where déjà vu governs the laws of momentum, and yet not everything in the world is as predictable as we would like to think. Those who live in a certain street in Kaliningrad thought they would never see the day when they would get themselves a brand-new pavement, but that day eventually dawned, despite one woman tutting, “It’s taken thirty years!” and now that vital change for which we had all been waiting seems as though it was always thus, that the pavement has always been there.
The same could be said of a certain sub-post office in a certain UK shire town. The post office seems to have been there for as long as memory itself, and mine is quite a long one, but it’s ‘all change’ when you scratch the surface. I am sure that this has got nothing to do with the fact it is run by Asians ~ which British post office isn’t! ~ but everything to do with the erratic hours it keeps. It is the first post office I have ever encountered that opens when it likes, making it an excellent venue whenever you catch it right, because since nobody trusts its opening hours very few people use it, hence the absence of queues. Not having to stand in line makes such a welcome change from a trip to your average post office, where you need to go armed with a sleeping bag and enough provisions to last you a fortnight, and yet it is such an odd phenomenon that it has you asking the question, could this peculiar post office that is more often shut than not, in fact be a front for something else? Like all these foreign food stores that pop up overnight and the multitude of barber’s shops purporting to be Turkish when the owners and all who work in them look and talk Albanian. Perhaps the owners of these businesses are engaged in some other activity, such as laundering, for example. There’s no hard left sign visible outside the coven of Hope Not Hate, but just because you cannot see the twin tubs does not mean that they are not there and the country is not being rinsed.
Whilst every street in every town and every city in England have fallen forfeit to immigration (you may have heard the phrase ‘Our cities have changed beyond recognition’), the streets of Russian Kaliningrad have decidedly changed for the better, that is to say materially and, with the restitution of law and order and regaining of self-respect, which had been partly laid to waste as a repercussion of perestroika, in matters of social decorum.
Whenever I walk the perimeters of Königsberg’s ancient ponds, this variance in urban life does not leap up and out at me like something dark on a no-go street in Peckham but is inviting enough to assail my senses with what we have lost in Britain. The contrast in the cultural climates is visible, audible, palpable, and it starts with the way in which people dress.
From New York to the South Pole, almost everybody these days is hardwired to dressing casual. I suspect that I am one of the few remaining sartorial standard bearers who espouses cravat, frock coat and top hat ~ not forgetting silver-topped cane ~ rather than wear a pair of trainers.
Above: “I don’t as a rule wear any, but I always make sure not to go out with, or in, a strong wind”
Kaliningradians and Kaliningrad visitors from other parts of Russia tend to follow a smart-casual trend. Whereas, as in every other sphere of cultural life, dress code in the UK has taken a turn for the worse and worst, going from ultra-smart to smart-casual, to trendy casual, to half casual, to dumb-down casual to bags of shit.
Who is not acquainted with that funny old Asian man? Let me point him out to you: that’s him there, there, there, over there and over here … See how he wears all sorts of oddments, everything thrown together: the workshop apron, pantaloon trousers, corny ill-fitting jacket bought from yonder charity shop and, of course, a pair of iridescent trainers ~ what lovely colour combinations, orange, yellow and purple. And he is indisputably the best dressed man in Bedford.
Now turn around and cast your gaze on those beautiful English ladies amorphously squashed in over-tight leggings, all bums and large tums, with cattle rings through their noses, shrapnel embedded in brows and lips and covered in head to foot with tats. Isn’t their language colourful: f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. And what is that pervasive smell, no not that smell, this smell! Pooh! It is the town centre gently marinating in the stench of stale and smoking Ganja. Look up, it’s a live one, and he’s heading in our direction! Time to take evasive action! Cross to the opposite side of the street and quick!
The fundamental difference between Britain’s streets and the streets of Kaliningrad is not confined to sartorial consciousness: manners maketh man (they seem not to maketh UK women). Public behaviour on Kaliningrad’s streets, give or take the inevitable exception, is generally better than it is England. And, with the Russian accent on family values, traditional family groups of traditional Russian heritage freely and with confidence enjoy the streets of their city. Contrast homely scenes like this with the kind of groups you can expect to find, and more’s the pity do, hanging around in England’s cities and degrading its small-town centres.
Lefties would have us believe that the gangs of blacks and Asians, and the johnny-come-lately tribes flooding in on the promise tide of benefits, rights and endless freebies from far-flung parts of the world’s subcontinent are an enriching sight for monocultural eyes. But such postulations are unconvincing even through their glasses. Excelling the attitude and behavioural problems evinced by their white ne’er-do-well counterparts, a pervasive air of ‘up to no good’ hangs above the Ganja cloud and fills the vacuum on Britain’s streets left by the absence of coppers with an ‘at any moment it could all kick off’ incertitude. Menace and apprehension rule. Britain’s streets are not just uncouth, they are gravely infected with passive aggression.
Yes, things have certainly changed from the Britain I once knew and loved. I wonder what the Victorians and Edwardians would make of it. I wonder what those who fought for their country and died in two world wars would make of it. What would Sir Winston Churchill say? We know what Enoch Powell would say, since he said it back in the 1960s. Lord, if only someone had listened to him!
Spare some change, please!
I read somewhere (please tell me that this is not true) that housebreakers in the UK do not qualify for prison sentences until they have been convicted of 26 successive accounts of burglary. It is an indisputable fact that you have got more chance of winning the lottery or stopping the boats at Dover than getting arrested for shoplifting. It’s take your pick skanky ladies and nothing resembling gentlemen, you’ve really nothing to lose. In the unlikely event you get caught in the act, just give the merchandise back and have it away from the shop next door. Nice one, mate: Ha! Ha! Ha! Easy-touch-Britain, innit!
I have no idea if shoplifting is as prevalent in Kaliningrad as it is in every British town and city. I somehow feel it is not. But I do know, as I have witnessed it personally, that Kaliningrad has a boy-racer problem and that those that race are not all boys. Thankfully, however, one of the more applaudable changes has been the city-wide installation of efficacious pedestrian crossings. Gone are the days when we used to huddle in groups of five or more on the opposite sides of the four-lane roads and then, on the count of 10, make a nervous dash for it. Oh, how the drama of youth gives way to prudence in later life!
If someone was to ask me, and I don’t suppose they will, what is the one thing you would like to see changed in Kaliningrad, the answer without a second thought would be the introduction of a law to stamp out dugs that bark incessantly or, better still, to penalise their owners. These must-be mutton-jeff mut-lovers can never have heard of noise pollution, possibly because like the rest of us, they can hear precious little above the row that their barking dugs are making. It’s a dugs life, as someone said, someone who couldn’t spell dogs correctly.
Since the subject of this post is change, I expect that you expect that at some point in the narrative, at this point, for example, the temptation to make some corny remark about change in relation to underpants would finally prove too much for me, but I hate to disappoint you that I am about to disappoint you, because someone might pull them up on me, I mean pull me up on it, and I do not intend to stoop so low, so let’s instead be briefs.
Ringing the changes is happening in a negative way on the Polish border. Always slow and unhelpful, the Polish border authorities are excelling their own track record for putting obstacles in one’s way where none should be encountered, thus holding up one’s journey as though suspending it in empty space by a very strong pair of invisible braces (we’re suspiciously close to pants again!). The object of the exercise appears to be none other than to subject the weary traveller to the torment of terminal boredom or failing in that ambition to simply delay one long enough to make one miss one’s flight. If you have been an unhappy recipient of this apparent change in policy and believe you are being short-changed by conditions of an adverse nature at the Russian-Polish border, here is where you can lodge your complaint:
I was going to finish this post on change by saying something profound, like ‘things change and that’s a fact, and very often not for the better’. And then it suddenly occurred to me that women in leopard print tights rarely change their spots. So, then I revised my ending to read, ‘if it don’t change it will stay the same’, but whilst I know it will not change anything, I went and changed my mind.
Beggar: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/homeless-man-sitting-ground-flat-vector-illustration-desperate-hungry-poor-male-person-sitting-street-near-trash-bin-asking-help-getting-into-financial-trouble-poverty-concept_24644540.htm/#query=street beggar&position=0&from_view=keyword&track=ais_hybrid&uuid=af6b8f40-80ae-4929-ae9a-94b805e40e71″">Image by pch.vector</a> on Freepik
What is it about coach-based tours that have long been unappealing to me? And, if I faithfully eschewed them in the UK, why would I volunteer to go on one, here, in Kaliningrad? Well, I certainly had the means, the motive and the opportunity: at 15 quid I could just about afford it; I want to visit as many interesting places in the Kaliningrad region as I can; and we had a bus to go on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!
“You’ll probably be the only man on the bus,” opined my wife. According to her, Russian women are predominantly more interested in matters of culture, art and history than Russian men. Ooh, that’s so sexist!
Well, she was wrong. There were three males on the coach, including myself, and one of them was the bus driver. I wonder what he was doing on this trip?
As with many events that are organised for me, I did not know where we were going or what we were going to see. I had been told that one stop on the way to Wherever It Was would be a cheese factory. I was rather looking forward to that. It’s a pity it never happened. However we did stop at two towns, two settlements, visited two museums and ate in an unconventional restaurant.
The job of the by-bus tour guide is very much a vocal one, and no sooner had the driver started the engine and put the bus in gear than the guide was giving us a dose of the verbals. She spoke too fast for me to catch everything she said, but I got the gist and where the gist escaped me, Olga brought me up to speed.
The first place where we came to rest was ‘The Big Meat Pie’. I don’t suppose for a moment that this is its real name, but I christened it that in the summer of 21, when we paused here for refreshments on route to Angel Park.
You would never have guessed it from the effigy of a big meat pie proudly rotating on top of a pole some forty feet above the carpark that this place is genuinely held in awe by lovers of big meat pies.
I am not sure whether anybody from our group partook of these exquisite delicacies, which look like giant turnovers, but I do know that there was a veritable stampede for the public incoveniences, which, located inside the premises, are one of those annoying places where to pee or to poo comes at a price.
Whenever I travel anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, I deliberately cut down on my fluid intake and was glad that I had today, because the toilet queue was rammed and the access gate unmanned, in other words it was coins or card. I can just imagine how happy folk would have been standing there with bursting bladders should a silly old fart of an Englishman jam the gate with the wrong coins or fail to use his card correctly.
There was another option: Outside in the carpark stood two of those little green Portaloos. I don’t like these, do you? No matter where you find them in the universe, more often than not they are stink-ridden, lack essential supplies for the paperwork and have, that is when they do have them, hand-gel sanitisers that have not seen gel since dinosaurs ruled the Earth. (Come back dinosaurs, we now have globalists!)
As in all the best sitcom films of the 1970s (Carry Ons and On The Buses etc), having peed or not, having stuffed a gigantic meat pie down our gullets or not, we all at a given moment filed back onto the bus and went roaring off in unison ~ destination, a town called Gusev.
A town called Gusev
Our bus drew to a halt in front of a large, ornate and, although I say so myself, impressive-looking Orthodox church domineering a vast piazza (no, that’s a pizza you are thinking of), which, before it underwent the modernisation of multicoloured block paving, substantial shrub and flower planters, street lamps of a retro nature and benches to watch the world go by on, would have been, I am sure, a large chunk of bland concrete on which the Soviets held parades and where its dignitaries and officials would have addressed the proletariat. If that was the sort of place it was, it was not that sort of place now.
Naturally, I took photos of what I could see, and naturally/unnaturally, depending upon your point of view, Olga asked for numerous photos to be taken of herself to go with her numerous selfies.
The Greg Wilcox bag, a fantasy military shoulder bag befittingly finished in olive drab, donated to me by my old friend Greg some time in the recent past, had been requisitioned for today’s trip. Hidden in it were sandwiches, sweets, fruit and a flask of coffee. This bag was slung over my shoulder as I stretched my legs in the square. Had you been nearby, over near the church, perhaps, or furtively lurking behind any one of several ornamental canons, you might have seen me extract from this bag a savoury roll and a large banana. A note to the uninitiated: Always take some snacks with you when embarking on a bus tour.
Stop over ~ Olga complaining that it was over too soon; that we had not seen enough ~ it was back on the bus: ‘chop, chop!’
Could it be Dobrovolsk?
After a brief interlude of highway driving, we left the beaten track. The Kaliningrad region (Kaliningrad Oblast) covers an area of approximately 15,000 square kilometres. In the past decade, a spanking new network of highways have made regional travel far more comfortable and infinitely more express, but the land is still criss-crossed with old Gerry roads, which are typically long, straight and narrow and lined on either side by sizeable trees.
It was by recourse to this web of smaller roads that we eventually ended up ~ and I choose the phrase ‘ended up’ with considered deliberation for its sense of where we felt we were ~ seemingly tucked away in a strangely quiescent nowhere hidden away in the back of beyond.
From the elevated vantage point of our bus windows ~ one of the advantages of travelling by modern bus is its height, since it allows you to see things which at eye level in an average-sized car would be at best half visible if not plainly indistinct ~ it appeared to us that we were driving into the centre of somewhere; a core area of something. But what exactly, I was not sure. It was a large space that would have been open was it not for the dominant presence of a prodigious, vented, cylindrical Soviet war monument, a tall obelisk arranged in three parts set in paved grounds surrounded by trees and shrubs.
To the right of this monument-occupied otherwise empty space stood a series of small prefab sheds, white with sloping roofs, which looked commercial in purpose. One, in fact, was a café, but whatever function the rest fulfilled all looked closed and vacant. The impermanent nature of these huts put me in mind of the sort of thing common to British seaside resorts back in the 1960s.
At the far end of this contrastive arrangement, a long, grey building presided, which had its origins in the German past. Although in part it contained the settlement’s shop, the spectacle of the Russian flag hoisted upon its front lent to the whole a distinctly municipal air.
The gravity and dignity which this building bestowed, counterpoised as it was with the row of little white huts, was not, however, salient. That accolade went to the war memorial, which, not in its size and scale but by virtue of its symbolic presence, dwarfed everything around it.
These centralising elements, particularly the preponderous nature of the carefully choreographed cenotaph, whilst engaging all normal senses, were yet softened and enveloped, near and far the same, by an already verdant call from a mid-summer fast approaching. But what was decidedly unaffected either by hand or by nature, nature, that is to say, divined at its most natural, was the felt presence of an invisible entity, an invisible mass of some description, which, whilst no one in their right mind would want to meet it at night, was, I am glad to say, in the full refulgence of open daylight at the better end of almost unbearable.
I am trying to remember another such brooding dominion in my life where the push-me pull-me forces were so exacting. I know there have been some, even perhaps too many, but in this place, at that time, the ambivalent impulse to stay and go exerted an indescribable strength, so strong in its contradiction that either nothing I had experienced was quite so remarkable of its kind or the power that it wielded had wiped the slate of memory clean.
It was, therefore, with regret and relief and a kind of mystical thank you that, with our explorations for now concluded, we clambered back on board the bus and took off for another world, one hopefully less unfamiliar.
Another long trek through the old East Prussian countryside on roads narrow and lined with trees and for the most part empty of vehicles, brought us by and by to another public space of note in the centre of what I guesstimated was a small provincial town but was later told had city status.
Here our bus was met by the head honcho of the town’s museum, who preceded to deliver what I have no doubt was a most informative lecture on the history of the township and the biographies of its great and good. Unfortunately, however, two factors weighted against staying the course of his holding forth, which were that (a) my work-in-progress Russian permitted me to catch only so much of what it was he was saying, and (b) all of us from the coach were standing there in the midday sun slowly baking like a tray of potatoes. Thus, we sincerely trust, without incurring lasting offence, we sidled off to renew our acquaintance with an old and thoughtful friend. It was Mr Vladimir Lenin, who, standing high upon a plinth with an air of requited authority was, for all his self-assurance, looking rather upstaged, we thought, so we gave him the benefit of our attention and made his day by taking a snapshot.
At length, with the man from the museum having reached the close of his not inconsiderable address, we rejoined our bus-prone group and allowed ourselves to be led away towards the town’s museum, passing on the way a group of local drunks who, observing our ordered formation on Russia’s Pioneers’ Day could not resist lampooning us, calling out with a snigger: “Are you pioneers?” They could not have made me feel more at home than had I been walking down Rushden High Street past the drunks that congregate outside the Rose and Crown. But we sallied forth away from them, like the cultured folk we were; away from their mid-day quips, away from their cool, their corrupting, their challenging, their callous and chilled cans of beer!
Krasnoznamensk and its museum
I like my museums like I like my antique auction houses: old buildings labyrinthed with rooms. Thus, Krasnoznamensk museum and I were destined to get on famously.
The exhibits contained therein are drawn from every-day life in the former East Prussian region, from and across the time when its occupants were German to and across the time when its occupants were Soviet. The displays range in type and scale from pottery fragments skilfully mounted between the frames of picture boards, a simple but effective technique which I must remember to try myself, to chunky household furniture, reconstructed Soviet kitchens and cottage-industry weaving machines. There is more than enough paraphernalia upturned into the present from its resting place within the past to make obsolescence a thing of the future, including ~ and these are my favourites ~ hand-written letters, objects of ephemera, 19th century postcards, diaries and scrapbooks ~ intimate records of social history on which I place the highest value.
It was of no insurmountable consequence that I struggle in reading Russian and that the only words I know in German, other than Adolf Hitler, are ‘achtung’ and ‘schnell’, since help was on hand to translate the Soviet texts (you cheat, you!), and I found the German scrapbooks largely understandable. The newspaper cutting headlines and snipped extracts from magazines could often be worked out, especially when there were images present, and the published and personal photographs were all but perfectly self-explanatory.
One exhibit which particularly caught my time-obsessive eye was a torn and mottled document, on which was written in a hand exquisitely calligraphic and laid out with the exalted precision fabled of the Germanic race, an inventory of goods and chattels belonging to the writer’s home. Completed comprehensively, this illuminating historical record had been carefully rolled into a scroll and slotted for safe keeping inside a metal cannister. The lid had then been screwed on tight and the time capsule secreted away within the wall of the writer’s house, and there it had remained undisturbed for over a century. Great galloping goose bumps Batman!
Above: The time capsule dates to 1905. It was discovered on 8th July 2019 in the wall of a building in Youth Street, Dobrovolsk, Kaliningrad region.
Above: Condition of handwritten document preserved as a time capsule.
Above: Close-up of the handwritten paper found within the time capsule.
By the time we emerged from the museum, time itself had moved on and taken the piss artists ~ that delightful bunch of fellows who had so kindly serenaded us earlier ~ with it, leaving us with a bench on which we could sit in peace and enjoy our ice creams. There are times when time can be nothing but cruel, and at other times awfully kind.
Once all of us pioneers had been assembled, we set off, guided-tour fashion, not in the direction of our charabanc but towards a piece of notable scenery.
The weather was made for meandering, and our walk, taken in low gear at deliberate tourist speed, took us down a steepish street with some lovely old houses on either side, the culmination of which was a landscape painter’s view of an archetypal red-brick church resting on a hill.
The pictorial composition with the church seen in the distance on top of its grassy eminence, bucolically framed by trees and meadows, its inverted mirror image reflecting in the river, made me reach for the brushes and easel that I have never had and oddly enough did not bring with me, and which, even if I had and did, I could not have used in a month of Sundays (this is where Victor is needed). So, I reached for my camera instead.
We had come to a halt on a small knoll leading up to the sluice gates of a dam. From this position, and along the lower embankment, the water barely moving, pooling in the river’s widest point before making its rapid descent over the crest of the barrier, the lucky sightseeing tourist is treated to a first-class display of contrasting natural elements. In the foreground ~ suspension, energy, drama, a continual state of momentum; away and to the rear ~ unity and balance, a time-honoured pastoral tranquillity. Juxtaposition holds its own on the fringe of this chocolate box scene but is exceeded by a clever aesthetic in which we and Harmony have no doubt that she is the pedastalled Goddess and Contrast her submissive.
Having seen the church from afar, it was no other trick of nature that in the space of a short bus ride we were at its gates and then inside. The once Lutheran institution, which, as far as the cursory eye could see, had undergone no dramatic changes to its external heritage, had surrendered within, however, to the will of the reigning Orthodoxy.
Mercifully, in this instance, the exchange of religious affiliation had done nothing to damage the age-old idea of church as a place for retreat and sanctuary, and neither was it sufficient to have harmed and/or eroded all that we had been taught as children, that irrespective of denomination a church is always a church, a temple within whose hallowed walls everyone talks in whispers. With this particular church, even the least devout of Christians would be hard pushed to come away without confessing some admiration for the splendiferous Orthodox décor and a love of the heavenly scent lifted into the air from a multiplicity of burning wax candles.
Among the congregation of the church, there were these three Storks ~ you know the sort of thing: those prehistoric, long-legged birds native to these lands ~ who were conspicuous for their absence. They were standing not so far away looking like beaks on stilts above their ginormous nests, which they had built without permission on the tall tops of some telegraph poles, protruding from the yard of a deserted industrial building. “We never saw nuttin,” they seemed to say. “We were here, at home, all day, minding our business as usual.”
Above: Did you know that storks can be camera shy? She sat down as I was taking the photo.
It may be of interest for you to know that stopping off for a bite to eat had been included in the price of our tour. As that was something that never happened at the ‘Big Meat Pie’, and by now it was half-past three, we were all getting rather peckish. “I should think you jolly well would be!” reasoned the storks. So we said our goodbyes to them, waved farewell to the church and shot off in the bus.
Seeing the Kaliningrad region by coach
On our way to somewhere else (Nemanskoye), it was made known to us that the restaurant awaiting our patronage was located in the same settlement where the last venue of the day, a museum to local and Soviet history, was our current destination. The master plan was simple: split the company into two groups; one group to the museum; the other off to the restaurant. We were in the restaurant group and that was fine with me.
By and by the bus came to rest on a piece of rough ground. I presumed that the large German building to the left of us with a giant mural on its gable end had to be our restaurant, but I couldn’t have been more wrong than had I won first prize in the Getting It Wrong on A Bus Tour show.
In my defence, however, there was nothing in the near vicinity remotely restaurant-like. Before us stood some old brick barns, worth their weight in golden history, and behind us a red-brick building with a broad and sweeping roof, which, judging by its maintained appearance and the tended garden in which it stood, was, I inferred, the museum. Give the man a coconut! This time I got it right!
Above: Vicarage when the region was German. Now a museum dedicated to Soviet social history.
Unlike the other venues we had stopped at on our journey, this hamlet had no centre. All it appeared to consist of was half-a-dozen humble cottages on either side of the road. Where on earth in a place like this could the restaurant be? I wondered.
I was still wondering this when the game of follow my leader began. We were heading in the direction of a typical row of East Prussian cottages, brief terraces under one roof often topped with asbestos; one-storey dwellings which logically could have been two, as almost all German houses built to this spec scattered across the region have room enough in their attics in which to hide a doodlebug.
We were walking across the opening to a yard which, with its sloping sheds, buckling barns, old wagons, oil drums, chickens and a cat, had ‘rural smallholding’ written all over it. What it did not have, however, was a sign saying ‘restaurant’. Nevertheless, before long, we would be stooping under a home-made porch, frightening off a gaggle of children who were hanging around outside and making the cat go ‘meow’. I replied in kind, of course; forever the well-behaved Englishman.
Above: View from inside the restaurant into the back yard.
Normally, a provincial building of this type would be segregated into three or four parts, that is to say three or four homes, with the front doors lined up in series along the longer edge, which is often, but not always, the side that borders the road. Bucking the trend, however, this building ~ it was our restaurant ~ was accessed through the gable-end wall. I imagine that at some time in its history the intersecting walls had been removed in order to transform the building into what it had become, one long rectangular room.
It was welcomingly cool within, if not a trifle chilly and definitely feeling and smelling unused, in the sense of quaintly damp. Several laid tables with four seats apiece were arranged in sequence along one side, the side with the windows that bordered the road.
The decoration was rather spartan and most of all it did not fit. And yet, its being so oddly mis-matched made it a place like nobody else’s, and a memorable one at that. The restaurant had a bar where similar things were going on. At first it was alluring, but faster than immediately, you could say quite at once, it lost its appeal and attraction, like a sequestered piece of ground might do if thought at first to be a garden when in fact it was a graveyard. Every bottle on every shelf and attached to every optic was as empty and forlorn as a liberal comedian’s repertoire and looked as if they had been that way before recollection had been invented. The bar did have Jim Beam, however! But, of course, it didn’t.
It was socially unacceptable, so many empty bottles, a little like reading the local obituaries first thing over breakfast to see which of your remaining friends had died the night before. With a heartfelt sigh, I turned away. I might even have said a short prayer. And if I didn’t, I should have done.
Above: Is there something a bit Old West going on here? The drinks had certainly gone west.
Ordinarily, I am not a fatty fry-ups man, but today I was so hungry ~ the proverbial hungry traveller ~ that I could have seen off a plate of bacon and eggs, no problem ~ minus the bacon, of course. However, the menu had but one thing on it, of which we had been forewarned but it did not follow had come forearmed.
Today’s special was billed as a traditional Lithuanian delicacy. It was normally stuffed with meat, but a vegetarian option, in which the animal parts had been replaced by potatoes, was about to make its debut. So, let it not be said that I had not been adequately catered for!
When the dish was slapped on our table, however, I greeted it with deep suspicion bordering on alarm. Whatever was it supposed to be? It embodied the shape of a Cornish pasty but had such a pallor of sickly white that the last to make its acquaintance must surely have been Count Dracula. It glistened from head to toe with something that looked like nitro-glycerine and was crowned with a caking of crispy brown stuff, which, I rightly or wrongly presumed, was a pinch or a sprinkling of bacon burnt. Vegetarian or not, it had an altogether living look, like an alien cheaply made for an early episode of Dr Who before Big Budget turned it woke.
I nibbled just a bit, just to be polite, but could not disguise my aversion. At the very least it reminded me of those rubbery, stodgy, suet dumplings routinely and far too regularly offered up as food at school (which you had better eat or else!) and which dropped from gullet to guts like British Navy depth charges onto states of panic in the turmoil below.
Politely saying, “I think I will pass”, was not on the menu either. There it sat, this delicious delicacy, as bold as bollocks upon my plate. It could only be a matter of time before the guards discovered that Appetite was missing and would drag me away for interrogation: “You don’t like it? Why? What is wrong with you? Why don’t you like it?” Every question they fired at me sounded like an accusation.
In fairness, and unfairness, we vegetarians are used to this. I myself have 48 years of used to. But it certainly is not everyday, especially in these enlightened times, that turning down a recipe on the grounds that meat might be lurking in it attracts such grave astonishment from an audience so astounded. Every person within the room, that is every person without exception, was gawping in my direction, some with their forks comically frozen midway to their mouths, as if they could not believe their eyes and ears. How could one be so rude to that lovely hunchbacked anaemic thing crouching on our plates.
I lowered my eyes to my own plate; it was right and proper to do so; such indefensible shame. The source of my torment grinned back at me in a state of half-mutilation: “Eat me! Eat Me!” it goaded. Where was Alice’s Wonderland when you needed to shrink in it most!?
“These people,” I thought to myself indignantly. “Why do these people complain?” (Although no one was complaining.) After all, whatever it was we were eating, or not as the case may be, had come from Lithuania. It was not as if I was turning down honest-to-goodness buckwheat or good old kapoosta pie; those I can eat ‘till the bears come home! I simply, but categorically, had lost myself in the critical fog of what, by all accounts, should have been that Lithuanian moment.
Glad I came to the restaurant, gladder when I came out, all I had left was the cat for a friend. It followed me to the roadside and saw me off with a last ‘meow’, saying “No one can blame you, Englishman. Given the opportunity, I wouldn’t have eaten it either.”
“Must be a Russian cat,” I thought.
Banquet over, I tightened my belt and put on my museum hat. It was by far the better thing to do. If museums be the food of love, move on!
Above: Museum as seen from the grass area on the opposite side of the road.
Nemanskoye Museum
The renovated but not spoilt building now occupied by Nemanskoye museum is devoted generally to an exposition of Soviet cultural history and specifically to life in the village of Nemanskoye from the end of the Great Patriotic War to the fall of the U.S.S.R.. In German times the house had doubled as the home of the vicar and village hall, a place where meetings could be held to air and discuss community matters.
Now, as a museum, the connection between the past and the present could not be more complete. It is as sharp as a contactless card: Cross the threshold it registers. The connection is a personal one. The museum so thoughtfully tended with personal love and care wires you into its memory banks quicker than you can say ‘Life was harder in those times but somehow remarkably more in touch with the core of who and what we are’.
The Soviet story of life in the settlement and the lessons learnt in humanity passed down through the decades from the vicarage that was, and the influence they brought to bear in creating this private museum, whether predetermined or acausal, have a humanist continuity that is worth revisiting at a later date and thus in a later post. Although my sound advice to the reader is go and see for yourself.
Epilogue
At the outset of this post, I confided in you my reservations about sailing off on coach trips. Never a beckoning finger or a tune that would have me dancing to it have persuaded me to think otherwise, but had I stuck to my prejudiced guns and been led by nothing but precedent, what, odds I wonder, would Ladbrokes have given me of my ever encountering the historic delights I experienced thanks to this tour?
True one or two of the stops we made had been little more than flying visits, such is the nature of coach tours, but they made an impressionable mark, so that should the compulsion assert itself, which I am fairly certain it will, then these introductions may pave the way for further exploration.
Thus, the moral of this story is, in case you have not deduced it yet, that, as with many things in life, and guided tours are no exception, give it the benefit of the doubt: ‘don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!’
Farage’s victory makes Labour’s landslide look like landfill
5 July 2024 ~ Farage Election Victory Ruins Labour’s Big Day
Astonishing and fantastic news: Labour won the General Election! Well, no, of course it isn’t. It is only astonishing that given the Labour party is the party of immigration that anyone in the UK, except that growing number who neither have an historic nor emotional franchise in the country, would vote for them at all, and it is only fantastic in the sense that at this most pivotal point in British history, to be handed the keys to Number 10 is akin to be handed the poisoned chalice.
Thus, although mainstream leftist media had already linguistically married ‘Labour’ and ‘Landslide’ far ahead of the election results, the mood within the Labour party and among its kneejerk supporters is that the honeymoon is over even before it started.
As more than one journalist put it, Starmer’s ‘New Dawn’ is significantly different from the one that Tony Blair enjoyed in 1997.
The left hate him now, he is a constant source of embarrassment to them, but, in 1997, Blair was unconditionally idolised; for all the wrong reasons, yes, but idolised he was. Conversely, no one cares that much for Starmer or for his party; both are boring and predictable, and no one has any great faith in him even less his government. Labour’s election was a protest win. It was more to do with kicking the Tories out than embracing Labour’s ironic slogan ‘change’. I think we can safely there will be precious little of that.
As for the Cons …
As for the Cons, for 14 years the Conservative government was more powerless than it was in power. Riven with internecine squabbles, split down the middle by Brexit, hopeless in the face of the immigrant invasion, the Conservatives ended up looking less like an adult government than a snotty-nosed bunch of toffs partying wild whilst home and alone after their parents forbade them to do so.
Who remembers that wonderous moment when following one of the their election victories (there have been so many recently that I have forgotten which one it was), when the UK’s political map went all but totally blue. Even up North and over Hadrian’s Wall, in Labour’s traditional heartland, less red remained intact upon the political map of Britain than on an arse severely spanked a fortnight ago last Wednesday. The Conservatives had been handed the country on a proverbial plate. Mrs Thatcher sold the silver; this lot broke the crockery.
Nevertheless, in spite of the liberal media’s attempts to put a victorious spin on Labour’s ‘landslide’ victory, outside of their fantasy world, the general feeling is that there is very little to shout about. Everybody knows that Starmer and his motley crew have absolutely nothing new to offer, just more of the same that nobody wants and what the country wants rid of.
It’s a Labour landslide!
That’s good, because it means that Labour, like their Conservative chums, are more than certainly doomed. By stuffing their ears with Woke, turning their back on the host population and doubling the number of third-world migrants flocking to these shores, which is exactly what they will do, it will not be very long before the avenging arse boot of doom swoops down from an offended heaven and kicks them into the political wilderness to share the fate of their Tory friends.
And won’t that be a bright, New Dawn! Bye, bye Labour, bye, bye leftism. Now that will be a landslide moment!
The big news, the history-making news, the ‘takeaway’ from this Election was the outstanding performance of Nigel Farage and the performance of his party, which both UK and US media in a fit of foot-stamping pique dubbed the ‘upstart party’. Could that be a typo? Perhaps they mean the ‘Upstaging’ party? Or the party that ‘Upsets’? I see before me a vision of upturned apple carts.
And then there is that troubled word, that wrongly attributed, that clichédword, that ‘landslide’, a dynamic hardly applicable to the shifting electoral sands on which Starmer precariously rests. But when applied to Nigel Farage, to his meteoric rise and the ultimate success he achieved in four short unprepared weeks in which he kicked the Tories out of Clacton (Oh, they did like to be beside the seaside!) and secured a place for himself within the House of Commons, now that is a landslide and no mistake!
Farage Election Victory Ruins Labour’s Big Day
The fundamental but essential difference between the people who voted Starmer (apart from being stupid) and the people who support Farage is that Starmer is merely tolerated whilst Farage is genuinely loved. And this is what the UK needs. It is what its people long for. Someone they can look up to. Someone they can identify with. Someone they can trust. And, for heaven’s sake, someone at last who has a personality!
These are the reasons why the mood within and surrounding Labour including and most tellingly across its typically gloating media is not just simply low but, beneath the hollow cries of ‘landslide’, as low as it can get. Labour is back in Number 10, but all that anyone cares about is Nigel Farage in Parliament.
The last thing that a political party wants, a political party for migrants and woke, which is all that Labour is and all that it will ever be, in these terribly troubled UK times is a vocal, woke-resistant, straight-talking, defiant adversary, in other words Nigel Farage, facing them down with relentless vigour within the House of Commons.
Sparks are going to fly. You mark my words!
For a long complacent British establishment used to calling the shots without fear of contradiction, Farage’s accession to Parliament is the one terrible, frightening nightmare that’s kept them awake at nights but which they thought, they prayed would never come true. The man that single-handedly took on the Evil EU and defeated it single handedly now has his sites on Starmer and is taking careful aim. “We are coming after Labour,” he says, sounding more like Britain’s Clint Eastwood than the mealy-mouthed politicians that we are used to and used to despising. And there is weight behind his words, for already the bad guys are running for cover. (More toilet rolls for Westminster, please!)
One thing we can be sure of is that Farage will blow the whistle on every attempt by the UK establishment to accelerate and enforce the Anglo-European plot to mongrelise Britain with third-world migrants, and will take great delight, I am sure, in exposing the woke apparatus which has for far too long, since 1997 to be exact, been used to oppress and suppress British opinion, British tradition and centuries-old British values.
Viewed in the harsh light of day and in the grey and murky shades of Starmer’s dubious limp new dawn, Labour’s win is less of a landslide than Leonard Cohen’s avalanche. I’ve heard it tell that Number 10 can be a very cold place indeed, even though the taxpayer foots its gas bill:
I’m always alone My heart is like ice And it’s crowded and cold In my secret life.
Kier Starmer wrote ~ sorry, I meant Leonard Cohen.
The real winner in this General Election is undoubtedly Nigel Farage. He certainly put a damper on Labour’s and its media’s triumph.
Now it is up to Reform supporters and every right-minded UK person who wants to take their country back to keep the pressure on Labour. No opportunity must be missed to piss on Starmer’s fireworks. And a very warm welcome to you, Mr Fate! Your place has been reserved, Sir, its at the front of the queue.
2 July 2024 ~ Vote Rough Speaking Parker for a Better UK!
The rough-speaking cockney geezer who, like Nigel Farage, is to be congratulated for injecting life and humour into what started out to be the most dull as dishwater general election ever, is, it would appear, a well-spoken actor, who was certainly, definitely, absolutely not hired by a hard-left British media corporation, who had employed the man before and who just happened to have an undercover reporter in the right place at the right time.
If Parker is to be exonerated for anything, apart from his wonderful accent (I have met him a thousand times in back street London pubs and seaside resorts in Essex.), it is for seizing the opportunity to say nationwide exactly what he thinks (and he may speak for many others) about British politics and ‘British’ politicians and to offer his solution (which others may secretly back, but not whilst being ‘secretly filmed’) to the single most-important issue of our time. My only criticism of him is that I wish he would stop bleeping and just say f*ck like most British people do.
Vote Rough Speaking Parker for a Better UK!
A seaside sideshow, the manifestation of the intemperate use of a truth serum, staged or not, the ‘secret’ filming of Parker revealed him to be an incisive and deliberate thinker, able to offer cheap, though admittedly somewhat unorthodox, solutions to the UK’s ‘small boat’ problem. Whilst Parker may never be nominated for a chance to win the Nobel Peace Prize, as many lefties are ~ he talks too posh for that ~ the Parker Solution, as his advocates call it, is certainly worthy of serious debate in the forthcoming sitting of Parliament.
For the time being, however, I shall stick to my guns, not Parker’s, and vote Reform. But if this man, Parker, ever attempts to act himself into Number 10, and he’s far more likely to get an Oscar than Starmer in that role (I have the feeling that Starmer will play a strictly walk-on/walk-off part.), then I’d vote for him in a heartbeat.
Vote Rough Speaking Parker! His Parker Solution is bang on target!
Breaking Wind and News Just Out (Broadcasting source: Across the English Channel~4) (in fact, more than 4, there’s boat loads) Rough Speaking Parker may form new UK Outrage Party
Here’s something you’ll want to take advantage of 🤔 A one-time discounted offer of a free day out in Clacton, if you enrol now in Mr P’s “‘ow to talk ruff, like me … guvna!” course. Plus, a special Meet Nigel Farage the Prime Minister in Waiting coupon for ex-prime ministers of the disgraced and soon-to-be defunct Conservative party. Email Channel 4-and-a-half using the catchline: *F*cked up by our own ‘secret’ filming*
Nigel Farage shakes up election in a bid to rescue Migrant Beleaguered Britain
Update 30 June 2024 | First published: 11 June 2024 ~ Nigel Farage Election Hope for Migrant Invaded UK
30 June 2024: Thought for the day: A ‘carefully selected’ BBC Question Time audience, Woke cries of Racism and other tricks to incense the brainwashed and get the liberal sheep barking, demonstrates how terribly frightened Britain’s fifth column is of Nigel Farage’s mission to take on the establishment and save the country from its dystopian fate. A vote for any other party other than Reform is a vote to put the last nail in the coffin of your country.
You cannot trust the mainstream media. You cannot trust the UK’s old political parties. It’s the usual dirty tricks time as the pseudo-libs go running scared …
Nigel Farage: Not frightened to speak out
Imagine waking up the day after the election and finding that the only truthful man in British politics, the one that the pseudo-left are knicker-twisted about, has won the General Election. Yes, Nigel Farage is in! Not only would the UK have someone in office who means what he says, who is a true patriot, who is not frightened to speak out about the iniquities and threats of socially engineered immigration, who would enforce his call for net zero migration and put British people first, but he and his Reform party would change the landscape of British politics forever ~ and forever for the better.
First off, the immigration problem would be kicked into touch. Farage recognises, or rather is willing to state what other politicians are too frightened or too self-interested to acknowledge, that immigration, particularly illegal migration, is the single most important issue of our time.
Nigel Farage Election Hope
In this YouTube video, the ‘Negative Impacts of Immigration’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYHOmT0f13c footage is included from the topical debate programme Question Time, in which Nigel Farage spells out the negative impact immigration is having (and remember, this address was made in 2016!) on local school placements, GP access and young people’s chances of getting on the housing ladder. More importantly, he makes a case that the globalist fallback on the economic advantages of never-ending, uncontrolled and unvetted migration is not nearly as significant as the negative impact it has on quality of life.
Hitting the immigration nail firmly on the head is Farage’s forte, but he stops short in his definition of quality of life of including the deleterious effects of an increase in serious crime and terrorism, the loss of safety on our streets and the disintegration of social cohesiveness*. An interesting point, however, flagged in this video is that the population of the UK has risen by 10 million since 1997, when Tony Blair came to power, 85% of which is directly due to immigration.
“A foreign court in Strasbourg [is] telling us how we can control our borders” *Nigel Farage*
Comments accompanying the video, ‘Negative Impacts of Immigration’ provide a consensus of opinion of what ‘quality of life’ entails:
@yamyam3905: Why do you think you can’t get a council house ? Why do you think you can’t get a doctor’s appointment, Why do you think it takes you hours to drive anywhere. Why do you think you can’t get your child into a school. Why do you think people are too afraid to go out at night ??????
@veronicapetersen8915: Welcome to South Africa since 1994. This … happened in South Africa since and we were silent we just went with the flow. [Note: Good comparison. Another good comparison would be Sweden, which owing to its open-door immigration policy is rapidly descending from dysfunctional to dystopian.]
@garyfallows1123: If Enoch Powell had been listened too, Britain wouldn’t have this problem. [Note: Ah, Gary, the Usual Suspects are as frightened of Enoch’s ghost as they are of Farage’s presence]
@bobcat2378: It is high time the house of lords was abolished! [Note: And with it the dictatorship of the European Court of Immigrant Rights and the Europhiles Convention on Migrant Rights and any connection we have with these two manipulative networks.]
The question “Why do you think people are too afraid to go out at night?” and allusions to South Africa derive from the routinely unpublicised perception that UK society largely is, and UK streets predominantly are, unsafe.
Just off to the local shop, dear, to buy the Guardinistan
To put it bluntly, the economic argument for supporting immigration palls into insignificance against the perceived need to wear a stab vest whenever you walk up the street, and the pragmatic need to weigh the odds of survival before attending a concert, theatre production, before participating in a major event and assembling in any crowded place for fear of nutters brandishing knives and detonating bombs*.
“Our towns and cities are literally becoming unrecognisable in every way.” *Nigel Farage*
Let’s rerun the intro to this post> Imagine waking up the day after the General Election to discover that the Reform party had taken office with Nigel Farage as leader. Nigel Farage as Prime Minister of the UK. Wouldn’t that be handsome! It would truly herald a new dawn, not only for British politics but for the positive fate of our once, but no longer, glorious country.
Sadly, however, as Nigel Farage points out in his recent Talk TV interview, such is not possible [see video]
Mike Graham, the host of the show, asks Nigel, why they, Reform, “are not looking at going all out and winning?”
Farage replies simply and honestly that it is impossible. The political voting/electoral system does not permit it.
“If this was proportional representation … an Italian-style system, a Dutch-style system, I promise you, I’d be sitting here saying ‘I can be Keir Starmer’,” says Farage. I trust he did not mean that in the literal sense!
What Nigel does not say, but he could have, is that the UK ‘first past the post’ voting system is rigged, insofar as it ensures that the grossly imperfect status quo of British politics goes virtually unchallenged. In this respect, the UK’s democratic system is no different from any other: it is a managed one. The Old Guard, Liebour and the Cons, will stop at nothing to keep the seesaw going, ensuring that every five years the same two tired, past-their-sell-by-date parties jockey for prime position.
Nigel Farage Election Hope
On the issue of immigration, the most important issue of our time, the Tories have proven themselves to be woefully inadequate ~ fourteen years of woefully inadequate. The explanation that they have been too busy fighting amongst themselves to run the country properly is a credible one, but methinks it is only half the story.
To give the Tories their due, the one thing that they were successful at was drawing the British people’s attention away from the real threat to our society, immigration/migration, by instituting mass hysteria, first with coronavirus lockdowns and calls for successive jabs and then with Ukraine.
INCOMING!!!
In both cases, instead of listening to the siren warnings that Farage & Co were sounding, apprising us of the threat to social stability and British values posed by the migrant invasion, our sorry excuses for leaders were urging us to change our avatars, first to ‘I have had my vaccine’ and then to the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Whilst the majority of Brits were falling for these ploys, our streets were becoming steadily more dangerous, terrorist plots and acts were increasing and the economy nosedived dramatically.
Coronavirus costs and the wasteful moral and economic extravagance of arms shipments to Ukraine became the government’s get out clause for price hikes on almost everything. Migrant hotel bills of £8,000,000 a day is a lot of money to find. It has to come from somewhere folks! Isn’t it all so wonderfully liberal!
Meanwhile, Labour, the party without any policies, who opened the floodgates to mass immigration in 1997, looked on dumbfounded: Could the Conservatives really be beating them at their own game, upstaging them in the race to divide and rule and inflict grievous racial harm on a moribund British society? They could hardly believe their left-wing binoculars as boat after boat of migrants romped in.
The most important issue of our time, immigration, is a good yardstick with which to measure how closely aligned the agenda of the UK’s main political parties has become under the auspices of the globalist-liberal cartel.
It also discloses how crucial the ‘first past the post’ system is for ensuring the permanency of a two-party political system.
“The national debate on immigration has gone so far to the left during 14 years of Conservative rule“ *Nigel Farage*
This raises the question that If our ‘first past the post system’ is a deliberate bar to any small party making significant headway against the old two, which it is, then what can Farage and his Reform party hope to achieve by standing in the election? Farage claims that he is not ‘back’ just for the election but for the long haul, to build Reform into an effective opposition to a Labour government, which I suppose means a political entity that is capable of holding a Labour government’s every suspect bill and anti-British policy to account, especially with regard to immigration.
“The Conservatives are going to be in opposition, but they won’t be the opposition” *Nigel Farage*
Imagine how mortified Liebour and Cons must be, recalling Farage’s superlative performance in the European theatre of politics. There he will be, in the House of Commons, meting out the same indomitable and no-holds-barred Farage treatment that he visited on the despots of the European Union. The thought of Nigel in the House of Commons asking awkward questions about failed immigration farces and every other wokist kowtow must already be giving his enemies in and out of Westminster the most collusive shit fit. How entertaining it is all becoming. At last a ‘reality’ programme worth paying one’s TV licence fee for.
“It’s like D-Day in reverse!!” Nigel Farage, commenting on the UK’s migrant invasion
We must all by now have grown accustomed to the lead-in-to-election blackmail that a vote for another party other than the establishment twins is a vote for the twin you least like. Within the straitjacket restrictions of the ‘first past the post’ system, this perhaps is the most honest thing our politicians tell us.
From the word ‘Go’, even before Nigel Farage threw his cap into the ring, the Tory party were falling back on the old tried and tested mantra that a vote for Reform will be a vote for Labour. And what? It’s worked before, but who cares now? The miserable performance of the Tories in the past 14 years has clearly demonstrated, particularly with regard to immigration, that apart from the old school tie there is fundamentally no appreciable difference between the mainline politics of Cons and Labour, most of whom are Europhiles, and, one would have to be daft not to suspect, in the globalist paymaster’s pocket. As for ‘throwing away your vote’, Liebour and the cons are so much and so often in the same bed together when it comes to globalist policies that you will be buggered if you do, and buggered if you don’t, merely, I hope, in a manner of speaking.
So, the message this time around is don’t worry about ‘throwing your Tory vote away’, because in their present form they are Tweedledee to Labour’s Tweedledum, and the foregone conclusion is that Starmer and his crazy gang are going to get in anyway ~ that is the nature of British seesaw politics.
See Saw Everyone’s Sure Brits will have a New Master Democracy is a cross in a box But it’s always a liberal Disaster
The net result of this farcical catastrophe will be a doubling down on all things detrimental to British values and our British way of life. But take heart, the cloud may yet have a silver lining ~ of sorts.
Will Labour bring it on!
The socio-political situation in the UK is so dire now that it can only get worse and in one sense ~ Hobson’s choice ~ the quicker it does the better. In other words, if there is going to be a ruck, best get it over with, and at this point in time, the advantage is yet to be lost. Give it another decade, however, and if things in politics don’t radically change, there will be nothing left to fight for. So, the completely favourable thing about Liebour coming back to power, albeit a grim but realistic one, is that by facilitating the migrant invasion and pushing all those ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ to the top of their agenda, they will be sure to stoke division faster than the Tories ever could through culpable indolence and sheer ineptitude, and up will go the powder keg one way or another. Let’s face it, the question of the end game is a question of ‘sooner or later’. It is not as if it will not happen.
Time for the UK is fast running out …
A peaceful, but Britons-first resolution, is clearly what is needed. But that can only be brought about by a strong and determined leader with strong and determined leadership skills. Wishy Washy no longer washes. The UK has past the tipping point.
Nigel Farage Election Hope
So, if you want more of what we already have and don’t want, such as millions of third-world migrants, draconian tax increases to pay for them, more street crime and candle-lit vigils*, more division in the name of diversity, destabilising sectarian politics, more houses, roads and cars and more hypocritical soundbites about environmental issues and saving the poor old planet, less money in your pocket, less valuable items left in your homes after visits by Burglar Bill* and no Old Bill to follow it up as they are all too busy monitoring tweets, no-go areas in towns and cities, even no-go towns and cities, and a suffocating smog of woke ~ if you want, in effect, your once great country to look and to be like South Africa, with a distinctly Swedish flavour, then put your ‘X’ in the box for Labour.
What’s that I hear you say? “It can’t get any worse!”
23 June 2024 ~ Hotel Mercure Gdansk reasons to stay there!
You may recall, if you were listening to me (“Now, pay attention, as I will be asking questions later!” ) that returning from the UK to Kaliningrad, I made the fatal mistake of booking via Booking.com the apartment Tawerna Rybaki in Old Town Gdansk. To all extents and purposes, the apartment never existed, and I was left on the streets of Gdansk, me and my faithful laptop, with nowhere to lay my head for the night.
The subsequent hunt for alternative accommodation was a long and arduous one, eventually culminating, not before time, at Gdansk’s Mercure Hotel.
Although I appreciate that my positive affirmation of the Mercure’s finer points may be tinged by the fact that at the time I was desperate and ‘any port in a storm’ had become my alma mater (original use of the term), in reviewing the Mercure Hotel, I have attempted to put the object of my misfortunes, the bogus Rybaki apartment, as far behind me as I can and write with objectivity.
So, here we go: My first reaction to the Mercure was “Oh, it’s a tower block”; my second, “It looks a tad upmarket for a chap who just wants a bed for the night”; my third, “Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I have been walking around for hours. I need to book in somewhere and head off to a bar!”
Getting the feel of the place
On the other side of its perpetual revolving door, the Mercure’s interior is TARDISial. It’s grand, it’s palatial, it’s swish, say your senses, but once you have checked in and taken a second look your senses qualify your first impression with ‘it is also rather passe’.
The lobby, indeed the Mercure in its entirety, has a distinctly 1980s’ look and a period feel to go with it. It is not faded and jaded, on the contrary, the hotel could not be more 1980s than if it was still the 1980s. And yet, it is not unfair to say that the swish has lost its swashbuckle.
Nevertheless, there is enough of the right thing going on in its aircraft hangar interior to strike the gong of plush. The vast space is broken down into open-plan units: seating areas with big, spongey recliners, coffee-table resting points, unusual modernist sculptures, a shimmering shiny floor, downlighters, uplighters, pendulous globular basket lampshades, and, ah yes, at the back of the room, that all-important traveller’s requisite the hotel lounge and bar. Don’t leave home without one!
It had been a long day for me when I booked in to the Mercure, and I was dying to use the loo, so I was not entirely enamoured when I was given a plastic card instead of a good old-fashioned key. First off, I shoved it in the hole, and it did not work the lift; then I nipped quickly off to the toilet, and it did not work the toilet lock, then when I rushed up to my room in it went and opened the door, ruining whatever chance I had of changing my pants and complaining. Just in the nick of plastic-card time!
My opinion of the interior downstairs décor, that it was 1980s, was given a serious leg up when the lift went ching on the hotel’s sixth floor. In contrast to the capacious lobby, the sixth-floor landing and long, long corridor was a little Alice in Wonderland. I felt as if I had sipped from Alice’s ‘Drink Me!’ bottle, and now my head was touching the ceiling.
The imposing and all-suffusing chocolate browns of the carpet, which match the tones of the doors, the walls and the ceiling, and which are brought into intimate proximity thanks to the carpet’s thick and heavy mercurial globular patterns and their blotting paper absorption of the well-intentioned low-lit lighting, has 1980s stamped right through them like a piece of seaside rock, and the rooms, or at least my room, completed that turn of the retro page.
Turning back the page need not be disagreeable if, like me, you find that direction infinitely more appealing than moving with the times. Thus, although the tones of the hotel room, at least the room in which I was staying, followed the lead of the communal areas in their 1980s’ love of chocolate, the amenities therein neither added to nor subtracted from the context of backdated.
There was everything you would expect to get from a hotel of this scale and calibre. It came in spades and with enough variation to seduce you into believing that it offered more than you had expected and all with an extra air of luxury tinged with a personal touch.
The lighting alone was sufficient to do this to you. Ambient lighting, lighting for reading, mood lighting, soft lighting and lighting to get you in the mood ~ multiple combinations of it and all at the flick of a switch ~ or two.
Not the Hotel California, hence no mirrors on the ceiling, for which I was truly grateful. For I would not wish to inflict on myself a view of myself like that first thing in the morning! But the room did have its fair share of mirrors, including, above the convenient desk, a nice, big, long, rectangular one, which looks a bit like a telly? I could not tell you for certain as I have not used one for years.
The seating was also variegated to suit every type and class of bum. And there was an adequate wardrobe with sliding doors and adequate chests with sliding drawers. And a bed with a firm and comfortable mattress, on which to sleep and what have you.
The 1980s was not so primitive as to exclude the presence of an ensuite bathroom, and neither, I am glad to report, was my 21st century room. It had a credible bath and shower room and even contained a toilet, which was just as well in the circumstances, as a tower-block hotel with a lavvy out back in the yard would be mighty inconvenient.
Ah, excuse me, I almost forgot, there was also a safe to put things in, if only you knew how to use it (I believe you put your bits inside, then close the door and lock it Mick.) (Quite so.), and the room comes equipped with its very own window, which is useful for letting in natural light, which if there was no window, you would need to bring your own natural light, and, of course, when letting in light and even when it is not, the window comes in handy when you get the urge to look out of it.
I am not about to pretend that the view from my window was actually inspiring, but equally shall not argue that it was not. As the photograph below reveals, the view does capture Gdansk; the new Gdansk and the old.
Excited by the red-brick church, you swear on a pint of good beer that as soon as you have unpacked your things, attended dutifully to your reasonable ablutions and put on a different cravat, you will point your brogues decisively in the direction that you want to go and permit them to carry you off towards the architectural/historic masterpiece that those ever-inventive Poles did christen the Old Town.
Unfortunately, however, although the Mercure Hotel is devilishly close for on-foot types to the town’s historic quarter, my shoes belong to an era, as I do myself, in which modern navigation aids play no understandable part.
I could have asked the way of course, but that would have been too easy and obviously much too sensible, and so, of course, I didn’t. I simply relied on my sense of direction, and for once I got it right.
This is something else that speaks in Mercure’s favour. If, like me, never becoming a navigator was one of the most applaudable things you did in your life, then the Mercure should appeal to you. Its name emblazoned in bright white light at the very top of its tower acts like a lighthouse beacon. It can be seen from many points of the compass and therefore can be used in co-operation with other landmarks to guide you safely home in the unlikely event you have drunk too much after a night on the town.
In summarising my Mercure experience, I would say “a solid hotel ~ rock solid”. Comfortable, appealing ~ in a slightly old-fashioned sort of way ~ and supremely atmospheric, it effortlessly brings together the feel of a hotel somewhere above its station with a kindly welcome that is home-from-home. The bar, my natural habitat, has that cushty, big upmarket hotel, relaxing, come-hither air. You just order yourself a drink and sink yourself carefree into its soft and sumptuous seats. The staff are as pleasant as they are helpful; the service cannot be faulted. Everything around you is as easy on the eye as it is upon the senses, which is quite an achievement in itself as the hotel contains some visual surprises. And in its relativity to Gdansk’s Old Town and to the central railway station, if any hotel deserves the accolade of being well-appointed then that hotel is the Mercure.
I know and I do appreciate that on that fateful day when I first laid eyes upon it, the Mercure appeared on my troubled horizon like an oasis in a desert of lies and deceit, but be that as it may, from any objective viewpoint, the Mercure delivers the goods and with it value for money. What else would you expect? It is not for nothing that it derives its name from the Roman God of Travellers!
The main thing
Hotel Mercure Gdańsk Stare Miasto Jana Heweliusza 22, 80-890 Gdańsk, Poland
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer)
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
6 June 2024 ~ Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad is it good?
“Anyone for tennis?”
Hardly!
“Anyone for Keptinis?”
I should say so!
‘Keptinis’ ~ it doesn’t exactly roll off of the British tongue, does it? How I remember the name of this beer is to think of a sport I don’t like. Problem is there are many ~ football, cricket, rugby, tennis, I have a healthy dislike of them all. But for the sake of recalling the name of a beer, and a very good beer at that, no sacrifice is unjustified.
Thus, I take the silly game in which three rackets are involved, two that are held in hands and the other that coins in money, and, by the simple cross-referencing method, I think of that common earole complaint medically known as tinnitus, but spelling it wrongly ‘tinnitis’, and I allow the tail of the misspelt word to wave in my direction. Then all I have to do, by way of association, is to think of a beer so all consuming that it would save me from anything foolish or rash, like playing or even watching tennis, and ‘kept away from tennis’ thus, with tinnitis in my ear, I say it so fast it becomes ‘Keptenis’, which is as near to Keptinis as dammit and as damn them is to a boat load of migrants steaming into Dover.
An easier, far less linguistically challenging means of bringing this beer to mind is to focus on the label. With its striking green and yellow shapes and the stovepipe hat and long moustache of its mysterious pop art poster man, it really is, to coin a phrase and in the process mix two metaphors (which like mixing race is never advisable), the ultimate dog’s whiskers, and just to please the equality conscious, the absolute cat’s bollocks. Mix your metaphors if you will, but before you go mixing anything else, for heaven’s sake think of the pups.
Keptinis is a mixed-up beer. The moment you flip the Keptinis stopper you are nose to brew with a different species. This is no simple mass-produced, wishy washy paleface lager or bland keg-bitter fizz bomb. What you have is a subtle hybrid. So subtle, you may not know what it is, but it sure as hell smells different!
So, there I am, sniffing away like a kid in a baker’s shop. Although, I never was a kid, as I never was American. And my first reaction to Keptinis is: For what I am about to receive, will it taste like liquefied rye bread?
“Is there any body there?” I ask, like the only one at a lonely guy’s séance.
And remarkably there is. An awful lot of body. Almost too much in fact (and also too much in fiction): a crowded coven of smell apparitions which, in no one order of merit or preference, gives vent to nasal impressions like dried fruit, molten caramel, aromatic scents, spices of the orient and something not dissimilar to chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
Whiffed from within the glass, the subtle and complex combination of deep and rich aromas give way to a smell that is more pronounced, more reminiscently rounded. The jury is out on the soft drink kvas, which is, it may surprise you, mildly alcoholic, while at a stonking 5.7% Keptinis commands a virile strength that by any stretch of the wotsit is hardly soft and rarely limp.
The creamy head that flows profusely and lathers up at the top of the glass looking like old-fashioned shaving foam is a sight for proverbial sore eyes, especially eyes up North (It’s looking up at those pigeons that does it. Why are they all wearing head scarves these days?). But it reminds me more of ice cream; Mr Whippy passing his flake. It was all 69 in the ’70s. (That’s ’99’ with a bit knocked off.)
Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad is it good?
The first mouthful revs up your kvas. Talk about turbo-charged! The taste is full-throttle and it comes at you fast, bouncing from taste bud to taste bud, like brown ale on a Friday night down at the working It’s club, and though incipiently and enduringly dry, both the finish and the aftertaste possess a hitherto secret hint of a not unlikeable sweetness.
The contrast is right-on punchy and funky. To give it a visual translation, a kind of non-binary gender-neutral pole-vaulting limbo dancer strutting her stuff on a pinball table. Please, if you must indulge you fantasies, Keptinis them to yourself!
Some beers are disappointing. They flirt with you in the early evening yet fold before the evenings through, after parting with your money. You might just as well have sat and drank tea whilst watching some tripe on the BBC (It rhymes!) Is this something else you shouldn’t have paid for? A lie, lie, lie, lie, lie-sense. Look out, you’re being investigated! Will you be in next Thursday? You bet your wife I will, but possibly not for the rest of the week! (Sorry, that’s an ‘in’ joke.)
Of all the things on God’s great Earth that are not worth the salt of being kept in by, the BBC is top of the pops. They forgot to investigate Jimmy. But even without a TV licence, I would do everything in my power not to be kept in by a Liebour party political broadcast, or by something equally appalling and unequivocally just as implausible, which rules in coronavirus. And I never have, at least to my knowledge, been kept in by the rogue desire to watch a game of tennis. I would rather stand outside in the street and laugh at cyclists in Lycra shorts. Yet, to be keptin by Keptinis, now that is a horse of a different colour. We won’t divulge which colour (clue, it’s nothing to do with Persil) or we may be coerced into ruining our trousers, along with our integrity, by doing something really stupid like taking a virtue signalling knee. Ho! Ho! Ha! Ha! He! He!
Thankfully, Keptinis is 100% hysteria free: a ‘no one size fits all’ beer that bucks (Did I get that right?) the stereotyping straightjacket. It is less insane than more well-balanced, and though it does resemble kvas, in unassuming and subtle ways, especially if you smoke, has flavours hidden deep within arranged in such cunning and clever ways that the taste bouquet only glitters (all that glitters is not Gary) by slow and teasing degrees, which is all to the ‘so say all of us’, hooray! ~ for Keptinis, it is telling us, is not a one-glass beer and that in order to fully appreciate the deluxe brew it surely is, you have to finish the bottle. I suppose it is what is colloquially known as a drink that is rather morish.
They say, and they are always saying, and I suppose they always will, that the saying about the ‘good thing’ of which, it is said, ‘you can have too much’, will, if you say it often enough, get in the way of the very thing that you cannot get enough of. But shucks (and a word that rhymes with shucks), what the hell do they know!
“Anyone for Keptinis?”
Everyone, I should think.
Disclaimer: Keptinis bears no resemblance to cyclists living or dead or to anyone else not as daft as cyclists who nevertheless would not be seen dead in a pair of Lycra shorts? (sponsored by the Save Me from Being a Sheep Society and the Campaign for Corduroy Trousers in association with Bicycle Clips)
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Keptinis (or is that ‘Keptenis’?) Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai Where it is brewed: Lithuania Bottle capacity: 1litre Strength: 5.7% Price: It cost me about 230 roubles in 2021. More recently in Kaliningrad, it cost me about 399 roubles/£3.44 Appearance: Dark Aroma: Not unlike kvass Taste: Predominantly caramel but with other things going on Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Pop Art Would you buy it again? Faster than I would buy the Labour party’s policies
Beer rating
About the beer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai | Keptinis
Keptinis is categorised as a ‘Farmhouse Beer’, a rare beer, difficult to brew, native to Lithuania. It is called ‘farmhouse’ for the very good reason that it was traditionally brewed by farmers. Rumour has it that as the special kind of malt that was needed for the brewing process was cost and distance prohibitive, the crafty farmers would create a mash and then bake it at high temperatures in order to produce the distinctive caramel taste for which it is renowned.
The brewers, Aukštaitijos Bravorai, refer to it as an ‘Oven Unfiltered Beer’ and describe its unique personage thus: “This beer stands out because it uses not only caramel and Pilsner malts, but bravura roasted malts, which give this beer a mild bitterness and aroma. Beer after fermentation and maturation has a frozen taste and a dark color.”https://www.aukstaitijosbravorai.lt/
Wot other’s say [Comments on Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) from the internet, unedited] 😑Taste is close to aroma, but with harsh yeasty note. [Comment: Yeasty note, yes; harsh, no]
😊A very rare farmhouse style [Comment: Wellies and all the rest of it?]
🤔Initial malty flavours soon got tired, it really needs some hop bite to balance it out [Comment: Your application for tightrope walker has not been successful]
😊 Kvassy, super bready, yeasty and bit funky, bit caramelly sweet and quite bitter [Comment: Yesy, very goody, welly saidy]
