Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
25 August 2024 ~ Bistrampolio Beer in Kaliningrad is it any good?
Bistrampolio! It’s very much a mouthful, isn’t it! To the complacent, or could that be arrogant, English, who expect everyone else to speak their language, it sounds like a cross between a poser’s restaurant in old-time London’s Tooley Street and a disease brought on by inveterate mint eating. But have I got news for you: it’s nothing of the sort!
Bistrampolio is, for want of a better description, a chocolate stout. Its full name is Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus, but we won’t hold that against it.
It is brewed by Lithuanian brewers Aukstaitijos Bravorai, who seem to specialise in my favourite bottles ~ flip top ~ and win countless awards in my mind for best labels in their class, possibly because their labels exist in a class of their own.
The Bistrampolio bottle is dark but not as dark as its contents. If you were to pour it into a glass, and where else would you pour it (?), and then swiftly turn off the lights, you wouldn’t be able to see it. No, honestly, it really is that dark. As black as your hat, which is green.
And even with a miner’s helmet with a torch strapped on the front, which you probably bought from eBay, you would only need to wear it, if you felt you had to.
A full body is easily found, and this beer certainly has one. If you’ve got a girlfriend like that, you’ll know perfectly well what I mean.
Bistrampolio Beer in Kaliningrad
I’m busy at the moment sampling what the brewers of Bistrampolio tell me is a beer containing five types of malts. That’s not one malt! That’s five! Another interesting figure, which ties in like a pair of corsets to the image of full-bodied, is its 6% O.G., making it not just a full body but an appreciably strong body.
The flavour is all there, and believe you me it’s rich, but, unlike many strong, dark beers, its consistency is light, not intensely glutinous, thus giving you, the drinker, the full malty, as it were, but in a rather surprisingly thirst-quenching way. Drunk chilled, as the brewers suggest, Bistrampolio hits the right spot from the top of the glass to the bottom.
Has it a good finish and an aftertaste to match? What sort of question is that? Has a globalist got morals? The first is a yes; the second a no. Bistrampolio is smooth, as smooth as the finest black velvet. Comparatively speaking (why not?), Guinness is to Bistrampolio what a horse-hair blanket is to silk. “On my sainted mother’s life, to be sure, to be sure, to be sure …” In the second place, there is no second place, for if Bistrampolio was a horse and I a betting man, I would be quids in on this one-horse race.
But enough of this idle banter! Switch the light back on and let’s have a proper look at her!
She’s dark, dusky, sultry; she carries the perfume of caramel malts with just the right hint of barley; and boy does she go down well.
With a pedigree like this (woof!) and an O.G. of 6%, she possesses the kind of darkness that I could gladly take a knee for, or anything else for that matter…
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai Where it is brewed: Lithuania Bottle capacity: 1litre Strength: 6% Price: It cost me about 310 roubles (£2.71) Appearance: Dark chocolate Aroma: Rich malty chocolate Taste: Handsome Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Classic Would you buy it again? I want to
“BISTRAMPOLI MANOR unfiltered chocolate dark beer. This 6% ABV beer is brewed with a combination of five malts – Pilsner Light, Munich, Caramel, Dark and Chocolate – which gives this beer a dark mahogany colour and a subtle dark chocolate bitterness and aroma. Serving this beer cool (about 12 ⁰C) reveals its true aroma and taste.”
Wot other’s say [Comments on Bistrampolio Dvaro Alus from the internet, unedited] 😑 Smooth and very drinkable. Just slightly sweet overall. Not a roast bomb. 😐 The taste is sweet, malty with a noticeable rag. [Comment: Is he drinking it through his underpants?] 😊The aroma is persistent and tasty. Damn, really tasty. The aroma is clean and chocolatey. [Comment: Now here is a chap who tells it as it is!] 💪F*ing Handsome! [Comment: My brother! He’s got a way with words, but rarely gets away with them …]
In case you are wondering should you travel to the UK, my advice to you is you’d be safer as the target in a circus knife-throwing act. And it’s nothing to do with the ‘far right’ and all to do with immigration.
12 August 2024 ~ UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Travel Warning Issued: Stay away from the UK
What a great idea! What a cunning plan! Was it the new government’s or the evil far right’s? Apparently, several countries, including the likes of Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, are warning their natives not to travel to the UK as it is a dangerous place. I have to agree with them, but it is nothing to do with the riots. Now all we have to do is to get countries spanning the entire continent of Africa, Pakistan and the whole of the Middle East to issue similar warnings ~ even Rwanda might join in ~ and like stranger things which happen at sea, perhaps the ‘little boats’, which are anything but little, will sail away to somewhere else, like Never Never Land, and never return again. Amen.
After 27 years of being forcefully told that multiculturalism and diversity are the best thing since the Black and White Minstrels disbanded, and you’d better believe it, keep your mouth shut and only say what we want you to say, the lid has finally blown off the UK pressure cooker. Perhaps now at last the UK can stop looking for bogus invasions from fictional enemies abroad and address the home-grown threat from the immigrant invasion. Sorry? What was that? You doubt it? So do I.
The British media and the newly appointed Labour government are at such frenetic odds to divert the British public from the root cause of the riots, the immigration crisis, that if the situation was not so egregiously dire, and as we have seen in the past few days so dangerous, it would make good comedy. The UK is disintegrating and everyone and everything is to blame except for failed multiculturalism, perpetual immigration and an endless sludge pump of stifling woke.
Social media is to blame, especially Musk’s ‘X’ (just because he dismantled Twitter’s left-wing hegemony and then scrapped the platform’s silly name for another silly name); Farage is to blame, because he tells it as it is (I blame it on that suit he borrowed from Tommy Robinson.); GB News is to blame, because it raises questions and highlights issues that the lefty mainstream media would rather not confront and evidently has no answer for; white Britons are to blame because some of their compatriots have taken to the streets to vent their anger and frustration, when they should be playing the white man, complying and capitulating and taking whatever shit is shot in their direction by the establishment’s anti-white fan. It would not be so bad if it was aimed at everyone else, but unfortunately it seems to them that they are the only target.
Who will not be blamed, until history exposes them, is the UK’s political elite and the puppeteers, their globalist masters.
How UK mainstream media plays down and manipulates the truth This is an exercise you can do at home. Go to UK Google News and search on ‘stabbing’. This will give you a list of articles. Read these articles and see if you can find the identity of the person (people) being stabbed and the identity of the person (people) doing the stabbing. This is a simple test for mainstream media obfuscation. Often, the articles seem to be hiding something ~ and we know what that something is!
Also, watch video news reports carefully. For example, some of the mainstream news videos of the alleged assault by two policer officers at Manchester Airport. Here, the bias is often conveyed almost subliminally in the tone of the narrator. It is a weary, sorrowful, injured tone, as if the person doing the talking has contracted a virulent dose of the bed-wetting liberal lefties. Both techniques are employed to a mutual end, but one plays with your focus whilst the other attempts to infect your thoughts like a virus through your feelings. Read. Watch. But above all be sceptical.
Recent things to consider: * What started the ethnic riots in Leeds: Google answer: anti-police sentiment.
* UK serviceman stabbed: A hard left newspaper standfirsts its report with the usual get-out-clause, the attacker could have a mental health issue. Well, yes, all of these enrichers who have nothing better to do in life than roam around stabbing people, blowing people up and, for an encore, blowing themselves up have, by definition, mental health problems. The question you should ask yourself, and your politicians, is, why do we keep importing them?
* Police officer kicks assailant in head: Did you know it happened at Manchester Airport? Airports are prime targets for terrorists. Terrorists fit a certain profile. They could be carrying weapons. When people hit you, you generally hit them back, and after all they are the Police Force.
** Southport dance-class killings: Media focus switches from victims and perpetrator to accusations that ‘false claims about the attacker’ went viral. The riots start, and who, what and why are submerged beneath blanket MSM coverage of the threat we face from the ‘far right’. “I say, Binky old boy, I don’t think I’d know one if I saw one. They must be pretty rare, not like those ethnics and lefties, what! They take to the streets like boats on water!”
Attention: Diversion Ahead! The heartfelt sigh of relief from certain ruling quarters and the leftist MSM when the riots kicked off in the aftermath of the Southport carnage could be heard all over the country, especially in the capital. If you are of a cynical mind you might suspect that this diversion was the one they had been waiting for.
The leftist mainstream media were off the chocks like a 1970s’ streaker on ice: “Far Right Riots!!!” they shrieked. The government seized on this diversionary tactic to condemn the rabble in no uncertain terms, vowing to bring them to justice Edgar J Hoover style (He looks a bit like him, don’t you think?) Strong and stronger words were uttered!
In keeping with the modern idiom, the mainstream media did not report, it ranted, raged and fumed and then it slammed and blasted, and at the height of this hullabaloo the issue of and the evils of relentless immigration were quietly, oh so quietly, swept beneath the liberal-left carpet. Whilst all this was going on, whilst the ‘anti-protesters’, Hope Not Hate, Unite Against Fascism, Stand Up Against Anything That Makes Us Sound Incredibly Virtuous (emphasis on the ‘incredibly’), and all the other touchy-feely left-wing Marxist groups (who seem to act like fascists themselves), were getting the full-praise treatment from an extremely grateful establishment and the nasty far-right fascists the full force of the law, over the Channel in France, gangs of Sudanese cut-throats were swotting up on their riot techniques, using knives and machetes to ensure a place in the boats waiting to bring them to easy-touch Britain, where, once ensconced in their free hotels, they will sleep the sleep of the privileged and awake the following morning to face the full and formidable force of a traditional English breakfast. There! Let that be a lesson to them! It serves them right for coming!
Next stop, Britain’s streets!
How and when did it all go wrong? Queen Victoria asks.
It all started going wrong at the end of the Second World War with cheap imported labour. Then, as now, we were told that immigration was good for us, a bit like eating one’s greens (ay up, that sounds quite racist!). It was beneficial for the economy. Then as now it was beneficial, but only for the few. In the short term, the few cashed in; in the long term the rest of us paid the price. We continue to pay the price today, but the stakes are considerably higher.
Now, several decades later, with the zealous help of the pseudo-liberals, a country of unparalleled excellence, a country to be proud of, has been thrown back into the dark ages, its towns and cities trashed and transformed into something resembling third-world ghettos.
And so the riots start
In the days leading up to the riots, Britain witnessed a series of precipitating events. First there was the ethnic riots in Leeds. Cause, we are told, anti-police sentiments. Don’t like the police much, time to the smash the city up. Then came the stabbing of a UK military serviceman, targeted, it was suggested, because he was in uniform. It has really come to something if you dare not wear your uniform in the country that you serve; is that what I hear you say? Believe it or not, it is policy. Members of His Majesty’s Armed Forces are advised not to wear their uniforms when in public places. Yep, Britain really is that dangerous. I have even stopped wearing my Girl Guides’ uniform.
The next provocation to hit the mainstream headlines was the Manchester Airport incident, in which a police officer was accused of kicking a man in the head. A video taken at the time shows that he and his colleagues had been assaulted. The attack was violent and sustained, and the officer fought back. One tends to do so when assaulted, and besides he has a job to do. He works in the British police force. That’s ‘force’, spelt f-o-r-c-e, for those who are liberal dyslexic.
The officer accused was suspended pending investigation, a thousand apologies issued, and the ethnics and their lefty chums took to the streets in force on the evidence of a video selectively edited and quickly posted on social media platforms purporting to show police brutality.
The final spark to the tinder box that set a montage of riots in motion was the brutal killing of three young white girls at a community centre in Southport.
Police at airports Whilst we wait with anticipation on the verdict of the police officers’ conduct at Manchester airport that sparked ethnic protests that we don’t hear much about, I must say that it is reassuring to know in a country like ours, soft-touch Britain (soft for some), where the green light is routinely given for access to all kinds of people about which we know next to nothing, that our airports, which are prime targets for ruthless terrorist maniacs ~ Killers with a capital ‘K’ ~ are protected day and night by brave police and security forces, who have an extremely difficult and dangerous job to do. The last thing any of us want, who would rather not be obliterated whilst waiting in the departure lounge, is an airport overseen by demoralised, disempowered police, who, if and when the balloon goes up, are hamstrung when they need to act by the disconcerting thought that pillocks might be filming them on smartphones, and what will be the consequences if, heaven forbid, they have to use force. Let us hope and pray, therefore, that the result of the inquiry into the conduct of the officers protecting Manchester Airport does not jeopardise all of our lives by rendering airport police, and all police for that matter, even less effective than they have become in recent years through the disservice done to us all by the imposition of social media and winging wokist policies.
Much was made by the leftist media in response to the riots that followed in the wake of the Southport atrocity that false claims on social media relating to the stabman had triggered public disorder. But citing misinformation spread by social media as the definitive cause of the riots is a bottom-scraping exercise. As tragic and catalytic as the barbaric act in Southport is, the significance of this incident in relation to the riots is commensurate with the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
The riots, strictly speaking, are not a manifestation solely of recent events, as one-sided and tragic as they unequivocally are, but stem from an accumulation of deep, of bitter frustration, conjoined with a sense of national unease, that free-for-all immigration and the woke by which it is enforced is rotting British culture, contributing to the country’s crime wave, making the streets unsafe, advantaging foreign terrorists and turning British subjects into second-class citizens in their own country.
Since the on-stage debut of Tony Blair, Britons have been forced to accept wide and penetrating cultural changes, none of which they asked for, did not want and do not want; forced to pretend they are being ‘enriched’ ; forced to live in a shadowy world of rising crime and terrorism to which the only official answer is go home, hold hands and have candle-lit vigils. The end result, to coin a phrase, are riots waiting to happen.
It is understandable why one faction of the pseudo-liberal cabal refuse to exit their little world and admit that it’s all gone terribly wrong. These are those who simply need to feel good about themselves, who crave the accolade of being enlightened, who refute the perils of mass immigration because every now and then Mrs Patel, from the house next door, makes them onion bhajis, and Mr Bingbongo, on the opposite side, speaks to them of religious conversion. Better get to it quick, I say! These are the liberal lefties who, though many of them mean well, have proven themselves to be as daft as they are insufferably gullible, who swallow, hook, line and sinker, the misinformation fed to them by those who owe them no greater allegiance than whatever it takes to exploit their simple childlike naivety.
At the command end of this miserable chain there exists a more insidious, a more invidious clan ~ you know who you are! ~ who will be rubbing their hands with glee as they witness the breakdown of law and order and the scenes of devastation playing out on Britain’s streets.
They, the ones in the shadows, the ones that pull the strings, have worked long and hard for things to go this way. They have lusted after division, and now at last they’ve got what they craved for. Like the average useful idiots, they sing the praises of multiculturalism, the wonders of diversity, but for them they have a different meaning in which peace and harmony play no part.
The newly elected Labour government and the usual media outlets which continue to push this far left agenda, as powerful as they are, are clearly out of their depth. Using the old distraction technique, they blame the riots on far-right thugs, thus focussing on the symptom rather than the cause, and in the process deliver the threatening message, ‘speak out of turn about immigration and we’ll slap an extremist label on you!’
When they speak they preach to the converts of old, Guardian and Independent readers, who, like drug addicts craving their daily fix, need to hear those magic words ‘far right’, and hear them loud and often. It binds them to their fantasy. For the rest of us, however, the truth is plain to see. Ninety-nine per cent of the British population are not, as a leftist journalist recently claimed, happy with mass immigration and the radical changes it has brought to our country. In fact, each and every one of us face a riot every day, a sad, a sickening, emotional one, which we struggle to contain, as we angrily watch from the sidelines a country that once had no equal being fly tipped into the swamp.
Allow me to put this in context: A few days ago, I attended a classic car show, where I met and spoke to a lot of English people. Car talk apart, the conversation inevitably shifted into a higher gear when someone mentioned the riots and from there into top gear when the state of the country was broached.
“It [the country’s] gone to the dogs,” one man spat. (I think he said the ‘dogs’.)
“I no longer think of it as ‘my’ country,” another cursed. I think this man was Indian.
And still another asserted, and he did not mince his words: “The UK is a s*it hole!”
A man who purported to be a former officer of the law, recently retired, got wind of our conversation. Standing in front of the fatty-fry van where we all were queuing, he swore an oath on the sign that said ‘Fish ‘n’ Chips the Great English Meal’, which was backed by a union jack, that he had to leave the police force as it was systemically anti-white British and sabotaged by the ‘yoke of woke’. I asked him to pass the vinegar. I believe he already had.
In the three hours I spent talking to people at this event, if there was anybody there who harboured a Guardian, Independent or Observer point of view that mass immigration is a wonderful thing and that the Britain we live in today is a safe, morally stable, decent, civilised liberal utopia then no one was letting on.
No one condoned the riots, but they evidently understood, more than the government wants to, the reason why they happened, and none were willing to buy the snake oil pedalled by mainstream media.
One person to whom I spoke did confess, reluctantly, with an air of self-conscious shame, as if he was looking for absolution, that he voted Labour at the last election, because there was something wrong with him. But when he came to his senses, he realised his mistake. Labour, he had realised, is the party of immigration. The Tories were simply inept, but Labour have an agenda, which is to flood the country with undesirables. “We’ve got enough of our own,” he declared, “So why do we want to import them?”
Another chap, who was busy observing a T-shirt printed with ‘Bald Lives Matter’ ~ My brother, between a mouthful of chips, looked self-consciously down at his stomach, no doubt wondering if ‘Fat Lives Matter’, whilst a friend wondered, or should have been wondering, if a case could be made for ‘Tight Lives Matter’, as he hadn’t paid for his chips, I had ~ declared, philosophically, in a broad Northamptonshire accent, “They [the establishment] are frit of ‘them’. ‘Them’ being you know who. That’s why we have this two, er, what do you call it, two-tyre policing and why hardly anyone gets arrested when foreigners go on the rampage.” He was actually more specific in naming who these foreigners are, and his expressions were liberally [pun intended] peppered with lots of f*cks and c*nts.” Now, if I had been a ‘counter-protester’ an ‘anti-fascist’ or (God forbid!) a craven apologist for Black Lives Matter (wait a minute whilst I take a knee ~ what a twat he looks!), I might have dismissed this impudent white man as a raging f*cking fascist and ignored whatever he had to say, riot or no riot!
I looked away at that point, as though I was trying to find in the not too distant but mythical future a T-shirt with the caption, “British White Views Matter”, but I must have been looking in the wrong direction, towards London and onto Downing Street, because no matter how I strained my eyes, my hopes and my imagination, the only thing that seemed to matter was that it no longer mattered to me, at least not as much as it will for those who though they are young today won’t be young tomorrow, and for those, the most unfortunate, the waiting-to-be-born, who will never know anything but the horror of tomorrow. Perhaps this is their silver lining: for them it will be as it is; not as for us, as it was.
I looked again and what I could see, as plain as the House of Commons, was an awful lot of bullshit, the sort that could easily nurture the roots of the UK’s civil war, as predicted by Elon Musk.
Civil War in the UK: Will there or won’t there be?
I, personally, do not think there will be a civil war, at least not in the accurate sense of the term, because a civil war presupposes two opposing sides each identifying with itself as distinct from one another, and this is unlikely to happen in the situation we have in Britain, because diversity has done away with absolute cohesion, which is, as I am sure you know, one of the more subversive reasons for engineered diversity.
Moreover, the people who really count, or should stand up and be counted, the British white middle class, have their ‘I’m alright Jack’ arses firmly and forever perched upon the non-comital fence, preferring to hide in the dangerous belief that saying and doing nothing is the better part of valour. Besides, they, in the mind they inhabit, are far enough removed in their leafy suburbs and quiet rural backwaters to be spared the worst of whatever goes down in Britain’s towns and inner cities, and their take on the situation is that as long as they keep on looking anywhere rather than where they should be looking, never revealing what they think, never saying what they feel and on no account what they fear, this, they keep their fingers crossed, will be the saving of them. They are wrong.
As for the left-wing faithful, the useful voting idiots, they will still be parroting the same old simpleton mantras with which they have been indoctrinated even when it is all too late, when, like the obedient sheep they are, they are led away to the slaughter. And even then as the curtain descends, the truth will refuse to occur to them that the ‘far right’ was never their nemesis. They betrayed themselves with their own ideology, poisoned themselves in the end with the lies with which they had poisoned the country for years.
No, I see the UK ending up somewhere between the twilight world of dystopias Sweden and South Africa, with the chauffeur-driven rich ring-fenced and body guarded inside their gated compounds, whilst out there on the streets, the no-go areas echo nightly to gunfire, screams and wailing sirens, and should you really have no option but to walk from A to B, you do so at your peril and never without your stab vest.
Already when dusk descends on Britain’s towns and upon its cities, we bolt the windows and bar the doors. The zombies are out on the streets at night. Has anyone seen a copper?
(By the way, has anyone else, I wonder, noticed that the countries worst impacted by ‘come one and all’ immigration are those that traditionally see themselves as paragons of liberalism? Just saying …) Sectarian violence, lawless streets, an escalation of knife crime, gang warfare by race and religion, flashes of inter-ethnic conflict, the dirty business of vigilantes and an endless cycle of civil disorder and riots policed by robo-cops, possibly even standing armies, this could well be Britain’s future, but civil war, not yet.
UK Anti-Immigration Riots Herald New Dystopian Era
Mr Starmer’s answer to this apocalyptic vision is to form a ‘standing army’, a militia ~ er, but where is the money coming from to fund this standing army? We cannot even afford more coppers. (And the way we treat our coppers, will anyone want to do the job?) I feel a tax hike coming on. But I do not see that standing army.
The UK’s New ‘Standing Army’
The task of this new yeomanry, be it fictious or not, is to ensure that Britain’s rioters ~ rioters of a particular type ~ feel ~ make no mistake ~ ‘the full force of the law’ (PC women Melons and Bristols, this is the news you’ve been waiting for!). So, does that mean, may I ask, that this is the end of policing as we know it: “Now let’s sit down, have a nice cup of tea and discuss the problems you might be having?” “Thank you Mr Whitey Policeman, wait a moment whilst I adjust my machete. Do you think you could hold it for me?”
In case it has escaped the new prime minister’s notice, may I gently remind him that Britain already has a standing army, it’s called the British police force. They do a lot of standing, particularly during pro-Palestine rallies, at Black Lives Matter riots and at stab-fest events like Notting Hill Carnival. They also do a lot of standing whenever they cannot avoid anti-social behaviour ~ which is every day and everywhere. I hasten to add that it is not their fault; it is not what police officers want to do; it is what they are told to do. The thin blue line has never looked thinner.
“It’s a sh*t hole!” cried the Englishman. For once, it was not his country to which he was referring but the town in which he lived. “We don’t have to wait for a riot in [name of town withheld], we have one almost every night. The town centre is plagued by gangs of nasty little shits kitted out in hoodies and ski masks. They dig the flowers out of the planters and chuck them at passing cars. A few weeks back, they were up there, up there on the roof, slinging mud and masonry down into the High Street. The police arrived. Did nothing. They just stood in the street and watched!”
Police officers are not to blame for ~ excuse me whilst a borrow a phrase ~ this non-two-tier passivity. Like teachers, with whom they balance precariously on the literal knife-edge of Britain’s frontline, they are victims of insuperable woke and ultimately the lightening rods for all of society’s liberal left ills.
A funny thing is happening The government, using the mainstream media’s trumpet, keep blowing hot with riots that never materialise. The ‘expected riots’ are named by area, large crowds of ‘peaceful protestors’, ethnic and seen-to-be-doing-the-right-thing whiteys, invade the areas named and stand there on their own for hours with no one to be peaceful with. What a waste of banner-making time! Well, it keeps them off the streets … Oh, wait a minute. Then, the next day, or even shortly afterwards, along from the 1950s comes that stern school master Mr Starmer and takes the credit for backing the rioters down, who, apparently, dare not show in case they become the hapless recipients of the ‘full force of the law’.
I imagine the police are wondering what exactly the full force is, as, for the past 30 years, they have been schooled to deal with offenders with the kid gloves of a social worker and the diplomacy normally reserved for a job in public relations. However, you would do well to remember this, that if you are taking part in a riot and your shirt is brown and moustache faintly similar to that of Mr Hitler’s, then the rules of the game are likely to change and definitely not in your favour.
So, what we need, my dear Mr Starmer, what we desperately need, is not a ‘standing army’ but a competent, well-equipped, non-woke-manacled nationwide series of riot squads, and we need them fast and everywhere, up and down the country. But we need them to be impartial. It is essential they are fair, because if the only arses they kick are white ~ and remember YouTube is watching ~ then Mr Elon Musk’s prediction of the imminence of civil war may well be brought to fruition quicker than you anticipate, and if that day doth suddenly dawn, then we’ll all be standing by Liz Truss Door, ready to follow her example, preferably wearing full-force roller skates that will guarantee our exit like, if you’ll pardon my use of colloquialism, shit off a shiny shovel. Play it again, Harry Corbett: “Bye, Bye, Country, Bye, Bye.”
It may already seem to Mr Starmer, who, and let’s be fair about this, has not been in the hot seat long, just long enough to get his trousers scorched ~ and how! ~ that he finds himself in a rather bad place: the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, why did he give up that paper round! But nothing could be further from the truth. If he did but know it, the place he is in is the right one, and the timing could not be better. He has been given a first-class opportunity to rise to the challenge of statesman, to address the ills of the country, to strike a humanist balance, to patch up divisions across communities (where they can be patched), to become a prime minister like those of the past who dealt with the present in terms of the future, one who puts the people first, all of the people first and fairly. Would you rather go down in history as the man who got it right, or join your political peers and predecessors, ineffectual and out of touch, who one by one have fizzled, or are in the process of fizzling, out, leaving the political table, as though everyone knew it was them who farted and never did anything else. Or, even more damning than this, be remembered as that man who, when given the chance to save his country, blew it. He locked himself in the liberal mindset and, ignoring the value of those people whose forbears built this country (Can people such as these really be replaced by hoards of swarthy young men who come bouncing rudely into England mounted on top of inflatables?] effectively signed the UK’s death warrant.
Try listening. It might help!
The key to stopping the riots and the general sense of unease that is spreading like a rampant pestilence across this once great Christian land is to use it to close and lock the gates at Dover. Stop the boats. Stop the immigrants. Listen to what it is that legacy Britons are saying. Ditch the Machiavellian creeds of disgraced Prime Minister Tony Blair. Withdraw the UK from the ECHR, tear up that beguiling document the Convention on Human Rights, return to police their pre-woke powers, rid the streets of crime, tackle the sprogs who blight our neighbourhoods, stop and search regardless of colour, stand as firm against ethnic rioters and the PC blackmail that oils their cogs and defends them from arrest as you would against those nasty far whites, show the country as a whole that the day of the limp-wristed, bed-wetting lefty and his media misinformation network has run its evil course, come to an end, is finished, kaput, is over. It sounds like an awful lot, but it really is not that difficult. All you need is love for your people and, unlike your immediate predecessors, to be a proper prime minister.
Over to you, Mr Prime Minister, it really is your call.
Right Wing Thugs, Political Prisoners, Martyrs or Robin Hoods? The only way to restore real law and order in the UK, as distinct from soundbite law and order, is to ensure that it is applied fairly and without prejudice right across the board. Calling white rioters the ‘far right’ and then banging them up with disproportionate sentences is a sure-fired way of turning them into martyrs. As it is, a good many of the anti-immigrant protestors will wear their prison sentence with pride and will be regarded throughout the prisoner fraternity as patriots, political prisoners, ordinary people wrongly, unjustly convicted for standing up for their families and the preservation of their sovereign country against what they, and a good many like them, see as a repressive socio-political system out to destroy all they hold dear.
If they are to ‘feel the full force’ of the law, then come the next ethnic riots, as come they surely will, the same condemnation and same stiff sentences had better be applied, or off we will go again on the embittered and violent merry go round, with more rhetoric, more harsh sentences, nothing gained and everything lost. It is advisable to consider that those involved in the riots who are facing the law’s ‘full force’ have brothers, family, friends, compatriots, colleagues, and that everyone of these, together with YouTube and social media addicts, will be watching very closely to see if the accusation of two-tier policing can be equally applied to the country’s judicial system.
If a partisan link can be established between government, police and the courts, they, the ones subjected to the full force of the law, may begin to see themselves, as may the voting white majority, as latter-day Robin Hoods, come to save, at the risk of their personal liberty, white tattooed English maidens from an embarrassing fate worse than death (For heaven’s sake think of the pups!), pitting themselves heroically against the evil wiles of the Sheriff of Shock-it-to-them: “The full force of the law, I tell you!” [An elastic band twangs off stage] and his globalist boss King John, aka Big George Sorryarse, the most philanthropic of migrant traffickers the world has ever known (and Hungary disowned). Where will it all end? Usually, after crossing the Channel, in luxury five-star hotels. Cheap at half the price, I say; only £8 million a day.
Meanwhile, not in hotels but languishing in Britain’s prisons is the country’s heritage population, who, before they made a name for themselves as ‘facing the full force’ rioters, were only guilty of thinking and stating, “The migrant invasion has to stop. They really should go home.” They really do have a point, don’t they.
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!’
Thoughts on the fifth anniversary of the death of Victor Ryabinin
18 July 2024 ~ Königsberg Artist Beyond the One in a Million
I am asked by the curious both in my native country, England, and in Russia, why my blog is dedicated to Victor Ryabinin.
Surely, a blog written in English whose target audience is presumably English people could have been dedicated to any one of a number of English friends or colleagues with whom I am close or hold in high esteem?
To answer this question, I turned to the many people whom I have crossed paths with, and some with whom I have crossed swords, and drew the conclusion that outside of my family circle only three people, excluding Victor, qualified. One is my friend of 44 years, Mel (Melbourne) Smith; the other his brother, Rolly Smith; and the last, but by no means least, Mr Richard Oberman, my former English literature tutor, who taught at Kettering Technical College, aka Tresham College.
Mel and Rolly Smith are two of my life’s most colourful characters. They were an investment in experience which paid dividends in friendship. Without them I would have foregone so much by way of excitement and laughter that an omission of this magnitude would have been nothing short of criminal. Looking back, with the help of my diaries, the exploits that we shared have taken on a legendary status, made more so by the retelling of them. Of all the things in life that cannot be overvalued, friendship, laughter and camaraderie are difficult to compete with. Theirs is the currency in which we trust: the gold standard.
Richard Oberman was a master of his vocation. Dry humoured, slightly off the wall but always in control, he would play his classes like a fiddle. As good a psychologist as he was a teacher, he would deftly juggle his act using the stick and carrot approach to win his students over. He was our general, we were his troops, and like every astute and accomplished leader he brought us on by steady degrees to trust, obey and admire him. Displaying an in-depth knowledge of and an absolute love for his subject, better than any who would teach me later at university level, by the encouragement he gave and the respect that he engendered, he opened up a future for me to which before I had been oblivious and in the process of doing so changed the course of my life forever.
Set against this exquisite triumvirate, Mel, Rolly and Richard Oberman, who and what was Victor Ryabinin?
Königsberg Artist Victor Ryabinin
Victor Ryabinin was born in Königsberg, where, like the great German philosopher Emmanuel Kant before him, he worked, lived out his life and died. He shared with Emmanuel Kant a genuine, singular love for the city, and though he travelled quite extensively whereas Emmanuel Kant did not, he shared the convictions of the city’s academia that Königsberg was a spiritual magnet drawing into its centre intellectual and artistic excellence from the highest minds and most sentient hearts and from every sphere of imaginable talent.
Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, charmed all who came in contact with him. His professional and bohemian side possessed an aura of mystique and an intuited profundity. Like most creative minds, a managing ego must have been working somewhere behind the scenes, but wherever he kept it hidden it never got the upper hand and through all the years I knew him, he was never anything less than open, honest, affable, modest and perfectly unassuming. Indeed, Victor Ryabinin, the man, epitomised the best that human nature can offer. He was everything you could want and more than you could hope for. He was an ambassador for humankind.
Victor had a gentle heart, a warm welcome, and no edge to his character. He had a wonderful sense of humour that was often self-effacing (he said that those who could laugh at themselves had a right to laugh at others). He was endowed with a gravitational presence, a generous sense of spirit and had the most enchanting art studio, where I, for one, never painted but sat with him for hours on end, talking history, eating gherkins, smoking cigars of a cherry flavour and drinking beer and vodka.
Victor’s company never grew old. Victor himself never grew old. He collected years like the Königsberg relics with which he adorned his studio, but the years, like all who knew him, respected his ageless spirit. Driven and sustained by an endless curiosity and an endearing fascination for everybody and every new thing, this was perhaps the secret elixir by which he kept himself ever young.
The grim irony of his dying just nine short months from the time when he, more than anyone else, brought me to Kaliningrad, and the way in which his death, inconceivable and unexpected, swept away the blueprint of my future, came as a stark reminder, as it had with the death of my friend Mel Smith, that whilst we may all be unique and some of us exceptional, those most precious to us are simply irreplaceable, so that when they up and leave arm in arm with death a sizeable chunk of our present and more, much more, of our future leaves the table with them.
Victor Ryabinin disclosed that he would reach out to such people who possessed the qualities that he lacked. This statement alone reveals the modesty and humility that endeared him to so many, for it is difficult to imagine what those qualities could have been that he failed to see in himself whilst everyone around him saw them with such clarity.
If throughout my life I had taken a leaf from Victor’s book and leant towards those people whose qualities I lack, I would, to paraphrase my old friend Cohen, have “leant that way forever”.
In retrospect, my choice of friends would appear to have been determined on criteria not dissimilar to that adopted by Molly Fox, my former boss at a publishing house, who once confided in me that she no longer filled job placements on applicant suitability but according to their eccentricity, interest value and personality.
If ever a man could tick these boxes, and the many more besides by which exceptionality can be measured and companionship appreciated, then Victor Ryabinin was that man.
I have yet to meet another like him. I know I never will.
“I first met Victor Ryabinin in the spring of 2001. A friend of my wife’s, knowing how much my wife liked art and how fascinated I was with anything to do with the past, suggested that we meet this ‘very interesting’ man, who was an artist and a historian.” ~ by Mick Hart
“The first year of Victor Ryabinin’s life could have been his last. There was an epidemic in Königsberg which wiped out hundreds of children, both German and Russian. The military doctor who came to visit the Ryabinin family broke Victor’s parents’ heart when he delivered the verdict that there was nothing to be done to help their child. ‘A day, perhaps two,’ he said, ‘and the child will die’.” ~ by Boris Nisnevich
“At first sight, from a teenager’s point of view, he was this small and funny man, but very soon our attention was attracted to his methods of teaching. He was a breath of fresh air in my understanding of art. He was so alive in comparison with many of the other teachers. He ignited our imagination” ~ by Stanislav Konovalov ~ student and friend of Victor Ryabinin
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 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, hypocritical slogan ‘change’. I think we can safely say that 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 Britain’s political map 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 have 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 politically 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 all of us are used to and have grown 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 it’s the taxpayer that has to foot 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. It’s 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, that is on the day that Parker volunteered to canvas for Reform.
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, the immigration crisis. My only criticism of him is that I wish he would stop bleeping and just say f*ck like most British people do. British women are particularly good at it; saying it, I mean.
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!”
Updated: 30 June 2024 | First Published: 29 January 2023 ~ Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony
I’m sure, almost certain, that it was not there 18 months ago when I last visited Zelenogradsk (doesn’t time fly!), but it was there now. I am talking about a new restaurant ~ new to me ~ that sits smack bang at the midway point of Zelenogradsk’s serpentine high street: a large, impressive, luxurious establishment set back from the street inside a broad paved plaza, its plate-glass single-storey extension forming a scaled juxtaposition against the taller four-storey building to which it is attached, the latter meticulously refurbished to a grand and imposing standard.
In the winter months when we were in town, the first impression of this restaurant from the outside looking in was PC; that’s not politically correct, but plush and cosy.
It was bitterly cold that day, and if the hallmark of a successful bar or restaurant is principally defined by the pulling power it possesses to tempt one off the street, then rest assured Balt restaurant has it.
Oh, did I forget to tell you? The name of the restaurant is Balt.
The first impression from the exterior of the building, which is so categorically bourgeoisie that Lenin had turned his back to it, was swish. I made a mental note, a simple equation: plush+posh+impressive+coastal-resort-town-centre = expensive. So, let’s jump to the bill. We had three dishes, nothing elaborate, a speciality tea and a glass of beer. It didn’t break the bank.
The second impression the Balt conveys is ‘big’. “It’s so big!” say your senses, when perhaps what they should be saying is not that it’s so ‘big’ but “It’s so tall”! In keeping with the modern trend in bar and restaurant design, the Balt is undeniably big, but, initially and accurately, the spaciousness perceived is confined to the height of the ceiling. In fact, the seating area which leads away from the entrance hall is limited to the perimeter of the extended part of the building; it forms the letter ‘L’, being a long, but slightly wider than the word implies, corridor. This is because, once again conforming to popular predilections, the restaurant is built around the kitchen, in other words built to a plan in which a centralised kitchen is King.
In the olden days, restaurants concealed their kitchens as though they were the black sheep of the family, the philosophy seeming to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This closeted mentality was an excellent way of keeping patrons on edge, since they never knew come the following morning, having enjoyed their meal the night before, whether their friends would be ready and waiting to scream, “You didn’t eat there, did you!” and then hamming it up with relish, proceed to recount in lurid detail the latest hygiene scandal.
Today, there is no need to be told by the ‘well-meaning’ ~ friends, family or the media ~ what goes on in restaurant kitchens, because everything is on display and laid out for the eyes to see. Restaurant kitchens have come of age. They are open, accessible, uninhibited, something to be admired, something to be proud of, not hidden away like a seedy back room in the depths of a mucky book shop. Restaurant kitchens have been emancipated, and a large part of that liberation lies in the transformation from an observance of cautious propriety to out-and-out exhibitionism.
True, some bar and restaurant designs tend to over-egg the soufflé. Displaying a kitchen eagerly in all its stainless steel, hygiene-oriented, busy, industrious, functioning glory is one thing, but it is quite another and quite inexcusable to overdo the exposure. Thankfully, Balt’s kitchen is a far more sophisticated and in-keeping centrepiece, enabling it to escape comparison with a man in a mac on a hill surrounded by too little foliage. I think the word I am searching for is ‘subtle’.
In fact, everything about Balt, not in its individual accoutrements but taken as a job lot, regarded in its entirety, is the epitome of subtle. How this works exactly is rather clever, because Balt is far and away not without a surprise or two, not undernourished in novelty.
Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT
We were able to appreciate both the component parts of this dichotomy and its overarching effect from the favourable location of the table to which we had been escorted. The seats to which we had been shown occupied the latter portion upon the longer extension of the ‘L’ shaped room, almost at its inflection, thus availing us of a first-class view of each and all the different elements, which, when assembled as a whole, add up to the Balt experience.
First off, we were close to the kitchen, just a few feet away from the serving area: a long, curved counter on which chefs add the finishing touches to the dishes they are preparing before popping them into the tandoor oven, and from which attentive waiters pick up meals that are ready to go.
From our vantage point, we had a privileged view of the kitchen and the floor-to-ceiling tandoor, a large cylindrical-shaped oven used for baking unleavened flatbreads and for roasting meat. Once the open oven door and blazing fire beyond had ceased to remind me of crematoria, it was fun to watch the chef at work, sliding the various dishes and breads into the wood-fired oven with the help of a peel, a long-handled shovel-like implement with a flat metal pan attached to its furthest extremity.
Looking straight ahead, I noted with satisfaction the high-backed wooden chairs belonging to the nearest table. The back rests consisted of two vertical ebonised planks slightly angled toward one another. Close to their highest point a pair of semi-circles had been cut out so that in alignment they formed a circle. The only other concession to decoration was the seemingly random inclusion of small, pierced motifs ~ simple shapes which donated a touch of mystique without disturbing the minimalist balance.
My forward view also provided examples of ingenious lighting styles, including a heavy, orange tassel-roped pendant and lampshades mimicking small sheaths of straw.
The tables to the left and behind me were objects to be marvelled at. The tops were made of marble, the ends scalloped to give an uncut look. They were supported on a cluster of angled posts, recycled wave-breaking poles, some of which had been allowed to protrude through the table’s surface, and hovering above them with remarkable pendulosity was a clump or cluster of shell-like bowls, off-white in shade and in shape asymmetrical, which had me wondering, out loud as it happens, if they were really made from the pumpkin skins I imagined they were or from moulded papier-mâché
Every item in the Balt’s atmospheric makeup is an imagistic letter in the word and concept of ‘Natural’: wood, stone, fire, rope, straw, vegetables. At one end of the subtle spectrum, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble would not look out of place, but the Balt’s natural is a polished natural that borrows as much for its appeal on the application of chic sophistry as it does from down-to-earth and back-to-nature.
For all its emphasis on the natural world, Balt’s designers’ have hedged their bets, choosing not to preclude but include the fashionable tried and tested, omniprevalent in bar and restaurant, distressed industrial look.
This approach has become so widespread that it has gone beyond ‘must have’ to ‘can’t do without’. In the Balt, it has gone one further, becoming ‘Would you Adam and Eve it, the concept actually works!’: rocks, marble, stoneware vases, corn plants, vegetables and pieces of tree, rub along quite nicely, thank you, with gnarled brickwork, whitewashed slat-board, old beam ceilings, exposed ventilation ducts and suspended arty farty spots.
It is a tribute to Balt’s interior designers that they have managed to pull off a subtle, seamless fusion of modern chic and reclaimed-rundown and then wrap it all up in an eco-friendly ethnicity.
In a nutshell ~ and I am sure that Balt would approve of the use of such natural imagery ~ the key word to Balt’s come-hither and dine-within appeal is harmony. Everything, including things that would normally be at odds with each other, are wedlocked. It might be a marriage of convenience, but one that is no less perfect for it. Even the ethnic music, with its emphasis on tom-tom beat and repetitive chanting, is low-key, Sade-like and subtle.
At the centre and everywhere else of this is lighting. I’ve said it before; I’ve said it again; I’ll say it again and keep on saying it: from Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris to The Four Seasons B&B in Brightlingsea, if the lighting is not right everything else will be wrong. Lighting is the magic drawstring that pulls everything together.
Balt’s lighting is soft, suffused and artistically modulated: a harmonising integration of ambient-sensitive ceiling spots and downlighters, overhead table pendants ~ each paired with its own novel shade ~ soft-glow wall lights, natural fire and candles. It’s good, because it works. It works because it’s good.
At this juncture, I know what you are thinking: So much for the Balt’s design; what about the grub?
Those of you who have read any of my bar/restaurant reviews will know that when it comes to food I’m hopeless. Why do I go to bars? To drink. Why do I go to restaurants? Usually because the company I’m in wants to go to restaurants, and so I tag along, but also because, as you may have deduced, I am an ardent fan of interior design and a connoisseur of atmosphere.
As a baked-beans-on-toast man, a man who likes simple food, I cannot provide you with a gourmet breakdown of the range of food Balt has to offer or the quality of its meals, and neither shall I try. However, a quick twirl around the internet should satisfy your curiosity. It might even tell you all you need to know.
Our order at the Balt amounted to a snackette: a spicey vegetable platter on oven-baked bread ~ a white leavened flatbread similar in texture and taste to naan ~ and some exotic-looking poppadoms. It was not in the least expensive, but I will say that presentation took precedence over quantity. Now, were you to indulge in a main meal, the situation may be completely reversed or, like everything else at Balt, a happy medium struck.
I had a beer, naturally. It was palatable but served up in one of those peculiar ‘neither here nor there’ glasses, ie glasses that are neither small nor large, which frankly I find irritating. Half a litre, fine; half a half litre, fine; anything else exceeds my mathematical ability (see Soul Garden post).
The Balt, I am told, offers a range of dishes based on Indian subcontinent fare, which is something of a luxury in this part of the world. The prices are so-so, but not so expensive that they will tear the lining out of your pocket, and the carefully choreographed atmosphere, which is as restful and relaxing as it gets, beats anything I have experienced anywhere else in the Kaliningrad region or for that matter in the UK. Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could!
The main thing Balt (restaurant) Kurortny Prospekt, 16, Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad region
Angel Park Hotel > An inspirational rural recreation centre on the site of an East Prussian settlement Amber Legend Restaurant > Amber Legend Yantarny, a jewel in the coastal town of Yantarny Fishdorf Country Guest Complex > A family-oriented retreat, secluded and steeped in nature Fort Dönhoff (Fort XI) > An evocative 19th century redbrick fortress, part of Königsberg’s labyrinth defence network Polessk Brewery > Beer, history and German-Gothic architecture (that’s my personal order of preference!)
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]
