An Englishman's Experiences of Life in Kaliningrad
Архив рубрики: Diary 2023
Diary 2023 is a subcategory of Kaliningrad: Mick Hart’s Diary. Mick Hart is an expat Englishman living in Kaliningrad, Russia. The subcategory belongs to the blog expatkaliningrad.com
You said it last year, you’ll say it again … probably
31 December 2023 ~ Why Happy New Year?
Hardly a year goes by without somebody saying, and I believe that I have said it myself, “Thank God that 1987, 1999, 2020 (whatever the year) is over. It’s been an awful year for me. Let’s hope that the next one will be better.” So off we go to the New Year’s party, drink copiously, leap around, get wildly and uncontrollably drunk ~ don’t you! ~ pop the champagne corks, countdown the minutes to 12 and on the strike of midnight shout ‘Hooray and Happy New Year’. In short, we do everything we are supposed to do. We play it by tradition.
Come the next morning, nothing has changed. It’s just as grey, cold and wet outside as it was the day before. The holidays are over, and in a day’s time it will be back to the treadmill of work. The New Year stretches before us, not the Yellow Brick Road of the night before but a long, bumpy, uneven track seemingly heading nowhere. And to add to the disconsolation, there’s also the terrible hangover.
Nihilistic, is that what you say? Or perhaps, what a miserable bugger!
Why Happy New Year?
Let’s roll back the decades and take a look at the event-grabbing headlines that defined the ‘Happy New Years’ of those specific years.
Happy New Year: 2014 1. Global Bola epidemic 2. Malaysian airline disaster 3. Rise of the terror group ISIS 4. Black Riots in America
Happy New Year: 2002 1. Mount Nyiragongo erupts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2. President George Bush delivers his ‘Axis of Evil’ speech 3. Two Snipers in Washington DC kill and injure people 4. Terrorists detonate bombs in two nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, killing more than 200 people
Happy New Year: 1992 1. Black riots in Los Angeles 2. Pro-abortion demonstrations in Washington 3. Major earthquake in Turkey 4. First McDonalds in China
Happy New Year: 1982 1. Argentina invades the Falkland Islands 2. Tylenol capsules impregnated with potassium cyanide kill 7 people in Chicago 3. Genetic Engineering is used commercially for the first time 4. IRA bombing campaign in London
Happy New Year: 1972 1. Watergate {death by boredom} 2. The Munich Olympics Massacre by Palestinian terrorists 3. Northern Ireland, the Bogside Massacre 4. Vietnam War drags on
Of course, newsworthy calamities such as those listed above pertain to world events. On the scale of our own lives, we have to back-peddle somewhat to bring together the recollections of all that was said and done over the months preceding the New Year bash.
Happy New Year from a rather strange potato
Now there’s an exercise for you. If you don’t keep a diary, and you jolly well should, grab a pen and a piece of paper and jot down a list of events and incidents that define in your opinion the past 12 months of your life. When done, back-track through the list and mark the incidents and events that gave and brought you happiness with a smiley-faced emoji and those that caused you harm or grief with, if you happen to have one handy, a two-fingered ‘V’ sign. Next, just tot them up and compare the ‘Happy’ to ‘F..K Off!’ score to determine what sort of year you have had and the quality of life you are having. At the end of this simple exercise, hopefully but most unlikely, you should be able to say, “What a stonking good year that was. If 2024 is anything like its predecessor, my life going forward is right on track”. Have you been able to say this? Welcome to the minority.
You could say, if you belonged to a certain generation, that ‘it’s being so cheerful that keeps me going’ and that’s why my New Year’s resolution for 2024 is going to be ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’. I’ll let you know how my new business venture, ‘Rent a Life & Soul of the Party’ is doing 12 months from now, if I’m still doing time here on Earth.
Meanwhile, enjoy yourselves, and I hope you’ll be able to say this time next year that 2024 was the best year of my life. (snigger).
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year UK! It’s at the end of that rainbow!
30 November 2023 ~ Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
The last man to leave the sinking ship; the last man to go to the Isle of Man before they change the name to the Isle of Person; the last man to be the fourth man, as you know there was a third; the last man out at the wickets; the last man to be allowed to be called a man; the last man to play the white man; the last man behind the penultimate man; the last man ~ real man~ to win the lottery; the last man on Earth; the last man in Islington (even more rare than the last man on Earth) ~ you probably wanted to be, if not all of these, at least one of them, in the same way that I had led myself to believe that I was and would be the last man without a mobile phone. I didn’t plan things to be that way, neither did I design my phoneless status, as rumour has it, according to some highfalutin principal. It just happened. I never had a mobile phone, because I never had a mobile phone.
As with being a vegetarian (I became one of those in the 1970s.), I discovered, and I must confess with some delight, that not possessing a mobile phone became other people’s problem not mine, but when those around me who were most effected by my not possessing a mobile phone began to turn up the morality and invoke the strains of guilt, viz that my not having a mobile phone did not prevent me from using theirs, I had to agree, they did have a point.
There cannot be many of us who do not realise that the mobile phone (and I use this term generically to also include the smartphone) is, as with every other technological communication system, a tool for mass surveillance. Whenever you use a smartphone, they know where you are, what you are doing, what you are saying, and, once they have compiled that electronic dossier on you, you can bet your life they presume to know what is on your mind, even how it works, if indeed, it does work after you have enlisted yourself into the ranks of the twiddling masses. So, there it is, the smartphone, but for whom is the smartphone smart? ‘The Spy in Your Pocket’ my brother calls it.
Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
Mass surveillance is the price we pay for our addiction to technology. Some of us rail against it; some of us accept it; most of us ignore it. I, personally, am not so much bothered about Big Brother as ending my life as the Lone Ranger to become one of the twiddling cattle-driven.
Not having a smartarsephone is a little like not being saddled with children. Without both, you can sit back at comfort’s distance and watch with a heartfelt sigh of relief as it passes you by. But as Nature and habitualisation dupes us into doing things that others think we ought to do, so William Gates and his band of silicons coerce and cajole us, hunt us out, hound us down and round us up until, with no place left to hide, the last stop is the twiddler zone. Remember, just because your paranoid does not mean that they’re not out to get you!
Whilst having children is not so much of a stigma as a life sentence, having a mobile phone is incalculably stigmatic. As soon as you pull out that phone and twiddle, an arrow seems to flash out of the ether, pointing the caption at you, “One of the brainwashed masses!” Tell me, in some American states is it still a felony not to guzzle alcohol inside of a brown paper bag? Taking this as my cue, I was thinking of disguising my phone as a sandwich or rubber duck, but that would never do, because twiddlers who twiddle their lives away do so as if by self-enslavement, they are wearing a badge of honour. All for one and look like all! WTF! (The World Twiddling Forum).
It astonishes me how inveterate twiddlers, who twiddle whilst they walk, do not meet with a horrible accident. An acquaintance of mine, an elderly gentleman, has seen fit to turn this banal practice into a source of entertainment.
Whenever a pedestrianised twiddler is heading in his direction deaf and blind to all around them, he takes up position on the pavement, having first worked out their approximate trajectory, and stands there whilst they collide with him. Judging by the average response, it would seem that even the demigod smartphone, with all its apps, bells and whistles, is powerless to resist when it comes to timely embarrassment.
My personal favourites of the twiddling fraternity are pub twiddling couples. I have seen couples come into pubs twiddling, buy drinks whilst twiddling and then spend the entire evening sitting next to each other, never saying a word, just twiddling. Are they beyond repair, or do they actually ‘talk to each other’, for example on the WhatsArse messaging system?
“What an interesting evening, darling. Time to twiddle back home.”
You’ve probably guessed by now where all this is leading. Correct, no matter how much I might rail against it, and in the process vainly hope that somehow, somewhere along the way, I will exonerate myself, the indisputable fact remains that crumpling under umpteen pressures, I eventually succumbed. Yes, I went out and bought a twiddler (‘Arrrggghhh!’)
So, whatever could have gone wrong to have brought about this extraordinary U-turn?
For all its social and psychological evils, whilst it irrefutably is an implement for mass surveillance, the smartphone also doubles as a cloak of invisibility.
Before the smartphone and its mass uptake, going to the pub on one’s tod was a peculiar exercise in self-consciousness. If you hadn’t got a newspaper to hide behind, and even if you had you might end up reading it cover to cover, upside down and back to front, all you could do was to stare into space. Thankfully, the days have gone, except in some up-North benefit-class clubs, previously ‘working man’s’, when a knuckle-dragging neanderthal clocking how you were sitting there with seemingly nothing better to do than letch would adopt a confrontational tone: “Are you looking at my girlfriend?” which obviously you were, or, if he hadn’t got a girlfriend, which usually he hadn’t because he was far too stupid to have such a thing: “Are you looking at me mate?” The temptation to reply, “Given any number of variables, I would rather look at a piece of s_ _t!” was often too hard to resist, even though as a means of closure, it often ended in fisticuffs and sometimes a trip to the local nick.
Today, pubs, in the main, are much more civilised. Possibly because they are more food, and therefore family, orientated, and also because some of the ‘men’ who frequent them would be positively miffed if they didn’t catch you looking at them. You can usually tell who these men are. You’ve seen them on the adverts. They’re always winning the lottery.
How many men have stopped doing the lottery since adverts like that appeared is a question for another day. It does not alter the fact that sat there in the boozer looking like Billy No Mates, constantly checking your watch, as if someone you had arranged to meet is late, or coddling the delusion that after you have finished that long, that slow, that lonely pint you are going on somewhere else, are no longer ruses you have to resort to in an age where everyone looks and acts as if they are everyone else.
Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?
As long as you are a paid-up member of the Zombified Smartphone Club, nobody is going to bother you, nobody is going to question you. With that little (not so little and also rather heavy) rectangular glass-front phone, a voyeur’s window on the world, not so different from Pandora’s Box, flings itself open to you. You can kerb-crawl the net at will, take as many selfies as you like ~ hundreds if it floats your boat ~ before seizing on that magic one that looks not remotely like you. As long as it hides those sags and wrinkles and makes you believe you look 20 years younger (Likes and Followers! Likes and Followers!), you’ll kiss the ass of your mobile phone until all the old cows come home. Ahh, shrine to delusion, vanity, narcissism, thy name is social media!
I instinctively knew that to take a selfie of myself was something I should avoid. And was I ever right. But for the sake of historical record, I took that selfie. Good heavens, I thought, when I looked at my selfie, what on earth do I think I’m doing wearing the nose of Charles de Gaulle?
This first sorte into the realm of selfie-taking taught me in no uncertain terms that there is obviously more than meets the eye (and nose) when it comes to taking fawning photos for mass consumption on Facebook, especially abracadabra ones that transform you from what you really are into the oil painting you never can be. Indeed, every photo on Facebook is intrinsically an art form, art meaning ‘artificial’, and not everyone can master it. The trick (and what a trick!) is to make your faithful believe that the life your photos say you are living is primarily better than theirs and certainly better than yours.
Look out! Selfie in Victory Square!
My next trick was to put the smartfun away, cease repeating “He nose you know!” and shoot off on my solo run into Kaliningrad’s city centre, where, it embarrasses me to confess, that in front of the monument in Victory Square the compulsion took me again. I had to try for another selfie! (You can see the way it goes, can’t you?)
This time I would bring into play the much loved sucked-in cheeks and ubiquitous silly pout. At the very last minute, however, drawn in cheeks were dropped (they tend to do that, don’t they?), as I had noted in my dotage that my impression of Peter Cushing was already quite advanced and that to remodel my cheeks into two squeezed lemons might prove a bridge too far. If only I’d have stuck in my youth to murdering animals and eating them, by now my cheeks would be lovely and round like two plump rolls of prime pink brisket!
Even though my lips had not been enhanced, pumped up so that they looked like slugs, and I had no Frankenstein’s bolt through my snout, which given its size on my debut selfie could easily have accommodated any number of scrapyard pieces, this was destined to be my first (and also my last, I might add) outdoor-taken selfie. All that I succeeded in doing by pouting my lips like a retard was to convey the regrettable impression that although I was out on the town tonight my false teeth had not come with me. They were probably still in the gherkin jar into which they had landed when I let out that sneeze.
“Well, bugger that!” I said to myself, and shoved my Toosmart phone deep within my inside pocket, and I did not take it out again until I was standing outside the bar to which my feet had been programmed to take me. (Blame it all on the technocrats!)
Here are some facts for you. There are two bar/restaurants in the centre of Kaliningrad which are joined at the hip: one is Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka. The only pubs in the UK I know which had a similar arrangement, occurred in London’s Greenwich. They were the Richard I and The Greenwich Union (since vandalised by Young’s Brewery, which, with typical corporate disregard for social history and heritage, knocked them into one).
How embarrassing it was that on one occasion when a group of us had gone to the Richard I, I somehow ended up halfway through the evening accidentally in The Greenwich Union. I had stepped outside the front of the Richard for a quick puff (that’s right, I said ‘puff’!) on my King Edward cigar and when I went to return inside unknowingly entered The Union. Thinking I was in the Richard and that my friends were playing a silly joke, ie they had gone into hiding somewhere, I took the pint I had freshly ordered and went and sat in the beer garden to ponder on what I should do. It was only when I heard my friends chatting away behind the fence in the Richard garden next door that I realised my folly: it wasn’t my friends who had played a joke; it was beer and navigation!
“Well, that’s nothing to be proud of. Is it!” Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one.
Out of the two Kaliningrad bars mentioned, my first bar tonight would be the Bavarian one, an establishment where, if you are lucky, you get to sit down the centre of the room inside a make-believe beer barrel. Unfortunately, my luck was out this evening ~ it had probably gone to Maxims ~ and I was shown to a line of seats and tables that ran along the perimeter of the room. Good! A young couple sitting together at right angles to my table would provide the perfect opportunity for testing the cloaking function of that recently purchased gadget that was jumping out of my pocket.
A businessman, to the left of me, who had obviously not just bought his phone, was so absolutely invisible to everyone in his orbit, with the exception of himself, that had his skills at twiddling not been so well endowed (which seemed to beg the question, was he born with his smartarse in his hand?), I would never have thought to notice him.
He was a pro, I was a novice, and I have to say it showed. My first message on WhatsArse was an all fingers and thumbs job. It took me 20 minutes to compose a reasonably legible paragraph which, had I been working on a laptop, would have taken perhaps a minute or less. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns, and over the next 40 minutes, managed to shoot three messages into and across cyberspace complete with photos attached. During those 40 minutes, the young couple facing my profile (and thinking “It’s Peter Cushing!”), and whatever it was the man was doing down the other end of the room with his Bavarian sausage, were so plainly indistinct as to issue the suspicion that I had come as close to vanished as Davos had to resetting the world. Had I been any more gone, I would have been shaking hands with H.G. Wells!
Next door, in the Czech bar, I was again unlucky. The best seats had been taken, and I ended up perched upon a sponge-filled leather-look bench, which was, I suppose, alrightish, except that being so high off the ground it left one’s little legs dangling with nothing to rest one’s feet on, rather like sitting in the barber’s chair when you were six-years old. How fortuitous and kind of fate that she had arranged a stool in front of me so that I could use its stretcher as a foot rest.
In this bar, I tried out my phone with an email or two. Fine, although when it came to attaching images, the process became a tad mysterious. Exit quickly and onto Google. I had never opened websites using a smartarsephone before, and now that I have, I cannot say that I found the experience particularly positive: yards and yards of constant scrolling. It’s like an electronic version of bog roll. But twiddling and swiping go hand in glove, and for me, the man with the reputation for being the Last Man on Earth to Own a Smartphone, the gauntlet had been thrown.
In the bar up in the clouds (the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery) overlooking the spot where I shouldn’t have taken my second selfie, and now on my third beer, not only had I become more confident in my twiddling and more comfortable with my twiddler, but my Russian language had improved no end. Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo (“Good Moaning”) may well have had good reason to feel proud of me, but could his approval be half as rewarding as thinking you’re getting it right, whilst most likely you are not, or rather not quite, but not knowing nor either caring because sitting snuggly in your pocket, if you haven’t already lost it, is your little spy and pie in the sky, your customised, very own smartphone ~ ahhhh.
By the end of the evening I was able to say two things. No, I had not drunk so much that I could only say two things, I mean two things pertinent to my smartphone experience. The first was something I had always suspected: Never take a selfie and, if you have to think again, never take a selfie. The second was that my expectations of the smartphone as an instrument of lonely-guy concealment when sitting alone in a bar or pub was vindicated. And yet, the keeping-tracks-on-you downside that inevitably comes with owning a smartphone, unless you keep it switched off, continues not to sit easily with me.
In more recent years, I have heard people say that the Silicon Valley Mob have turned up the heat in their racket to enslave people and to extort as much personal information about everyone on Earth as completely as they can. Like the Capone organisation, which, after Al’s demise, moved with the help of Sam Giancana into the labour rackets, the Silicon Outfit found a new racket in 2-step verification.
Conspiracy theory or not, with the roll-out of 2-step verification for online banking, as a sign-in function for websites and blogs and as the only option for identifying yourself on ecommerce sites, such as eBay for example, the message is loud and clear, either get a smartphone or else be bolloxed.
The one-step further exploitation than 2-step verification is fingerprint and/or eye recognition. Now it’s getting personal. Where will it all end? The clue may lie in the word ‘end’. In other words and words more plain, is Anus Authentication already passing from science fiction into the realms of science fact? It is too much of a coincidence that AI (Anal Intelligence) is the state of the art abbreviation on the tongue of every news editor. AI is everywhere, so there must be something in it, as I’m sure there must be someone out there, in a small secluded brick-looking building in Silicon Valley’s back yard, who is poised with the paperwork in his hand for the biggest breakthrough yet. Zappa may have the answer …
Image attributions
Man with phone on couch: Image by <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/character-playing-videogame_7734013.htm/#query=clipart sitting using a smartphone&position=17&from_view=search&track=ais&uuid=00c57546-c79e-4db8-a98c-c064c40ce15e”">Freepik</a>
12 October 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Toilet Door is a thing of Beauty
Has it ever crossed your mind that one day you might be famous and, if so, in what capacity? Many dream of fame when they are young at a time when the reason is unimportant. This is one of youth’s luxuries: the dream of fame for fame itself.
But fame can strike at any time, when you least expect it, in the most unexpected way and for the most unexpected reasons. Take me [Frank Zappa: “Take me, I’m yours …”], for example, how could I have possibly predicted twenty years ago, when I was 14🙂, that fate would have me knock on the door of fame, or would have had me knock on the door of fame had there been a door to knock on.
When I was young, I staked my claim to fame, or so I would have them believe, on the publication of my first toilet wall. What an imagination! Yet even I, as fanciful as I was, could never have envisioned that it was not a wall but a toilet door that one day would consign me to the annals of posterity.
I can hear you asking, although you are rather faint, how such an extraordinary set of circumstances ever came to be and, considering its phenomenal nature, have I thought of contacting TheGuinness Book of Records? Answer, in reverse order, I shall wait for them to contact me, but, whilst we wait in suspense together, the very least I can do is let you in on the noble act to which my fame is owed.
Kaliningrad Toilet Door
Not so long ago, the president of the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club acquired a property which the club could use as a base for its activities and as a classic car museum. An historically interesting building, which, in the days of German Königsberg, had been used as an aircraft parts repository for Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, it was otherwise perfect in every sense for what the club required, except in one respect ~ an important one, I thought. For this public venue where people would meet, attend lectures, be taken on tours and, if they so desired, could hire for private parties was lacking in one essential ~ it had no toilet door!
It is monumentally inconceivable that during the Third Reich’s reign the bog in the Luftwaffe building would have been doorless. I have it from a reliable source, a man who’s devoted his life to toilets ~ he majored in them at Cambridge ~ that, to quote his words verbatim, “They made very good doors those Germans did, and very good toilet doors!” We are left to conclude, therefore, that in the days when defeat was imminent, as well as destroying their vital papers, either the Germans destroyed the toilet door or hid it where no one could find it. We cannot put it past them. It is a typical Gerry trick, I’d say; the sort of thing they went round doing just to be awkward and spiteful.
However, to give credit where credit is due, the fact that the door was missing had not escaped the notice of the club. And it was patently clear to everyone that something had to be done about it, not the absence of German decorum but the absent toilet door. Then came the question, what exactly?
In the Club
As with all complex organisations presided over by reams of committees, reliant on detailed reports from antithetical think tanks and subject to the dislocation of interdepartmental interests, the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club faced a difficult dilemma. The knock-on effect, or no knock-on effect, as there was nothing to rap one’s knuckles on, of having no door to your toilet became one of those gritty [spelling correct] seemingly endless issues, destined to be shuffled about from one desk to another, until at last worn down and out by the suspenseful acrobatics of over-careful toilet timing, it fell on me, to coin a phrase, to roll out an initiative. “Why don’t I buy a door,” I said, “and have someone fill the hole with it!” The motion was passed unanimously.
Job done, you think. I can tell you that it wasn’t. Where would we find that fix-it person now Jim was no longer with us. He fixed a lot of things did Jim, including over-generous posthumous payouts for a herd of out-of-the-woodwork women now minted in their retirement years.
When, at last, we did find someone ~ and, of course, at last we did ~ it felt like every toilet trouble wherever it was in the world was nought but a poof in the wind. The handyman he fitted the door quicker than Brand got fitted up ~ he certainly knew his angles from his elbows ~ and before you could say ‘engaged’ or ‘vacant’ or ‘here’s another perfect example of a bum-wrap by the leftist state’, the club was no longer one door short of a toilet.
Some of you may feel that the saga of our toilet door was all a storm in a Portacabin, whilst the rather less polite amongst you might think it a load of c..p! And I am willing to concede that some of the visitors to the club may miss the thrill of sitting there whilst a friend or colleague stands guard for them, but I have to say from my point of view, it all looked rather cheeky. Bringing a bottle to an event is something not unheard of, but come on, really, deary, deary me, bring your own toilet door!
As the intelligence of my philanthropy leaked out far and wide, eventually reaching St Petersburg, my friend and colleague, Yury Grosmani, writer, author, journalist and latterly film producer, flushed with excitement at the news, immediately reached for his keyboard and wrote this moving tribute to me, which he posted on VK:
Вообще, музей без туалета, а равно как и музей с туалетом, но без двери, заведение абсолютно бесперспективное. Очень приятно, что известный журналист, писатель, а теперь мы уже знаем, что и киноактер, Мик Харт, выступил спонсором такого важного, нужного и благородного дела. Теперь музей АвтоРетроКлуба имеет на одно преимущество больше, чем самые известеые музеи мира. Например, на дверях туалета Британского музея такой таблички нет. Лично подтверждаю! А у нас она есть! Передаю слова огромной благодарности моему другу и коллеге МИКУ ХАРТУ 🇬🇧🇷🇺👍
And now in English:
“ [computer translation] In general, a museum without a toilet, as well as a museum with a toilet, but without a door, is an absolutely hopeless establishment. I am very pleased that the famous journalist, writer, and now we already know that film actor, Mick Hart, sponsored for such an important, necessary and noble cause. Now the AutoRetroClub Museum has one more advantage compared to the most famous museums in the world. For example, there is no such sign on the toilet doors of the British Museum. I personally confirm! And we do have it! I convey my deep gratitude to my friend and colleague MICK HART 🇬🇧🇷🇺👍
Whether I fully deserve this accolade, I will leave that up to you decide. As for the British Museum’s pitifully Mick Hart plaqueless status, there may be some truth in this; I can neither confirm nor deny. But should that august establishment ever find itself taken short by the urgent need to have one, then I’m the man for their big job.
For my own part, now that the door is up and the paperwork is done, I am happy to rest on my laurels, content in the certain knowledge that although my simple toilet door has not converted this lowly loo into anything close to a cistern chapel, it fulfils the function, as nature intended, to stop the things that shouldn’t come out from coming out of the closet. Small things in life, perhaps, but if by my private motion I have achieved some good in the public realm and in the process of doing so prevented the club’s reputation from hitting the skids big time and going down the pan, then per angusta ad augusta. It is just something we often say (as well as going ‘ahhh’) in the world of toilet-door sponsorship!
Note: The door sponsored by Mick Hart is available for viewing, and not least using, at the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club Museum. To avoid disappointment, advanced booking is advisable.
23 September 2023 ~ Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine
Whilst London’s Notting Hill Carnival, which should have been banned years ago, was erupting into its usual frenzy of violence, with, as the Daily Mail* depicted, odious-looking behoodied things running amuck in the streets brandishing knives and machetes, we, I am happy to say, were over the hills and far away, somewhere on the brighter side of proper English culture.
Resisting the temptation to allow ourselves to be dragged down by the Daily Mail’s depressing but not delusional strapline, ‘ … Britain Now Feels Like a Third World Country*’, but pondering on what Plod will do in the unlikely event they apprehend the Notting Hill Carnival misfits (‘Come on now, don’t be naughty. How about a cup of tea. Let’s sit and discuss your problem.’), we escaped the gruesome subspace that London has become by joining a lot of nice English people at one of the county’s late ‘summer shows’.
Dean Village Show the Last of the Summer Wine
You may recall in a previous post on ‘summer shows’ that I happened to remark upon the tragic disappearance of the greatest big band leader the world has ever known, Glenn Miller. In this post I postulated that at the time of his disappearance he may have had in his pocket a list of English garden fetes to which he was rather partial. It cannot be confirmed, but neither can it be dismissed.
The whereabouts of such a list, if indeed there ever was one, deserves a trial by academia. I am assured by its ambiguity that for someone craving a PhD it would give them something to waffle about for the three small years it takes to secure a job for life within the ivory-tower equivalent of an overpaid Alice’s Wonderland.
As for us real folks, who have ‘to move those microwave ovens … got to shift those colour TVs’, the historical mishap that was Glenn Miller’s fate and the mishap of the present, as signified by the mud-hut happenings in Britain’s capital city, which will themselves one day be judged by history, if today’s generation can get off their phones long enough to realise what the establishment has in store for them (I hear the sound of sheep!) were insufficient reasons not to struggle into the Aston ~ jumping in and out of it is not as feasible as once it was when we were twenty years younger ~ and go tootling classically off to yet another local village fete, which prefers, by academic licence, to rebrand itself as a ‘summer show’.
As we were pulling out of the gate on the spoked wheels of the Aston, our senses were regaled with the inspirational sight of a lady with whom we are acquainted (She works behind the bar (but only on Mondays and Wednesdays) of a pub we know and to which we go.). She was trumping past on a vintage tractor, with a cute little trailer in tow. She was, and in this we were not mistaken, off to the same show as us.
It is hardly surprising that here in the sticks, agricultural relics command the same respect and attention as vintage and classic cars. True village folk, as distinct from Johnny-come-latelys, have all had a taste of agriculture sometime in their lives, and these days even women, when not playing at football, are trying their hand at driving tractors. And some, it must be said, appear more suited to this task than butching it up on a football pitch. Just remember not to get too close when you are behind them and, when they are coming directly towards you, always give them a very wide berth.
The last of the summer wine
One of the lasting joys of my personal summer, this summer, give or take local garden fetes and the odd summer show or two, is the privilege it bestowed upon me to witness from my bedroom window the impressive extent and degree to which British agriculture has progressed.
It is years since I participated in the yearly rural ritual of ‘bringing in the sheathes’, and, needless to say, things have moved on. The good old days, so called, characterised by pitchforks, sore, blistered, split and chafed hands, jumpers out at elbow and trousers out at arse, tied at the waist with bailer twine, have gone to be replaced by farm machinery the likes of which is so fantastic that my generation could never imagine it outside of the realms of science fiction.
Young farm operatives now drive these fabulous machines, not crusty, gnarled old farm-hands. They cruise around in comparative luxury ~ fitted cabs, music systems, heaters for the winter, air conditioning in summer and everything satellite navigated. Sporting the latest haircuts, trendy country-wear jerkins and smart regulation high-vis jackets, the young who work on Britain’s farms often look better turned out than the lords and masters for whom they work. “Where will it all end?!” I ask. It’s new, but it’s not Notting Hill!
The farm machinery of today, the combine harvesters and the tractors, are vastly larger than they used to be and so much smoother in their operation ~ their engines no longer ‘chug’, they glide. They are also more sophisticated, even excessively comfortable; capable of getting things done in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to do them using our often second-hand, tired, worn out, prone to breakdown, cronky and battered old kit.
Good examples of how much things have changed is the paper sack stuffed with straw, which we used to cushion the bumpy ride and to prevent our arses from icing up on the notorious raw metal tractor seats, and how through the winter months we went, chugging and bouncing across the plough, in gloves, jumpers, jackets, top coats and with balaclavas wrapped round our heads. Men were men in those days and boys expected to do a man’s work, often without so much as a thank you let alone a proper wage and, if you were really unlucky, as frequently we were, a boot up the arse for your troubles. It was angry farmers who ruled the earth then; ‘uman rights and children’s rights and the global-warming industry were just a twinkle in the collective eye of your preposterous liberal-lefty.
A better example of ‘how things have changed’, that is to say a less emotive one, is captured in a photograph, taken from my bedroom window, which juxtaposes yesteryear’s farm implements with their plush and powerful modern counterparts.
At today’s garden fete, sorry, I meant to say summer show, I would be given the chance to see tractors pre-dating my farming years as well as those that were contemporary to the time I spent on the farm. In other words, I would be looking back in awe, and not with a little disbelief, at tractors old and classic which, only the blink of an eye ago, were objects to be marvelled at in spite of their myriad defects. To us they were acceptable; we didn’t know anything else.
Fortunately, time softens sensibility and mellows troublesome memories, turning what was once a bitch to work with into something we never imagined it could be, an icon of nostalgia, deserving of affection bordering almost on abject reverence.
To one side of these veterans of the land, these old tractors which were lined up on the field like so many members of the Home Guard, stood something cute and dinky. We had met its owner the night before in the local village pub, who, in response to my revelation that I had in my youth one just like his, corrected me forthwith, saying whilst it was certainly true that Dinky had made a road-roller, the toy was not the full-sized model parked outside the front of the pub. His was a mark ‘blah blah’ with an ‘oops, ay now and what-do-you-call-it?’ and what is more with an engine capacity that was ‘fart de-lah-de-lah-lah-lah!) … The trouble with vintage vehicle owners is they really know their stuff.
It was a similar situation when I accosted the owner of a Ford Zodiac Mark IV. He had no difficulty rattling off the engine capacity and build, top speed, fuel consumption and a whole lot of other technical and historical stuff, including, I was amazed to learn, that the reason, as I had stated, ‘you don’t see many of these’ was that in spite of the hundreds of thousands of Mark IV Zodiacs produced less than 300 have survived!
My uncle ~ let’s call him ‘L’ ~ owned a Mark IV Zodiac back in the 1970s. When I expressed an interest in it, he told me he bought it because (a) it holds a lot of ‘stuff’ and (b) it can accelerate faster from a standing start than the average police car.
At his funeral a few years ago, I was walking with my mother behind my uncle’s coffin as the pallbearers bore it from church to cemetery when suddenly, from around the corner, a police car hoved into view.
Casting a wry glance at the car, I heard my mother whisper, “I’m afraid you’re just too late”.
Dean Show 2023 ~ Fast Cars
The Ford Zodiac Mark IV was not the only now classic car that could outrun Britain’s rozzers. During the 1960s, the villains’ vehicle of choice was more often than not the Jag. Not only were Jags fast, they were also incredibly flash, seeming to possess for the raffish and the rakish just the right combination of tasteful class, wheel appeal and polished disreputable charm.
A Jag Mark II was with us at the show today, as was one of the 1960s’ most iconic vehicles, the unmistakeable E-type Jag, a masterpiece of curvaceous chic, both the hardtop and convertible versions. Also on display was a 1970’s Mustang, a Citroen from the 1930s’, a lovely coach-built red Rolls Royce and umpteen variations on the nippy sports car models which, individually and collectively, left an irrepressibly glamorous signature on the 1960s and 1970s.
So, where and how did it all go wrong? Whatever happened to classic car design, with its emphasis on strikingly different, instantly recognisable and once seen never forgotten? Whatever happened to walnut dashboards, numerous dials, must-click switches, leather seats and glittering chrome. Wherever the good times went, the good cars must have gone with them.
It was all too much. We decided to explore the stalls, were disappointed when we could not find one catering in old-fashioned junk and swung away in protest for my brother to try his luck on the tombola. (Who on earth is Tom Bola?)
At a previous event, which had been called a garden fete, not show, my brother had had the good fortune to win a bottle of wine on the tombola and a bottle of brandy in rapid succession. Would his luck hold out today? Did it heck as like!
“I said it would be a tin of beans, and it was!” he matter-of-facted. But the little spin of clairvoyancy in which he had couched his statement did nothing to hide his deep disappointment. It isn’t winning, it’s playing the game that counts. What a load of old nonsense!
What you lose on the tombola, you might win on the circus skills, and in this respect my brother fared better, I must say remarkably better, in tightrope walking and juggling. Not that this came as a great surprise. There are those who would say that he has walked a tightrope and juggled his way through life. But today it was for real. Admittedly, the tightrope was only two feet off the ground, and he was juggling bean bags not clubs, but I’ve got to hand it to him, I did not need to hand it to him: he succeeded in both endeavours.
One of the supreme joys of attending English garden fetes, and shows, is not the inevitable dog exhibition. To like dug shows, you have first to like dugs. Some don’t.
Today’s dug show was all about gun dogs and the obedience they learn through training, but as most of the bitches were in heat there were one or two near unfortunate incidents which threatened to turn a family show into something rather embarrassing. This was just the excuse we needed to head back to the Aston, drag the folding chairs from the boot and get stuck into the old, packed lunch, which I washed down eagerly with a refreshing pint of English ale.
Picnic over, it was time to circulate; to say hello to people whom you knew, who you knew had been trying all day to avoid you, and to avoid those people you knew, who you knew had been trying to say hello. You don’t understand the rules? It’s a quintessentially ‘English thing’.
No English garden fete or English village show could be considered complete without the proverbial cup of tea and slice of cake. To enjoy it at its best, you should be able to sit outside in the sun under a Panama hat, preferably wearing a day cravat. Such attire is also good for drinking beer in the evening. Consider it done.
And so, another garden fete, sorry, village show, and indeed another garden fete season (with the exception of Riseley show) inevitably came to an end. Whatever it wants to call itself, it had been a pleasant experience, as had all the local garden fetes that I have attended this summer, prompting the reflection that the UK can be an enjoyable place when free of the unwanted enrichment that Sorryarse and his motley crew seem to have forgotten previous British generations did very well without. “Not today, thank you (or any other day!)!”
As we all know, however, the good old days were not all that: there was no woke, no PC, a lack of sexual harassment payouts, certainly nothing LGBT and sadly no global warming to melt the frost on your tractor seat. Nevertheless, when all is said and done (a lot is said but not a lot done) the good old days in hindsight seem a darned sight better, infinitely better in fact, than what we have at present and what is yet to come. You ain’t seen nothing yet, but consolation has it that the reset they have planned for us will not endure for long. Across the political West, pseudo-liberal doctrines have already begun the slow, the painful, the inevitable process of rupture and unravelling. In the long term it will be brutal, but right will prevail as it always does.
In the short term, however, the story will be different. All that will remain to fill the echoing void left by garden fetes, Sunday cricket and good old English pubs will be foreign food stores, Turkish barbers, one or two Indian corner shops (whatever happened to Arkwright?) and, last but by no means least, the never pleasant, totally unnecessary, no-excuse-for-it Notting Hill Carnival.
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A YORSHIK, who lived in the fifth dimension and worshipped Beautiful Nature. Although she could be prickly, she was not a nasty Yorshik. She loved the fields, gardens, flowers, lakes, suns, skies and trees ~ most of all she loved the trees.
One day, whilst walking by the side of the lake in the footsteps of the Teutonics, she espied a tree that she liked very much. It was an old tree, a tree that had stood for centuries. This tree had seen so much of life and of countless people’s lives.
How many people have admired this tree? thought the Yorshik. How many people have sketched or painted it? How many people have written poems about it. How many people have sat beneath it ~ daydreamers, lovers, people in need of shelter, people in need of support, people in need of a tree?
Whenever Yorshik found a tree, especially a great old tree like this one, she felt the need to hug it. She would throw her arms around the tree and say, “I long for the day when your inner strength will be my strength also.” And the trees that she hugged would hug her back, and each would sigh with happiness.
And so, she hugged the mighty tree before her. But the tree neither hugged her in return nor sighed a happy sigh. It clung to her. It trembled, and its sigh was a groan of fear and despair.
“Whatever is the matter, tree?” asked the Yorshik.
“They are coming to cut me down tomorrow,” sobbed the tree.
“But why?” Yorshik asked. “You are so big and strong and healthy!”
The tree it sobbed some more until regaining its composure, said: “Because I have a fairy in my boughs.”
Yorshik looked up and sure enough, sitting in the branches of the tree, there was a fairy.
Yorshik had seen many things, such as flowers, hedges, clouds and trees, but never a fairy before. She had, of course, seen drawings of fairies but never of one so round.
“What?” Yorshik asked the tree, “has a fairy in your branches got to do with cutting you down?”
The tree sniffled: “The fairy has cast a spell, and tomorrow at daybreak the men will come with saws and axes, and I will be cut down.”
“I didn’t want to cast the spell,” then spoke the fairy in a quavering voice, “truly I didn’t. But I am trapped between Heaven and Earth, and if I place my feet voluntarily on Terra-Ferma, I shall be forced to exist in a limbo state for the rest of all eternity.”
And now the fairy was crying, too.
“But if the tree is cut down,” the fairy sobbed (and the tree let out a wail) “I shall descend to earth, but not by my own volition, and I will be saved.”
The fairy was weeping, the tree was weeping and Yorshik was at a loss for what to do. She could not bear to see the tree cut down, but neither could she bear to imagine the fairy trapped between Heaven and Earth in a state of immortal torment.
A Birthday Fairytale with Love
She thought and thought until she could think no more, whereupon, in a paroxysm of despair, she threw herself on the ground and hugging the trunk of the tree, implored and prayed to the Gods for an answer.
As she prayed, her tears fell to the ground, and the tears of the tree and the fairy followed, mingling together until they had formed a stream that trickled into the lake. At that moment, the clouds, which had settled upon the sky, parted, and a ray of sunlight soft and luminous travelling from the Heavens landed gently at the point where the river of tears held hands with the lake. Still embracing the tree, the Yorshik watched the light as it danced upon the water. She followed its vibration along the beam, into the sky and back to the water again.
At the water’s edge, where a moment ago no one had been, she thought she saw a figure, the figure of a man. She could not be certain of this, because her eyes were so full of tears; they had become twin ponds from Königsberg.
She peered again at the water’s edge. Sure enough, there was a man. His detail was lost to her, but she could feel the warmth of his presence and the kindness in his heart.
“Who are you?” the Yorshik asked.
“I’m an artist,” he replied. “I have come to paint a picture of you. To paint it upon this tree.”
And setting down an easel, this is exactly what he did.
When he had finished the picture, which seemed to be of a moment’s work, he turned to the Yorshik and smiling said: “Don’t worry, Yorshik. Don’t fret. Everything in this universe has its finite place and everything will fall into place when the time is right for it to do so.”
He had hardly finished speaking, in a voice like balm to the Yorshik’s soul, when a second beam of light breaking through the clouds momentarily dazzled her, and when she could see again, the artist he had gone.
A Birthday Fairytale with Love
It was then that she saw his painting on the tree. She gasped in amazement. Her likeness was so lifelike, the colours so strong, so vibrant, altogether alive and everything so beautiful that she felt as if everything good had been given to her forever. And even the fairy and the tree, on beholding the artist’s magic, forgetting guilt, regret and fear, also forgot that they should be crying.
Spoke the fairy from the tree on high: “I cannot let this kind old tree that has given me hope and shelter, and which now has such a beautiful picture of Yorshik painted on it, be cut down. Tonight, I shall climb from the branches myself and take my chances as predetermined.”
It was a frightful night for Yorshik. There was a full moon that shone through the crack in the bedroom shutters and danced around in her half-sleep in an endless succession of mutated forms and apparitions most ghastly. She felt the bite of the woodman’s axe and turned away from that horror only to be confronted by the dreadful sight of the screaming fairy descending into a fiery hell.
No sooner had dawn broke, than, with bleary eyes and in a cold sweat, Yorshik scampered from her woodland house and hurried towards the lake and the tree. She was so afraid of what she might see, and even more afraid of what she wouldn’t, that she thought of running backwards, but very few Yorshiks have reverse gear, so she had to proceed as always and make the best of a very bad job. At least it wasn’t foggy.
As she rounded the corner where she knew the tree would be, if indeed it would be, she took her hands away from her eyes and, rubbing the bruises on her body, which, unfortunately, one tends to get when one attempts to run with their eyes closed, stared at where she thought she’d see nothing, or perhaps just a pile of logs. But Saints preserve and Hallelujah, the tree it was still standing!
Alas, of the tree-bound fairy, however, there was not the slightest sign.
Falling to her knees by the side of the tree and hugging its mighty trunk, the Yorshik cried: “You are safe, thank the Gods that you are safe, but what has become of the fairy? I cannot bear to imagine the pain and the suffering which, through her most noble act, she has brought upon herself!”
But why was the tree not crying! Heartless, ungrateful tree! The heartless, ungrateful tree was smiling!!
“Shh, shh,” said the tree, “Do not cry! Be still! Dry your eyes! Look at the painting, Yorshik! Look at the painting!”
Bewildered, understanding not, but drying her eyes as instructed, the Yorshik did as she had been bidden and looked towards the painting. At first, she could see nothing but herself, as a reflection might see itself on the opposite side of the mirror. But when she rubbed her eyes again and took a second look, there, in a moment of joy and rapture, she saw in the painting by her side the fairy smiling back at her. The fairy was alive! The fairy was alive!
And above and around the Yorshik in the painting on the tree, and above and around the Yorshik kneeling on the ground, not one but a host of fairies danced and laughed, embraced and sang and loved.
This time when the Yorshik hugged the tree, the Universe hugged back, and since that day to this, no one in the world and anywhere else beyond has ever had to suffer the pain of being alone again.
All it took was a bag of frozen peas left on the end of the checkout conveyor belt, my public spiritedness and up went the balloon. And it was high drama at the local supermarket.
1 August 2023 ~ Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke
I had just arrived at the local supermarket checkout with my week’s shopping ~ six bottles of beer, a can of cheap beans and a pound of liver, which I will need to replace mine if I carry on drinking like this ~ when I espied a lonely bag of frozen peas beached on the metallic rim at the end of the conveyor belt.
There was only one person in the queue in front of me, an elderly black lady.
“Are these yours?” I politely asked her, nodding towards the peas.
“No,” she replied, in a strong Jamaican accent, then, whistling through her teeth, asked “Why do people do such things?”
“A sign of the times,” I replied.
I began to unload my purchases from the basket to the conveyor belt, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A lady, unusually large for the time of year, one of those scarred for life by the coronavirus Plandemic who cannot escape from her facemask, was asking me: “Are these your frozen peas?”
“No,” I answered. “I asked the lady in front of me the same question.”
A public-spirited person, ie me, then sought to bring the lonesome bag of peas to the attention of the foreign gentleman manning the checkout (‘manning’, we are not supposed to say that, are we?’).
“It’s OK,” he said, in a strong foreign accent, “Lady has gone to get something.”
That told me. But hardly had he finished speaking than he began to take a peculiar interest in something at the checkout opposite. He continued to look in that direction, calling as he did so, “Lady, lady, your things here!”
I looked where he was looking. The ‘lady’ to whom his comments were addressed, presumably she who had left the frozen peas, was standing in the opposite queue. She was big and black with a face resembling something that Buffalo Bill Cody would have been familiar with. Just then we, the elderly black lady who had spoken to me earlier and who was in the process of paying for her goods, glanced at each other. A second earlier she had turned her head to look at the culprit who had abandonned her frozen peas. The elderly lady seemed embarrassed. Hurriedly stuffing her last purchase into her bag, she scurried off, leaving me to mull over her question, “Why do they do it?” Why, indeed?
The foreign white gentleman manning the checkout was still appealing to the foreign black lady’s responsibilities, trying to get her to take the frozen peas back to the refrigerator, but whilst the peas were rapidly thawing, she was frozen within her ignorance.
“They [the peas] will defrozen,” called the checkout man, “defrozen, and then we will have to throw them in the bin.”
At long last, the ‘lady found her voice: “I don’t see it like that,” she retorted.
Now there’s an answer for you!
Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is No Woke
It was evident by now that the checkout man was flogging a dead horse, buffalo or something. He got up, strode down to the end of his conveyor belt, grabbed the peas and headed towards the fridge.
“It’s all happening at Fiddles today,” said I. “Such drama!”
The mask-wearing woman looked the other way, just in case her mask was not as foolproof as they had made her believe. The little middle-class lady standing behind her ~ and you don’t get a lot of them in Fiddles, come to think of it, you don’t see many of them in Bedford town centre ~ sniggered but did not utter a word.
The white checkout man from who knows what country strode back, resumed his seat and staring into the middle distance said, with an expression of incredulity, “Lady got same products but leave these, why?”
“Cuh,” I chimed, “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
And it didn’t, particularly as he was white and the frozen-pea leaver was black.
I half expected her to suddenly burst into a tirade of, “Yu wacist! Yu wacist, yu are!” and dash from the shop.
She would then complain online to her friends, who would then alert the authorities, who would then contact Fiddles’ management and demand an apology. The Guardinistan and the BBC would get wind of the situation and commence a campaign on the black woman’s behalf, reporting that she had been so terribly traumatised by the outrageous request to return the peas to the fridge that it had caused her to lose her self-esteem, not to mention her self-respect, and that, as a result, she could no longer go to the supermarket unless she was accompanied either by her grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews or nieces, preferably all of them together, which is why they are currently bobbing about in an inflatable dinghy on the English Channel, soon to dock at Dover from whence they will be V.I.P. driven to a nice five-star hotel, providing there are any left that are not already full.
Frozen Peas in Bedford
Shortly, a solicitor, one of those who specialises in just these sorts of cases, would volunteer to represent her. Her case would go to court. Naturally, the LLJUK (Liberal Left Judiciary UK) would award her compensation ~ a frozen packet of Fiddles’ peas for life to be delivered every week by hand by Fiddles’ CEO and in addition, and just for good measure, a handout of two million quid.
As for the white foreign gentleman, who had been totally out of order for calling the woman’s attention to the bag of peas she had ditched, he would be sacked forthwith, and his bank, The Cashless Globalist Inc., would immediately close his account Nigel Farrage-style, and wouldn’t that serve him white! What would he do? Where would he go? No lifetime’s guarantee of frozen peas for him. How would he survive in an overpriced country dominated by profiteering supermarkets, greedy utility companies, extorting financial institutions and totally in-the-pocket-of-George-Sorryarse MPs? There would be nothing for it but to turn gay, join the British Army, sue them for being beastly to him, or perhaps not beastly enough (pass the mascot, ‘Woof!’), and leave the service with his own compensation.
Bletsoe Garden Fête is just one event on Mick Hart’s enviable social calendar. This year he put away his bicycle clips and went by Aston Martin instead.
2 July 2023 ~ Bletsoe Garden Fête in an Aston Martin DB2/4
Among the high-quality merchandise that I am disposing of at present, I happened upon a box full of the 1960s’ educational comic for children Look and Learn.
Opening the pages of these august volumes, I was treated to a compendium of educational articles, some features, others comic strip but all superbly illustrated and all reminding me of the way we were when England was really England.
The content of the magazines reflected the educational ethos of the time, presenting informative articles of a historic, scientific, cultural and practical nature. The scope of the subject matter was world-wide but the emphasis was squarely placed on inculcating the young into appreciating the unrivalled part that England played in the evolution of the civilised world. Topics ranged from famous English people to national passtimes to traditional British games to great events in British history, so that it was impossible not to come away from the magazine instilled and inspirited with a patriotic sense of pride.
It was at that moment that a modern-day version of Look and Learn insinuated itself into my unguarded imagination. There it was saturated with Black Lives Matter, the joys of immigration, LGBTQ+ZX!!&£££, Radio Zelensky, how to adapt your broom cupboard to house an economic migrant, and how to get out of Brexit free. It was also spattered with lots of adverts, just like those we see on TV, which show people from far flung places acting and talking like cloned English persons eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with lashings of Bisto gravy. Ahh Bisto. Ahh Bullshit. I’ve always been a green bananas and bread-fruit man myself.
Bread fruit are marvellous. It occurs to me that they are the humane steam-powered alternative to Scotland’s McSporan haggis. I like them, which is more than I can say for cricket. I have never liked cricket, correction, I never liked playing cricket, but whenever I take a turn through the English countryside in the midst of summer the sight of men dressed in their cricketing whites and the sound of leather on willow is most inspiring. BDSM aside, (it’s always gone on in English villages) another revered and quite frankly reassuring English tradition has to be the garden fête, or garden fetty, as my wife liked to call them.
Now that summer is here and the nights are growing whiter, as in gentlemen in their cricketing whites, it is difficult to decide which is the most exciting: men stumping their middle wickets or England’s profusion of garden fêtes.
“It’s come to something,” said my brother, “when all we’ve got to get excited about is the local village garden fête. But this is unfair, if not true. It’s when your calendar has a string of garden fêtes on it and nothing else that you should be worried.
Anyway, not that we have a list of local garden fêtes you understand, but our first fête this year was Bletsoe, to which we would be going in style. My brother had changed his socks, and I had my Russian hat on. Oh yes, and we were also going there in a vintage 1954 classic Aston Martin.
Now, to look at this Aston Martin you might think, ‘Look at the state of that!!’, or you could, as I overheard some chaps saying when we arrived at Bletsoe Garden Fête, “You don’t see many DB2/4s in original condition.” To repaint or not to repaint, that is the ££££ question?
Aston Martin DB2/4
The Aston Martin DB2/4 was produced from 1953-1957. The model shown here is a a four-seater drophead coupé, The engine is a Lagonda straight-6, 2.9 L, providing the vehicle with 140hp and a top speed of 120mph [193km/h]. A DB2/4 Mk I drophead coupé featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.
The Aston shown here is one of the few to have survived in its original untouched condition. Most Aston connoisseurs argue that the vehicle should not be resprayed but left as it is. The engine has been rebuilt.
Having videoed our trip to the fête from the inside of the Aston, we stopped out front Bletsoe Church to allow Martin to blow a hole through the wall of his wallet and steal a fiver for the entrance fee.
This difficult operation accomplished, but not without some groaning and sighing, we pulled up at the entrance to the field where a young lady asked us, “Are you exhibiting?”
“We’re not,” replied brother Joss, “but he is (pointing to Martin]. He’s got no trousers on?”
The fact that we were exhibiting but still had to pay an entrance fee was a bit rich in my opinion, even if the money was going to a good cause — the vicar’s holiday in St Tropez. But I put it down to the mercenary sign of the times and quickly blamed it on Russia.
The man who took the fiver off us was not the girl on the gate, well who knows what gender anyone is in England nowadays? The fiver took, someone then told us that if we headed in that direction towards the field, someone’s wife will be there to show you where to park.
Another someone said, mention no names, “I bet she isn’t, she’s most likely behind the hedge in the arms of another man!” [That comment loses something in translation, but this is a family blog.] Anyway, there was no one there when we got there, or where we thought we ought to be, so we parked up and jumped out. Actually, we struggled out accompanied by lots of geriatric groans and ‘oo-ahhh!’ noises. Aston Martin DB2/4s are certainly young men’s cars.
We hadn’t been there more than five minutes rubbing Fiery Jack into our joints when three more young men arrived, all driving early 1960s’ Ford Zodiacs. I liked the model that starred in the old 60s’ TV series Z Cars. It was, reputedly, the first 100mph car on the road. That taught the crooks! It did, they all went out and got Jags. As for the pink-outside, pink-inside job (see photo), well what can you possibly say? The owner-driver had even taken the trouble to ensure that the 1960s’ music seemingly coming from the car’s original radio only played hits up to the time that the car was produced and no later.
Once the circulation had come back, we began to circulate. There were a number of stalls in the offing and the first we visited was one that was selling vintage clothes. Nothing they stocked caught my eye and the clothes that caught my brother’s also got caught around his stomach, so we had to pass.
Sitting next to the clothes stall was a man surrounded by treen (look it up!).
“Did you make it all yourself?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “I’ve always been good with my hands.”
The wife of the man whom he said would be there was nowhere to be seen.
Today would be a day when I would meet people that I had not seen for some time ~ those who thought of coronavirus have an awful lot to answer for. The problem was that they all seemed to be faces with no names. You know the situation: “Hello, how are you, er …”
“Yes, I’m alright. How are you, er …?”
“Are you still …?”
“Yes, I am. Are you?”
“To the best of my ability.”
“How’s your wife?”
“I haven’t got one, but I’ve got somebody else’s …”
Wherever was that car-parking woman?
“How’s yours …?”
“Mine’s all right, how’s yours …?”
“Well, its’ been nice speaking to you, er …?”
“You too, er …?”
Exit stage left.
“Who on Earth was that?”
Others, however, were indelibly impressed on my memory, and it was very good to see them. (Their names have been withheld in order to protect our senility.)
After I had had my Pims, Joss his coffee and Martin all the sandwiches, we took a photographic stroll around the pre-war and wartime vehicles. And what an outstanding collection there was! Among them I made a bittersweet discovery: the presence of a Daimler the precursor of the Lanchester.
My friend had a Lanchester. Back in the 1970s, we teenagers used to pub crawl in it. He sold it eventually for 70 quid, and all I’ve got left is the ashtray. If only he had known then what I knew then and never fail to mention every time I see him now.
My brother Joss is on a salad diet. He’s currently eating about 3cwt of lettuce a day, which is probably why he could not resist buying a big sticky chocolate fudge cake from the cheap produce stall. He also found some moisturising cream, which he said was orgasmic ~ I think he meant ‘organic’ ~ but we passed on that all the same, preferring to invest instead in the guarantee of a good dawn chorus — four cheap cans of Heinz Baked Beans.
It was now time for Martin to buy me a drink. He was heading for the ‘bar’ quite nonchalantly when someone mentioned that it was his round and into the grass went his hooves like a donkey. Martin’s wallet is such a hard nut to crack that even the Hatton Garden Mob would think twice before attempting it. Eventually, however, he did cough up, but the experience was so traumatic that he collapsed rigid and spluttering onto a bale. Either his wallet was in dire need of Anusol or perhaps he was clenching it safe between his cheeks.
We stayed where we were for the rest of the event, watching dugs catch biscuits. Joss’s diet had got to him so badly that he was down there on all fours hoping a biscuit might come his way. We told him he was barking.
The next garden fête on the list ~ not that we have got a list, you understand ~ Ha! Ha! just talking metaphorically, is Milton Ernest. Did you know that the famous American big band leader Glenn Miller was billeted at Milton Ernest for a while during the war? He took his last fateful flight from nearby Twinwood Airfield. Both he and his list of garden fêtes were never seen again.
25 June 2023 ~ Russia Big and Unpredictable You Cannot Help Love It
The Master of Understatement prompts me to comment that the past two days have been the most dramatic 48 hours in recent Russian history. Over here as distinct from over there, the first I heard about the ‘spat’ was when my brother tuned into the internet to check whether he could sue the Fat Busters company for having sold him an expensive tub of tablets that guaranteed to relieve him of 20 pounds in weight in a week but which so far had only succeeded in taking 20 pounds out of his wallet.
Russia Big and Unpredictable You Cannot Help Love It
I don’t have a television set, wouldn’t give one house room, literally, and although my brother has one, he uses it sporadically, as he finds the adverts disturbing (think about it), so, we glean our news mainly from the internet.
Some statements are obvious
On 24 June, I received an email from Olga with two video links to what she described as ‘a mutiny in Russia’. She wrote that she was with two friends watching President Putin’s address on TV to the nation. There was an uneasy irony in the parallel that she drew, the recollection that the last time that she had listened to such an address it had been in the company of the same friends back in the 1990s. She noted that then it had been a different president and that the speech was slightly different, and ended on the foreboding note, “Whatever awaits us next …?”
Whenever a big story breaks, I read news from around the world, preferring not to rely on corporate western media, and then after reading several news bulletins or articles on a specific topic, draw my own conclusions. I did note that the UK media was not crowing as much as one might expect. Had the ‘mutiny’ so-called been favourable to the West, it would have been a different matter, but it was obvious in the absence of champagne corks popping and from the general sense of restraint and reticence percolating throughout the media that a possible outcome to the Russian scenario was not one that they favoured. As I wrote to Olga in the second of several emails that day, for the West it really looks like a case of ‘Be careful what you wish for!’
On Saturday evening, we took a walk across the fields enroute to the local pub. It was a warm night. The sun was low in a clear sky, a burning orange ball, and, with no cloud of which to speak, from the high plateau on which we were situated, we were offered a magnificent sun-drenched view out over a rural landscape that coined the immortal lines, “England’s green and pleasant land.” Descending from the corn fields, we passed through a typical English village, replete with manor houses and cottages so old and established in time that they looked as though they had been planned by nature rather than built by the hand of man.
On the bend, just outside of the village, the local pub was a picture: thatched roof, traditional pub sign, neat and tidy gravelled car park, a small, grassed garden with tables to the front and to the rear a naturally undulating beer garden backing onto open fields.
Sitting there, sipping at our beers, as the sun went to rest and the lights from the pub came on, I became conscious of a surreal distance greater than distance itself between my experience in the here and now and that of my Russian friends.
I ruminated quietly over the emails that Olga and I had exchanged earlier this evening. I had read an article in the British press in which responding to someone asking if the UK government was urging all British citizens to leave Russia the reply was, we have been instructing British citizens to leave Russia since the outbreak of the troubles in Ukraine.
I wrote to Olga: “Did you know that the UK government has been advising British citizens to leave Russia? No one told me. Anyway, there’s no point in you celebrating. I shall still come back whatever the situation. I’m too old to let it bother me and, besides, it gives me something to write about.”
It was an odd feeling, most bizarre, but I felt as if by being in England I was missing out on history?
However, I knew that there would be at least one bright spark in the pub who given recent events would weigh in with: “Well, so what do you think about Russia now!” The reply I gave couldn’t have been more obvious: “I leave Russia for five minutes and look what happens!”
19 June 2023 ~ Reg gets his Wheel Nuts out at Sywell Aerodrome
If, like me, you have a sentient rapport with the first half of the twentieth century, in particular the 1920s to the 1940s, and Art Deco is a design style that you just can’t live without, then the Aviator Hotel in Northamptonshire is something not to be missed. It is called the Aviator as the hotel is conveniently situated on the perimeter of Sywell airfield. People who name things think of everything, don’t they?
All airfields in the UK have an interesting historical background and Sywell is no exception. It originated in 1927, when a local landowner let 55 acres of his land to the Northamptonshire Aero Club and was opened officially in 1928 by Air Marshall Sir Sefton Brancker. Throughout the 1920s Sywell went from strength to strength. By 1929 it had its own clubhouse and hangar and by the close of the decade it owned two Gipsy Moth aircraft and played host to 14 different types of aircraft. The first half of the 1930s saw a new clubhouse constructed at Sywell, now known as the Aviator Hotel, and the day-to-day running of the aerodrome pass into the hands of the Brooklands Flying School, known throughout the world today as Brooklands Aviation Ltd. In the second half of the 1930s, leading up to World War II, the airfield’s facilities expanded considerably to cater for a civil RAF training school, and another hangar was included as an RAF repair depot for Wellington Bombers. During the war, Sywell Aerodrome was shrouded in secrecy, as it was here where close on 100 Mark II Lancaster Bombers were built. Sywell Aerodrome escaped enemy bombing during the war thanks to its heavy camouflage.
Among the luminaries who have visited and/or played an officiating role at Sywell Aerodrome are Amy Johnson, Errol Flynn, Freda Jackson, HRH Queen Elizabeth and HRH Prince Phillip and, of course, me.
In 2019, Sywell Aerodrome received the AOA Best General Aviation Airfield in the UK award. Methinks that the Aviator Hotel should receive an award of its own.
Everything about the Aviator is right, in that everything hits the Art Deco spot, from its Art Deco modernist exterior, with its elevated aircraft feature, to the simple but stylish lobby, to the wood wall panelling, to the chevron parquet floor, to the style and effect of the lighting, to the deep low-slung cloud-iconic armchairs, to the historic photos displayed on the wall and the evocative aviation relics exhibited in its display cabinets.
If I wasn’t there to do it for him and Biggles was to stroll through the front entrance looking dashing in his leather flying helmet and white silk scarf and the well-healed flappers seated around the tables sipping at their cocktails and posing elegantly with their long, sleek cigarette holders were to fill the air with more than smoke, toying with such words as ‘divine’, ‘heavenly’ and ‘blissful’, you would hardly be surprised.
At the Aviator and at Sywell Aerodrome itself, there is plenty of divine and therefore plenty to be blissful about. The bar and restaurant speak for themselves, but sit out on the terrace on a warm, sunny day and gaze quiescently across the turfed back garden onto the perfectly mown lawns of the airfield and watch the helicopters and light private planes flitting about in the bright blue sky whilst you sip on the amber nectar. If you are lucky, you might be privy to the famous wartime Spitfire or any one of a dozen aircraft deserving of their classic status, since Sywell is a magnet to them.
The perfect events venue
It is its long history of aviation and the facilities at its disposal which makes Sywell the perfect venue for retro and vintage events. Sywell holds several air and vintage shows annually, some on a large scale, as well as being a favourite meeting place and dance venue for 1940s’ afficionados. In our hey-day, that is when we were running the vintage emporium, Olga and I attended several of these events, escaping from the 21st century if only for an evening.
On a scale not quite so expansive but none the less enduring, is Mr Reg B’s Wheel Nuts. Reg and his followers have been displaying their nuts, and the rest of their vehicles, on a slice of hard ground at the rear of Sywell Airfield, out front of the Sywell Aviation Museum (more about this in a later post), for as long as I can remember, which is actually seven years. Reg and his fellow Wheel Nuts are wed to, or at least have a long-standing love affair with, restoring, driving, displaying and treasuring vintage and classic motor vehicles.
Once a month, on the first Tuesday of the month, come rain, hail, snow or shine, (well, at least come shine), Mr Reg can be found officiating in his own inimitable style over the gathering of his Wheel Nuts. It is difficult to say which of the two are happier, the vehicles or their owners, as it is a nice day out for both parties. Anyone can roll up in their car and anyone can come and view, and it don’t cost you nowt. For, as long as I can recall, Reg has never knowingly, or even probably accidently, run anything for profit, although on those rare occasions when it does happen, we worry a lot about what went wrong.
In a previous life, the one in which we owned and ran an antiques and vintage emporium, Reg was my favoured partner in ‘crime’, my ‘wheel man’ ~ he was a ‘wheel man’ long before he became a Wheel Nut! This is another way of saying that on our many missions to assess items with a view to purchase, especially house-clearance missions, Reg wore the chauffeur’s hat; he also wore a sheepskin jacket which made him look like Del Boy’s stand-in. His other claim to fame was that he was excellent packer. He could cram things into a van as if he’d invented the Rubik Cube.
The last time I saw Reg, none of us had ever heard of coronavirus, so for this our first reunion in four and a half years, I wanted to surprise him. Reg knew that my brother and our friend Martin would be attending his latest car-club event, but he had no idea that I would sneak up on him, tap him on the shoulder and ask if he had a can of WD40 which I could use on my ‘squeaky wheelbarrow’ ~ a private joke that would take far too long to explain. Every cloud has a silver lining!
“Blimey,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised, “It’s Mick, from Russia!”
And it was all downhill from there.
I have to say, however, that unlike the first Wheel Nuts event that I attended seven years ago, today’s turnout was commendable ~ they must have known that I was coming. Whilst Reg and I talked bullshit, for old times’ sake (I wrote in my email later, “It’s amazing how much bullshit and banter two people can squeeze into forty-five minutes!”), my brother and our associate Martin were sworn in as deputy photograph-takers. Below is a collage of their snapshot skills and some of the wonderful Wheel Nut wagons displayed at Sywell this June.
Nice work, Reg. You always were a promising student!
6 June 2023 ~ Beldray at Kaliningrad Flea Market a Surprising Find
In a previous post (What makes Kaliningrad Flea Market a Junk-Buyer’s Paradise) I wrote about the inveterate and incorrigible habit of collecting: call it antiques, call it vintage, call it what you like, but once you get hooked on collecting stuff it’s hard to kick the habit.
It does not matter where in the world you are, if old stuff is what you are after, you will find it, and the wonderful thing about old stuff is that everyone’s got some somewhere. I’ve dug out old stuff, sometimes literally, from all over England and way beyond. Indeed, one of my favourite junk markets was located close to the centre of Odessa, and what a marvellous market it was ~ street upon street upon street of it, as far as the eye could see. All that stuff laid out on blankets, old sheets of cardboard and hastily erected trestle tables, shimmering like a mirage under the summer sun. Alas, something tells me that it will be a long time, bordering on never, before I return to that market again.
On my current sojourn in the UK, I have yet to attend a boot fair or an auction, but I am gearing up to do so should we ever see the back of winter in what some waggish statesman in Russian called this damp and dismal country.
Beldray at Kaliningrad Flea Market
When in Kaliningrad, if ever I need to feed my addiction for stuff, all I have to do is make for the city flea market. But because I always buy something, I often try to resist the jaunt. However, a few weeks before I left for the UK, I found myself yet again ogling up the stalls that line the side of the pavement, and this is what I found.
As soon as I clapped eyes on it, I knew, providing the price was not too extortionate, that I would be taking it home with me. I don’t smoke, but I do maintain a healthy interest in all kinds of smoking memorabilia, and what was special about this little beauty was that it was unmistakeably Art Noveau.
Made from copper, which in the first quarter of the 20th century was a popular material for artistic metalwares, the box’s salient Art Nouveau feature is the stylised flower, with its sinewy stalk and voluptuous detail presented in relief on the object’s front-facing side.
The unusual four, small, upturned feet that are hollow in the middle and resemble cups also contribute to the object’s organic form on which the Art Nouveau premise relies. Aesthetically conforming, they were most likely used as miniature ashtrays in which to stub out one’s spent cigarette.
The part-planished finish to the copper surface is by no means unusual for metalwares of this period, although research has it that it is unusual for Beldray, who were less inclined to resort to this technique than some of their competitors.
I like it, and I also like the exposed rivetted construction, which speaks to me of Arts & Crafts. The fact that the box has ‘Cigarettes’ scrolled across the lid, the relief wording framed within an incised cartouche of waisted form, has effectively taken the guesswork out of the object’s purpose, but even had it not been literally spelt out for us, the wooden lined interior would have provided the vital clue. Most cigarette boxes of this age have long since parted company with their fitted interiors, so the fact that this one is still intact is the cherry on the icing.
How much did I pay for it? Ah now, that would be telling.
Some things are bought for profit, others for pleasure. In this instance, the purchase of the cigarette box has nothing to do with the money but all to do with its past and the history it connects me to.
I am always interested in buying old stuff, whatever it is, both in Kaliningrad and the UK, so if you have anything you wish to sell on, are decluttering or need someone to clear a barn, an attic or property, please feel free to drop me a line at konigsbergmick@mail.com
