Mick Hart’s 2025: a nostalgic review in photographs
30 January 2026 – 2025 that was the year that was: UK and Kaliningrad
As the photographs immediately below illustrate, Kaliningrad has been and is experiencing a real winter this year. Snow fell on cue, a week or so before the New Year celebrations, and its festive debut at this time was very much appreciated. Three weeks into the New Year, however, and like that ‘long time, no see’ distant relative, who, out of the goodness of your foolish heart, you invited to stay for the Yuletide season, snow, ice and formidable temperatures hovering somewhere between minus ten and minus 14 are beginning to overstay their welcome.
With spring and summer still out of sight, one way of looking forward to more hospitable climes is to look backwards. Hiding in the house is, I think, a lot less disagreeable than struggling into heavy boots, thermal coats, hats and gloves and braving the great outdoors. If I wanted to be a snowman, I would never defrost my heart. Moreover, shutting the door on the outside world provides the excuse and opportunity for stepping inside your computer and doing a bit of digital spring cleaning ahead of the leaves and buds returning to the trees.
I don’t know about you, although I’ve heard what others say, but both my smartarse phone and laptop are like pictures at an exhibition after a hurricane has gatecrashed.
In days of old our forebears seemed to have been smitten by the optical difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees; today, in snappy la-la land, the wood has become the photograph and the trees a forest of images forever growing more expansive across the finite landscape of digital storage.
Like you, I can think of better things to do whilst whiling away my time indoors, but computers and digital storage systems, like overburdened, unkempt woodland, need to be attended to, lovingly tidied up and judiciously pruned back.
The estate managers among you will appreciate what I say, when I do say that there’s a lot to be said for ridding oneself of dead wood (not to mention fallen trees), for rolling up one’s sleeves and trousers, and with knotted hanky on your head in lieu of the summer to come, buckling down to some good old-fashioned lopping, chopping and admin work.
In practising what I preach, whilst waiting for the snow to melt, I have sifted, sorted, catalogued, carefully reassigned and refiled chronologically a prodigious number of scattered images; a making-me-smug endeavour, enabling me to extrapolate those which feature in this post; images which, in my opinion, open a retrospective window on the nature of my personal world in 2025.
2025 that was the year that was: UK and Kaliningrad
As you can see, January 2025 in Kaliningrad was not much different than January 2026, except that in 2026 the temperatures have been hovering around minus 8 degrees and minus 14 degrees. It was not quite that cold back in 2025. At least not cold enough to prevent one from indulging in the fully explainable practice of falling backwards into the snow. Something for you to try sometime. And no, that’s not me dressed as a woman.
As spring approached in 2025, we took the opportunity to indulge our philosophical/mythological side by visiting Ponart Brewery’s Creation of the World Exhibition, after which, with no excuse intended, we side-stepped into the Art Depot Bar , which is part and parcel of the Ponart Brewery complex. Here, you can enjoy the historical ambience of one of the brewery’s original beer cellars and have your beer delivered to you in the trucks of a model train.
Back in the UK, my Gothic alter image was inspired by a susceptible reaction to the living and studying conditions in which, I am grateful to say, I entrancingly immersed myself:
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …” – Edgar Allan Poe
Such volumes of ‘forgotten lore’ were indeed forthcoming, complete with ink inscriptions, naming the person or persons to whom each book belonged, those who had lived out their mortal sentence in the early 20th, late 19th and even 18th centuries.
It was still officially or unofficially winter, and though not so excessively cold that it could hold a candle to Kaliningrad’s temperatures, the UK’s outrageously high utility costs made, and continue to make, candle-burning the second option to staying in bed until spring – which is not that far away; just a couple of paragraphs down.
The only way to keep warm in Britain in these troubled times is to rail at those wrongly elected who have all but destroyed our homeland, some by incompetence, some by design, but all by disavowal of the suicidal part they have played in orchestrating the migrant invasion.
Into spring we go, where it’s time once again to dust off one’s antiques. In the early 20th century, a celebrated chat-up line, at least on the stage of the music hall, was, “Would you like to come home and see my etchings?” but in the twilight years of one’s spent youth, or in my case misspent youth, “Would you like to come home and help me to polish my antiques?” seems somehow more appropriate, if admittedly rather tawdry when paired with the grace of early spring.
With the buds returning to the trees and it being warm enough to escape the inclement weather of one’s sparsely heated house, it was away we went to conduct business of a sort that I wont bore you with, stopping off on one’s return at the atmospheric Brampton Mill.
At the curiously named ‘The Hill’, a public house in Wollaston, where they serve, I don’t mind saying, a fine and revolving array of ales, the night scene outside the pub was hauntingly English Gothic. Yet, nearby Rushden by night is infinitely more unnerving; come to think of it, not only by night. Take a drive down Rushden High Street (prudently with your doors and windows locked!) and let me know what you think. The theme of Gothicism and antiques persisted as long as spring existed and followed us into the warmth of summer.
Summer (Ah, sun and warmth – sometimes …) saw us set sail in 2025 on a monumental, intriguing and adventurous voyage of discovery to Cornwall and North Devon, calling on the way, and whilst we tarried there, at, among other places, Tintagel, Port Isaac (Portwenn of Doc Martin fame), Boscastle, Padstow, and, following in the footsteps of her much-devoted fans, the Agatha Christie trail; taking in the Art Deco and earlier historic wonders of Burgh Island and then onto Christie’s adored 18th-century summer home, the reclusive-seclusive Greenway House.
2025 that was the year that was: UK and Kaliningrad
Summer in Kaliningrad found me undertaking grossly inadvisable experiments of a selfie kind, as seen here in the photo, which was snapped out front of Kaliningrad’s vast and intricate Baroque fantasy, the multiple entertainment and bar complex, Residence of Kings. Like the historic Blue Anchor in London’s Southwark, bars sufficient there are inside this gargantuan establishment not to venture outside if a ‘pub crawl’ is what you’re after.
On a return trip to the Art Depot Bar (Ponart Brewery), Olga and I went bananas. Let me rephrase that: on this occasion, she elected to join me. We also did a spot of amber dredging along the Baltic beach and shabby-chiced the entrance hall to arty-fart the dacha. Later, we solicited the assistance of real artists to illustrate the outside paint job.
Arguably the best month of the year for me – the glorious and sadly soft transition from extraversion to mellow introspectiveness. Having said that, the famous Königsberg monument depicted below, as captured in September, is not bull-orientated, so you haven’t discovered a worthy joke there. Neither will it assist you should your first name be Bill and your last name Cody. The famous bronze creatures locking horns on Prospekt Mira, opposite the Regional Scientific Library, are, in fact, Bisons, sculpted by August Gaul in 1910 and valued as well as intrinsically for having survived the city’s destruction at the close of World War II.
The chap standing there with an anchor in his hand and pointing at me as if he is trying to tell me something is, as if you didn’t know, the one and only Peter the Great.
Mick ‘the very rarely even close to great’ polishes his tree-hugging skills, which he does in one of the photographs here, to a very grateful tree, which has very little else to do but stand the test of time on a hilltop deep in the North Beds countryside. Staying with the Bedford theme, there’s also a picture above of the state-of-the-art Gothic revivalist De Parry’s Avenue D’Parry’s hotel, framed within the gathering hues of autumn’s transitionary season.
Coincident with the autumn school term, when, presumably, there would be less family convergence on Poland’s Sopot resort, we stole away for a five-day break. This was my second visit to Sopot, in which I discovered architectural gems Art Nouveau in nature and, wouldn’t you just know it, gems of a different but not indifferent kind to a man of my discernment: ‘Bar, Bar, Black Sheep’. For some people it was sea and sand, and how does that expression go, ‘like a kid in a sweet shop’.
This time of year also found Mick Hart giving an impromptu address to Kaliningrad’s lucky ProSchool students.
Late November ushers in, with a defining sublimity that never grows old, the dying shades of verdure, taking a last, impressive bow before, come the final encore, they leave the seasonal stage, handing over the act to winter. There are more deep, dense, poetically invocative and graduated praiseworthy colours in a typical autumnal scene than you and I could shake a stick at, and as November plays itself out, less on high upon the sticks than are woven at ground level into a semblant natural Axminster, the wonderful reams of golden yellows, astonishments of auburns and the artists’ palettes of burnished browns waft us gently away on a seasonal magic carpet into the swan-song realm of Christmas and its boisterous prelude to the end of the year.
What goes around comes around, and here we are, back again in winter.
Kaliningrad’s Svetlogorsk, its premiere Baltic resort, which, in summer, is a hubble bubble of touristic jostling bustle, with streets teeming, beaches embattled and popular bars and restaurants bursting at the seams, is, in the earliest throes of winter, an altogether different, essentially meaning quieter, place; for, as many of you likely know, out-of-season resorts, when experienced as a solitary cloud might enjoy its singular company, are like the recuperative restoration, the danger past in the aftermath, that follows in the wake of a raging distemper akin to flu.
Thank Heaven! the crisis
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last – Edgar Allan Poe
Aw, come on, Edgar, old mate, I’m with you totally on this kind of sentiment in its relation to mortal existence, but it’s a bit strong in this context, isn’t it!
Excuse him, if you will; he’s rather given over, you know, to lifelong fits of self-indulgence in the addictive vagaries of bleak melancholia. Let’s merely fall back on words and phrases that do to seasides out of season no conventional harm, such as ‘deserted’, ‘quiet’ and ‘reflectively peaceful’.
One thing that covers all seasons, and has been for me for the past 54 years, is the daily writing of a diary. Not content, however, by exhausting the present with thoughts of the past, in 2025, I stepped up the arduous process of scanning in, and thus digitally converting, 40 years of handwritten copy. Bless him, that’s what I say! It keeps him out of mischief – “And not before time!” say those who know him!
Copyright © 2018-2026 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.
Image attribution⬇️
Hello Spring: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/fancy-lines-dots-hello-spring-lettering_6992212.htm/#fromView=search&page=1&position=16&uuid=42aab2a9-9c0f-4fa6-83d7-c57dc3e4d659&query=spring+antique+typographic+image”">Image by freepik</a>
Hello Summer: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/summer-background-design_1084447.htm/#fromView=search&page=1&position=42&uuid=e75660f9-e7ca-4ad9-b222-fcc3664d6f3d&query=Hello+Summer+antique+typographic+image”">Image by mariia_fr on Freepik</a>
Hello Autumn: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/elegant-hello-autumn-lettering-composition_2659814.htm/#fromView=search&page=1&position=16&uuid=781c1b5d-05f1-46f2-8e85-c0dbe722dc9d&query=Autumn+antique+typographic+image”">Image by freepik</a>
Hello Winter: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/hello-winter-lettering-with-leaves_10612573.htm/#fromView=search&page=1&position=39&uuid=056e05c8-7285-4de1-b3c5-3cdbeaee5a94&query=Hello+winter+antique+typography”">Image by freepik</a>
Book with glasses: <a href="/ru/”https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/top-view-book-flower-glasses_4881633.htm”/">Image by freepik</a>