Published: 4 December 2021 ~ Please Look! A Weird UFO off the Baltic Coast!
Olga took this photograph last week on a very cold and snowy night on the Baltic Coast. “What is it?” we asked.
“It’s your wife!” my brother replied.
“I know,” I said, “but who’s that next to her, to the right of the photograph, on the right-hand side as you are looking at it?”
It could have been the Imp of the Flippant, but then again? Small settlements along the Baltic Coast are rich in folklore and teeming with legends about ghosts, ghouls and unexplained phenomenon, so believing everything that we read in the press, we put it to the test: we asked for second opinions from people in the UK on what the green-faced, bog-eyed monster might be.
“Oi, that’s no way to talk about your husband!”
To protect the not-so, never-were or never-could-be innocent, we have omitted the names of the respondents and replaced them with a brief description of ‘type’ in italicised text after each quote.
Responses to the question: What is it in the photograph?
“Whatever it is, it’s a different colour so you should be taking a knee” ~ a hairy-fairy quite contrary Wokist
“It looks to me as if it is an extra-large Covid particle specifically designed to lend some sense to the argument that wearing face masks can stop coronavirus” ~ a man with a three-week old face mask hanging below his chin
“I thought, ‘I’ve seen one of these before’. In fact, I had the distinct impression that I had seen thousands of them. And then it clicked! It was the rabid, barking, frothing, foaming at the mouth, hyperventilating pro-vaccination poltergeist, screaming get vaccinated now in order to save yourselves and the rest of society! If you don’t, I’ll murder yu!” ~ a man who has since received Facebook of the Year Award 2021
“I think you’re right! The last time I saw one of these they were carrying a placard with ‘Stop Brexit’ written across it!” ~ Mr Wagtale
“Leave it out! You know it’s me muvver in law!” ~ the last cockney geezer in London to know about white flight
“The green face symbolises the paranoid fringe to which vaccine-hesitant conspiracy theorists are driven via a self-inflicted disconnect from sane members of a beneficent social spectrum from which their psychosis has ostracised them due to a process which they are reluctant to confess is nobody else’s fault but the consequence of their own choice and actions and that blah, blah, blah, drone, drone, drone” ~ a pseudo-psychological nasty Nazi narcissist from the UK
“Well, I’ll be buggered, if it’s not George Sorryarse!” ~ A George Sorryarse spotter
“Well, I’ll be buggered, if it’s not George Sorryarse!” ~ George Sorryarse’s’ Reflection
“Well, I’ll be buggered” ~ someone (everyone) who believes that George Sorryarse is what western media says he is
“It’s such a bloody mess, it has to be the UK establishment’s plan to protect everyone from coronavirus” ~ the man who drew up the plan
“A pair of old fisherman’s underpants time travelling across the Curonian Lagoon” ~ a likely story
“It’s sexist! It’s racist! It’s an offence to gender neutrals! It’s Brexit! It’s a symbol of British Imperialism! It should be taking a knee! It’s homophobic! It’s anti-candle-lit vigil! It’s in violation of everything that Facebook cons us with! It’s inciting revisionist hatred! It’s inciting cancel-culture hatred! It’s everything I accuse others of, but which stares at me from my mirror! It’s liberal!” ~ a liberal
“It’s a red thing in a rectangle” ~ a recently graduated millennial-era student with a triple ‘A’ mark in all 45 subjects taken (which he did in a week, although his first language was Martian)
“I think its … “ {You have just been redirected to an article that tells you the truth about vaccination}
“It’s a vaccination passport with an inferiority complex who believes she has no friends” ~ the Dwarf from the North
“The last time I saw one of those I was working for The Guardian”~ an ‘it’ that is glad that ‘it’ no longer does
“What’s Green but got a satanic face?” ~ a Green Party MP
“Greenpeace 30 years on” ~ a pointless exercise
“You’ll never know the truth” ~ the UK media
“It could be a trick of the light?” ~ a world-leading virologist deplatformed for not towing the establishment line
“It’s the latest strain known as Sinoucret” ~ a WHO public health specialist with a developed sense of anagramism
“WHO?” ~ most likely
“WHAT FOR?” ~ don’t ask!
“WHERE?” ~ everywhere
“WHEN?” ~ never!
“Are you quite finished?” ~ No! Davos
[Answers supplied by an anonymous cohort of public health specialists and Big Pharma scientists handpicked by Establishment inc]
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 608 [2 November 2021]
Published: 2 November 2021~Old Tin Buckets & QR Codes
So I said to my wife, “No, I don’t think so. I’ve got better things to do this morning.”
But she looked so disappointed that I relented, saying, five minutes later, “OK, I will walk with you to the market.”
“You don’t have to, unless you want to,” she quickly said ~ a little too quickly for my liking.
I know when I’m not wanted.
I remember hearing my mother and father quarreling when I was about six months old, blaming each other, arguing about whose fault it was. I have no idea what they were arguing about, but when I got to the age of five I suspected something was wrong when I came home from school one day and found some sandwiches, a bottle of pop and a map to Katmandu in a travelling bag on the doorstep.
Never one to take a hint, I knew that my wife really wanted me to walk to the market with her today, so I swiftly replied, “Well, if you really want me to come with you, I will.”
Apart from knowing when I’m not wanted ~ it gets easier as you get older ~ I needed to buy myself a new atchkee. No, not ‘latch key’. Atchkee is the phonetic spelling for spectacles in Russian. Isn’t my Russian improving! I am a two-pairs spectacles man. I like to have one pair so that I can find the other.
This was a great excuse for being a nuisance, so I got ready, tried not to look at the cat, who always looks sour at us when he sees that we are leaving the house, and off we went, on foot, to the central market.
“Ee by gum,” I might say, if I was from Up North in England, “but it were a grand day.” Here we were at the end of October, underneath a bright blue sky and the sun right up there where it is supposed to be.
We stopped off for a coffee at the top of the Lower Pond, risked the public Portaloos and then made our way to the market from there.
Being Saturday, and good weather, the second-hand and collectables market was in full swing.
When it was our business to buy and sell, we always had an excuse to buy, now all we could say was, ‘we’ll just have a quick look’. And then leave an hour later barely able to carry what we had bought.
Today was no exception. That’s willpower for you!
During the course of not buying anything we got to talking to one of the market men, who was not wrapping something up for us because we hadn’t just bought it.
“Good thing about outside markets,” said I, no doubt saying something entirely different in Russian, such as “Would you like me to pay twice as much for that item that we really should not be buying?” It must have been something like this, because when I checked he had short-changed us.
That sorted, I continued: “Good thing about outside markets, you don’t need ‘Oo Er’ codes.”
“QR codes!” my wife corrected me impatiently, as she bought herself a pair of boots that she didn’t need.
“QR codes!” repeated the market man solemnly, with a sorry shake of his head. “It’s bad business and bad for business. You can’t go anywhere without them now.”
“Niet!” I agreed, looking all proud at myself for saying it in such a Russian-sounding way, which enabled him to sneak in with, “But if you do not have a QR code, there is another way of getting access to bars, shops and restaurants.”
My ears pricked up at this intelligence, or was it because someone walking by had laughed, as if they knew what I didn’t?
I was too intrigued to be diverted: “How is that?” I asked
“Tin buckets!” replied the market man, with stabilised conviction.
“Tin, er …?”
“Like this!” the market man infilled.
And there, in front of me, where it hadn’t been a moment ago, was this large tin bucket.
Old fort, old fart & a tin bucket (thanks to my brother for this caption)
As tin buckets go, it was quite the bobby dazzler.
It was one of those vintage enamel jobs; a pale, in fact, with a cream exterior and a trim around the rim.
“If you don’t yet have your QR code,” the market man continued to solemnise, “all you need is a tin bucket and, as you say in England, Fanny’s your uncle.”
Well, there is nothing LGBTQITOTHER about that, I had to admit.
“OK,” I said curiously, “I’m listening.”
There was Olga in the background, sticking to her non-purchasing guns, busily buying something else.
“That’s it really. Just say at the door, ‘I haven’t received my QR codes yet, but I do have a tin bucket’.”
I am telling you this just in case you are wondering why I have photos in this post of me walking around Kaliningrad with an old tin bucket. (That’s not a nice thing to say about your wife!)
The next stop was the city’s central market, where I bought a pair of specs, better to see my tin bucket with.
I needed to confirm that I really had bought that old tin bucket and that it wasn’t, after all, a figment of my stupidity.
“Ahh, you are British!” the spectacle seller exclaimed.
“No, English,” I corrected him. “Anyone and everyone can be ‘British’. All you need is to arrive illegally on a small boat, and a couple of months later they give you a piece of paper with ‘you’re British’ written on it.”
Now I had my new specs on, I could see that approximately 75 per cent of the market had been rendered inoperable. Many of the shutters were down, and I could read the ‘closed’ signs that were Sellotaped to them, stating that they would remain closed for the ‘non-working week’. If coronavirus turned up here in the next seven days, it would be sorely disappointed.
Spot the old bucket
Nevertheless, by the time we had exited the market at the end where the spanking brand-new shopping centre has been built, my bucket was getting heavier.
I put it down for a rest, on the pavement, directly outside of the new shopping centre entrance, thus giving myself a commanding view of the row upon row of plate-glass doors, behind which sat shops that still had nothing inside of them. Obviously, no chances were being taken. Should the thousands of square metres of space remain empty, the risk of non-mask wearers and QR fiddlers entering the building would be considerably reduced. In addition, the spanking shopping-centre was surrounded by a large impenetrable fence, creating a 20 metre no-go zone between itself and the pavement. A red-brick fortress had also been built just across the road, so that any attempt to cross the minefield between the pavement and shopping centre, if not thwarted by the mines and patrolling Alsatian dogs, would be repelled by a volley of arrows, or something closely resembling them, fired from the slits in the fortress wall. In particularly demanding circumstances, for example when everything in the shops that had nothing in them was half price, thus attracting the crowds, I would have thought that backup, in the form of mobile dart vans stationed close to the entrance, would be advisable. But who am I to say? Confucius say, “Man with tin bucket talks out of his elbow!” Confusion says, “Man with elbow talks out of his tin buttock.” (The last sentence is sponsored by The Cryptogram and Sudoku Society.)
A lesser person would have been intimidated by fantasies of this nature, but not I. I had a tin bucket and, in case I haven’t divulged this already, that same tin bucket contained a green leather jacket, which I did not buy from the second-hand market, and a jar of homemade horseradish sauce, which I had not bought from the city market.
Old Tin Buckets & QR Codes
The bucket was as heavy as my heart as we parked ourselves on one of the seats outside a once-often visited watering hole, Flame. We were waiting for a taxi.
We had not long been sitting there, when I began to develop a jealousy complex. Staring back at us from the large glass windows were our own reflections. What were they doing in the bar without QR codes? It was then that I noticed that my reflection had an old tin bucket with him. What a coincidence, it was not dissimilar to mine. I recalled the wisdom of the man on the market who had sold me the bucket; his tale about old tin buckets having parity with QR codes for gaining access to cafes and restaurants.
However, before I could put his advice to the test, our taxi arrived. We said farewell to our reflections and hopped inside the vehicle. Our taxi driver, who was a stickler for rules, did insist that our bucket wear a mask for the duration of the journey. Stout fellow!
Although the taxi driver never asked, I was unable to say whether or not we managed to gain access to anywhere using our tin bucket in case the authorities find out and proceed to confiscate every tin bucket in Christendom.
The taxi driver did want to know what we were going to use that old tin bucket for, but I was not about to divulge my secret to him.
Give me a week two and I will divulge it to you. Although there will be a small charge for the privilege.
You can ‘read all about it!’ ~ as they say ~ in Mick Hart’s Guide to Homemade Vaccines.
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 579 [14 October 2021]
Published: 14 October 2021 ~ A new QR code era in Kaliningrad
ON THE 9th OF OCTOBER, the day after the QR code restrictions hit Kaliningrad, Olga and I walked through the atmospheric autumnal streets of Königsberg and then whizzed off by bus across the other side of town on an errand.
Having alighted from public transport, we decided to stop for a coffee. If we had attempted to enter a café, restaurant or bar today, we would have had to produce a QR code, but because we were buying refreshments from a pavement kiosk, we were, at least for the moment, QR exempt.
Subliminally, the advertising gimmick had worked. I saw a giant cup and a cup of coffee I wanted.
As I waited for my brew, I could not resist contemplating what it must be like to go to work each day not in an office, school, fire station, police station, on a building site or in a city bar but inside a giant coffee cup ~ and an orange one at that!
Through the little glass windowed serving hatch it did not look as if there was an awful lot of room inside the cup, and I began to imagine some of the more expansive people whom I knew in the UK working there. I concluded that they would not be so much inside the cup as wearing it.
Joss, my brother, could live in it. I could see the place slowly converting before my eyes. It had a television arial on top, a satellite dish on the side and protruding from the roof a long metal chimney that was smoking like a volcano. Outside, there was a crate of empty beer bottles and a pair of old pants and socks, both with holes in them, hanging on a homemade line strung across the front of the cup, looking like last month’s tea towels.
If this coffee cup was for sale in London, it would be described by London estate agents as ‘a most desirable property’, well-appointed and almost offering commanding views over the road to the bus stop. You certainly would not get much change out of a million quid for it. Five miles outside of Dover, with a 5-star sign above it, the cup would be housing a boat load of migrants. Why Nigel Farage is gazing at it from a hilltop through his binoculars the British government will never know ~ and don’t want to! But this is hardly surprising, as Nigel has a reputation for waking up first and smelling the coffee!
With no one any the wiser as to whether we had a QR code, a bar code, a one-time code, a code that needed verifying or a code that was Top Secret, we took full advantage of our incognitoism by finding a spot in the autumnal sun in which to savour our brew.
Giant pavement-side coffee cups, even bright orange ones, do not as a rule run to tables outside, but just at the back of this one there happened to be an old, long, green Soviet bench, where one could drink one’s coffee whilst ruminating upon the good old days when the proletariat sitting here would have been comfortably unaware that the USSR when it folded would eventually be replaced with coronavirus QR codes. This long and sturdy bench also facilitated my admiration of the pretty and well-stocked flower bed and enabled me to keep an eye on the plums.
Plums! What plums? Whose plums were they? And how had these plums got there? They weren’t aloft growing on a tree these plums but scattered upon the ground. Someone, I conjectured, must have sworn bitterly, perhaps a bit stronger than blaher moohar, when the bottom of the bag that they had been carrying split, plummeting plums all over the paving slabs.
The who and the why of the plums, whilst inspiring at first, soon gave way to the far more exciting realisation that by observing people’s reactions to the plums, I could play the psychoanalyst and categorise them according to plum personalities. Of course, the way they approached and dealt with the plums would not help me to determine whether or not they were in full possession of their QR codes, were evading pricks or considering vaccination at any moment, possibly when they least expected it, but when all was said and done the experiment would be an interesting one, and, besides, I had a cup of coffee to drink.
Twenty sips or so into my coffee and a substantial cohort of pedestrians later, and I had been able to determine that there are basically four types of plum approachers.
1. Those that spotted the plums and walked around them, giving them a particularly wide berth. Any wider and they would have needed a visa, not to mention a coronavirus test or six, as they inadvertently crossed the Polish border.
2. Those who spotted the plums but carried on walking anyway, chatting casually to their companions as though they were no strangers to plums in public places, yet who picked their way through them gingerly as they would a minefield on their way to buying a Sunday newspaper.
3. Next came the sort of people that you would not want to walk across a minefield with, since, seemingly oblivious to their feet and where they were putting them, they inevitably stepped on one or two plums, immediately looking down in alarm at the squish beneath their shoes, no doubt fearing that the lack of fines for Fido’s indifferent owners had landed them in it yet again.
4. Finally, it was the turn of “I’ll give them plums on pavements!” This category was mostly comprised of manly men; you know the sort, either their arms don’t fit or they have gone and grown a beard, not knowing why they have done it and because, quite obviously, it certainly does not suit them, it was the last thing on Earth, next to deliberately stepping on plums, that they should have gone and done to themselves, unless it really was their intention to make themselves look like a bit of a dick.
This category saw the plums but chose to pay no heed to them. They juggernauted along as if plums grew on trees and these boots were made for walking. Unbeknown to them, however, plums can be slippery customers and more than once were the over-confident nearly sent arse overhead. They would step, squash, slip a little, look around really embarrassed, hoping no one had seen them, and then hurry on their way, leaving behind the priceless memory of a bright red face burning like a forest fire in a beard to which they were both ill suited, as well as a boot-imprinted trail of squishy-squashy plum juice.
So, what I had learnt from all this plum gazing? Not a lot. It had been a different way of occupying one’s mind whilst drinking a cup of coffee, although it had made me wish that I was 14 years’ old again, so that I could shout, “Watch out for the plums!” or simply “Plums!” But you can’t go around doing silly things like that when you are (ha! ha!) a ‘mature person’, especially not when you are in somebody else’s country. I bet Adolf Hitler never shouted “Plums!” when he was cruising about the streets of Paris. Boat migrants to England certainly don’t. They just shout, “Take me to your 5-star hotel and give me benefits!” And liberals, who always find something to shout about, would, on seeing the black shiny plums in their path, have been unable to resist the wokeness of going down on one knee whilst crying, “My white knees are in trousers, please forgive me, I am too privileged”.
Young boy: They ain’t plums! Me: I know. But I just wanted to show that in Kaliningrad at this time of year there are also a lot of horse-chestnut tree … Young boy: You put those there because you ain’t got any pictures of plums … Me: Why you cheeky little f …
I finished my coffee, wished the entertaining plums good day, and off we went to complete our errand.
On the way, on this second day of QR codes, giant cups and plums (plums, no less, my friends, which had fallen by the wayside), we overheard a lady at a bus stop complaining loudly to anyone who had a mind (or not) to listen.
It was quite evident by her excited, ruffled and animated manner that she had recently undergone a most traumatic experience. Apparently, she had ventured into a small café to buy some jam and was horrified to discover that not only were most of the people inside the shop not wearing masks but, as far as she could ascertain, none had been asked for their QR codes. “I shall report them! I shall report them!” she wailed, shouting so loud that had her mask been properly in place, which it wasn’t, it would have fallen from her nose, like plums from a wet paper bag, to end up uselessly wrapped around her chin. It was fortunate, therefore, that such a calamity could not occur, as that is where her mask was anyway ~ swaddled around her chin protecting it from coronavirus.
On completion of our errand (there has to be some mystery in this post somewhere!), whilst sitting on the bus with my mask strapped to my elbow, I drifted into contemplation of the feasibility of QR codes extended to encumber access to the city’s supermarkets.
I wondered: “Does it mean that if you do not want to get vaccinated you will have to buy your own shop?” And: “What is the going rate for one of those giant coffee cups?”
If it does happen, if they do impose QR code restrictions on shops, I can see some astute entrepreneur, some Russian equivalent to Del Boy, quickly cashing in on the act. It is not difficult to imagine a fleet of shops on wheels whipping about the city from one estate to another, selling everything from buckwheat to outsize, wooly, babushka-made socks.
Alternatively, we could convert our garage into a Cash & Cart-it Off. Our garage stands at the end of the garden, some distance from the road, but in these coronavirus-challenged times what once might have been regarded as a commercial disadvantage could potentially be transposed into a positive marketing ploy.
All that was needed would be to install large glass windows in the sides of the garage, stack shelves behind them full of sundry goods, position two telescopes on the side of the pavement, preferably coin operated so as to make a few extra kopeks and, Boris your uncle, Svetlana your aunt, you’re in business!
Potential buyers viewing our wares through the telescopes provided could place their orders by Arsebook messenger. On receipt of their orders we would select the goods, load them on the conveyor belt and ship them from store to roadside before you could say, who’s making millions out of the sales of coronavirus masks? What could be better than that? Accessible shops, you say?
Come to think of it, there are probably not a lot more inconvenient places than shops where QR codes could be implemented, except, of course, for public lavs.
Imagine getting jammed in the bog turnstile unable to get your mobile phone from your pocket to display your QR code whilst the call of Nature grows ever more shrill!
This situation, difficult though not insurmountable, would stretch both the imagination and the resources of even the brightest entrepreneur, who would be faced with the daunting prospect of rigging up some curious contraption or other, consisting of a series of pipes, funnels and retractable poes on sticks.
On a less grand but no less adventurous scale, my wife has suggested that we plough up the lawn at our dacha and use it for growing potatoes, which is not such a bad idea, as it would mean no longer having to mow the lawn. But would it mean that we would have to get a statutory dog that never stops barking as a deterrent to potato thieves and to ensure that our neighbours are completely deprived of peace? “What is the use of having a dog that don’t bark? An intelligent lady once said to us. Answer: about as much use as one that never stops barking! Or about as much use as a dog owner who allows its dog to incessantly bark.
Whilst a constant supply of beer and vodka would not be a problem as we could always convert our Soviet garage back to what it was obviously used for when it was first constructed, alas ploughed up lawns will not grow washing sponges or cultivate tins of baked beans. And the last thing that I would want, even if my potato patch was the best thing since Hungary stood up to bullying EU bureaucrats, was to own something so useless that all it does is shite on pavements and bark as if a potato thief has thrust a firework up its arse before leaving the garden with a sack on his back.
Of course, all things considered, it would be far easier and, perhaps, far wiser, certainly less embarrassing, just to go and get vaccinated. But if you do that, will you be tempted to go out every night to the city’s bars and restaurants, just to say that you can? And if so, can you or any of us for that matter, be 100% sure that, even after vaccination and thirty years of boosters, whichever vaccine it is and from wherever the vaccine comes from, will we, the little ordinary people, be guaranteed at some point, preferably sooner than later, a return to the life that we had before? Er, or any life, for that matter. >>‘This statement is false!!!! (See G Soros’ Fact Checker). You will now be redirected to the neoliberal globalist version, which is as honest as philanthropy and almost twice as honest as the EU parliament ~ which is not exactly difficult (Source: An Open Borders Publication}’<<
Plough a straight furrow or walk a taut tightrope, whichever path you choose to take, do ‘Watch out for those plums!’
