Getting yourself into a scrape by I Cicle
21 Feb 2026 – Snow in Kaliningrad: Great Shovels and Icicles!
Brrr! That’s something that we all understand in England. At 14 degrees above outside, it’s brrr in most English houses, not simply because we are not used to the cold, but from the shiver that passes down our spines and out through the toots of our toes when we have, in the last resort, to switch on the central heating: Better the shiver we know and must live with than the aaargh that comes with the gas bill.
Fortunately for the UK, however, whilst we really should open the coal mines and pile that lovely black stuff into our stoves and onto our fires without a thought of tomorrow, global warming has come to our rescue. Temperatures in England – not the ones that are rising under every true-born Englishman’s collar, owing to the government’s sponsored migrant invasion – are typically, if not perversely, generally low in summer (you’d think that would drive the blighters away, would you not?) but not so low in winter.
Passing over pointless places of which the UK is composed, and, focusing solely on the one and only UK country that counts, that being obviously England, we will state in connection with our winters that it’s just as well that things are as they are; for given the slightest touch of ice and the most meagre sprinkle of snow, the government and the media go immediately into national crisis overdrive – ‘Help, there is snow on the road!’ – when all we should be concerned about at any time of the year are migrants, muggers and terrorists and with signing up to reasonable campaigns such as banning the hoody from our streets along with the types that wear them. Not yet put your name to this? Then do so straightaway!
Snow in Kaliningrad: Great Shovels and Icicles!
It pleases me to confirm that in Kaliningrad this year, we have experienced, and are experiencing, what I would call a real winter. For several weeks at least, temperatures have been hovering between -9 and -14, dropping sometimes dramatically to -24.
There are certain sounds associated with real Kaliningrad winters, which are alien to their unreal England counterparts, and of this we can honestly say vice versa. For example, mild winters in England are apt to bring forth incredulous cries of, “What the f…?! I can’t believe this gas bill can be right! ”, whereas in Kaliningrad, and I imagine most everywhere else in Russia, when the temperature rises slightly, one is wont to hear, especially in one’s attic, a terrifying and mighty roar, like the tortured grate of metal on metal, which could easily be mistaken for the frightening din of Casey Jones’ train hurtling out of control down the MF of railway gradients (A conversation in Islington: “Mummy, who the [beep] is Casey Jones?” “Hush, now, dear, put out the light and try to go to sleep. Don’t read that terrible stuff; it is the workings of the fetid mind of one of those naughty men The Guardinistan calls a populist; besides, even with the help of daddy’s child support benefit and contributions from your many uncles, and with I working every hour that the tax god sends, we cannot pay the electric bill, so please don’t give me cause to wonder why I am blessed with being a mother, particularly at this stressful time, and put that light out, now!”), or, for those, like the child in Islington, who have never heard of Casey or his Cannonball Express or owned a pair of stoker’s gauntlets, a substantially different comparison, but one I am sure you will all agree lacks no less of the colourful, is that of the sandpaper sound emitted by a big fat woman hauled along on a sledge, albeit not very gracefully, over freshly gritted ice or across a piece of pavement where the snow has mischievously melted.
Thankfully, this ginormous roar emanates not from either one of these two most obvious sources or even, as might be supposed, from the jaws of a passing lion. They are broadcast by the peremptory movement of prodigious drifts of snow and underlying sheets of ice taking their leave from sloping rooftops. This is why, as you saunter around Kaliningrad, you will observe on many an apex roof protrusive wire frames put there for the strategic purpose of cunningly arresting the wanton and wayward slip of snow, the ultimate objective being to prevent its rapid downward motion so as to mitigate the risk of it plummeting onto your head and doing to you, as a result, without recourse to expletives, what your maiden aunt might coyly describe as ‘a right old mischief, make no mistake!’.
We desperately need something like this – wire frames, not aunties – positioned just a little below the surface of the water and preferably fitted with very sharp spikes, invisibly laid length and breadth across the English Channel. Apart from the entertainment value accruing from the implementation of such a delightful and curious contraption, it would, methinks, provide some budding entrepreneur with the opportunity of making a killing (language of the stock market) on the crowded shores of France, before the inevitable killings are made (language on the streets) in England, by selling to the former country’s lucrative and ever-expanding inflatable dinghy industry thousands of puncture repair outfits, which much of Britain would surely sponsor, as the last thing that its people want is to stop the boats rolling in and prove Elon Musk’s predictions wrong that in them, along with the migrants, a civil war is coming.
The other tell-tale sound of winter heard with fascinating regularity in the attic of your former Königsberg house is the one that goes scrape, scrape, scrape, wafting upwards in the chill of the night from the snow-challenged ground below. This is the winter serenade of many plastic-bladed snow shovels, wielded by men in thick woolly hats, shovelling snow off paths, both in private gardens and on public streets, as though should their husbands fail to do it when they are expected to, then their wives might form the opinion that there is something seasonally wrong with them.
Snow in Kaliningrad is a shoveller’s paradise
Shovelling snow in Kaliningrad is rather more than just a must-do occupation during the winter months; it is, most vitally, when push comes to shove, an intensely competitive sport intended to determine who can do it more frequently and with the most success.
Hailing from a country that is largely less white than it should be, by which, of course, I mean snowless England, where all you have to do is sneeze from any part of the body and the little snow that there is gets blown away, I confess that I am not, by culture and also by lack of experience, particularly good at shovelling, and being rather competitive, or so I have been told and more often than not accused, I tend to subscribe to the mantra of letting sleeping snow lie, preferring rather to trudge across it, even should it cover my knees, than spend a proverbial month of Sundays digging away at snowdrifts as if they never have any intention of disappearing on their own accord.
However, like so many things in life, once bitten, forever smitten. Public Health Warning: Shovelling snow can prove addictive!
A word to the wise, therefore! Before you take to your shovel, it is as well to glance at the nearest rooftop to ascertain the amount of snow and estimate its adherence, prefacing this wise precaution with yet another you may not have thought of, which is that before you start to wield your shovel, stick a tin helmet on your head, or alternatively a Russian castroola (that’s saucepan in your lingo). Once you get beyond the question, “What am I doing this shovelling for?”, which is quickly followed by “Is it necessary?”, and which runs to the conclusion that “I suppose I must. I’ve bought a snow shovel”, you really can get into it, both the saucepan and the shovelling; and, after a while, its all systems go and, dare I say it, really quite fun.
Snow in Kaliningrad paves the way for new experiences
I find that the pleasure of shovelling snow is intensified considerably if, by using the imagination that God saw fit to give you, you trundle forcefully through the snow, making a brr, brr, brr sound as you go. Since it is so cold, so very cold, at -24, you will probably find these sounds occur in the absence of conscious effort, but rattling teeth and knocking knees, though they add tremendously to the experience, are never nearly quite so satisfying as going ‘brr, brr, brr’, when the object of the exercise is to pretend you are a snow plough cutting along the highways and byways in blizzard-blown Siberia.
Adopting this clever fantasy (clever because it stops you asking, ‘What am I doing this for?’) inspired the efforts of a certain man, who uncannily looked a little like me, to such a devoted extent that he found it hard to stop, which in hindsight was rather unfortunate, because having shovelled a surfeit of snow from the pavement outside on the street, quite by accident or malevolent fate, overnight the temperature rose, causing some of the snow to melt and that which was travelling down to earth from an inconsiderate universe to turn whilst on its long descent partially into icy water before coming to rest on terra firma, thus threatening to transform his (this man who looked a little like me) nice, neat, snow-clean path into a local skating rink.
This unforeseen development had the effect of persuading me, I thought not injudiciously, to desist from looking out of the window through which the altruist’s handy work was so demonstrably evident. There were other windows that one could look out of without incurring a sense of guilt, advocating remorse or entertaining rum predictions of unspeakable turns of events, but possibly not with so much success of not inviting jealousy, as from the window I had chosen I could only admire and gasp out loud at how big the neighbour’s had become. Sagely, I said to myself, against the lamentable backdrop of someone vigorously shovelling, ‘Should Kaliningrad hold a competition to see whose is the biggest, it would have to be our neighbour’s.’ I mean, just look at the size of that one! What a beauty! What a monster! What a magnificent icicle to behold!
It saddened me to think that when soon the shovelling shall be heard no more, this prize-winning shard of ice will melt and shrivel away no different to us and to nothing, and all that will be left of winter, as with every seasonal change in life, will be an echo of the past, marked by the eerie silence of redundant snowmen’s shovels, since disbanded in garden sheds, their handles and blades covered in cobwebs, and in their forced retirement singing, humming and sighing gently of shovelling feats and duty done.
But take heart, those that do, compared to those that don’t or rather petulantly won’t! Spring is not as distant as the snow would have you believe. No sooner will your magic shovels be sadly stashed away than the long green grass will rise on your lawns, over which you will feel the duty-bound need to wave and waggle your strimmers.
And to think that there are philosophers out there who waste their entire existence deliberating and discoursing on the purpose and meaning of life. Give them a shovel, I say, and put them to something needfully useful!
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