Published: 16 November 2022 ~ How to blog when you are not
Not seen nor heard of since the last time I was seen and heard of, people have no idea why they are asking where is he, when, by all that was two and thruppence, I should be posting things to this blog. After all, you don’t buy a blog and bark yourself.
People are saying things and jumping to confusions:
Ms Nosepoke: “He hasn’t posted anything since 18th October. If you ask me, he’s up to no good.”
Ms Nogood: “What are you suggesting?!”
Ms Knowsitall: “What the eye don’t see …”
“More tea vicar?”
And then there are the rumours; the dark and sinister rumours:
He turned gay and joined the BBC. He got himself a job with The Guardian as Chief Wokesperson. He won the lottery and bought himself a beach hut in Brightlingsea (aah, how he remembers Lynn and that hot summer of 76!).
The media says (so it can’t be true) that the sanctions worked (we know it’s not true!). They forced his return to Devil’s Island, where he is currently doing penance. Each time he goes to the supermarket, he carries with him an old lady’s shopping bag and solemnly swears at checkout, “No, don’t give me a carrier bag; the UK is saving the planet’, even whilst its government, ignoring the needs of the NHS, continues to ship thousands of tons of ozone-depleting munitions to far-away lands at a time when the country’s cost of living and inversely its standard of living are exploding and imploding respectively as if every day is November 5th.
He’s in the UK, there’s no doubt about that! Someone who knows him, saw him. He has cunningly disguised himself as Lord Lucan. He was spotted in a Paki shop in Peterborough buying some UHU to hold his moustache in place and an overcoat to wear in bed! “Such selfishness! He always was a selfish man; a man of toxic masculine aspirations!” (previous mother in law, twice rejected) “And his poor, poor, neglected greenhouse tomatoes, what’s left of them, shivering in that conservatory with ho heater to call their own, recalling at their tormented leisure the chilly and chilling maxim, ‘politicians in glass Number 10s should never throw stones or tantrums !” Poor Liz Truss, she never got the chance. No sooner on the inside than on the out, she was not in the glass house long enough to do any permanent damage: Smash! And now what has become of her? And what has become of the blogger?
We will accept a reward
His family, who are extremely concerned that he might come home, are offering a substantial reward, payable to them, from anyone who has any information pertaining to his whereabouts and who hasn’t got the decency to keep it to themselves.
Retired police officer Superintendent Clampit, from the City of Armston, warns that anyone discovered not to be withholding vital information about his whathaveyous will be subject to the full and most serious rigours that the law can implement, and, on conviction, which will never happen as the police are far too busy arresting people for allergic reactions to Liberal (I heard it on the Grapevine) Jeremy, could face five years in Vine Street Prison or be sentenced to a lifetime’s subscription to The Guardian, whichever of the two is perceived to be the most terrible, vile and odious.
Lifetime friend, Professor Toalbucket, who met him yesterday, but don’t know where, don’t know when, had this to say: “It’s all so peculiar!” And after a moment’s reflection: “It don’t make sense!”
How to blog without heating
The missing blogger’s neighbour saw him in the garden once. He was going back into the house. This did not stop him wondering, however, why a man who to all intents and purposes was a born-again extrovert but hardly ever went out was where he was when he should have been blogging. His neighbour had an awful lot to say on the subject but, being Russian, he would keep talking in his own language in spite of attempts by trillionaire string pullers of western-leaders to cancel Russian culture. Since sanctioned, he no longer has access to things that he never knew he had and didn’t need, but he knows that he has a lot of gas and he’ll use it to heat his house this winter.
One theory is that the blogger has stopped posting because he hasn’t posted anything recently; another that he might have posted in invisible ink; and yet another ~ conceding that the previous two are as silly as a country that fills its hotels with thousands of migrants at a cost of millions each day (Are you a politician or a politician’s friend who owns or has a stake in a string of British hotels?!) ~ that he may in fact still be posting but posting surreptitiously using a false identity and assumed name.
Someone, someone who makes money out of things that have no relevance to the real world, has suggested that he could be posting in an esoteric way, such as posting somewhere in a parallel universe or at an earlier time in his life, when, for example, he was at school, in those inconceivably terrible days before internet and arsephones.
Chrystal Bollocks, YouTube’s Number One snake-oil salesperson, called upon her disciples, the gullible and emotionally vulnerable, to tune into her latest meditative video, and there, amongst the postsynch sounds of tinkling tubes, tiny bells and dubbed-on heavenly choirs, in a husky half-monotone whisper (barely audible above the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs) she pulled the answer to this and to everything else in the Uniperverse, as if it was rabbit pure and simple, out of her magician’s hat. We are so lucky, don’t you think, that we live in an age where, without recourse to qualifications, nuisance of track record or the inconvenience of credible reason, we are blessed with so many experts.
Whether it is better to be trapped inside the mind of some meditating monk or stuck in Dr Who’s wardrobe with a gaggle of prissy old BBC wokists, it is widely believed, from one end of Hackney to the other, that he will just turn up like a bad Rupee. Some say that he should have stuck to the straight and narrow; others that he did, but it sent him round the bend and then, with the full complicity of the French Government, across the Channel to Blighty.
The Dover Port Police, acting on information received by George Sorryarse, have already launched several more boats to ferry migrants freely across the Channel. At the same time, they are conducting a dinghy-by-dinghy search.
Should, during the course of this extensive operation, it be discovered that he has concealed himself among the deserving illegals, make no mistake, said a Labour MP, we shall turf him out.
“We simply won’t tolerate English people wanting to live in their own country!” said a spokesvestite from the Home Office. (Patriots live in hope that one day they will rename this department the Go Home Office and that once renamed it will at last succeed in performing the vital function for which British taxpayers’ money funds it, namely to ‘send the buggers back home!’. Anything less than this should immediately see the department renamed in the spirit by which it is highly regarded, in other words the Home Orifice.)
“Bugger!” his kindly uncle retorted, inspired to do so by some word or other he’d see in print recently: “He wouldn’t come looking for me so why should I go looking for him!”
Asked to comment on his whereabouts, all his old university tutor was willing to say was (He had a wry smile upon his face when he said it): “One can only hope that he doesn’t end up like his favourite author, Edgar Allan Poe, paralytic, face down in the gutter, garbed in somebody else’s clothes … mind you, if my memory serves me right, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
Someone with his mind so thoroughly grounded in the mundane and his logic so infused with and underwritten by commonsense that it couldn’t possibly do him any good had the impertinence to suggest that his whereabouts is Kaliningrad, and that, having recently returned from a sojourn in his native country, England, he is preoccupied with solving the question ‘Is Bedford UK Worth Visiting?’ And that once he has answered this question to the accord and dictates of his own satisfaction, he will post his response forthwith. Even bloggers take holidays, this venerable person ventured.
He was immediately slammed a conspiracy theorist and has had his culture cancelled!
I was sitting in the office of our antique shop. It was a bright, sunny afternoon one Saturday in June. A couple whom we knew as being members of the 1940s’ crowd had just parked their 1935 vehicle on the small forecourt out front. I greeted them as they entered the shop, and they said to me, in a disappointed tone, “We have just heard that the shop is closing; that you are selling up and moving.”
I replied in the affirmative.
After saying how much they would miss the shop and us (which was nice of them), they enquired where I was moving to. Over the past six months I had become an expert at answering this question. Turning away to place an advertisement on the shop’s ad board, I casually replied, “Russia.”
Nine times out of ten, on hearing this, the astounded party would cry: “Russia!”. And some even fell back a few paces, as if thrown from the bombshell I had just dropped.
On this occasion I was deprived of my fun, as the people concerned turned out to be the one in ten: they expressed no astonishment on learning that I was planning to leave ‘our wonderful democracy’, in fact they empathised with me, sounding envious that I was ‘getting out whilst I can’, and saying “we don’t blame you” and “we would like to do the same.”
Mick Hart & Olga Hart in the Vintage & Antiques Emporium
But I did not decide to leave the UK and give up the country where I was born and everything I had ever known simply because it would furnish me with a first-class opportunity to laugh at the way the UK media brainwashes people.
It is true that my wife is Russian, and some people when apprised of this fact took it for granted that this is why I wanted to move to Russia, the logic being that had my wife been Martian I would want to move to Mars or, even more irrational, had my wife come from Wisbech I would want to move to the Fens. She hadn’t, and I didn’t, and I wouldn’t. Would you?
There was, of course, a bit more to it than that.
Moving to Russia from the UK
My wife, Olga, moved to England in 2001. In Russia she had been a qualified teacher of English with 10 years’ teaching experience, but as we know, or are led to believe, educational standards in the UK are far superior than those in any other country, so her qualifications and teaching experience was immediately rendered null and void.
Being a worker not a shirker, within two days of arriving in England, Olga set out to find gainful employment, no matter what it was, and after a couple of weeks managed to obtain the envious position of waitress at d’Parys Hotel in Bedford. Not bad, we thought: from qualified teacher with 10 years’ experience to table servant in two weeks: Welcome to the UK!
Nevertheless, it was a job — a thankless job. No sooner had she started than she fell foul of a bossy young lady with a rank inferiority complex and seriously challenged people skills, whom I would eventually christen ‘Fat Arse’ ~ for reasons that would be quite apparent to you had you been acquainted with her ~ and by extension (heaven forbid!) d’Parys then became known to us and our close circle of friends as DeFatties.
Incidentally, this rebranding of the hotel almost caught us out when my seven-year-old stepson, who liked to be taken to d’Parys for chicken nuggets and chips, blurted out one Sunday afternoon, “I like it here in DeFatties!!”
“DeFatties?” asked Olga’s bemused manager.
“Er yes,”I quickly replied, “Daniel calls it that because I always say that we are off to d’Parys for chicken nuggets and fatty fries, instead of saying chips, and although he’s doing well with his English, he does tend to confuse his words a little.”
But I digress.
During this period of her induction into the side of British life which immigrants rarely anticipate, Olga did manage to find temporary work with an agency that needed tutors with foreign language skills to act as a guide and mentor for overseas students. She juggled both jobs and eventually migrated her waitress skills to what was then d’Parys’ sister enterprise, The Embankment Hotel in Bedford.
The Embankment Hotel, Bedford, UK (December 2019)
Whilst labouring here, in addition to working towards her UK Citizenship ‘exams’, she was also studying for a postgraduate degree at Luton University, and in the meantime landed her first education post in the UK as an advisory teacher for EMASS (Ethnic Minority Achievement Support Service).
This meant that she would have to give up her job in the hotel trade, an outcome which my stepson Daniel heartily disapproved of. His mother becoming a ‘teacher’ was a definite step down from hotel waitressing, with its chicken nuggets, fatty fries and often free ice cream.
Although the EMASS job was a demanding one, Olga enjoyed it. As she said later, she felt as if she was actually doing some good and although it was not that well paid, most importantly, she liked the staff and got on well with her boss.
It was about this time, as Olga passed her QTS (Qualified Teaching Status) exams, that I asked her, whilst she still had chance to change her mind, was being a full-time teacher really what she wanted? I had visited a couple of schools in Kaliningrad, Russia: once to collect Daniel from primary school and, on another occasion, to pick up some documents from the Russian equivalent of a UK comprehensive. On both visits I had been struck by how well behaved and polite the children and students were and how attentive and orderly they were in class compared to their British counterparts.
I was not without experience of what British schools were like. I had a near brush with school culture when I left university. Not having the faintest idea of what I wanted to do in life, I fell prey to what in those days was standard career’s advice, which was to dragoon you into teaching. Reluctantly, I went through the motions, which included three-days’ ‘teaching observation’ at a school of one’s choice ~ I chose The Ferrers School, in Higham Ferrers, Northants*.
This brief introduction was enough to convince me that by not pursuing it further I would escape a career worse than death, and that, remember, was back in the 80s, when although British schools and life in Britain generally was all going terribly wrong at least it had not gone so utterly wrong as to be irredeemable.
But, in spite of all my remonstrations to the opposite, Olga ignored my pleas, held her course and set sail into the Poe-like maelstrom of UK education, reasoning that this was her job, this is what she had been trained for and this is what she wanted to do. Besides, she enjoyed teaching and enjoyed being a teacher.
Illustration for Edgar Allan Poes’ A Descent into the Maelstrom by Harry Clarke (Attribution: Harry Clarke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Soon after qualifying she landed a job at the now no-longer-in-existence Harrowden Middle School, Bedford, and soon after that she stopped enjoying teaching and stopped enjoying being a teacher. This was the UK: being a teacher in the UK was nothing like being a teacher back home in her native country, Russia.
There are so many accounts that I could narrate to you about my wife’s experiences as a teacher in the UK, but I will leave that for a later post. Suffice it to say, it was every bit as bad as I had described it and worse, and it was no coincidence that the first school at which she worked, Harrowden, soon earnt itself the sobriquet of ‘Harrowing’.
If you are familiar to any degree with the UK education system you will not consider it to radical of me to say that UK schools and universities are little more than political indoctrination factories. The educational equivalent of ‘from the cradle to the grave’, but in this instance from primary school to university, the principal function of the education system is to inculcate, without fear of question or second thought, the dubious doctrines of so-called liberal progressiveness, particularly with regard to socially engineered and politically correct enforced multiculturalism and, in more recent years, gender engineering.
This, let us refer to it as political paedophilia, filters down from the top, through the career school heads and the ultra-left liberal staff to be consolidated by the biased nature of the texts and writers studied and reinforced by a daily helping of liberal-leftism from the BBC.
At the time that Olga was teaching, the BBC was head-over-orgasm in a tawdry sycophantic fantasy with Barack Obama, pulling out all the stops to cast him in the unlikely role of the Patron Saint of Democracy. When he was ousted in 2017, Trump was immediately framed as Bogeyman Number Two, just behind Vladimir Putin. Although Olga was unwilling to take an active part in this political grooming of youth ~ and refused to point blank ~ she had to endure considerable bullying before her case was heard, viz that she was there to teach English not enforce political views and corrupt the minds of the young.
Be careful whose sweeties they are and who you accept them from!
There are many other problems associated with working as a teacher in the UK, such as inflated bureaucracy, unnecessary paperwork, unpaid overtime etc, but these ills are universal to a good many other jobs and professions. However, one that is exclusive to teaching, and which stems from the same invasive fungus root of ‘liberal progressiveness’, is the continual round of daily abuse that teachers have to contend with both from feral pupils and their belligerent parents.
Every single day in my building, there are egregious acts of student misconduct going unchecked. Teachers are losing hope that things will ever get better, and we are tired. We are expected to be therapists, social workers, substitute parents, punching bags, and outlets for student rage and verbal abuse. Teaching is only a small percentage of what we do anymore.
Once again, I do not intend to expatiate on this here but will leave that subject for a later and more detailed post on the parlous state of the UK’s education system, in which I shall provide specific examples of incidents that my wife experienced whilst teaching.
After 20 years on the frontline of Britain’s schools, my wife had had enough. It was time to call it a day ~ get out. In many ways, this was a great pity, as teaching had been her life. In the UK, in addition to her teaching qualification, she attended and successfully completed many professional development courses and received numerous compliments and accolades from the heads of the institutions in which she had taught, from members of the teaching staff and also from pupils.
The rewarding element of teaching ~ so sad that UK’s schools are the victim of a pernicious ideology
Throughout her career, she had seen many teachers come and go, both long serving and new: some who had been ‘dreaming of escape’ for years and just could not take it anymore; others, fresh from college, who lasted less than a week before making the brave but timely decision to embark on a different career.
As if an Orwellian education system, lunatic skewed political correctness and state-sponsored delinquency was not enough, another baptism of western malfeasance awaited my wife.
In the time that she had been resident in England there had been several anti-Russian campaigns prosecuted in the extreme by the UK’s media, but in her last three years of living there the establishment and its media’s attempts to trash all things Russian and stir up rampant Russophobia had gone into overdrive, having obviously been prioritised by those who control our governments.
It was no coincidence then, and it is no coincidence now, that the anti-Russian Blitzkrieg had been launched at a time when both the British and American public’s trust in the neoliberal way had resoundingly hit the skids. The last thing that an imploding democracy needs is its 5-year cross-tickers looking elsewhere for the national, traditional values that no longer exist in their own back yard. And UK politicians would do well to remember that making history is a considerably less stable proposition than valuing and celebrating history, not to mention rewriting it or simply giving it away.
At last, incensed by the liberal propaganda machine and suffocating political correctness, Olga broached the subject to me of getting out ~ of leaving the country.
So, did I agree to go just because I am a fine husband and devoted to my wife? It would be so easy at this point to say yes, and by doing so pedestal myself as a martyr to feelings other than my own, but the truth is that it took almost three years before I, too, decided that I had had enough of the liberal canker that was so malevolently blighting the land that I loved. English born and bred, a legacy Briton with roots ~ my grandmother’s brother fought and died for his country in the First World War; my two uncles also fought in the Second World War, and my father’s brother, who was a Major in the Second World War, was awarded the Military Cross (M.C.) posthumously) ~ it should not have been an easy decision to make, and it wasn’t.
In the interim, whilst I was weighing my decision, I used to joke that the next time I went on holiday to Kaliningrad I would ask for political asylum on the grounds that I could no longer live under the oppressive liberal yoke: open borders, anti-social behaviour, ethnic-linked but never officially admitted-to crimes, increased internet censorship, and all the other politically correct baggage ~ the petty, ridiculous, meaningless stuff that is blown out of all proportion and which saturates our daily life, such as should we have a female Dr Who? how many women are there in the UK’s board rooms? not enough black actors on television, should same sex couples be allowed to adopt children, LGBT issues, gender issues, race issues and aarrrrggghhh!!
And then comes Brexit, with its liberal-motivated back-stabbing, double dealing, wriggling, writhing shiftiness and utter contempt for democracy — the liberal leavers screaming (and don’t they just!) that we must have a ‘people’s vote’ in the name of democracy when by the democratic process that is exactly what we had, it was called a referendum. (Apropos of this, it amused me recently to see the headline in one of the UK’s extreme left newspapers which claimed that if Trump was not impeached it would be a ‘threat to democracy’. Talk about ironic!)
Even though Democracy ~ battered, bloody, tarnished, sullied, bribed, threatened and subjected to all manner of shameful legal illegalities ~ would eventually break free from its criminal leave abductors, thanks primarily to Nigel Farage, by now my mind was made up. We were sailing on a cultural Titanic. It was time to leave the sinking ship
There were some who asked, “Why not got to Spain?” and “Why not go to France”. I suspect my reply was somewhat too obtuse for them: “The EU ~ NGOs ~ Merkel”.
And now, when fellow Brits ask me ‘do I like living in Russia?’ I play their game. Knowing what they want to hear, I reply, in a suitably pained tone: “Why did I do it …?” And as a triumphant smile begins to dawn on their faces, before they can say I told you so I quickly conclude my statement with, “ … leave it so long, I mean. I should have moved ten years’ ago!”
Next (when I have time to write in between beers) ‘What I like about life in Kaliningrad’
When it’s gone, it’s gone … Updated 5 March 2024 | First published: 16 September 2021 ~ Death of the House of Culture Remembering Zalivino’s House of Culture. The space once occupied by the House of Culture is now just a bed of hardcore and thistles. Here is what it was like before they made… Read more: Death of the House of Culture
What I like about Kaliningrad Updated 18 April 2022 | First published: 2 March 2021 ~ Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West [INTRO} I wrote this piece over a year ago, at a time when western media had nothing better to do than push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the coronavirus pandemic; now, apparently, it… Read more: Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 645 [9 December 2021] Published: 8 December 2021 ~ Vaccination Passports Stop the Spread of Underpants Diary of a self-isolator is one of a series of posts and thoughts on self-isolating in Kaliningrad. Links to previous posts appear at the end of this post. It’s amazing isn’t it! Just when… Read more: Vaccination Passports Stop the Spread of Underpants
In Memory of a Good Friend Published: 1 November 2021 ~ Celebrating the Memory of Königsberg Tour Guide Stas 28th November 2021. Today was the anniversary of Stas Konovalov’s death. After paying our resects at the graveside, a group, consisting of family, close friends and neighbours, were brought together by Stas’ mother for a memorial… Read more: Celebrating the Memory of Königsberg Tour Guide Stas
“Bucket!” he shouted. They hadn’t let him in! 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… Read more: Old Tin Buckets & QR Codes
Published: 5 February 2021 ~ How Russophobia makes the West look Silly
Have you noticed how anti-Russian hysteria whipped up by the UK media comes in waves? It is rather like a bad case of diarrhoea, very often brought on by something uncomfortable happening on the home front which swiftly requires some form of diversion.
Why is the West so Silly?
A couple of years ago, the UK media’s Russophobia ramp-up preoccupied itself with the terrors that Brits would face if they travelled to Russia for the World Cup, Dr Salisbury and the Mysterious Case of the Skripals, watch out there are hackers about, and the omnipotent cyber power that Russia is said to possess which enables it to steal into one’s sub-conscious and influence the way one votes, from Brexit or not-to-Brexit to presidential elections. Incidentally, how does this work? Here I am committed to vote Remain in the Brexit referendum. I read something on social media, purported to have been written by someone from a foreign power, telling me to vote the opposite way. Bingo, I’ll vote to Leave!! I mean, would you? Do you? Does it …? Or, in the United States: I am going to vote for the Democrats. I always vote for them. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s because my mum does. She’s very PC and cannot have enough ‘isms’ in her life. But wait a moment, I have just read something that has told me to vote for Trump! Right, Trump it is.
I’ve just had a word with our cat, Ginger, about this, and all he can say is ‘give me some grub or let me scratch and bite you’. And then he rolled over and purred.
Nevertheless, such was the panic engendered by this media-created long arm of the Russian state, even longer than the famous long arm of the British law, that my mother was convinced that when she woke up one morning and found that the wheelie bin had gone that it must be the Russians who’d dun it!
Sputnik V romps home
I can see that you are not comfortable with the diarrohea metaphor, so let’s try another. How about a militaristic one, in which there are major battles and random cases of sniping?
For example, when the Russian vaccine Sputnik V was announced last year as the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it sparked nothing short of a full-scale war in the West’s mainstream and science journal media.
Examples of Headline News in the West
Experts Raise Alarm As Putin Says Russia Has Approved World’s First Covid-19 Vaccine
Russia approves Sputnik V Covid vaccine despite testing safety concerns
We have no idea if the Russian Covid vaccine is safe or effective
Russia’s Fast-Track Coronavirus Vaccine Draws Outrage over Safety
Russia is spreading lies about Covid vaccines, says UK military chief
UK ‘95% sure’ Russian hackers tried to steal coronavirus vaccine research (Who wrote this one? Was it ‘Highly Likely’ Theresa May?)
It began politely enough, with the odd shot or two fired at the vaccine’s validity based on scientific testing protocols, but soon escalated into the bellicose language that we have come to expect in the Coronavirus & Cyber Cold War era, with accusations of disinformation, misinformation, no information and, yep you’ve got it, hacking.
As the first salvos gradually diminished, the sniping continued sporadically until, on 2 February 2021, The Lancet, an esteemed British medical journal, published the results from a phase 3 trial of the Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine in an article headlined ‘Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine candidate appears safe and effective’. On the same day, the BBC ran this article, ‘Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has 92% efficacy in trial’, in which, in recognition of the unjust way in which Russia had been treated, it was quoted that “we should be more careful about being overly critical about other countries’ vaccine designs.”
A muted apology but an apology all the same.
It was quite obvious, and therefore understandable, that with western mainstream media using the phrase ‘vaccine race’ freely from the outset to dramatise research efforts to develop a Covid vaccine, that considerable pique would follow when on entering the race, which was pretty much a closed affair, Russia left its western ‘competitors’ standing, pipping them at the post before they had time to pip.
Of course, the US and Brit government will never forgive Russia for coming first in their race, apart from the loss of prestige there is all that globalist vaccine money to think of, but they are doing their utmost to detract from it by focusing instead on selectively publishing photographs taken of street protests recently staged in Russian cities.
I asked my dear and well-informed friend, Lord Wollocks, what he thought about this:
“Deflection technique. A bit embarrassing for the West of late. Lots of civil disorder. Last thing that they want [in the UK or the States] are their people looking in the direction of the former USSR and saying, ‘my word but things look a lot more civilised over there’, especially if they make the not-so quantum leap from a land blighted by coronavirus mishandling and BLM riots to one which holds unswayable store on conservative norms and family values.”
And off went Wollocks, to make a cup of tea.
No one, not even Lord Wollocks, made any connection between the good visual copy of street protests elsewhere coinciding with Biden coming to power, but that was possibly because if all else fails there is always this little bit of land, Kaliningrad and its region, at which to level one’s sites.
A rather Silly case of Russophobia
Western media has a never abating obsession for what it calls the strategic military importance of Russia’s westernmost outpost. In the past 10 years it has been in and out of the press more times than something attending a gender reassignment surgery which cannot quite make up its mind. On one hand, Kaliningrad has a ‘taste for western Europe’, on the other, it has a lot of clout for resisting western Europe, but should there be nothing more to snipe at Kaliningrad makes a convenient target.
Wait a mo! If I was going to nip into someone else’s backyard and switch off the dog so that my mates could rush in behind me and claim squatters’ rights, why would I want to tell the owners of the yard what I was going to do? Whatever happened to secrets? More to the point, what do spies and military generals put on their CVs when they are seeking alternative employment?
I mentioned this news report to a Russian friend of mine as we were standing in the supermarket trying to decide which brand of vodka to buy. I said, “Analysts say Poland could win Russia-NATO war by invading Kaliningrad and securing Moscow’s nukes.” “Really,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He thought for a moment, scratched his head and then asked, solemnly, “So, which vodka is it to be?”
