The autumns of our years leaf everything to our imaginations
15 November 2023~ Kaliningrad in Autumn Leaves it Out
You’ve heard the one, ‘Bringing in the sheaves’, but here, in Kaliningrad, at this time of year, it’s more a case of cleaning up the leaves.
I love autumn, it is by far the most favourite season in my romantic calendar. To enjoy it to its utmost and garner from it the utmost joy, you really must locate a tree, or better trees in plural, and cuddle up beneath them. Leaves in autumn (as I wrote in an earlier post) are one of Kaliningrad’s municipal treasures.
Kaliningrad is a green city, haven’t I told you so already. Its tree population is quite prodigious: many streets are lined with them, many gardens full of them, many parks play host to them and the city in itself, in its large and spacious capacity, is endowed with small spinneys and woods, none of which are treeless. In fact, as strange as it may seem, none of Kaliningrad’s woodland is short of a tree or two. I cannot recall a single occasion whilst walking through the wooded areas availed of by the city, when I could not find a tree. Thus, when the time eventually comes, as come around it must, for the leaves to eventually twig-it, they’ll be sure to let you know.
Recently, however, Kaliningrad has entered the phase when it best at worst resembles Britain. In Britain some blame it on ‘global warming’ (they usually look and sound like parrots), others on globalist bullshit (They are quickly labelled conspiracy theorists and sectioned under the Mental Health Act for being too perspicacious.(Hysterical Whitehall laughter!)).
Whatever the explanation, it has all gone damp and soggy when previously it was crisp and dry. All it took in those conditions was a light to moderate breeze and leaves were swirling from the trees like proverbial pennies from heaven. (It’s good that leaves aren’t feminine pink, for when outed by the tree it would be difficult not to compare them to confetti at a gay pride wedding. (“Oooh, now, just listen to him. Who does he think he isn’t!”)
Kaliningrad in autumn
One day these leaves line the trees like a coat of many colours, the next they lay like a carpet, or like Sir Walter Raleigh’s autumnal cloak, thick and deep and predominantly yellow, on lawn, verge, road, cobbles, on pavements where there are some and on pavements where there aren’t.
The affect of this time of month on Kaliningrad’s leafy parts is to transform it into a dense yellow snowstorm, which on closer inspection at ground level reveals a colour composition of varying yellow hues interspersed with auburn, browns and intricate shades of red.
If autumnal colours do something to you, if they reach the parts others cannot, if in the changing fate of leaves you find all that your heart desires and more than you thought you could ever deserve, then Kaliningrad in autumn is the place you should have gone to when you had the chance.
If, on the other hand, the sight of leaves makes you incurably phobic, then your relief will be as keenly felt as my infatuation for the leaf collectors when they hit the streets to engage in their yearly task, which by no means insurmountable is none the less redoubtable, of lifting and shifting piles of leaves before buckets of snow plummet down on top of them, not on them you understand, but on top of the fallen leaves.
Hanging, floating, whirling, twirling, falling and settling autumn leaves possess a poetic beauty but come the damp and the snow, they can overnight turn slippery, ‘mighty slippery’ I might say, but I’d only say it in an Old West accent and when I’m wearing my cowboy suit.
I don’t expect you to go so far, to visualise this scene, a scene like that is nobody’s business, but please do take a moment to gander at the lovely photos of Kaliningrad’s autumn leaves:
Thank you for travelling Autumn Post, the next stop will be Christmas.
Published: 22 October 2021 ~ Kaliningrad Leaves Autumn to the Leaf Suckers
I am not precisely sure when it was, but I know that I converted to the religion of insomnia many, many years ago, during which time, having lived in numerous, too numerous to recall, properties, I have lain awake at night, or, indeed, have woken during the night, listening to the sounds of the world on the other side of my window.
Naturally, every different place in which we find ourselves sleeping, or not, as the case may be, possesses its own external world of noise, its own audible signature, and Königsberg-Kaliningrad is no exception.
For the sake of brevity and the object of this article, let us hastily pass over tempting references to unthinking ‘dugs’ and thoughtless ‘dug’ owners, both doing what they do because they haven’t the sense to do otherwise, and focus instead on a noise, or noises, the type of which are pertinent to and typical to no other but Kaliningrad at night.
During the summer months, night noises in cities and towns, wherever these places may be, are plentiful and variegated, because universally the heat of the night invariably brings forth denizens, particularly young denizens, whose expression of the first flush of yoof is noise. ‘Hey, I’m alive! I must make a racket!”: Bum, de Bum, de Bum (In case you are wondering what that is, it is the world-over urban sound of a delinquent’s ignorant base-beater.).
But even in the summer months, against the backdrop of predictable noises, such as someone staggering home with a skinful or someone with a motorbike thrust between their legs, there are strange noises, weird noises that once having entered your consciousness refuse to let go or give up, until, to the best of your ability, you either solve their mystery or surrender to their influence and fall asleep in spite of them.
For a long period, and the night is long when sleep is in an elusive mood, I focussed my deductive powers on the source of a low-humming drone. And yet it was some time, successive early mornings later, before the identity of my preoccupations decided to make itself known to me. What I had been listening to was neither a space ship nor banshee, a hover car or a hole in a trumpet, it was in fact a road sweeper or, to be more precise, a lowly street cleansing vehicle: a truck that trundles about the city sloshing water around the street when normal people are sleeping.
Kaliningrad Leaves Autumn to the Leaf Suckers
It was yesterday, at 4am. I was thinking about the usual things, the ghosts of pub crawls past, QR-coded existence, all I was going to do in life, should have done, might still do, but might not have time to do them now ~ you know how the gospel goes for we insomniacs ~ when I heard what at first impressed me as the sound of a distant street slosher. I lay there for a good twenty minutes, using the constancy of this sound, its soothing continuity, to lull me into further thoughts, tranquil and obsessive, before it eventually dawned on me that this was the month of October and that the days of summer dust-damping had been succeeded by autumn leaves.
There was the clue I needed! Fellow insomniasts will understand when I say that we who need sleep, just as much as you do, but don’t get it, are no strangers to Eureka moments that fly phantom-like from out of the darkness and keep us awake even more! That long, that mid-range humming tone to which my thoughts were singing and which had occupied my mind as if it was a reference library, was not the sound of water on dust, it was nothing of the sort. It was the steady rhythmic lilt emanating from the suction hoses of the pre-dawn leaf-sucking lorries!
Have you taken leaves of your senses?
Cast your mind back, if you please, to a post I wrote in 2020. In that post I stated that Kaliningrad is a green city, a city full of trees. Yes, in the summer of 2020, I wrote, Kaliningrad is a green city, to which I should add, and now will, that in autumn it turns yellow, as well as orange, red, russet, purple and many shades of brown. This is because trees, unlike many of us, are not known for insomnia. In the autumn they get busy, shedding their leaves in the imminent countdown to winter, when all as one will sleep. And in places where there are lots of trees about to bed down for winter, there are also lots of fallen leaves.
Thus, for the past three weeks or so, gangs of Kaliningrad leaf shufflers have been marshalling piles of leaves, stacking them at the sides of streets and raking them up from lawns and verges. Both by day, but mainly by night, when you are asleep and we are awake, the leaf-sucking lorries and flat-bed trucks crawl stealthily out of their depots to ply their trade on Königsberg’s cobbles and Kaliningrad’s highways and byways.
If you cannot shut them worry not, it is truly a sight for sore eyes, and the distinctive hum is not so bad. Think of it as an autumn lullaby, played for you and for me by the Loyal Fill Those Trucks Up Orchestra.
And so it makes you think. And lying there in the dark, steals you away to a time so far away in your youth that it may never have really happened ~ if it was not because in the night, there, alone in the dark, you have to place your trust in something, so why not your mind and its memory?
When I was a young boy, and I was never anything else when young, growing up in a small English village at a time when Arsebook and PlayStation were but devious twinkles in the ‘me, myself, I’ of a neoliberal’s bank account, I found that I was fascinated by the tarmac gangs resurfacing the road; the dustbin men collecting the rubbish; the drain unblockers unblocking the drains; the road sweepers sweeping the roadsides; and last, but by no means least, the crème de la crème of them all, the men who rode around in a tanker into which they emptied the house latrines ~ the all-important ‘Bucket Men’!
In fact, I was so took up with this last profession that when my well-to-do auntie and uncle visited us at our family home, and I was asked in an imperious voice by an omnipotent-looking lady all done up in a large fur coat, “So, tell me Michael, when you grow up what do you want to be?” Instead of answering a doctor, lawyer or banker, which is what I suppose she wanted to hear, I replied, with childlike candour, “I want to be a bucket man!”
Granted, perhaps not the most salubrious or rewarding of vocations, but at that particular time, when connection to mains sewerage was far from universal in small villages, the necessity of the bucket man, even more than the leaf-sucking lads, commanded a certain respect. However, every ‘dug’ has its day (bang!) and the day of the bucket man (I think it was Tuesday?) came and inevitably went, driven eventually to extinction by the triumphant rise of the bucket-man-free self-propelling flush lavatory.
How fortuitous then that I eventually went into publishing, and also how lucky I was to have narrowly missed working on newspapers. Mind you, if I had gone in for news media, would it have been so very much different in terms of substance, stirring and shovelling to what would have been my lot had I found an opening in bucket toilets. Let me in hindsight be thankful for one and romance lament for the other.
With the humming still in my ears, I returned from the place where my auntie still stands to this day. She has taken root in my memory; her face all shocked and dumbfounded. Meanwhile, in my thoughtful unsleep, I offered a prayer of thanks to the nocturnal Kaliningrad leaf suckers* for autumnal services rendered when everyone else, except for us, are sound asleep in their beds zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
(*sounds like the sort of lyrics Frank Zappa would have been proud of!).
We never did keep that appointment we promised ourselves and go for a picnic this summer in Königsberg’s Max Aschmann Park, but prompted by the delightful autumnal weather, all sun and blue skies, we did walk to the park today and, because it covers a large area, managed at least to stroll through one section of it.
Autumn in Kaliningrad
Our route to the park would take us through some of the most quiet and atmospheric streets of the old city. These are cobbled streets lined with great trees on either side. In spring and summer these trees are a silent explosion of green leaves, and although they have begun to shed them profusely in anticipation of winter’s dawn, sufficient remain to act as a filter to the last rays of the summer sun, which scattering through them illuminate their various hues and shades like a giant back bulb behind an origami screen.
Olga Hart photographing autumn in Kaliningrad, October 2020
Below the sunburst, across the humpty dumpty road surface, the grass verges ~ neat or overgrown ~ and on the pavements, where there are some, the leaves lay strewn like so much wedding confetti ~ yellow, brown, auburn and gold. They would form carpets were it not for the hardworking road sweepers, who are out and about at the crack of dawn piling the leaves into heaps ready for the administrations of the follow-up leaf-sucking lorries.
The street we are walking along is, like many in this neighbourhood and in other parts of remnant Königsberg, a cavalcade of architectural opposites. We pass by the Konigsberg signature flats, a series of long but detached blocks, three or four storeys in height, each one re-equipped with its Soviet steel door and, in this particular instance, curiously clad in wood.
If you know Kaliningrad you are ready for contrasts, but ready does not mean less surprised. In two steps we go from the scene I have just described to another quite improbable, yet not quite so improbable in the light of the status quo.
A large bushy tree rolls back at the side of us and there, of course, they are ~ the new-builds. We were half-expecting them, but not at any moment. They are three or four in number, big brand-spankers; demure-brick faced in parts but striking in their adaptation of Neoclassical principles. They shine and they sparkle with pride in the sun; the sun polishes them and casts an autumnal eye along the neat, trimmed verge evenly planted with shrubs, the upright expensive fence and the ever-imposing gate. The sun seems to wink at me, but perhaps in my admiration I failed to notice the slightest breeze and the way it secretly shifted the branches across my line of vision.
Some of the houses along this street conform to the more conventional and some, which must be flats, are hefty great slabs, albeit with nice arched windows. And then, just when you have stopped thinking ‘phhheww they must have cost a bit’, you reach the end of the road, and there in the corner, at the junction, you immediately fall in love with what once would have been an almost-villa ~ a lovely, lovely property, with its original pan-tiled roof virtually conical in form and with one of those small arched windows typical in Königsberg peering out of its rooftop like the hooded eye of an octopus.
For a few moments I stand in the road looking from my present, as its past looks back at me.
Königsberg house on the corner, autumn 2020
We have no choice but to leave Königsberg at this junction, making our way along a busy thoroughfare where the concrete battery of flats left us in little doubt that we were back in Kaliningrad ~ they in the 1970s and we, by the sight of a facemask or two, again in 2020.
We instinctively knew that we were on the right track for Max Aschmann. We did have to stop and ask someone, but immediately afterwards landmarks from our previous excursion remembered themselves to us, and it was not long before we recognised the lemon church and one of the entrances to the park, the one we had used before.
On our previous visit, we only had time to venture as far as the first group of lakes, but today we wanted to broaden our horizons, so we pressed on. We had not gone far when Olga, always on my left side, relinked her arm through mine.
The broad swathed track curved and as it did another expanse of water opened up to us on our right, set against a verdant backdrop of trees, some still green, others in autumnal garb. The leaves were thick on the ground, but not all of them had fallen, and those that were still aloft painted autumn across the skyline in nature’s soft and mellow brush strokes. It was as if we were walking into the heart of a picture.
At the front of a lake stood a fir tree, anchored to the ground by three or four ropes. It was a Christmas tree, bracing itself for the world’s first coronavirus Christmas. Close by, there was a great pile of tree trunk sections. We wanted one of these for our garden. We had the samovar, the juniper twigs and each other, all we needed now was the log, so that we could sit on it and count the stars like Meeshka and Yorshik in Hedgehog in the Fog (Russian: Ёжик в тумане, Yozhik v tumane)
Christmas comes early to Max Aschmann Park ~ Kaliningrad, October 2020
We walked on. Whatever Max Aschmann Park had been, and it was really something in its day, for all intents and purposes, its modern incarnation is more Max Aschmann forest.
On the hard-surface paths, long and straight that criss-cross the woodland, lots of people were walking. They were people of all ages, babushkas and derdushkas, family groups and teenagers, but no matter who they were or how old they were, a peaceful unification prevailed. There was nothing fast, nothing loud, nothing out of place or obtrusive, certainly no coronavirus madness or any other menace to interfere with the calm repose. And yet here we were in the midst of dense woodland, itself in the midst of a bustling city. The experience was simple but memorable. There was something wonderfully alien about it, not only by what there was but thankfully by what there was not.
An Autumn Walk in Kaliningrad
It does not matter where I roam; wherever I am, something old, something from the past comes forward and makes itself known to me, and that something this afternoon was the remains of a building, here, in the centre of the park. I had read somewhere that in its day the Max Aschmann Park had been a haven for the German well-to-do and a holiday destination for those who by virtue of wealth and status qualified for its privileges, so the sight of this leftover dwelling did not entirely surprise me.
What remains is little more than a great slab of concrete, but closer inspection reveals metal reinforcing rods and the remnants of one or two steps that lead down into a small recess beneath the concrete floor, now silted up with earth and woodland debris but which would presumably once have been a cellar or, perhaps, a subterranean garage, as these are standard features of houses in this region.
Mick Hart sitting on and surrounded by history in Max Aschmann Park, Kaliningrad, October 2020
Before I sat down on the concrete remains to have my photograph taken, as thousands had done before me and would continue to do so afterwards, I discovered one of the house gate piers lying prostrate among the leaves. There would have been a time when it was doing something practical, but it was doing nothing practical now, having relinquished its incipient function for matters of mind and heart.
Next on the voyage of discovery was another lake, this one more expansive than those we had passed already. The ground tapering gently to the water’s edge made an approach quite possible, and three or four people were gathered there feeding a bevy of swans. There were also two or three trees, not many, but just enough to satisfy the idyl along this picturesque border.
Olga Hart at the side of the lake in Max Aschmann Park, October 2020
Waterside trees always possess an anachronistic architecture, and these were no exception. Complementing the natural contours of the lake, and with the trees and bushes in their variegated shades rolling and billowing around it and into the distance, they and the scene they belonged to put me in mind of a 19th century lithograph, which, if it was mine to own, I would hang on a wall, preferably in my personal bar, in Mick’s Place, where I could sit and savour the view whilst sipping a glass of beer.
A beautiful autumn-leaf hat in Max Aschmann Park, Kaliningrad
But time was ticking on, as it has the habit of doing, and it was time to be making tracks. For this purpose, we chose instead to return through the woodland itself, at least for a short distance before we re-joined the path.
Under the trees, the ground was a little bit squelchy, but this natural hazard of woodland walking was only objectionable as far as our boots were concerned, and it had certainly made no difference to a small group of woodland wanderers who had removed themselves into the fringe of the wood for a spot of al a carte lunch. I wondered, had they carried that old metal barbecue on stilts with them, or had it been donated by an unknown benefactor who had staked out that spot on a previous occasion?
Even deeper into the wood and perched on wooden roundels cut from sizeable trees were people enjoying a picnic. Now that’s an idea, I thought, we really must do that and do that one day soon: go for a picnic, here, in Max Aschmann Park.
When I was a nipper, I would like nothing more when we visited the seaside than spending my parents’ money on the funfair rides. Sea and sand are OK to look at, but I like water in tea, and I am no beach lizard.
If you live in or are visiting Kaliningrad, you can get your funfair fix at the Youth amusement park, which is a spacious and well-equipped amusement park across the road from the Upper Lake.
Recently, on my birthday, I was smitten by the regressive desire to go oscillating on the park’s big wheel. This is quite unlike me, as I gave up heights in preference for the sure-footedness of good old terra firma many moons ago. But it was my birthday, I had eaten an ice cream by the lake, and the wheel, which I had often regarded with curiosity whilst partaking of beer at the front of the Mercor Hotel, must have said something to me today like, “you’d better do it now, before you get too old!”
Kaliningrad Ferris wheel at Youth Park
I have never argued with a Ferris wheel before, have you? And today was no exception. But had I have been inclined to do so nothing would have come of it, because Kaliningrad’s big wheel is not one of those fast-moving fairground attractions where you sit with your friends suspended in chairs and when the wheel stops at the top your friend begins to rock it and is no longer your friend anymore, it is, in its construction and spirit of revolution, more akin to the London Eye ~ big, solid, friendly and sedate.
Nevertheless, at 50 metres it is high enough for me, and as we stood on the departure platform waiting for one of the empty cars to descend and allow us to board, I caught myself thinking yet again how unlike me this is, even on my birthday.
Kaliningrad Ferris Wheel at Youth Park
The cars roll around at a gentle pace but even so you clamber quickly aboard goaded to do so by the Imp of the Perverse who is whispering in your ear, “Quick, imagine your trouser leg getting caught on the edge of the car; how embarrassing that would be, to go hopping off towards the end of the platform!”
Mick Hart about to board Kaliningrad’s Ferris wheel
This thought, or thoughts similar, have you jumping aboard in no time. The car lurches and swings in response to your opposing momentum, but it is alright: the thing seems sturdy enough, and before you can say ‘motion sickness’ you have plonked yourself down on the bench seat.
Olga Hart not at all frightened on Kaliningrad’s Ferris wheel
The wheel’s cars are in fact quite spacious and would, I imagine, hold six people quite comfortably. The cars have glass doors, so you are fully enclosed, and the wide windows offer an awesome and spectacular view not just of Kaliningrad from an aerial perspective but of the steel lattice-work fabric, nuts, bolts and bearings from which the revolving contraption is made.
View of Kaliningrad’s Ferris wheel and Kaliningrad itself from one of the wheel’s cars
As we levelled out at a 45-degree angle to the ground, the angle of the dangle incidentally causing you to feel more vulnerable than when the car reaches the summit, this is when both the wheel’s superstructure and park layout below are at their most dramatic; and then, slowly, very slowly, as the car begins to rise, Kaliningrad in all its (as I have said before) green glory and contrasting urban extensiveness folds quietly out beneath you inciting a landmark-spotters epiphany.
Looking out across the once Königsberg district of Maraunenhof from Kaliningrad Ferris wheel
Away with apprehension and out with the camera, I get some fairly good shots of the wheel itself and some admiral ones of the city. Yes, the photographs would have been better had I come prepared with a proper camera instead of relying on the mobile phone’s, but spur of the moment decisions respect nothing but opportunism so, as I did not plan ahead, I have to be contented.
Kaliningrad Upper Lake
Kaliningrad boating lake
The view from the wheel’s highest point is nothing short of breathtaking, and for 200 rubles a ride (£1.99), presuming you do not own a microlight, this is the next best way to reach the dizzy heights, in other words to see the city of Kaliningrad as you have never seen it before.
Next on the bucket list is a spin on the wheel as dusk settles, when the wheel and the cityscape are bedecked with illumination.
Whereabouts
The Youth Park of Culture and Recreation is located in the Leningrad district of Kaliningrad at 3 Telman Street, opposite the Upper Lake.
It only seems five minutes ago that I was remarking on the welcome novelty of buds and leaves appearing on the Königsberg-Kaliningrad trees, and now here we are in September, the leaves turning brown and yellow and falling to the ground.
Early yesterday morning I was alerted to this fact by our cat, who jumped off the sideboard and scampered out of the room. Gin-Ginskey is extremely intrepid when it comes to hunting flies but anything that sounds like a vacuum cleaner is bound to send him dashing for cover, and in this instance the vacuum cleaner was of the large lorry variety, sucking up leaves from the old cobbled streets and pavements in front of our house.
Kaliningrad a green city adorned with flowers
In spring and summer Kaliningrad is one of the greenest cities imaginable, a feature which the art-historian Victor Ryabinin noted was not true of its predecessor Königsberg. In what was the Maraunenhof district of Königsberg and in other areas developed during the first years of the 20th century through to the 1920s, the streets are lined with Königsberg trees. Now they are old and gnarled, venerable survivors of a brutalised city, but back in the day when they were mere precocious saplings they would not have provided the streets of Königsberg with the leafy green vistas and avenues of which Kaliningrad is the fortunate benefactor.
Indeed, Kaliningrad is a city of green open spaces: along the banks of the Pregel river where warehouses once have stood, surrounding the cathedral on Kneiphof Island, around and in front of the House of Soviets, that most controversial of Kaliningrad’s structures, in the numerous grassed quadrangles between the flats, and around the banks and perimeter of the upper and lower ponds.
Three or four large public parks, each endowed with their own distinctive character, contribute copiously to the leafy green landscape, creating rural backwaters in the heart of the city, which in the spring and summer months form natural retreats from the relentless pace and energy of urban living.
Kaliningrad green & adorned with flowers
Kaliningrad in the kind seasons is also a city rich with blooms and flowers of seemingly endless variety. You will find them everywhere: in the enviable gardens of the Maraunenhof villas, along the banks of the river, in municipal planters and thoughtfully planted flower beds, in the small border gardens that front the old German flats and the cottage gardens lovingly planted and tended at the foot of the Khrushchev flats ~ these borders can be surprisingly large and full of the most eclectic variety of flowers and flora.
You will find flowers adorning balconies, in window boxes and hanging baskets, some so prodigiously and impressively arranged that they are left to spill over on their own accord or are trained to cascade imaginatively into the garden below.
Shrubs, bushes, silver birch, pine, all manner of fir trees ~ even blue ones! ~ are thrown into the mix. Evergreen hedgerows tower above and push their way through perimeter railings, forming dense thickets for garden privacy, whilst fences new and old act as impromptu trellis work for climbing plants of every denomination.
And even though Kaliningrad is a bustling modern city, one of its more appealing attributes to my mind is that here and there you can stumble upon curious pockets of wild naturalistic vegetation, small friendly jungles that turn otherwise neglected spaces and mundane objects into inherently picturesque compositions ~ an old garage door, for example, biffed and battered through age and use, transformed by climbing foliage into a quaint vignette of antiquity or a ropey looking fence entwined with vines instantly elevated to photographic status~ the very stuff that artists delight in for its authentic old-world charm.
Although, as summer retreats, the pines and firs will not forsake us, in a few weeks from now the deciduous varieties will lose their foliage, the scene will shift to winter and the built-on urban landscape will assert itself again.
Hopefully, however, our collection of photographs taken during the spring and summer months will remind you how blessed Kaliningrad is to possess such examples of nature’s beauty and will help to sustain and lift your spirits through the winter months to come.
Snowy scenes in Kaliningrad 2021/2022 Published: 31 January 2022 ~ All White in Kaliningrad More Snow on its Way! For the past three or four days the rain has been teeming down here in Kaliningrad. It has washed away the snow and left the city and my shirt, which is hanging on the balcony railings,… Read more: All White in Kaliningrad More Snow on its Way!
Captain sinks with his ship off Königsberg Pond Published: 4 October 2021 ~ Pondering on the future of Kaliningrad Pond There are two lakes in Kaliningrad that are not lakes, they are in fact man-made water features and, as such, their real nomenclature is ‘pond’, even though rural English folk of a certain age will… Read more: Pondering on the future of Kaliningrad Pond
Kaliningrad Ferris Wheel at Youth Park Published: 30 September 2020 When I was a nipper, I would like nothing more when we visited the seaside than spending my parents’ money on the funfair rides. Sea and sand are OK to look at, but I like water in tea, and I am no beach lizard. If… Read more: Kaliningrad Ferris Wheel at Youth Park
As summer fades … Published: 13 September 2020 It only seems five minutes ago that I was remarking on the welcome novelty of buds and leaves appearing on the Königsberg-Kaliningrad trees, and now here we are in September, the leaves turning brown and yellow and falling to the ground. Early yesterday morning I was alerted… Read more: Kaliningrad Green & Adorned with Flowers
No Laughing Matter! Continuing with our theme of Kaliningrad City of Contrasts, I was out walking the other day and I came across this rather splendiferous example. On one side of the road you have this spanking new block of flats; on the other, this rather sad and sorry ruined Königsberg cottage. Kaliningrad City of… Read more: Kaliningrad City of Contrasts
12 July 2020 saw our first get together with friends since coronavirus sentenced us to solitary confinement. Although my wife had been working on her pet project for six months, converting what had once been a slab of Soviet and German concrete into a real, live garden and the sun had come out to play after two days of heavy rain and a marked decline in the temperature, the social occasion was impromptu.
Earlier this morning I had emailed our friend Stas’ revised ‘Homework’ back to him for his approval. He had written, in English, an account of his life leading up to the time he met our mutual friend, the late Victor Ryabinin, and how through Victor’s influence he had developed both his interest in art and his love for the history of Königsberg. I had edited his work and now needed him to sign it off prior to posting it on my blog under the Victor Ryabinin category.
Socialising in the Coronavirus Age
Anyway, it was during this exchange of emails that I accidentaly mentioned to Stas that it was a pity that he was driving to see us today because if he was not, instead of a cup of tea we could have taken advantage of the good weather, the hard work my wife has put into her garden project and partake of a beer or two.
This must have had resonance as Stas delivered the plants for our garden as he had promised but left his car at home. Along with his girlfriend, Olga, he also brought a bottle of cognac, so from little acorns mighty oaks did grow.
Whilst not under one of Robin Hood’s, we do have a rather nice, albeit problematic, pear tree in our garden ~ problematic in that had we had it removed as our landscape gardener advised it would have eliminated the issue of how best to incorporate a functional seating area in the space at our disposal. But we love trees, so there was never any question of taking a saw to it. However, the block-paved roundel at the base of the tree, whilst looking nice, would not easily accommodate a table and six chairs. We had considered constructing a table around the tree, with its trunk at the centre, but eventually decided against it as the net result would have been that for each person in six seated only five would be seen, an interesting conundrum and highly beneficial if you could get the seating right in circumstances where every guest had at least one person whom they did not like and therefore would rather not see.
That was not the case today, where all we had to think about was arranging the seats around the rectangular table in such a way that after half a dozen cognacs the spindly legs of the chairs did not slip off the hard ground into the soil giving its occupants that distinct sinking feeling before the ultimate embarrassment of sailing arse-over-head.
And yet, there was another thing to consider, as remember we were operating this get-together under strict observance of the Coro social distancing guidelines.
In this respect, our seating arrangements should not have been more beautiful. With the assistance of a lump of cardboard and a piece of board a not attractive but workable proposition was achieved, whereby myself and another of our clan could move back from the table, our makeshift plateau having removed the risk of any unsightly submissions to gravity.
The art and science of socialising whilst social distancing
At first the six of us stuck more or less to our social distancing and preventative strategy guns. Some, those more inclined towards caution, adopting a more rigorous approach than others.
Red star marker and an excellent cognac brand!
To assist us in this respect, Olga had taken the precaution of introducing some jolly looking beer and shot glass markers so that each individual would be able to personalize and safeguard their glass. These little brightly coloured objects were fashioned into distinctive novelty shapes, for example Olga had a red star, which I deemed appropriate because she was always talking about the positives of Stalin and the Soviet system; I had a little red car because I hated driving and had given it up years ago; I also had a green meeshka for my beer glass, which was most appropriate as my wife often calls me Meeshka (she calls me a lot of other things as well), and green for beer was green for go; other people, depending on their preference and personality, were able to choose from a variety of symbols, which included a ‘stop’ sign, a mobile phone (perhaps this should have been my wife’s, as she would be lost without her phone!!), a big red hand and so on.
A meeshka beer glass marker
The glasses having been carefully labelled, each serving plate of food was then equipped with its own tongues or spoon, according to the type of fare offered, and each guest had his or her own packet of antiseptic hand wipes.
We had, in effect, taken all the precautionary measures that could be taken. Alas, however, with the best will in the world, it soon became apparent to me that force of social habit and practicality were two rogue factors that no amount of precautionary procedure could ameliorate.
Socialising in the Coronavirus Age
As the occasion got underway, various conversations sprang up. As Stas can speak English and my Russian is not going to win me any linguistic awards ~ although I learn a little more of the language each week ~ Stas was my discussion partner. When our conversation commenced, we were sitting about one metre away from each other, but the background volume of other people talking soon required that we lean in closer toward one another to hear what each was saying.
Another decreasing factor in the art and science of social distancing came when, according to the old Russian custom, someone proposed a toast before quaffing the drink in front of them. As well as necessitating encroaching upon the one metre or one-and-a-half-metre rule (whatever it is supposed to be now), the clinking together of glasses, although brief, was nevertheless receptacle contact, and, of course, when different people helped themselves to food from the serving plates, each of us in turn handled the same cutlery.
With the sensible precautions that we had taken exposed for what they are in real circumstances ~ nigh-on impossible to adhere to ~ we decided to talk about politics.
Talking politics whilst the guests tend to our garden!
Now, according to the Western media, the ‘autocratic nature of Russia’ (their label) precludes such conversation, but like so many stereotypifying things I have found this categorically untrue.
On the subject of the recent constitutional vote and Mr Putin’s presidency, I pointed out that whilst I had met and spoken to people who obviously were not supporters nobody seemed to be able to answer the question, “who then would you vote for?”
When the conversation turned the socio-political situation in the UK, Europe and the USA. I expressed the opinion that, as with everything, liberalism came with a price. In the UK, and West in general, that price included unrestricted and uncontrolled immigration, racial disharmony, a baggage of political correctness to keep the host population in line, an exponential loss of tradition and cultural identity, a revisionist version of history, a threat to heritage and ancestral home, the loss of a moral rudder, anti-social behaviour, a rise in violent crime, terrorism and diverse divisions leading to societal instability and lack of social cohesiveness, in return for which you received soundbites about civil liberties, freedom of speech and rights. Every five years you got to put your mark on a slip of paper in the voting booth giving you the choice between two political parties. This ensured that the name of democracy was upheld, even though the core members of each party were singing from the same rap sheet. In my opinion, the price that you were paying had no value to it and was, again in my opinion, far too high a price to pay.
Well, the sermon came to an end, and as in every civilised realm of the world, no one was any the wiser about what people want and where they think it will lead them, and, as political discussions always change nothing, we all had another cognac and broke the distancing rule once again by coming in closer for photographs.
The guests study the cognac bottle; Mick drinks the cognac!
Nevertheless, these flaws in our risk-assessment plan noted, at the end of the day we refrained from a lot of handshaking and embracing. Stas and his Olga left, as work was on the horizon tomorrow, and my Olga and I repaired to our neighbour’s gazebo for an hour, where, as we were sitting over a metre apart, I suppose no one could really fault us.
The cat was pleased to see me when we got home. He has decided that social distancing skills are not for him, as he needs to nip and scratch me given the chance once a day at least. I sometimes suspect he is liberal …
The guests doing our gardening. I would have helped, but I was drinking …
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 65 [23 May 2020] ~ Trenches & Trees
Published: 23 May 2020
Unlike in the UK at present, there is no sudden uplift in the weather, nothing to tempt and entice one to cast caution to the wind and go wassailing off to the coast, but we were blessed with a gradual hike in temperature, somewhere around 15 degrees, and this blessing, together with a light breeze in association with Mr Blue Sky and a sun that had its hat on at last, were altogether alluring enough to winkle me out of self-isolation for the novel pleasure of stretching my legs.
As part of our exit strategy, we first had to run the gauntlet of passing without mishap from our garden to the road beyond. For the past three to four weeks, our house, and those in the immediate vicinity, have been subject to what I have christened in my diary ‘trench warfare’.
The Trenchmen cometh … I can’t help thinking that we would have been better laying that new block paving later …
Cable-laying has been going on, and a narrow but deep trench, deep enough to dislocate or break should a wrong step occur, dissects the pavement at the front of our abode and at right angles to it, extending along the neighbours’ boundary to the gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, behind which sits a very large dog.
From the vantage point of my bedroom window I have been able to observe (intermittently, you understand, as self-isolation has not left me wanting in occupations of an interesting kind) this work in progress and to chalk up the differences between how a job of this nature is handled in Kaliningrad compared with its UK equivalent.
From the outset, and for most of the work period, the construction crew consisted of three lads and a young woman, armed with a couple of spades, shovels and a wheelbarrow. The young blokes did most of the digging whilst the young woman, with her workman’s gloves tucked professionally in her back pocket, appeared to have an overseeing role, an inference corroborated later when a clipboard appeared in her hand, but praise where praise is due: at one stage in the game, she too rolled up her sleeves and took a turn on the shovel.
Considering that there were at maximum four workers armed with nothing more mechanical than their arms, they did pretty well. Weather conditions ~ lots of rain ~ were unsympathetic, but after a week’s hiatus the original band was joined by a veritable armada of labourers, who were not only trenchers but also there to lay the cables which, as with the aggregate, had been dropped off on the central island ~ a grassed oval section of land in the middle of the thoroughfare overlaying a German bunker built in World War II.
The temptation to go off at a tangent at this juncture and elaborate on the many surviving monuments to WWII that exist in Kaliningrad and the surrounding region is difficult to resist, but as global tourism has yet some way to go before it can get off of the back foot of coronavirus, I will focus for now on my outing.
Green & cobbled streets of Kaliningrad
We had crossed the trench and this accomplished were now walking along the original cobbled streets of Königsberg. Victor Ryabinin, the artist and historian, had assured us that ‘green’ Königsberg was a myth. Königsberg, at least the oldest parts of the city, was never green. The streets were narrow, the buildings high and brickwork and cobbles had been the order of the day. The outlying districts, the suburbs laid down in the early 20th century and developed in the 1920s through to the mid-30s, had been designed with green in mind. The houses and the plots on which they stand have their equivalent in England’s 1920s’ suburbs, where homes were sold on the back of the catchy and appealing advertising slogan, ‘A country home in the city’, or words to that effect. Every home in these outlying districts had a small front garden with a larger plot at the back, and on the streets where these airy new houses stood trees lined either side augmented, where space allowed, with a neat grass verge between the pavement and the road.
Nevertheless, as photographs and postcards testify, though most of the streets in Königsberg’s expansion districts were avenued with trees, they were, of course, saplings, newly planted. In their day, they would have formed graceful vistas but with nothing like the leaf foliage that adorn those selfsame trees now that they are mature.
You see, this is what happens when you self-isolate: everything, every simple detail, every once commonplace and taken-for-granted minutiae undergoes an amplification process, so acutely rendered to senses locked indoors that before you can safely say facemask you cannot see the wood from the trees ~ or, in my particular case, the trees from Kaliningrad’s leaves.
No matter; we had now crossed the road, just in front of that peculiar waterside café, that abandoned monstrosity which, with its fake lighthouse, Captain Ahab perched on the roof doing something over the side and a lot of marine-like crustaceans daubed upon the walls, resembles something sneaked into Russia from an amusement park in Skegness.
I have seen postcard photographs of the building that stood here originally. Admittedly, it, as with the lake and everything around it, was monochrome ~ they obviously did not experience bright sunny days in the early 20th century ~ but even though the world then was black and white (as things used to be black and white before coronavirus) the Konigsberg building had all the ennobling features bestowed by Gothicity and was, in its setting, a sight for sore eyes rather than a sore sight for tearful eyes, which is as good as it gets today.
Across Kaliningrad’s lakes (ponds)
Kaliningrad a Green City
Passing quickly by this ‘thing’, we wended our way, more happily now that it was behind us, along the block-paved path that runs around the lake perimeter. Old photographs show that the lakeside (apologies purists, I mean, of course, pond sides) had banks well stocked with natural vegetation, and trees abounded plentiful. In a black and white world some details are lost ~ atmosphere reigns supreme, but some details are lost ~ but in the photographs that I have seen of this area, it appears as if a small winding pathway, most probably gravel surfaced, curled through the trees at the edge of the lake in the early 1900s. This track has subsequently been lost, replaced through a gentrification process by block paving typical both in colour and character of 21st century urban design. Much of the original foliage, by that I mean the wild and natural, has been dug out and substituted with mown greens and municipal flowerbeds, but although block paving in all its imaginative shapes, patterns and sizes, along with children’s’ play parks, public lavs, and even an exercise quadrangle has colonised what used to be, the Königsberg trees that line the side of the road and the odd gnarled or venerable specimen dotted amongst the newer plantations, some Soviet others millennial, contribute in this neck of Königsberg’s woods to Kaliningrad’s attribution of being a very green city.
As much as I was enjoying and being distracted by that which I am phenomenally good at ~ mental rambling ~ we were on a mission, and this meant putting my tree-hugging propensity on hold and focusing for a moment on finding a wall with graffiti on. Not that this endeavour would be difficult in Kaliningrad. Sadly, graffiti is another of those unwanted imports that has made its way from the West.
Mick Hart with Anthony Hopkins in Kaliningrad
The graffiti we were looking for, however, was not one of your run of the mill deface, vandalise, degrade and then aggrandize as ‘urban art’ jobs, it was truly an original piece, a real work of art, featuring none other than Anthony Hopkins in his role as Hannibal Lecter ~ but more of that on another occasion. We found what we were looking for, and my wife made good with the camera.
There is graffiti and graffiti … Mine’s a vegetarian
“For old times’ sake,” that’s what my wife called it. I wondered what she was asking me?
She wanted us to walk closer to the lake, taking in Flame restaurant as we did so. The ‘old times sake’ was a reference to recent history, which, in the New Normal, is as lost to the world as dinosaurs. Aahh those glorious days ~ so happy and carefree ~ when we would walk to Flame on an afternoon or evening for a meal and a pint of brew. What had become of them and will they ever return?
Like every other pub/bar victim of coronavirus, there stood Flame, dark and extinguished. However, a nice touch, and a reassuring one, was that in keeping with its tradition Flame, although closed to the public, continued to play music through an external speaker system situated on its alfresco area. It was more like an overture of hope than the band playing on as the Titanic hit the watery skids.
Now that the shops ~ some of the shops ~ had officially opened their doors again, we had a small errand to do. As we crossed the road from the lake, emerging at the side of Flame, it was evident that whilst we had been hibernating Kaliningrad’s construction workers had not: the new shopping centre at the end of the city market had gone from being a shell of incomplete concrete pieces and knotted wire to a three or four-storey series of profiled platforms. Ordinarily, back in the days of the old normal, something like this seen on a day-to-day basis would have excited little more than a passing glance, but incarceration, whether self-imposed or not, has a sharpening effect on the mind, so much so that in looking on this building, at its Phoenix-like transformation, I felt a kindred spirit in Rip Van Winkle at the moment of his awakening.
Errand done, we set off on our homeward journey not by retracing our steps ~ I think having to pass Flame again would be more than the drinker in me could stand ~ but with a view towards returning on the opposite side of the lake. This route took us to the busy crossing in front of yet another landmark bar, the one housed in the historic Rossgarten Gate ~ CLOSED!
Luckily, by way of distraction, on the opposite side of the road, on one of Kaliningrad’s large, open WWII monument squares, I saw a man with his hose in his hand. He was leaning nonchalantly from his truck window, playing his hose over some of the prettiest city flower beds that you could possibly imagine. “Hmm,” I thought, “It’s not only the bars that are dry.”
A lovely day on which to have your hose out
Kaliningrad a Green City
Our walk back around the lake was a pleasant detour. There is only so much of novelty in strolling back and forth day and weeks upon end from your kitchen to the living room, and, let’s face it, though unarguably indispensable, the twin water features of bath and bog hardly compete or come close to the natural scenerific beauty imparted by rippling lake under a clear blue sky. And you can be sure that, as on the other side of the lake, there were trees in abundance here and in such variety and of different ages that I amused my obsession for the past for a while in attempting to determine which of the trees had been planted in Soviet times and which belonged to Königsberg.
The wise old trees of Königsberg-Kaliningrad
Trees, lakes, shopping centres rising from out of the ground like mysterious midnight mushrooms, men with their hoses dangling quaintly out of truck windows, a light breeze, a blue sky and off to the shop to buy some tomatoes. Very nearly back home, just now the trenches to cross.
