Kaliningrad and things that go clank - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Lifting the lid on Kaliningrad’s nocturnal noises

Published: 25 January 2023 ~ Kaliningrad and things that go clank in the night

From the same wonderful chap who brought you Kaliningrad’s midnight leaf suckers (that wonderful chap is me, by the way, just in case you failed to recognise me by the accuracy of the description), we have something at 2am …?

I was just off into slumberland, lulled into this blissful state, which is an exotic and privileged condition for a confirmed and inveterate insomniac, by a series of smiles set in motion by a composition of novel remarks discovered in the perusal of a news report on Yandex.

In this report*, the Press Secretary of the President of Russia, Dmitry Peskov, was responding to the head of the Kiev regime, Vladimir Zelensky (you know him, he’s the man with whiskers who perpetually wears a green T-shirt) who said, when addressing the World Economic Forum (you know them, the Davos cartel, a super-rich globalist gang obsessed with resetting the world for their benefit at everyone else’s expense), that he doubted the existence of Vladimir Putin. Peskov replied: “It is clear that purely psychologically, Mr Zelensky would prefer that neither Russia nor Putin exist, but the sooner [that] he realizes ~ the sooner the Ukrainian regime realizes ~ that Russia and Putin are and will be, the better for … Ukraine.”

As a roll-call of ghastly phantom-like images, including Tony Blair, Bill Gates, George Soros and other nightmare villains, such as might have been applicably cast in the 1970s’ pot-boiling series the Hammer House of Horror, slipped mercifully from my mind, I was suddenly dragged, hauled out as it were, from the luxury of impending sleep into a yet to be expunged existence, where the Davos set still are but hopefully soon will not be, by disturbing sounds in the street of an incomprehensible nature.

Kaliningrad and things that go clank in the night

It is a selfish but incontrovertible fact that people in my age group can afford to entertain, with less regret than the young, sounds that could be mistaken for a global nuclear incident, but the sounds outside my window seeming rather less than might be imagined for an event on such a scale, had more to do with engines running, metal wotnots clanging together and men calling out to each other in a distinctly blokey and workman-like fashion.

Whatever was occurring it could not be truthfully said to be keeping me awake, as I had mislaid the art and science of sleeping many years ago. No, it was the presence of these perplexing sounds at this fairy-tale-time of the morning that had me all agog.

It was not very long before fantasy overtook me ~ you know how it is in the early hours ~ suggesting I believe that in response to my recent post on pavements some receptive spark in authority acting on the hint had decided to ship the requisite materials needed for renovation, and that even as we slept ~ and even whilst some of us didn’t ~ shipments of hardcore and other materials ferried in by moonlight were being deposited on the grassy knoll in the centre of the street.

This theory had a near-firm basis in a previous early-morning chorus of indefinable noises, the source of which it transpired was a working party busily engaged in the not unreasonable occupation of vacuum-cleaning the grass gone midnight.

The fallen leaves of autumn having been whisked away, it was a small step for an imagination accustomed to leaps of fancy to envision the wartime bunker lurking below the knoll earmarked for refurbishment, contingent on the unlikely event that should the sirens go off all would never hear them, because someone up our street delights in keeping a witless dog that hardly ever stops barking.

Unable to contain myself, and my curiosity, any longer, I slid out from my bed and made my way to the window. I had it in my hand, my camera, and you’ll never give me credit for it, but with it, it was I that took this unreasonably awful photo, which ~ and you’ll have to take my word for this~ shows two or several men mingling with the morning shadows at a time when every abnormal person, those without guilty consciences, are snoring and farting deep in their sleep; they were busy, were these men, busy thrusting big thick pipes down drainholes, sucking stuff out with gusto as if their very jobs depended on it. Yes, there they were, I am tempted to say, waking up the entire street, but that would be a fallacy, as often there is that shitty dog (with an owner whose name must be Mutton Jeff) that barks and barks and barks and barks. And if you can sleep through that, then presumably you’ll sleep through anything: “Did you hear that siren?” Woof! “Did you hear that burglar?” Woof! Did you hear that …? What? Woof! … Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! What did you say? I said “Woof”!

I consider it fortunate that I’m an insomniac, or I could have trouble falling asleep.

Pleased to look out the window and see things going on which in my youth, that is my very young youth, would fill me with fascination ~ drain suckers, dustbin men, bucket men, tarmac gangs ~ oh, and Robert Brothers’ Circus’ lorries cavalcading for winter quarters ~ I crawled back into the pit, thinking now that I know what it is they are up to should I block out those naughty men’s sounds by recourse to soothing ‘White Noise’ (and just how racist is that!), but before you could say ‘you’re a strange bugger’ and before I could ‘take a knee’, I had bucked the insomnia trend. I was slipping faster than soap on ice into a hallelujah dream fest, a film noir, They Worked by Night! starring noises of a nocturnal nature, hundreds of Königsberg manhole* covers and the gangs of men who go around in the dark lifting those covers up when we are fast asleep or, when we are not, we should be. What more can we say at the end of the day than bring on the ZZZ…

Source:
*Peskov responded to Zelensky, who doubted the existence of Putin – RIA Novosti, 19.01.2023

**Manhole: This is one of those words that we need to be particularly careful of when sycophantically brown-nosing woke in an absurd aberration for gender inclusiveness.