Tag Archives: Mick Hart

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Smartphone Spy in Your Pocket or Liberator?

30 November 2023 ~ Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

The last man to leave the sinking ship; the last man to go to the Isle of Man before they change the name to the Isle of Person; the last man to be the fourth man, as you know there was a third; the last man out at the wickets; the last man to be allowed to be called a man; the last man to play the white man; the last man behind the penultimate man; the last man ~ real man~ to win the lottery; the last man on Earth; the last man in Islington (even more rare than the last man on Earth) ~ you probably wanted to be, if not all of these, at least one of them, in the same way that I had led myself to believe that I was and would be the last man without a mobile phone. I didn’t plan things to be that way, neither did I design my phoneless status, as rumour has it, according to some highfalutin principal. It just happened. I never had a mobile phone, because I never had a mobile phone.

As with being a vegetarian (I became one of those in the 1970s.), I discovered, and I must confess with some delight, that not possessing a mobile phone became other people’s problem not mine, but when those around me who were most effected by my not possessing a mobile phone began to turn up the morality and invoke the strains of guilt, viz that my not having a mobile phone did not prevent me from using theirs, I had to agree, they did have a point.

There cannot be many of us who do not realise that the mobile phone (and I use this term generically to also include the smartphone) is, as with every other technological communication system, a tool for mass surveillance. Whenever you use a smartphone, they know where you are, what you are doing, what you are saying, and, once they have compiled that electronic dossier on you, you can bet your life they presume to know what is on your mind, even how it works, if indeed, it does work after you have enlisted yourself into the ranks of the twiddling masses. So, there it is, the smartphone, but for whom is the smartphone smart? ‘The Spy in Your Pocket’ my brother calls it.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

Mass surveillance is the price we pay for our addiction to technology. Some of us rail against it; some of us accept it; most of us ignore it. I, personally, am not so much bothered about Big Brother as ending my life as the Lone Ranger to become one of the twiddling cattle-driven.

Not having a smartarsephone is a little like not being saddled with children. Without both, you can sit back at comfort’s distance and watch with a heartfelt sigh of relief as it passes you by. But as Nature and habitualisation dupes us into doing things that others think we ought to do, so William Gates and his band of silicons coerce and cajole us, hunt us out, hound us down and round us up until, with no place left to hide, the last stop is the twiddler zone. Remember, just because your paranoid does not mean that they’re not out to get you!

Whilst having children is not so much of a stigma as a life sentence, having a mobile phone is incalculably stigmatic. As soon as you pull out that phone and twiddle, an arrow seems to flash out of the ether, pointing the caption at you, “One of the brainwashed masses!” Tell me, in some American states is it still a felony not to guzzle alcohol inside of a brown paper bag? Taking this as my cue, I was thinking of disguising my phone as a sandwich or rubber duck, but that would never do, because twiddlers who twiddle their lives away do so as if by self-enslavement, they are wearing a badge of honour. All for one and look like all! WTF! (The World Twiddling Forum).

It astonishes me how inveterate twiddlers, who twiddle whilst they walk, do not meet with a horrible accident. An acquaintance of mine, an elderly gentleman, has seen fit to turn this banal practice into a source of entertainment.

Whenever a pedestrianised twiddler is heading in his direction deaf and blind to all around them, he takes up position on the pavement, having first worked out their approximate trajectory, and stands there whilst they collide with him. Judging by the average response, it would seem that even the demigod smartphone, with all its apps, bells and whistles, is powerless to resist when it comes to timely embarrassment.

My personal favourites of the twiddling fraternity are pub twiddling couples. I have seen couples come into pubs twiddling, buy drinks whilst twiddling and then spend the entire evening sitting next to each other, never saying a word, just twiddling. Are they beyond repair, or do they actually ‘talk to each other’, for example on the WhatsArse messaging system?

“What an interesting evening, darling. Time to twiddle back home.”

You’ve probably guessed by now where all this is leading. Correct, no matter how much I might rail against it, and in the process vainly hope that somehow, somewhere along the way, I will exonerate myself, the indisputable fact remains that crumpling under umpteen pressures, I eventually succumbed. Yes, I went out and bought a twiddler (‘Arrrggghhh!’)

So, whatever could have gone wrong to have brought about this extraordinary U-turn?

For all its social and psychological evils, whilst it irrefutably is an implement for mass surveillance, the smartphone also doubles as a cloak of invisibility.

Before the smartphone and its mass uptake, going to the pub on one’s tod was a peculiar exercise in self-consciousness. If you hadn’t got a newspaper to hide behind, and even if you had you might end up reading it cover to cover, upside down and back to front, all you could do was to stare into space. Thankfully, the days have gone, except in some up-North benefit-class clubs, previously ‘working man’s’, when a knuckle-dragging neanderthal clocking how you were sitting there with seemingly nothing better to do than letch would adopt a confrontational tone: “Are you looking at my girlfriend?” which obviously you were, or, if he hadn’t got a girlfriend, which usually he hadn’t because he was far too stupid to have such a thing: “Are you looking at me mate?” The temptation to reply, “Given any number of variables, I would rather look at a piece of s_ _t!” was often too hard to resist, even though as a means of closure, it often ended in fisticuffs and sometimes a trip to the local nick.

Today, pubs, in the main, are much more civilised. Possibly because they are more food, and therefore family, orientated, and also because some of the ‘men’ who frequent them would be positively miffed if they didn’t catch you looking at them. You can usually tell who these men are. You’ve seen them on the adverts. They’re always winning the lottery.

How many men have stopped doing the lottery since adverts like that appeared is a question for another day. It does not alter the fact that sat there in the boozer looking like Billy No Mates, constantly checking your watch, as if someone you had arranged to meet is late, or coddling the delusion that after you have finished that long, that slow, that lonely pint you are going on somewhere else, are no longer ruses you have to resort to in an age where everyone looks and acts as if they are everyone else.

Smartphone how Smart is it to have one?

As long as you are a paid-up member of the Zombified Smartphone Club, nobody is going to bother you, nobody is going to question you. With that little (not so little and also rather heavy) rectangular glass-front phone, a voyeur’s window on the world, not so different from Pandora’s Box, flings itself open to you. You can kerb-crawl the net at will, take as many selfies as you like ~ hundreds if it floats your boat ~ before seizing on that magic one that looks not remotely like you. As long as it hides those sags and wrinkles and makes you believe you look 20 years younger (Likes and Followers! Likes and Followers!), you’ll kiss the ass of your mobile phone until all the old cows come home. Ahh, shrine to delusion, vanity, narcissism, thy name is social media!

I instinctively knew that to take a selfie of myself was something I should avoid. And was I ever right. But for the sake of historical record, I took that selfie. Good heavens, I thought, when I looked at my selfie, what on earth do I think I’m doing wearing the nose of Charles de Gaulle?

This first sorte into the realm of selfie-taking taught me in no uncertain terms that there is obviously more than meets the eye (and nose) when it comes to taking fawning photos for mass consumption on Facebook, especially abracadabra ones that transform you from what you really are into the oil painting you never can be. Indeed, every photo on Facebook is intrinsically an art form, art meaning ‘artificial’, and not everyone can master it. The trick (and what a trick!) is to make your faithful believe that the life your photos say you are living is primarily better than theirs and certainly better than yours.

Look out! Selfie in Victory Square!

My next trick was to put the smartfun away, cease repeating “He nose you know!” and shoot off on my solo run into Kaliningrad’s city centre, where, it embarrasses me to confess, that in front of the monument in Victory Square the compulsion took me again. I had to try for another selfie! (You can see the way it goes, can’t you?)

This time I would bring into play the much loved sucked-in cheeks and ubiquitous silly pout. At the very last minute, however, drawn in cheeks were dropped (they tend to do that, don’t they?), as I had noted in my dotage that my impression of Peter Cushing was already quite advanced and that to remodel my cheeks into two squeezed lemons might prove a bridge too far. If only I’d have stuck in my youth to murdering animals and eating them, by now my cheeks would be lovely and round like two plump rolls of prime pink brisket!

Even though my lips had not been enhanced, pumped up so that they looked like slugs, and I had no Frankenstein’s bolt through my snout, which given its size on my debut selfie could easily have accommodated any number of scrapyard pieces, this was destined to be my first (and also my last, I might add) outdoor-taken selfie. All that I succeeded in doing by pouting my lips like a retard was to convey the regrettable impression that although I was out on the town tonight my false teeth had not come with me. They were probably still in the gherkin jar into which they had landed when I let out that sneeze.

“Well, bugger that!” I said to myself, and shoved my Toosmart phone deep within my inside pocket, and I did not take it out again until I was standing outside the bar to which my feet had been programmed to take me. (Blame it all on the technocrats!)

Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka in Kaliningrad

Here are some facts for you. There are two bar/restaurants in the centre of Kaliningrad which are joined at the hip: one is Bavarian themed, Zötler Bier, and the other Czech, U Gasheka. The only pubs in the UK I know which had a similar arrangement, occurred in London’s Greenwich. They were the Richard I and The Greenwich Union (since vandalised by Young’s Brewery, which, with typical corporate disregard for social history and heritage, knocked them into one).

How embarrassing it was that on one occasion when a group of us had gone to the Richard I, I somehow ended up halfway through the evening accidentally in The Greenwich Union. I had stepped outside the front of the Richard for a quick puff (that’s right, I said ‘puff’!) on my King Edward cigar and when I went to return inside unknowingly entered The Union. Thinking I was in the Richard and that my friends were playing a silly joke, ie they had gone into hiding somewhere, I took the pint I had freshly ordered and went and sat in the beer garden to ponder on what I should do. It was only when I heard my friends chatting away behind the fence in the Richard garden next door that I realised my folly: it wasn’t my friends who had played a joke; it was beer and navigation!

“Well, that’s nothing to be proud of. Is it!”
Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one.

Out of the two Kaliningrad bars mentioned, my first bar tonight would be the Bavarian one, an establishment where, if you are lucky, you get to sit down the centre of the room inside a make-believe beer barrel. Unfortunately, my luck was out this evening ~ it had probably gone to Maxims ~ and I was shown to a line of seats and tables that ran along the perimeter of the room. Good! A young couple sitting together at right angles to my table would provide the perfect opportunity for testing the cloaking function of that recently purchased gadget that was jumping out of my pocket.

A businessman, to the left of me, who had obviously not just bought his phone, was so absolutely invisible to everyone in his orbit, with the exception of himself, that had his skills at twiddling not been so well endowed (which seemed to beg the question, was he born with his smartarse in his hand?), I would never have thought to notice him.

Smartphone how smart as mass surveillance systems?

He was a pro, I was a novice, and I have to say it showed. My first message on WhatsArse was an all fingers and thumbs job. It took me 20 minutes to compose a reasonably legible paragraph which, had I been working on a laptop, would have taken perhaps a minute or less. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns, and over the next 40 minutes, managed to shoot three messages into and across cyberspace complete with photos attached. During those 40 minutes, the young couple facing my profile (and thinking “It’s Peter Cushing!”), and whatever it was the man was doing down the other end of the room with his Bavarian sausage, were so plainly indistinct as to issue the suspicion that I had come as close to vanished as Davos had to resetting the world. Had I been any more gone, I would have been shaking hands with H.G. Wells!

Next door, in the Czech bar, I was again unlucky. The best seats had been taken, and I ended up perched upon a sponge-filled leather-look bench, which was, I suppose, alrightish, except that being so high off the ground it left one’s little legs dangling with nothing to rest one’s feet on, rather like sitting in the barber’s chair when you were six-years old. How fortuitous and kind of fate that she had arranged a stool in front of me so that I could use its stretcher as a foot rest.

Mick Hart's shoes with microphone attached

In this bar, I tried out my phone with an email or two. Fine, although when it came to attaching images, the process became a tad mysterious. Exit quickly and onto Google. I had never opened websites using a smartarsephone before, and now that I have, I cannot say that I found the experience particularly positive: yards and yards of constant scrolling. It’s like an electronic version of bog roll. But twiddling and swiping go hand in glove, and for me, the man with the reputation for being the Last Man on Earth to Own a Smartphone, the gauntlet had been thrown.

In the bar up in the clouds (the Pivovar Restaurant Brewery) overlooking the spot where I shouldn’t have taken my second selfie, and now on my third beer, not only had I become more confident in my twiddling and more comfortable with my twiddler, but my Russian language had improved no end. Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo (“Good Moaning”) may well have had good reason to feel proud of me, but could his approval be half as rewarding as thinking you’re getting it right, whilst most likely you are not, or rather not quite, but not knowing nor either caring because sitting snuggly in your pocket, if you haven’t already lost it, is your little spy and pie in the sky, your customised, very own smartphone ~ ahhhh.

By the end of the evening I was able to say two things. No, I had not drunk so much that I could only say two things, I mean two things pertinent to my smartphone experience. The first was something I had always suspected: Never take a selfie and, if you have to think again, never take a selfie. The second was that my expectations of the smartphone as an instrument of lonely-guy concealment when sitting alone in a bar or pub was vindicated. And yet, the keeping-tracks-on-you downside that inevitably comes with owning a smartphone, unless you keep it switched off, continues not to sit easily with me.

In more recent years, I have heard people say that the Silicon Valley Mob have turned up the heat in their racket to enslave people and to extort as much personal information about everyone on Earth as completely as they can. Like the Capone organisation, which, after Al’s demise, moved with the help of Sam Giancana into the labour rackets, the Silicon Outfit found a new racket in 2-step verification.

Conspiracy theory or not, with the roll-out of 2-step verification for online banking, as a sign-in function for websites and blogs and as the only option for identifying yourself on ecommerce sites, such as eBay for example, the message is loud and clear, either get a smartphone or else be bolloxed.

The one-step further exploitation than 2-step verification is fingerprint and/or eye recognition. Now it’s getting personal. Where will it all end? The clue may lie in the word ‘end’. In other words and words more plain, is Anus Authentication already passing from science fiction into the realms of science fact? It is too much of a coincidence that AI (Anal Intelligence) is the state of the art abbreviation on the tongue of every news editor. AI is everywhere, so there must be something in it, as I’m sure there must be someone out there, in a small secluded brick-looking building in Silicon Valley’s back yard, who is poised with the paperwork in his hand for the biggest breakthrough yet. Zappa may have the answer …

Image attributions

Man with phone on couch: Image by <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/character-playing-videogame_7734013.htm#query=clipart%20sitting%20using%20a%20smartphone&position=17&from_view=search&track=ais&uuid=00c57546-c79e-4db8-a98c-c064c40ce15e”>Freepik</a>

No walking with Smartphone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/No-smartphone-while-walking/81731.html

Spectacles: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Glasses-with-eyes/44056.html

Microphone: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-clip-art-of-electric-microphone/28206.html

A couple more posts

It’s that man in the Russian Hat in Bedford!

Secret Weapon in Kaliningrad

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

It never rains but it pours!

24 August 2023 ~ Britain a nice place to live on the telly

As coronavirus begins to look more and more like an unsolved crime, leaving many people wondering if they should really have had those jabs, and now that the conflict in Ukraine has passed its media sell-by date, thanks mainly to the British public’s notorious attention-span deficit, the climate-warming bandwagon has taken to the road again, strapped to which is a dubious sidecar, artificial intelligence. Billed by UK media as the greatest threat to humanity since Britain’s extended opening hours (licensed premises or the country’s borders?), an arguably greater threat to us all than artificial intelligence must surely be our national failure to use the intelligence with which we were born when defining our relationship with truth and what we see on the telly.

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

You might ask what I, the Chairman of the TV Temperance Society, is doing sitting in front of the telly, and you would be right to do so. The answer is simple: During my recent tour of duty here in the UK, my predicament is one in which I have found myself exposed, and not infrequently, to the TV set of a friend, who, for reasons only known to himself, insists on ‘catching the news’.

Catching the news in the UK is a little like catching coronavirus, catching the adverts is worse, the only difference being that those we never believed or trusted before the onset of coronavirus and anti-Brexit hype, and whom we believe and trust a whole lot less in hindsight, have no desire to protect us from these twin pestilences with a vaccine false or otherwise. Thus, when we watch the news, or watch anything on British TV, it is our own immune system, our God-given common sense, in which we must rely, not Big Pharma.

I must say (why?) that having not ‘watched telly’ for a considerable period of time, 17 years in fact, from a purely academic perspective, the experience is quite an interesting one. For example, take the conmercials.

As well as attempting to persuade us to buy something and/or fork out for a service that we do not need and would better do without, TV adverts have become an integral part of the media’s, and by default the British Government’s, perpetual drive to convince us that all is hunky dory; that the UK has at last become the happy, harmonic multicultural melting pot that Enoch Powell predicted it could never be. To a lesser extent, yet creeping through the woke back door left open, LGBTQ is also ideologically embedded in British TV advertising, suggesting that all to a man are firmly behind the movement … so to speak.

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this, in fact it is essential, dramatically essential, that however disingenuous the product they are pushing, we are willing to buy into it. As it happens (thank you Jim!), we really have no choice. Having made our multicultural bed without the permission of due democratic process, it is the job of our string-pulled political classes to make sure that we quietly lie in it … innit!

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

So, there is an awful lot more foreigners floating around in the adverts than there was when I last watched television 17 years ago. The people pecking order is blacks first, then Asians and here and there the odd oriental, which, again, is fine, in the sense that, like it or not, this is where we are at in modern-day Britain, give or take a few Albanians and also half of Ukraine.

At a cursory glance, for example over the top of your mobile phone, the inference could be that it is a red letter and rainbow day for the concept of inclusivity. But look again; all is not well. The British-on-paper-only folk, as distinct from Britons by lineage, are not stereotyped by characteristics universally associated with who they are and where they hail from, all of which would be jolly liberal if not for the ironic fact that the TV remodelled version is more like ‘us’ than we are ourselves.

Becoming ‘more like us’ is a strange, strangely controversial and also amusing phenomenon, why? Because nobody on our TV adverts and nobody’s lifestyle as portrayed on TV bears the slightest resemblance to ‘us’ ~ to our lifestyles, to what we think, to what we say and the way we feel, least of all to what we think and feel about our reconstituted, repackaged country.

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

TV adverts would have us believe, and it is make-believe pure and simple, that everyone in the UK inhabits a star-spangled realm where, regardless of background and ethnicity, we are middle-class, upwardly mobile, swanking it up in des-res properties (warm and with the lights all blaring, and don’t forget incessantly grinning, irrespective of soaring utility costs ), united by shared cultural values and generally ‘’avin’ it large” together. Naturally unnaturally, this televised illusion of what and who as a nation we are is complete and utter fiction, but when all is said and done the fiction is a nice one.

‘Nice’ is something that in my absence, British TV has almost mastered. Not entirely, however, as it continues to churn out sleazy, violent, tacky programmes, front and centre of which are a plethora of films and dramas which, in the days before life went virtual, would never have got past the censor. But cut through the sleaze and primeval viciousness, the woke blancmange and PC tripe, and the overall impression is (please sing along together now) ‘we all live in a rainbow submarine’. It is finely tuned, perfectly balanced, well-adjusted and ~ this is the all-important bit ~ effortlessly inclusive.

This kudos, or a fair proportion of it, must be ascribed to the hand-picked newsreaders and the sterling performance they give. My favourites, but then I am bias because of my personal, historic connections with Norwich, are those nice people who present Anglia Regional News. A more affable bunch of English people you would be very hard-pushed to find, especially off the telly ~ think needle in a haystack. How could you not help warm to them, this rare and endangered species?

Admittedly, it does not harm Norwich any that its geographic location puts a fair distance between it and some of our country’s less salubrious cities and that the Norfolk and Suffolk regions are some of the finest examples of Englishness the nation has yet to lose. Thus, give or take the odd exception ~ since the country as a whole is nowhere near as nice as the make-believe one served up on the box and certainly not as safe and stable ~ the news from rural regions can often be more palatable than the horror seeping daily out from those manky NO-GO Areas, which, we are officially told, do not exist in Britain. Stand by to ‘pull the other one’!

Another feather in the media’s illusory cap (Do you recognise it? It hangs down limply with bells on.) are, without question, the weather forecasters. This little band of interluders, are such a welcome breath of fresh air ~ even when it isn’t windy ~ that they can make the weather in Britain seem nice when in fact it has not stopped piddling with rain since summer was announced.

Torrential rain, gale-force winds, perpetually overcast skies, temperatures like the arctic, however bad it may be, our presenters keep on smiling. Land heaves, earthquakes, asteroid apocalypse, whatever the state of play (Look up! It’s a nuclear strike!) the face of the British weather forecaster always wears a smile.

And this is as right as alright can be, because in a country the social stability of which grows more precarious day by day, a country in which it is virtually impossible to stay in a hotel without sharing a room with an Albanian drug dealer, a country where the political classes are more obsessed with woke than ensuring safety on the streets, a country in which its police force says ‘blame it on your politicians’, a country where no one dare switch on the heating since the cost of gas and electric has spiralled out of control, a country where millions of pounds are squandered on financing futile conflicts in faraway lands which are none of its business, especially whilst legacy Britons sleep rough on our streets and the NHS is imploding due to egregious immigration indifference, more than ever before we, as a nation, are in dire need of solace, comfort and reassurance from the traction-gaining realisation that it is all going terribly wrong and that if we continue on the present trajectory it can only get much worse.

If television can work a miracle and make our country feel ‘nice’, then no matter how it does it, the BBC could honestly say, ~ if it remembers how to honestly say ~ that the risk of not paying your TV licence is worth the money it costs them to keep sending investigation letters that the world and its wife ignores.

I myself believe, however, that apart from being a very bad habit, lack of funds to do anything else and the exhaustion that naturally accrues from the daily lot of a wage slave, the flawed mentality of those who incessantly watch the box and take it all as gospel lies somewhere between ‘Don’t touch that dial!’ and TV’s shining, happy people.

Nice to see you, to see you nice, but anything more than that is so far from the truth as to make it powder-keg dangerous.

Here comes the intermission! Best go and make a cup of tea.

Charles III Big Day Sees Rural England go Flagtastic

In England’s Green and Pleasant Land

6 May 2023 ~ Charles III Big Day Sees Rural England go Flagtastic

It wasn’t my intention to be in England during the coronation, even though I naturally received a personal invitation from the Palace to attend. I would have accepted, but I am rather busy at the moment sifting and sorting junk, or as I am often wont to call it, ‘highly desirable antiques and collectables’.

To tell the truth, as there is neither a telly nor connection to the internet in the gaff where I am staying, if it hadn’t been for BBC Radio 4 and the sudden inexplicable festooning of houses with Union Jacks and bunting, I may have been none the wiser. What’s that you say? Am I joking about my personal invitation?

Charles III Big Day Sees Rural England go Flagtastic

It has to be said that in spite of the British media’s best efforts to mar the historic occasion with programmes and articles devoted to the as usual tedious and typically predictable leftist bleating to abolish the monarchy, it was most satisfying and inspiring as we winged our way through the last bastion of Englishness, the English countryside, to behold and admire the enduring support for the good old English monarchy.

Whilst liberal lefties throughout the land will not be satisfied until they have ousted the monarchy and installed in its place something sun-tanned of suspect gender preferably wrapped in a blanket and have stuffed the remaining rooms of Buckingham Palace with 8 million-pounds-a-day grinning illegal migrants (How much does the monarchy cost us? I’ve heard it said a penny a day.) at which point in our country’s decline, we will be forced to rename Buckingham Palace by changing the ‘B’ to an ‘F’, the miserable machinations of the country’s self-culture loathers pale feebly into insignificance against the inspiring sight of flags and bunting streaming across the length and breadth of heritage-conscious rural England.

The Royal Mint, pandering to the liberal myth of harmonic multiculturalism, may have slapped something really ridiculous on one of their 50 pence coins ~ a piece of woke for your pocket ~ but the real currency of a united kingdom is unequivocally that which is visibly and tangibly expressed in the pride that we take in flying our flag and its relevance to our heriditary monarchy.

Yes, it is a pity that allegedly ‘King Charles has chosen the colours of the Ukrainian flag for his coronation’, (or so it has been Twattered) but the mentally stable amongst us (and there are still some left in the UK, honestly!) are quite capable of dismissing such folly as a 50-pence-piece worth of public relations. No doubt in the fulness of time it will also be revealed for the consumption of the liberal masses that throughout his coronation his royal highness’s royal underpants were LGBT monogrammed.

Whilst there are some things in life that do not bear thinking about, others exhilarate. Feast your eyes on the following photographs snapped by yours truly as I travelled recently through a small village in the heart of north Bedfordshire. What they could not fit on a 50 pence piece, they should inscribe on a note of more value.

Have a good Coronation celebration weekend. God Save the King! God save us all!

Charles III Big Day Flags in Bedfordshire

A linked post

Woke and Hypocrisy: God Save the King!!

Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout

Attendance at Kaliningrad’s 9th May celebration

Published: 12 May 2022 ~ Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout

This year’s attendance at Russia’s annual 9^th May Victory Day celebration of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War (WWII), which liberated the world, ensured Russia’s preservation and determined its future role on the international stage, was nothing short of spectacular. In Moscow it was reported that more than a million people took part in the annual procession of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, and a friend, contacting us by VK messenger, said that the crowds in St Petersburg were literally overwhelming.

Here, in my hometown, Kaliningrad, the volume of people making the yearly pilgrimage to Victory Park to place flowers of respect and gratitude on the monuments to their Soviet forbears who had risked and layed down their lives by the millions to free the world of Nazism was a truly phenomenal sight. Russian citizens of all ages from the very young to the very old streamed towards the park, proudly holding aloft placard-mounted photograph portraits of grandparents and great grandparents who had fought and died defending their country.

Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout

Such was the magnitude of the throng that when we arrived at the edge of the park we found further progress impeded by a redoubtable network of crowd-control barriers. However, with a little effort and ingenuity we gradually joined the vast procession as it slowly made its way towards the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen, the city’s foremost war memorial.

Here, the crowds would pause to say a silent prayer, to reflect on the sacrifice made by previous generations and to lay flowers at the foot of the 26-metre obelisk.

The Monument to 1200 Guardsmen is Kaliningrad’s open church. Its landmark obelisk, eternal flame ~ lit more than fifty years ago ~ and spacious square flanked by two figural sculptures depicting Soviet troops storming the city of Königsberg (renamed ‘Kaliningrad’ after the war) is a living memory embodied in stone and bronze of the fortitude and heroism exemplified by the Soviet people in resisting and vanquishing fascism and in lifting the shadow of the dark forces that it had cast upon the world.

Victory Day Russia 2022 expatkaliningrad

Crowds on bridge Victory Park Russia 2022

Like the eternal flame of which it is a part, the Monument to 1200 Guardsmen is a holy place of patriotism. The crowd brought more of it with them. In addition to the portraits of their ancestors, many people carried and waved small commemorative flags and some of the more adventurous full-sized Soviet banners. The Georgian ribbon, a one-time component of military decorations but latterly used to honour veterans who fought on the Eastern front, a symbol of glory instantly recognised by its striking combination of contrasting black and orange stripes, was everywhere. And many people, including my wife and our comrades, also donned wartime pilotkas ~ olive-green military side caps complete with Soviet insignia.

Along the approach road to the obelisk and the entrance to Victory Park music of a patriotic and sentimental nature recorded during the wartime era played through the PA system. People brought up with these songs, and later generations who had been taught them by their parents and in history lessons at school, sang along as sentiment directed, sometimes wistfully, then triumphantly but always with great affection.

The shared respect for historical memory by so many people of so many differing ages was uplifting and inspiriting. It is hard to imagine greater devotion stemming from people of a sovereign country to and for that country. The evocation of pride and faith, unity and belonging is one which westerners seldom encounter; indeed, one which modern western youth deprived of would find alien.

Victory Day Russia 2022 brings Record Turnout

For Russians, however, the past remains a part of the living present. It is the foundation of their strength, a triumph of cultural values that has transcended generations and continues to transcend, uniting and sustaining them. It is the dove and poetry of the Russian soul; the stoical spirit of the Russian bear. The people of their past are the people of their present and the children of their present is their future. This then is the march of Russia’s Immortal Regiment!
<9^th May Victory Day 2022>

By Volga to Yantarny Russian Easter and Beautiful Coast

Traditional Easter in Kaliningrad, Russia

Published: 27 April 2022 ~ By Volga to Yantarny Russian Easter and Beautiful Coast

Whilst the French were masochistically (or should that be Macronistically) condemning themselves to another five years of neoliberal arrogance in which cash is king but people and culture are, according to their president, there to be p_ _ _ _ d on, we, here, in Russia were celebrating one of the most important holidays in the Orthodox Christian Calendar, Easter ~ a time for observing sanctified traditions, passing those traditions on to the next generation and uniting family and friends.

Easter eggs play an essential role within the Christian ethos of this holiday, not the chocolate variety, but actual eggs, hard boiled and dyed typically red using onion skins. I recall one Easter in the UK when my wife Olga and her English class decorated hard-boiled eggs in a variety of elaborate and brightly coloured patterns; a labour of love no doubt but a formidable task no less. Nowadays, modern techniques make it possible to cheat just a little, using decorative highly coloured and often illustrated bands that once applied to the egg wrap themselves tightly around it.

Hand-painted or not, the eggs, which symbolise resurrection and new life, are blessed in the church and presented as gifts to relatives and friends. Other blessed Easter gifts include bought or home-made cakes and fortified Church wine. We received and gave such fare from and to our friends and neighbours.

Easter Blessing Kaliningrad Russia — **The blessing of Easter Gifts in Kaliningrad 2022**

By Volga to Yantarny Russian Easter and Beautiful Coast

On Easter Sunday, 24th April, our friends, Arthur and Inara, invited us to be driven in style in their 1970s’ Volga to the seaside resort of Yantarny.

Yantarny is much smaller and further away from Kaliningrad than the increasingly popular resorts of Zelenogradsk and Svetlogorsk. I had not been there since my brother visited Kaliningrad in May 2019.

As then, the weather today was superb ~ a gorgeous and perfect spring day ~ just right for lounging near the sea and taking snapshots.

Yantarny Russian Easter Olga Hart — **If you go down to the woods today …**

Since I was last in Yantarny, a number of municipal improvements had been made, and in the coastal woodland, a picturesque pre-sea descent, landscape-sensitive work of both a practical and embellishing nature abounded, including more woodland paths, eclectic artworks and non-obtrusive visitor facilities. One among these is the installation of a wooden-decked observatory, enabling unimpeded views across the white, sandy beach and rolling expanse of the Baltic.

Olga Hart at Yantarny — **Looking out across the Baltic Sea**

On the coastline itself a series of attractive and much-needed chalet-style café’s interlinked by wooden platforms, each offering inspiring views of the sea, have been tastefully constructed, and it was in one of these that we would stop a while to take advantage of their hospitality.

Sitting outside beneath the shade of the broad eaves, I was befriended by the cafés’ resident stray. No, not that irritating and passively (if you are lucky) aggressive stereotype that blights the British pub and whom everyone tries to avoid, but an old moth-eared and fur-matted cat, slate-grey and socially promiscuous. He obliged me by sitting on my knee and then, after 10 minutes, possibly dissatisfied that no grub had come his way, decided to bite the hand that hadn’t fed him. Ahh well, I thought, if you can’t be bitten by a curmudgeonly old cat over the Easter weekend when can you be bitten by one?

Bitten or not, I was content. I had good friends, good beer, the gentle sound and sight of the sea and was suffused with such a sense of complete and utter relaxation that it seemed to transcend almost everything, even philosophical thought and the quiet reflection with which it is nurtured. Effort was redundant, and effort, for the moment, had been effortlessly put aside.

We ~ as I perceived a communion among all present not only within our small group ~ remained thus for some time, gazing out across a sea that seemed at peace with its gently rippling self as much as we were with ourselves.

We remained this way for over an hour until the sun, shimmering silver across a broad swathe of sea where the surface seemed nearly smooth, challenging the visibility of my 1940s’ sunglasses, prompted us with the realisation that the afternoon was giving away to evening and that we would have to make a move. Alas, the time had come, as it always does; and for all that we had put it on hold, the ebb and flow of our own tide eventually carried us back into town.

The departure was sweetened, however, by calling in for lunch at Yantarny’s Amber Restaurant. What a remarkable place! I think we’ll give it three exclamation marks ~ !!! If you are curious as to why they call it Amber Restaurant, there’s no perhaps about it, you simply need to visit.

Hopefully, I’ll write a little more about it at a later date. For now, however, let’s just say that if the combination of amber, atmosphere, good food and brilliant beverages is something that appeals to you, the Amber Restaurant is the place!!!! There, I’ve gone and given it four exclamation marks. See > Amber Legend Yantarny

Fed, beerified and tripping up the step as I left ~ I always do that, it’s not because I was squiffy ~ we walked the short distance to the local church.

In German times Yantarny Church was Lutherian. The restored church is now Orthodox, The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, and belongs to the Kaliningrad diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Mellow and mesmerising, it is difficult to imagine an environment more conducive to an appreciation of all that is dear ~ your loved ones, friends, the life you have lived and the current life you are living. Yantarny Church is not just for Easter, or any other special date on the religious calendar, it is an open sanctuary for thought and reflection, a quiet, hallowed place in which to take pause from the daily static of our estranging modern existence.

We had spent approximately three hours in Yantarny. It had been nowhere near enough and the need to return was incipient. I could definitely feel a weekend break coming on. But first there was the question of how we would leave today.

On emerging from the church, we discovered that Arthur had left the Volga lights switched on, which wasn’t so good for starting the engine. As ordered, I put my shoulder to the front of the big old car and gave it all that I could. Miraculously ~ you might say ~ the lovely old lump (not Arthur, I mean the car) fired up, and although praised for my efforts, and also praising myself, I was secretly reflecting on the mysterious ways in which things move, are moved and how they move us and the wonderful gift of having spent a perfect Easter day.