12 October 2023 ~ Kaliningrad Toilet Door is a thing of Beauty
Has it ever crossed your mind that one day you might be famous and, if so, in what capacity? Many dream of fame when they are young at a time when the reason is unimportant. This is one of youth’s luxuries: the dream of fame for fame itself.
But fame can strike at any time, when you least expect it, in the most unexpected way and for the most unexpected reasons. Take me [Frank Zappa: “Take me, I’m yours …”], for example, how could I have possibly predicted twenty years ago, when I was 14🙂, that fate would have me knock on the door of fame, or would have had me knock on the door of fame had there been a door to knock on.
When I was young, I staked my claim to fame, or so I would have them believe, on the publication of my first toilet wall. What an imagination! Yet even I, as fanciful as I was, could never have envisioned that it was not a wall but a toilet door that one day would consign me to the annals of posterity.
I can hear you asking, although you are rather faint, how such an extraordinary set of circumstances ever came to be and, considering its phenomenal nature, have I thought of contacting TheGuinness Book of Records? Answer, in reverse order, I shall wait for them to contact me, but, whilst we wait in suspense together, the very least I can do is let you in on the noble act to which my fame is owed.
Kaliningrad Toilet Door
Not so long ago, the president of the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club acquired a property which the club could use as a base for its activities and as a classic car museum. An historically interesting building, which, in the days of German Königsberg, had been used as an aircraft parts repository for Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, it was otherwise perfect in every sense for what the club required, except in one respect ~ an important one, I thought. For this public venue where people would meet, attend lectures, be taken on tours and, if they so desired, could hire for private parties was lacking in one essential ~ it had no toilet door!
It is monumentally inconceivable that during the Third Reich’s reign the bog in the Luftwaffe building would have been doorless. I have it from a reliable source, a man who’s devoted his life to toilets ~ he majored in them at Cambridge ~ that, to quote his words verbatim, “They made very good doors those Germans did, and very good toilet doors!” We are left to conclude, therefore, that in the days when defeat was imminent, as well as destroying their vital papers, either the Germans destroyed the toilet door or hid it where no one could find it. We cannot put it past them. It is a typical Gerry trick, I’d say; the sort of thing they went round doing just to be awkward and spiteful.
However, to give credit where credit is due, the fact that the door was missing had not escaped the notice of the club. And it was patently clear to everyone that something had to be done about it, not the absence of German decorum but the absent toilet door. Then came the question, what exactly?
In the Club
As with all complex organisations presided over by reams of committees, reliant on detailed reports from antithetical think tanks and subject to the dislocation of interdepartmental interests, the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club faced a difficult dilemma. The knock-on effect, or no knock-on effect, as there was nothing to rap one’s knuckles on, of having no door to your toilet became one of those gritty [spelling correct] seemingly endless issues, destined to be shuffled about from one desk to another, until at last worn down and out by the suspenseful acrobatics of over-careful toilet timing, it fell on me, to coin a phrase, to roll out an initiative. “Why don’t I buy a door,” I said, “and have someone fill the hole with it!” The motion was passed unanimously.
Job done, you think. I can tell you that it wasn’t. Where would we find that fix-it person now Jim was no longer with us. He fixed a lot of things did Jim, including over-generous posthumous payouts for a herd of out-of-the-woodwork women now minted in their retirement years.
When, at last, we did find someone ~ and, of course, at last we did ~ it felt like every toilet trouble wherever it was in the world was nought but a poof in the wind. The handyman he fitted the door quicker than Brand got fitted up ~ he certainly knew his angles from his elbows ~ and before you could say ‘engaged’ or ‘vacant’ or ‘here’s another perfect example of a bum-wrap by the leftist state’, the club was no longer one door short of a toilet.
Some of you may feel that the saga of our toilet door was all a storm in a Portacabin, whilst the rather less polite amongst you might think it a load of c..p! And I am willing to concede that some of the visitors to the club may miss the thrill of sitting there whilst a friend or colleague stands guard for them, but I have to say from my point of view, it all looked rather cheeky. Bringing a bottle to an event is something not unheard of, but come on, really, deary, deary me, bring your own toilet door!
As the intelligence of my philanthropy leaked out far and wide, eventually reaching St Petersburg, my friend and colleague, Yury Grosmani, writer, author, journalist and latterly film producer, flushed with excitement at the news, immediately reached for his keyboard and wrote this moving tribute to me, which he posted on VK:
Вообще, музей без туалета, а равно как и музей с туалетом, но без двери, заведение абсолютно бесперспективное. Очень приятно, что известный журналист, писатель, а теперь мы уже знаем, что и киноактер, Мик Харт, выступил спонсором такого важного, нужного и благородного дела. Теперь музей АвтоРетроКлуба имеет на одно преимущество больше, чем самые известеые музеи мира. Например, на дверях туалета Британского музея такой таблички нет. Лично подтверждаю! А у нас она есть! Передаю слова огромной благодарности моему другу и коллеге МИКУ ХАРТУ 🇬🇧🇷🇺👍
And now in English:
“ [computer translation] In general, a museum without a toilet, as well as a museum with a toilet, but without a door, is an absolutely hopeless establishment. I am very pleased that the famous journalist, writer, and now we already know that film actor, Mick Hart, sponsored for such an important, necessary and noble cause. Now the AutoRetroClub Museum has one more advantage compared to the most famous museums in the world. For example, there is no such sign on the toilet doors of the British Museum. I personally confirm! And we do have it! I convey my deep gratitude to my friend and colleague MICK HART 🇬🇧🇷🇺👍
Whether I fully deserve this accolade, I will leave that up to you decide. As for the British Museum’s pitifully Mick Hart plaqueless status, there may be some truth in this; I can neither confirm nor deny. But should that august establishment ever find itself taken short by the urgent need to have one, then I’m the man for their big job.
For my own part, now that the door is up and the paperwork is done, I am happy to rest on my laurels, content in the certain knowledge that although my simple toilet door has not converted this lowly loo into anything close to a cistern chapel, it fulfils the function, as nature intended, to stop the things that shouldn’t come out from coming out of the closet. Small things in life, perhaps, but if by my private motion I have achieved some good in the public realm and in the process of doing so prevented the club’s reputation from hitting the skids big time and going down the pan, then per angusta ad augusta. It is just something we often say (as well as going ‘ahhh’) in the world of toilet-door sponsorship!
Note: The door sponsored by Mick Hart is available for viewing, and not least using, at the Kaliningrad Auto Retro Club Museum. To avoid disappointment, advanced booking is advisable.
Bletsoe Garden Fête is just one event on Mick Hart’s enviable social calendar. This year he put away his bicycle clips and went by Aston Martin instead.
2 July 2023 ~ Bletsoe Garden Fête in an Aston Martin DB2/4
Among the high-quality merchandise that I am disposing of at present, I happened upon a box full of the 1960s’ educational comic for children Look and Learn.
Opening the pages of these august volumes, I was treated to a compendium of educational articles, some features, others comic strip but all superbly illustrated and all reminding me of the way we were when England was really England.
The content of the magazines reflected the educational ethos of the time, presenting informative articles of a historic, scientific, cultural and practical nature. The scope of the subject matter was world-wide but the emphasis was squarely placed on inculcating the young into appreciating the unrivalled part that England played in the evolution of the civilised world. Topics ranged from famous English people to national passtimes to traditional British games to great events in British history, so that it was impossible not to come away from the magazine instilled and inspirited with a patriotic sense of pride.
It was at that moment that a modern-day version of Look and Learn insinuated itself into my unguarded imagination. There it was saturated with Black Lives Matter, the joys of immigration, LGBTQ+ZX!!&£££, Radio Zelensky, how to adapt your broom cupboard to house an economic migrant, and how to get out of Brexit free. It was also spattered with lots of adverts, just like those we see on TV, which show people from far flung places acting and talking like cloned English persons eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with lashings of Bisto gravy. Ahh Bisto. Ahh Bullshit. I’ve always been a green bananas and bread-fruit man myself.
Bread fruit are marvellous. It occurs to me that they are the humane steam-powered alternative to Scotland’s McSporan haggis. I like them, which is more than I can say for cricket. I have never liked cricket, correction, I never liked playing cricket, but whenever I take a turn through the English countryside in the midst of summer the sight of men dressed in their cricketing whites and the sound of leather on willow is most inspiring. BDSM aside, (it’s always gone on in English villages) another revered and quite frankly reassuring English tradition has to be the garden fête, or garden fetty, as my wife liked to call them.
Now that summer is here and the nights are growing whiter, as in gentlemen in their cricketing whites, it is difficult to decide which is the most exciting: men stumping their middle wickets or England’s profusion of garden fêtes.
“It’s come to something,” said my brother, “when all we’ve got to get excited about is the local village garden fête. But this is unfair, if not true. It’s when your calendar has a string of garden fêtes on it and nothing else that you should be worried.
Anyway, not that we have a list of local garden fêtes you understand, but our first fête this year was Bletsoe, to which we would be going in style. My brother had changed his socks, and I had my Russian hat on. Oh yes, and we were also going there in a vintage 1954 classic Aston Martin.
Now, to look at this Aston Martin you might think, ‘Look at the state of that!!’, or you could, as I overheard some chaps saying when we arrived at Bletsoe Garden Fête, “You don’t see many DB2/4s in original condition.” To repaint or not to repaint, that is the ££££ question?
Aston Martin DB2/4
The Aston Martin DB2/4 was produced from 1953-1957. The model shown here is a a four-seater drophead coupé, The engine is a Lagonda straight-6, 2.9 L, providing the vehicle with 140hp and a top speed of 120mph [193km/h]. A DB2/4 Mk I drophead coupé featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.
The Aston shown here is one of the few to have survived in its original untouched condition. Most Aston connoisseurs argue that the vehicle should not be resprayed but left as it is. The engine has been rebuilt.
Having videoed our trip to the fête from the inside of the Aston, we stopped out front Bletsoe Church to allow Martin to blow a hole through the wall of his wallet and steal a fiver for the entrance fee.
This difficult operation accomplished, but not without some groaning and sighing, we pulled up at the entrance to the field where a young lady asked us, “Are you exhibiting?”
“We’re not,” replied brother Joss, “but he is (pointing to Martin]. He’s got no trousers on?”
The fact that we were exhibiting but still had to pay an entrance fee was a bit rich in my opinion, even if the money was going to a good cause — the vicar’s holiday in St Tropez. But I put it down to the mercenary sign of the times and quickly blamed it on Russia.
The man who took the fiver off us was not the girl on the gate, well who knows what gender anyone is in England nowadays? The fiver took, someone then told us that if we headed in that direction towards the field, someone’s wife will be there to show you where to park.
Another someone said, mention no names, “I bet she isn’t, she’s most likely behind the hedge in the arms of another man!” [That comment loses something in translation, but this is a family blog.] Anyway, there was no one there when we got there, or where we thought we ought to be, so we parked up and jumped out. Actually, we struggled out accompanied by lots of geriatric groans and ‘oo-ahhh!’ noises. Aston Martin DB2/4s are certainly young men’s cars.
We hadn’t been there more than five minutes rubbing Fiery Jack into our joints when three more young men arrived, all driving early 1960s’ Ford Zodiacs. I liked the model that starred in the old 60s’ TV series Z Cars. It was, reputedly, the first 100mph car on the road. That taught the crooks! It did, they all went out and got Jags. As for the pink-outside, pink-inside job (see photo), well what can you possibly say? The owner-driver had even taken the trouble to ensure that the 1960s’ music seemingly coming from the car’s original radio only played hits up to the time that the car was produced and no later.
Once the circulation had come back, we began to circulate. There were a number of stalls in the offing and the first we visited was one that was selling vintage clothes. Nothing they stocked caught my eye and the clothes that caught my brother’s also got caught around his stomach, so we had to pass.
Sitting next to the clothes stall was a man surrounded by treen (look it up!).
“Did you make it all yourself?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “I’ve always been good with my hands.”
The wife of the man whom he said would be there was nowhere to be seen.
Today would be a day when I would meet people that I had not seen for some time ~ those who thought of coronavirus have an awful lot to answer for. The problem was that they all seemed to be faces with no names. You know the situation: “Hello, how are you, er …”
“Yes, I’m alright. How are you, er …?”
“Are you still …?”
“Yes, I am. Are you?”
“To the best of my ability.”
“How’s your wife?”
“I haven’t got one, but I’ve got somebody else’s …”
Wherever was that car-parking woman?
“How’s yours …?”
“Mine’s all right, how’s yours …?”
“Well, its’ been nice speaking to you, er …?”
“You too, er …?”
Exit stage left.
“Who on Earth was that?”
Others, however, were indelibly impressed on my memory, and it was very good to see them. (Their names have been withheld in order to protect our senility.)
After I had had my Pims, Joss his coffee and Martin all the sandwiches, we took a photographic stroll around the pre-war and wartime vehicles. And what an outstanding collection there was! Among them I made a bittersweet discovery: the presence of a Daimler the precursor of the Lanchester.
My friend had a Lanchester. Back in the 1970s, we teenagers used to pub crawl in it. He sold it eventually for 70 quid, and all I’ve got left is the ashtray. If only he had known then what I knew then and never fail to mention every time I see him now.
My brother Joss is on a salad diet. He’s currently eating about 3cwt of lettuce a day, which is probably why he could not resist buying a big sticky chocolate fudge cake from the cheap produce stall. He also found some moisturising cream, which he said was orgasmic ~ I think he meant ‘organic’ ~ but we passed on that all the same, preferring to invest instead in the guarantee of a good dawn chorus — four cheap cans of Heinz Baked Beans.
It was now time for Martin to buy me a drink. He was heading for the ‘bar’ quite nonchalantly when someone mentioned that it was his round and into the grass went his hooves like a donkey. Martin’s wallet is such a hard nut to crack that even the Hatton Garden Mob would think twice before attempting it. Eventually, however, he did cough up, but the experience was so traumatic that he collapsed rigid and spluttering onto a bale. Either his wallet was in dire need of Anusol or perhaps he was clenching it safe between his cheeks.
We stayed where we were for the rest of the event, watching dugs catch biscuits. Joss’s diet had got to him so badly that he was down there on all fours hoping a biscuit might come his way. We told him he was barking.
The next garden fête on the list ~ not that we have got a list, you understand ~ Ha! Ha! just talking metaphorically, is Milton Ernest. Did you know that the famous American big band leader Glenn Miller was billeted at Milton Ernest for a while during the war? He took his last fateful flight from nearby Twinwood Airfield. Both he and his list of garden fêtes were never seen again.
Updated 18 April 2022 | First published: 2 March 2021 ~ Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
[INTRO} I wrote this piece over a year ago, at a time when western media had nothing better to do than push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the coronavirus pandemic; now, apparently, it has nothing better to do than to push a hysteria-fomenting narrative about the situation in Ukraine. Bearing this in mind, I dutifully revisited my post to see if anything had changed regarding my opinion of life in Russia and to what extent if any western media had succeeded in convincing me that I would be happier in the UK than if I remained a sanctioned Englishman living in Kaliningrad. I am pleased, but not surprised, to say that other than one or two grammatical improvements, there was nothing to revise! Here’s that post again …
We left the UK for Kaliningrad in winter 2018, but things were far from settled. Over the next twelve months I would have to return to the UK three or four times to renew my visa and to obtain official documents and then return again to pay an extortionate sum of money for a notarised apostille, a little rosette-looking thing verified by a notary that once clipped to the official documents could be used to complete my Leave to Remain in Russia. It was expensive; it was a rigmarole; but obtaining Leave to Remain meant that opening visas would be a thing of the past.
The last time that I was in the UK was December 2019. I returned to Kaliningrad just in time for the New Year celebrations and a month or so afterwards was granted Leave to Remain. We had intended to return to the UK in April for a month, as we had some business to attend to, but before we could do that coronavirus came along and the rest, as they say, is history.
In a previous article I revealed the circumstances which persuaded us to leave the UK and move to Kaliningrad. Now, with December 2019 to the present date being the longest uninterrupted period that I have been in Kaliningrad, it would seem appropriate that I pause to reflect on what it is about Kaliningrad that drew me to it and continues to endear and fascinate.
Our friend, the late Victor Ryabinin, used to refer to Kaliningrad and its surrounding territory as ‘this special place’, and I am with him on that. Whether it is because I see Kaliningrad through his eyes and feel it through his heart, I cannot rightly say. Certainly, his outlook and philosophy on life influenced me and my intuition bears his signature, but I rather imagine that he perceived in me from the earliest time of our friendship something of a kindred spirit, someone who shared his sensibility for the fascination of this ‘special place’.
Nevertheless, my feelings for Kaliningrad are in no way blinkered by a Romanticist streak, which, yes, I do have. If Victor could describe himself as a cheerful pessimist, then I have no qualms in describing myself as a pragmatic Romanticist. But I am no more or less a stranger to Kaliningrad’s flaws and imperfections than I am to my own.
When we arrived in Kaliningrad on a very cold day in winter 2018 to make arrangements for moving here, we were thrown in at the deep end. Early in the morning, still tired from our flight the night before, we had official business that would not wait, which meant trekking off to one of the city’s less salubrious districts. We had given ourselves sufficient time, allowances having been made for the usual protracted queuing, but on reaching our destination discovered that the office we were bound for was working to a different timetable than the one advertised, and consequently we had a two-hour wait before we would be seen! Asking some kind people if they would reserve our place in the queue, we ventured out to a small eatery, a cubicle on the side of the road, for a coffee and a bite to eat. I wrote in my diary:
“Outside, we were confronted yet again by downtown Kaliningrad at its ‘finest’: those ubiquitous concrete tower blocks, stained, crumbling and patched; pavements cracked, ruptured and sunken; kerbstones akimbo; grass verges churned by the wheels of numerous vehicles so that they resembled farmyard gateways; small soviet-era fences rusting and broken; and roads so full of potholes that I began to wonder if it was 1945 again and looked anxiously above me to check for the presence of Lancasters.
When I returned to Kaliningrad from England in December 2019, I wrote: “I am not sure whether I love Kaliningrad in spite of its imperfections or because of them”.
Kaliningrad beyond the headlines of the West
They say that it is people that make places what they are, and it is a difficult-to-disprove logic. In the UK, for example, left-leaning commentators, liberal media editors, state-blamers and apologists are continually referring to ‘disadvantaged’ people from ‘deprived areas’, whereas in my experience it is people who deprive areas not areas that deprive people and the only disadvantage is yours, if you should wander into these areas by mistake.
Case in point: Back in the 1990s I had a female acquaintance who lived in a notorious concrete citadel in south London’s Peckham; her reputation I was assured of, but when I visited her one late afternoon in autumn, my knowledge of the Badlands where she lived was incipiently less important to me than my amorous intent. Ahh, the follies of youth!
When it came time to leave, I was ready to phone for a taxi. It was then that she informed me that after dark taxis refused to enter the estate, in fact the entire area! I suggested hailing a black cab in the street and was told that black cabs were as “rare ‘round here as rocking horse s!*t!”.
There was nothing for it: I would have to walk. I cannot say that I was unduly perturbed by this prospect. I was young, well relatively young, and these were the days of my London-wide pub crawls, which would take me to every corner of London no matter which corner it was.
On this particular evening, I had not walked far before I espied my first pub. I was still some distance from it, and though the light from the one or two working streetlamps was dim, the building was easily distinguished as the front was bathed in a low, lurid glow.
As I drew closer, I discovered to my surprise that someone had propped a large mattress on the side of the pub wall and had set light to it. It must have been very damp, the proverbial piss-stained mattress I suppose, because the conflagration was limited to a slow, puthering, smoulder.
Being the Good Samaritan that I am, I popped my head around the pub door and called to the chap behind the bar, “Hey, did you know that there is a burning mattress strapped to the side of your pub?” I need not have felt so daft for saying this, as, barely looking up from his newspaper, the barman grunted in reply, “It’s not unusual around here, mate.”
I had not walked far from The Burning Mattress pub before I found another: The Demolition Inn. All of the windows on the pavement side were smashed, and one pathetic light shone miserably through the broken glass in what otherwise would be a superb and original 1920s’ doorway. I couldn’t just walk past!
The place was empty and quiet, but it had not always been. Evidence had it that not too long ago it had been extremely lively. In one corner there was a pile of broken furniture and that which was still standing had bandaged legs and strung-up backs. The mirror behind the bar was bust, western-film style, and all of the more expensive bottles, the shorts, had been removed from the shelves and the optics, presumably for their own safety.
I never did ask what had happened. It just did not seem the polite thing to do. I just ordered a pint from the man behind the bar, who had a lovely shining black eye and his arm in the nicest of slings, and spent the next thirty minutes on my own in this disadvantaged pub, philosophically ruminating on the nasty way in which bricks and mortar and the wider urban environment deprived people to such an extent that there was nothing they could do but set light to piss-stained mattresses, smash up backstreet pubs, terrify London cabbies and (a popular sport in London’s predominantly ethnic areas) mug the hapless white man.
So, what can we conclude from this? Most large towns and cities have rundown areas, but the difference between the rundown areas in Kaliningrad and those that we know and avoid in London and other UK cities ~ the ‘deprived areas’, as they are called ~ is that you are less likely to be deprived of your possessions, your faculties even your life, whilst walking through the Kaliningrad equivalents of the UK’s infamous sink estates. Although, to be precise, such equivalents do not exist.
Thus, without sounding too fanciful, let us agree that it is people ~ the way they act, talk, behave, dress and generally conduct themselves in public ~ that makes a place what it is. An observation that applies to anywhere ~ be it a 1920s’ terraced street, a 1970s’ concrete estate, a pedestrianised city centre, anywhere ~ from region to region, country to country.
I am not about to make any silly sweeping statements about what Russian people are really like. I could not accomplish this with any degree of validity if someone was to ask me to ‘sum up’ British people (not the least because true British are lumped together with people from foreign lands, who in appearance and behaviour are anything but British, and yet have a stamp in their passport that contradicts good sense) simply because every individual is different no matter where he or she hails from. What I can say hand on heart is that in the 22 years that I have been coming to Kaliningrad, I have had the good fortune to meet, and in some instances become friends with, people of the highest calibre in this small corner of Russia.
It is true that in June 2019 we lost Victor Ryabinin, which was and still is an inconsolable loss, and tragedy would overtake us again in November 2020, when our friend and Victor’s protégé, Stas Konovalov, who helped us through the emotional period of Victor’s death and with whom we shared so many good times, died also. For the second time in less than two years, irreplaceable people had been taken from us. We continue to miss them both.
As it had been for Stas and Victor, history plays an important part in my relationship with Kaliningrad. There is, of course, my own personal history of Kaliningrad, an interaction that stretches back over two decades, and then the energy of the greater past that flows from antiquity into the present. In Kaliningrad, and its region, the past and present parallel each other. There are times and places where the past seems so close that you feel all you need to do is reach out, pull back the curtain and take its hand in yours.
“There is something magnetic in this city; it pulled some of the world’s most significant people into it as it has pulled me. I cannot explain this magic, but I know that this is my city.”
Victor Ryabinin
For some, this confluence of the past has more disturbing connotations. My wife’s mother, who is attuned to the ‘otherness’ of our existence, complains that although she likes Kaliningrad, there is something inescapably ‘heavy’ about it, defined by her as emanating from its dark Teutonic and German past. And I am inclined to agree with her. But I do not share her more gloomy interpretation of the dark side or its negative affect. For me, the cloud has a silver lining: it is profundity and, at its core, cultural sensitivity, interlaced with creative energy. Indeed, creativity and creative people thrived and flourished in Königsberg and that legacy, I am pleased to say, lives on to this day.
Königsberg ~ the retrospective world of artist Victor Ryabinin
Whilst the bricks and mortar of Königsberg’s ruins ~ the haunting landscape in which Victor Ryabinin spent his susceptible childhood ~ may have largely been replaced, the spirit of the old city and the spirits of all those who passed through it, whether peacefully or violently during times of war, are ever present. And I earnestly believe that the energy of our two departed friends, Victor and Stas, walk among the living here as countless others do who were brought to this place by fate.
Königsberg after allied bombing ~ the childhood landscape of Victor RyabininKaliningrad 2019
Victor wrote that “there is something magnetic in this city; it pulled some of the world’s most significant people into it as it has pulled me. I cannot explain this magic, but I know that this is my city.”
I was told by someone, not by Victor himself, that Victor believed that no matter how we felt about the past, we have to live in the present. I never did get chance to ask him whether by that he meant that we had no choice but to live in the present or that we each had a moral imperative to do so, but whichever version you choose, I would qualify both by adding that to a certain extent we can pick and mix, take what we need from the past and present and leave the rest behind.
In my case, the past and present converge, and I am attracted to modern-day Kaliningrad as much as I am fascinated by its East Prussian, German and Soviet history.
When English people call me out, asking pointedly what it is I like about Kaliningrad. I reply, glibly: “What’s not to like?”
Of course, I start with the historical perspective ~ it would not be me if I didn’t ~ referring to the Teutonic Order, ancient Königsberg, Königsberg’s fate during the Second World War and its Soviet reincarnation. I emphasise what a fascinating destination it is for those who are interested in military history and woo antique and vintage dealers with seductive tales of dug-up relics, the incomparable fleamarket and colourful descriptions of alluring pieces hidden away in the city’s antique shops.
Relics of Königsberg & Soviet Kaliningrad’s past
Then I go on to say that Kaliningrad is a vibrant and dynamic city, a city of contrasts, of surprises; I talk up its superb bars and restaurants, the variety and price of the beer, the museums and art galleries, the excellent public transport facilities, the attractive coastal resorts that are a mere forty minutes away and cost you two quid by train or a tenner by taxi, the UNESCO World Heritage Curonian Spit, the small historic villages, how friendly the natives are to visitors and, when the wife is not about, the presence of many beautiful women.
Above: Kaliningrad region’s main coastal resorts: Svetlogorsk & Zelenogradsk
*********Editorial note [18 April 2022]******** In the paragraphs to follow, I refer to the onerous restrictions which at the time of writing were impacting international travel in the name of coronavirus. Since then, you will have probably noticed that we have entered a new, dramatically more restricting chapter in the history of international travel, thanks to the West’s anti-Russian hysteria and its sanction-futile attempts to isolate the largest country on Earth. This ill-advised and not very well thought through economic warfare programme has added multiple layers of estranging complexity for global travellers everywhere, not just for potential visitors who want to leave the West to travel to Kaliningrad. From a purely selfish standpoint, these self-defeating impositions have merely made the ‘special place’ that Kaliningrad is to me that little bit more special, its taboo status, difficult-to-get-to location and mythicised risk to westerners making my ‘secret holiday destination’ even more enticing, albeit, ironically, somewhat less secret since in the latest round of Russophobia it has been singled out as a strategic military obstacle to the New World Order aspirations of neoliberal globalism.
You will also find in my later comments evidence supporting Russia’s assertion that the West’s attempts to stigmatise and degrade its international standing and denigrate its culture did not start with Ukraine. The events that we see unfolding today have been a long time in the making and by comparing my honest depiction of life in Kaliningrad with life as you know it in the UK, you should begin to understand why Russia’s traditional cultural ethos inflames the rancour of the West and why it fuels a burning desire in its governments to corrupt, transform and replace that culture with something sub-standard resembling their own. All I can say is Heaven forbid! *********End of Editorial note [18 April 2022]********
Admittedly, as with everywhere else in the world, access to Kaliningrad and accessibility with regard to its facilities have suffered restrictions through the outbreak of coronavirus, but hopefully it will not be long before the borders are open again. Before coronavirus struck, I was looking forward to excursions into Poland and to Vilnius, Lithuania ~ one of my favourite cities ~ and I want to make that train trip across Russia to Siberia.
As I say, what’s not to like?
Above: Scenes from Kaliningrad and its Baltic Coast region
I realise, of course, that this is not what most English people expect or even want to hear. The UK media has done a good demolition job on Russia over the years, especially Kaliningrad. True, each year that goes by, as things improve here and grow inversely worse in the West, the UK media is finding it increasingly difficult to slag Kaliningrad off. Who can forget its failed propaganda coup in 2018, when it pulled every trick in the book in an attempt to terrify British fans from travelling to Russia for the World Cup?! The plan backfired spectacularly, since the fans that trusted in their own intuition and came to Kaliningrad in spite of media hype were later to report how immensely they enjoyed themselves. What an ‘own goal’ for the West and an embarrassing one at that!
Nevertheless, UK and American liberals continue to bang their conspiratorial heads against the door of this nation state, taking solace in the belief that should they ever run out of tall and sensational stories, there’s always Kaliningrad’s ‘military threat’, to latch onto. Simultaneously, they promise to bestow on Mother Russia ~ as if she is an ‘it’ or an ‘other’ (now, isn’t that just typical!) ~ the rights equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and all for the knock-down bargain price of Russia becoming a vassal state of the New World Liberal Disorder.
When I am asked about Kaliningrad, I respond to the critics by saying that I can only tell it how I find it, from my point of view, and that the Kaliningrad that I know is not the one readily fictionalised by UK mainstream media. They listen, but I suspect that Brits being Brits they routinely dismiss me as a latter-day Lord Haw Haw, even though the only hawing I do is when reflecting on their entrenched dogmas I allow myself a good chuckle.
However, there is one thing about Kaliningrad that has changed decisively for me: When I first came here, I was a tourist. I came for the good times; I had a good time; and then I went home until the next good time. I was a tourist.
Holiday venues are like that, they exist in the distance of your life, somewhere on the periphery. It’s a bit like having a mistress, or so they tell me: you can call round when it pleases you, take your pleasure, vow one day that you will move in together and then return to your life and forget it, until that is of course holiday time comes round again.
The risk is, however, that by returning time and time again ~ to places not mistresses (although …) ~ you develop friendships, and before you know it you have become a part of their life and they a part of yours. Your lives become enmeshed. You learn about each other’s hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, dreams and aspirations. You gain an informed insight into each other’s past and the course your lives have taken, and whilst you are living in each other’s lives fate, which is working behind the scenes, is quietly writing you into its narrative
The point at which you find yourself no longer living on the outside but looking in is indistinct, but it occurs somewhere at that imperceptible juncture where you are not only sharing the ‘ups’ of people’s lives but also the ‘downs’.
This is particularly true when you fall into the raw, barely consolable emotion, grief, in which fused as one by pain and despair, you eventually emerge on the other side less intact than you were but brothers in arms and sorrow. Such experiences are not peculiar to me or to Kaliningrad, or for that matter to any one time and place; they are timeless, universal. But it is these experiences that will ultimately determine which are the stations on your way and which your final destination.
And do you know what is most awesome? It is that you never know where it will be until after you arrive there.
Zelenogradsk in the sun … It’s not always cold in Russia!!
Kaliningrad via Gdansk My first visit to Kaliningrad: left UK 23 December 2000
Kaliningrad via Gdansk is one in a series of posts that recount my first visit to Kaliningrad in 2000, and my first impressions of the land, the people and its culture.
Updated: 18 January 2022 | First published: 16 August 2019
It’s 7pm, 23rd December 2000, and I am sitting nervously on a British Airways’ plane bound for Warsaw, Poland. I am one of those peculiar types that believes sitting in an aluminium tube with thousands of gallons of highly inflammable fuel at 35,000 feet is perfect insanity. Never mind about the well-meaning ‘statistically safest form of travel’.
But was it a nice place where I was hopefully going to get
to?
As I said in my previous blog post, I hadn’t flown since 1971, but here I was jetting off to Warsaw. From Warsaw, we would take a bus to Gdansk and then, after a night or two there, a train to Kaliningrad, Russia.
For a non-flyer I took a perverse almost masochistic delight in the journey, overcoming much of my fear with the aid of three or four vodkas and a very complacent brother, who grinned like a jackanapes all the way.
For my own part, arriving at Warsaw Airport was not only novel in that we had arrived but also for the officialdom that greeted us. Here we were in the East, where it pleased my literary and cinematographic prejudices to discover a far more officious and militaristic reception. In London, Heathrow, it had been all suits, ties and ‘ladies and gentleman’; here, in the East, it was visor caps, uniforms, side-arms and cold stares. Passing through passport control was a stereotypical dream come true: the steely eyed and expressionless face of the man inside his little glass booth, glancing first at my passport photo and then searchingly back at me.
Somewhat disappointed that I had not been mistaken for the spy that they had been waiting for, I was then treated to what for most people I should imagine is a dull and onerous routine ~ retrieving one’s luggage ~ but which for us, thanks to a certain bag in our entourage, proved to be most entertaining.
The bag in question was a cylindrical-shaped canvas hold-all with a rubberised waterproof base. In theory it was a great piece of kit, capable of holding, well, anything really, and, when empty, folding away into nothing. Problem was, however, that when full it was very bulky, extremely heavy and extraordinarily long and, although it was well-catered-for with various handles and straps, those little wheels, which are such an indispensable feature of today’s large travel bags, were conspicuously non-existent.
So there we were with the rest of them waiting patiently at the side of the carousel for our luggage to emerge. One by one our cases appeared, and we duly retrieved them. But where was that last, that special bag?
With about six people left around the carousel excluding ourselves, we began to grow concerned. But just as we began to fear that we may have lost our exclusive bag, we caught sight of it, coming out of the luggage hold from behind the rubber flaps ~ only it didn’t. It sort of popped out, sat there for a while and then nipped back in again.
Two or three large heavy cases then came tumbling out in a kind of jumbled confusion, quickly followed by another sighting of our long and lost bag. For some odd reason, it was making its exit and entrance at a compromising angle.
Moving closer to the exit point, we could clearly hear lots of huffing, puffing and cursing from behind the rubber curtains. Our bag was now sandwiched sideways across the gap, forming a blockade with the remaining cases caught on top and behind it. From what we could make out, a lot of frustrated energy was being expended out of sight behind the scenes and then, with a thump and a cry, our obstinate bag and the others that it had bullied came tumbling into view.
Whether our long bag didn’t think much of Poland or was simply a petulant creature, this we will never know, but It was evident from the large boot prints on either side of the bag that our ‘Sausage’, as it became to be known, had put up a hell of a fight!
By bus to Gdansk
After this trauma, we no doubt took a quick snifter or two of vodka from the hip flask that I had brought with us. It was now time to lug our luggage, including our recalcitrant Sausage, from the warmth of the airport to the snowy wastes outside.
The plan was to bus it to Gdansk. We were both looking forward to the journey, to relaxing on the bus, that is until we saw what it was that we would be travelling in. Being English, we can be forgiven for believing that we would be going by luxury coach when, in fact, the carriage awaiting us was a rusting, clapped-out minibus with mustard lace curtains that once no doubt had been white.
I don’t recall being too perturbed by the fact that almost everyone was smoking on the way; my brother was a smoker and I was prone now and then to indulge in the odd cigar. Looking back on it, it must have been a right old stinker ~ the curtains weren’t yellow for nothing, although my smell memory retains a distinct essence of diesel fumes more than it does tobacco.
It was a long journey, and we were very tired. It was snowing continuously and sometimes quite heavily, but this merely added to the stereotypical image that I had nurtured, and it pleased me for its novelty as much if not more than for the differences I noted as we trundled on our way: shops and road signage, all written, of course, in Polish; the filling stations whose names I did not recognise; and, when it was possible to see through the steamed-up windows, the distinctive change in architecture.
As the open road gave way to increasingly built-up areas we knew we were travelling through the outskirts of Gdansk.
We had in our possession a computer printout identifying the hotel where we would be staying and, according to the bus driver, we were close to where we wanted to be. We alighted from the bus, cramped and stiff, on the side of a dual carriageway teaming with traffic, shell shocked from travel fatigue but anaesthetized by vodka.
My wife to be, Olga, had arrived there some hours before us and, as luck would have it, I spotted her having a cigarette in the window of the hotel restaurant across the busy street from where we were standing. Remember those wonderful days? Having a cigarette in the restaurant! {Post-normal days’ comment: Remember those days before coronavirus, ie sitting in a pub or a restaurant!}
Thus, the first stage of the journey into Russia was complete. We would stay for three days in Gdansk, which included Christmas Day, and then, on the 27th December, leave Poland by train for Kaliningrad.
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 579 [14 October 2021]
Published: 14 October 2021 ~ A new QR code era in Kaliningrad
ON THE 9th OF OCTOBER, the day after the QR code restrictions hit Kaliningrad, Olga and I walked through the atmospheric autumnal streets of Königsberg and then whizzed off by bus across the other side of town on an errand.
Having alighted from public transport, we decided to stop for a coffee. If we had attempted to enter a café, restaurant or bar today, we would have had to produce a QR code, but because we were buying refreshments from a pavement kiosk, we were, at least for the moment, QR exempt.
Subliminally, the advertising gimmick had worked. I saw a giant cup and a cup of coffee I wanted.
As I waited for my brew, I could not resist contemplating what it must be like to go to work each day not in an office, school, fire station, police station, on a building site or in a city bar but inside a giant coffee cup ~ and an orange one at that!
Through the little glass windowed serving hatch it did not look as if there was an awful lot of room inside the cup, and I began to imagine some of the more expansive people whom I knew in the UK working there. I concluded that they would not be so much inside the cup as wearing it.
Joss, my brother, could live in it. I could see the place slowly converting before my eyes. It had a television arial on top, a satellite dish on the side and protruding from the roof a long metal chimney that was smoking like a volcano. Outside, there was a crate of empty beer bottles and a pair of old pants and socks, both with holes in them, hanging on a homemade line strung across the front of the cup, looking like last month’s tea towels.
If this coffee cup was for sale in London, it would be described by London estate agents as ‘a most desirable property’, well-appointed and almost offering commanding views over the road to the bus stop. You certainly would not get much change out of a million quid for it. Five miles outside of Dover, with a 5-star sign above it, the cup would be housing a boat load of migrants. Why Nigel Farage is gazing at it from a hilltop through his binoculars the British government will never know ~ and don’t want to! But this is hardly surprising, as Nigel has a reputation for waking up first and smelling the coffee!
With no one any the wiser as to whether we had a QR code, a bar code, a one-time code, a code that needed verifying or a code that was Top Secret, we took full advantage of our incognitoism by finding a spot in the autumnal sun in which to savour our brew.
Giant pavement-side coffee cups, even bright orange ones, do not as a rule run to tables outside, but just at the back of this one there happened to be an old, long, green Soviet bench, where one could drink one’s coffee whilst ruminating upon the good old days when the proletariat sitting here would have been comfortably unaware that the USSR when it folded would eventually be replaced with coronavirus QR codes. This long and sturdy bench also facilitated my admiration of the pretty and well-stocked flower bed and enabled me to keep an eye on the plums.
Plums! What plums? Whose plums were they? And how had these plums got there? They weren’t aloft growing on a tree these plums but scattered upon the ground. Someone, I conjectured, must have sworn bitterly, perhaps a bit stronger than blaher moohar, when the bottom of the bag that they had been carrying split, plummeting plums all over the paving slabs.
The who and the why of the plums, whilst inspiring at first, soon gave way to the far more exciting realisation that by observing people’s reactions to the plums, I could play the psychoanalyst and categorise them according to plum personalities. Of course, the way they approached and dealt with the plums would not help me to determine whether or not they were in full possession of their QR codes, were evading pricks or considering vaccination at any moment, possibly when they least expected it, but when all was said and done the experiment would be an interesting one, and, besides, I had a cup of coffee to drink.
Twenty sips or so into my coffee and a substantial cohort of pedestrians later, and I had been able to determine that there are basically four types of plum approachers.
1. Those that spotted the plums and walked around them, giving them a particularly wide berth. Any wider and they would have needed a visa, not to mention a coronavirus test or six, as they inadvertently crossed the Polish border.
2. Those who spotted the plums but carried on walking anyway, chatting casually to their companions as though they were no strangers to plums in public places, yet who picked their way through them gingerly as they would a minefield on their way to buying a Sunday newspaper.
3. Next came the sort of people that you would not want to walk across a minefield with, since, seemingly oblivious to their feet and where they were putting them, they inevitably stepped on one or two plums, immediately looking down in alarm at the squish beneath their shoes, no doubt fearing that the lack of fines for Fido’s indifferent owners had landed them in it yet again.
4. Finally, it was the turn of “I’ll give them plums on pavements!” This category was mostly comprised of manly men; you know the sort, either their arms don’t fit or they have gone and grown a beard, not knowing why they have done it and because, quite obviously, it certainly does not suit them, it was the last thing on Earth, next to deliberately stepping on plums, that they should have gone and done to themselves, unless it really was their intention to make themselves look like a bit of a dick.
This category saw the plums but chose to pay no heed to them. They juggernauted along as if plums grew on trees and these boots were made for walking. Unbeknown to them, however, plums can be slippery customers and more than once were the over-confident nearly sent arse overhead. They would step, squash, slip a little, look around really embarrassed, hoping no one had seen them, and then hurry on their way, leaving behind the priceless memory of a bright red face burning like a forest fire in a beard to which they were both ill suited, as well as a boot-imprinted trail of squishy-squashy plum juice.
So, what I had learnt from all this plum gazing? Not a lot. It had been a different way of occupying one’s mind whilst drinking a cup of coffee, although it had made me wish that I was 14 years’ old again, so that I could shout, “Watch out for the plums!” or simply “Plums!” But you can’t go around doing silly things like that when you are (ha! ha!) a ‘mature person’, especially not when you are in somebody else’s country. I bet Adolf Hitler never shouted “Plums!” when he was cruising about the streets of Paris. Boat migrants to England certainly don’t. They just shout, “Take me to your 5-star hotel and give me benefits!” And liberals, who always find something to shout about, would, on seeing the black shiny plums in their path, have been unable to resist the wokeness of going down on one knee whilst crying, “My white knees are in trousers, please forgive me, I am too privileged”.
Young boy: They ain’t plums! Me: I know. But I just wanted to show that in Kaliningrad at this time of year there are also a lot of horse-chestnut tree … Young boy: You put those there because you ain’t got any pictures of plums … Me: Why you cheeky little f …
I finished my coffee, wished the entertaining plums good day, and off we went to complete our errand.
On the way, on this second day of QR codes, giant cups and plums (plums, no less, my friends, which had fallen by the wayside), we overheard a lady at a bus stop complaining loudly to anyone who had a mind (or not) to listen.
It was quite evident by her excited, ruffled and animated manner that she had recently undergone a most traumatic experience. Apparently, she had ventured into a small café to buy some jam and was horrified to discover that not only were most of the people inside the shop not wearing masks but, as far as she could ascertain, none had been asked for their QR codes. “I shall report them! I shall report them!” she wailed, shouting so loud that had her mask been properly in place, which it wasn’t, it would have fallen from her nose, like plums from a wet paper bag, to end up uselessly wrapped around her chin. It was fortunate, therefore, that such a calamity could not occur, as that is where her mask was anyway ~ swaddled around her chin protecting it from coronavirus.
On completion of our errand (there has to be some mystery in this post somewhere!), whilst sitting on the bus with my mask strapped to my elbow, I drifted into contemplation of the feasibility of QR codes extended to encumber access to the city’s supermarkets.
I wondered: “Does it mean that if you do not want to get vaccinated you will have to buy your own shop?” And: “What is the going rate for one of those giant coffee cups?”
If it does happen, if they do impose QR code restrictions on shops, I can see some astute entrepreneur, some Russian equivalent to Del Boy, quickly cashing in on the act. It is not difficult to imagine a fleet of shops on wheels whipping about the city from one estate to another, selling everything from buckwheat to outsize, wooly, babushka-made socks.
Alternatively, we could convert our garage into a Cash & Cart-it Off. Our garage stands at the end of the garden, some distance from the road, but in these coronavirus-challenged times what once might have been regarded as a commercial disadvantage could potentially be transposed into a positive marketing ploy.
All that was needed would be to install large glass windows in the sides of the garage, stack shelves behind them full of sundry goods, position two telescopes on the side of the pavement, preferably coin operated so as to make a few extra kopeks and, Boris your uncle, Svetlana your aunt, you’re in business!
Potential buyers viewing our wares through the telescopes provided could place their orders by Arsebook messenger. On receipt of their orders we would select the goods, load them on the conveyor belt and ship them from store to roadside before you could say, who’s making millions out of the sales of coronavirus masks? What could be better than that? Accessible shops, you say?
Come to think of it, there are probably not a lot more inconvenient places than shops where QR codes could be implemented, except, of course, for public lavs.
Imagine getting jammed in the bog turnstile unable to get your mobile phone from your pocket to display your QR code whilst the call of Nature grows ever more shrill!
This situation, difficult though not insurmountable, would stretch both the imagination and the resources of even the brightest entrepreneur, who would be faced with the daunting prospect of rigging up some curious contraption or other, consisting of a series of pipes, funnels and retractable poes on sticks.
On a less grand but no less adventurous scale, my wife has suggested that we plough up the lawn at our dacha and use it for growing potatoes, which is not such a bad idea, as it would mean no longer having to mow the lawn. But would it mean that we would have to get a statutory dog that never stops barking as a deterrent to potato thieves and to ensure that our neighbours are completely deprived of peace? “What is the use of having a dog that don’t bark? An intelligent lady once said to us. Answer: about as much use as one that never stops barking! Or about as much use as a dog owner who allows its dog to incessantly bark.
Whilst a constant supply of beer and vodka would not be a problem as we could always convert our Soviet garage back to what it was obviously used for when it was first constructed, alas ploughed up lawns will not grow washing sponges or cultivate tins of baked beans. And the last thing that I would want, even if my potato patch was the best thing since Hungary stood up to bullying EU bureaucrats, was to own something so useless that all it does is shite on pavements and bark as if a potato thief has thrust a firework up its arse before leaving the garden with a sack on his back.
Of course, all things considered, it would be far easier and, perhaps, far wiser, certainly less embarrassing, just to go and get vaccinated. But if you do that, will you be tempted to go out every night to the city’s bars and restaurants, just to say that you can? And if so, can you or any of us for that matter, be 100% sure that, even after vaccination and thirty years of boosters, whichever vaccine it is and from wherever the vaccine comes from, will we, the little ordinary people, be guaranteed at some point, preferably sooner than later, a return to the life that we had before? Er, or any life, for that matter. >>‘This statement is false!!!! (See G Soros’ Fact Checker). You will now be redirected to the neoliberal globalist version, which is as honest as philanthropy and almost twice as honest as the EU parliament ~ which is not exactly difficult (Source: An Open Borders Publication}’<<
Plough a straight furrow or walk a taut tightrope, whichever path you choose to take, do ‘Watch out for those plums!’
Published: 7 September 2021 ~ How to Grow Old Graciously
For the past week, I have been preoccupied with the 50th anniversary of my former UK school. The school opened officially on 6 September 1971, and I was among the first batch of inmates. To mark the occasion (not me having been there 50 years’ ago but 50 years of the school’s existence) a reunion had been planned to coincide with a book written by the school’s first and longest serving headmaster, the book being an anthology of amusing anecdotes gleaned from his 25 years of tenure.
Although I would not be attending the reunion in person, owing to coronavirus restrictions and the global money-making industry that has sprung up around it in the form of multiple tests and fines for non-compliance, I did join the reunion’s Facebook group to see if I could identify anyone by name or by photograph who was at the school at the same time that I was there. As I had been one of the school’s first intake, I did not expect to find many people that I knew, and I was right. We were the vanguard, the founders, the golden oldies. There were many more who came after us. We were, inevitably, in the minority.
Nevertheless, as I scrolled down the page the odd photograph of people from ‘my time’ at the school and then the names of fellow pupils crossed my memory radar, and before long I was communicating with people that I had not spoken to for half a century.
Having kept a diary for the same amount of time, I was able to regale group members and my fellow alumni by posting extracts from it, which, I was surprised to discover, were greeted and read with unbridled enthusiasm. Within 15 minutes of posting, I was harvesting Facebook likes as if I had paid someone to make me look popular, and my computer was bonking, perhaps a better word would be bonging, like a cash register on Black Friday morning, alerting me to the fact that Facebook comments were flooding in.
Mick Hart’s 1971 diary
It was all nostalgic and all good, except for one peculiar facet. As the day of the reunion grew closer, a number of posts and comments began to appear in which the posters confessed that they were ‘getting cold feet’, in other words that they were having second thoughts about attending the reunion. The reason they gave was almost always the same: they were self-conscious that in the past 30, 40 or 50 years their appearance may have changed. Get away with you. Really!
The more they whinged the more their former friends and colleagues rallied round and sort to comfort them, cajoling them to come to the reunion at all costs!
I could not help but wonder what the object of this exercise could be. If, for example, it was simply a way to solicit reassurance, you know the just-finished-exam patter, ‘I did not do well in my exam, how did you do?’, it seemed to me to be a rather cack-handed way of going about it. For if all they hoped to gain from their confessional was a sympathetic ear and the indulgence of their ‘friends’, surely if they then allowed themselves to be persuaded to attend the reunion, which I presume was what they wanted, then would not the revelations about their fears come back to bite them? Let’s face it (no pun intended), online their former acquaintances may have been kindness personified but after that pot boiler (no pun intended) once offline what would they be thinking? Alas, Human Nature informs us that it would be something like this, “Tom so and so, or Sally such and such, must look a right old state. I cannot wait to clap eyes on them!!”
To draw a parallel, it is a little like telling everyone that you will becoming to the reunion wearing a big false nose, when the last thing that you want is for people to know that you are wearing a big false nose.
Naturally, when we go to reunions or even just bump into someone that we have not seen for yonks, being British we instinctively yearn to say the right thing, which is, and ironically is not, ‘Hello Frankenstein, you haven’t changed a bit!’ Not many people cotton on to the fact that this seemingly innocent line, as over polished as a piece of trench art on an old lady’s mantlepiece, is deliciously offensive, viz: “Hello Frank, you haven’t changed a bit!”
Response: “Really, so what you are saying is that I always looked 65!”
And off goes your old school chum, calling back at you, “We shouldn’t leave it so long next time”, whilst muttering, “Never wouldn’t be a day too soon!”
To be honest, I cannot think of a better way of putting yourself under the microscope than by letting on that you are worried about your appearance.
Some people were obviously so convinced that they had changed beyond visible credibility and that as a result no one would recognise them that they had made name plates for themselves and hung them around their necks or pinned them to their shirts, which must have made them look very official indeed.
I can only imagine how much worse it must have been for name-plate wearers to have recognised someone immediately who had not tagged himself or herself with their names, only to have that person peer studiously at their name plate and then look at their face with bewildered astonishment!
Obviously, with so many ex-pupils from so many different years milling around, name plates performed a valid function, but think how excellent it would have been to have swapped the name plates around a little, and then stood back to see how many people disingenuously greeted others with ‘you haven’t changed a bit, Tom’, revealing that they didn’t know Tom from Adam.
How to Grow Old Graciously
My youngest brother made no bones ~ old and aching bones ~ about the fact that one of the reasons he was going to the reunion was, apart from the legitimate one of looking up old friends, to spot the bulging tums, big bums, double chins, bald heads and grey beards. He omitted ‘lines on the face like the British rail network’, but I am sure if he had thought of it, he would have included it too.
Indefensible? Inexcusable? Come now, let us not be hypocritical. I am sure there were many of you who were doing the self-same thing!
I do not expect there were many, however, if indeed any, who took this strategy to its next logical level, which is to have amused oneself by keeping a written record, something akin to a train-spotters’ notebook, to enable them to judge at a later date who had aged the least gracefully, ie possibly by using a point system to determine the size of bums and tums and the absence of hair on pates.
Unworthy, yes, perhaps, but I can think of a lot worse things to do on a Saturday afternoon.
The point I am making is that whilst people do genuinely go to school reunions to rekindle relationships with their old chums, generally shoot the breeze and chat about old times, they also go for reassurance. By the time we start going to school reunions, any reunion in fact, we have usually arrived at an age of advanced deterioration and hope that by seeing someone we know who is more advanced than ourselves it will make us feel better about ourselves. There is nothing wrong in this, since, as everyone is at it, it falls ironically into the category of mutual appreciation ~ er, or should that be, mutual depreciation?
Perhaps, that is why it is such a sod when you meet that one, really well-preserved person, and you have to say, begrudgingly, “you haven’t changed a bit!” And mean it!
Let’s face it, and I know we would rather not, it’s life. And life is all about deteriorating and then, a bit later on, decomposing. Who sang, “What is the use of trying the minute you’re born your dying?”
I know it was Leonard Cohen who sang, “Well, my friends are gone, and my hair is grey; I ache in the places where I used to play …” And “Who in your merry, merry month of May; Who by very slow decay …”
Hmm, better Auld Lang Syne, me thinks!
The other reason for going to reunions is to discover who has made it and who has not. I mean apart from talent and brains, if we all went to the same school, it figures that we all started with the same hand, the hand that life has dealt us. Thus, whilst at the reunion, if you meet Jane, who wasn’t academically the sharpest knife in the drawer but now has her own international fashion business with several shops sprinkled around the world, a large London town house, a villa in Spain, two beautiful children and, most likely given this profile, a husband who is a merchant banker (see cockney rhyming slang), whilst you have been sitting on the dole for the last 30 years nursing five A levels, you might not be too chuffed.
But, please, do not despair, help is at hand. It is called Bullshit.
This is not something that you can get O and A levels in, more’s the pity or I would have got a PhD, but it is something with a little practice and resolution that you can perfect. So, before you go to your next reunion take a tip from me, re-invent yourself. Determine who you are, what has happened to you, where you have been and where you are going. You can still be you and be somebody else at the same time: you can be you and the you have always wanted to be. Let’s be honest, isn’t that what most people do on social media, invent themselves and the world they live in? And, as almost everybody is on social media, then it follows that this is one skill that everyone possesses.
You may be a dustman, a drain cleaner or even, God forbid, a TV celebrity, whatever lowly station you hold in life, you can change all that, if only for one day! Say, for example, you are by nature a lazy, idle, layabout loafer, a ne’er do well, no good no-hoper, so what of it! Hone your bullshitting skills and by the time you arrive at that next reunion you could be Bill Gates or someone infinitely worse. You could be so successful that you are envious of yourself! And filthy rich, or just plain filthy. Whatever it is you are selling, it’s a way of buying respect!
Never lose sight of the fact, however, that when you are making your own reality, whatever you do in life, be it the ‘real’ one or the one that you have created, you really can change nothing.
Deterioration is the name of the game, and the game as we know it is life.
A friend once said to me, when he was approaching 75 years of age, that he was driving along in his car when he saw his reflection in the rear-view mirror. “I’d better call the police!” he thought, “Some old buggers just stolen my car.”
Or, to look at it from another perspective, at a funeral of a mutual friend, I said to one of the mourner’s “It’s a sad day,” to which he philosophically replied: “Well you can’t stop it!” meaning death. And, as a prelude to it, you can’t stop the ageing process. So just keep slapping on that Oil of Ulay, doing those press ups, eating all of the right food and injecting yourself with Botox, then, when it all fails, sit back, put on Monty Python’s Always look on the bright side of life and have a good chuckle at yourself.
Is becoming an old fart really that bad? Yes, of course it is and more! But he who laughs last laughs longest, which is especially true when you laugh at yourself.
I Have Had My Covid Vaccine ~ so many times that I’ve lost count
Published: 28 May 2021
These are the coronavirus vaccine statistics from ourworldindata.org as of 25 May 2021 (not easy to see from this screen grab, but you get the picture):
Never before in the history of transmissible disease have governments embarked upon and pushed an agenda like this one. But is that agenda honourable or there is a subtext to it that neoliberal global politicians, Big Tech and Big Pharma are exploiting for their own elitist ends?
Coronavirus has polarised the world. There are those who believe everything they are told by the powers that be, and in the process seem to have resigned themselves to a lifetime of lockdowns, mask-wearing, new strains, mutations and an ever-expanding cycle of vaccinations, and those that suspect that as nothing about coronavirus and, more to the point, coronavirus restrictions appear to add up, then someone must be up to something ~ and up to something on a global scale.
The UK is a perfect example of this polarity, divided as it is by those who are falling over themselves in the panic to get the vaccine ~ the same group of people that advocate enforced lockdown and mask wearing ~ and those whose distrust of the establishment’s official vaccination line is only exceeded by their utter contempt for the WHO.
The West’s liberal-controlled media routinely rounds up all coronavirus sceptics and labels and thus discredits them as conspiracy theorists. But what if they are? In the words of Joseph Heller, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The ‘we don’t trust them as far as we could throw them’ camp entertain myriad theories, which when gathered up coalesce into one or another of the big three. These three theories have one thing in common, which is that the perpetrators of the biggest hoax in history are neoliberal globalists. The three scenarios play out like this:
1. Coronavirus restrictions, particularly lockdowns, mandatory mask-wearing and state-enforced mass vaccination programmes are a covert way of reconditioning the collective mind, controlling the masses by fear in preparation for something worse to come. That worse being the neoliberal New World Order.
2. Both the virus and the vaccine are man-made entities (Sorry, let’s be woke here, I mean person-made entries. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so who knows what ‘it’ and ‘others’ can unleash!). Both have the capacity to liquidate, and both have a job to do, which is to reset the world’s population, in other words, to cull.
3. The vaccine is a long-term project which will inevitably pour endless amounts of wealth into the globalist’s coffers through the symbiotic relationship between Big Pharma and the neoliberal mega-rich. Yes, the vaccine may be free now, but as mutations and new strains emerge requiring, so we will be told, new or modified vaccines, someone will have to pay ~ and that will be you and me.
For the sake of argument, let us play devil’s advocate and say that the endgame involves elements of all three scenarios but, neoliberal globalists being what they are, money must figure first and last, so is it proposition number three on which we need to focus, or is all of it just tabloid pie in the sky?
Responsibility for the propagation of distrust, its entrenchment and the vast number of citizens throughout the world who are either unsure of the vaccine or vow they will never accept it, lies in the contradictory messages with which the public has been bombarded since day one of coronavirus. Making sense of it is like trying to put together a sabotaged jigsaw puzzle, the vital pieces of which are missing: nothing fits, nothing adds up and very little is logical.
At the centre of this programme of obscurantism is the liberal media and at the epicentre the liberal-oriented social media, which, instead of upholding free speech, the number-one tenet of democracy, have decided ~ inspired and emboldened by its track record for crucifying dissenters on the altar of censorship ~ to persecute anyone and everyone who dares to contest, question or doubt the rubber-stamped version of coronavirus.
Now, I do not have a Twitter account or Facebook account for obvious reasons, but I hear tell that if you post anything on Facebook that calls into question the official coronavirus narrative, especially as it pertains to vaccination, first your post is blocked and then you are ‘politely’ redirected to a source of information that purports to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But whose truth is it?
I am also told by those who use Facebook and other liberal-orchestrated social media sites that if you post anything that challenges pro-lockdown, pro-mask wearing, pro-vaccine enforcement, you run the risk of being banned from such sites for a month or in severe cases, for example if your argument is too cogent or too plausible, face permanent exile, destined to live out the rest of your unliked days in a social media wasteland every bit as dire as the ironic political wilderness into which Enoch Powell was cast when he told the truth about immigration.
The reality is that apart from liberals, nobody trusts Big Tech. Why should they, when it is the same mega-corporations prohibiting alternative viewpoints on coronavirus that routinely censor and remove the numerous accounts of those who dare to expound the cultural and moral tragedy of state-sponsored social and gender engineering programmes? And don’t forget that this is the same Big Tech that banned the President of the United States and attempted to atom bomb Parler, an alternative social media platform for those who mainstream social media have arbitrarily deplatformed.
The EDL, Britain First, Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, all enemies of the neoliberal state, wear the same badge of honour: they have all been banned from either Facebook, Twitter or both, as have a good many other ‘ordinary’ people. According to the social media monopolisers, these individuals and/or groups are guilty of using their squeaky-clean sites to incite racial hatred, religious hatred and call it what you like. But the truth is that this arbitrary definition is a convenient way of silencing anyone who dares to question, contradict, make a stand against or even invite discussion on subjects that run counter to the liberal-left’s world view and to its global aspirations.
And it does not matter how cogent the argument is or by whom it is addressed ~ acclaimed scientists, long-serving public health officials, eminent virologists and so on, are summarily struck down for speaking out against coronavirus protocols which, in their opinion, have a scientific margin of error that render them at best questionable or at worst not fit for purpose. Woe betide you if you post the views of these renegades on Facebook!
These distinguished dissenters ~ doctors, professors, scientists and so forth ~ who, it would seem, have nothing better to do than to incite the ire of the powerful and the media megalomaniacs, are summarily dismissed by the same as misinformation peddlers. Some of these eminent personages question the shaky empirical foundation on which mass vaccination is based; others claim that vaccines are already causing significant harm and that there is evidence of deaths directly linked to the vaccine, but, as any search on Google will confirm, absolute proof of such does not exist [as of 25 May 2021]. All media-owned signposts point in the same direction.
Now, I am not a Facebook subscriber (I wonder why?) but I have been told that pricks ~ people who have had the vaccine ~ have been cajoled and coerced by Facebook to wear their vaccination status with pride. Apparently, once you have been vaccinated, you can change your Facebook profile image using a ‘I have had my vaccination’ template, a circular frame surrounding your mug for all the world to see.
Is it my imagination, or do some of these silly little roundels come complete with frames in limp-wristed rainbow colours? Hmm, when I see such things, I am put in mind of that excellent Orwellian TV programme The Prisoner, in which a spy who has resigned from his post is gassed, abducted and wakes up in a terrifying fantasy world known as The Village, a high-tech concentration camp masquerading as a utopian democracy (sound familiar?).
In this happy realm of many nationalities, the good citizens, those who have been brainwashed and soul-destroyed, do everything they are told to do and say everything they are told to say. They are deliriously model citizens, who, deprived of free will and no longer capable of independent thought, literally dance to their masters’ tune wearing rainbow-coloured clothes whilst toting rainbow-coloured umbrellas (It certainly was a programme ahead of its time!).
I have nothing against taking the vaccine myself, in spite of the fact that I would never allow the likes of Facebook or Twitter to manoeuvre me into taking it and provided that I am not forced to take it under duress and threat of not being able to travel, not being able to get a job, not being able to visit a pub, in fact, not being able to do anything or go anywhere without my vaccine passport. All this smacks of a cheap protection racket: Buy our Brand or else!
But the last mistake I would want to make was to discover all too late that between them they have murdered me and, in the process, have conned me into celebrating the fact that not only was I stupid enough to have bought the lies they sold me but that they have also had my leg up to such an extent that they had me advertise my gullibility in a circular social media frame surrounded by rainbow colours ~ the final insult!
If I was Facebook inclined, I personally would not entertain such a frame. It is not nearly woke enough for my liking, and until they include a clenched BLM fist, preferably certified by Sadiq Kahn, if I were you, I would refuse to use one, at least until you are sure that you have been well and truly exploited.
At the end of the day, it is not up to social media or governments to force you to have something stuck in your arm or anywhere else for that matter, especially when it bypasses the usual strict requirements for vaccine testing and approval and even more especially when Big Pharma, Big Tech and ultimately Big Brother have a get-out clause in the small print which exonerates them from any blame or compensatory comeback in the ‘unlikely’ event that it all goes terribly wrong.
To conclude with the inconclusive, I will leave you in the safe hands of Facebook’s Mr Zuckerberg and his team. Ruminate on their words and then ask yourself the question: are these the words of humanitarians, or is something else at work?
“These new policies will help us continue to take aggressive action against misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines. We will begin enforcing this policy immediately, with a particular focus on Pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules, and we’ll continue to expand our enforcement over the coming weeks. Groups, Pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram …” ~ source: An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19, published by Facebook, 16 April 2020 [my highlights]
At the close of this article, I have provided three or four links to alternative views: Are these the words of crackpots or of well-informed and enlightened people who genuinely fear for our future and are attempting to shine a light to avert us from the very dark place to which we are being taken?
How will history judge our shepherds? Will they be praised and exonerated as the angels of our salvation, or eventually tried Nuremberg style for crimes against humanity?
Living through history is certainly not the same as reflecting on it, but these must be interesting times indeed for those out there in the future to whom Facebook and its kind are just amusing anachronisms, a spent and obsolescent force harking back to the days when Big Tech, in its naivety and arrogance, mistook its short-lived era for the promise of eternity. I wonder what lessons the new generations have learnt from our coronavirus ‘conspiracy’ era, and what they will do to prevent it from ever occurring again.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
Alternative Views on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Media Censorship & Why {don’t take their word for it ~ draw your own conclusions!}
An ex-colleague of mine, whom I have not heard from since his wife became a diversity manager, submitted this essay to me, ‘Tracking World Vaccination with the Prickometer, saying, “I think you should put this on your blog.” At first, I thought it might be something from The Guardian, so naturally I ignored it. But curiosity, not being the sole province of our cat, Ginger, mugged and got the better of me. Two paragraphs in and I was thinking, “Hmmm, this is rum stuff.” So, I did what I always do in times of trouble (they would make good lyrics for a song), I contacted my old friend Lord Wollocks.
“Ha!” he snorted, having read it in less time than it takes to enter Britain illegally, “You know what you can do with this …”
“Wollocks!” I reproved.
“Put it on your blog,” he continued. “Heaven knows, I, and most of my class, come from a long line of pricks. Take my second cousin, The Duke of Megan Merkel, at last removed …”
I got the point. At that moment, our next-door neighbour’s boy, Little Tommy Goodsense, who had been eagerly listening to my conversation from behind the Truth, chipped in, “Mr Rart …”
He’s got a bit of a lisp, bless him, and cannot pronounce his ‘Hs’. When he says WHO, he usually says ‘WO!’ ~ he’s an intelligent child.
“Mr Rart. If it says ‘Freedom of Speech’ on the can, then it should do as it says. Just because they say that Freedom should wear a muzzle does not mean that Covid masks really work.”
“They, Tommy, Who are They?”
But before he could answer, Tommy had seen the light and had quickly emigrated, taking his Noddy books with him.
I realised, of course, what it was that my ex-colleague was getting at in writing and sending me this post. He knew that I was contemplating having it done to me later this year. He knew, in other words, that I was a potential prick, and like the British education system he was out to take advantage of me.
“I’ll show him!” I thought. “I’ll post his manifesto and let that be a lesson to him!”
Tracking World Vaccination with the Prickometer: Chapter (& Verse)
The race to see which country would develop the vaccine first is over; now it is the race to see how many will get the prick in each country and which country can claim that theirs is the first to be full of pricks.
Dr Force-It, whose name is synonymous with prick, vows that all Americans will be pricks by the summer of 2021 and mumbled something about ‘open season on something’, which will make anti-vaxxers think twice before bending over indiscriminately. If all goes according to plan (but whose plan is it?), even if some Americans do insist on remaining prick-free, herd immunity could be achieved by late summer: ‘baa, baa’.
In order for us to understand how well their plan is working, we are indebted to Big Pharma for providing us with the world’s first Prickometer, a cunning tracking device sponsored by the NWO (New World Order), which will please some and confirm the suspicions of others. Already the Prickometer shows that in most European countries pro-pricks are on course for a majority, but what does this mean for the prick-resistors?
Some of us flew to the UK to find out, where we were forced to stay in hotels for two weeks costing us almost two thousand quid a person or be promptly sent to prison. The rest of us travelled by small boats and inflatable dinghies across the English Channel, were bussed to five-star hotels, and each offered a free prick along with British citizenship. We turned the latter down on the grounds that it might affect our benefits.
Whilst we discovered that the Prickometer was a useful tool for persuading the majority to continue to be the majority, its big carrot has been let down by its even bigger stick, which, although it rhymes with prick, is seen by some as a back-passage way of enforcing mandatory pricks. We refer here to the controversial Prick Passports, which Hatty Mancock has refused to rule out, but which prick-resistors feel will soon be used to shaft them.
But what does this mean exactly for society at large, or rather, before total lockdown, the society that used to be at large?
It means that pricks with Prick Passports will be allowed to roam the globe at will (no change there then!) whilst conspiracy theorists and those without a prick will have to content themselves with sneaking out in the dead of night for illicit trips to Skegness or bumming around in Brighton.
Opponents to the scheme worry that once Prick Passports are introduced, it will pave the way for including them for pubs, clubs, restaurants, museums, art galleries, various regions of the UK and hopefully McBidens, in which case the best that prick-resistors can hope for will be to sit at home doing distance holidays on the liberal-left censored internet.
Whilst some are determined to avoid a prick at any cost, others are crying out for one. Take this woman from Scunthorpe (she wished someone would) Mrs Northgob, who having received her first prick free, courtesy of Big Farmer (blast Gates and his spell checker!) went on to equip herself with several different identities: she just could not get enough pricks! And can you blame her? With so many to choose from, Big Pharma has ensured that one-size-fits-all is simply not an option.
But sailoring is not as plain as first it might appear.
A spokes-it for the UK Outrage Industry claims that every ethnic minority no longer under the sun, because they are all living in Britain, are victims of prick discrimination. They are disproportionately short on pricks.
“Give them an inch and they’ll take a yard,” sneered someone who was feeling particularly inadequate ~ he was waiting for Labour to make a come-back.
Leroy, currently doing a 10-inch stretch for procuring illegal pricks, said that it was simply a case of supply and demand, m’lud, and if white bois won’t help white chicks, it might be a dirty job, but someone had to do it!
An International Commission of Inquiry, costing the tax-payer millions, has been convened to look into allegations that the ‘Parades R Us’ community were short of pricks, hadn’t had a prick in months, wouldn’t know what a prick was even if it was offered to them, had had more than their fair share of pricks or could not decide whether they wanted one or not.
Alice Quimby, spokes-something or other for the dating agency Snatch, said that she was personally chuffed that none of her members were prick-oriented. She boasted that they had it licked, the system, that is, and then, just before she got the hump, she adjusted her strap-on ~ seatbelt ~ and before driving off on speed added that her friend Dilis de’ Doe had summed it up in a nuthouse when she said the whole world had gone arse about face.
Terry Twinky, owner of Tinker Tailors the Men’s Infitters (Alterations Made, Shirts Lifted), took umbridge at our suggestion that some of his lads considered themselves above pricks, whilst others in his sister company, sometimes referred to as his sissies’ company, Fudge Packers UK, downed tools and aprons at the mere mention of having a prick.
“I’ll have you know,” he hissed, “that my members have bent over backwards to meet the demands of this government and what have we got for it? Nothing! It was never like this when Jeremy Thorpe was in power!” Upon which, telling us in no uncertain terms that he would not bandy his wotsits and mince his words with us, he turned the other cheek, and walked away like the words he would not say.
Meanwhile on the streets of London, there have not been riots. According to the Indefensible, peaceful pro-prickers who were simply having a nice day out showing off the new banners they had made whilst living with their mums and claiming benefits, had been provoked by right-wing statues and anything vaguely phallus-like. Heckled by Far Right, White Supremacist, Nazis, disguised as two old ladies chanting ‘No more Pricks’, and then sighing loudly, the largely peaceful protest descended into a mild anti-Christ of all riots, about which Theresa May later opined it was ‘highly likely that the Russians dun it’.
Nelson (certainly not Persondella) was the first to get it in the neck ~ or somewhere.
An innocent bystander, who was later jailed for 5 years because it was discovered that he had once voted UKIP, said that he was “horrified”. “One minute, Nelson had been up there, proud and erect on his column, and the next he was sent crashing to the ground. In the ensuing impact, Nelson’s coat tails whipped up and what happened next was just too shocking to report … “
A man named Hardy (I think that’s how you spell it?), said “It Woke mine up!” He is now helping police with their inquiries ~ into people saying mean things on Twitter whilst terrorists roam the streets.
The only other witness, Churchill’s statue, was unavailable for comment since he had been boxed up and moved for his own protection and what had replaced him hadn’t got the intelligence to understand the question.
It was reported in The Gonadstan that the suggestion that the extreme left group Anti-Prick had fomented the violence was baseless, not least because the British establishment, which most likely funds and supports it, denies its very existence. The Gonadstan went on to say that pro-prick supporters had been provoked by something which Nigel Farage was doing, which was sitting outside a public house drinking a pint of beer whilst wearing his tweed cap, looking far too British for his own good and anyone up from Dover.
The British government, its well-paid advisers and members of the shadowy government, unassisted by the House of Frauds, immediately did one: they consulted the Prickometer.
But can the Prickometer help? The answer is no. There is little chance that Nigel Farage will suddenly vote liberal.
So, what does the Prickometer tell us? Well, the Prickometer tells us how many pricks there are per 100 population, the total number of pricks in any one country, the percentage of population that has had at least one prick and those that enjoyed it so much that they have gone back for another and then changed their Facebook avatar to something under a rainbow and had an orgasm. In short, the Prickometer is a reliable source of which countries are swallowing the official coronavirus narrative and which countries are a head ~ according to our expert Dick ~ of other countries in boasting more pricks than others.
In short, the Prickometer tells us that never before in the history of the world have there been so many pricks.
“Never before in the history of the world has so many pricks been administered by the machinations of the few” ~ Sir Wokeston Chapelhill
WHO SAID THAT!!! DOWN WITH HIS … STATUE!
Note: We have had to substitute ‘prick’ for ‘jab’ as ‘jab’ is the registered trademark of World Exploitation Inc.
Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 333 [10 February 2021] or Russia’s Near Normal vs the West’s New Normal
Published: 10 February 2021 ~ Russia aims for pre-Covid Near Normality
There are a few weeks to go yet before I can legitimately celebrate my first Covid self-isolation anniversary, but as that peculiar milestone approaches there are other positives that merit raising a glass or two.
Top of the pops must be the worldwide thumbs up for Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine. Following news of its approval by one of the UK’s most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet, begrudgingly the West’s media has been forced to concede that Sputnik V flew first past the finishing post in their international vaccine race, proving against all odds that the classic adage ‘who dares wins’ is still the winning formula.
The ‘bugger, we got it wrong’ factor is almost palpable in hindsight, as the great bastions (I think that’s the right word?) of the neoliberal press twist and turn within themselves to corkscrew a last derogative spin out of what remains of their discredited cynicism, and inevitably in the process come away from it all looking and sounding rather mardy.
With the EU let down somewhat embarrassingly by a vaccine supply bottleneck and other problems with its two main vaccines, one developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, and another by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, let’s hope that neoliberal globalist politics will not get in the way should Angela Merkel’s welcome mat need to be rolled out quickly for Sputnik V. After all, the international nature of a pandemic requires international co-operation.
Pre-Covid Near Normality
Another reason for celebration, but one tempered by caution and common sense, is the understanding that daily coronavirus cases in Russia are down 50 per cent from their peak in mid-December 2020*. With infection numbers said to be travelling in the right direction, downwards, it would appear that in some parts of the country steps are being taken to relax coronavirus restrictions*, a move which represents an entirely different approach to the ‘no light at the end of the tunnel’ endless lockdown scenarios with which my family, friends and the rest of the nation are faced in embattled Britain.
In Moscow, limitations on opening times of pubs, restaurants and clubs are due to be removed (I should say so!), and full-time teaching in universities is to be resumed.
Cheering news for those who have been staunch and consistent critics of the efficacy of masking-up is that based on evidence of increasing immunity the days of mandatory face masks might soon be over in Russia. And not before time.
Recently, I was pulled up by a tram conductress ~ one of those large redoubtable babushkas ~ for being maskless on public transport. I had not forgotten to wear my mask, and neither was I making a formal protest; the face towel had simply chosen to leap from my pocket as I was boarding the tram. I did try to improvise by wrapping my scarf around my mush, but this stout defender of rules are rules was not the sort to take prisoners. Fortunately for me, my wife procured a spare mask from her handbag and honour was seen to be done ~ in other words, I narrowly escaped the humiliation of having my maskless arse kicked off the tram.
Had this happened it would have been a grave injustice, as I, for one, have found wearing a mask to be particularly useful recently, possibly not as a hedge against catching coronavirus but most definitely as an effective face glove, as temperatures in Kaliningrad plummet to minus 20. If the weather carries on like this debunking global warming, I will have no choice but to snip off the fur-lined flaps from the sides of my spare ushanka (hat) and attach two bits of elastic to them.
However, whilst we wait for this to happen, here is a quick recap of the latest response to coronavirus as reported in Russian media:
🤞There is hope in the air that soon we might all be enjoying more air as part of nationwide demasking.
🤞As there are no strict lockdowns in Russia, they will not be lifted, but spirits may still be lifted by relaxing what restrictions there are.
🤞Normal service is beginning to be resumed in the nation’s universities and, most importantly, in the bars, clubs and restaurants.
😁Sputnik V gets 10 out of 10 in the International Vaccine Race and quick to criticise critics 10 out of 10 for egg on their face. And doesn’t it serve them right!
We all know a lot less than we think we knew when all this started
Published: 29 December 2020
So, here we are, coming to the end of the first year of the Coronavirus Age and my first 9 months of being a coronavirus self-isolator. Time for reflection, or, as Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise the comedians used to say, “What do you think of it so far?”
In 1992 the alternative rock group REM produced a hit record the chorus of which went, “If you believed they put a man on the moon … If you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool.”
The question today is ‘Do you believe that lockdowns, mask-wearing, social distancing and a worldwide coercive mass vaccination programme using vaccines which scientists and public health officials admit have been fast-tracked into existence and therefore, one presumes, not as rigorously tested as they would normally be, are manifestations of global humanitarianism or a totalitarian globalist agenda in which economic reset and culling the world’s population are two primary objectives? And apropos of this, do you believe that the misinformation and disinformation at the centre of public confusion is just a byproduct of the gabbling information age in which we live, the bungling inefficiency of the ruling elites or a carefully and meticulously orchestrated web of deceit and deception.
Take my word for it: I don’t know.
But there is no doubt that the traction gained by conspiracy theories is beginning to make them look and sound a lot less infeasible than the obfuscating quagmire into which the official narrative, in its failure to provide conclusive answers or even address people’s fears, sinks a little every day.
So, this is where I come to my What Do You Make About That? section ~ where I air alternative views to those presented in the authoritative script and leave you to make your own minds up: ‘Trick or Treat’?
Coronavirus Truth or Trickery Trick or Treat?
In this video clip taken from the Brexit party’s Facebook page we learn that the Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel Centre in London has disappeared. It has been dismantled, which is a mite odd as we are told that London is supposedly locked down tight, sinking into the abyss of yet another onslaught of virus virulence and, moreover, threatened by a mutated strain of Covid-19.
This clip is taken from www.bitchute.com {link inactive as of 12/04/2022} an alternative social media platform to Facebook. It sees controversial investigative journalist Gemma O’Doherty ‘proving’ that proof exists that coronavirus does not ~ in the most official sense ~ and, it would seem, that the efficacy of every preventative measure and precaution taken to limit the spread of this ‘non-existent’ disease has no basis in fact.
Here is a Gemma O’Doherty’ quote: “As part of our legal action we had been demanding the evidence that this virus actually exists [as well as] evidence that lockdowns actually have any impact on the spread of viruses; that facemasks are safe, and do deter the spread of viruses – They don’t. No such studies exist; that social distancing is based in science – It isn’t. it’s made up; that contact tracing has any bearing on the spread of a virus – of course it doesn’t. This organisation here – is making it up as they go along.” — Gemma O’Doherty
The article which claims that the British government ‘know what they are doing’ ~ “One should be wary of caricaturing Boris Johnson and the rest of his cronies perpetrating this crime on the people as ‘Grinches’. They are nothing so amusing or cuddly. They are far, far worse than that, and make no mistake about it, they know full well what they are doing.” ~ is strangely reassuring for, from the average Britisher’s viewpoint, they don’t.
So, here we are, coming to the end of the first year of the Coronavirus Age. Whether you believe that what is happening in response to coronavirus is all part of a well-orchestrated plan by the usual neoliberal suspects or just another example of where are the world leaders we used to have when you need them, one thing is universally certain, we will all be glad to see the arse of 2020 well and truly booted out. But, as one life and soul of the party said to me recently, do you really think that things are going to get better in 2001?
That is a tough one to be sure. If 2020 was the year in which a new disease was unleashed on us, and the year when all respect and trust in authority and the media died, 2021 looks set to become the year in which Big Pharma faces its greatest test of veracity and confidence since Charles Forde & Co beguiled us into believing that Bile Beans cured everything.
In 1979, The Police, no, not those ones who are told to look the other way when statues are being defaced and to arrest people for not eating Christmas dinner in a small room papered with old copies of The Independent (They don’t produce a print version anymore, do they. I wonder what their readers do for toilet paper?) —The Police rock group released a record called ‘Message in a Bottle’. Perhaps, this is where the answer lies, and we will not know the truth for certain until it comes rolling in on the tide of time.
