Published: 31 December 2022 ~ F*ck New Year Calendars and How do They Work?
Every year, on the 31st of December, most of us, not all but most, celebrate the arrival of a New Year. Some celebrate it quietly, others party like it’s going out of fashion, hopping, whooping, shouting, working themselves up into a right old frenzy as the hours, minutes and seconds count down to midnight. By the time midnight arrives, sobriety has left, and everyone screams ‘Happy New Year’, and then we get more drunk.
As a consequence of this mandatory ritual, typically and ironically for most of us the New Year starts on a none too auspicious note: We fall into bed at 5am and wake up half-way through the day with a bucket for a head, a mouth that tastes like the cat slept in and a guts ~ Well, let’s not draw a picture.
As the last minutes of the last 365 days of our life tick away, you can guarantee that almost everyone around you will breathe a sigh of relief, chorusing “I’m glad to see the back of 1065,” for example, “1066 can’t be any worse!” I think it was Harold who said that.
So it is with philosophical solemnity, that I present to you today, on this last day of the Year of Our Lord 2022, this photograph of a rather rude calendar, which a ferret and I discovered whilst roving the bars of Kaliningrad.
Now we have no way of knowing, and cannot say for certain, if those who hung this calendar on the wall, presumably in January of 2022, were in receipt of psychic information. Did they have a direct line to the Universe’s Control Centre? Was it just a self-fulfilling prophesy? Or is it the work of a ‘double agent’, ie I will denounce 2022 but secretly I support it. In other words, how does this calendar work?
Presumably, like any other, you pin it on the wall on the first day of the New Year to which the calendar applies. Well, OK, making allowances for hangovers, most likely on the second day. But how do you know? How do you predict how the year will pan out for you? What gives you the right and credibility to hang a calendar on your wall that says F!ck 2022, 2024 or 2020-anything?
Does the advocate of this type of calendar have a sixth sense ~ some might argue that they must have a sick sense? Before hanging such a prophetic calendar on his wall, does he consult the tarot cards, examine his crystal balls, believe in horoscopes, resort to numerological mysticism in which 2+2= 6 (which just means his maths are awful) or does he sign up to the endless twaddle that spews out of YouTube videos from self-appointed, self-proclaimed, creepy homespun spiritualists? The mind ~ that is, the mind that is still in control ~ boggles, and shudders, to think.
F*ck New Year Calendars and How do They Work?
Those of you that cling to the adage that pessimism breeds pessimism, ie what goes around comes around, and that bad-joke calendars like this manifest reality, will no doubt recoil in horror at such presumptuous negativity and may even have a calendar on your wall to set the record straight, a calendar, for example, on which it could be written ‘Welcome 2022’, the bold, pink words surrounded by little elves that dance, fairies that flutter, butterflies that bob and rabbits that bunny and bunnies that rabbit, all afrolick together among the softening rays of a sunburst yellow bathed like a halo on the blue-sky background, and they sigh, they sigh with such sighs of optimism that they carry you back like a tune to your childhood and you know instinctively and have no doubt that this, at last, is Your Year!
Looked at objectively and objectionably, It’s hard to decide which of the two calendars surrenders itself more completely to the irony of fate: the bar’s F*uck You calendar or the optimist’s New Era dream, ‘Hoorah! 2023 is going to be the year for me’. (Some woman on YouTube told me so!) Ah, hem …
I don’t wish to be a killjoy, especially on New Year’s Eve, but it must be plain to the most myopic that calendars that purport to predict the essence of the coming year, both the good and the bad, are best to be avoided, or, if the temptation is just too much, try keeping them off your wall, at least until their year is out and the next year safely in.
Let hindsight be your witness and you will minimise the chance of Irony passing judgement on you!
Published: 30 December 2022 ~ 4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Mick Hart’s Pub Crawl
Tradition has it in the UK that after spending a long Christmas Day incarcerated at home, on the day after, the theatre of overindulgence is shifted to the pub. Boxing Day might well commence with a brisk walk or some good old-fashioned fox hunting, but such exertions are principally symbolic, diplomatic token gestures intended purely for the amelioration of one’s restless, poisoned conscience for over doing it the day before, mere curtain raisers to the main event, the much-needed trip to the pub.
As a firm believer in the doctrine that the preservation of tradition is an essential prerequisite for any culture’s survival, I applaud the actions of legacy Britons whose interpretation of Boxing Day is to switch off that infernal box, which, if you have not already done so, you should really not pay a licence for, and hotfoot it down to the pub for a pint or six with your mates, where you can safely slag of the country’s turncoats, those you elected to run the UK but who are running it into the ground, without fear of detection by PC Plods who constantly monitor the Net (No wonder they call it The Net!).
Practising what you preach is not only to lead by example, but also good for the soul: Why not, I thought, why not indeed! And it was in this proactive spirit, lashed together with seasonal goodwill and the assistance of my compatriots, that we put together a British-style pub crawl coincidental with Boxing Day but adopted for Kaliningrad.
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars
From the plan’s genesis I had venues in mind, old bar favourites that you could slip back into like a comfortable pair of slippers, but a friend who had expressed an interest in joining us proffered the suggestion that I start the crawl with somewhere new, a bar that had recently opened. Game for anything, at least where pubs and bars are concerned, I couldn’t fault the logic, and this is how and why we met up in a bar which for me was virginal territory on Boxing Day at 3pm.
We would, by the time our mission had been satisfactorily completed, which concluded at 12am, sample the delights of four establishments, which I will mention briefly in this post and then cover each individually at a later date and in more detail.
Whilst we never intended the crawl to be leitmotif driven, fate, it would seem, had other ideas, and these were partially revealed to me on the occasion of the third bar which, like the previous two, had been designed around the popular concept of industrial-look interiors.
The first bar on our itinerary, where Olga and I would rendezvous with our collaborators Inara and Vladimir, was divulged to me as Morrisons. It struck me that this was an unfortunate name for a bar and try as I might to think otherwise whilst bowling along in the taxi, I could not help but cogitate on what the price of baked beans might be and, in the process, distress myself with visions of jostling trolleys and moody faces at checkout tills. Rest assured, however, that the Morrison Bar has nothing to do with supermarkets. It is, in fact, eponymous with, and pays tribute to, the one and only Jim Morrison, who was never accused, as far as I know, for including among his many addictions an inveterate baked bean habit but who left his mark on the world as the impetuous, bold, ill-fated lead vocalist of the 1960s’ rock band Doors. Yes, but why and why now in Kaliningrad? You might just as well ask, why not?
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars
Morrisons (There I go again!), correction Morrison, is a basement bar, the interior of which closely follows the popular trend for artistic degentrification.
The crux of this design concept is Victorian iron and rivets in both execution and effect. Out with the suspended ceiling, the boxed and cased in beams and pipes, the trunking that hides the wires. The bones and sinews are there to be celebrated not covered up and occluded. Nuts, bolts, wires, vents, pipes, warts and all are left exposed to the naked eye. Rooms are effectively skeletised, even to the extent of eschewing plaster and panelling. Neglect, decay and degeneration replace conventional virtues of maintenance; revitalisation is quashed and in every aspect and every facet the old becomes the new.
Towards this end Morrison has got everything going for it, from shattered ceiling to paint-pealing walls, but, as the chrome-glistening Harley Davidson in the entrance hall denotes, everything that is distressed in Morrison’s shines with the lustre of a bright new pin, which is hardly unexpected as it is one of Kaliningrad’s most recent contenders on a bar circuit already unique, and the polish and varnish is not yet dry.
Mick Hart in the entrance hall to Morrison Bar, Kaliningrad
Morrison, which is a café, bar and music venue combo, has some nice touches to it, which I will reveal at a later date, and since no one had cause to complain about the food and as I enjoyed my ‘pint’ of Maisel’s Weisse and as the seats were comfortable and the place had atmosphere, the newly incorporated Morrison Bar receives the Mick Hart Seal of Approval.
From Morrison we set off for? Where would it be? The Sir Francis Drake, which was not a million miles away, was suggested first, but as we had been there recently, we decided to detour to a bar which when my younger brother visited me in the summer of 2019 became an absolute favourite of his; and that bar is the Yeltsin. No prizes, I’m afraid, for guessing the namesake of this establishment.
Boxing Day night was a filthy night, a term which I appreciate will have different connotations for different kinds of people but which I shall disappoint you now by saying that in this particular context means that the evening was wet and cold.
Huddled beneath our umbrellas, we hurried across the railway bridge to a bar which cannot so much be called industrial by design as designed in a previous lifetime for industrial purpose. It occupies the tail end of a behemoth of a building, which gives every indication of having once been emphatically industrial and which today still houses, as far as I can tell, a jamboree of workshops and small commercial units.
Walkers to the Yeltsin should take note that the pavement rises at the front of the Yeltsin building as the lie of the land and the road atop ascends to the height of the railway bridge.
This geographical tilt requires all prospective patrons to stray from the straight and narrow using the concrete steps provided. The Yeltsin, therefore, is not strictly speaking a basement bar as such, but one whose entrance is to be found located at lower ground level. (Talk about nit-picking!)
The first thing noticeable about the Yeltsin’s interior is that it is not a shabby chic makeover; it is genuinely shabby and basic and has ceilings as high as a kite. There has been no need, or should I say no apparent need, to create atmosphere in the Yeltsin, as whatever it was before it became what it is today (which is sublime) it was already infused with atmosphere and when whatever it was went away that atmosphere forgot to go with it.
Mick Hart propping up the bar in Bar Yeltsin, Kaliningrad
My brother liked the Yeltsin for its fantastic range of beers, and what dyed-in-the-wool beer drinker wouldn’t? But I am also attracted to it by the way that its easy down-at-heel character brings back affectionate memories of student union bars, two bars in particular: one, the London College of Printing as it was in the 1980s and, two, Southbank University bar, which back in my drinking-studying days were conveniently placed in staggering distance.
(If I was to say ‘corrugated metal sheets’ and ‘Pizza, beans and chips’ and you were to recall these bars respectively, then you must have been around in the days when I was frequenting these drinking holes.)
There is certainly a lot more that can be written about the Yeltsin, and I will try to get round to that, but, for the time being, let me just say for the record that on this auspicious Boxing Day visit, it was my privilege to enjoy an exceedingly nice ‘pint’ of Fruit Beer there, the OG of which weighed in at an impressive 6.3% and which cost somewhere in the vicinity of 350 roubles.
The unifying quality of good beer and a positive drinking atmosphere prevailed on me to stay, but the first law of pub crawling is that you must get off your arse and walk. Fortunately ~ fortunately that is for the integrity of the crawl ~ we were enticed to do just that, following a recommendation from one of the bar staff. No, not the one ‘get out you’re barred’, but from his giving us the name of and the directions to a bar that was so near that had it been any nearer the need to leave the Yeltsin would have been superfluous. Apprised of this piece of news, we were up on our feet and away!
In the drinking interlude that we had spent within the Yeltsin, the weather had grown more foul, and so it was with great relief that we discovered that, true to the barman’s word, the next port of call was upon us before we had time to button our coats.
This third place on our adventurous itinerary is called Forma in Russian, which in English translates into ‘Form’. (Cuh, there’s nothing to learning the Russian language, is there!)
Across the outside drinking and smoking area to the front door of Forma Bar, Kaliningrad
It was Form that alerted me to the second theme of our evening, namely that all three bars we had visited were either subterranean or housed at lower ground level. Like Yeltsin, to get into Form we had first to cross a small enclosed and hard-surfaced forecourt, just the ticket for good-weather drinking and the perfect place to corral the once glamorous, now social pariahs, who, flying in the face of every public health warning going, still refuse to kick the tobacco habit.
Who would have believed but a few short years ago at a time when every bar in the world, between the ceiling and the floor, was hung with a film of blue-grey tobacco smoke that in order to pursue your vice you would one day be expelled, forced to huddle in the cold and rain just to drag on a fag? I shudder to think of a future in which bottles of beer bristle with health warnings and drinkers are forced to drink in closets and legally made to drink alone so as not to subject tea-totallers to the risks of passive drinking! Oh Brave New World that has such restrictions innit!
As the only good weather this evening was whether we could get in out of the rain quicker than Liz Truss left Number 10, we did not stop to answer the question from those not there to ask it: “Have you got a light?” Sanctimoniously: “No!” But hurried from the shadows into the sanctuary of the bar.
Form was the third venue to receive us this evening, and the third bar to give more than a passing nod to the conceptualised industrial look. Without going into too much detail in this post, I will merely mention plain concrete floor, a screen made from hollow section con blocks, rudimentary wood panelling and the sort of serving area that looked as though whoever made it had DIY skills in common with mine, except here I mean to be complementary, which for honesty’s sake I certainly could not be had it really been my hand working the carpenter’s tools.
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars
Whilst Morrison occupies the high end, the aesthetic end, of the industrial look, and Yeltsin is baptised by an effortless urban chic, Form possessed a distinctly vintage feel. Indeed, if you were to situate in the centre of the room four or five rails of clothing, unusually small and occasionally mothed ~ bingo! You would think you were in the right place to get yourself a pair of those as-scarce-as-rocking-horse-sh*t men’s trousers, the high-arsed ones which have braces buttons on the outside waistband. Guess whose got two pairs of those!
It is a well known fact, well known amongst the drinking fraternity, that both beer and pub-crawling can make you hungry (sounds suspiciously like a public health warning). In the Yeltsin we had addressed that problem by indulging in corn chips and cheesy strings. Now, it was the turn of a large dish of olives, easily and eagerly washed down with a delicious white wheat beer.
As with the Yeltsin, the range of beers on offer left nothing to the imagination. Frank Sinatra could have danced all night, and I could have drunk at Form all night and ‘still have begged for more’, but duty has a way of calling and, before the night was over, we had one more stop to make.
The bar, which was to become the last bar on our picaresque adventure, was divorced from the other two and required first that we tackle the appalling weather and second that we hop on board one of Kaliningrad’s new trams. What a treat! There’s a first time for everything and this was a first for me!
Fortunately, the walk from the tram stop to our final bar this evening was relatively amenable, which was fortuitous because I would not want to ask the way to a bar that goes by the long-tail, provocative name of Your Horizon is Littered. I joke ye not. Let’s play that again in Russian: ‘У вас горизонт завален’. Does that make it any easier for you?
Gentle illumination in the Kaliningrad bar ‘Your Horizons are Littered’
Having already littered my horizon with empty beer glasses, I decided to do it one more time (It’s strange how ‘once’ can sometimes multiply into ‘twice’ without awareness informing you that the multiplication is taking place.)
The name of the bar may have come as a surprise to me, but that it was a basement bar did not. As I said earlier, all of our haunts this evening had a subterranean theme. However, that’s where the similarity ends. Your Horizons are Littered was not littered with even the slightest allusion to industrial chic. It is, in comparison to the three bars visited earlier, easily the smallest of the three and has a low-lit, cosy, comfortable, laid-back feel to it, qualities which, at the end of a long drinking day, are exactly what you want and when you want it most.
Horizons (let’s abbreviate it a little) does not serve tap-dispensing beer, so I had to make do with bottled, which was no hardship since they do stock Maisel’s Weisse. On the scale of one to 10, Horizon effortlessly scores maximum points on the snug and relaxation chart, an attribute attested to by Inara and I staying on, after the others had thrown in the beer towel, just for a nightcap ~ or two. That two could easily have turned into a nightcap and three had we not been so mature and with it wise and sensible and besides we had run out of time. Unbeknown to us, lulled into a sense of false security by the combination of good beer and a complementary atmosphere, closing time (thank you Tom Waits) had slipped behind the bar and quietly switched the barman off. No ‘Last Orders!’ here.
There was nothing for it now than to litter our horizons with the cold, the rain and the hope of a taxi. But, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca who consoled himself with the thought that they would ‘always have Paris’, we would always have Kaliningrad (apologies to the Czechs) and the memory of our Boxing Day crawl.
As Bogart never said, but would have done had he been with us today, ‘Play it again, Sam’ ~ soon!
