On the right path in Kaliningrad

Published: 15 December 2022 ~ Kaliningrad Pavements Pave the Way for the Better

Tratooraree, said Mick in his bestest Russian. Nobody quite understood him, but that’s the story of his life, so he pressed on regardless, translating the word into English, “Pavements!” he said, triumphantly, and everyone went back to sleep.

No one talks pavements in the UK, after all pavements, and the conditions of them, are one of the reasons why we pay our council tax. They are lumped together with such essential but taken-for-granted services as emptying our bins, clearing litter from the streets (although the council rarely get round to this) and policing by consent (ie you and the police agree that when you are mugged or have your house burgled the police will give you a crime number and that anything that you say, meaning ‘mean tweets’ on Twatter, will be taken down, twisted round and used in evidence against you). Council tax, the get-out-clause for Maggie Thatcher’s controversial poll tax, has risen so high in Britain in recent years that it represents a second mortgage, so Brits expect to see as much done as is civically possible in return for the confiscation of their hard-earned cash, and that, amongst other things, takes care of pavements.

In Kaliningrad pavements are, or can be, a controversial subject* and one that has persistently percolated to the top of the restoration agenda since the dissolution of the USSR.

When does our street get its much needed and long overdue pavement renovation? ~ is not something that residents of Kaliningrad discuss on a daily basis, but it does come up in conversation, occasionally, from time to time.

When I say, ‘our street’, I use the term to imply a general anxiety and impatience amongst those residents who live in certain areas where pavement reform sits at the top of their collective bucket list as distinct from the pavement up ‘our street’, meaning the street in which we specifically live. And yet, to coin a phrase, if ‘the cap fits …’.

My wife asked someone about the situation regarding ‘our’ pavement and was told that it was not likely to happen this year, but maybe next year. Her inquiry was made in 2021, when next year was 2022 (It would be funny if it was 2023, wouldn’t it?) but next year has almost gone. I know this because when I first began to write this post snow was falling but not in sufficient quantities to entirely exorcise the pavement problem, but snow is now falling snow on snow and ‘what the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve about’.

For people like me, who have the ability and choreographic instincts of Fred Astaire (Mum, who’s he talking about?), the pavement problem, though not in itself altogether inconsequential, has me reach out sympathetically to others who are more affected by the inconvenience and its negative impact.

From my window, which I look out from, from time to time ~ they are good for that, aren’t they? ~ I watch the world go by, and in the process typically think to myself, how on earth is that young couple going to pilot that pram of theirs across the assault course which now confronts them? Wheels are good but tank tracks would be better. And then there’s the senior citizens, of which I count myself one, many of whom avoid the path and take to the cobbles instead. Königsberg’s road cobbles may also not be an easy terrain, but at least to trip is a trip into history.

Kaliningrad pavements

Whilst the pavement can be treacherous, especially on the way back from the bar late at night, and especially where lack of light adds to the problem, I have got round this one, partially by memorising the pavement on both sides of the street. I am not going to go so far as to say that ‘I know this pavement like the back of my hand’, because the last time I heard that expression it was back in 1983 on a dark and dank November evening when fate was in a playful mood.

At the time, we were flying along the country roads at 80 miles an hour in my Ford Cortina when, replying to an admonition from me, my brother, who was driving, said: “Ahh, you worry so much. I know this road like the back of my hand!”

It would seem, however that his hand did not have a sharp bend at the bottom of a hill and a tight grass verge on either side, which, when clipped at the speed we were doing, sent us spinning backwards through the hedge, left us hanging momentarily, headlights pointing towards the sky, and then brought us down like a spinning top bluntly to rest in a wet ploughed field.

Whilst there’s little fear of a similar thing happening as I traverse Kaliningrad’s pavements at considerably less speed in my Wrangler boots, I have been known to work up a good head of steam when steering a course to the local shop to replenish my beer supplies.

To be fair, the pavement on the left side of our street is not that unnegotiable until, that is, you reach the point where it meets the junction. Here there is an interesting piece that looks lunar in its construction, or do I mean destruction? By the way that’s lunar, with the stress on ‘ar’ in Russian. ‘We interrupt this discussion on pavements to bring you a surreptitious lesson on stress in the Russian language’. No stress and no sweat with this moon, however, because I know this patch of the lunar landscape well, yet woe betide you if you don’t, because it is precisely at this spot that in the absence of adequate street lighting the dark side of the moon begins.

I remember (Oh lord, there he goes, reminiscing again!), when we returned to Kaliningrad in the winter of 2018. At that time, we were renting a flat in the Kaliningrad district close to the radio mast. Believe you me, the radio mast is something you cannot miss; a welcome beacon on a stormy night to guide you safely home after one to many in the Francis Drake.

We were walking back one evening, the radio mast towering above us in all its multicoloured splendour, my wife grumbling about the state of the pavement, the deep pits and iced-over puddles, when Victor Ryabinin, whose company we were in, showed us, with characteristic insouciance, how literally one can get round this problem. “Like this!” he said, with a giggle. And he hopped and skipped and jumped, still laughing, first around the one obstacle and then around or over the next, treating them all as lightly as if they were nothing more than mirages.

With his usual gift for doing so, Victor had taken an everyday problem and made a moral out of it, namely that there’s more in life to worry about than pavements or more to life than pavements to worry about or, as Leonard Cohen put it, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in …” {Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: let’s dedicate it to Victor’s pofik!}

Kaliningrad Pavements

The pavement in our street on the opposite side of the road earns itself the reputation of being an obstacle course of sorts and, therefore, compared with its parallel relation, demanding of greater navigation skills and sense of co-ordination.  Once again, for some unknown reason, the most challenging aspect of it lies at the end of the street closer to the junction. Some way from this, it is mainly earthen, then tarmacadam before becoming, albeit briefly, spanking new and modern.

Incongruously, but only in looks not reason, this updated portion of pavement made from very nice decorative blocks has been laid down privately, and at personal expense, by the owner of a large house ~ impressively designed as a mediaeval fortress ~ for the express purpose of aiding both the ingress and egress of his personal vehicles and also, and understandably, as an improvement to the appearance of the frontage of his property.

Whenever I arrive at this particular section of pavement, the thought that I am about to walk across it christens me with guilt. I feel intuitively that I ought to change my boots for my carpet slippers or, at the very least, pay a toll for the privilege of crossing. Now then, now then, don’t go putting ideas into certain people’s heads!  

Unfortunately, however, after this magic carpet ride, it’s downhill all the way. The configuration of a worn and rutted entrance to a private commercial carpark, not much more than hardcore in construction, pocked with serious cavities and craters on either side, which in the rainy season fill with water, makes for a treacherous path indeed. But force of habit and the challenge that it presents has, over a period of time, deluded me into thinking that I can almost walk on water, using the stepping-stone techniques learnt when we were children for crossing fords and streams.

Knowledge is king, as they say (who does?) and as with everything in life the difference between a safe passage and one you should not have attempted (there’s a lot of those in Brixton) is knowing where to put your foot without putting your foot inadvertently in it (innit, man!).

As a not-too-young person, whenever I return from the shop with five pints of beer and a tomato, I pick and mix my pavements ~ sometimes hopping on this one, sometimes skipping on that, sometimes weaving around that section, sometimes straddling this, just as Victor taught me or rather like the tightrope walker at Robert Brothers’ Circus that I almost but never eventually became.

I go to these lengths because (a) it tests my memory (which is important as you get older, for you would not want to run the risk of forgetting what you went to the shop for: “Sorry, dear, I forgot the tomato.”); and (c) (having problems remembering the alphabet), it helps in honing the essential skills of balance and agility.

You might think that the topic of this post is right up my street, and you’d be right, but there’s a good chance that if you live in Kaliningrad, you are streets ahead of me, for this city has some wonderful streets, many with wonderful pavements, and with pavements that as each year passes are clearly on the mend.

But if the pavements on your street are still waiting on the waiting list, console yourself with the image of how things used to be! Those of you who are old enough should be able to cast your mind back to earlier times, when the mean streets of Kaliningrad were very mean indeed!.

Way back when, in the formative years of the 21^st century, a pastime that I quickly cultivated whenever I visited Kaliningrad was to watch the women as they walked by. For purely scientific purposes naturally, I observed the tall, leggy women in short skirts and six-inch stilettos teetering precariously ~ but never tripping, mind! ~ strut their stuff as confidently as any model on the catwalk could across the pits, crevices and uneven ground where, prior to perestroika, Kaliningrad’s pavements once would have been but sadly were no more.

It may come as a surprise to you, but I never tired of watching these ladies; I suppose because they were so adept.

But times, as they say, have changed: the skirts are not so short, the heels are not so high and the pavements, though not as exciting, have attained for the greater part an air of respectability and those that haven’t are getting there! Sigh, progress can be a lot like love: it depends on the beholder.

Reference
* Anton Alikhanov: “Problems with sidewalks are ignored in Kaliningrad” – MK Kaliningrad (mk-kaliningrad.ru)

Former posts
What I like about Kaliningrad
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’.

Why I left the UK and moved to Kaliningrad
I did not decide to leave the UK and give up the country where I was born and everything I had ever known simply because it would furnish me with a first-class opportunity to laugh at the way the UK media brainwashes people.

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.