Why does it feel like something bad is about to happen?

I want to write this blog to give you, apart from the beginning, a feeling of extreme normalcy. The kind where things are so normal you start to wonder if it is real. The kind where even if you have two good days in a row, you are still worried about the third being a catastrophe.

This would be the first day of normalcy, where you start to relax. Where you start to forget you are in a dangerous place, and perhaps the way you can relax so much is why it is so very dangerous. It is almost like the feeling of slipping in a pool, cold at first, then you relax, then you look down - and there is no bottom and the ladders are gone. You try to look up, and you see the face of a teenage girl smiling as she cancels your swimming action and removes the last ladder.

I ask you: How long will your moodlets stay green?

Chilling!

Today, we wanted to recover from running around yesterday. I know that at the start of the last blog, all I talked about was how much we would start to relax and chill out, but I think it was a false alarm. Today was really when we started to relax.

We woke up late, probably didn't get out of bed until 12 - I say we, but actually I got up earlier than Alice. Just like home, even on weekends or holidays, I will try to get up before 11, really!

I don't like it when I get up and half the day is gone, I feel like I am wasting that time by sleeping. I know what a therapist would say:

Why do you feel that sleeping is wasting time? Resting is the opposite of wasted time.

However, the therapist can go fuck themselves because I do not get to actively enjoy sleeping more. You might make a reach and say that I could enjoy the passive effects of being well rested. However, this is why I love lisdexamfetamine - it's like that but in pill form. Burning out is a future problem.

Gastronomy and language - it is that deep bro

Yesterday we had Holubtsi - and now we will learn about another Ukrainian breakfast!

But first, I wrote Ukrainian in italics for a reason.

A recurring theme of the Russian genocide is that it extends much further than war. A few blog posts ago, I wrote about how I saw a cool patch that said language is our weapon.

This is because Russia has historically used the Russification of other languages as proof that those peoples are nothing but subgroups of Russians.

If you wanted to see a successful example of this, look no further than Belarus. Like Ukraine before 2022, if you asked people to point to it on a map, they might even just point at Russia, thinking it is a province.

And if you said that now, I would honestly say for Belarus, you are right. In 1999, more Polish people spoke Belarusian at home than Belarusians, and this collapsed further in 2009.

It will be even worse now, after the Russification laws and crackdown on democratic liberties (see 2020 protests).

This is not just a new thing either - I want to emphasize that this is NOT a 'Putin problem'.

In fact, the earlier Soviet Union exercised regional independence. In each of the Soviet Republics (basically regions where historically it was a separate country), there was a process of ethnic rejuvenation. Each republic was encouraged to teach its native language in schools, and later on even in universities. In 1924, a national decree was passed enshrining the four main languages (Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish) as equal languages.

Article 22 of the 1927 Byelorussian SSR constitution declared Belarusian to be the primary language for state, professional, and public institutions. Even in the nearby regions of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), schools taught in Belarusian.

This is what happens when people are given independence (even if it is limited), they choose things that help them flourish.

Then of course, as we know, Stalin came in, and after that, laws promoting the use of Russian as an inter-state language followed. After Stalin's death, Belarusians were given the choice of which language school to send their kids to. Most requests were for Russian schools - primarily due to the promotion of it by the RSFSR, with secondary factors such as forced immigration of Russians to Belarus. If you wanted to 'get ahead', you had to speak Russian, as good jobs only were available to Russian speakers.

However, tankies don't like it when I call it forced immigration because these were mostly on an individual basis - if you graduated in Omsk, you might be given an engineering role in Minsk, for example. However, these will have been based on quotas, which is why it feels like a genocide in all but name.

Then, as through the years it's all but done, besides a brief glimmer of hope in the 90s, you get Lukashenko in power, who signs treaties with Russia, saying, 'you provide the chair, and I'll sit and watch you fuck my wife'.

I specifically wrote about Belarus and not Ukraine, despite being married to a Ukrainian, despite loving Ukraine, because I wanted to show that it is not just a Russia vs Ukraine thing. Everything that has happened in Ukraine has happened elsewhere. I also wanted to show it is not just a Putin thing, which seems to be a recurring thought in many minds of even the strongest of Ukraine's supporters.

I hear a lot of people calling it "Putin's war" or a "mad man in the Kremlin", which completely ignores the Russification of these areas in the past 100+ years, all the while excusing the Russian population for their aggressive cultural problem.

Is every Russian who signs a Russification policy Putin? Every bomb dropped from a plane piloted by Putin? Every air commander sending those pilots out "under duress" (lol) named Vladimir Putin? Is every mother sitting down watching Rossiya 1 laughing at the propagandists, bearing the name Vladimira Putina?

A tankie will have an answer of "no, but there are complex factors at play".

At what stage of reductionism will the Russian people as a collective be held responsible for the crimes their country has committed in the past two centuries?

I am sorry, back to food

I will talk about my breakfast now.

I had сирники or sirniki. If you google it, you might be convinced it is a Russian breakfast dish.

I ask you this - what is the word for cottage cheese in Russian? What is it in Ukrainian? Google it and tell me I'm right.

Anyway, they are delicious. It is soft cottage cheese (not like British stuff, it is less creamy and drier). It is shredded up as much as possible and mixed with flour and sugar.

I prefer Puzata Hata sirniki, which is blended so the mixture is creamy inside. However, we all know that Mom's sirniki is the best sirniki...

Kvass my beloved

An aside - I fucking love kvass. It is the most delicious summer drink ever. When it is 'live' (so not industrial crap), then it is crisp, light, not too sweet, and very refreshing. Every grandma makes it different, but this time we had some good stuff from the supermarket.

A moment to talk about our dear Silpo

My new Ukrainian friend asked me:

Why do you guys love Silpo?

Despite the whole war thing, I don't think my little friend understands how lucky he is to have the quality of food you can find in a regular chain supermarket here.

I think that for that comment, he should be forced to live in the UK and eat only from a Tesco Express for his insolence.

Fresher than fresh

I want to give an example. When you are tired, working in the office, what do you get to eat that you can scoff in 10 minutes and not give any indication to your colleagues that you are ABC1 rather than C2DE?

While in Silpo, when you are hungry for something fresh, what can you get? I'll show you, but I'll be testing the limits of Ghost's gallery function.

I would also like to mention that this Silpo was smalle than your usual Tesco, and definetely smaller than something like a Tesco Extra. I think a lot of it goes to show that we aren't limited for choice in the UK, but the choice we do have is useless.

For example, in the UK, you might be able to choose between 50 different cereal types, or 50 different types of crisps, in different sizes, whether it's a multipack, the premium, midrange, and budget brand. All of it sounds good in theory but it's just segregation for no real reason. The difference between the cheapest crisps and the most expensive is not worth that amount, so it would be better for all of us if we had less choice when it comes to processed crap.

In Silpo, despite being smaller, it actually feels like you have MORE choice, because the things you can actually choose from in terms of food product are vastly different, whereas in the UK a lot of space is wasted in showing different versions of the same product.

There has been many times I have walked in a British supermarket and browsed through the many aisles, eyes darting around bombarded by options, just to walk out feeling like I had nothing to really choose from.

I feel like it is part of the problem of the post-capitalist hellspace we live in. Everything is monitored, analysed, optimised. Nothing that provides an improved experience is kept if removing it increases theoretical profits. A good example would be taking a look at facilities supermarkets used to begrudglingy offer.

From memory, sometimes you would see:

• hot counters with sausages, chicken, pizzas, wedges, etc
• 'Fishmonger' and 'Butcher' stations that offered a level of customary feel to each product you were buying
• Fresh bread/bakery counters with someone to cut it for you
• A supermarket cafe with a functioning selection of hot food

Morrisons seems to be the final holdout of the all of these - but it is declining rapidly. Morrisons is in a lot of debt and they are cutting stuff left right and center. You might scream: but mev! It really seems like they were losing money offering these things!

Yeah sure, but balancing the books doesn't necessarily mean stripping away everything that is a net loss and leaving things that currently do well. How about we analyse why these are causing a net loss, or if they ever made a profit? Nope, onto the cutting block, fuck the experience of shoppers.

We are partly to blame though. As always nothing is ENTIRELY the fault of our corporate overlords (but I don't see how it is the customers fault that profits weren't invested), we are also to blame. Our stupidly isolated, technological lives show us reems and reems of content fed to us in little dopamine chunks influencing us in our consumerist habits. We demand new items to stimulate our brains and tongues, like and share rapid cycling food trends on social media, get attached to processed crap... and get upset when it goes.

If I want something fresh to eat, Silpo offers me good quality made in house sandwiches, or pastries, or different meal kids with simple meals already prepared (such as cutlet and buckwheat, or chicken kyiv and potato).

You might have things similar in the UK such as ready meals, which are full of salt, not cooked yet, and meant to bridge the gap in convenience. However I really think we are lying to ourselves if we think the quality of a ready meal is improved that much by "cooking" it yourself, versus it being cooked and presented fresh.

Dnipro and chill

Sometimes I feel like a dumb westerner. I didn't realise rivers can have beaches. Maybe not dumb westerner, but just dumb... do we have those in the west?

We got a snack from Silpo from the Pizza Counter.

I actually don't like BBQ pizza. I don't think it is a pizza at all. I actually felt my heart sink when I asked my wife if we were getting the margherita and she said "no, I was thinking bbq".

My heart sank a little, and I felt like a 10 year old child being told they have Polio and have to spend the rest of their life in an Iron Lung.

Stripped of all joy and autonomy, I carried the pizza to the beach and picked the cheese of it.

Walking back after the beach we were caught in the rain. It felt very anime and it makes me cringe to even say that. Rain in the UK is different, 'summer rain' is still cold, and it lowers the temperature of the day dramatically.

The weather in the UK is often described as temperamental. I would say after experiencing both countries' weather that really this is just down to how rain behaves in the UK. It is a pissy, explosive child. The clouds build up quickly and it throws buckets down at you, enough to make you feel the world is flooding. After 10 minutes, it slows to a spittle and gives up - as if the upset child realised nobody was paying attention.

In other countries, rain is longer and thorough - the 'bell curve' of intensity is more an upsidedown bathtub with a long middle part. So we had to hide under a tunnel and watch it rain down all the while worrying about our pretty cakes from Silpo.

We had sushi again when we got home, but I think I have shown you enough sushi for now. I will let you have a break.