TYSLA – Vehicle Carrier

I am still experimenting with WordPress. There is some good, some bad. I have also just bought a new camera and sat on a beach this afternoon experimenting with that. I can’t get the photographs to represent properly on this blog. Wondering whether I need a different design.

Tysla is a vehicle carrier on its way from Antwerp to Southampton. The other ship – which was further out in the channel, and is also a smaller ship – is the Kegums. It’s on its way to Le Legue (Saint Brieuc, France) from Svetly, Russia. This looks to be part of the port infrastructure of Kaliningrad .

Russia becomes more and more intriguing. It is as if the Iron Curtain still exists; certainly in many people’s heads. It feels as if it should be much easier to get there; and it seems so unknown to most people in western Europe.

Last summer I was sitting on the steps of a building in Duke Street drawing an Arts and Crafts inspired building opposite (at least that’s my memory). Was it Duke Street? Was it Arts and Crafts? I can’t find that particular sketch book at the moment. But I do remember the Russian woman who stopped to ask for directions and how different she seemed. Everything about her, clothes, shoes, phone (she showed me the screen, all in Russian), haircut, mannerisms. It made me realize how homogenized people and things have become here. She was easily the most ‘different’ person I met all year and I didn’t get the impression she had set out to be so.

I am not of the sort to ask strangers to accompany me to a devil’s hostelry, but I still regret that I didn’t ask her. It would have been a key to a completely different world, and such keys can be hard to find but with the potential to unlock rich treasures.

If there were any smart politicians in the west – which there don’t seem to be – they would ignore Putin and his cronies and hold out a welcoming hand to the Russian people. But we have crony-ism and corruption in Britain and they recognize their counterparts abroad.

Which makes the history and experience of the Russian people even more intriguing and raises a question as to in whose interests it is to keep as all apart?