A number of years ago I made the step from working for a major computer company (sadly on its demise) to being an independent contractor. My first job was in the newly independent Estonia at the Estonia Mobile Telephone company in the capital Tallinn. I had to take a flight via Copenhagen, where I switched airlines to Estonia Air, newly separated from Aeroflot. I remember walking out onto the tarmac and looking up at an ancient Tupolev TU-134. It had a glass nose and reminded me of a World War II Lancaster Bomber. I realized this was my flight to Tallinn. Someone told me later that the company motto was ‘Fly – if you feel lucky.’
I arrived in Tallinn in late November and it was cold, I mean brass monkey cold, Tallinn is only 50 miles south of Helsinki and 200 miles west of St Petersburg. After much bargaining and the scenic tour of Tallinn, I finally arrived at my hotel, having paid the taxi driver most of the cash in my wallet. After I settled in, the girl behind the bar in the hotel told me there was an Irish pub across the town square. This was in the days before Irish pubs were more numerous than Catholic churches. I decided it was time to explore and soon found myself moving at a rapid rate across the cobbled square. The reason I was moving so fast was that I was sure if I moved slower I would freeze solid and join the statues scattered around the square, no doubt figures of years gone by who had merely gone out in search of a drink.
The George Browne was a genuine out-of-the-box, Irish pub (well-known to us all now, but a novelty back then). There was a small road sign by the front door that said Dublin 1200 Miles. The place had creaking wooden floors and a long polished bar that served draught Guinness, which wasn’t bad, and the local head banger brew, Saku. The place was well patronised for a Sunday evening and I soon got chatting to a couple of English guys at the bar. One of them, Ernie, was a short rotund guy, who after a couple of drinks gave me a peek at Betsy, his automatic pistol tucked away beneath his coat in a leather shoulder holster. Ernie’s parents were Estonian and had left Tallinn for England as children during the Second World War. Now Ernie was back to claim his birthright. He was working as a minor official in the government. Under the influence of a good few pints of Saku, he would often boast, with a conspiratorial wink, that his position allowed him to use Betsy on one adult or two small children with complete immunity.
Ernie’s friend Bob was another character, as tall as me and twice as round as Ernie. He had the skinniest waif of a girlfriend who he supplied with a constant stream of vodka. She just leaned on the bar and never spoke a word. Bob told me he was in the semi-precious metal business. To hear him describe it, he was a sort of mix between James Bond and Harold Steptoe (sorry, for the non-Anglophiles, Harold Steptoe was a famous comic TV scrap metal dealer (when I was a lad)). Bob was involved in decommissioning a local radar station, only from what I could gather, they were decommissioning it over the back fence.
The George Browne was my first close up view of the Russian Mafiya. There was a bleached blond guy, whose name I forget, who always wore his overcoat around his shoulders like a cloak. He had the meanest looking eyes I’ve ever seen. He had a bodyguard the size of a house, who was on nodding terms with Ernie and Bob and occasionally, while his boss was in the corner chatting up two or three women at the same time, he would wander over for a chat. He spoke broken English, but enough for bar conversation. I remember Ernie egging him on to show me his gun, and him pulling out a make-my-day special as long as my forearm.
So this was the level of intrigue available at the bar of the George Browne, the writer in me was loving it. I could go on writing for pages yet about nights in the George Browne, but this is a blog so I need to get to the point. Suffice to say I was a frequent visitor over the next months. It was often my step off point before venturing into the depths and delights of the old town. I have very happy memories of that little Irish pub and of my stay in Tallinn. Back then it was a frontier town, a frontier in time to the old Soviet Union. There were still few visitors from the other side of the old iron curtain (the west) and the place was frequented by just a few ex-pats and dodgy traders. Now, I believe it has become the stag party (bachelor party) capital of Europe, frequented for long weekends by a string of drunken youths, trashing the bars and nightclubs and, if they are lucky enough to return home on Monday morning, with no memory whatsoever of the place they have visited.
Something prompted me the other day to Google the George Browne. I wanted to see what it had become. No doubt it would have its own website and offer free Wi-Fi to its clientele. I was devastated to find I didn’t get a single hit. Panicking, I looked up various tourist maps, places to drink in Tallinn, but not a single mention of the George Browne. It had simply faded away, except in my own precious memories. But isn’t that the way of the past, the golden memories that you have, are best left there. The fact is, for the most part they don’t exist anymore or worse.
I frantically e-mailed and old friend who I met over there (and has been my best friend ever since) and he sent me a link but warned me not to look. I should have listened to him. The place is now a posh wine bar, but worse, it’s decorated in pink and does not even sell beer. It makes you wish you’d never gone looking in the first place. Trying to go back only leads to disappointment. Memories are made from the now, the place you are in, the people you are with, that are then carefully packaged away for you to reflect on in the future. These are the golden moments, remember them, sure, treasure them, absolutely. But they are for moments of pleasant reflection, to relive with a wistful smile and quiet thanks that you had the opportunity to be there, before moving on and living with the now. In these particularly tough times, it’s easy to hanker for the past, but the future isn’t there, it’s here, where it’s always been, with the people you love, the people you respect, the people you work with and see on the street every day. The future is that way, as my old dad used to say, pointing forward, out into the distance. And he was right.
I guess the thing that had prompted me to look up the George Browne was a theme that had been running through my head when I was writing my new thriller, the Foo Sheng Key. The whole idea that you can never go back, that the mere process of moving forward changes things. It is a theme that follows my hero, Jai, throughout his physical and emotional journey through the book. This theme was so strong in me that after writing the first 50 hand scribbled pages in my notebook, I got up one morning and turned back to the first page and wrote across the top, the opening line from a favourite Paul McCartney’s song from way back:
‘Once there was a way to get back home.’
I let that thought and everything it implies, stay with me throughout the writing of the whole book. And even that is now a memory, that I can look back on and smile, but know I have to move on to the next one.
Check out my books on https://www.amazon.com/author/neilhowarth and remember –
Enjoy the now.
