"Will you please desist from writing about the arrival of Spring and everything leaping into life," asks a friend. "It means that I am driven into digging out the lawnmower, trimming the grass and tidying up the hedge. For God's sake, write about something else."
Well, indeed, there is much else to wonder at Dublin's jewellery shops, for example, have seldom, in memory, been so stocked with amber. Amber you know what it is. It is the fossilised resin of pine trees. Often millions of years old. Anyone familiar with the coast of the Baltic countries will remember, in the far off days, scouring the lovely white sandy shores for pieces of the precious substance. It is usually yellow. You will have seen it in necklaces. Yellow cigarette holders were often of amber. There are stories of amber, perhaps millions of years old, which contained within their clear yellow substance, a fly, trapped there equally millions of years ago.
Most amber is in various shades of yellow, but it may even be dark brown or black. Boutiques in what used to be Danzig and is now Gdansk, specialised in this precious and yet warm and friendly substance. The centre of the amber trade now seems to be somewhat east of Gdansk. Dennis Chamberlin, writing in the March issue of the National Geographic, tells us that in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg, the capital of amber is apparently Yantarny, which means village, of amber".
He met the director of the world's largest amber mine. For, while beachcombers used to find bits of the precious stuff on the beaches, the real riches lie in blue clay nearby to this place, where giant dredgers and siphons scoop it out of that soil layer which holds "the hardened resin of pine forests that bled when a warming period changed the climate here millions of years ago."
Officials, writes the correspondent, admit that more than 20 tons of amber is smuggled yearly out of Kaliningrad, including more than 50 per cent of the grade used to make jewellery. The writer wonders if Kaliningrad is to become a Russian Hong Kong. Or an in dependent Baltic State. Or what strikes anxiety in city officials most, he writes, a reborn, re Germanised East Prussia. It's an odd corner of Europe. Emmanuel Kaut never left East Prussia, yet felt he was a citizen of the world.