REGULAR readers may recall our sensational story from last year when we exposed the dual life of then-PM Kalvitis, acting as prime minister by day and ‘Cukmens’ the litter-collecting pig by night.

Now we must ask questions about Kaptein K’s successor, Ivars ‘Call me God’ Godmanis. It seems that like Kalvitis, Godmanis is not averse to earning a few lats on the side by moonlighting at another profession. Yet unlike Kalvitis, Godmanis is not hiding behind a porcine superhero mask. He even has the nerve to appear on posters in Riga city centre advertising his alternative life!

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IT SEEMS particularly appropriate that on St George’s day, our subject should be the problem of taking a leak in the Baltic - a problem which, it must be admitted, only ever seems to be experienced by English visitors. It has become a kind of rite of pissage for visitors to the fair city of Riga to leave a warm, wet memento of their visit somewhere near the Freedom Monument, much to the annoyance of the locals.

But there’s good news from the gutter - a solution is at hand and we can thank those suspiciously clever Estonians for providing it.

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LAST WEEK I was in Tallinn for a series of interviews, a strange mini-seminar with some very maxi-participants and, perhaps most usefully of all, a chance to simply wander around for a bit.

My first wander took me to a tiny little cinema at the end of the day where I watched Alyosha, a film about the eponymous Soviet war memorial and the 2007 ‘Bronze Soldier riots’. It happened to be about to screen just as I was passing at 5pm, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did. I’d heard mixed reviews but I thought it was a super piece of documentary film-making.

Today when virtually every documentary you see on TV skews off into ‘reconstruction’ and barely-veiled rhetoric, it was immensely refreshing to see a film whose only real authorial technique was the juxtaposition of footage of essentially the same thing - Alyosha - but at different times and in different social and political contexts.

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