It’s great to be back in Kaliningrad/Konigsberg. Being a schizophrenic, I love the fact that it can be a Prussian town one day, Sovietopolis the next - depending where you walk and how you’re feeling. In the same way, it can be turn of the century or 1970s. (Though not much later. Laugh.)

But anyway, I was having a Soviet mood today, sitting in Marx Park and catching up on the news of Lithuania’s new crackdown ban on all Soviet symbols.

Quite how they’ll frame this law boggles the mind. You’d have to demolish half of Vilnius to eradicate that most pervasive of all Soviet icons, the apartment block. And what will become of ‘Stalin World’ ? Berlin city council gave up trying to demolish all the Soviet granite years ago. It was just too damn expensive. Rewriting history doesn’t come cheap.

But here in Kaliningrad we can relax nicely amongst our Soviet era heroes and reflect that bird droppings fall equally upon everyone, from Marx and Leonov to Nelson and Napoleon.

Before dismissing the Lithuanians as nutters, note that Germany already has a law prohibiting Nazi symbols. Lithuania is outlawing everything - flags, emblems, hammers, sickles, the works. Which is where it gets tricky.

In recent cases in Germany, people were fined for wearing Thor Steinar sweaters and T-shirts, since the company’s logo looked ‘a bit like a swastika’. That’s because it was composed of runes. The ruling effectively criminalised the runic alphabet.

Yet more nonsensically, no-one in Germany is fined for wearing anything with a Hugo Boss logo, even though Boss designed the SS blackshirts and Hitler Youth uniforms.

While Lithuania is rewriting history, we’ll just have to give it a wide berth. And maybe rewrite the phrase, ‘like a red rag to a bull’ to ‘like a red star to a Lithuanian’. Check your wardrobe, duvet and cushion covers. Stars may soon be going the way of the runic alphabet.