Fresh snow, brief thaw

A lovely sunny day yesterday, with temperatures touching +5°C. Overnight, clouds rolled in and this morning – a lovely surprise; heaps of fresh snow. The old snow was getting grubby, so the new stuff was aesthetically pleasing even though there was not a single beam of sunshine today. As soon as they'd eaten the cats (with the exception of Céleste) were all eager to go out and experience the fresh powder. However, they were back within the hour. With all the cats in the house, I could check how far they range by checking paw-prints in the virgin snow...

Below: Moni's Micra hasn't moved since 27 December, between it and the salty road lie about 45 cubic metres of snow (120m by 2m by 20cm). And so it waits for the thaw. Hope the battery holds out!

Below: house from the back. Note the snow cover on the terrace. I've not been up there in a while. 

Below: view of the house in the distance (about halfway from the road to the back of my działka). Snow-covered fir trees make it look like it's still Christmas,

Below: I come across multiple sets of paw-prints from my front door, over the fence and across the forest. They are obviously criss-crossing this land, but not going any further east than the boundary of the next house along.

Below: Flippin' Nora! (nora = burrow, hole.) I followed my cats' paw-prints (can't tell which one) from my garden, over the fence and through the wood. Looks like they smelt some prey down below, sniffed around and went back.

Below: from feline prints to those left by my new Lowa boots. I must say, that after today's two-hour-long walk, some over slushy asphalt, my socks were slightly damp, though not sopping wet as they had been in my old boots. For most of the day, temperatures hovered just above freezing.

Below: juvenile male roe deer foraging for food in deep snow, between orchard and forest. Here and there, I come across patches of turned-over snow where deer and elk have scratching around for mosses and lichens to eat.

Below: You were on the inside, I was on the outside... Céleste, after a taking a peek outside, decides it's preferable in the kitchen on days like this. Not as cold, but damp.

The forthcoming week promises to be much, much colder, with double-digit frosts at night, and some sunshine towards the end of the week. More (wet) snow forecast for next Wednesday,along with another brief thaw, and then back to frost for the foreseeable future in the 15-day prognostication.

Update, Thursday 29 January. Scrapper joins me in the forest next door. Here he is, sizing up a sapling.

This time seven years ago:

The Ten-Year Challenge (Pt. I)
[This year's equivalent, says Moni, is '#2016']

This time nine years ago:
Getting my act together - or not!

This time ten years ago:
The Polish Individualist

This time 12 years ago:
The Holocaust and the banality of evil

This time 13 years ago:
Snow scene into the sun

This time 14 years ago:
More winter gorgeousness

This time 15 years ago:
New winter wear – my M65 Parka

[Still going strong, though replaced by my N3B Parka]

This time 16 years ago:
Winter and broken-down trains

This time 17 years ago:
General Mud claims ul. Poloneza

This time 18 years ago:
Just when I thought winter was over...

When earnings rise faster than prices...

 ...consistently – over many years – the nation is happy.

Yesterday, Statistics Poland (GUS) announced that the gross average monthly wage in the corporate sector in December was 9,583 złotys (£1,980), a year-on-year increase of 8.6%. Average monthly earnings in the UK are currently £3,211, having risen by 4.7% over 2024. However, inflation in Poland currently stands at 2.4%, whilst in the UK it is 3.6%. So – taking price rises into account, over the course of 2025, Polish real wages have increased by 6.2%, in the UK by a mere 1.1%.

But 2025 was not an outlier – this same story has been repeating (with a few exceptional years) ever since 2005. Polish wage growth has, over the past two decades, massively outstripped price increases. Prices have nearly doubled... but wages have nearly quadrupled. Yet over those same 20 years, average earnings in the UK have barely managed to stay ahead of inflation. 

A similar story can be told in the US. Whereas cumulative inflation over the past two decades has been lower than in either Poland or the UK, wage growth has been muted.

Below: graph comparing average earnings vs. CPI inflation from 2005 to 2025, Poland, UK and US. The base year, 2005 = 100%. Solid lines: average earnings, broken lines: consumer price index; red = Poland, green = UK, blue = US. Polish wages are for corporate sector, so don't include public-sector employees or businesses employing fewer than ten people.

Yes, Poland's much-praised economic miracle has many left-behinds, but there's an indefinable something in Polish social cohesion that foreign commentators overlook. Whilst the US and UK have seen relatively stable but high inequality, Poland has undergone a significant transformation, moving from one of the most unequal EU members in 2005 to one of the most equal by 2025. The Gini coefficient of income inequality measures the distribution of money coming into households (wages, pensions, and benefits) after taxes. The Gini scale runs from 100, where all income goes to one person, to 0, where all income is divided equally. Poland in 2005 was 35.6 and is currently 26.2 – a significant decrease in income inequality. Over the same time, the UK has seen a much smaller decrease, from 34.7 to 33.1, whilst the US has seen an increase, from 41.0 to 41.5. [Source: Our World in Data]

The other side of the coin is labour productivity. If workers get paid more and more while producing the same amount of goods or services, inflation rises. But here, Poland has been doing well. Since joining the EU, its growth in productivity has been one of the fastest in the bloc. Averaging around 4.5% a year, it has been keeping pace with growth in real earnings. And money earnt gets spent; cafés, bars, restaurants are doing good business as disposable income is funneled back into the economy boosting growth. In 2025, Poland's labour productivity grew faster than any other EU member state.

And now my controversial assertion: Polish employers are less stingy than British or American ones because they are cut from the same cloth as the employees. There's far less of a class barrier between bosses and workers. Yes, Polish bosses are doing well, but many are also the children or grandchildren of peasant farmers or factory workers. Wealth accumulated across multiple generations brings with it a sense of entitlement and 'us-and-themism'. And the idea of "screwing the workers to earn me another million or ten is something" that Poland's boss class feels less comfortable with than in countries where the rich are historically detached from the travails of the masses by many generations. 

As long as wages grow faster than prices, then all will be well. Important caveat, however – labour productivity must grow faster than both! And faster than in competing economies! Poland's productivity growth in recent years has been among the fastest in the EU (albeit from low levels). May it stay that way...

Before the moaners and carpers start to chip in: Polish pay data is average for the private sector (the public sector pays less) and there are big regional differences (10,500 zł in Warsaw vs. 6,500 zł in eastern Poland). The UK also has those regional differences, but the British public sector has seen much higher salary increases over the past year and half than has Poland's.

Sources

Poland: Główny Urząd Statystyczny (GUS) index uses the annual average price indices of consumer goods and services. GUS Price Indices. Average Earnings (GUS) data is based on the Average Monthly Gross Wage and Salary in the national economy GUS Wages and Salaries Data.

UK: Office for National Statistics (ONS) Consumer Prices Index series, the UK's headline inflation measure. 

ONS Inflation and Price Indices. 

Average Earnings (ONS) uses the series for total pay including bonuses. ONS Average Weekly Earnings in Great Britain.

US: Consumer Price Index is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); the CPI-U (All Urban Consumers) series, the most widely used measure of inflation. BLS Consumer Price Index Data. Average earnings data from the Social Security Administration and BLS. The index uses the National Average Wage Index and BLS Current Employment Statistics. Social Security National Average Wage Index.

National data cross-checked with the OECD database which gives harmonised CPI and hourly earnings data across all three nations, used to ensure the indexing methodology (re-basing to 2005 = 100) remained consistent across different currency and reporting standards: OECD Data Portal.

This time last year:
By tram out of central Warsaw

This time two years ago:
Base Twelve (why decimalisation speeded up Britain's decline)

This time three years ago:
Memories of Seasons

This time four years ago:
Pictures in the Winter Sun

This time five years ago:
Magic sky

This time six years ago:

Too good to skip over

This time eight years ago:
The Hunt for Tony Blair
[Apologies to UK readers - the YouTube link is geo-blocked there]

This time ten years ago:
Lux Selene

This time 13 years ago:
David Cameron, Conservatism and Europe

This time 14 years ago:
Citizen Action Against Rat Runners

This time 15 years ago:
Moni at 18 (and 18 months)

This time 15 years ago:
Building the S79 - Sasanki-Węzeł Lotnisko, midwinter

Last chance to experience sun+snow this winter?

Weather forecast suggests that today will see the end of the spell of clear skies that bring sharp frosts at night and wintery gorgeousness by day. So a walk is in order to make the most of it all, to bring elation to my spirits, to extract maximum repeatable joy from the being in the light.

Below: pollarded willow, on the farm track between Grobice and Kozłów. Photo taken just ten minutes after today's meridian (when the sun's at its highest in the sky). 

Left: a female adult sparrowhawk (krogulec, Accipiter nisus), perched on a fence-post, Grobice.

Photo taken at the long end of my 70-300 Nikkor zoom, and – for the first time – using the Generative Upscale AI feature in the latest Photoshop. The picture was cropped tight on the bird, then blown up four times, with AI filling in the space between the pixels as they are moved apart from one another. 

I must say, I am impressed, and cannot find any anomalous artefacts within the image.

Below: new house at the edge of Kozłów; just as I did in early autumn, I took the photo and asked Chat GPT to make me a poster image in the mid-century modern style. And here they are...

Below:  having reached the furthest point of my walk, I turn around to head back, this time towards the sun. On the outward leg, my hands were frozen; with the sun shining on them, it soon felt warm enough for me to take my woollen gloves off!

Below: within two and half months, this snow-covered field will be yellow with dandelions... That cloud bank is drifting ever closer; more snow is due sometime over the next three days.

Below: today's welcoming party – Scrapper (left), Wenusia, and Pacyfik at the back there. Czester, Arcturus and the glamorous Céleste stayed in all morning.

This time three years ago:
Into the wet snow

This time six years ago:
Minimising #Flygskam

This time seven years ago:
Notes from the Arena of the Unwell II

This time nine years ago:
Ice – pond – night

This time 11 years ago:
Sorry, taki mamy klimat – Polish rail in winter

This time 13 years ago:
Music of the Trees

This time 14 years ago:
Studniówka – a hundred days before the exams

This time 15 years ago:
It's all in the mind – but where's that?

This time 16 years ago:
Roztopy – the big melt-down

This time 17 years ago:
The year's most depressing day

Traversing the Machcin wetlands in the snow

At this time of year, it's possible to cross the wetlands that lie between Dąbrowa Duża and Rososz with dry feet. Last year, there was no snow, but a deep frost froze what little water lay amid the rush-covered tussocks and channels. This year, there's snow that's knee-deep in places.

Unlike the wetlands between Sułkowice and Gabryelin, which I visited earlier this month, these marshes have no river flowing through them, this is a sump , a lower-lying area (129m above sea level), into which drains water from surrounding forests and fields. These wetlands occupy slightly over six hectares (about 15 acres) of land; an ever-diminishing body of water at the western end, the rest is boggy. Ideal nesting habitat for the local cranes.

Below: at the western end of the wetland is a small, maybe two metre-high, hillock. From the top, I get a good view across the area. In the distance, just behind the treeline, the unasphalted road running from Dąbrowa Duża to the left and Rososz to the right. 

Below: In the middle of it all. Reed stems rise from an undulating blanket of snow, sculpted into mounds and hollows. The reed tufts emerge like small island, their stems pale and feathery, backlit by the low sun. The air is cold but dry. Moving through this is hard work; I have to thread my way around the tunnocks in an approximation of a straight line, heading for the trees along the horizon. Along the way I see the tracks of large birds, which I can only presume to be cranes. Four or five prints in the snow – then nothing. And then again, the same. The birds must have landed and flown off straight away.

Below: just before leaving the forest east of Dąbrowa Duża, I spot a vapour trail marking an unusual curve in the sky. I check this on Globe ADS-B Exchange and it turns out to be a Polish air force MiG-29 fighter jet. The white dot in the top left corner (click on image to enlarge, then left-click to see full size) is a southbound airliner at a slightly lower altitude.

Left: autumn leaves that fell not provide contrasting colour to the blue sky and evergreens. The track between Machin II and Dąbrowa Duża, on the way home. Note the depth of the ruts left by a tractor. Walking requires significantly more energy and care than usual.

Finally, an interesting feline story. As I approach my działka, I'm met in the lane by Wenusia, and, turning into my drive, by Céleste. They were outside with Pacyfik. The other boys, Arcturus, Scrapper and Czester, were indoors, fast asleep. They'd spent the night outside, patrolling the grounds. For in the evening as I was going to bed, the three of them were on my front patio, observing something in the bushes. I'd popped out to call them in, but they were rooted to the spot, watching an interloper. I went for a torch. A cat, a grey tabby tom, ran off. But my cats stayed outside to ensure he'd not return. I woke around two am, and opened the front door to call the cats in. Scrapper returned, but Czester and Arcturus decided to stay out despite the double-digit frost to keep watch. Both came in at daybreak for food, warmth and an all-day snooze.

[To read of last years crossing of these wetlands, click here.] 

This time three years ago:
When to hold on, when to let go

This time four years ago:
Classical and meta-classical physics

This time five years ago:
The Sun and Snow

This time six years ago:
Farewell to my father's car

This time eight years ago
Notes from the Arena of the Unwell

This time nine years ago:
The magic of a dawn flight

This time ten years ago:
Warsaw as a voivodship

This time 12 years ago:
Around town in the snow

This time 14 years ago:
Reference books are dead

This time 15 years ago:
A winter walk to work, and wet socks

This time 18 years ago:
Blue Monday

Migratory consciousness; migratory souls?

What's your earliest memory – the first thing you can remember remembering? 

And why don't we remember the first months of our lives? 

Were we indeed conscious in our first months?

My earliest memory is a memory of a memory. It would be from some time early in 1959, I guess. 

My father would develop and print his own black-and-white photographs in a makeshift darkroom (our kitchen with blackout blinds over the window) right through until the end of the 1960s. One evening, he made a set of prints from Christmas 1958. I am kneeling on a chair next to our Christmas tree, decorated with lights, baubles and tinsel. I am wearing a woollen jumper knitted by my mother. I have a small scab on my forehead/temple, about the size of a thumbnail. There are presents under the tree. 

On seeing the photograph, I remembered that moment clearly. I remembered that scab, and the bump that it resulted from. And I remember having quite a sophisticated thought; as I looked back at photos from the earliest weeks and months of my life on the previous pages of the photo album, I was aware that I had no memories of myself from those times. Yet when I looked at the photo of myself by the Christmas tree, I recalled experiencing that moment, living it, being aware.

And that was the first memory that I can remember*; the excitement of Christmas impending. I would have been around 14-and-half months old at the time. I had precise recollection of the moment captured in the photograph, and the sense of self that associated my consciousness with the little fellow portrayed in it.

When does consciousness slip into this house? It felt fully formed by that age; but was it fully formed earlier? If so, when? And if so, why no earlier memories? 

If we work on the assumption that consciousness is the underlying substrate of reality, the fundamental property of the universe, from which spacetime and matter/energy derive, and that our biological bodies are containers of our immortal souls, which evolve over the aeons – at what point did my consciousness and my body become one? At conception? At the 'quickening'? At birth? Or some time during that first year of my body's life, that time from which we have no memories?

What brings a soul to a body? I had an intuition yesterday while walking through snowy fields. Could it be... music? I started thinking about my earliest musical memories. We had a radio, which my parents had bought soon after getting married. It stood in the dining room, and my mother would have it on for much of the day as she went about the housework. Central to this was Housewives' Choice and Music While You Work, the signature tunes to both which are instantly familiar to anyone around in the UK at that time.

Below: my parents' radio, bought at Barker's of Kensington department store. Screenshot from the Bluebells' Young at Heart video (at 0:41).

This fact makes it nice and easy in our days of AI to track down typical BBC Light Programme playlists with the music I'd have listened to as a very small child. Now, whilst Housewives Choice played records, Music While You Work presented live music played by dance bands (union musicians). So whether discs originally cut by Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington or Tommy Dorsey – or live covers thereof – I would have been exposed to a great many numbers from these bands. Tunes from the 1940s were as close to my early years as tunes from the 2010s are to today.

Count Basie and his Orchestra entered the Capitol Records recording studios in New York City on 21 October 1957, just over a fortnight after I was born, to record an album now known as The Atomic Mr. Basie. The first track, The Kid from Red Bank, as well as several other tracks (Flight of the Foo Birds, Whirlybird and Splanky) have resonated strongly with me since I bought the album in the early 1980s, especially on snowy days under clear blue skies. How, why, I don't wish to speculate. I just feel a strong connection here.

[*But then there are what I'd term the 'birth-canal dreams', one of the most common tropes in my dreambook – squeezing through a narrow passage. Do these dreams prove a memory connection with birth?] 

This time last year:
Sunshine reminds me of spring
[not a whisper of spring right now! It's -8.7°C outside at the moment]

This time two years ago:
Winter's wildness

This time five years ago:
Snow turns to slush

This time six years ago:
London in its legal finery

This time seven years ago:
Winter walk through the Las Kabacki

This time nine years ago:

1967: The Year The World Started Turning To Colour

This time 12 years ago:
Rain on a freezing day (-7C)

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time 15 years ago:
Winter's slight return

This time 16 years ago:
Unacceptable

This time 17 years ago:
Pieniny in winter

This time 18 years ago:
Wetlands in a wet winter

Hard frost continues

Into the third week of snow and frost; the 14-day forecast shows minus temperatures right through into early February. With the sky remaining cloudless, conditions for evocative photography continue.

Below: the wooden church, Chynów, in winter. The tractor has pre-1999 white-on-black registration plates from the old Krosno (!) voivodship. It is still for sale. An old-school Poland scene.

Below: pigeons flying around their loft, high over Chynów. They fly in a tight, coordinated formation; when they all suddenly change direction, their white undersides contrasting against the brilliant blue sky, the effect is dazzling.

Below: out into the forest, the going is not easy. Trudging through virgin snow that's up to 20 cm in average depth, snow that's not been trodden down, is hard work, but at least its not slippery.

Below: heading home. Saturday's second walk was short on account of what hard work it was in the forest, but a third walk (after dark) brought the day in on target in terms of paces.

Sunday was a social day, friends from London visited me on the działka, followed by a walk along the Vistula, followed by more socialising with London friends in a pub in Warsaw's Norblin centre.

Below: half an hour before sunset and Warsaw's skyline is lit up by the low sun. Much of the river has frozen over, but despite nearly three weeks of sub-zero temperatures, there's still plenty of open water.

Below: the three brave girls had just dried themself off and got dressed after a dip in the icy waters of the Vistula. A friend had come at eight in the morning with an axe to make these two holes in the ice.

Left: Arcturus in his element, today. I am trying to limit the cats' exposure to double-digit frost, certainly keeping them all in overnight. But once fed, after breakfast, and after lunch too, they are all very keen to get out onto the snow. After dark, however, the temperature plummets, so the cats are called back to spend the night in the warm.

Below: ulica Główna, Chynów's main street. The DK50 bypass has taken the traffic out of the village. Across the street is the local health centre, the church is in the distance

Below:  sunset over Chynów Poduchowny, as seen from ul. Lokalna

Below: ul. Słoneczna near the railway tracks, as the sun disappears. The snow turns a shade of violet. The sun set precisely at 16:00, so there's now 36 minutes more afternoon daylight than at the earliest sunset (9-16 December)

This time six years ago:

Cars: bigger, heavier, more powerful... why?

This time seven years ago:
Train journey to Chynów

This time 12 years ago:
It's healthier to live in the city than in the suburbs
[Car-driving makes you fatter]

This time 13 years:
Ikaria - the island where people forget to die

This time 14 years ago
Miserable depths of winter

This time 15 years ago:
From – a short story (Part 1)

This time 16 years ago:
A month until Lent starts

This time 17 years ago:
World's biggest airliner over Poland

This time 18 years ago:
More pre-Lenten thoughts

Doris Lessing’s On Cats – review

First book of 2026 (I have made it a New Year's Resolution to read more); a big thanks for Moni for getting it for me for Christmas, and a big thanks to Jacek K. for recommending it. A second cat book for me, after Mornings With My Cat Mii (my review here); that book I read last spring when I was the guardian of one but cat, Wenusia. Like Mii, Wenusia was a foundling kitten. Like Mii, she was "a calico, with black and tan stripes on her head and patches on her back, and a belly that was pure white". But now that I've become the guardian of six cats, a book written by someone whose life was usually shared with multiple cats becomes more apt. 

Doris Lessing's On Cats is not about a single feline life lived together with the author’s, but about her life with many cats over many decades, from the semi-feral cats of her African childhood to the aged, three-legged El Magnifico, whose life brought both joy and discomfort, loss and deep reflection to the author late in life.

On Cats is neither sentimental nor a mere succession of anecdotes; it is a series of sharp and often emotionally painful meditations on the creatures that have haunted, challenged and comforted the author across her life. And as a book written by a winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature, the quality of the prose doesn't disappoint. Her observations are those of an artist, not the empirical notings of a biologist, so don't expect science.

The book brings together three short works; Particularly Cats (1967), Rufus the Survivor (1989) and The Old Age of El Magnifico (2000). As such, there's no single narrative arc; rather, On Cats is a set of essays and recollections that collectively form an elegy for the felines in our lives. This approach mirrors the way how cats subtly inveigle themselves enter our lives: indifferently, with grace and charm, yet with an inevitability that shapes the routine of a cat guardian's daily existence. 

Lessing's many trips to the veterinary surgeon shows she cared deeply about the suffering of her feline charges. She writes often about sterilisation and the ambiguity of doing what's right for human society, whilst regretting the loss of her cats' "wholeness". It's a question I'm weighing up. As someone brought up in the country, she brought with her a rural approach to cat ownership after settling in London in the 1950s; her first two females – 'grey cat' and 'black cat' – would have litter after litter, which she'd give away. Black cat had three litters in a single year. Grey cat would kill the first-born of ever litter. In the end, grey cat was sterilised and resented black cat, who'd continue reproducing.

This unsentimental clarity about the rough edges of cat life – illness, rivalry, birth and death – is what gives this book its power and authenticity. Lessing's prose precisely captures feline gestures and moods. The universality of feline behaviour becomes a lens through which we see ourselves: our attachments, our awkward attempts at communication – both between species and between one another – deeply moved by what cats will accept from us and what they will politely ignore.

On Cats is the antidote to sickly-sweet cat YouTube videos with vocal-fried American accents counting down listicles like 'five ways in which your fur-baby says it loves you'. For any cat guardian wishing to peek into the mystery of the human-feline relationship, the book provides genuine and timeless insight.

This time last year:
The use of English in Europe after Brexit

This time three years ago:
The King's Horse (Short story, Pt I)

This time four years ago:
Hoofing it
(Not horses - Nordic walking!)

This time six years ago:
Signals from space - what's the meaning of 187.5?

This time seven years ago:
Ice – proceed with utmost care

This time nine years ago: 
In which I see a wild boar crossing the frozen ponds

This time ten years ago:
Thinking big, American style. Can Poles do it?

This time 13 years ago:
Inequality in an age of economic slowdown 

This time 14 years ago:
The Palace of Culture: Tear it down?

This time 15 years ago:
Conquering Warsaw's highest snow mounds

This time 17 years ago:
Flashback on way to Zielona Góra

This time 18 years ago:
Ursynów, winter, before sunrise 

Slush and crust – the brief thaw

The Inuit have 70 words for 'snow' (or so goes the myth); Poland has experienced several forms of sub-zero precipitation over the past 36 hours. A heavy fall of fresh powder followed by freezing rain; then a thaw lasting around 24 hours, crusty ice on virgin snow and slush-and-glaze havoc on pavements, roads and indeed rail.

Below: my Samsung Galaxy A56 is 6.4 inches (165mm) high; snow in the garden this morning was nearly eight inches (200mm) deep. A cat running through this will only have its ears, spine and tail visible.

My train into town to a business meeting yesterday morning was 55 minutes late (I'd opted for an earlier departure to be on the safe side, so no big problem in the end), but at least with snow powder one can move through it without slipping. Journey home OK and on time, but once the freezing rains started to fall in the late afternoon, pavements and roads became treacherous.

As I write, it's currently +0.3°C outside, but due to fall below zero soon – and then stay below freezing for the next two weeks! Double-digit frosts are forecast ever night through to at least Thursday 29 January, but with no new snow on the way. So what we have is what will be hanging around, not melting, just getting greyer and dirtier with time.

My new winter boots, bought two weeks ago, are excellent. The brand was recommended to me by the man who runs a militaria shop in Wola, although that shop doesn't sell footwear. I found the boots in another shop in Śródmieście, with a nice reduction (799zł reduced from 849zł). The boots are Lowa, a German brand, though made in Slovakia. These replace my old Ukrainian army boots, which sprung a leak in the late autumn after five winters of heavy use. [The old pair, minus laces, I retain as boots that I can easily slip on and off to go out to the compost heap or get something from the garage. I am practical.]

Two weeks of daily walking (10km a day) and the new boots (which labour under the ridiculous name of Lowa Renegade Evo GTX MID) are excellent. Goretex, leather and Vibram soles, they are comfortable, don't slip, and are warm and waterproof. They've experienced temperatures down to -15°C and have taken me over kilometres of slush-covered pavements with no discomfort experienced by my feet. And no falls.

This morning, I ventured forth into the garden, above freezing for the first time this year, and over a crispy crust of virgin snow covered with a thin layer of ice. I walked around with a satisfying 'crunch' as my feet broke through the thin ice and pushed down through the soft, ankle-deep snow. 

Still unable to use the car (last journey: 27 December), I walked to the shops in Chynów, and back the long way to get my paces in. Again, I choose a route with plentiful virgin snow for that rare experience of crunching through crusty snow. But most of Chynów's pavements were unpleasantly slushy ('slush' = breja, and that other nasty surface, gołoledź, 'glaze' or 'glazed frost'). Really nasty stuff, but my Vibram soles coped well. 

This time three years ago:
Mid-Jan town-and-country pictorial catch-up

This time four years ago:
Winter at its zenith

This time six years ago:
Signals from space

This time seven years ago:
Ice – proceed with utmost care

This time eight years ago: 
In which I see a wild boar crossing the frozen ponds

This time nine years ago:
Communicating the government's case in English

This time 11 years ago:
Thinking big, American style. Can Poles do it?

This time 12 years ago:
Inequality in an age of economic slowdown 

This time 13 years ago:
The Palace of Culture: Tear it down?

This time 15 years ago:
Conquering Warsaw's highest snow mounds

This time 17 years ago:
Flashback on way to Zielona Góra

This time 18 years ago:
Ursynów, winter, before sunrise