Wszystkich Swietych - All Saints

All Saints' Day (Wszystkich Swietych) is one of the key Polish national holidays, with most Poles visiting graves of departed family members on or around this day. Cemeteries are ablaze with votive candles, bought in their tens of millions. No grave was without its bouquets or candles.

We visited the local cemetery in Pyry, a half-hour walk north from Jeziorki. Above: the military quarter with the graves of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) partisans who gave their lives fighting the Germans in the Las Kabacki forest in 1944.

A time to reflect on life, death, growing older and What It's All About. Families silently reflect upon these big questions together by visiting the cemeteries in multi-generational groups. Poland as a nation draws its strength from this.

The universe is indeed held together by a web of coincidence. Yesterday in London I fortuitously came across two pieces of music I'd been searching for since 2001. Two song cycles by Ralph Vaughan Williams - On Wenlock Edge and Songs of Travel. I'd borrowed a recording many years ago from the public library, then bought the cassette (the tape snapped). I've not found any MP3 format files since I started looking. Yet as I was transferring a PowerPoint presentation from a colleague's memory stick - what should I find on it but a single MP3 file consisting of both pieces.

The songs of On Wenlock Edge, poems from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad set to Vaughan Williams' music, are emotionally powerful at this time of year. The lyrics of Is My Team Ploughing? are especially moving, a dead young man's dialogue with his surviving friend who's now, as we learn, living with his girl.

Songs of Travel, poems by Robert Louis Stevenson set to music, have similar bleak, contemplative air; consider the refrain from The Vagabond:

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,

Nor a friend to know me;

All I ask, the heaven above,

And the road below me.

Above: On the corner (another Miles Davis title slips in!). Eddie squatting on the pavement on ul. Gajdy, in Pyry on our way home from the cemetary. This is the street where we used to rent a house before moving to our own place on ul. Trombity. The white streak across the top of the photo is an airliner inbound to land. The house behind Eddie was lived in by our friends Mark and Lesley and their boys Konrad and Adam; they moved to Shropshire (more coincidence, see above) in 2003.