W-wa Jeziorki

At last - winter's gorgeousness

2012-01-27T23:43:00.005+01:00

A big thank-you to fellow-blogger and near neighbour, Bartek aka Student SGH for offering me a lift this morning. We toured the roadworks around the S2 between Węzeł Lotnisko and Węzeł Puławska after which Bartek dropped me off on ul. Taneczna, I then popped into the local store for food and a paper and then had a refreshing (read: icy cold; it was -11C) stroll down ul. Wodzirejów (below) towards Puławska and Platan Park for my morning meetings. The route was slippery and I did well to avoid getting wet socks breaking through thin ice into freezing puddles.

The sun rose this morning at 7:23, a mere 22 minutes earlier than at Winter Equinox (by contrast, the day's gained 48 minutes on the shortest day in the evenings. A strange asymmetry. Below: Platan Park, on ul Poloneza, my destination.

After two hours at Platan Park, off to town. Another refreshing walk to Puławska (having missed two buses), then on to Wilanowska. And here, along with crowds of late morning commuters, off the 739 and on towards the Metro station. The blue sky makes the scene look quite summery - and yet it's -10C.

This time last year:
New winter wear - my M65 Parka

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

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

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

Warsaw is ready for winter

2012-01-26T18:37:00.005+01:00

Proper winter is arriving. The past week has been a thoroughly unpleasant mix of rain and wet snow, temperatures just above zero. Last night the temperature fell to -4C and by tomorrow morning it will be -10C. The temperatura odczuwalna will be -17C. Light snow fell today, no more is expected in the immediate future. But the city is ready. READY - d'you hear me?!

Below: snow ploughs on Pl. Konstytucji, quarter to eight this morning. (Note the row of bollards keeping rogue parkers off the pavement. It's the only language they understand!)

Below: as much attention is being lavished on pavements as on roadways. Ul. Waryńskiego (between Nowowiejska and Pl. Konstytucji). Note the pattern of the swept snow.

Not just in town, but on the fringes - this is ul. Puławska in Grabów (between Jeziorki and Civilisation). A day earlier, at twenty to eight in the morning. Note the light traffic - this is ferie fortnight (Warsaw's school winter holidays).

Warsaw seems well prepared - nevertheless there was a spate of traffic jams and crashes today. The city can do its bit - but crazy drivers will wreck it for everyone.

And getting home in the evening, I spied a sure sign that winter has its costs... the footprints from the gate the gas meter and back. Will the bill for Dec-Jan be lower than last year?

This time two years ago:
Łazienki park, glorious midwinter

This time three years ago:
At the Rampa - work stops

This time four years ago:
Polecamy MROŻONKI - old-school retail

Get orf my lairnd!

2012-01-25T19:05:00.006+01:00

Orjan's comment on my last post (sadly hijacked by the Smolensk issue) raises some valuable points that need further discussion in the ongoing debate about Polish-British cultural differences. His comment was in Polish, so an overview will be needed for the non-Polish speaking majority of my readers...

One interesting question that has yet to surface in British historiography is the influence of deportations to Australia on the long-term crime rate (comedian Alexei Sayle, being asked upon his first visit down-under by Australian immigration officers whether he had a criminal record, answered "Why - do you still need one?"). According to Wikipedia's sources, penal deportations to Australia went on for 82 years from 1786 to 1868 (82 years), depositing 165,000 convicts there. And before the USA won its independence, Britain dumped a further 60,000 convicts in penal colonies across the Atlantic. Whether this sustained onslaught on the nation's ne'er-do-wells left Victorian Britain a safer place for the building of low walls around houses is a moot point.

Now I will take the liberty here to translate the key paragraph from Orjan's comment:

"In Polish culture, there is a much broader concept of personal liberty, and also in its relation to other people's space. Besides someone else's ban on entry, there exists my own need to enter, does there not? Hence, a low wall is not culturally interpreted as 'crossing is forbidden', but as 'please, I'd rather you didn't cross' - in other words: "you're not allowed, but you can". By contrast, higher fencing gives the legal message integrated with a real obstacle: "you're not allowed and you can not".

This brings us back to that greatest of differences between British and Polish culture - common law vs. code-based law. The spirit vs. the letter of the law. The low walls embody the spirit, the high walls the chapter and verse.

But wait - there's another, quite paradoxical, difference between the landscape of Poland and the UK that requires explanation. In Poland, fields are not fenced off. And as long as you don't trample the farmer's crops, there's generally no gripe about you walking along the miedza between two fields. (As long as there are no dogs running loose.) In Britain, fields are enclosed. (See my photos of Derbyshire, here.) By hawthorn bushes and barbed-wire fences in the south, by stone-wall fences in Wales and the North (generally). Walkers must stick to marked (and mapped) public footpaths or bridleways. Failure to do so is regarded as trespassing; landowners take a dim view of people crossing their field and will bellow at them to 'get orf their lairnd'. Failure to do so may well result in a shotgun being fired into the air.

Which - when you think about it - is strange. Crime is far higher in urban Britain than rural Britain, as is unemployment. (Yes, there is livestock rustling going in Britain, something generally unreported in Poland). In general, however, while you are prevented by fencing from stepping foot on someone's agricultural land in Britain (you are not in Poland), you can walk off the pavement on most British streets and step right up to the front door of a house, and even push open the letter-box, without incurring any ill effect.

Where does that leave the British countryside? I believe that's a relic of the Enclosure Act of 1773 (with subsequent amendments), where landowners would use the law to turf peasant share-croppers off their land (that they'd farmed for centuries) and replace them with more profitable sheep.

And there you have it.

This time last year:
A Dream Too Far - part two

This time two years ago:
Electric in the dark

This time four years ago:
Elegant and proper

It's a conspiracy!

2012-01-24T18:45:00.007+01:00

An incident on the way to work got me thinking. A guy sitting opposite me commented on my US Army parka and fur hat; he told me that he collected militaria and pointed to his 1960s Red Army-issue boots. The man, in his early 30s, dressed like a manual labourer, then went on to talk. quite knowledgeably, about his collection of military bits and pieces he'd dug up around Magnuszew, (where the Red Army established a bridgehead on the west bank of the Vistula and fought off the Germans counter-attacks in 1944).

Next, he told me that he'd had a stash of 160 WWII hand grenades that he'd kept in his basement. When these were found by the police (his neighbours, he said, were always complaining about the explosions he was setting off) he was imprisoned for six and half years. At this stage, I started having doubts as to the veracity of this man's tale.

He then told of how he'd often recruit local drunks from Warka to dig for military remains, paying them 100 złotys for a day's work. “Two of them blew themselves sky-high”, he told me. "Fantasist," I thought. His grandfather was a German, he said, who had fought with the SS on the Eastern Front. “The things he'd seen...” His grandfather, who he said died when he was 12 or 13, said “they should have liquidated all the Jews.” By now, alarm bells started ringing. The guy's not only nuts but quite probably psychopathic. “The Jews are running Poland!” he said, drawing attention from other commuters. “Even this railway is owned by the Jews!” Without saying a word, I stood up and moved to another carriage.

This encounter – most untypical, I must add - got me thinking about the role of Conspiracy in politics. At the weekend, reading KGB – The Inside Story by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky – the link between mental illness, paranoia and conspiracy all fitted together. Poland is still emerging from a dark period in its history – the direct result of the madness that fuelled the minds of two men – Hitler and Stalin.

Both were obsessed with conspiracies – one was convinced of a Jewish plot to run the world. The other – of a capitalist plot to run the world. The mental flexibility that allowed their ill minds to find plots and sub-plots that simply did not exist is staggering. During the Spanish Civil War, when Stalin was supporting the Republican side – his NKVD henchmen spent more energy chasing Trotskyites than they did fighting Fascists – which, ostensibly, was what they were there for.

Both Hitler and Stalin's secret services were in the business of torturing the truth out of innocent people in order to prove the existence of a given conspiracy. Stalin was so much more effective. His secret services effectively spread disinformation, they found useful dupes to do good propaganda for them, they were so much better at getting their victims to volunteer information to them. Hitler's propaganda had no room for shades of grey. Stalin's propaganda could make white look like black.

Destroying the bonds of human trust are a prerequisite for a New Order to step in, replacing centuries-old institutions with The Party. In the 20th C., this happened right across much of the Eurasian continent. It deeply affected the psyches (and indeed mental health) of those who lived through it.

To finally kill off the evil effects of totalitarianism in Poland – and other post-communist countries – what is needed is the rebuilding of social trust. Good must arise out of bad - not sinking back into a world of plots, counter-plots and counter-counter-plots.

One of my students, Marzena, who has just returned from her first trip to the UK, noticed how low the walls surrounding English houses were compared to the elaborate security measures that defend Polish houses. Despite (or because of) this, burglary rates in Warsaw are actually lower than in London. Three times lower, in fact. And yet, fear of crime is far greater here.

Paranoia – the fear that someone's out to get me – is at the heart of many populist political movements. Russia's Putin cannot accept, for example, that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – voluntary bodies set up from the grass roots – can exist or even spring up without the careful planning and support of foreign powers intent on using them to take over Russia.

Populist parties around the world use conspiracy theory to boost support among the disaffected. Those who believe that the fact that life has been less than fair them is the fault of some vast conspiracy. They will vote for anyone who can put their minds at ease by convincing them of that fact.

I'm not going to make any direct references to today's press conference by Antoni Macierewicz; I shall let readers make their own conclusion.

This time last year:
A Dream Too Far - short story

This time two years ago:
Compositions in white, blue and gold

This time three years ago:
Dobra and the road

This time four years ago:
Polish air force plane full of VIPs crashes on landing

Citizen Action Against Rat Runners

2012-01-23T19:28:00.008+01:00

Ul. Trombity develops by sprouting spurs off to either side, new houses spring up, next to tumble-down old farm buildings. The spurs tend to follow farm tracks and footpaths. What happens next is that the the tracks get explored by lone four-wheel-drivers, and when they become convinced that this is a potential short-cut that can save them 45 valuable seconds waiting for the lights at Ludwinowska, they start using it on a daily basis.

Except the track is entirely unsuited for motorised traffic. But the Roald Amundsen spirit in our four-wheel-drivers, with their Piaseczno or Pruszków plates, is quite indomitable. There's only one way to stop them: Szlaban. A word not entirely translatable into English (neither 'barrier' or 'gate' do szlaban justice - a ter all, there's bariera and brama/bramka). It's a loan-word from German Schlagbaum (lit. 'shock-tree'), which means 'turnpike'.

Above: the path that links ul. Trombity to ul. Nawłocka and Karczunkowska beyond, from the Trombity end. A solid piece of work, leaving the 250m of path walkable for local residents and maintaining its semi-rural charm.

Left: "Dogs begin to bark, hounds begin to howl/Watch out strange cat people, little red rooster's on the prowl..." [Little Red Rooster, Willie Dixon]. A corner of rural Oklahoma that's forever Jeziorki? The same path, looking towards ul. Trombity.

Weather today (and at the weekend which I spent mostly in bed) continues to be abysmal; the worst that winter can deliver to the human psyche. Temperatures just above freezing, snow that falls as rain, slush, dampness and general bleahh. This morning, having no lessons, I indulged in the luxury of working from home, setting off for town after the rush hour had completely subsided.

Below: W-wa Jeziorki, not a soul in sight. The train that came (on time, it must be said) was only three carriages long and packed to the gunwales. And around 50 cars parked higgledy-piggledy in the muddy verges around the station. If there were more space, properly organised, and more trains to town, maybe the road chaos between Jeziorki and the city centre would be more bearable during the working week.

This time last year:
Moni at 18 (and 18 months)

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

This time three years ago:
My return to skiing after an eight-year break

This time four years ago:
Moni's 15th birthday

Which reminds me - today is the fifth anniversary of the death (in 2007) of Ryszard Kapuścinski, Poland's greatest journalist. If you've not read any of his works (in Polish or in English) - do so.

Music of the trees

2012-01-22T14:39:00.005+01:00

This - is quite something. Slightly unnerving, but most original.

A slice of tree, its rings acting as the grooves of a record. The light, reflected from the patterns upon the surface of the wood, triggers, via a computer, relevant notes on a piano.

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

Eddie and Moni both quite amazed. Interesting to see that this short film has been watched 103,000 times in just five days.

This time last year:
Studniówka - a hundred days before the exams

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

This time three years ago:
Roztopy - the big melt-down

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

Reference books are dead.

2012-01-21T17:42:00.003+01:00

Enthralled by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy last weekend, I decided to get a better understanding of the espionage struggle at the heart of the Cold War. Finding on my bookshelf the book KGB: the Inside Story by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, I dived into it - the first non-fiction book I've read for several month- and soon found myself hungry for hyperlinks. Every now and then - indeed, several time per page - I felt myself frustrated at not being able to click on a link to uncover more information about a related topic.

This does not happen when reading a novel; here, the author draws the reader into a self-contained world where explanations are provided within the text.

The title of this post is deliberately provocative. They are not dead, but their role is greatly diminished. Had I not had bought Andrew and Gordievsky's book in the early 1990s, I would not not have felt a need to buy a similar book today - there's simply so much information online, verified, cross-referenced, updated, debated on fora, discussed on blogs. And had the book's text been available online and hyperlinked, it would have made it easier to assimilate.

Gazeta Wyborcza has started publishing a regular history supplement on Tuesdays. The first issue carried an account of Operation RYAN, the secret Soviet operation to discover the circumstances of a purported US nuclear first-strike against the USSR. KGB: The Inside Story goes into much detail about RYAN, which it claims, is the second-closest the world got to nuclear Armageddon. And of course, this has prompted me to have a look at the Wikipedia article, to read more about RYAN and Operation Able Archer 83, the NATO exercise that the Soviets believed were the prelude to a pre-emptive nuclear assault. Clicking on that link, (and from it an entire network of subsequent links) I have learned so much more than I could have learned from a magazine article or a book chapter.

Wikipedia (may God bless it, its founders, editors and contributors) has brought about such an unbelievable enhancement to the information that we can access from our home or office computers, from our laptops, tablets and smartphones, that the traditional reference book or encyclopaedia has become a very poor substitute.

Of course, should the book contain a ripping narrative, great prose style, enthralling reportage or original research, or else voice a novel thesis, then yes, it's worth reading and buying. But simply to ground oneself in the basis facts around a subject, then it is indeed Goodbye, Gutenberg.

Having said all this, I've spent today in bed, knocked out by that cold virus that has been creeping up on me. And what could be more conducive to a good read than a day in bed?

But for day-to-day reading, it will be back to literature. And reportage.

This time last year:
Another winter walk to work

This time two years ago:
It's unacceptable.

This time three years ago:
Pieniny in winter

This time four years ago:
Wetlands in a wet winter

Miserable depths of winter

2012-01-19T17:56:00.003+01:00

It's not snow or frost that gets me down - it's weather like today's. Just over zero degrees, with precipitation falling as (very cold) rain rather than as snow. What snow cover we had is melting, pavements are slushy and the damp air feels colder than dry air (just as putting your hand into water at +60C is painful, while being in a dry sauna at +60C feels, well, cool).

Yesterday morning, my bus didn't turn up at all (probably never left the depot). It left me standing, shivering at the bus stop for 17 minutes. And yesterday evening my journey home by Koleje Mazowieckie took 1hr 55mins - double the optimal time. Working days, starting at 8:00am and finishing nine or ten hours later, are in themselves not that tiring. What gets me down at this time of year is leaving home in the dark and coming home in the dark.

This time of year, the second half of January, is depressing. Not an intimation of spring for another two months. Indeed, Blue Monday, that urban-myth-pop-science day that is 'proven' to be the most depressing day of the year (presumably in the northern hemisphere), either fell last Monday or will fall next Monday.

This is also a time of year when immune systems, weakened by cold and lack of sunlight, fall prey to colds and flus. Last year, I fell ill for around 36 hours though a week later. Today I feel that without a sauna and a very early night, I shall get swept away by some vulgar little virus...

This time last year:
From - a short story (Part 1)

This time two years ago:
A month until Lent starts

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

This time four years ago:
More pre-Lenten thoughts

Copyright issues - my thoughts

2012-01-18T19:34:00.009+01:00

Wikipedia woke me up to this - Wikipedia - that wonderful, free-of-charge condensation of all knowledge about all things ever, without which I cannot effectively work or blog - and its worldwide protest against the American Congress's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Here are my rather disjointed, emotional rather than rational, thoughts on this issue. But also read this article, here.

The guys behind SOPA and PIPA are essentially rich, non-creative people leveraging America's power and global reach to ensure they can remain fat off the creativity of others. They are lawyers, big-shot producers, media moguls, owners of copyrights. They are not writers or musicians or actors or music- or film-lovers. They are, essentially, parasites.

Once upon a time, I'd buy records by James Brown. Lots of them. Then tapes. Then CDs. Then the internet came along. James Brown is dead now. If I spent £17.99 on a rare CD of his early recordings tomorrow - where would the money go? To the record company that bought the record company that bought the record company that bought the record company that once upon a time - more than half a century ago - invested its money to record James Brown and the Famous Flames? To the relatives of Mr Brown, quarrelling over their relative share in his fortune? To the lawyers, servicing record company and heirs?

The copyright issue all clicked with me the day I watched Hugh Grant in the film About a Boy (2002). From IMDB's synopsis of the plot: "38 year-old Will Freeman is a slacker who has lived comfortably off the royalties of a song written by his deceased father, and as such has never had to work a day in his life." The film, coincidentally, appeared just as peer-to-peer music downloading was becoming mainstream.

Paying money to the heirs of dead people to listen to their music is wrong. After all, why shouldn't my children receive royalties for their late grandfather's architectural drawings, still underpinning schools and hospitals across north-west England?

I do not believe for a second that Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Michael Jagger ever had an eye on decades' worth of royalties cascading down upon them, their children and their children's children as they co-wrote, respectively, I Want To Hold Your Hand or (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. They c0-wrote and performed their songs for entirely different reasons. Neither do I believe that J.K. Rawling wrote the seven Harry Potter books in order to become Britain's second-richest woman.

The reason that copyright laws exist is to protect the investment of the book publisher, record company, movie production company or software publisher. They must feel confident that the money they invest in bringing a book, song, film or program to market will be recouped. Fair enough. But the cost of doing so (in real terms) has plummeted thanks to technology, while the copyright owners (not necessarily the creators) have, over the years, been extending the protection period for ever-increasing lengths of time. [I can't tell you precisely how long, because Wikipedia's down. But when it's back tomorrow, check for yourselves].

SOPA and PIPA are attempts by big-money people, people who have more money than you or I could ever dream of, to hang on to a handy revenue stream despite the fact that the world is moving on. Technology and globalisation are changing it all. SOPA and PIPA, if passed, would allow America a huge say over who can and who can't access knowledge around this planet. This is just plain wrong.

This time last year:
Waiting for the sun

This time two years ago:
From suburban to inter-city

This time three years ago:
Into the trees

Palace of Culture in Winter

2012-01-16T23:59:00.005+01:00

Two views - below; the Palace of Culture and Science looms out of a snowy morning sky as Warsaw hurries to work...

...and below, illuminated in lavender, the Palace of Culture and Science looks down as Warsaw hurries home.
The first photo was taken from the south side, the second from the east side.

Last week, foreign minister Radek Sikorski suggested knocking down the palace (click to watch interview below) on the grounds that it would be a post-communist act of catharsis - much like like the demolition of the orthodox cathedral on (what is today) Pl. Piłsudskiego in 1920. He also says the building is unecological, wasteful of energy and soon in need of a remont that will cost tens or even hundreds of millions of zlotys. In place of the palace, he suggests a park with grass and a pond, where Varsovians can picnic.

Sikorski: Zburzmy Pałac Kultury i posadźmy tam trawkę

I'd be against knocking it down - but then for me, personally, an occasional visitor to communist Poland, it does not stand as a monument to oppression, rather as a historical curiosity; and socialist realist architecture from the Stalinist era is surprisingly rare in this part of Europe. If it give future generations the shudders - well, maybe it should. A reminder of a time when totalitarianism ruled. May it never rule again.

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

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

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

Tinker, Tailor: why I watch films

2012-01-15T20:25:00.008+01:00

Some people go for fast-moving plots and action - car chases, explosions, shoot-outs - not me. I prefer my cinema reflective, well acted and well scripted. Film-going is not just a way of passing an hour and half. It's about usefully increasing the sum of my experience, though in a vicarious manner (indeed, like reading a good book). A good film, then, is one to which I'll be coming back time and time again, quoting quotes from it, and referring to in my writing.

Watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Gary Oldman in the role of George Smiley was a real pleasure; though spy films are not my genre, this film is deeply cerebral with an obsessive focus on accuracy. The period - one which I remember well as a teenager - is beautifully captured; clothes, cars, props (Harp lager, Trebor mints) - but most of all the dingy grandeur of early '70s London.

The moral equivalence between communism and the west seeps out now and then (particularly shocking was the scene of the Christmas party at which the top British secret intelligence service staff were drunkenly singing the Soviet national anthem). By the 1980s, with Reagan having defined the Cold War as one against an Evil Empire, one which 'we must win and they must lose', musings such as 'they're just like us' or 'we're just as bad as them' would have been quite, quite treasonable. Despite the ambiguity (the Soviets were on our side during the 'real' war) there was an awareness that the activities of the West's spies was aimed at preventing World War III.

Nicely portrayed was the analogue-era equipment of spying - film cameras and encrypted telex machines - and everything was on paper, filed in rows upon rows of shelving occupying floors upon floors of office space - stuff that today would fit into a handful of domestic computers. And manual security systems; guards and dockets, turnstiles, no swipe-cards or biometric ID checks.

Use of music to create the right period was neatly, subtly done. Choosing Hurricane Smith's 1971 hit Don't Let It Die - a masterstroke. A song that reached No. 2 in the UK pop charts that summer, was played everywhere - and then promptly forgotten for four decades. And the scene where Peter Guillam is stealing the log book, and Mendel is at the car mechanics ready to make a distracting phone call. On Radio 2 (presumably!) we hear a request for George Formby's Mr Wu's A Windowcleaner Now. The 1939 novelty song in the music hall tradition, at that time the film was set* three and half decades old, is still a hit with the mechanics (tapping their spanners) and the eavesdropping stenographer singing along as she transcribes the intercepted phone call. The way it fits in with the suspense - will Guillam be discovered - makes the scene a great one.

The plot hangs together very well; despite being completely new to John Le Carre and the spy genre, I had no problem following the twists and turns of the story line, and I was genuinely surprised by the ending(s). But given the lukewarm reviews in the Daily Mail and Daily Express I can see that many film goers would prefer to see Tom Cruise being propelled through the air in the wake of a giant fireball while waving his arms and legs.

More films like Tinker, Tailor for me, please!

* 'the film was set'. How do you say that concisely in Polish - as in 'the film is set in 1970s London'?

This time four years ago:
Trundling Tamara

First snow in the Old Town

2012-01-14T23:16:00.007+01:00

As Golden Autumn turned to cold greyness I promised a visit to the Old Town when the first snows started to settle on the cobbled streets. Today, though the temperature was only -1C, the wind was a damp northwesterly, the Old Town was calling.

Below: on the way, the junction of ul. Kozia (left) and Krakowskie Przedmieście (splendidly and tastefully lit, to the right). Fewer people than expected on a Saturday night, even in January. Some hardy souls out and about to capture the atmosphere, but no crowds.

Left: looking down ul. Kozia (notable for the caricature and cartoon museum) towards Krakowskie Przedmieście. In the distance on the corner (click to enlarge), Kino Kultura, a self-confessed art-house cinema run by the Polish Association of Film Makers.

Below: ul. Kanonia in the snowstorm. Howling winds made the evening feel much colder than it was.

Right: looking towards ul. Kanonia from ul. Dziekańska, the walls of Katedra Św. Jana (St John's Cathedral) on the left. With the temperature just below zero, wet patches on the roadway indicate where the hot water pipes are running just below the surface.

Below: view of the Barbakan, the Old Town's mid-16th Century defensive fortifications, from the Old Town walls.

Below: ul. Krzywe Koło (lit. 'Crooked Wheel Street'), with its 90 degree bend.

Below: ul. Piwna, back on the tourist trail, Christmas lighting and small gaggles of foreign-speaking visitors taking in the town.

When the snow starts a' fallin', Warsaw's worth a visit. Ideally, it should be a bit colder, so the snow's not so damp, no wind - or just enough to produce slight swirling; the best time of day? Just after sunset and early evening, before the nightlife kicks off. Annoyingly, my photos of ul. Rycerska didn't come out - too blurred - next time a tripod would come in handy, as the street is not well lit.

This time last year:
Blood on the tracks, again

This time two years ago:
Views from Książęca footbridge - winter and summer

This time three years ago:
The Most Poniatowskiego

This time four years ago:
[What was once] The highest point in Jeziorki

Kebabville

2012-01-12T21:18:00.007+01:00

Happily ensconced in my new office on ul. Nowogrodzka, I am delighting in being so close to so many good places for an inexpensive and tasty lunch. Today for example, we popped round the corner to the Fire'n'Ice Lounge on ul. Parkingowa, a Bollywood bar with a very reasonable lunch menu. For 19 złotys (£3.60), a salad starter with lassi and poppadum, a curry (vegetarian, chicken/meat or fish) and rice or naan. Reasonable quantities, very tasty, nice price.

More often, however, there's the Grill Bar Egipt(open 24h) on the corner of Parkingowa and Nowogrodzka (opposite the Novotel). My dish of choice here is kebab z baraniny na cienkim, podwójne mięso, na ostro (mutton kebab on thin bread with double meat and hot sauce). This kebabsko costs 13 złotys or £2.50 (i.e. UK prices from a quarter of a century ago) and fills you right up; the meat is good and there's plenty of surówka (raw salady things) stuffed in there with the meat to ensure at least one of your five portions of fresh veg. The Egypt gives you a complementary glass of strong tea too. And if you're not too hungry, the standard kebab costs 9 złotys (£1.75).

Given the scandal concerning the kebab meat factory under Dworzec Centralny (long gone!), I'm surprised to find a) myself regularly eating kebab and b) thousands of other Varsovians queuing up for kebab, in preference to American or Vietnamese fast-food. Today, for example, after open day at Eddie's school, I popped into the Amrit Kebab on Pl. Wilsona, for a large mutton kebab. Huge crowds, seven-thirty in the evening. (I notice that Scatts mentions the place in a comment about Żoliborz's answer to Piccadilly Circus.)

To date, I've not had any adverse tummy scenarios after eating kebab in Warsaw. Indeed, I've not had any adverse tummy scenarios after eating anything in Warsaw - which is more than I can say for London (where I lived and worked for 16 years).

Differences between a British and Polish kebab? Mainly the bread. In the UK, you'll get meat and salad stuffed into a smallish pitta pocket. In Poland, a huge circular flat bread (cienkie ciasto) is spread out and filled with grilled meat and salad, the hot sauce added, then the whole thing is carefully folded to avoid drips in a take-away eating-on-the-street situation.

If there's one adverse effect, it's the smell of grilled mutton, which hangs on one's clothing for days after a visit. Or the risk of hearing cheesy Ukrainian pop that plays alternately with far better modern Egyptian music.

Have any of my readers had any bad experiences from kebabs? Any known health risks associated with regular kebab consumption? Recommendations for good ones? (there's a good one on Marszałkowska by Teatr Bajka...)

This time last year:
The day I found a million zlotys

This time two years ago:
Making the most of winter

This time three years ago:
Progress along Ballay Street

This time four years ago:
Shortest, mildest, winter?

I'm taking a couple of days off... drink

2012-01-11T19:51:00.006+01:00

The British Government has always had a nanny-ish instinct, leading the world in Health and Safety best practice etc. The British Government has been actively and effectively encouraging its citizens to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables (the long-running Five a Day campaign) which at least has resulted in fruit and veg being the most widely wasted food among Brits (in Poland its bread - see this post).

Nanny State has been warning Brits of the dangers of alcohol since Victorian times. You're never more than a few days away from a new alcohol scare story in the British media (drunk woman under train video; alcohol abuse rising fastest in over-70s; liver disease epidemic in North-East). The cost of treating alcohol-related illness (and indeed social costs of alcohol-related misbehaviour) is evidently worrying the cash-strapped governments.

Now, a report by a group of Members of Parliament is urging that Brits (and by implication all other human beings with livers) cut out all alcohol consumption for two days of each and every week. (Full report here.)

This is an interesting development, following on from a story that staying off booze for a month in the New Year is futile. (I don't see the science behind this one.)

Given that for the past two decades I've cut out alcohol entirely over the six-and-half-week course of Lent, I read both stories with great interest.

Given that I never binge-drink (disliking the spinning-head sensation), the question in my case is rather one of the daily tipple - typically two or three glasses of red wine. This does put me within the limits set out in the British Government's 1995 guidelines - three to four units of alcohol per day, 21 t0 28 a week, for a man. And quitting for one-eighth of a year, every year, I would argue is eminently healthy.

But the two-days off regimen may be useful towards my long-term goal of keeping happy, healthy and active well into very old age. And so from tonight I shall resolve of avoiding alcohol for two days a week (outside of Lent) and seven days a week (within it).

In essence, this means not opening a bottle of red wine every other day/every third day, so a modest saving of around 100 zlotys a month will accompany the health benefits.

This time last year:
Depopulating Polish cities?

This time two years ago:
Powiśle on a winter's morning

This time three years ago:
Sunny, snowy Jeziorki

This time four years ago:
Eddie's giant soap bubble

My enemy's enemy is my... ?

2012-01-10T19:46:00.008+01:00

The Przybył case gathers momentum. "Here's that gunshot again, viewers, in case you missed it last night. And again" - Bang! A day later, Col. Przybył's doing fine, conducting media interviews.

I watch with interest what would occur on Toyah's blog, the right-thinking antidote to what you're reading here (written by someone incapable of independent thought - brainwashed by years of reading Gazeta Wyborcza and watching TVN news. And growing up in the West.).

[To get my non-Polish readers up to speed on this story, here's the BBC report.]

Instead of lashing out at the System, the one that murdered President Lech Kaczyński, intriguingly, Toyah lashes out at... Artur Zawisza. Readers may associate him with the lighter moments of the PiS-LPR-Samoobrona government (2005-07). Zawisza will primarily be remembered as the politician who wanted to ban the wearing of mini-skirts alongside public highways. And this while his coalition partners from Samoobrona were busy offering jobs for sex.

What has Artur Zawisza done to offend Toyah? He's a splitter. SPLITTER!

Along with Marek Jurek (Prawica Rzeczpospolitej), then Adam Bielan, Michał Kamiński, Paweł Poncyliusz and Joanna Kluzik-Rostowska (Polska jest Najważniejsza), and then Zbigniew Ziobro and Jacek Kurski (Solidarna Polska), Zawisza had the temerity to set up a rival right-wing party in opposition to PiS.

OK, Zawisza is a splitter - indeed proto-splitter, because he was one of the very first to break off from Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński. But what did he do to earn Toyah's opprobrium?

The key thing to remember as the Przybył case unfolds is that it is being presented by the media as the result of the conflict between the civilian and military prosecutor. Now, the civilian prosecutor-general, Andrzej Seremet, with whom the military prosecutor is at odds, was appointed by President Lech Kaczyński.

So... Seremet is our friend. Przybył and his boss Krzysztof Parulski, being at odds with him are... So whatever Przybył says is... ? Well? About Smoleńsk, about dodgy public procurement practices in the armed forces? About organised crime? True? Or an insane attempt to discredit Seremet, anointed by the martyred President?

This case will get curiouser and curiouser. Expect some fine conspiracy theories to emerge from all this!

Postscript, Wednesday 11 January: As predicted, we did not have to wait long. Read the comments of Jagoda B. Kidding on Toyah's post from today. Przybył did not shoot himself. (Something to do with the 9mm round in a NATO Parabellum)

This time last year:
Some thoughts upon the Nature of Warfare

This time two years ago:
Snow so deep it needs a plough

This time three years ago:
A fieldfare in midwinter

This time four years ago:
Kraków, a bit of winter sunshine

I understand... nothing

2012-01-09T21:15:00.009+01:00

Just when I thought I had Poland well-understood, this happens. Now I'm utterly flummoxed.

Military prosecutor, Colonel Mikołaj Przybył, was holding a press conference about press leaks concerning information about the Smolensk air crash investigation, when he ushered out the media, saying he needed to air the room. There was a sound, which journalists took to be that of a camera crashing to the floor. They dashed in to find Col. Przybył lying on the floor. It looked like he'd taken his life...

Now TVN24 has just inferred that he shot himself through the cheek and he'll be out of hospital tomorrow. True? Or cover-up?

Hang on - a man with a gun and live ammunition is allowed to host a press conference? He was allowed to have a gun because there were threats to his family's life? This is getting weirder and weirder by the minute!

Grounds for conspiracy theorists (who've had a rather tough time over the past few months alleging that President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others were murdered, rather than being the victims of cock-up piled upon cock-up) have suddenly become fertile once more.

Gnash Dziennik has (as of this evening) nothing to say on the matter (lead story about TV Trwam not getting a digital licence).

Col. Przybyl has claimed that attempts were made to scare him - threats to his family, break-ins to his house, attacks on his car - by whom? To what end? "It's like Lenin said. Look for the person who will benefit. And, uh, you know, uh..."

I am the Walrus

What's going on? Lot of ins, lot of outs, lot of what-have-yous. uh... Right now, I really don't know. I do know, however, that the conspiracy theories, having somewhat run out of steam (Russians filling the valley in front of the runway at Smolensk with helium etc) will resurface.

And with them the division between the "brainwashed" (brainwashed by Tusk, PO, Gazeta Wyborcza and TVN) and the "brainwashed" (brainwashed by Kaczyński, PiS, Gnash Dziennik and TV Trwam) get ever deeper.

This is going to be an interesting story.

I look forward to the regular battle of wits between the usual suspects...

This time last year:
Wetlands winter meltdown

This time two years ago:
Jeziorki rail scenes, winter

This time three years ago:
Winter drivetime, Jeziorki North

This time four years ago:
Disappearing winter

A rare PS: I notice a clear correlation between climate-change deniers and PiS supporters. Am I right?

It's expensive being rich in Warsaw (or is it?)

2012-01-04T23:25:00.002+01:00

The joys of working in the very centre of town include being surrounded by a great many shops. Across the road from my new office is a bespoke tailor, Zaremba. Now, being in need of a new suit, I thought I'd pop in to find out how much a made-to-measure suit would be. Prices, I was told, start at 6,000 złotys. And there's a three-month wait. At today's rate, that's £1,100. GULP! Given that made-to-measure suits at Gieves and Hawkes start at £795 - and many other Savile Row tailors match that price point, one does wonder why wealthy Poles don't fly to London for bespoke suits. Well, it's evidently time plus the fact that one needs to shell out for at least two return airfares.

Warsaw, lacking a Savile Row sector of its own (competition = lower prices + better quality) is a more expensive place to be rich than London. Or is it...? Wandering into the Gucci store in the new vitkAc luxury fashion house (five security guards to every putative customer) and then comparing prices online, I could see effectively no difference between Warsaw and London.

Porsche's website throws more light on whether it's more expensive to be rich in Poland... Look at the UK or German pages and you'll see the prices transparently quoted for each model. On the Polish pages - er... no. In Germany, the bog-standard Cayenne diesel will set you back €61,381. In the UK, £46,338. (So, about 10% cheaper in the UK.) A bit of googling and a Polish price for a Porsche Cayenne with 3.0 litre diesel engine (no extras) is... 341,917 PLN. That's the equivalent of €75,813 or £62,852. [Exchange rates: 1 GBP = 5.44 PLN, 1 EUR = 4.51 PLN]

So... a bespoke suit can be more expensive in Poland because it costs more to buy one in London on account of the travel costs for fittings. Gucci products are more easily transportable, being ready-made. Car prices - after sales service can make the difference. And we are talking about a single European market.

Is it really more expensive being rich in Poland? Well, the single most expensive purchase a wealthy person is likely to make is real estate. And here, Warsaw beats the western European competition. Houses and flats are dramatically cheaper than London. And another expensive thing for Brits - their children's education - is not only cheaper, but on the whole better, in Poland. Plus the top tax rate is 32% (19% for entrepreneurs) and not 50% as it is in the UK.

So all the money that wealthy Poles save on housing, school fees and tax - they can afford to blow on tailor-made suits and luxury sports utility vehicles!

It is a biological imperative to show off one's wealth as soon as one has acquired it. Flaunting it to demonstrate one's position in the pecking order. Neighbour got a Porsche Cayenne? Buy a Porsche Cayenne Turbo (673,617 złotys = over twice the price of the basic petrol-engined model 319,989 złotys). Or better still - spend the surplus 354,000 złotys on buying more land, a bigger house or more luxurious apartment. But no one will see that when you're standing at the lights.

Which suggests some business opportunities...

This time two years:
Winter commuting in colour and black & white

This time three years ago:
Zamienie in winter

This time four years ago:
Really cold (-12C at night)

Changing the lights at the Presidential Palace

2012-01-03T22:25:00.002+01:00

Tuseday evening, after work; here's the Namiestnikowski Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście (memorable scene of the Smoleńsk cross debacle). The flag is flying, but the President is not in - Bronisław Komorowski lives at the Belweder Palace further down the Trakt Królewski.

And seconds later the colour changes to a more fetching shade of lavender. Elegant or tacky? I shall yet you be the judge!

Lavender? A fashionable shade this Christmas - the Queen was wearing it at Sandringham!

This time last year:
New Year stocktaking

This time two years ago:
A post about... juice

This time three years ago:
That's what I call Winter Vol. 12

This time four years ago:
When the days start getting a little longer...

New Year's coal train

2012-01-01T16:37:00.003+01:00

We bloggers may have little in common with each other subject-wise for 363 days of the year, but we seem to be posting round about now posts summarising years and going for New Year's Day walks. In Warsaw 1 January was a dry, sunny day with a milky blue sky; top temperature +3C; spring feels in the air, yet there's just under three months to wait. Anyway - a good chance to take the camera for a walk.

Nothing I saw today could beat the grandeur of the sight of a pair of TEM-2 diesel locos bringing back a full rake of empty coal wagons from Siekierki power station to the marshalling yards at Okęcie. The train was heading northbound between Nowa Iwiczna and W-wa Jeziorki.

The two electrified tracks in the foreground give a strong impression of the solidity of rail infrastructure, even if the wooden sleepers on the Warsaw-Radom line are in desperate need of replacement, with many having rotted through. The non-electrified coal line, which carried far heavier loads, had the sleepers replaced around the turn of the century.

Other point of note: during our brief stay in England, the lowest-lying bit of ul. Trombity, around nos. 24 A-N, was decently tarmacked over - the work that had started here is now complete. It's beautifully smooth - long may it stay that way!

This time four years ago:
Winter train

Economic predictions for 2012

2011-12-31T16:24:00.004+01:00

My quick calls for 2012...

Key economic indicators: Poland
	2011 (latest data)	2012 (same time this year)
GDP growth	4.2% (Q3)	2.0% (Q3)
Unemployment	12.1% (Nov)	14.5% (Nov)
Inflation	4.8% (Nov)	4.0% (Nov)

Key economic indicators: UK
	2011 (latest data)	2012 (same time this year)
GDP growth	0.6% (Q3, revised)	-0.3% (Q3)
Unemployment	8.3% (Oct for Q3)	10.5% (Oct for Q3)
Inflation	4.8% (Nov)	4.5% (Nov)

Key economic indicators: Eurozone
	2011 (latest data)	2012 (same time this year)
GDP growth	1.4% (Q3)	-1.5% (Q3)
Unemployment	10.3% (Oct)	15.0% (Oct)
Inflation	3.0% (Nov)	3.8% (Nov)

I predict that the eurozone will somehow stick together; Greece will not be pushed out.

And currencies - on 31 December 2012, I predict 1 GBP will be 5.15 PLN, 1 EUR will be 4.20 PLN, and 1 GBP will be 1.22 EUR.

In Poland, 2012 will be drier and slightly hotter than 2011, with a snow-free winter; a long, dry spring (leading to some crop failures); intense rainfalls and winds in July and August; and a calm, long, dry golden autumn. Snow will come early in 2012; there will be a white Christmas.

This time last year:
Classic cars, West Ealing

This time two years ago:
Jeziorki 2009, another view

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki 2008, another view

This time four years ago:
Final thoughts for 2007

Random blogging thoughts at the end of the year

2011-12-30T10:30:00.005+01:00

I've not posted for two days; a return to Warsaw - no sunshine, no snow, no major events, no inspiration... a good chance to share with you, then, some thoughts about blogging.

Localism, down-your-wayism - year on year, I'm building a picture of life in Jeziorki; the slow process of development of this semi-rural corner of Warsaw, the capital of the EU's sixth-largest member state. This year, as last year, and next year too, local life has been dominated by the slow progress of the construction of Warsaw's Southern Bypass (which will finally connect us to the Outside World by expressway). The new infrastructure minister's decision to abandon plans for a central Poland airport between Warsaw and Łódź means that for the foreseeable future, Okęcie will remain Warsaw's principle airport, and while we can expect more flights overhead, new developments in and around Jeziorki will be limited by zoning.

Looking a bit beyond Jeziorki, I write about Warsaw as a fast-growing city, getting wealthier, more sophisticated and civilised, a city that's working flat out to get ready to host the Euro 2012 football championships (though I must say I'll not be watching any of it). Over the years, Warsaw is visibly changing, getting smarter, more akin to western cities, though the growth private car use has outstripped the city's ability to deal with it. Commuting from Jeziorki could be better. I look forward to more frequent rail services in and out of town, more Park+Rides, an extension to the city centre parking zone and more bus lanes and cycle paths (especially along ul. Puławska).

The economy will feature heavily in next year's blogs - though some posts may end up here on the BPCC's newly-resurrected blog page (after eight months' hiatus). Watching the zloty slide by 12 grosze against the pound in the first six hours of trading today fills me with apprehension - the markets react too violently and in response to short-term stimuli. I must say, personally, I am in favour of a financial transaction tax, although it should be introduced globally. Raising badly needed revenue for sovereign budgets - but also taking the edginess off those pre-programmed transaction computers that can destabilise companies, currencies or countries all too easily.

Creative writing: I've currently got three short stories and a half-completed novel all gathering dust on my hard drive and no real urgency to complete. This past year, I've written around 12 short stories around the theme 'After the War was Over'. Whereas I feel a pressing drive to blog, to engage with my online readers in Poland and around the world, I can't claim to feel that same pressure to press on with my creative writing. I should do though - New Year's Resolution #1: write more.

Photography: Despite my urges when passing through Dixon's Travel to buy a new camera, I can't really justify it. My brace of Nikons (D40 and D80) are holding up fine, very reliable, and the D40 is light enough to go with me everywhere. One camera that really interests me is the Fuji Finepix X100, the spiritual successor to the Leica. But it still have teething problems (battery life, software, filter attachment); I'm sure - given that the camera is such a hit - Fuji will one day bring out an improved version. Once it gets a full-size sensor, focal-plane shutter and and interchangeable mount that takes Leica-M lenses - I'll have one. And should one or other of my Nikons pack up finally and irrevocably, I'll buy a D3100 or D5100. But at the end of the day, the means are not the ends. The end in my case is to edge ever closer to the realisation of the Sublime Aesthetic.

Ultimately, blogging is the act of offering a personal testimony. My consciousness is present in the here and now, my memory shaped by growing up in England* in the late 20th C and by living in Poland in the 21st C. I've witnessed England's slow (relative) decline and Poland's rapid rise. But my consciousness, as it moves upon the face of the earth, is getting older and wiser. There are so many secrets yet to be uncovered, chief among these for me is the nature of consciousness; the balance between human biology (so many unknowns - especially in the field of neuroscience) and spirituality. Science will shed light on many mysteries, not in dazzling ways, but in tiny increments. Another New Year's resolution - to dive deeper into New Scientist each week and keep up with the latest discoveries.

* Ten years ago, I'd have written 'Britain' here.

This time last year:
Beery litter louts

This time two years ago:
Miserable grey London

This time three years ago:
Parrots in Ealing

This time four years ago:
Xmas lites, Jeziorki

Hurry up and wait

2011-12-28T23:58:00.003+01:00

WizzAir has this little trick to get its passengers to come to the airport three hours before departure and spend more time and money at Luton's departure lounge. You get an SMS a day before your departure with the following text: "Due to congestion at Luton Airport we strongly advise you to arrive at least 3hrs before departure to avoid missing the flight. Check-in opens accordingly." What does 'check-in opens accordingly' mean? That it opens three hours before departure? Now, having read Scatts's post about this proceder, Eddie and I were expecting this.

We arrive in good time to drop off our rented car (Ford Fiesta from Hertz), got the bus to the airport... formed an orderly queue of two at the WizzAir check-in desks, and waited about half an hour. Lo and behold, check-in did actually open three hours before take-off. Great! We were first to check in, through security - then two and three-quarter hours of waiting air-side. A pint of Guinness, some Pret a Manger sandwiches, a look at what's on offer at Dixon's (Fujifilm X100 for £740? Thanks, I'll wait...), sit and read the papers, browse magazines at WH Smiths... then w learn our flight will be delayed by 25 minutes... Hurry up and wait.

Above: at least I got a nice sunset shot of the control tower at Luton.

Everybody's out on the road today

2011-12-27T19:33:00.005+01:00

Driving from Derbyshire to London in our hired Ford Fiesta (a car of truly hideous external appearance - the result of design me-tooism, not a shred of originality) made me appreciate that transport infrastructure is not a given and should not be taken for granted.

I had read just before Christmas that 17 million Britons were expected to travel to spend the holidays elsewhere than where they live. And having travelled there, they will have to travel back. And so, onto the Road. The M1 was thick with traffic, jamming up totally around Junctions 24(multi-car pile-up) and 18 (roadworks). Even a minor rear-end shunt at Junction 25 brought traffic to a crawl (above, photo by Eddie). The junction with the M6 was similarly treacle-like.

Once we'd reached the South, I took a decision to swing west along the A43 towards Oxford and the M40, in the hope that this approach to London would be easier - it was not. Once again, long queues, especially around High Wycombe at Junction 4, where three lanes become two under the junction bridge, to widen back to three after the junction.

And so a journey that normally takes around two hours took three hours today. Bah humbug.

This time last year:

50% off half price and nothing to pay until June 2016!

Boxing Day walk, Derbyshire

2011-12-26T18:31:00.010+01:00

Around Christmas, walking between meals is a necessity. So after a fantastic Christmas lunch prepared by Ciocia Jane, crowned by the best Christmas pudding I've ever eaten, mountains of crackers and exquisite English cheeses washed down with fineft alef and a bottle of Mogen David (to see what Sy Ableman was on about in A Serious Man) - a walk was in order.

Duffield in Derbyshire where my brother lives is a fine place for kicking off walks, as the countryside is minutes away on foot.

So - less blabbing from me, bring on the photographs.

Above: view looking across the Chevin golf course, the sun setting in the south-west.

Above: hilltop stone farmhouse overlooking Belper. Reminds me of Crow Crag from Withnail and I, does it not, fellow Withnail fans?

Above: the lights of Belper.

Above: the lights of Duffield. Personally, I dislike the orange light cast by British street lamps (sodium vapour bulbs); I prefer the whitish glow of mercury vapour lighting that's more commonplace in Poland and the USA.

This time last year:

Derbyshire in the snow

This time three years ago:

Derbyshire in the sunshine

This time four years ago:

Derbyshire in the drizzle

Manchester for Wigilia

2011-12-24T16:26:00.004+01:00

Eddie, Moni and I flew into Manchester airport late last night, picked up a hire car and drove to Babcia Wanda's. Temperature +9C, it has stopped raining (my wife said it rained every day last week, my brother said it was +15C in Derby on Thursday). Shops crowded with last-minute shoppers - the prices at John Lewis hard to believe (expensive) what with the pound costing 5.30 zlotys (compared to 4.70 last December).

Papers in England talking about men being habitual last-minute gift buyers, with 80% waiting for Christmas Eve before buying presents. This phenomenon has been named the 'man dash' by the media. Canny retailers change their shop window displays to cater for the change in gender of the predominant customer group.

To my surprise, the car park outside John Lewis and Sainsbury's in Cheadle was almost as full of black SUVs with darkened rear windows, so it seem a broader socio-cultural phenomena than just the bad-taste merchants of Warsaw. Lack of imagination seems to have no borders.

And now, time to sit down to śledź, barszcz and the other accoutrements of Polish wigilia. Fortunately, no carp (hello taste - where are you?). I can't say this is my favourite time of year.

This time last year:

Christmas Eve in England

This time two years ago:

Washing the snow away

This time three years ago:

Traffic at 38,000 ft

Work in progress

2011-12-22T20:59:00.005+01:00

This year has been one of maximum traffic disruption in Warsaw. The building of the second Metro line (which will not be ready in time for the football in June), the National Stadium and the infrastructure around it (which will be ready), a new bridge spanning the Vistula to the north of the city, the work to connect the western world to Warsaw via a motorway - all these have made themselves felt to Warsaw's inhabitants and commuters.

If there's one project above all that's created transport headaches it's the construction work on the second (east-west) Metro line.

Above: looking north along Al. Jana Pawła II at what used to be a very busy roundabout (Rondo ONZ) - with ul. Prosta running off west towards Wola (to the left of the pic) and Świętokrzyska running east towards the Vistula (to the right). Note the remnants of the tram tracks in the roadway. Sometime towards the end of 2013 (if all goes to schedule) this will be the site of Rondo ONZ Metro station. What will happen with ul. Świętokrzyska - will it be pedestrianised? I do hope so.

It will be interesting to return to these pictures in a few years time and see how things have changed. In the meanwhile, Google Earth users - cut and paste these coordinates into the 'Fly to' box (52°13'59.32"N, 20°59'53.93"E) to see how Rondo ONZ looked before the work started (current satellite pic from April 2009).

Above: looking east along ul. Świętokrzyska, towards the Vistula. Below: the same view, in Google Earth with 3D buildings switched on. Crowdsourcing works! (the skyscraper on ul. Tamka is missing, however... anyone care to model it?)

Ah - and work at Dworzec Centralny is now pretty much finished - all four platforms and the three passageways connecting them are all open. The shops in the commercial passages are starting to fill up with new and smart retailers - no cooking allowed, so none of that atrocious smell of burnt casein that used to permeate the north and south passages.

Extreme fixie

2011-12-22T17:58:00.005+01:00

It's been over eight weeks since the clocks went back; since then I've ridden my bike to work two or three times, so respect to those who cycle all the year round. Since an ill-fated bike ride in the Las Kabacki forest in early 2002, I do not mix cycling with snow on the ground.

Cycle couriers who want to earn money in the busy run-up to the festive season (I read once that 40% of all the work done in the Northern Hemisphere happens between early September and the middle of December) keep on pedalling.

I caught this extremist fixie outside the Deloitte building on Al. Jana Pawła II; absence of any kind of braking mechanism is par for the course, but look at those handlebars! Barely an inch of metal between the stem and the index fingers! I ask whether this makes sense - the idea of shortened handlebars means it's easier to nip in between stationary or slow-moving traffic - but surely the widest part of a bicycle is the rider's hips and shoulders - there's little sense in having handlebars any narrower... Extend your arms directly ahead of you so they are parallel to one another. That's the optimal width for narrow bars. Anything narrower is a pure pose (or in Polish - lans).

This time two years ago:
Poland's worst railway station
(and it's no better two years on. Just two years shabbier.)

This time three years ago:
Last Christmas before the Recession?
(as it happened - no. This one unlikely to be either - in Poland anyway)

First snow - but proper snow?

2011-12-21T19:08:00.005+01:00

So here we are - 21 December - the Darkest Day - Stalin's Birthday - Winter Solstice - and Warsaw wakes up to the merest dusting of light snow. Nothing outside that even prompts my eye towards my camera's viewfinder. Grey skies, sunshine later, and tiny amounts of snow. Enough, however, for England to grind to a halt, but here, in the office, for instance, no one even mentioned it.

Still, for the record, the first snow of this winter (which can properly be called that) fell on the night of 20/21 December. In the city centre, thermometers registered +2C, out in Jeziorki, it was 0C.

I confess to driving to the office today. I have an excuse - I met Moni off the Łódź train, and together we dragged her things to the car (including her pet rat, Rat Boy - ironically named, as it's a female - in its large cage), plus I had some heavy stuff to take home from the kaletnik. (There's a craft skill you don't get in the UK!)

Driving into and out of the city centre is not a pleasant occupation. If only the Metro ran closer to our house. The Metro is far and away the optimal method of getting into central Warsaw. Sadly, there's only one line running north-south; in a few years there will be an east-west line too.

Looking at the economics, sociology and ergonomics (and did you know that the term 'ergonomics' was first coined by a Polish biologist, Wojciech Jastrzębski in 1857?) of commuting, I find driving to work tiresome, costly and promoting selfish and asocial (if not antisocial) behaviour. I recall in a previous job, one of my workmates remarking (her car broke down that day) 'że musiała się wozić do pracy z narodem' (lit. she had to 'carry herself to work with the nation'). It was meant to be humorous, but driving to work cuts you off from society - from your customers and your voters.

This time last year:
Dense, wet, rush hour snow

This time two years ago:
Evening photography, Powiśle

This time three years ago:
The shortest day of the year

This time four years ago:
Bye bye borders - Poland joins Schengen

Oh, the humanity! Oh, the bureaucracy!

2011-12-20T20:53:00.007+01:00

A man fell under my train home this evening, the 18:20 from W-wa Centralna all stations to Skarzysko Kamienna. He slipped on the platform at W-wa Rakowiec. From what I could see, and from what other passengers were saying, he was neither drunk nor old; he had slipped off the platform edge and under the middle carriages of the train. The temperature had remained below zero for much of today, and despite the platform edge's knobbly surface, there was a certain slipperiness underfoot.

As he fell, he must have banged his head hard; there was blood and he appeared unconscious. He was quickly pulled free by fellow passengers and placed on a bench. The train crew acted admirably. An ambulance was called and medics were on the scene within minutes. I was impressed by everybody's helpfulness and concern. "Has he dropped anything?" The man's glasses were seen under the train. The guard slid down between the platform and the train to pick them off the tracks. Several men gave the medics a hand taking the stretcher up to the ambulance. Solidarity in action. It was good to see; basic human decency - a desire to help one's fellow man in trouble.

The ambulance departed as swiftly as it came, and I have little doubt that the man would be well looked after. Assuming he has somewhere about his pockets his employer's details, his ZUS account number, proof that he hasn't any ZUS payment arrears.

Did the train depart swiftly? It did not. No doubt there was also much form-filling that needed to be done. The driver and guard needed to be interviewed... Meanwhile, a trainload of people were getting increasingly impatient. Half an hour later, another train turned up, also heading south, on the 'up' platform. Where was it going to? Góra Kalwaria? Radom? Piaseczno? No one knew. But lemming-like, everyone in the back half of the train leapt off the platform, on the the track, across the other one, up the opposite platform, and onto the train that had just arrived.

As we finally pulled out of W-wa Rakowiec, some 35 minutes after arriving, we passed two north-bound trains that were stopped at intermediate stations waiting for a clear line into town.

The accident was sorted out quickly and efficiently. The bureaucratic cleaning up took a whole lot longer, and affected at least five train-loads of people, anxious to get home.

When will the public sector acquire the skills (and technologies) to speed up its procedures to an acceptable level?

This time last year:
Kidnapped by Koleje Mazowieckie

This time two years ago:
Google Earth updates Jeziorki

This time three years ago:
Out and about with two foot of glass

A word about Juche in the modern world

2011-12-19T06:36:00.002+01:00

The Dear Leader has passed on. Father of the People, Sun of the Communist Future, Guiding Sun Ray, Wise Leader, Shining Star of Paektu Mountain, Sun of Socialism, World Leader of the 21st Century, the Amazing Politician, Glorious General Who Descended from Heaven, Mastermind of the Revolution, Leader of the Party and the People, Great Man Who Is A Man of Deeds, and indeed, The Bright Sun of Juche.

If you're unclear as to what Juche (as an ideology) actually is, immerse yourselves in the madness here, here and here. (And read this Wikipedia article here.)

My point being? That economic nationalism is madness. Cutting a nation off from the rest of the global economy (autarky) leads to the extreme deviation we witnessed today - that phony grief brought on by the death of a man who kept his nation imprisoned and wretchedly poor for the past 17 years (and whose father did so for half a century before that).

The famine of 1994 to 1998, which left between a million and three and half million dead, was the result of economic mismanagement - stopping the unseen hand of the market from doing its work, replacing it with central planning with an ideological imperative.

When the nutty end of Polish politics talks about quitting the EU - I ask - and how is the Polish economy to function then? It's all well and good complaining that one doesn't want to be a German satrapy, but given that Germany buys 26% of Poland's exports and is where Poland buys 22% of its imports, were the German market be cut off from Poland, millions of Poles would go hungry. The EU accounts for 59% of Poland's exports; the eurozone 46% of Poland's exports.

I'd offer clear warning to anyone wanting to get involved in politics without having a grasp of basic economics: don't.

Just look at what's happening in Vik Tor Or-ban's Hungary.

This time last year:
Global warming or climate change?

This time two years ago:
Progress along the S79

Art, design and modernity

2011-12-18T15:37:00.007+01:00

When did the world start looking and sounding more or less as it does today?

Click on the embedded YouTube link to hear the Miles Davis nonet playing Rocker, a Gerry Mulligan composition. Recorded in March 1950. Fresh, isn't it?

Go back three years - and have a listen to Charlie Parker's Crazeology (click on YouTube link below). Such a complex and yet catchy melody

Now look at the aircraft below: Have a guess when it first took to the air? It's a shape not unfamiliar in today's skies...

This is the Boeing B-47, which first flew on 17 December 1947 - 64 years ago yesterday! Its design foreshadowed the B-52, which first flew in April 1952 - and is scheduled to remain in service with the USAF until 2045 - a staggering 93 years after its first flight!

The Big Leap Forward was the swept wing planform and the multiple jets slung under the wings in pods. Big fat turbofans have replaced the slender, polluting turbojets, but otherwise, the configuration of modern passenger jets is little changed.

Now, on to automotive. The last major innovation in terms of the car was the Kamm tail, applying downward force on the rear wheels at speed. Before that - it was the fared-in mudguards. These had been separate until the second world war - then smoothed into an integral unit with the bodywork. If I'm not mistaken - the first mass-produced car with smooth sides... was the Soviet GAZ M-20 Pobieda - which entered production in 1946, at the same time as American cars were still sporting vestigial mudguards. It was two years later that the USA would catch up with the USSR in car design! Technically, it was not the world's most advanced car in 1946, but its design would show the way forward.

Above: a 1952 Hudson Wasp. Today's Opel/Vauxhall Insignia (Buick Regal across the water) is but slightly sleeker at the front and has that aerodynamic back - but essentially, we have the same design concept. Launched in 2008 it has many improvements over the Hudson from 56 years earlier - yet design-wise, the man-on-the-street in 1952 would not be overwhelmed.

Clothes - fashions - certainly for men, wearing something today that would be entirely normal in 1950 - two-piece suit, jeans or chinos, sweatshirt, leather shoes or canvas sneakers - would even look fashionably hipster retro. (Imagine walking about in 1950 wearing clothes from the 1890s!) For women - well, there's a greater tolerance range when it comes to fashion.

Railways - streamlining was present in the zenith of the Age of Steam; by 1964, the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train linked Tokyo and Osaka (515km, 320 miles) in four hours (top speed 210kmh /130mph).

Architecture - moderne has been with us since before WW2. I was recently looking for Scandinavian architecture that has stood the test of time - that has inspired architects to this day. Look at this - Jorma Järvi's design at Pakila primary school in Helsinki from 1954. The stairs, the sunlight, the scale - such a huge leap from the Education Board (architectural style) primary school I attended with its high, thin windows, overbearing brickwork and long, dark corridors.

Yes, information technology has had a profound influence on the way we live and work and entertain ourselves; the change over the past 20 years has been radical. But from the the point of view of the way the world looks and sounds, the last fifty years have brought us little in the way of revolutionary progress. Just small increments, recyclings of what's been, reiterations in a more contemporary key.

The study door is open. The TV's on. There's an ad for Krakus hams and smoked meats. The music - a straight lift from Philip Glass's score for the 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi (see trailer here).

We're not living in a breakthrough era for art, design and music. When will see signs that things are starting to change dramatically once again? Maybe not in the immediate future - when the global economy's in recession, there's less appetite for risk, for design innovation (unless it can be proven to have a direct effect on measurable things like productivity or fuel consumption).

What were the drivers of modernity in the middle of the 20th Century? In one word - war. It was war that got us from the Wright Brothers to the B-52 in less than fifty years. It was reaction to war that stood behind Jackson Pollock.

Wars have been great catalysts for those leapfrogs of human progress - but let's not wish for one now.

This time last year:
Happy ever after

This time two years ago:
Road and rail let me down again

This time three years ago:
Alignment and synchronicity

This time four years ago:
Retro shop, ul. Fabryczna

Ul. Trombity: a step closer to dry feet?

2011-12-17T15:08:00.003+01:00

All morning, there's been a shuttle of heavy dumper lorries driving down ul. Trombity, so I thought it's worth seeing what's going on. It looks like that spur off our road, known as 'Trombity A-to-N' (below) is finally going to get a decent surface. The inhabitants of this stretch have often been under water whenever it floods a bit. And even modest precipitation turns this low-lying stretch of road into a muddy bog.

Above: looking east along ul. Trombity 24 A to N; amazing that this 280m long no-through-road does not have its own name. There are 14 houses on it at present and several vacant plots.

Above: looking south along ul. Trombity; one dumper pulls out, while three more wait in turn (below) to drop their loads on to Trombity 24 A to N.

Things look no better on the spur off ul. Trombity towards ul. Dumki. Again, the houses at the end have been cut off from the outside world whenever there have been heavy rains. Some building materials by the side of the 'road' suggest that an upgrade can be expected here too.

The real answer - apart from laying down proper asphalt - is extensive drainage of this area so that excess rainwater can run down to the Vistula instead of threatening residential real estate around these parts.

This time last year:
Matters of style

This time two years ago:
Real winter hits Warsaw

This time three years ago:
This is not Mazowsze, no?

New platform at W-wa Służewiec

2011-12-16T23:09:00.007+01:00

The new timetables, introduced last Sunday have (as far as I can see) produced one major change for Jeziorki's rail-using classes: Koleje Mazowieckie's double-decker trains no longer stop there. So to avoid being carted off to Nowa Iwiczna (and outside Warsaw's fare zone), I changed trains at W-wa Służewiec and waited 15 minutes for an all-stations to Skarzysko Kamienna service.

While waiting, I noticed that the station is still restricted to one working platform for both up- and down- services, though it's now the new line that's operational (to the west of the old one), while the old line and platform are both being refurbished (below).

Overhead, the ongoing roadworks at the Węzeł Marynarska, with the sliproad from the airport joining ul. Marynska crossing above the tracks.

Once the 'down' platform is completed, trains running and and out of Warsaw will have their own tracks, and a significant bottleneck on the Radom line will have been eased.

A little bit of sunny Kraks in December

2011-12-16T22:39:00.006+01:00

Always a pleasure to get down to Kraków - even if business means there's only time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Market Square. Below: the north side of the square. Look at the gorgeous sunshine - it was +7C; positively hot for mid-December.

Below: we passed through the square as the trumpeter played the Hejnał Mariacki at 11 o'clock. You can just see the brass bell of the trumpet in the upper-middle window.

Below: the Sukiennice (cloth hall) seen from the east...

...and from the west (below). It's been recently refurbished, and there's much to see below ground level (though not this time).

Inside the Sukiennice, everything's as it was (wooden and woollen touristy artefacts) though a bit more Christmassy.

And so farewell, Kraków. It's good to know you are there, and that you can be reached from Warsaw for a mere 54 złotys by train (TLK - the InterCity's second class costs 119.50 złotys). Below: vue generale of the north side of Sukiennice and the Marian church in the background.

"F" for Franco

2011-12-16T21:54:00.000+01:00

I got pulled up by Toyah and AdTheLad for being too easy in my use of the 'F'-word - fascist. In my youth, when, as a student I could do anything I wanted, anyone who tried to prevent me from exercising my will was immediately branded a 'fascist'. Of course, having studied inter-war history and politics, I should have known that fascism was - and still is - an ideology that needs to be correctly defined, and should not be loosely bandied about, as a kind of political insult.

The best definition that can bring clarity to the debate here and now in Poland about fascism is that it is anti-liberal, anti-communist... and anti-conservative.

There was a good piece in Gazeta Wyborcza some months ago delving into Poland's (truly) fascist fringe; the author distinguishes this tiny minority from other ultra-nationalist groupings as being pagan rather than Catholic.

So then. Let's not lump the tiny truly fascist extreme in together with Poland's more mainstream nationalist tendencies. For them, Hitler is definitely not the role model.

I'd suggest instead Francisco Franco. Here was a man, deeply conservative, deeply religious, deeply nationalist; an implacable enemy of cosmopolitanism, liberalism (both social and economic).

So here's my answer to the conundrum - why British Conservatives and American Republicans can't see eye-to-eye with Jarosław Kaczyński's PiS - because he's far nearer in ideology to El Caudillo than he is to Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. It's worth reading about Francisco Franco - the parallels with Kaczyński are indeed interesting.

The barbarism of the Spanish Civil War should act as a warning for all those who love Poland. And so, from now on, I pledge not to use the "F"(for fascism) word in regard to anyone in the Kaczynski-ite camp.

I'll leave the last word to Walter Sobczak (played by John Goodman) from the Coen Brothers' excellent film, The Big Lebowski:

...say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

This time three years ago:
Christmas lights: all in the best possible taste

This time four years ago:
Letter from Russia

The euro crisis: What would Jesus do?

2011-12-15T20:12:00.011+01:00

This one's been around for a long time in the USA; I was reminded of it in a recent BBC News article.

Faced with the current euro crisis, would Jesus:

Insist that bad debtors - including countries - face immediate bankruptcy (with all the attendant woes - pensioners not getting their state pensions, public sector workers not getting paid, mass unemployment)?
Sanction the printing of more money, keeping the economy afloat while allowing inflation to erode the value of prudent savers' cash assets and pensioners' fixed incomes? And by doing so, tell mankind that actually, it's OK to spend more than you earn?
Or would He insist that all debts are paid back, in full, at their proper value? And by doing so - by insisting on a general tightening of belts - would He be content to stifle demand, stamp out prospects of growth, while keeping unemployment high?

Well? Or would He end up doing what Europe's policy-makers are doing - dabbling between the three options in the hope that things will turn out OK in the end?

Or would He (as PiS supporters would like) order the break-up of the single currency and the EU, allowing Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain to suffer massive currency depreciation, runaway inflation and unemployment unseen in Biblical times, while the EU's more prudent lender countries would see their currencies soar to uncompetitive levels killing off their exports and also bringing about mass unemployment?

What message would Jesus send to the world's financial markets (other than short-circuiting the computers in the money-changers' dealing rooms)?

How you see your God is how you see the way out of our current global economic mess.

As a financially prudent person, I believe in paying off debt rather than printing money or allowing debtors to slip away from their obligations by declaring bankruptcy.

But maybe that's a bit Old Testament of me. Maybe Jesus would be more forgiving of the household that overspent on luxury cars, exotic holidays and fashionable clothes, or of bankers that invested in dodgy instruments, or in governments that consistently spent more than they raised in taxes.

[And incidentally, would Jesus insist on bringing back the death-penalty, as PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński would like?]

What do you think, dear readers?

This time last year:
Orders of magnitude

This time two years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time three years ago:
Better news on the commuting front

This time four years ago:
I no longer recognise the land where I was born

Warszawa H&M

2011-12-14T22:15:00.001+01:00

Gazeta Stołeczna has recently got all exercised about the fact that Dworzec Centralny - Warsaw's central station - which is getting towards the end of a serious remont (refurbishment) - has been plastered with giant ads for a clothes shop.

Above: the west elevation of Arseniusz Romanowicz's greatest work: defaced or beautified by ads for eight-quid shirts and blouses? Incidentally - that's 66 year-old Bryan Ferry and his former girlfriend, the 55 year-old Jerry Hall showing off the clothes. And one of Mick Jagger's daughters is up there, too.

Above: The huge mural continues on the front (southern) elevation of the building. I must say that I've never been into an H&M in my life, and I couldn't even tell you where it is in Warsaw. I guess by the choice of models that I'm (almost) in their target age demographic, though somehow the message is lost on me.

Inside the ticket hall, now completely remonted, there's more of Mr Ferry, Ms Hall and their eight-quid shirts and blouses, though displayed more discretely.

Above: and at platform level; the traveller cannot get away from them. "I give in," the traveller will say. "I'll just have to miss my train home to Rzeszów and pop into H&M (wherever it is, for the ads don't say) and stock up on eight-quid shirts."

An issue or non-issue? The ads will come down, people will soon forget about them. As they do with most advertising.

Anyone give a stuff?

History what-iffery

2011-12-13T20:04:00.006+01:00

Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (or, if you prefer, Chou En-Lai), when asked what how he thought the French Revolution had affected world history, famously replied "it's too soon to tell".

This was my first thought when David Cameron (Britain's first prime minister to be younger than me) pulled out of the EU's stability pact last Friday. Since then, I've been on Polish TV and radio half a dozen times explaining Britain's semi-detached relationship with the European Union.

Was it a historical moment, akin to Chamberlain's return from Munich? Or will it all blow over? Too early to say. Was Cameron right to walk away from an EU-wide deal? Depends. Will Britain survive economically whilst the eurozone founders? Can't tell. Will the eurozone survive whilst Britain flounders? Haven't a clue. For an answer - be prepared to wait a long time.

We really don't know. Too soon to tell.

Let's look at the reality. From the outset, the eurozone project was extremely naive to couple so many disparate economies in a currency union without any thought to fiscal and budgetary convergence. MAYBE it was a German plot to stop the deutchmark from becoming uncompetitively strong, by shackling it to deadbeat currencies like the drachma and the lira. Set the Greeks and other chronic debtors adrift and the northern European remnants of the eurozone will see their currency soar in value like another Swiss franc.

So if the Germans (until very recently the world's No. 1 exporter) want to go on selling their BMWs to America and their machine tools to China, maintaining the easy-living South within the eurozone makes some kind of sense - as long as the cost of doing so doesn't outweigh the advantage of an artificially weaker currency.

So where does Britain fit in all this? Some voices critical of Cameron says he's pandering to the City. OK - it provides employment for a million people and brings in £40 billion in tax revenues. Now, any meaningful pact to shore up the euro should, logically, involve steps to converge the eurozone's taxes. And this is more than likely to involve a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT). Which the City of London fears dreadfully. Given that 75% of all financial transactions in the EU take place in the UK, a tax on them would have the effect of shifting much of the footloose global business to New York or Singapore.

I must say, personally I'm in favour of a FTT. It would introduce a measure of stability to the markets; dealers would have to think twice (shock!) before pressing the 'sell' or 'buy' buttons. And the software behind automated dealing would also have consider this tax in its algorithms. This would moderate the wild swings that anyone watching markets at work notices on a daily basis.

An FTT, then, would both smooth out wild vicissitudes and bring in much-needed tax revenues to national exchequers. (As long as they could be trusted to spend them wisely!)

An FTT is one of those Good Ideas In Theory - good in practice only if wereto be adopted by the USA and every other market on this planet as well. A level playing field indeed.

The City of London, yes, it's a million jobs - but the UK's manufacturing sector is two and half million jobs (and for the knockers - the UK's manufacturing sector is still the world's sixth largest). With around 45% of the UK's exports going to to the eurozone, it's critical to the survival of UK manufacturing that the eurozone does not collapse (or else only the Germans and Dutch will be able to afford things Made in England).

So - anyway, on Cameron, the EU and the eurozone - too soon to tell.

But what about Martial Law, imposed upon Poland 30 years ago today? Too soon to tell?

Well, yes. There are two schools of thought on the day Polish army tanks put an end to the dreams of Solidarity.

1) Had General Jaruzelski not imposed Martial Law, Mr Brezhnev from over the way would have inflicted something far nastier upon Poland (think Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968).

2) Brezhnev was washed-up (he'd be dead in 11 months anyway) and his system would implode. One shove - the Polish communist party going for wide-sweeping economic and political reforms - and the Soviet bloc would have crumbled a whole eight years sooner than it did.

I've heard cogent arguments in favour of both scenarios. Intercepts of Soviet signals by NSA purportedly suggesting that a) the Red Army was ready to move in and b) it was not. That the People's United Workers' Party could have a) introduced market liberalisation a la Balcerowicz - and b) that it couldn't. The truth is a messy amalgam of strands of so many factors that it will indeed take 200 years before historians can reach a consensus as to the słuszność (rightness, justness, legitimacy) of General Wojciech Jaruzelski's coup d'etat.

Fewer Poles today believe that Martial Law was 'necessary' to spare Poland from a Soviet invasion than was the case several years ago; as time goes by the spectre of that threat diminishes. Generations who experienced Martial Law - and indeed their children and grandchildren - will have to pass before a clear-headed appraisal can finally be made. My take on Martial Law - Jaruzelski was first and foremost a soldier, conditioned to carry out orders. He had not an inkling of the power that could be unleashed from a society once the shackles of central planning were removed. He had not the vision to do anything other than send in the tanks. He could have done nothing, of course. That would have been an interesting variant - but do please recall that Poland in 1981 was in the throes of the fifth deepest economic depression experienced by any country in the 2oth Century.

In the meanwhile, yesterday and today, supporters of Jarosław Kaczyński together with assorted neo-fascists will march up and down chanting "Byłeś w ZOMO, byłeś w ORMO, dzisiaj stoisz za Platformą." In English, so you can appreciate the infantile crassness of this slogan: "You, [Jaruzelski and your communist buddies] were in the Motorised Reserves of the People's Militia, you were in the Voluntary Reserves of the People's Militia, today you stand behind Civic Platform (the majority partner in the ruling government coalition)".

Civic Platform can be accused of lack of boldness when it comes to enacting necessary reforms of public finances, but the party is certainly not the creature of Wojciech Jaruzelski and his cronies. That would in fact be SLD ('Stalin Lenin Dno') - the successor party to PZPR; however it polled but 8% in this autumn's parliamentary elections. Poland today and Poland 30 years ago - what a difference. Let's be thankful for it.

This time last year:
Life without a computer

This time two years ago:
Cheaper by taxi

This time three years ago:
The closest we'll get to the moon for nine years

This time four years ago:
Going underground

Take Me Back To Tulsa

2011-12-11T22:52:00.005+01:00

A house on ul. Karczunkowska, just around the corner from ours, has been abandoned and put up for sale with planning permission to use the plot for a warehouse or similar. The old-school Americana look of this building has given me an excuse to use Pixlr-o-matic, a software tool (available free and online here) that allows you to give your pics no end of nostalgic photo effects.

Above: looking like a 6x9cm transparency from my old Zeiss Ikon Ikonta C... (a great landscape camera with a 105mm f3.5 Tessar lens). Now I can do this with a Nikon D40 - anyone want to buy the Ikonta?

Above: looking like an Kodak Ektacolor 35mm print developed somewhere in the mid-1950s.

I have a feeling I shall be revisiting Pixlr.com again to give a dab of nostalgia to those pics from Jeziorki and district that give that makes me think "this is not America - No?"

The interesting thing about the plot of land offered for sale is its dimensions: 16.5m (53 ft) wide street frontage by 235m (775 ft) deep. [See it here on Google Earth: 52° 6'38.30"N 21° 0'34.78"E] Typical of the strip-farms in Mazowsze, this is result of not having primogeniture enshrined in Polish law. Rather than passing the entire estate to the oldest son, British-style, Poles would pare down their landholdings into ever thinner strips so that each son could get a fair share. The result can be seen from the air; rather than a patchwork of regular, rectangular fields that is most of western Europe, Poland has thin strips running across the landscape (see this post here).

This time two years ago:
Another book launch

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki in the 16th Century

This time four years ago:
Rotten weather, literally

Classic glass

2011-12-10T21:30:00.009+01:00

One of the main reasons I bought into Nikon's DSLR [digital single lens reflex] system was because I already had a Nikon SLR (an old-school manual-mechanical FM2) and the nice Nikkor lenses that went with it would work with the latest digital Nikons.

Today I went for a stroll with my 28mm f2.8 Nikkor replacing the standard 18-55 zoom that usually accompanies my faithful D40.

Here are two results (below). First up, ul. Trombity on a dour December afternoon. A bit of 'fill light' in Photoshop Lightroom, and some desaturation on the red roof in the middle of the frame.

Below: W-wa Dawidy station, again some desaturation of the image for a more realistic feel. Less ghosting, less distortion than on Nikon's zoom lenses.

Taking pics in manual mode is no problem; you set camera to 'M' for manual, dial in the appropriate shutter speed, and set the aperture on the lens ring. And being a digital camera, you can see the results instantly; should the image be over- or under-exposed - adjust accordingly and shoot another frame.

Nikon's DX format sensors cover an area about two-thirds of a 35mm film frame. This means that when used on DX cameras, Nikon lenses made for 35mm cameras give a narrower field of view than originally intended.

My 28mm lens, when used on the DX, gives a field of view equivalent to a 42mm lens on a 35mm camera. So no longer is it a wide-angle lens, rather something slightly wider than standard. Fully glass and metal, it feels like a professional piece of kit.

After spending an afternoon with it and taking a close look at the results, I can see little point in using it day to day. The kit lens that Nikon offer on their entry-level DSLRs, the 18-55mm f3.5-f5.6 zoom is a great everyday workhorse, light, and with vibration reduction, you can hand-hold at longer exposures than the old lens. Still, it's fun to play around with old Nikkor lenses and know you can still use them on today's Nikons.

Above: my D40 fitted with 28mm f2.8 Nikkor. Looks better than with the plasticky zoom - and yet that standard Nikon zoom lens is a quality optic, is lighter and only half a stop slower when set to wide. The VR version of the 18-55mm zoom is even better for when the light gets low.

This time last year:
What's the Polish for 'pattern'?

This time four years ago:
"Rorate caeli de super nubes pluant justum..."

Ronald Reagan remembered

2011-12-09T22:15:00.003+01:00

Unveiled by Lech Wałęsa less than three weeks ago, across Al. Ujazdowskie from the American Embassy - a new statue to grace Warsaw; that of President Ronald Reagan. A man who contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The Evil Empire, as he put it. "My idea of the Cold War," he said, "is that we win, they lose."

By forcing the Soviet Union into an arms race they could ill afford to take part in, he helped bankrupt the system. Poland has much to be grateful to a president who stood up firmly to Brezhnev and his associates, successors to that criminal gang that seized control of Russia in 1917 and used genocidal methods to gain control of most of Central Europe.

The scale of this statue is human. It's so good to see a counterpoint to the gigantism of the communist era - see posts here and here (scroll down a bit) . Isn't that what makes Warsaw brilliant? So much meaning at every turn!

Every time I pass the Reagan statue, I'm struck by the avuncular decency and strength of the man - captured so brilliantly by the sculptor.

Once upon a recent time, voices on the city council expressed a desire to rename Plac Konstytucji (named after the Stalinist constitution of 1952) Plac Ronalda Reagana. This was an excellent idea - after all, Warsaw has squares named after American presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover. I'm not generally in favour of re-naming places for the sake of it (I like Rondo Babka, Okęcie Airport), but Ronald Reagan needs to be immortalised on Warsaw's street map.

This time last year:
Accident of birth

This time two years ago:
Under the Liberator

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki on old maps

Boring.

2011-12-08T21:35:00.011+01:00

Boring. (I like the Volvo XC70, but please - not in black, not with darkened rear windows!)

Boring.

Boring.

Boring.

Boring.

Tedious.

Deathly boring.

Boring.

Boring.

Boring. What is this place? Moscow?!?

Boring.

Boring. Get out of town!

Boring.

Boring. Zzzzzzz.

Boring.

Yaaaaawn. Totalny brak wyobrażni.

This time last year:
Atonement

This time four years ago:
Where I'm from, and why

Cars

2011-12-07T21:33:00.008+01:00

A few personal observations. My first and abiding love in the automotive world was with American cars from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Fins and Chrome, peaking with the 1959 Cadillac, but not forgetting the Hudson Hornet or the (original) Ford Mustang. Classic autos, big on style rather than go-fast ability or road holding have always appealed to me. My first three vehicles were (respectively) a Morris Minor van, followed by a 1963 GAZ M-21 Volga (black of course - and what a rarity in the UK!), then a 1955 88" wheelbase Land Rover Series I.

By the late 1980s I'd moved up the career ladder, and as managing editor of CBI News, I stumbled upon the idea of introducing an executive motoring column to the business leaders' magazine. For several years, Jaguars, BMWs, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Audis, Mercedes Benzes, Lexuses and the odd Aston Martin (as well as lesser marques) waited outside my door for a test drive. After several years of doing this, I came to the following conclusions:

1) Buying a car with your own money is the biggest waste of money you can achieve in your lifetime. If no one (i.e. your employer) is willing to buy one for you, buy the smallest and cheapest and most reliable car available that meets your needs. Invest the money saved on property.

2) Sitting barefoot in a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, feet immersed in lambswool rug, breathing in the heavenly aroma of Connolly leather, seeing only wood, chromed metal, leather and glass around you, and the Silver Lady or Flying "B" on the bonnet, makes you feel quite Godlike. Sit in any other car, and after a while, you forget whether you're in a Jag or Merc or a Nissan Micra.

Today, a full tank of petrol in the Toyota Yaris costs as much as a quarterly season ticket for Warsaw's public transport system. When I used to drive to work, a tankful would last a fortnight (one-sixth of the duration of a quarterly ticket). Plus parking fees, insurance, servicing etc. Plus walking between bus stop and Metro, Metro and office, keeps you fitter than blobbing out at the driving seat.

From the financial point of view, if you live within Warsaw's borders and no longer have children that need driving to school, it's hard to justify a car for day-to-day use.

Which is not to say I don't like some cars - aesthetically. Any decision as to what car I'd like to own would be primarily dictated by looks rather than performance or roadholding.

What could I consider owning?

Contemporary cars that I find attractive...

Opel (Vauxhall in the UK) Insignia. I like that retro look, harking back to the late '40s/early '50s. The four-door saloon (sedan) version, in a rich burgundy colour - nice. A bit of a rep-mobile, but a design that has the makings of a modern classic. I'd customise mine though:)

No longer in production, the Nissan Micra K12/K12C (2002-2010) is a car I've long fancied, looks-wise. Again, a retro design, which, in three-door guise, gives it the air of an American hot-rod from the 1930s, customised in the 1950s. Primer Gray and chromed steel wheels to give it that Two Lane Blacktop look...

Out of production for a few years now, the 2000-2007 Volvo XC70 is a bigger car than I'd care to own (not really having the need for all those doors and load space), but I love its looks. It's another contemporary classic, replaced by a corporate clunker with stuck-on silver plastic rhomboids applied in the mistaken assumption of making the current XC70 look more modern. Colours? Sand, navy blue, maroon - but not black.

The BMW Mini is my dream city car, especially in drop-top form with a frugal diesel engine. The Mini has a timeless charm about it, and quite honestly, there's little need for anything larger if 95% of your driving is around town. The Countryman is an obese irrelevance, but the rest of the range, I consider quite wonderful.

Another convertible, though quite pricey, that tickles my fancy, is the Audi A4 Cabriolet (2000-2005). With a dark red soft-top. And diesel engine. More for the long-distance touring perspectives that will open up when ul. Puławska is connected to the rest of the continent via the S2 expressway...

Four-wheel drives can be useful on the few untarmacked roads between Jeziorki and the city centre, but generally I consider full off-road capability wasteful of fuel and space. Unless you have pigs to get to market. One 4x4 that I have hankered after for many years, however, is the Jeep Wrangler; again, must be with a diesel engine. A classic with a bloodline going back to the WWII Willys Jeep, a vehicle with character. Green or Sand. NOT BLOODY BLACK!

And that's about it. I can't say I care for any other contemporary vehicle. The ubiquitous Warsaw-issue black SUV with darkened rear windows driven by someone with a mobile phone clamped to their ear - makes me puke. Sign of a buc totally lacking in imagination.

Now, classic cars - don't get me started! Temat rzeka, Panie...

This time last year:
What's the English for kombinować?

This time three years ago:
The demographics of jazz

This time four years ago:
A day in Poznań

The meaning of Clarkson

2011-12-02T23:59:00.005+01:00

Jeremy Clarkson is not a name unfamiliar in Poland; his books and TV shows are available here in translation; Świat wedłu Clarksona (four volumes of the stuff) is a concept that many Poles will have come into contact with in their native language.

The man has made his name and his fortune driving expensive cars around public roads while pressing the loud pedal. His forthright views on matters unrelated to the ignition of fossil fuels in the pursuit of thrills are often hilarious. His ranty writing style inspires rank-and-file bloggers in a way that only Bill Bryson can better.

So. On Wednesday, Britain's public sector went out on strike (well, some of them). Jeremy Clarkson said on BBC television:

"Frankly, I'd have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean, how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?"

Obvious uproar. Over 21,000 complaints to the BBC. The main public sector trade union has called for his sacking. Even the prime minister, David Cameron, said to be a personal friend of Clarkson's, was forced to comment ("a silly thing to say... I'm sure he didn't mean it").

It will blow over, but will not be forgotten. However, Clarkson (though he probably doesn't twig) does has a serious point. The British public sector has become an economic absurdity, and economic absurdities in the long run face correction. The bigger the absurdity, the bigger the correction.

Amid the outrage, that point has been lost. Over the Blair-Brown years, the UK's public sector has been silently bloating, soaking up the slack in the labour market caused by 1.7 million manufacturing jobs heading east. Paid for at first by GDP growth and windfalls such as the sale of 3G licences netting £23 billion in 2000, this scheme started becoming unworkable as recession struck in 2008/9; since then, these additional public sector jobs (and their attendant pension schemes) were increasingly paid for out of debt.

Now, many British public sector workers are living a life of entitlement ("I'm doing the public a service, so the taxpayer owes me"). Well, nie do końca. It's time to count the cost. In Poland, for example, the minister of administration, Michał Boni, has calculated that it costs 50 złotys to administer 50 złotys of state benefits. This will have to change if Poland is to escape the fate of Greece and Italy. Britain is much further down the road to ruin than Poland (which as least has plausible growth scenarios to keep investors interested). Britain's public sector workers need to wake up to that unpleasant reality.

Until relatively recently, Britain was a land of pubs full of laughter, informed conversation and cigarette smoke. Each pub would have its own Jeremy Clarkson holding forth at the bar after three pints of Old Nutkin and commenting wittily upon the affairs of the day. Today, Britain's pubs tend to be joyless, sterile and half-empty places; the nation instead imbibes at home in front of 46" TV sets. This, I think, rather explains the Clarkson phenomenon - we still need our public house pundits.

Sadly though, Clarkson is outliving his usefulness. How much of Britain's economic woe is the result of consumers believing that they were entitled to purchase that car Clarkson drooled over on Top Gear. He should give up driving expensive cars; instead, he should go to his nearest adult education college and study for a Higher National Diploma in economics. Then, he'll be able to apply his ready wit to affairs of state with at least some underpinnings of theoretical knowledge. Instinctively he's right - but his lack of gravitas now sits uncomfortably upon a man of his age.

This time last year:
Today, not so good.

This time two years ago:
In which I walk to work

This time four years ago:
Act 1, Scene 1, a blasted heath

Snow-free November

2011-11-30T20:12:00.003+01:00

Well, that's November gone, and no snow.

Let's look back over this blog at when Warsaw experienced its first snow... (this is where blogging proves its worth as a form of popular record). We can see - well, not too anomalous. Having said that, there are rumours, whispers, from the south of Poland of an impending drought. Indeed, I can't remember proper rain since the second half of August. And people are talking about a warm (+12C) Christmas - will we get show this December? We did last year and the year before...

2010: 28 November (I missed it, but on my return to Warsaw on 29 November, it snowed and kept on snowing). December was snowy - in the UK too!

2009: 14 October (!!!) An absolute anomaly, the more so that November proved snow-free. However, the second half of December saw heavy snowfalls

2008: 22 November. Snow stayed around for a few days; December was not snowy at all.

2007: 14 November. It didn't settle for long, returned briefly a week later; December was pretty much snow-free too.

A final word about this year. Many's the time I've heard about it snowing (during communist times) on the May Day parade; white shirtsleeves and blouses with red neckerchiefs - and snow. Yet this year, it snowed on the evening of 3 May - free Poland's celebration of its Constitution Day. Bizarre when I think back - eight o'clock in the evening, it's still light outdoors - and there's the garden covered in snow.

This time last year:
Krakowskie Przedmieście in the snow

This time two years ago:
Ul. Poloneza bisected by S2 roadworks

Unashamed City of Dreams gorgeousness

2011-11-29T21:49:00.004+01:00

Once again - a crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams. Look at how Zlota 44 (between the Palace of Culture, right, and Złote Tarasy, centre) is rising to find its place on Warsaw's skyline.

Two exposures - one (top) exposed for the ground, the other, for the sky. HDR (high dynamic range imaging) would allow for the capture of an image that incorporates the best of both pics.

Follow the Zlota 44 saga back over the past three and half years - here (Yellerbelly) and here (Scatts). Both guys know what they're writing about. See the building when it was no more than a hole in the ground.

A propos of dreams - my dreams are getting increasingly hybrid. One character that pops up in them frequently is my brother/son; an amalgam of my brother at Eddie's age and Eddie; neither and both. And the dreams are more often than not located in an amalgam of modern-day Warsaw, 1960s/70s London, and 1930s-50s USA. Such were the dreams I dreamt last night.

This time last year:
I'm so glad I'm living in Warsaw

This time two years ago:
Candid photography

This time three years ago:
Archival photos of the Rampa in action

This time four years ago:
Red sky in the morning...

And end to the Entitlement way of thinking

2011-11-27T11:33:00.010+01:00

There must be some kind of way out here
Said the joker to the thief

The first lines of Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower* spring to mind as I watch the world teeter on the brink on economic meltdown. There must indeed be some kind of way out of here, but it's not going to be pleasant. A face-off between young protesters and their banker foes will not, however, produce any roadmap as to the exit route from the crisis.

I can sympathise with the voice of a generation whose prospects are getting bleaker by the day, the Occupiers of Wall Street or London or Spain's Indignados and other groups of protesters. My problem with them, however, is that they have no solution to the problems besetting the global economy; all they can offer is a generalised list of woes that anyone can pick up from reading the papers.

Problems. Take the eurozone crisis. We all have a good idea of what would happen if, for example, Greece were to replace the euro with a new drachma. A run on the banks, capital flight - wealthier Greeks taking suitcases of euros out of the country to havens safe, printing new banknotes and minting new coins, making adjustments to bankomats** and vending machines, re-pricing all products in all shops. And the economic fall-out - suddenly, Greece would be the cheapest place in Europe to holiday, but, as the Greeks don't actually make anything, everything they need to fit out hotels and restaurants has to be imported from a prohibitively expensive eurozone.

We don't know what course of action to take. Keep the Greeks in, or push them out? Pain one way, pain the other. Greeks? Who's next? The Italians? A problem one order of magnitude greater. Then who? France? Germany? Britain? The USA? China? Contagion! Panic! The Great Depression, all over again. Just 80 years on.

Let's look at the root causes. I go back to Student SGH's brilliant essay from early last year, in which Bartek looks at the two main drivers of the market, Fear and Greed. He postulates that it was not so much Greed that sank the markets, but Lack of Fear. Now, I'd also like to add another root cause, namely Entitlement.

When anybody thinks "it's my right (to get money from the state for doing nothing/for leading a bank into failure)" then you know that Absurdity has got the upper hand. Entitlement-thinking leads to sub-optimal performance in the market place. Mnie się należy.

Because I'm the child of wealthy parents, I deserve an iPhone 4S for Christmas.
Because I'm a single mum, the State has a duty to provide me with free accommodation.
Because my company is French (or whatever) it should be protected from global competition.
Because my company is state-owned, and I'm in PSL, I must be Prezes.
Because I graduated with a Third in Media Studies at John Lennon University, I deserve a job.
Because my bank's Too Big To Fail, I deserve a huge bonus from the tax payer.
Because my parents will leave me a big house, I don't have to work too hard right now.
Because the value of my house will keep rising, I'm entitled to exotic holidays and flash car.
Because it's done so up to now, my company's market share will keep growing indefinitely.
Because my parents are wealthier than my grandparents, I'm going to be wealthier still.

As you can see from the above list, entitlement thinking affects people across the entire spectrum of society. The blame cannot fall on the bankers alone. People should take on more responsibility upon their own shoulders - should your bank fail - take the blame, sell your mansions and helicopters and put the money into the accounts of the small savers who've taken the blow. Take the blame for your own fecklessness rather than expecting the taxpayer to bail you out. Less entitlement - more individual responsibility.

Getting used to economic well-being gets you soft. Poles, who in the space of a generation have been through economic hardships undreamt of in the West are, I think (and here, of course, I'm forced to generalise) are much better situated to ride out the coming storm than the 'softies' of the pampered West. Since 1981, Poland has endured the fifth-deepest economic depression of the 20th Century; empty shelves on shops, inflation of 1,300% year, and shock-therapy transformation from which many provincial towns and rural areas have not yet recovered from.

Young Poles certainly feel less entitled than their British peers. They know that life's hard, work's a grind, but there's no one around to spoon-feed you. If they can't find a job in Radom or Gorzów, they'll fly to the UK to look for work. Hence the Polish barmen with Master's degrees in engineering and Polish chambermaids with Master's degrees in law.

Sustainable Growth, the chimeric Grail that corporates strives for, cannot be achieved by armies of pushy salesmen foisting unsuitable financial or insurance products or endlessly updated consumer electronic technologies upon unwary consumers. (Incidentally, I have yet to meet one person to rave about the wonders of BlueRay discs.) As consumers, we must save more and spend less. When we do spend, we should part with our money for things that we shall treasure, not junk destined for the bin. (How much of the money the Britain currently owes China is buried in landfill sites around the UK?) Business should accept that only true innovation is the way forward; consumers should pull things out of factories rather than sales forces push them into the consumers' living rooms.

The economic crisis will not go away quickly. It will be here, tainting the lives and prospects of a young generation just ready to enter the world of work. It will hit those societies that have had it too soft for too long. The injustice of it all is that the politicians, bankers and corporate leaders that have misshaped the world economy up to 2007, with all its absurdities and imbalances, will among the last to feel the pain upon their own skins. And that is what the Occupy movement is all about - a frustrated yet impotent cry of anguish. But no solutions.

AFTERTHOUGHT. I look at the title again. What rubbish! There will never be an end to the Entitlement way of thinking! It will return once this current crisis is gone and forgotten, it will return once another generation of political and business leaders says "an end to boom and bust", starts thinking that we're on a upward sloping trajectory that will continue upwards for ever. Once that thinking sets in, all manner of people will start believing that "it's owed to me".

* Jimi Hendrix recorded the definitive version.

** Bankomat - a word that needs to be adopted into English.

This time last year:
West Ealing - drab and sad suburb

This time two years ago:
To Poznań by train

This time four years ago:
Late autumn drive-time

Intelligence and the Ladder of Authority

2011-11-26T18:19:00.009+01:00

Every human being has an innate need to impose his or her will on another human being. This is inextricably linked with the fact that we are mammals; a biological imperative to have a clearly-defined hierarchy is born with all of us.

Whether it is a parent trying to instil values unto the next generation, a boss telling an employee what to do and how to do it, a sergeant-major barking out commands to new recruits or a householder instructing a domestic servant as to what needs doing around the kitchen, there are social hierarchies in which there is an intrinsic expectation of who is to be top dog.

This is the ladder of authority. It is based on age, status, experience, brute physical presence - but increasingly, over the millennia of human evolution - on intelligence. It is most visible among adolescent boys - in the playground, on the pitch, in the classroom (trying not to appear a swot, but to demonstrate effortless cleverness); they are yet too inexperienced to work out ruses how to rule by stealth.

Everyone wants to be boss. Even over their children or spouse. It is difficult for anyone to accept that in a small group, that they are not dominant. They will create excuses, make up stories, role-play - do anything rather than admit a lower standing on the ladder.

There's an official ladder, based on formal hierarchies, family trees or job titles and then there's what's really going on. Here's where the interesting interactions are going on. Peer-to-peer. That lovely line in The Office - Tim to Gareth - "you're not assistant manager. You're assistant to the manager".

We can sniff out weakness in another human, very quickly. We can tell who's really boss. Or so we think. And if that other person thinks that they are the boss - for what ever reason - there's bound to be conflict. Giving in is just not in our nature. Giving in is a sign of submissiveness, what's worse - that the person with whom you are in conflict with is dominant.

This plays out in the international arena, behind closed doors in politics. So many ruses can come into play; Stalin inviting Churchill to dinner at his private dacha after Churchill's first meeting with the General Secretary probably changed the course of post-war Europe by appearing to be placatory and showing his human side - which threw Churchill off guard. How much of what's being determined by Europe's leaders now is not being done on the basis of logic, but on the basis of human personality - dominance and submissiveness? How did Silvio Berlusconi - a farcical figure if looked at through the prism of cold logic - maintain power in Italy for so long?

We all set out wanting to be Top Dog. Even a Pope would not have got to the top without a strong will, a tough personality, determination to push others aside to get to the summit. Then there is that moment... I'll let the immortal Uncle Monty (from Withnail and I) explain:

"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: I will never play The Dane. When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases."

The theatrical metaphor of playing Hamlet extends to life. I got to play The Dane briefly (two years as general manager of the Polish operation of an international publishing company) but after the stress and pressure decided that I have neither the greed nor lust to dominate others needed to remain a senior executive in a global corporation.

Human life is a game in which a great many of our interactions are a trial of strength between two or more players, striving to be one up on the other(s). "You get the broom." "No, YOU get it!" "Open a Second Front now!" "The British and Americans are not ready yet!"

Once you recognise this, once you have the awareness of what is really going on when you ask someone for something, or they ask something of you, once natural positions are established, conflict can give way to partnership.

Again, I'll offer the most profound piece of advice that I can offer as a result of my 54 years on this earth - get to understand your biology, and rise above it.

This time last year:
Edinburgh portraits

This time two years ago:
Kiedy ranne wstają zorze

This time four years ago:
Thoughts on the Nature of Dad Rock

New train timetables - Radom line warning

2011-11-25T23:50:00.004+01:00

Thursday's Gazeta Stołeczna carried an article that filled me with dread. The last two paragraphs of this piece. The paper has seen the new railway timetables that come into force on 11 December (long-time readers of this blog will know that the introduction of new timetables mean chaos on the tracks at the best of times). For commuters coming into Warsaw along the line from Radom (calling at Warka, Czachówek, Zalesie Górne, Piaseczno and Nowa Iwiczna) the news sounds ominous. From four trains in the peak morning rush hour between 7:00 and 8:00 to two.

Well, let's not take news at face value and compare the new and old timetables:

Old - departures from Piaseczno to Warsaw (Koleje Mazowieckie)
6:15 - 6:46 - 7:03 - 7:20 - 7:33 - 7:51 - 8:40 - 8:57

New - departures from Piaseczno to Warsaw
6:06 - 6:41 - 6:56 - 7:11 - 7:35 - 8:19 - 8:38 - 8:59

Well, on paper, all eight departures between 6:00 and 9:00 are still there, though spread out more. Indeed, between 7:00 and 8:00 there are only two trains, but the number of trains between six and seven and between eight and nine have been increased from two to three each. So a bit of alarmism, but even so, that gap between the 7:35 and the 8:19 service is way to great. That train will be utterly packed.

Fewer trains to town?

To make matters worse, the semi-fast services from Radom and beyond to Warsaw are also being scaled back. In a letter to the Radom edition of Gazeta Wyborcza, users of the TLK and Interregio trains into Warsaw complain about chronic delays, overcrowding, ancient rolling stock - and now, curtailments of services in the new timetable. The final paragraph warns that desperate passengers will take to blocking the tracks.

Once again, we see mixed signals. On the one hand, Warsaw's authorities are clearly trying to wean the populace from driving into town in private cars. On the other, cash-strapped local and regional authorities are unable to dip into their budgets to support rail services. What are people from Piaseczno to do? Between 7 and 8am, there are just ten buses from Piaseczno to Warsaw. Given that each is able to take around 200 passengers, standing and sitting - that's a mere 2,000 Sand City dwellers that have that option. Plus, as we know, ul. Puławska is one solid mass of near-stationary traffic at that time.

No one seems to care. ZTM is not fussed that Koleje Mazowieckie can't cope; Koleje Mazowieckie doesn't care that Przewozy Regionalne and InterCity's TLK services are being cut; the city authorities are in no hurry to paint bus lanes down Puławska, or to provide a cycle path alongside the roadway - so what happens? People continue to drive to work, or at least to drive to the three Park+Rides at Stokłosy, Ursynów and Wilanowska Metro stations (room for 556 cars).

I find it inconceivable that rail services are being trimmed back. Bear in mind that a single six-carriage set of EN57 stock can take 1,360 passengers (as many as seven buses or around 900 cars assuming 1.5 passengers per car), trains really are the optimal form of travel.

Looking at an analogous commuter railway service in the UK, Slough to London Paddington, there are currently seven local trains leaving the town for the capital between 7:00 and 8:00am. As six-car sets, these trains can carry around 800 passengers in (slightly) greater comfort and much higher speeds than the half-century old Polish commuter trains.

Joined-up government is needed. Warsaw needs workers. People come into the capital each day from Radom (100km away), even Łódź (135km) as well as many nearer satellite towns. Merely leaving clogged-up truck roads, beset with roadworks, to act as conduits that get the Warsaw's economy moving and shrugging shoulders at the inertia on the railways, is irresponsible. Frustrated workers are not productive workers.

* Between 7:00 and 8:00, public transport can move a mere 4,800 people from Piaseczno into town, assuming that no one boards the bus or train at intermediate places like Nowa Iwiczna, Mysiadło, Dąbrówka, Jeziorki, Pyry or Dawidy. That really is pathetic.

This time last year:
London notes

This time two years ago:
Silent and Unseen - in your bookshops now

This time three years ago:
Frustrated by ul. Puławska - rat-run absurdity

This time four years ago:
Some thoughts on recycling

Selling old magazines - OK or not?

2011-11-23T19:47:00.007+01:00

And lo, upon TVN Fakty did they show the Authorities cracking down upon the Small Man and the Small Woman trying to make a living by selling clothes and things upon the highway side. And the Authorities liked not that these people be engaged in commerce without letting the State share in the trade. Mayors from Kołobrzeg, Łódź and Kraków explained that 'dziki handel' makes their streets and pavements look bad. And the Small People wept; for they have no other way with which to sustain their families. The Authorities seized boxes of clothing from the Small Man, sealed them and sent them even unto the Courts of Law.

The real reason for this high-profile clampdown is not to bring beauty and order upon the pavements of the land; it is so that Poland can be seen by the Ratings Agencies, the European Commission and the bonds markets getting tough on non-payers of VAT. Now, given that some 45% of all revenues flowing into the Polish state budget comes from VAT, squeezing out the non-payers from the market makes very good sense. Tough on the Small Man and the Small Woman, but they have for years been squeezing the revenues of the people one notch above them on the food chain who do pay VAT, do pay ZUS on their employees, do pay CIT on corporate profits. Tough on the customer of the Small Man and Small Woman; but their savings have been bypassing the state treasury and thus contributing to the budget deficit and to public sector.

Which as we can see from the experiences of Greece is not a good thing.

So. This evening, waiting for my train at W-wa Śródmieście, I noticed my favourite second-hand magazine stand was closed (below). Clampdown? These stands are the bane of Poland's publishers. Some types of magazine - classified ads, for example, have a shelf-life measure in days. But many hobby mags for example - cycling and photography being my two interests - can be bought months later without deleterious effect. Knitting patterns, computers, military history, motoring - likewise.

The process works like this. Magazines appear originally on news stands on a sale-or-return basis. What does not get sold in Ruch, Relay, Kolporter or InMedio ends up in recycling bins. As the retail price of waste paper is 30 grosze a kilo, while a magazine can get re-sold for 2zł - 5zł (depending on how old it is, how expensive it was), it makes sense to bring the old copies back onto the market.

Among the unsold months-old Uwarzam Że and Nowe Państwo magazines lie gems (English-language titles among them) for a fraction of their former price. Of course, no VAT goes to the state coffers, because what's 23% of the input cost if the input cost is zero?

My speculations about whether the Straż Miejska and Urząd Skarbowy had raided the bowels of W-wa Smródmieście came to an end when a few minutes later the shutters went up and it was business as usual (below).

Below: As you can see, a wide selection of titles on sale, very modestly priced to sell, buy one, get an even older one free - but nary a VAT receipt to be seen.

Below: And another such stand, this one on Platform 2. No doubt PKP Nieruchomości that rents out square metres in the innards of its subterranean passages (same thing goes on at W-wa Wschodnia and Zachodnia) is not too fussed about the fiscal niceties as long its revenues roll in.

With Germany unable to sell of its bonds today, we can see that Europe really is in trouble. Yet Poland has a sufficiently big grey economy that if were to be made to pay like the rest of the retail and distribution sector, budget deficits could be patched up. But sights like those above cannot be seen in Germany or Britain (what would W.H. Smith and John Menzies say?). If Finance Minister Rostowski can muster the state to force the VAT- and excise non-payers to contribute, Poland could pull itself up both fiscally and civilisationally.

This time two years ago:
Warsaw's woodlands in autumn

This time three years ago:
Still here, the early snow

This time four years ago:
Another point of view

How to lose customers

2011-11-22T20:20:00.004+01:00

I found this camera repair place, just off ul. Grzybowska. Time, I thought, to get the sensor of my D40 cleaned. Pictures (especially those of clear skies) have darker spots on them that I need to Photoshop away before publishing; it's getting time consuming.

Anyway, I strike a deal (125 zlotys - around 25 quid to get the camera cleaned up, ready by 18:00 tomorrow), take out the memory card, ready to leave the D40 behind. Then the young lady behind the counter asks me to take the strap off the camera.

"Why?" I ask. "Because the mechanic says so," she replies. It's not an easy thing to do, especially with numb fingers and no reading glasses to hand. And, no doubt, I'd be asked to put the strap back on again, even more difficult, threading a reluctant woven nylon strap through tight plastic hoops.

Politely I pick up my camera and tell the young lady that I shall get it repaired elsewhere. If they want my business - and assuming the strap really needs to be removed in order for the base to be unscrewed (which I doubt) - they'd take the trouble to take off and then put back the strap. For the price - towards the upper band of what I find online - I did not expect the client to be asked to do some of the work for the repair guy.

Anyway - I check the website; it transpires they also fix "Helwett-Packard" and "Haselblat" cameras. If the guy's as precise with his mechanical skills as he is with his spelling, I'm better off avoiding his services anyway.

Can any reader recommend a good place for cleaning sensors (my D80 also needs clean inside...)

This time two years ago:
November weather notes

This time three years ago:
First snow, winter 2008-09

This time four years ago:
Escapism

Kraków-Warsaw by train

2011-11-20T20:01:00.005+01:00

A post to show the ups-and-downs of Polish State Railways, how much has been achieved, how much more needs to be done.

After speaking at our PPP seminar in Kraków on Friday, Agnieszka, our Kraków office director, dropped me off outside Galeria Krakowska, in ample time, I thought, to catch the 16.45 to Warsaw. I made my way through the shopping mall to the place between Carrefour and McDonald's where, from memory, there was a passageway to the railway platforms.

Not a bit of it. There is an entrance to the new underground tram station - but that's it. I had to loop round through the mall to another passageway, one that did lead to the railway station.

Point One. No Proper Signage. How are passengers from out of town expected to know which exit is which?

So. Down the a passageway that led to the platforms. Hurray! Now for my ticket. A booth proclaiming itself to be 'Przewozy Regionalne' (i.e. not the company that operates my train home, PKP InterCity). From previous visits to Kraków Głowny station, I remembered that this booth will not sell InterCity tickets, and that after getting to the front of the queue, you'll be sent away with a flea in your ear. I missed, however, a small sign saying "we [now] sell tickets for all train operating companies". So I pressed on to find another place to buy tickets. I found one - at the far end of the narrow tunnel, half-closed off by building works. Again, run by Przewozy Regionalne. This time, the sign saying 'all tickets sold' was more prominent. I join the lengthy queue.

Point Two. No Proper Signage. How are passengers from out of town expected to know where they should buy the right ticket?

Let me return to the narrow tunnel. It's about three metres (10ft) wide. By every platform entrance, there's a timetable. Around every timetable, there's a cluster of anxious passengers looking for information. They are blocking the narrow tunnel. And the timetables are printed in a tiny font, which many people (including myself) need reading glasses to make sense of.

Point Three. Make timetables bigger; put them where they won't disturb passenger flow. Timetables are an essential part of signage and passenger information; they must be clear and visible.

While I'm in the queue, there's a passenger announcement that the Warsaw train will, unusually, be departing from track #*, platform @'. The message is repeated. "Track #*, platform @'."I strain my ears to decode the number of the track and the platform. I still can't make it out.

Point Four. Ensure that public announcements can be heard in every corner of the station. Train the announcers to speak clearly, slowly, not to garble their words. Put up the right number of loudspeakers. Ensure they're all working properly.

Point Five. Get rid of the stupid track and platform numeration system (Tor 23 przy peronie pierwszym - 'track 23 by platform 1'). It is highly confusing and entirely unnecessary. Each track should have its own platform number. I koniec.

I get to the front of the queue knowing there's no way I'll catch my train. I buy a ticket for the next one, an hour and eight minutes later. I wonder around the mall, killing time; at last I make my way to track 18 platform 5 to discover... that it has its very own ticket booth, also operated by Przewozy Regionalne, also selling tickets for all trains. Now... had I known that earlier...

Points One and Two. See above.

I board my train. Carriage 26, seat 111. Second class. LUXURY! Six seats to the compartment, a power socket for every seat. I can open my new Samsung notebook and spend the journey writing! And when I got hungry, the Wars restaurant carriage, just a few footsteps away, is offering old-school pork chops with potatoes and cabbage and a glass of Konstancin Brewery beer for less than six quid! And the train arrives in Warsaw on time! All right, 3hrs 18 mins for 300km is really rather poor given that 440km between Madrid and Seville takes 2hrs 20 mins, but at least PKP InterCity train kept to the advertised timetable.

So - Kraków station is really quite appalling [see Dysposytor's post on the station]. Not as abysmally appalling as W-wa Zachodnia (the worst station in the civilised world), but a long way behind W-wa Centralna, also in mid-refurbishment right now.

But - I was pleasantly impressed by PKP InterCity. The ticket, at 125.50 zł (25 quid) cost almost double what a TLK (Tanie Linie Kolejowe - 'Cheap Rail Lines') one does, but it was worth it.

With the world's third-largest sporting event (only the Olympics and the World Cup draw bigger crowds than the European football championships) due to start in just seven months, will Polish railways and railway stations manage to get their act to cope with hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors? And what impression will they leave - of Poland a country that's rapidly catching up with the west, or a country stuck in some post-communist nightmare of inefficiency, indifference to the customer and technical backwardness?

This time last year:
Warsaw Blogmeet

This time two years ago:
My fixie reconfigured

This time four years ago:
Not In My Back Yard

S2/S79 works ongoing - from the air

2011-11-19T22:40:00.006+01:00

Perfect flying weather for my take-off from Okęcie, bound for London, last week (11 November). And a chance to photograph from the air the road works on the Elka or 'L'-shaped roadworks, the stretch of the north-south S79 between Węzeł Marynarska and Węzeł Lotnisko and the west-east S2 between Węzeł Lotnisko and Węzeł Puławska (węzeł means 'junction' or 'interchange').

Above: immediately after take-off, still within the airport boundary, the Cargo terminal and its apron; behind it the S79. Still much work to do to link Marynarska to the airport junction, not just viaducts and bridges, but whole chunks of missing roadway. Time's ticking away before next June's football championships... I can't see it happening.

Above: the S2, a big hole by ul. Oberka; intermittent sections nearing completion, but again so much to do, especially around the Puławska junction. Click to enlarge to get some more detail, especially the area beyond Puławska. Here - one day (don't ask) a tunnel will burrow under the blocks of flats in Ursynów to emerge by the Vistula escarpment and on to a new bridge over the river - and then onwards to the Belarusian border. I wonder what will happen first - the motorway gets to the border, or Belarussia rids itself of its ridiculous tyrant?

This time last year:
Fish and chips in Warsaw

This time two years ago:
Spirit of place - anomalous familiarity moments

And England's dreaming

2011-11-19T17:57:00.005+01:00

Time (after my return from London and Kraków) to upload and select some photos to show just how marked the climatic contrast between London and Warsaw can be. Both cities are around the same latitude, yet (anomalies excepted*), London's climate is much more temperate.

Above: Cleveland Road, West Ealing, the posh part. Below: Cleveland Park, view towards Harrow-on-the-Hill, centre left. Note the clarity of the sky - more associated in my mind with Warsaw than London. From the clothing of the individuals walking in the middle foreground, still shirtsleeves weather (18C on Saturday 12th November). On this very day, Warsaw was shivering under cloudy skies with a top temperature of +2C.

What a day! Another contrast - look at the leaves on the willow trees below. Not only are they still mainly on the trees (unlike in Warsaw) but they've hardly changed colour from late summer!

Not all trees, however. This avenue of elms (below) in nearby Pitshanger Park (at the bottom of Cleveland Park) is denuded of leaves and stands on a russet carpet that crunches pleasantly underfoot.

And finally - so quintessentially English - the bowling green at Pitshanger Park, below. Edwardian Ealing, once Queen of the Suburbs, that klimat is still to be found, here and there. That sky... those colours... it could be 1911... And why ever not?

* Let us not forget that last November, England was struggling under an inch of snow.

Tusk's exposé - my reaction

2011-11-18T23:42:00.000+01:00

Firstly, a translator's note. The Polish word exposé (a prime minister's first policy speech on taking office) is not the same as the English word 'exposé' ('the publication of some disreputable facts').

Well do I remember premier Tusk's first exposé, four years ago. In those days, I drove to work (an act I now consider to be anti-social behaviour) and I listened to some of it on the radio. As I approached red traffic lights on ul. Sobieskiego, I actually found myself clapping to Tusk's words. What a refreshing change to the intrigues, plots and counter-plots of the PiS-Samoobrona-LPR coalition that the Tusk government had just replaced! Heavy on the word zaufanie, ('trust'), I felt that at last - after four years of dodgy SLD leadership and two years of excruciatingly embarrassing government by PiS and its coalition partners, at last Poland was heading in the right direction.

The past four years proved that at least Poland was no longer moving in the wrong direction any more. But instead of progress and reform, the first Tusk administration found itself accused of being a 'do little' government. True, it had its successes - particularly on the economic front; Poland was the only EU member state not to slip into recession in 2009. And externally, Poland's government looked professional, with grown-ups minding the shop (Jacek Rostowski, finance, and Radek Sikorski, foreign affairs). But all in all, a 'could have done much better' assessment summed up the first Tusk administration.

So then - on to today's exposé. The full text, in a non-native translation into English, can be found on the Economist's website.

On reading it, I could see that was that here was a speech written-to-measure for the ratings agencies rather than to attract foreign direct investment. If zaufanie peppered Tusk's first exposé, this time it was bezpieczeństwo ('safety', 'security'), mentioned 34 times in a speech that filled no more than 12 sides of A4. And my first impression is of a schoolboy admitting to Headmaster Fitch (cane in hand) at the start of his second term in Big School that he hadn't worked nearly hard enough at those tough subjects like pension reform, taxing farmers or deregulating burdensome red tape, but that this term he promises to pull his socks up. And indeed. The headmaster put the cane down and let off Tusk with a warning that his performance (as with those class dunces Greece and Italy) would be under continual review.

Of 12 pages of speech, a full ten were to do with the economy. Retirement age will be raised. Farmers with larger holdings will pay proper social security contributions and be obliged to keep accounts (like any other business). Internet use tax relief will cease. High earners will lose child benefit unless they have two or more children. Copper and silver extraction will attract higher duties. People (like me) on umowa o dzieło ('authorship contracts') currently taxed on only half their income will have that privilege capped at 85,000 złotys a year (around £17,000), and pay full tax on income over that figure (fair enough - I've long thought I don't pay enough tax!). And so on. More like a Chancellor's Budget speech than a Prime Minister's maiden policy speech, to the extent that I was surprised when Tusk wandered, almost off-topic, onto subjects like religion and nationalism near the end.

So - the aim of the speech was to reassure the markets, bond-holders and ratings agencies that public sector debt and the budget deficit were both under control. He set targets for his government - to cut debt to 47% of GDP by 2015 (55% in 2010) and the deficit to 3% of GDP by the end of next year (from 7.9% in 2010).

All well and good. But what about growth? What about employment? One thing that REALLY worries me was Tusk's proposal (may it just stay a proposal!) to increase employers' ZUS (social security) contribution by an extra two percentage points. Employers, he says, can afford it, he says, in the nearest we got to economic populism in his speech, because 'businesses are not willing to spend money'.

This is in effect, a tax on jobs. When the UK Labour government announced an increase in employers' social security contributions by just one percentage point, all hell broke loose. It now stands at 13.8%; in Poland, employers will be forking out something like 24-25% of employees' pre-tax income. Where's the incentive for employers to take on new workers? Tusk should CUT employers' ZUS contributions - if he needs extra money, increase the corporate tax rate by one percentage point - take the money from profits actually earned, rather than by increasing the tax on jobs. Panie premierze - think again on this one!

The other thing that dismayed me was the complete and utter lack of the word 'infrastructure' in the speech. If there's one subject on the report card for Premier Tusk's first term that merits an F-, it's Poland's dreadful roads and railways. And, if we are to take the exposé as a road map for the next four years, we can assume it's one that won't join Warsaw or Kraków to the eastern borders by motorway.

Having said all that, I take heart that the tone of the exposé is one of long-term consideration for the good of the nation's finances, not a speech of political expediency knowing that a four-year term of office is all a premier can hope for. At last, Poland has re-elected a government; with luck and a fair wind, Poland will make it through the impending global economic recession without having its growth fizzle out.

This time last year:
Into Poland's former Heart of Darkness

This time two years ago:
Powiśle - synchronicity of shape

This time three years ago:
The last of the rampa na kruszywo

This time four years ago:
Airport zoning to halt development in Jeziorki?

Poppies, politeness and pride

2011-11-13T15:02:00.001+01:00

If 11 November for Poland is about Independence, in Britain it's about Rememberance.

I'm in London for a few days to help my parents; my father had an angioplasty procedure last Tuesday, so I'm on hand to help with driving, shopping, cooking, washing up and a bit of garden work. My father has bounced back incredibly well; after a bit of pottering around in the garden today, he announced that although he's tired, his heart doesn't hurt him. His blood pressure has stabilised at a perfect level. Amazing at 88; his chances of getting to 100 are very good!

As always, contrasts between Poland and England are at the fore when I come over. It's been nearly 11 months since my last visit to my parents with Eddie and Moni just after Christmas. The weather contrast is incredible. Whereas in Warsaw most trees are already leafless, here in London many have not even started to change colour. The willow trees in my parents' garden and in Cleveland Park have only just started to shed their leaves. And the sunshine and warmth (+18C today) were something that Warsaw could only envy.

Together with my parents, we watched the Rememberance Sunday parade at the Cenotaph and the British Legion commemoration at the Royal Albert Hall. Rememberance Sunday is a wonderful event, so rich in tradition and meaning. Watching the veterans marching past the Queen as they have done each and every Rememberance Sunday of my life gives me a sense of continuity and stability that counteracts the gloomy news headlines here. And watching the dignity and pride of those marching - many veterans my father's age or even older - I can't help but contrast it with what was happening on Friday in Warsaw at another public commemoration of 11 November. And draw conclusions about relative levels of civilisation in the two countries with which I associate myself.

Public politeness is an area in which as I've noted before, there is a big difference between Poland and England, to Poland's detriment. In the supermarket, in the car park, in a crowded tube station. "With a thousand ta's and pardons, daintily alights Elaine" wrote John Betjeman in the second line of his poem Middlesex. That essential politeness rubs off on many migrants to the UK, though the Poles who've settled here after 2004 might have been in England too short a time to leave off their public swearing.

This time last year:

Setting sun in the mountains

This time two years ago:
That learning moment

This time three years ago:
Along the Polish-Czech border

This time four years ago:
Ul. Poleczki - remember it this way?

What Independence Day means for Poles

2011-11-10T22:14:00.006+01:00

Popped into Auchan this evening on account of the fact that all the shops are closed tomorrow for the 11 November Independence Day public holiday. The hypermarket was heaving - these kinds of queues one sees in the run-up to Christmas. Yet this is a Thursday evening... had the shops not been closed on a Friday, would everyone had gone bonkers to fill up their trolley?

As I stood and queued, I pondered on the meaning of 11 November, a new public holiday, instituted after the fall of communism (which had 22 July as its commemoration of the Birth of the New Order). How does 11 November compare to Poland's other holidays?

All Souls/All Saints has a very special meaning in the hearts of Poles. It's a time to visit graves; as a holiday it is extremely significant. The same goes for the tradition-rich celebrations of Christ's Mass and of Easter. Secondary religious feasts that entitle Poles to days off - Corpus Christi and Pentecost Sunday (shops are forced to shut) divide the believing from the rest.

But Independence Day, celebrating Poland's return to the map of Europe as a sovereign nation after 123 years? Is it something more than an excuse for a punch-up between neo-fascists and neo-Nazis* on one side and assorted lefties and gays on the other?

What should a patriotic Pole do... Listen to voices telling him to stay indoors with the radio switched on - or go into the centre of town to listen to patriotic speeches and get drawn into political harangues between extremists?

I remember my first Independence Day in Warsaw; 1997. Krzysztof ('Toyah') and his family came up to stay with us; we trooped off to Plac Piłsudskiego to the commemoration. We neared the back of the crowd; some politician was speaking. Sense, as it sounded to me; hitting all the right patriotic buttons; yet in front of us some man was ranting "I can't listen to this bulls***!" as he stormed away. "Some communist?" I asked Krzysztof. "Not at all," he answered. "A right-winger, angry at the hypocrisy of a old communist like President Kwaśniewski" - for it was he speaking - "uttering such sentiments!" And so it proves we can't really know what's going on (insofar as it Polish politics go).

Stay indoors. Read history. Research what your forefathers did. Think about a map of Europe without a Poland on it. Make it an Independence Day of your mind. Don't get drawn into a futile debate as to who's a real patriot and who isn't. And it will be freezing outside.

* The difference between the two lies these days in religion. Poland's neo-fascists tend to be ultra-conservative Catholics, while the neo-Nazis are rather tattooed pagans with a penchant for death metal. What unifies them is a lack of tolerance for lefties, gays and peoples of other races. In the UK, types that in Poland end up being neo-Nazis are quickly identified as such by their health visitors, attracting the attention of the public prosecutor should they persist in their ways.

This time last year:
Words fail me: the Polish for "to fail"?

This time two years ago:
Autumn in Dobra

This time four years ago:
Autumn ploughing

Bad news for Jeziorki rat-runners

2011-11-09T20:59:00.005+01:00

As I've written ad nauseam, ul. Puławska is one barely-moving parade of steel, glass and rubber, trying desperately to disgorge tens of thousands of suburban and exurban Varsovians into their place of work - and failing. It is, then, only natural that drivers should seek alternatives to this near-stationary three-lane highway (traffic lights every two hundred metres).

The alternative route is marked on the map below (click to enlarge).

The yellow route, between ul. Karczunkowska to ul. Poleczki and its business parks is all well and good - except it's been severed by the ongoing roadworks (S2 southern Warsaw bypass between Węzeł Lotnisko and Węzeł Puławska). It's been like this for two years now. No problem for the all-terrain cyclist or pedestrian-in-wellies, but motorists must detour the road closure with a zig-zagging 3.3km detour over some of the worst roads in the European Union.

To make things worse, this week, ul. Ludwinowska (marked in red running horizontally from the end of ul. Jeziorki towards the railway line) has been well and truly cut by some sewerage pipe-laying (below), marked as a black line on the map above.

This leaves two options open for those who use this way to work: put up with the frustration of Puławska, or chance it over Poloneza's potholed surfaces and take a risk over the almost- but-not-quite completed viaduct. No work has actually occurred here since July, its still waiting for final layers of asphalt, one bit of pavement and some minor finishing off.

Locals have taken matters into their own hands and have forced the viaduct open by pushing apart the concrete barriers at the north end (below) and dismantling the no-entry signs at the south end.

But I wouldn't chance in a car without high ground clearance, there are big jumps where the road surface changes. Still, as it is, I can cycle the 5.6km from Karczunkowska to Poleczki faster than a car taking the long route.

This time last year:
Death on the tracks

This time four years ago:
From Łady to Falenty

Polish "right" splits. Again.

2011-11-07T19:38:00.006+01:00

For casual observers of the Polish political scene, you may be interested that for the third time there's been a split in Poland's main "right"* wing party - Prawo i Sprawidliwość (PiS - Law and Justice). This time angry young man, former justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro has marched off with 15 other newly-elected PiS deputies to form a new party (tentatively 'Solidarna Polska' - er... translation anyone? Poland of Solidarity? Loyal Poland? Joint and Several Poland?).

This is yet another schism in Poland's "right". The last one was when 15 PiSite deputies left Jarosław Kaczyński's party to form PJN - Polska Jest Najważniejsza (literally 'Poland Is Most Important') in November 2010. These splitters promptly achieved 2% in the latest parliamentary elections.

Before that? Marek Jurek. Remember him, readers? Former Speaker of the Sejm. He got upset that PiS was not religiously reactionary enough for his tastes, so he formed Prawica Rzeczpospolitej (The Right of the Republic) taking six PiS deputies with him in April 2007. Like PJN after him, his party got absolutely nowhere in subsequent parliamentary elections.

Why is it that PiS keeps fragmenting? Is it because of a conviction that under its leader (and co-founder, along with his late twin brother Lech) PiS will never regain power? Or because of Jarosław's authoritarian manner, his inability to placate competing egos, his sense of absolute conviction in the rightness of his argument? Or, indeed both?

What if things were different? Many commentators have said that PiS's 30% at the recent parliamentary election was a good showing, and that the party couldn't have hoped to have squeezed any more votes. But look at Hungary's Fidesz - a party that occupies the same quadrant of the political chart. Patriotic, traditional yet not a party to yield up the commanding heights of the economy to free enterprise. And yet it enjoys a constitution-changing two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament. So it is possible to win elections in this part of Europe with a PiSite world-view.

Meanwhile, Ruch Poparcia Palikota (UK readers - imagine a party called something like 'The Movement to Support Mandelson' and you'll not be far off) has finally realised it's time to shed the one-man band image, being the third-largest party in the lower house, and seeks a new name - in a nationwide contest. An ad agency asked by TVN news to devise one came up with '665' - as in 'the lesser evil'. Nice. We shall see what the people dream up...

And so, with the "right" divided, the SLD parliamentary club run by opportunist Leszek Miller, (changing parties as often as PiS has splintered, premier when Poland was at its most corrupt) rendering the post-communist party unelectable, Donald Tusk effectively has no opposition.

He MUST take the opportunity to force through badly-needed fiscal reforms, improve Poland's business environment, speed up delivery of infrastructure projects, or face his only real threat to political power - the markets.

* Why "right" in inverted commas? Because unlike American Republicans or British Conservatives, PiS is not a free-market party. It believes in a large state and mistrusts entrepreneurs.

This time last year:
Tesco vs. Auchan

This time four years ago:
My father's house

Town planning and the Sublime Aesthetic

2011-11-06T21:29:00.007+01:00

Are we in New Mexico? Is this Aquacaliente? Or Iridium Springs in Arizona? No, this is Warsaw's new exurbs, a new estate being built in fields between Zgorzała and Nowy Podolszyn.

(The mud-spattered walls, lack of pavement and asphalt are typical of Polish town planning: build the houses, and in a few years the infrastructure will follow).

In terms of the architecture, this I like. Bold, moderne, flashing me back to the near-past yet into the future - the essence of the Sublime Aesthetic - the sunset helps too. This is ul. Plonowa ('harvest street'), formerly nothing more than a track running through fields between Nowa Wola and Zamienie.

Looking west towards the setting sun; we can see the radio transmission tower at Raszyn (well, Łazy actually). Note how flat the landscape is. Agriculture as far as the eye can see.

Question is though, for how long? Google Earth's current image for this area (dated April 2009) shows no sign of development here whatsoever. Zumi.pl (from this year) does. Now, six houses are complete (one's a show house) with a further eight in various stages of construction. Another development is going up on ul. Plonowa nearer Zamienie.

The pros and cons of living here? The pros - it's far from the madding crowd. The cons - it's far from the madding crowd. To get from here to Jeziorki in the morning would take 15-20 minutes by car (assuming dry dirt-track road and the level crossing gates not being down). Right now, it's all fields (left, look at that cabbage in the foreground). Trouble is, with the economy as it is, it's unlikely there will be much by way of infrastructure any time soon.

This time last year:
On the long road from Zero to One

This time two years ago:
Łódź Rising

Vapour trails after sunset

2011-11-05T20:37:00.004+01:00

The sun now sets just before 16:00, rising at 06:40. Waking up at 05:40 each weekday morning, I have little benefit from the extra daylight in the morning and lose an hour in the evening. Bleh! Time to demand the scrapping of winter time; let's have summer time the year round.

Anyway, some 20 minutes after sunset today, I saw this magnificent sight (below), which thanks to Flightradar24.com, I ascertained as an Emirates Boeing 777 flying from New York to Dubai.

The starboard wing and the vapour trail brightly illuminated by the sun, which, at 36,000ft, had still not disappeared below the horizon. Just beneath it, another vapour trail, dissipating, from a four-engined jet that had been heading in the opposite direction. Quite a sight!

This time last year:
Autumnal blues

Skarpa in autumn

2011-11-04T22:54:00.001+01:00

A week away from Powiśle, and yet it beckons me back... above: Park na Książęcem, looking down the Vistula escarpment. The park, named after Prince Kazimierz Poniatowski, is part of a larger complex of public open space, the Marszałek Edward Śmigły-Rydz Park, which forms the western border of Solec.

Beautiful cloudless blue skies, trees clad in autumnal gold that also carpets the ground. This time last year, the trees had lost all their leaves.

I must say, the clocks going back last weekend is becoming a pretty senseless exercise. As it is, even with the time change, I wake up in darkness (at 05:40 weekdays), so all that's happened is that I lose an hour of daylight in the evening. Time to scrap wintertime - summer time all year round for me, please!

This time three years ago:
A town called 'Tunnel'

Three years ago today, also:
"Ten murzyn" wins US elections

New office - first impressions

2011-11-03T22:35:00.002+01:00

Well, the place reeks of fresh paint, and working in a 19th C. building (even if refurbished to meet the requirements of the 21st C.) takes a bit of getting used to, what with small, separate, rooms rather than one large open space for all.

So then - here we are - ul. Nowogrodzka 12 (the stretch between ul. Krucza and Marszałkowska). A more central location would be hard to find. The new office is six minutes away from the platforms at Centrum Metro station. A huge number of buses and trams pass by, along Marszałkowska, Al. Jerozolimskie, ul. Marszałkowska, and even one (the 107) going up and down ul. Krucza. Below: it's the middle building on the other side of the street. Looming out of the mist - the Novotel Centrum hotel, located at the very epicentre of Warsaw.

Food-wise, there's a heap more choice than around the old office, located in Solec, the southern end of Powiśle. My favoured lunchtime haunt there was Qchnia, a Viet-Pol place. And R20 on Rozbrat, a quality restaurant if too pricey for regular visits. Around Centrum, there's enough bars and cafés within a five-minute walk of my new office to ensure that I could eat somewhere different every day for a month. So far, I've tried Namaste India across the road and the Nam Sajgon on Bracka - both very good. Beef noodle soup at the latter is good value (but I preferred the same dish at the Asia-Tasty in Hala Gwardii.

Above: Step off the main street and through the entrance. Below: the courtyard of the kamienica ('tenement' - the official translation of kamienica does not reflect the flavour of the building). A bit run-down, but plenty of character, klimat.

These doorways (left)beautifully reflect the ambience of a Warsaw (indeed Polish) kamienica. Zapuszczone, zapyziałe, podrapane, zaniedbane are some of the kinder descriptions - and you can imagine that smell that greets the nostrils as you go through into the stairwell - a mixture of dankness, cheap cleansing fluid, cooking odours, cat-pee. But step through into the apartments - new furniture, 72" flat-screen TVs and all mod-cons. Signs ban ball-games and warn of falling plasterwork.

This time last year:
The topography of dreams

This time two years ago:
A regular interchange

South Warsaw transport hub

2011-11-02T20:30:00.003+01:00

Today was my first day in our new offices on ul. Nowogrodzka 12. I will write more about the place soon, once its platzgeist or genus locii becomes more bedded down. In the meantime...

Wilanowska - known by older Warsaw residents as Dworzec Południowy (analogous to W-wa Zachodnia and Wschodnia) - is a massive transport hub through which those heading south out of Warsaw must pass to move from Metro or tram to bus. The Metro is good at delivering Ursynauers to Ursynów. But for Sandbag City dwellers (aka 'Setchno) and their wealthier brethren living in Konstacin (aka Konstancheen), you've got to get past Las Kabacki somehow. The forest is a huge obstacle, enclosing Ursynów from the south and funnelling southbound traffic either down Puławska (west of the forest) or Przyczółkowa/Drewny to the east.

Above: Wilanowska bus terminal. Between 17:00 and 18:00, a bus leaves here every three minutes down Puławska alone. In total, 23 different day buses, three night buses and five tram lines pass through or terminate at Wilanowska. Plus long-distance PKS and PolskiBus.com coaches. The volume of buses leaving here is very high - if only there were a bus lane along Puławska and Przyczółkowa and buses could move swiftly past jams of stationary motorists rather than being stationary too.

Above: the bar with the tree sticking out of its roof - a bit of Slavic whimsy to add character to the place. A recent arrival to this rather bizarre row of booths, kebaberies, kiosks and bars is a cash-only ticket office for PolskiBus.com.

Above: looking north-east at the bus terminal. Between the buses and the distant blocks of flats - a three-level park+ride for 290 cars. Assuming they each take 1.5 occupants (which I doubt), the car park full holds cars for as many people as just three articulated buses could carry.

Park+Rides this close to the city centre make little sense. The cost of building the Wilanowska P+R could have bought dozens of new buses with enough money to paint a line down Puławska.

This time two years ago:
Powiśle on a cold, clear autumn morning

This time three years ago:
Okęcie "to remain Warsaw's only airport"

This time four years ago:
Searching for autumnal perfection

Miraculous no-gear landing of SP-LPC

2011-11-01T17:28:00.016+01:00

Half past two in the afternoon just gone; after lunch; time for a walk to the cemetery to photograph the graves in their All Saints' Day finery. But what's this? A Boeing 767 is coming into land - but where's the undercarriage?

Below: the plane, a LOT Polish Airlines Boeing 767-300ER, SP-LPC, at its closest to our house. I have never seen a plane this close to the runway threshold (a mere 4,500 metres away) with flaps fully extended but landing gear still in.

The plane passes over, getting ever-nearer the runway... and - no still sign of the wheels... Note the tail skid extended (click on photo above to see in detail).

Below: rapidly disappearing from view. I race indoors to switch on Flightradar24.com; by the time the page is live, there's no sign of the plane. So I assume there was no go-round; maybe the gear came out at the last minute? At this stage, the plane must be 2,000 metres or less from the threshold and 200 metres or less above the ground.

En route to the cemetery, the sky was filled by the roar of fast jets. I could just make out the shape of an F-16 flying south-west. At this stage, I had not put one and one together. A pair of F-16s had been called out of Łask air force base to check visually whether or not the gear was out.

Later, Moni called me on the mobile to say that a plane had landed gear-up at Okęcie and everybody safe - thank God! Putting down an aircraft like the 767 without wheels is incredibly difficult.

The part of the aircraft that must touch the ground first is the rear fuselage. If the angle of attack is too shallow, the first things that touches the ground are the engines; as soon as that happens, the nose flips down instantly. If the angle of attack is too great, the plane is in danger of stalling and literally falling out of the sky onto its tail. So - quite rightly, LOT's Captain Tadeusz Wrona must be lauded as the hero of the day.

[Amazing photo here]

[BBC news report here]

Looking at the pics again - spooky. Fill me with dread - and yet huge relief that a tragedy had been averted.

Forty-eight years ago, nearly to the day, my father photographed a Douglas DC-8 that had crash-landed wheels-up near Heathrow Airport. Pics and story here. (Incidentally, after a similar landing, that DC-8 lived to fly again, only to crash again, this time with fatal results.)

This time two years ago:
Where's the daylight gone?

This time four years ago:
All Saints' Day - Wszystkich Świętych

Manufacturing a city of culture

2011-10-31T08:40:00.011+01:00

I was in Łódź over the weekend to speak at the Regional Congress of Culture (how strange that sounds in English!). Taking part in a panel about fostering growth of a creative industries sector and urban regeneration, my role was to present the UK experience in this.

Łódź has a problem with its self-image. It's clearly a second-league city; Warsaw, Poznań, Katowice, Kraków, Wrocław and the Tri-City are fast-growing metropolises with low unemployment (3.5%-5%). But Łódź (10.4% unemployment) - with Lublin (9.2%) and Białystok (11.9%) - are cities lagging behind. I did note a burst of rapid growth around the second half of the last decade in Łódź - but that growth spurt ran out of steam. My most recent visits here left me with a vague sense of disappointment that the city has somehow stopped developing.

One of the problems of the city is its people. As the deputy mayor told yesterday's session of the congress, Łódź has over 250 million zlotys (₤50 million) in unpaid rent from its council tenants. (Private landlords fare no better - a UK investor recently approached the BPCC to see what could be done about tenants not paying him rent.)

Łódź has a run-down feel to it. I stepped out onto Piotrkowska, the main drag - early Saturday evening... the lights were on but the streets were empty. The main shopping street of Poland's second* city, and yet shops shut at four o'clock on a Saturday. Turning off Piotrkowska, unsavoury characters stood menacingly outside alcohol shops filling the air with expletive-filled dialogue. Grafitti lacked any other purpose than marking territory and mindless football preferences. No art, no culture, no humour. The city's art cinema has three shows a week (none at weekends).

Time, then, for a communist-era joke. The Soviet ambassador in Warsaw was puzzled when he received an invite from the Czechoslovak embassy to attend a celebration marking the Czechoslovak Day of the Sea. “But why?” asked the ambassador. “Czechoslovakia has no sea” "Well,” came the reply, “you invited us to the Soviet Day of Culture..."

So is Łódź a City of Culture or not? Is this merely an aspirational slogan, driven by the accidental presence of a world-class film school, the vestiges of a fashion industry and a few software companies? And is this enough to build on?

It's worth turning to the UK experience, the extent to which cities like Liverpool have Glasgow managed to turn around and to shed old stereotypes. To what extent do the city authorities need to pump-prime the turnaround, putting money into refurbishing public buildings, public spaces – will that attract creative people?

The impression I was left with was of a city that's lost its way - that has an idea of where it want to get to, but is clueless as to how to get there. The debate was interesting. Certain notions were agreed by all; Łódź needs to attract and retain talented young people, who will come to study in the city, and will stay there to build their career, start companies, employ others, contribute to local society. The university has pulled itself up - it's now joined Warsaw University, Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska) and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków as Poland's only universities in the global top 500.

So the students come; but how to make the students stay?

Łódź has potential. The streets have atmosphere; crumbling industrial-era tenements, unreconstructed communist-era klimat (the architecture of the TV building being a nice example)... low rents by Warsaw standards - vast swathes of real estate ripe for gentrification, a huge film-set (much like London's Docklands before redevelopment). Yet the deputy mayor shied away from gentrification as an answer (what would happen to the indigenous people squeezed out by yuppie-style property prices?).

And here we reached a certain problem, one that even robustly politically-incorrect Poland doesn't wish to confront. When talking about 'culture' in the sense of high culture - theatre, ambitious cinema, classical music, literature - there will always be large proportions of any population for whom it is simply inaccessible. Pan Heniek and Pan Ziutek, standing outside the Żabka store swigging vodka z gwintu and swearing aggressively, are not going to enjoy an Ibsen play no matter how much money the public sector pumps into subsidised theatre.

What to do with these people (who're probably not paying rent either)? Let the market force them out of town? The city authorities don't know... Where are they going to find the money to build social housing into which they have a duty of care towards anyone evicted from council flats in town?

Grafitti, smashed windows, litter, boorish behaviour in the streets do not endear the city to would-be gentrifiers. Tackle these first, and the rest will fall into place. Trendy bars, cafes and eateries will spring up, entrepreneurs will have ideas, people will flock - it can be done. Look at Warsaw's Praga district - Ząbkowska, for example. It's gentrifying at a rapid pace.
To what extent do public authorities have any influence over market forces in terms of which cities are on the ascendant, which ones are stagnant, and which are dying on their feet? What can City Hall do to promote growth - driven by a creative industries sector?

If we’re looking for exemplars – take a look at this. The cult design store, Pan Tu Nie Stał, with its ultra hip and trendy PRL-themed clothing and artefacts. It shows what can be done with an idea.

One of the speakers on the panel was the boss of a local IT firm. He mentioned a sobering fact. His company posted job ads for a junior programmer and for the personal assistant to the head of HR. There were five applications for the programmer's job. Over 500 application for the PA's job. Poland - like many other countries in the developed world - is churning out too many marketing, sociology, philology, media studies and linguistics graduates - and not enough engineers, scientists or biotechnologists. How to address this - at primary school level, I would argue. Every bit as important as imbuing in schoolchildren an love of the arts.

To sum up – far more questions than answers – despite the evident good will of the city authorities and the cultured part of the local population, there’s still no road map for the way forward. How will Łódź look in four years time, when, via Stryków, it becomes accessible my motorway to Warsaw, Poznań and Gdańsk? When Łódź Fabryczna is completed and a rail journey from Warsaw takes less than one hour?

My guess is a Łódź renaissance will slowly get under way, driven by young people getting increasingly wealthy, displaying hipness and trendiness, buying flats in old tenements and doing them up, more trendy bars appearing. But this will happen much more slowly than in Warsaw's Praga. We shall see.

Above: Hipster hangout; Owoce i Warzywa ('Fruit and Vegetables') ul. Traugutta 9. On the window it says KAWA ALKOHOL TWÓRCZOŚĆ ('Coffee alcohol creativity'). In the door, a poster for Bajkonur, a 'creative space' with rehearsal rooms, a stage, a café. In the foreground, bike stands of the correct design, correctly situated with correct signage. And an amsterdamka - lady's framed pushbike. Not as hip as a fixie, but nearly there - and front tyre different from rear tyre...

* Łódź has traditionally been Poland's second city. However, due to depopulation (it's one of Poland's fastest depopulating cities), it has been overtaken by Kraków in terms of numbers of inhabitants. And if you take the Silesian agglomeration as one cities rather than as ten towns clustered together, Łódź is actually Poland's fourth city.

This time last year:
My thousandth post

This time two years ago:
Closure of ul. Poloneza

This time three years ago:
Scenes from a suburban petrol station

This time four years ago:
Red Arrows over Lincolnshire from 30,000 ft

Wódźew Łidz or Łódź Widzew

2011-10-30T21:38:00.003+01:00

The old Łódź Fabryczna is no more, shut down for good, to be knocked down and replaced by a bright, modern underground station in some unforeseeable time in the future. (Three years? Dream on!)

Anyway, if you're coming to Łódź from Warsaw by train (the journey by road being execrable), your train will get no further than Łódź Widzew. To centre of town is another six and half kilometres (four miles). This is akin to closing Warsaw's Central station and having all trains from the west terminate at W-wa Zachodnia, or closing Birmingham New Street and having all trains from London terminate at Stechford. Coming home on Sunday, I paid more for my taxi to the station from my hotel than I paid for my ticket from Łódź Widzew back to Warsaw (my hotel being walking distance from Łódź Fabryczna).

Above: the arrival of the 11:15 train from Warsaw (running time - just under two hours; twice the time of the London Euston to Rugby service in the mid-'70s; same distance). A station in the middle of a field. Serving a destination that likes to be considered as Poland's second city.

Above: There's no underground passage between platforms and only one footbridge. And just as Łódź Widzew becomes the city's main station - the footbridge gets closed. To cross the tracks means having to walk to either end of the 300m-long platform.

The worst thing about all this is that this state of affairs will carry on for years and years. It's not doing the city of Łódź any favours.

A more informative article from the railway point of view over at Behind The Water Tower (Dyzpozytor himself hailing from Łódź and being personally affected by the Fabryczna closure). Maps and links to timetables.

This time two years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden

Of cycles, economic and human

2011-10-29T19:25:00.004+02:00

Nikolai Kondratieff (or Kondratiev), a Soviet economist, had worked out in the 1920s, looking at booms and busts in commidity prices since biblical times, that there is a historical long wave that oscillates between plenty and want that's around 50-60 years long. Kondratieff's work came to Stalin's attention, delighted that the Great Depression affecting the capitalist world was indeed, as Marx had insisted, a historical inevitability. But Kondratieff had the temerity of telling the Brilliant Genius of Humanity that the capitalist world would come out of the Depression as sure as day followed night. This angered the Great Architect of Communism greatly, who had Kondratieff packed off to the Gulag, where he died.

Kondratieff's work came to wider public attention in the west in the 1980s - 50 years after the Great Depression. Kondratieff's thesis was that the intervals between economic downturns was predicated by technology; I rather posit that it is to do with the human lifespan; people leading a company, a bank or a nation's economy into crisis would have learned their lesson, but would not be around to lead their firms, banks or countries into the next downturn. But the 80s straddled two short-wave downturns - one in late '70s, one in the early '90s.

The '80s (well, at least the period from '83 to '88) were a period of boom. This boom - in the UK at least - was fuelled by Margaret Thatcher's deregulation of Britain's financial services sector - the Big Bang in the City. Scrapping many of the restrictive practices that were said to hold back the market, she opened the door to derivatives trading, day-trading, options and many other forms of purely speculative financial plays that proved to be - ultimately - unsustainable. Economist Roger Bootle (link here), has suggested recently on the BBC Business News website that when markets start buying and selling things as exotic as options on the volatility of the dingbat, a crash is bound to follow.

The Kondratieff cycle has elongated itself. We're now The coming recession is likely to be part of a prolonged downturn (something I suggested here - a downturn lasting around one-eighth of the average human lifespan). It will not be resolved until the Great Absurdities can be fixed. Countries and households living beyond their means - people earning more money than the value they put into their jobs (here I'm thinking about the public sectors in many countries, not least Greece), balanced budgets, and corporations looking at long-term sustainability rather than short-term profits. Investors should be content with lower returns on their savings, in exchange for knowing that their money is being invested in sustainable businesses - not on purely speculative plays.

The global economy will emerge from this downturn (can we call it Great Depression II - abbreviated to GDII?) much the wiser. Voters will (hopefully) be less likely to elect people like Berlusconi or the socalists in Hungary or Greece who play fast and loose with taxpayers' money, racking up huge unsustainable debts (note the recent defeat of tax-and-spend parties in Poland's elections).

As I wrote recently, Poland has not got into similar trouble for a variety of reasons. Whichever politician included into the draft of the Polish Constitution the paragraph that the country's debt should not exceed 60% of GDP (and that emergency measures should kick in on the debt exceeding 55% of GDP) should be immediately given a Polonia Restituta and have streets named after him or her. And Polish banks were either too dimwitted or prudently cautious (delete as appropriate) to go on a wild lending spree or to invest in sub-prime mortgages, junk bonds or risky derivatives.

A final point. Poles (and indeed citizens of all the Soviet bloc countries) have first-hand memories of hyperinflation (1,400% a year in 1990), shortages of most consumer products, 20% unemployment. All this happened within the past 25 years. To Poles, what's going on now is a blip compared to what they lived through. The average Pole TV-viewer, watching the Occupiers of Wall Street, the Indignados of Madrid, the Greeks setting fire to whatever's flammable including themselves, thinks that these are the protests of essentially soft people, mollycoddled for decades, who're finally reaping the economic whirlwind.

Economic long-wave cycles are largely predicated by human memory. German hyperinflation on the 1920s and its effects - Hitler's democratic rise to power - are why the Bundesbank so assiduously protected the Deutchmark from losing value. Unbridled greed, unrestrained by a longer-term view; mindless consumerism - now, the world is paying the price. We can look at the global banking crisis, the 2009 recession, the sovereign debt crisis, the eurozone crisis - and the forthcoming recession - in economic terms. I'd like to look at it from a philosophical and human point of view.

Economic systems cannot tolerate absurdity for very long. Something had to snap. Greed and laziness, soaring property prices, ever-more abstract speculation on our financial markets.

The question Jak żyć?'('how to live'), which was asked by a farmer of premier Donald Tusk during the recent election campaign, became a slogan of the opposition.

It is a fundamentally important question.For my part, saving rather than spending, frugality and financial prudence, using a small, economic car only sparingly - foregoing exotic holidays, not spending big money on consumer electronics and clothes, segregating rubbish, yet living in a large, comfortable house in a quiet suburb - is my recipe for economic success. Working for several companies rather than for one employer that can sack you when things go sour (as has happened to me in the past). Looking forward several years rather than to the end of the month. Jak żyć is about being able to place yourself in a macroeconomic context - your time and place on the planet, economic cycles that ebb and flow.

This time last year:
Why didn't I read this before: Grapes of Wrath

This time two years ago:
Małopolska from the train

This time three years ago:
Grading ul. Poloneza

More hipster mounts

2011-10-28T21:21:00.008+02:00

Above: full marks for hitting all the trendy requirements for a fashionable hipster mount - the bike in the foreground; old-school PRL-era Romet track frame perfectly restored (to name a bike 'Super' - how ironic can you get?); rear-facing rear drop-outs (so rare! yet so essential for a well-functioning fixie). No brakes (kids - don't try this unless you know what you're doing). But best of all non-matching wheels; four-spoke carbon fibre aero wheel front (with red-rimmed rubber) and trad rear wheel, white rim, yellow-walled tyre.

Below: two matching fixies... His and hers? His and his? Hers and hers? We don't know. That's the point. One in front is more radical; no brakes, tyres of different colours, drop handlebars, drivetrain accented in blue, rear-facing rear dropouts. One behind has a front brake, flat bars, white hubs.

This time last year:
Welcome to Warsaw

This time two years ago:
Just like the old days

Classic truck cavalcade

2011-10-27T22:04:00.001+02:00

Every now and then, Warsaw yields some interesting classic vehicles. Below: here's one still in use - a Praga V3S with crane. Distinguishable by its snub-nosed appearance (short engine compartment that does not protrude far beyond the front axle), the V3S was in production for 32 years - from 1953 to 1985. Once a common sight in the communist world, now a rarity.

Below: A Dodge WC51 Weapons Carrier, 3/4 Ton. Built in huge numbers during WWII, the WC51 served also thanks to Lend Lease in the Soviet Army, which is probably how this example ended up in Poland.

Below: probably travelling in convoy with the Dodge Weapons Carrier, a GAZ-51 ambulance in the markings of the Polish People's Army. This one's marked 'Zavod im. Molotova' which means it's a pre-1956 model. The GAZ-51 was licence built in Poland as the FSC Lublin-51.

As always, good to see industrial heritage well looked after and on the road. Vehicles half a century old - or older - need to be kept going for future generations to enjoy looking at.

This time last year:
Narrow back-roads clogged with commuters

This time two years ago:
Autumn gold, Łazienkowski Park

This time four years ago:
Of bishops and bands

Warsaw - Poznań - Warsaw

2011-10-26T22:27:00.004+02:00

An early start yesterday - I had the first presentation slot at a conference on public-private partnerships in Poznań and was due on stage at 9:20. Problem: the first train of the day from Warsaw arrives in Poznań at 9:51. Take the earlier one? Well, that arrives at... 2:40. I toyed with the idea of flying (dep. Okęcie 5:50, arr. Poznań 6:45); then I remembered that Martin and Paddy will be driving there, so I cadged a lift.

Leaving Warsaw just after five, it took two hours and ten minutes to cover the 120km to Stryków, where the A2 motorway currently fizzles out in a muddy field. (A sarcastic 'thank you' to the procession of infrastructure ministers who, over the past 20 years, have done so little to provide Poland with infrastructure.) Average speed: around 38 mph.

At Stryków, we join the Modern World. Driving at the (new) legal maximum speed of 140kmh (87mph) - a warning bleeper sounded on Martin's TomTom whenever he exceeded it - we covered the 190 km from Stryków to the turn-off for Poznań in just over an hour and half.

The motorway - a public-private partnership operated by Autostrady Wielkopolskie - was a delight to travel on. Only two lanes in each direction (something that might be regretted by future generations), it cost 90 zł (18 quid) in tolls there and back. But what a contrast with the usual way one gets about Poland! Quite like western Europe, the normal world. At last.

But how just how long can the Polish economy wait for the A2 to connect Warsaw to the German border? And what about tempting all those trucks off the road onto the railways?

In Poznań, I learn that the third panellist in the first session, a lawyer, was on his way from Warsaw... by taxi... because that flight from Warsaw - was cancelled.

This time two years ago:
The clocks go back - but when should they go forward?

This time three years ago:
Warsaw's first Metro line is completed

A slow farewell to Powiśle

2011-10-24T20:50:00.007+02:00

We moved to ul. Fabryczna in December 2004; the office was operational in January 2005 with a new chief executive officer. Time now for another move, with a new CEO, from Solec, the southern end of Powiśle, to Śródmieście - to ul. Nowogrodzka (the Pl. Trzech Krzyży end). Below: the old office to the left, looking down ul. Fabryczna.

The office relocation has nothing to do with Mr Palikot and his Movement encamping themselves in the same building as us, but was planned long before they moved in upstairs from us. Below: his campaign trailer, chained to a parking meter. It perplexed the parking wardens; for this was not a car - so how could they give it a ticket? Clamp it for the duration of the campaign? That's exactly what Mr Palikot would have wanted! So, they left it as was...

Anyway, over the past seven (gosh!) years, I've grown very fond of Powiśle, an under-rated part of Warsaw, central (three bus stops from the Central Station), yet very quiet (click label 'Powiśle' below for all posts relating to this part of town).

The new location's great for restaurants, shops, public transport... but I will miss Powiśle. Below: blocks of flats at the Vistula end of ul. Fabryczna

This time last year:
A slow farewell to my Nissan Micra

Visceral and permanent - part II

2011-10-23T20:03:00.003+02:00

His children had settled down; it was quiet upstairs. He'd go for a short walk, around their peaceful suburb of Tapiola. The snow was falling in a more measured way; as he set off, Aarno didn't feel the cold, dressed in a windcheater he'd thrown on hurriedly before leaving the house.

He walked briskly thinking about the events that had unfolded last week. He had such hopes that the Hungarians, rising against the Red Star, would be able to wrest their freedom from the Soviet yoke. Now – with radio reports of hundreds of tanks pouring into Budapest since yesterday morning, he felt those same emotions that had stirred him to fight when he heard of the Red Army invading Finland. Aarno felt a different kind of rage this time, frustrated that he could do nothing. Nothing. His president was a Soviet apologist. Keeping Finland out of trouble by appeasing the Kremlin. What kind of posture was that? Sure, Finland was small, and had hardly any allies, but this was about truth, about honour, about national pride... Aarno had voted against President Kekkonen, but that fellow-traveller had sneaked in to office by just two electoral college votes. Where was that spirit of 1939? The USSR will end up ruling the world because of the cowardice of its neighbours, who will fall under its influence, one by one, until the brutal heel of communism will end up stamping down upon the face of every human being on earth... Where was NATO, where was the USA?

Aarno, beset by pessimism, considered calling in upon his colleague Tor, who used to work with him in the same law firm and now worked for the United Nations' office in Helsinki. Just the man to talk to at a time like this. He'll have some good insider information – and Tor, who lived a few blocks away, has a well-stocked drinks cabinet with excellent alcohols from all around the world. But no. That would not end well, of a Monday night... He thought about his daughters; turned smartly about face, like he used to do in army drills, and headed back home. Time to rest. His wife Alli would be back from Stockholm tomorrow evening; he'd meet her at the airport. She'd help him get over it; his beloved companion; so wise, so intelligent – no doubt the news from Budapest would be discussed by psychiatric doctors from all over Europe at the conference. He could talk it all through with her; the demons would leave him; he just needed her by his side.

His anger abated after the short walk; Aarno approached their house, fumbling in his pockets for his house key – in the aftermath of his rage, he walked out with neither wallet nor keys. He tried the back door but that was locked. Their eldest daughter Sylvi's bedroom looked out onto the street; he picked up a few small stones and began throwing them at the window. After a while, a little face appeared. However, she could not open the double-glazed windows, nor could she hear her father's exasperated shouts. Minutes later, a police patrol car turned into their street. Aarno, now shivering with cold, tried to be calm as he explained his predicament. As soon as he mentioned Budapest, a sympathetic glimmer appeared on the face of the senior officer. He too had fought in the Winter War. He understood Aarno's feelings.

Sylvi's face now showed up at a downstairs window to take a closer look at the flashing blue light of the police car. Aarno spoke to her, but realised that the five year-old probably couldn't reach for the door latch, and even if she could, she wasn't strong enough to turn it. In any case; she should be in bed, asleep; she'd be off to kindergarten in the morning.

The two police officers were good-natured enough and could understand that something needed to be done in this situation; another call was coming in on the short-wave radio. Aarno compared his situation to those Hungarians facing Soviet tanks 1,500 kilometres to the south. He pulled free a loose brick from his garden wall and, asking the older officer to come with him, he walked along the side of the house and smashed the small window to the larder, which he then carefully opened. With the policeman's help, Arno managed to wriggle through the opening, smashing several jars in the process, landing head-first in a mess of fruit preserves and shattered glass. Overnight he could put a piece of cardboard over the window, lock the larder door from the inside, call a glazier in the morning. No harm done, other than some minor cuts to his scalp and hands, jam in his hair and on his jacket. And earlier that evening, he'd been thinking of throwing rocks through the windows of the Soviet Embassy! Aarno put Silvi to bed for the second time that night, reassuring her that all would be well.

Another Scotch before he went to bed, he pondered? No. It won't help. Maybe a prayer to God will. That God may look after his nation, let them be free and live in peace. And may God look after the Hungarians. With that, Aarno went to bed, not entirely satisfied.

This time last year:
Autumn colours, locally

This time two years ago:
Edinburgh

Jeziorki, autumn dusk

2011-10-22T21:12:00.004+02:00

It was one of those afternoons when I knew a stroll at twilight would be rewarded by some great images. And so it came to pass...

Above: turn off ul. Karczunkowska, into the fields, fields lying fallow, fields full off mugwort (wrotycz). The owners of the land do not cultivate it, presumably hoping on vast returns when one day they come to sell it to developers.

Above and below: ul. Żmijewska, a Warsaw street (check it on the maps!) looking west, as the sun sets. I walk on.

Below: ul. Karczunkowska, the entrance to the scrapyard and to where one the rampa na kruszywa stood. The developers came, tore it down, then ran out of money to replace it with new housing. Grass triumphs, and I must say I'm rather glad.

On to the railway line. Below: the level crossing keeper's building and Posterunek Ostępowy (post. odst. Jeziorki), the fiery red remains of the sunset reflecting off the windows.

Below: turning back home, along ul. Karczunkowska, the bus loop on my right, the local shop (once called Tomasz, now Bodzio) on my left.

Below: standing outside the local shop, looking up at the twilight sky. Note the vapour trail. It's getting cold - time to get myself home.

This time four years ago:
Autumn sun going out

Twilight, Okęcie

2011-10-21T22:05:00.008+02:00

This evening, as the cycling season comes to an end (I don't cycle to work after the clocks go back), I decided to cycle through Pola Mokotowskie, down Żwirki i Wigury, past the airport and down towards Jeziorki the back way. A good decision, as the light was magnificent.

Above: The railway line at the new level crossing built by ul. Czempińska. Not official yet, but on bike, eminently crossable. Below: From the same spot - a town-bound Koleje Mazowieckie train passes by. The combination of catenary wires and clouds, under-lit by a sun that's already set, give the scenes that sublime aesthetic feel.

And all the time, planes are flying over, one after another. Left: A WizzAir Airbus A320 from London Luton about to cross the fence, five minutes ahead of schedule.

Below: a digger standing idle on the roadworks linking the new S79 to the S2. Will they be ready in time for the Euro 2012? The experts doubt it. The amount of work needed to connect the two roads at Węzeł Lotnisko and at ul. Sasanki is still vast - and winter will be coming soon.

I'm happy that I got some gorgeous photos that click with my spiritual side, that bring that sublime feeling of connection with the eternal.

This time last year:
The hammer of darkness comes down

This time three years ago:
Flying south for the winter

This time four years ago:
London's hidden glories

Visceral and permanent - a short story

2011-10-20T21:22:00.003+02:00

Aarno knew he was about to grapple with his demons again. He'd just put the children to bed (his wife being away on a medical conference in Stockholm), he fried a piece of fillet steak, poured himself a large whisky sour, and switched on the wireless. The newscaster told of Soviet tanks and infantrymen pouring into Budapest. All of a sudden his mood changed. Until that moment, he'd been very content. He'd just driven home from work in his brand new Oldsmobile Holiday 88, having had a successful day at work. The Helsinki court had upheld his pleading on behalf of his corporate client, and a new partner had just joined his law firm, the very lawyer the he'd been trying to recruit for some time. Things were going well – and then the news on the radio.

His three small daughters having settled down in their spacious bedrooms upstairs, Aarno bid their nanny goodnight. He had just settled down to a drink and was looking forward to listening to the new jazz record by John Coltrane and Miles Davis. But what he heard on the news infuriated him.

He knew what the Soviet army looked like; he'd faced that barbarism himself, 17 years earlier, when, as a young man in his final year at law school, he'd been called up to defend his homeland against an invasion from the east. For three months he fought them – hordes of sub-human idiots – forever charging forward through the deep snowdrifts, while he and his comrades would cut them down with machine gun fire. The Soviets were unable to bring artillery or tanks forward to support their infantry because of the thick forests shielding the Finnish positions, and so wave upon wave of infantry attacks was their only tactic. As long as the Finns' ammunition held out, the result was mechanised slaughter.

Aarno remembered it in numbing detail; faces of young men, many Asiatic types, comically distorted with drunken hatred, running forward in slow-motion through the knee-deep powder, encumbered in their khaki coats – how the Finnish machine gunners raked wave after wave of these stupid Bolsheviks – how he despised this cattle sent forth by Stalin and his commissars to take his fatherland by force. More ammunition belts. More charging Soviets. Fire! Watch them die like the sub-human vermin they were. Watch them fall like flies. Watch the 12.7mm bullets rip chunks of flesh, of brain, out them, knocking them over, into pink snow. A few mortar shells fell ineffectually between the Finnish dug-outs. He despised his enemy, utterly. And yet still they came on – driven forward by the NKVD troops at their rear. Onward into their inevitable deaths, piling on top of the dead and wounded from previous waves. Until the Finns' ammunition ran out. And then, clad in their white snow-suits, Aarno and his comrades would silently ski back to prepared positions from which they could continue to fight...

Viipuri finally fell to the Red hordes. Viipuri – where Aarno's mother's family was from. The city bombed and shelled, the civilians forced to flee. Finland's second city lost, a beautiful, historic city that would soon fill with the dim proletariat, shuffling to and from their factories, cheering Stalin – God, how he hated the Soviet Union, the Russians, Communism – he loathed it all. If he were Eisenhower, he'd not hesitate to turn Moscow – that heart of inhuman darkness – into an atomic wasteland. The contrast between the dirt and brutality of Russia and the civilised, agreeable peace of modern Finland was to Aarno too great a gulf to bear.

As he listened to the radio, to descriptions of the Red Army entering Budapest, to impassioned pleas to the world for help from the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution, Aarno found himself shouting at at his wireless set, swearing at it at the top of his voice. His daughters woke up and began to cry. “Why was daddy shouting?” On hearing their distress, blaming no one else other than the Soviet people, he became angrier still. That his baby girls would live to grow up in the shadow of that filthy, backward, brutal, stupid nation! That the USSR should be there – next to their homeland – armed to the teeth and threatening the peace and prosperity of the Western World!

The successful Helsinki lawyer's livid face contorted into the very quintessence of what it is to hate, his eyeballs bulging, his hands shaking in frustrated rage. He'd been in this state before, but then he had had the trigger of a heavy machine gun in his hand, and hundreds of enemy soldiers in the gun sights. But what now? Leave his children, drive to the Soviet Embassy and throw rocks at the windows? What effect would that have? He could say goodbye to his legal career; he'd bring shame upon himself and his family? Aarno turned off the radio. He opened the door to the back garden, and stepped out. The cool of the night air helped calm him down, a few snow flakes fell, touched his face, reminding him of childhood. The anger would not go away; but what could he do?

This time last year:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams II

This time two years ago:
Going North, the quick way

This time three years ago:
Glorious autumn dusk

This time four years ago:
Last man voting?

The Ballad of Tess and Adam

2011-10-18T20:58:00.003+02:00

...Or why no one's occupying the Warsaw Stock Exchange building.

The global protests against the fat cats of banking that have drawn the world into economic crisis have passed largely unnoticed in Poland. A few youngsters protested in Warsaw on Sunday, but this was as nothing to the protests witnessed in Rome, Madrid, Athens, New York or London.

Why?

As Jacek Żakowski in yesterday's Gazeta Wyborcza points out, you'd be mightily pissed off if the bank lent you a lot of money on easy terms to buy a dream home, then repossessed it when you lost your job as a result of the economy imploding due to bankers' stupidity. Yet in Poland, he says, the banks would not lend people money in the first place, so they had no homes to repossess, and hence have less anger to vent.

I'd like to mention Tess and Adam, who got married in 2008. When they applied to the bank for a mortgage to buy a flat in Ochota, they faced an almost insurmountable obstacle course to get hold of the money. Despite being two young professional people with excellent job prospects, the banks looked for every reason not to lend them money. But being determined young professional people, they finally managed to borrow the money and bought the flat. Now they have two children, and are working hard to repay the mortgage. Some of their friends were less lucky - cooped up in tiny flats, they feel they can't have that second child they always wanted, and yet no bank would lend them the money to buy a larger flat.

Why are Poland's banks so reticent to put their depositors' money to use? Lack of imagination? Over-bureaucratic approach to lending? Risk aversion? Or good sense and prudent management of depositors' funds?

In hindsight, it's better that Tess and Adam had to go through long and unpleasant formalities to get that flat in an economy that's still moving forward than if they were to have been lent lots of money to buy something dearer and then for Tess to get sacked and Adam's business to grind to a halt and for them - and their two children - to lose the roof over their heads. For this is what has happened across the USA, in the UK and in western Europe. And there, such people are marching.

For another perspective - consider this. The EU Capital Requirements Directive III, implemented in the UK long ago and here in Poland from 1 January 2012, caps bankers' bonuses and redundancy pay-offs. In the UK, it applies to those 'identified staff' in key risk-taking positions in banks and brokerage houses whose bonuses exceed £500,000. In Poland, it will apply to people in those same positions, whose bonuses exceed the equivalent of... €50,000. Twelve times less.

No wonder Poles are not mad at their bankers in the way Brits, Americans, Italians, Greeks or Spaniards are. Neither did Poland's bankers behave in an wildly imprudent manner in the run-up to the crash, nor did they brazenly overpay themselves for failure. The Polish taxpayer has not had to bail out any banks.

Will Poland's economy go into recession? I think not. It's steaming ahead at a strong enough rate for any coming slow-down to be just that - a slow-down of growth, not a dip into economic contraction. 2009 all over again - the Green Island.

This time last year:
Of sausages and drains

This time two years ago:
In search of the Sublime Aesthetic at 36,000 ft

This time three years ago:
Lublin works its charm

This time four years ago:
London from the air

First frost

2011-10-16T20:46:00.005+02:00

It happens around this time of year - the first night during which temperatures fall below freezing. A clear sky, high pressure system, no winds... and I wake up to find szron (frost) on the lawn and on the cars. A lovely day to get out and about. While at two o'clock in the afternoon I'm feeling a bit foolish for inserting the quilted lining into my M-65 field jacket, by sunset I'm regretting not taking a pair of gloves with me.

Still, the light is wonderful; a cloudless sky for much of the day and more to come tomorrow. The sublime mood becomes me - that glorious sense of wonder; a consciousness moving across the surface of the planet, at one with it all.

Above: Jeziorki, ul. Karczunkowska, by the railway crossing, half an hour after sunset.

This time four years ago:
First frost

What gets eaten, what gets thrown away

2011-10-15T21:21:00.002+02:00

An interesting article caught my eye in today's Gazeta Wyborcza: what foods Poles tend to throw away, compared what their British counterparts discard. The graph is here (if you can't read Polish, the graphics are clear enough if viewed in conjunction with this post). The full article is here.

Although the graph looks convincing, it is actually comparing apples and pears (percentage of Poles saying which category of foodstuff they throw away compared to actual tonnage of food Brits throw away, broken down by category), the ranking is most thought provoking.

Nearly half of Poles claim to throw away more bread than any other sort of food disposed of - surprising, given the fact that bread has an almost holy status in Poland (much like rice does in China). In the UK, bread comes third (after vegetables and fruit). Indeed, Brits throw away nearly twice as much vegetable as they do bread.

Discussing this with Moni this morning, we agreed as to why this should be. Polish bread - which is wonderfully tasty, nourishing and generally fabulous - has an 'best by' date measured in hours. Because taste is all-important, flour-enhancers are not used, and so Polish bread goes stale very, very quickly. In Britain however, Mother's Pride, Sunblest and other white-sliced is so stuffed with chemicals that it will last a week and still be OK to smear Robertson's jam over (35% fruit content).

The massive amounts of fruit and veg that Brits chuck out can be put down to the semi-effectiveness of the 'five a day' campaign that the UK government has been promoting for years, getting the average citizen to increase his or her intake of fresh fruit and vegetables. Brits will buy (often out of guilt rather than conviction) large amounts of the stuff, but will then not be bothered to actually peel, squeeze, cut or otherwise prepare it and then eat it. (Am I right?) And so vegetables and fruit become number one and two food products that are wasted. Poles, I think on the whole have a healthier attitude to both money and food, so less gets binned (food accounts for a higher percentage of outgoings in Poland than in the UK).

Brits, says this article, throw away a billion tomatoes a year. Can that be right? That works out at 15 - 16 a year for every man, woman and child in the UK... one tomato every three weeks? Sounds about right... A billion boiled down, and it's not so scandalous. What is, however, is the fact that 39% of food that gets wasted does so at the point of production (crops rotting in the fields, unpicked), and another 19% in transit to the point of purchase.

In these constrained times - should we buy less and consume less? Or does buying more food than we need actually support jobs and businesses from field to table? Wasting food may be ethically wrong, but in economic terms...? Please feel free to discuss!

This time three years ago:
Białystok, rush hour

One Stop Beyond

2011-10-14T21:22:00.006+02:00

For some inexplicable reason*, my bus journey to Platan Park this morning was 20 minutes shorter than usual for the time of day. Large numbers of drivers taking an long weekend or what? I decide to travel on an extra stop and walk back. The purpose - see how Poleczki Business Park is coming on, get some exercise, take some snaps.

Modernist simplicity - Mies van der Rohe would have been proud. Building complete, not many tenants as yet. Perhaps getting here is putting off prospective clients. How about PKP building a new station between W-wa Dawidy and W-wa Okęcie and calling it W-wa Poleczki?

Having said that, ZTM, the urban transport authority, has significantly increased the number of buses coming this way; as well as the established 148, 165 and 306 routes, there's now the rush hours-only 331 that links Wilanowska Metro with this part of Warsaw, while the 575 running between Wilanowska and the airport now calls at intermediate stops rather then ferrying fresh air. And a cycle path (although did planners seriously believe that cyclists would cross ul. Poleczki twice rather than continue along the pavement between ul. Tango and ul. Taneczna?).

Below: a string of buses turning onto Poleczki from ul. Łączyny. Note the hot-water pipes, right foreground.

And on, towards Platan Park, past the site of a new Holiday Inn (due to open in Autumn 2012, after the football finals), close to the airport, convenient for the new south Warsaw business district. Below: looking west towards Poleczki Business Park.

Below: Platan Park looking south - in the distance (click to enlarge), new warehouses are emerging from the soil. And there's Hoover - a familiar name to one who spent so much of his life in the UK living near to the Hoover factory in Perivale...

* Thanks to the Młochów Blog, I discover that today was Teacher's Day, most schools closed. That explains it. Shows how many mammy's boys and girls get driven to school.

This time last year:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)

This time two years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!

This time three years ago:
Train links to town improving

This time four years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw