Under Rzeszów – subterranean inspirations

Two weeks ago, I was chatting to my brother about my desire to build a Museum of Entropy in tunnels under my garden. Brick-lined, the tunnels would have enclaves or niches built into the walls in which exhibits would be displayed, illuminated by candle light. Little did I think as I described the place that I'd soon be visiting something that is remarkably similar to that.

Rzeszów is a town I have visited regularly over the years, though I hadn't (until now) been in the extensive warren of underground cellars and tunnels under the old market square. Built in the 14th and 15th centuries to serve as storage areas for the shops above, the subterranean complex has had a thorough renovation and been repurposed as a tourist attraction.

Work on the complex took place in five stages from the 1960s through to 2020, with an initial focus on preserving the structural integrity of the historic buildings around the market square (to stop them from collapsing). Successive stages incorporated more and more chambers and passages into the complex.

Left: the steps go from one level to the next, down to a maximum depth of ten metres below the market square. For those with a taste for mysterious underground passages, this place is hugely atmospheric. The history full of invasions and fires, is told right through to WW2, when Jews sought shelter here from the Holocaust As such, it is a microcosm of Poland's ever-changing fortunes. Display cases, LCD screens and interactive exhibits tell the story. One salient point made is that religious tolerance was insisted upon by the city's 17th century owners (and rulers), the Lubomirski family; if Catholics, Jews, Protestants and Orthodox Christians were to co-exist peacefully, trade would flourish and the city would prosper.

Below: the city's story is told in graphic and textual form as one passes from chamber to chamber. [Apologies for the picture quality – hand-held at two seconds with an ultra-wide lens.]

Below: Rzeszów town hall, the following morning. The entrance to the underground complex is at one end of the market square; you emerge in a different place, which can be a bit disorientating.

I must say. it would be great to have such a complex under my garden – a maze of brick-lined tunnels running hither and thither. A bit like the Mole Man of Hackney!

This time last year:
Another canonical past-life dream

This time two years ago:
Cottagecore - a manifesto

This time three years ago
Ego, Consciousness and Soul

This time four years ago:
Samopoczucie, Joy and the Sublime Aesthetic

This time six years ago:
Autumn, with a railway theme

This time seven years ago:
A few words about coincidence

This time ten years ago:
Hello, pork pie [my week-long pork-pie diet]

This time 12 years ago:
The meaning of class - in England, in Poland

This time 13 years ago: 
First frost 

This time 17 years ago:
First frost 

Started the day well?

The daily routine begins with waking up before dawn, now that it's dark at around half past six, sunrise being a little before 7am now. Slippers on, a wee, make the bed – and then, before anything else, the first set of exercises of the day. Pull-ups. Eight in one go, from full-dangle to chin above the bar. This is now the standard; I remember the elation at managing six for the first time in November 2022, eight in February 2023 and nine on 18 September 2024. 

Doing the eight pull-ups first thing in the morning gives me a real boost and sets me up for the day. If I fail to do this, I feel that laziness has got one over on me; consequently the rest of the day either slips or is coloured by atonement and doubt. Waking up with a headache, the result of dehydration or a heavy night, is the one excuse I give myself for not starting the day with a burst of exercise.

Next up is a review of the to-do list in my day book. This gives shape to how the day is likely to unfold. What needs to be done, what's urgent, travel plans (when I need to leave to catch the train). The list is usually about four to seven points long. Whatever can be put off until the future generally is. Stress is to be avoided, as is guilt.

Now the laptop can be switched on. I like to tune into BBC Radio 4's Farming Today (05:45 UK, 06:45 in Jakubowizna) followed by the Today Programme which starts with the 6am news headlines, a review of the papers and the business news. I switch off with the sports. While listening to Radio 4, I make and drink my daily coffee.

The morning coffee is an integral part of the morning ritual. Grinding the beans (125 turns of the crank, enough ground coffee to fill the basket of my three-cup Bialetti), boiling water, filling the tank to the safety valve, dropping the basket in, screwing the top on and putting it on the hob. I heat it with the lid open, surfing the flame so as to quickly stop the brewing process before the angry sputtering starts (which leads to burnt coffee smell and taste compromising the brew).

Once drunk, the coffee does the trick, the digestive process is complete, and having emptied by bowels, I give thanks for my regularity and that everything's working properly, time to experience the sensation of gratitude for my health. 

And another eight pull-ups. After the caffeine jolt, before breakfast, and moving less weight (see above), it's this set that breaks records. This gives me a rush of adrenaline and endorphine, and I'm up for the challenges of the day. Which begins with breakfast. Porridge followed by smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, or a tuna sandwich. Protein and carbs. And fresh apple juice.

Generally, my morning ritual is the same across the week – early morning starts and business travel (something I try to limit these days) are the exceptions. This also means being in bed shortly after ten pm, so as I can get in a solid eight hours' of sleep. I do not use an alarm clock. Travel that necessitates the use of one to wake up at stupid o'clock is something I have cut out of my life. Too much stress. And given the clocks going back at the end of this month, once more, I shall not move my daily routine to accommodate the time change; rather I shall go to be one hour earlier, waking up one hour earlier, in other words at the same time relative to the sun.

This time eight years ago:
The rich get richer – hence Brexit and Trump

This time nine years ago:
Respect for pedestrians' lives? Not among Polish MPs

This time 12 years ago:
Autumnal gorgeousness in Warsaw

A little bit more like autumn

I asked on Tuesday whether that (8 October) would be the last hot day of the year – it wasn't. After a rainy Wednesday, yesterday (Thursday), saw my external digital thermometer record a high of 23.7°C at quarter past two in the afternoon sunshine. Today was also sunny, but the highest temperature was a mere 14°C, a big difference. So I set off wearing two layers, the outer being a mid-weight jacket. A cool wind from the north-west blew in my face on the outward leg of my walk. At no time did I feel overdressed or in need of removing my jacket. 

Autumnal – but that beautiful autumn, starting to turn gold. Mushrooms – and mushroom pickers – are noticeable in the forests (though I can see only toadstools). Below: a recently ploughed field on the south-eastern edge of Jakubowizna. The tree on the left shows evidence of early leaf-shedding.

Below: entering Widok, where, according the local Facebook page, one of the two shops here will be reopening under new management. It could do with improvement, in particular a move toward self-service and a wider selection of product. Widok's other small shop serves great locally sources smoked meats.

Below: a new(-ish) wooden home built in the old style, Widok.

Below: a roadside crucifix by a small pond in Widok near the junction for Węszelówka.

Below: a familiar view on the way back home, taken from the top of a heap of earth by the side of the track from Adamów Rososki to Machcin II.

Below: autumn's emblem. The other one I'm not yet seeing – babie lato – (or spider ballooning). 

Below: again, a familiar view; the track back to Jakubowizna dives into the trees as autumn starts painting its colours on the leaves.

Back home with 13,000 paces on the clock, a walk of just under two hours. A similar day tomorrow – sunshine forecast for the whole day, maximum temperature 14°C, so I should make the most of it.

This is ideal weather for tourism; not too hot, dry – and the schools and universities are back.

This time three years ago:
Sublime farewell to sunny summer days

[I had to start heating the house then; not so this year or last.]

This time five years ago:
Warsaw-Wrocław-Warsaw-Kielce-Warsaw

This time ten years ago:

Poland gets anglicised as Britain gets polonised

This time 11 years ago:
Ale, architecture and city politics

This time 12 years ago:
The pros and cons of roadside acoustic screens

This time 13 years ago:
Moaning about trains again

This time 14 years ago:
Warsaw streets – Dolna, Polna, Rolna, Smolna, Wolna. Lost?

This time 16 years ago:
Ditches, landscapes, autumn

This time 17 years ago:
Golden autumn in Łazienki park

The human mind seeks mystery and magic

So much of our entertainment feed is to do with the unknown. From unsolved murder cases to UFOs, from ghost stories to the great puzzles of the past, there's something about the way our brains are wired that make it easy for us to get roped in by a good mystery. We want to hear about something puzzling – and then we want the solution, and preferably one that's not mundane but one that intrigues.

In our day-to-day lives, we observe patterns. Since childhood we have been putting two and two together to make sense of our reality and the world around us. And it's the anomalies that don't fit those established patterns that grab our attention. Philosopher of the history of science (or historian of the philosophy of science!) Thomas Kuhn said that discovery starts with the awareness of anomaly.

A pattern that we can all observe is the correlation between cause and effect – every physical phenomena that we observe has a physical cause. Magic is defined as a phenomenon that has no physical cause. 

We live, we learn, we accept explanations (our smartphones and laptops are beyond the comprehension of most of us, and yet we don't consider them to be magic) because we outsource the understanding of how they work to someone else. It has ever been thus – but historically, we'd outsource that understanding to shamans and holy men rather than scientists and engineers.

Curiosity is a natural characteristic of an organism as it adapts to its environment. There are wide variations in degree of curiosity from individual to individual. From the Darwinian point of view, too much curiosity is bad for survival, as is too little. Biologically, it's dangerous to be too curious, but then again it's dangerous not to be curious enough. But having somewhat more than average is a good thing, I'd argue. And I'd define a good teacher as one who raises their pupils' curiosity levels, placing more value in encouraging curious minds than in rote learning, important though that be.

The curious mind is intrinsically attracted to mystery, to trying to work out what has yet to be worked out. Curiosity keeps the human spirit questing, it gives purpose to life. Indeed, the advance of science and technology is about uncovering and making sense of the unknown. But there's more that's unknown than just physical matter. The arcane, the hermetic, the occult – the hidden. That which some do not wish others to see. Why not? Can I see it? Please?

Of course the greatest mystery, considered by nearly all of the 117 billion human beings who reached adulthood in health – what happens to our consciousness, our subjective experience of existing, when we die?

This time last year:
"Praise the Lord!" – thoughts about gratitude

This time two years ago:
Too busy running around and making cider!
[Biennial bearing; none in 2023, lots this year.]

This time three years ago:
All together, saving our planet

This time four years ago:
Consciousness, evolution and diet

This time nine years ago:
Chill beneath blue skies

This time 13 years ago:
Poles vote for continuity

This time 14 years ago:
Our daily Polish bread

This time 15 years ago:
Friday, Warsaw, October

Last hot day of the year?

Some time after lunch, I noticed that it was hotter outside than indoors. I opened all the windows and the front door, and as soon as I could close the laptop, I was off for an autumnal walk to glory in the warmth. Dressed in a shirt with a light jacket, I was soon overheated, so the jacket was removed and stowed in the rucksack. Thermometer in my phone said 23°C. Every hour of heat stores in the walls and postpones the day when I have to start heating the house.

Below: gone 4pm and setting off; just across the road from my place – canonical Jakubowizna. Familiar landscapes for my soul.

Below: traditional wooden house along ulica Główna (Main Street), Chynów.

Below: junction of ul. Szkolna ('School Street') and ul. Sportowa ('Sporty Street'), Chynów. The white barriers in the centre of the photo are the bridge over the river Czarna.

Below: house at the edge of the forest, Chynów.

Below: from the footbridge over the DK50, the view looking northwest towards Wola Pieczyska. Note the way the setting sun lights up the electrical wires, looking like the autumnal spiders webs that are still not around in any numbers.

Below: for the first time this autumn, the sun is setting before six pm. It's setting over Lasopole; photo taken from the road bridge over the DK50 between Sułkowice and Chynów. 

UPDATE: 10 October. After a rainy Wednesday (9 October), today was hotter still, with the thermometer reading 23.7°C at 14:15. Strictly one-layer weather on my walk today. For mid-October – lovely!

This time six years ago:
Warszawa Zachodnia Peron 8 to reopen
[Note: the station has since been renamed W-wa Zachodnia Peron 9]

This time seven years ago:
Learning to fly (swan pics)

This time nine years ago:
Scotland's answer to the Hoover Building

This time 11 years ago:
In which I don't vote in the mayoral referendum, thus helping to save HG-W's job

This time 12 years ago:
Gorgeous cars from Czechoslovakia

This time 13 years ago:
Donald Tusk and Co. get re-elected 

This time 15 years ago:
Poland's wonderful bread

This time nine years ago:
An October Friday in Warsaw

Keeping them down for our good

Society has finally learned to recognise and call out the Dark Triad of behaviours – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These traits are particularly prominent in those who are driven to lord it over others. Seekers of power, wealth and status. They gravitate towards politics and business; examples of those who have caused untold damage to fellow humans are all round us. From Putin to Al-Fayed they are easy to spot once they've reached their pinnacle and unleashed their venom.

The arrogant bastard needs keeping in his place (far more rarely, her place). Keep the fuckers down, I say. Don't let them run your country, your city, your town, your company, your anything. Identify their behaviour early on – and shun the shit out of them. Turn your back on them. 

HR departments – learn to identify the power-crazed bigmouths through careful sifting of CVs and by asking the right questions at interviews. Remember, people join a company but leave a manager. And in today's labour market, predicated by continual demographic decline, you don't want toxic twats rising up the fast-track management ladder, chasing promotions until they get that top job. They will cause talented staff to quit in droves.

Political parties – be very careful when selecting candidates. Consider the dangers of what such a person would be like in charge of things. The likelihood is that a person with the Dark Triad in a position of absolute power would eventually end up being an utter disaster for his nation. Hitler is the perfect example.

Narcissists are experts at masking their true nature; they have to. They are skilled at deception, weaving plausible narratives to gloss over their more egregious mistakes. As Machiavellians, they will play one side against another, using people instrumentally, as means to an end. As psychopaths they have zero empathy with those whom they must crush if they get in their way. And here, Stalin is the perfect example. [Trump doesn't have the brains to be truly Machiavellian. But then he makes up for it with his full-blown clinical narcissist behaviour disorder.]

"If only we could have known," people wail with hindsight. But as word spreads about the Dark Triad, as society acquires a better grasp of psychology, those who still hunger for power and status will fall into two categories – those who can mask well, and those who can't. The latter will be kept away from positions of power. Those who can mask will be going out of their way to fake empathy, charity, team spirit and openness. They understand full well that such displays are but a means to their end – power and status. But if we (we the people) are watchful, tell-tales signs will out. Freudian slips, what have you. 

So who should lead us? The humble and honest. But typically they have no desire to lead. The quest to find leadership talent untainted by the Dark Triad is much harder than merely giving in to him who shouts "ME! ME! ME!" the loudest. It should entail coaching and encouragement, persuasion and support once a potential leader is identified.

This time three years ago:
On the importance of observation

This time four years ago:
Rural supply, rural demand

This time five years ago:

Progress on the Radom line

This time six years ago:
Down with this sort of thing! Kler, reviewed.

This time eight years ago:
Britain's Conservatives turn their backs on economic liberalism

This time 11 years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi – Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time 13 years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction 

This time 14 years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time 16 years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development

A comfortable life – and then what?

"Luxury carmaker Aston Martin's share price sank more than 20% after it said profits will be lower than expected this year," the BBC reported earlier this week. A serenade of tiny violins. What the world needs now is fewer cars, smaller cars, and cars that don't harm the planet so much. The use of a car to project one's status is increasingly being seen as a waste of one's wealth. Could Aston Martin's financial woes reflect society's rising wisdom? Over the past weeks, the YouTube algorithm has been suggesting to me videos about how to become rich by looking poor. Lots of YouTubers have reached the same conclusion as me – that pissing away money on a new car every few years to impress your neighbours is dumb-ass stupid. 

But it's not just new cars. It's new clothes, new furniture, new tech, new any shit. I've got off the materialist treadmill (if indeed I was ever on it) years ago, realising that the consumer lifestyle hurts your wallet and hurts our planet. Result? I feel financially comfortable – not through busting a gut in the corporate rat-race, but by decades of not wasting money on fripperies and foibles.

Being comfortable is a noble aim; there's no virtue in suffering hunger, cold, ill-health or stress. Do I need luxury? No I do not. Do I need surfeit? I don't, and the planet simply could not cope with even two billion of us striving to live in surfeit or luxury. 

But should we worry that if a billion of us suddenly saw the light and stopped spending mindlessly – wouldn't it hurt the economy? I wrote back in June about the effects of a generation holding back on consumption. What would happen if Aston Martin would go bust? Not a whole lot. Or all luxury-car makers? Ditto. Several thousand skilled workers would (briefly) be out of work. Engineering and craft vacancies are hard to fill these days.

If supply of new cars suddenly dried up worldwide, we'd all become like Cuba. Used cars would gain in value, folk would take care of them more, knowing they are irreplaceable. We could go on for decades. The US embargo of Cuba was imposed in February 1962 by JFK; the youngest American car in that creaking, repressive socialist paradise is over 62 years old. There are an estimated 60,000 of them still in daily use, with some dating back to the late 1930s. Dragging iron ore out of the earth, smelting it and stamping out car bodies out of the resulting steel when it's not necessary, only something driven by individual egos, is not right. [Though I would argue that it's not anybody's business to ban car-making – people just need to reach that conclusion one epiphany at a time.]  

But buying unnecessary products creates jobs and generates taxes. Squaring the circle through a top-down policy of de-growth would be destructive – it would hit education, healthcare, infrastructure, security and defence. But I feel that we in the Western world are seeing a gentle form of de-growth; more and more people waking up to the need to spend less. Tough policy decisions are needed, in particular regarding immigration and accelerating green transformation.

Another birthday, another moment for reflection about the arc of my life. I'll keep on working into the foreseeable future (my father worked until three months' shy of his 70th birthday, giving up work to take up grandfathering duties). No great desire to travel, though Stella-Plage calls me back to revisit sometime.

Health and fitness report: better in every metric than the 66-year-old me – the result of stronger willpower rather than muscle power. However, eight pull-ups to the chin now a standard (last year I managed it only twice).

This time last year:
The Ego, the Soul and the Individual

This time two years:
In which I reach the Age of Maturity

This time three years ago:
Golden Autumn, Golden Years

This time four years ago:
Last embers of summer

This time five years ago:
It's that Day of the Year again!

This time six years ago:

Decline and growth

This time seven years ago:
Health at 60

This time nine years ago:
In search of vectors for migrating consciousness

This time ten years ago:
Slipping from late summer to early autumn

This time 11 years ago:
Turning 56

This time 12 years ago: 
Turning 55 

This time 13 years ago:
Turning 54

This time 14 years ago:
Turning 53

This time 17 years ago:
Turning 50

October and the Waning Year

The older I get, the more aware I am of living on the surface of a spinning rocky sphere that orbits a star. And as the sphere progresses around the star, it does tilted at 23.5° from the vertical. As I wrote the other day, this means we spend (just over) half the year with our hemisphere tilted towards the sun (our summer), and (just under) half the year with our hemisphere tilted away from the sun (our winter).

As I wake up on Tuesday 1 October, the temperature outside is 0.3C, although I couldn't see any signs of frost on the ground. For the first time since April, the temperature in the kitchen has fallen below 20C (although it soon warms up as I make coffee). The tipping point is now near, that moment when I have to start heating the house. The thick walls have absorbed summer heat admirably; last year I didn't switch on the underfloor heating or the bedroom radiator until 22 October, but last year broke records in terms of early-autumn temperatures. Colder this year, but still not duvet time, although I've had to take the pyjamas out of the wardrobe.

Even two weeks ago I could leave the house and go into town wearing a shirt, with a lightweight jacket in my rucksack for the cool evening or passing shower. Now, it's back into three-layer weather. The sky is cloudier, but not overcast; the year has been dry – maybe too dry for what farmers need. Climate change won't make Poland unbearably hot, but it will dry the country out. Droughts, punctuated by flash floods with the potential for local devastation as we saw last month.

The temperate climes of this latitude are none too harsh, either in terms of summer heat or winter cold; as the days march inexorably towards the winter solstice I must give thanks for where I live, and indeed how I live.

Below: Warsaw, today. Make a mental note to return to this photo in three years' time; the skyline will have changed even more once the Towarowa 22 (which will rise to the left of the Warsaw Unit tower) and Polfarma developments (behind it) are complete. 

Below: Warsaw, earlier. A view looking towards Rondo Daszyńskiego from the approaches to W-wa Wola station.

Incidentally, I looked up how many people live between 51° and 52° parallels North; it is 45 million people. This band covers London, Berlin and Warsaw, though further east it runs through sparsely populated lands; southern Siberia and northern Canada. The most populous parallel band lies between 29° and 30° North, with around half a billion people – ten times more. This band runs through China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico and Texas. 

This time last year
Marching again (ahead of the election)

This time two years ago:
Levels of Detail

This time three years ago:
Droga donikąd by Józef Mackiewicz

This time four years ago:
Words that pop into the mind, unbidden
[This morning's word: contumely]

This time six years ago:
Hops there for the taking

This time seven years ago:
Two weeks and two days of travel

This time eight years ago:
Final end to a local landmark

This time 13 years ago:
Independence Day

This time 14 years:
Out and about in Jeziorki

This time 15 years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 16 years ago:
Puławska by night