Goodness and Truth as Destinations

I woke up this morning pondering whether the Universe is intrinsically unfolding in the direction of Goodness and Truth, those Platonic ideals which every intelligent creature ought, however imperfectly, to pursue.

The orthodox reductionist-materialist answer would presumably be no. The Cosmos has no direction in the moral sense. Matter and energy behave according to impersonal laws; stars form, burn and die; planets coalesce around them; chemistry becomes sufficiently complex for life to emerge. Eventually, here on our rocky planet, conditions turned out to be just right for one particular species of primate to start asking what it all means.

But, says the rationalist, there is no meaning, because there is nobody or nothing doing the meaning.

That we are here is simply stochastic happenstance, the consequence of sufficient time, sufficient complexity and the right roll of the cosmic dice, one roll out of trillions.

And yet our current theories of physics contain a number of fundamental quantities which appear remarkably hospitable to human-level complexity. Change the relationship between gravity and electromagnetism just a touch and you change the sort of stars that can exist. A tiny change in the nuclear forces and stellar nucleosynthesis leaves the cosmos too poor in the heavier elements from which planets, chemistry and living things are made. Alter the relative masses of elementary particles just a smidgin and you affect the stability of protons and neutrons. Tweak the cosmological constant too much one way and matter flies apart too rapidly for galaxies to form; tweak ito too much the other way and the cosmos implodes in on itself.

This is the fine-tuning problem. It's not evidence of Divine fingerprints on the control panel, but it does make you think. Within our current understanding of physics, a universe capable of producing stable stars, complex chemistry, planets and ultimately conscious organisms appears to be miraculous. A one in a trillion-trillion chance.

The anthropic principle provides the obvious response. We live in a universe compatible with observers. If it were not compatible with observers, nobody would be around to observe it. Proponents of the multiverse hypothesis would contend that an unimaginably large numbers of universes exist, each with different physical parameters, nearly all of which are sterile. We just happen to live in a universe that isn't – and therefore one that contains observers that can observe its existence.

And then comes the question that interests me still more. Our Universe has produced matter that is alive, matter that feeds and breeds. Life is matter that can experience conscious. Consciousness that is aware of being able to contemplate the Cosmos (just stare up at a starry sky to see what I mean). And beings capable of recognising Goodness and Truth.

Now time for a crashing change of gear from cosmology to human history. Are we as a species progressing towards Goodness and Truth? I realise as I write this that my thinking on this subject has been inspired by a talk with the pessimistic British philosopher, John Gray, with whom I found myself disagreeing profoundly. Over sufficiently long timescales, I think humanity is on a course towards Goodness and Truth. The path, of course is neither smooth nor linear and it is marred by appalling reversals, and we need to be able to take a longer-term perspective

Homo sapiens has existed for around 300,000 years. For almost all that time we lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. Around 12,000 years ago, in several parts of the world independently, human beings started cultivating crops, domesticating animals and building settlements.

Hunter-gatherers did not live as prelapsarian innocents; archaeology gives us abundant evidence of interpersonal killing and sporadic outbursts of group violence long before agriculture. Humans didn't invent violence along with the farm. But agriculture changed the way that violence was organised and channelled. 

For the first time on any significant scale there were fields that could be seized, borders that could be disputed, livestock that could be stolen and stores of grain that represented many months of accumulated labour. A wandering band carries relatively little portable wealth. A farming settlement may contain enough stored food to sustain hundreds of people through the winter. There was now something worth raiding and therefore something worth defending.

Settlement also meant larger populations. Larger populations produced hierarchy, division of labour, inherited status and, over time, organised political power. Violence could cease being merely a quarrel between individuals or a raid between neighbouring groups and become something planned and collective on an ever-greater scale.

Archeology has unearthed enough fortified settlements, massacre sites and evidence of repeated organised conflict to prove that the Neolithic was the period in human history in which violence was dramatically scaled up. This is confirmed by several genetic studies that have identified a sudden reduction in Y-chromosome diversity after the adoption of agriculture. At one point, 8,300 years ago in the Near East, the inferred effective number of reproducing males relative to females became extraordinarily small – around one male lineage for every seventeen female lineages. When one clan defeated another, it didn't just result in the deaths of a few dozen random individuals: an entire cluster of related Y-chromosome lineages could be wiped out, while successful male lineages expanded dramatically. To the victors, literally, the reproductive spoils. Kill all the men, enslave all the women.

But killing, plunder and rape were not the only way. Another possibility gradually emerged in the Neolithic – trade.

Instead of taking what the other clan possessed by killing its menfolk in war, it turned out that exchange was a superior and risk-free way of obtaining what a given clan may need or want. Trading grain for pottery, wool for metalwork, wine for timber, and yes, draught animals for human slaves.

Trade requires something uniquely human; the recognition that the other clan has its own interests. “I may dislike you, distrust you, worship another god and speak an incomprehensible language, but if we can agree on the value of an amphora of olive oil, cooperation becomes more profitable than robbery, and without the risk of violent death.”

Nevertheless, as civilisations became more sophisticated, our reasons for killing one another became more sophisticated too. Territory and plunder remained and remain to this day, but religion, dynasty, ethnicity, nationalism and political ideology supplied grander casus belli.

Yet civilisation also invented mechanisms for restraining violence; law and legal contracts, upheld by courts. The notion of citizenship; governments; diplomacy, and the rules governing warfare. Multilateral institutions. Human rights. Property rights. “What's mine is mine, not yours, unless you pay me an agreed price for it.”

None of these mechanisms is anywhere near perfect, and each can collapse. And each one can be used as a smokescreen behind which the powerful continue doing what the powerful have always done. But their very existence matters; the fact that these mechanisms have survived and evolved over the centuries do suggest an upward arc of progress.

The philosophical pessimist, however, sees a different pattern predicated by human nature. We are status-seeking primates organised into hierarchies, inclined towards tribalism and perfectly capable of murder when circumstance licenses it. History therefore moves in cycles. Empires rise and fall. Peace is merely the interval during which exhausted combatants prepare for another war. “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” – the memetic quote from G. Michael Hopf's 2016 novel, Those Who Remain. is widely quoted as evidence for a cyclical model of history.

But I think history doesn't move in circles that loop back to exactly the same place. History moves in spirals. Sometimes it can spiral downward for a whole generation. Sometimes there's no up or down motion for a century. Yet observe it long enough, and the spiral moves upwards and outwards, encompassing ever more goodness and truth, squeezing out the evil and the lies.

Knowledge and wisdom accumulate, as does a sense of ethical morality, and the understanding of the necessity for empathy within any society that functions smoothly. The understanding of the Prisoner's Dilemma, that in the long term it is better to get on with the Other rather than trying to cheat him is crucial. Cheating only works in the short term.

In the past, until not so very long ago, slavery, torture, racial supremacy, religious persecution, aggressive conquest and the legal subordination of women have all been considered acceptable by sophisticated civilisations. They have not vanished, but increasingly they require justification, concealment or outright denial. Today, a tyrant won't announces: “I'm invading my neighbours because they are weaker than I am, and I want their resources.” He will make up some historical grievance, or claim self-defence or hold a referendum invoking national ideology.

Hypocrisy may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but the very need for hypocrisy (just listen to Sergei Lavrov lying through his teeth) tells us that over the centuries, standards have changed. Even out-and-out tyrants have to pretend to be the goodies.

The rules-based international order suffers setbacks. Civilisations regress. Evil persists, particularly when political systems fail to prevent psychopaths from acquiring enormous power.

But a mere twelve thousand years of civilisation is nothing; our species is 300,000 years old! The Universe is about 13.8 billion years old! Cosmically speaking, human intelligence (as opposed to consciousness) is in its infancy. We do not know how humans will evolve over the next ten thousand years, let alone another million. Nor do we know what consciousness may already exist elsewhere. Or even here. 

I cannot derive Goodness from the cosmological constant, nor Truth from the strong nuclear force. Fine-tuning does not prove God, but then the anthropic principle does not disprove God and human history certainly does not prove an inexorable law of moral progress. My claim is philosophical rather than scientific; the trajectory is suggestive.

A universe initially containing apparently nothing but energy and elementary particles produces stars. Stars manufacture heavier elements. Those elements produce planets. Physics becomes chemistry which becomes biology. Biology becomes conscious. Intelligent beings start pondering why they exist – why anything exists.

Why should a meaningless Cosmos give rise to life capable of perceiving meaning? Why should a morally indifferent universe produce creatures capable of conceiving moral perfection and judging themselves against it? None of these questions proves teleology. But then I don't think it's irrational to suspect one.

I believe that what Plato's ideals of the Good and the True are not just fancy inventions dreamt up by some Greek bloke two and half thousand years ago. I suspect they belong to a deeper reality than that.

History repeats – it rhymes – it is cyclical. But looked at from sufficiently far away, I think the circle is moving. It spirals, raggedly, often painfully, upwards. Give it a few more millennia. And my faith, for that is ultimately what it is, is that Goodness and Truth are somehow baked into cosmic teleology.

Whatever happens next in our own short-term perspective, the ultimate destination – in the scale of billions of years – is divine perfection.

This time last year:
Strange, storm-crossed sky

This time six years ago:
God and gratitude
[what a meaningful synchronicity...]

This time seven years ago:
Defending one's country is a costly business

This time 14 years ago:
Back to work

This time 15 years ago:
Clinging onto summer – cycling to Powsin

This time 16 years ago:
Composition in blue and yellow

This time 17 years ago:
Z-9

This time 18 years ago:
My favourite aircraft

This time 19 years ago:
Утомлённые солнцем

Ultimately, I am lazy. But so what?

My material needs are met; I have no material wants exceeding my needs. It would be nice to have a bit more cash in the bank, but only for an increased sense of security rather than because I have any desire to buy something expensive that I don't currently own. 

This is one of the great luxuries of getting older: discovering that there is little to covet.

People who know me also know that I'm not much of a reaching-out kinda guy. If someone contacts me and suggests meeting up, I'm usually delighted by the invitation and rarely say no. But I'm seldom the one who takes the first step. You may attribute this to laziness. Yet I live, as my primary-school teachers used to say, in my own little world. And I like it here. It is generally a little world of joy (especially when the sun shines upon it, as it's doing right now).

I don't have a constant need for human company. Solitude is a luxury. Human company is rather like spice in food: it brings things alive, introduces something unexpected, but too much of it can overwhelm everything else. One or two social outings a week, online chats with family and friends, conversations with neighbours encountered on my walks – that's quite enough for me.

I'm happy with my own thoughts, but that doesn't mean I don't value other people's! Quite the opposite. An hour or two of intelligent conversation can provide material for several days' subsequent thinking. Someone throws out an idea, an observation, an unexpected connection, a brilliant insight and off it goes to be further pondered over. New ideas gratefully received. Original thought is a deficit item in our modern world.

Much of what another person might consider as my laziness is actually the consequence of having thought through what would happen if I simply didn't do something. Why have I never been on an exotic holiday or cruise or trekked distant lands? Because I neither need to nor want to. Why don't I drive a big, expensive car? Because of entropy; it would be expensive to insure and maintain, I would worry about it getting scratched and dented. Why don't I mow my lawn? Because every blade of grass on my land is a tiny oxygen factory, and during the growing season I let nature maximise leaf cover. I keep paths clear. Bushes get trimmed, branches lopped and hedges shaped in late winter, before the sap begins to rise. The rest can get on with being vegetation.

There's a useful distinction between laziness and refusal. Laziness is failing to make an effort towards something you value. Refusal is deciding that the objective itself isn't worth the effort of pursuing it.

Modern life tends to confuse the two. We're surrounded by injunctions to optimise ourselves: travel more, earn more, network more, exercise more, renovate more, consume more, experience more. Anyway, endless growth is bringing on climate change. We live in a hierarchical society in which many seek external validation; their focus is on their place in the pecking order. Failure to pursue commonly coveted material goals can be confused for lack of ambition. 

There is nothing inherently virtuous about expending energy. The question is what the energy is for.

Duty answers that question efficiently. When have children to feed, clothe and educate, and a mortgage to pay off, you work. When lucrative work appears, you take it. You pull in the cash because there are large bills waiting to swallow it. Duty staves off laziness because duty removes choice.

Now I can take things somewhat easier. There are still twelve cats to feed and four litter trays to keep clean. And domestic entropy continues its tireless work.

But there's another kind of not-doing which I find harder to justify. I continually have that nagging sense that I should be reading more, writing more, producing more – sharing insights, creating, devising, inventing. There are books sitting unread, ideas sitting unwritten, and half-formed thoughts that ought to be followed through to a conclusion. And I'm not doing enough of it. My notebooks should be filling up much faster than they are.

And this raises tougher question – is this genuinely laziness? Is this an ethical issue (not working sufficiently hard at fulfilling my potential as a human being)? I think so.

But perhaps it's diminishing energy, an age-related thing. Perhaps I have never possessed quite as much drive as I imagine I ought to have possessed. Looking back, were my energy levels ever sufficient to achieve, excel, push relentlessly forward? I should have had a handful of books published by now. Or did duty disguise the limits of my natural drive? Surely my creative peak has already passed? A hard thing to admit to myself.

There is a crucial difference between not wanting something that other people tell you ought to want and failing to pursue something that you yourself believe worthwhile.

I genuinely don't want the large car, the exotic holiday or a manic social whirl. Nothing sacrificed there. But if I genuinely want to read the book, write the essay, develop the idea – and nevertheless don't – then the accusation of laziness becomes harder to evade.

And yet even here there is another question: ultimately, how much should I care?

I am who I am. I arrived in the world with certain talents and without others, with a particular temperament and a particular allocation of energy. None of us chooses the hand we are dealt.

This is where the modern cult of agency becomes slightly absurd (an interesting article in The Economist this week about 'internal locus of control'). We are constantly told that we must shape our own destiny rather than allow circumstances or other people (or God!) to shape it for us. There's some truth in that. But balance is called for. At one extreme lies fatalism: qué será, será, or inshallah. Why bother? Everything has been preordained, determined by the stars above. At the other extreme: the fantasy of total personal agency – you, and you alone, are responsible for how your life ends up unfolding. Work hard enough, want hard enough, organise yourself efficiently enough, see your projects through to the end, and the universe eventually submits to your will.

Neither approach to life is right. Chance matters; birth matters; temperament, health, your family, friends and colleagues, history, geography, and yes, good fortune all matter. But choice matters too. Agency is not about choosing the hand but how to play with what you have. 

And perhaps contentment itself requires a similar balance. It is hugely liberating when you get to the point in life when you realise that you have enough. But there is also a danger that contentment becomes a philosophical name for inertia.

So I find myself somewhere between the two. I don't strive for more things or more travel. I don't particularly feel a need for more social activity. I don't particularly want a busier life. or more things.. 

But I do want more from my mind, and for my soul.

And that is worth striving for.

This time last year:
Getting in, and staying in, The Flow.

This time two years ago:
To ease the soul

This time three years ago:
Retrocausality and the Goneself

This time four years ago:
Many Machcins

This time seven years ago:
The Long Dark Half-Hour of the Consumerist Soul

This time eight years ago:

Early-September travel news

This time eight years ago:
Fields filling up with houses

This time 15 years ago:
Battle of Britain: Poland's contribution

This time 16 years ago:
Sewer under ul. Karczunkowska

Back to back troubles

My painful back twinges had almost subsided after three weeks without any exercises. So yesterday, I thought, 'new month, new resolve', a good time to return gently into exercising. A minute of holding the plank (rather than the usual ten); ten sit-ups and ten squats rather than the usual sixty of both. Two lots of back extension rather than eight or ten. Half the usual number of bird-dog extensions. So – taking it easy to get back into it.

But waking up in the middle of the night, those twinges returned. I can lie down, sit, stand or walk without pain, but moving from one position to another can result in a sharp spasm of pain. I wince; I curse.

This is worrying. Night is a bad time to worry – would it get worse and worse? Have I passed a threshold after which return to regular exercise is impossible? 

About 27 years ago, I took a statutory medical examination ahead of taking on a new job here in Poland. My spine was X-rayed and the doctor told me my backbones were fusing together. She said that my spine would become immobile in old age. “Exercise and sanatoria” – the only things that could save me, she said. For the next 15 years or so, no symptoms. Then, one morning in June 2015, after a day walking around London, I woke up to feel numbness in the big toe on my left foot. In Warsaw, I called the clinic and was subjected to a barrage of tests to see, for example, whether a tumour wasn't pressing on a nerve somewhere. It wasn't – an X-ray revealed that it was indeed those bones in the spinal cord growing where they shouldn't be growing. Again, exercise was prescribed. Which I have been doing ever since, with a focus on maintaining core muscle strength and flexibility in my spine.

Earlier this year, I twanged my back doing something (I know not what!); several days laying off the exercise and I was back to normal. And again in early August, the same – but this time, the break from exercise did not solve the problem.

I worry about ankylosing spondylitis – did my father have this in old age? He was severely bent over in his nineties... This photo (he was 92 at the time) shows his characteristic posture. He could straighten up with effort, though he'd slump back to this default position. In his last years, he would take his afternoon nap lying flat on his back on the hard wooden floor, no pillow.

My great fear for old age is immobility; my daily walks are a source of joy and inspiration, especially on sunny days, at dawn, at dusk, any time of year. Losing the ability to keep on walking would be a terrible blow.

But sitting still, there's no pain, I'm not thinking about my back. Until a sudden sound below and to my left – it's Memfis ('Fisia') playing with a ball on the kitchen floor. I turn – and a sharp spasm (nothing too painful) shoots across from my lower back.

Time, I feel, to arrange a visit at the doctor's surgery to have all this checked out. I don't fancy a whole lot more new medications to go alongside the ones for my heart, but would be keen to learn about specific exercise protocols that might do the trick. After all, I still have more than eleven thousand days before my 100th birthday!

This time last year:
Early-September sunset moods

This time eight years ago:
Early-September travel news

This time nine years ago:
Fields filling up with houses

This time 16 years ago:
Things can only get better

Falling trees

Finding newly fallen trees in the forest next door after a storm or strong wind is a common occurrence.  Some have snapped, others have toppled over, lifting plates of roots and earth out of the ground. Birch trunks lie bleaching among the leaf litter, while elsewhere dead trees remain propped against living ones at crazy angles. 

After the most recent winds, I find my familiar paths blocked. New paths need to be threaded through the debris. Birch, pine, oak and – identified by AI – hornbeam (grab in Polish). According to my neighbour to the north, this land has not been farmed for over 50 years and just left to grow wild. Over time, the woodland has been in the process of gradually changing its composition as successive generations of trees grow, mature and die.

Birch is a pioneer species; it is one of the first trees to move in. It grows quickly, tolerates poor soil and produces vast quantities of seed. But it is not particularly long-lived. As a young forest closes over and becomes darker, the birches which colonised the site decades earlier begin to die, like the one below, while slower-growing, more shade-tolerant trees continue developing beneath them.

What is striking about this forest is the quantity of dead timber that has simply been left where it fell. In a park or garden, a fallen tree is regarded as something that needs removing. Here, it is part of the system. A dead trunk becomes habitat for fungi, beetles and other insects, that provide food for woodpeckers and other birds. Gradually the timber softens, rots, collapses and is incorporated back into the forest floor, returning nutrients to the soil from which the next generation of trees will.

Trees that have been uprooted rather than snapped suggest that their root systems are shallow. Instead of one great root plunging vertically downwards, much of the anchorage lies relatively close to the surface. Under sufficiently strong winds the entire root plate can rotate out of the ground. As extreme weather events become more frequent, trees will adapt and new ones will sink deeper roots.

Meanwhile, toppled trees make for easier climbing for the cats. Scrapper, below, on his way down.

Once one large tree has fallen, those behind it become more exposed to the wind. Forest trees protect one another. Remove one and the aerodynamic conditions change for its neighbours. The prevailing winds are from the north-west; so far not one has fallen westwards over my fence since it was erected to mark the eastern border of my działka. There is, however, always a first time.

It's not just whole trees that tumble. Branches snap off in the wind too and scatter on the forest floor. Birches and aspens are most prone to losing bits.

Standing among these fallen trunks, it is easy to think in terms of the deaths of individual trees: this one has died, that one has blown down, another is beginning to rot. But from the forest's point of view, the individual tree is almost incidental, the forest continues, new saplings will emerge from the forest floor and push up towards the canopy.

Left: bonus shot – last Friday's full moon, taken just around the corner from the next-door forest, where it opens out onto orchards. Shot on my Samsung Galaxy A20, f/1.8 at 0.8 sec exposure, 4,500 ASA.

This time last year:
Late August photo round-up

This time two years ago:
Passing late-summer storm

This time five years ago:
"Sod the locals" 

This time six years ago:
If you're really concerned about global warming...

This time eight years ago:
The balance between the spiritual and the material

This time nine years ago:
End of August, end of summer?

This time ten years ago:
Pavement for Karczunkowska... a bit at least

This time 11 years ago:
Gold Train update (the hope! the expectations!)

This time 13 years ago:
Poland post the Rubbish Revolution

This time 14 years ago:
Poland's most beautiful street

This time 15 years ago:
Getting to grips with phrasal verbs

This time 17 years ago:
What Putin wrote about Molotov-Ribbentrop

This time 18 years ago:
Summer Sunday in the city

This time 19 years ago:
Last bike-ride to work of the summer

Nihil a terra, solum ex arboribus

This is the motto for this year's vintage cider from my działka. I will not be using fallen apples, only those plucked off the tree. “Nothing from the ground, only from the tree.” Today I completed my first demijohn of cider, which will be joined by many more in the next week or so. Because of biennial bearing (apple trees come into fruit every other year if not sprayed and pruned), this will only be my third vintage of cider production here in Jakubowizna (or Jabłkowizna as it is at this time of year). 

The learning process is ongoing; new lessons learned with each successive vintage, augmented this year by tip from ChatGPT and Google Gemini. I learn from both that cider from my apple variety, Antonówka generally lacks tannins, and so adding some crab apples into the mix helps with flavour. I will make a batch to see if that works.

The apples are fully ripe. Many have already fallen to the ground – and there they will stay. Two years ago, I learned the difference between apples lying on the ground and the ones picked off the tree, and my 2024 vintage was a mixture of the two. The former have higher sugar content but are softer in consistency, and there is far more sediment, The latter are crisper, more tart, and produce less sludge, requiring less filtration.

Filtration has hitherto been the choke point in my cider-making. Removing the thick mousse (which, if eaten straight away, on its own or with Greek-style natural yogurt is delicious) takes more time than pretty much all other parts of the production process taken together.

By ignoring fallen apples and using only ones plucked from the tree, things are vastly speeded up. However, less sugar will mean a lower alcohol content, so I shall find how that affects taste. I want tart, I don't want sour.

Below: the first demijohn. The apple juice is still cloudy; the sediment settles; in a couple of days, the fermentation will begin, and carbon dioxide will start to bubble up through the water-trap pipe, which keeps oxygen from turning the juice into vinegar.

The cider will ferment in the demijohns until the autumn, and bottling will begin in early December. The bottles are recycled, having been used in 2022 and 2024; a new batch of bottle-tops will need to be bought.

This time last year:
Fading and resurging Chynów in monochrome and in colour

This time two years ago:
Imminent? I don't think so

This time three years ago:
Dawn tourism – the sights without the crowds

This time four years ago:
Bike ride to the past

This time six years ago:

Muscle memory

This time eight years ago:
The journey there, and the journey back again

This time nine years ago:
Sandomierz – another outstanding Polish town to see

This time 11 years ago:
Food hygiene and lies as Russian foreign policy tools

This time 12 years ago:
Asphalt for ul. Poloneza (to Krasnowolska at least)

This time 12 years ago:
A welcome splash of colour to a drab car park 

This time 14 years ago:
To Hel and back in 36 hours

This time 16 years ago:
Honing the Art of the Written Word

This time 17 years ago:
Of castles, dams and brass bands

The kittens at three months

Halfway through kittenhood, a quarter of the way to full feline adulthood. All is going well, rites of passage being observed by some but not all – Kwintesencja ('Kwincia') and Memphis ('Fisia') have already spent their first night outdoors after failing to come home by lights out, and Kwincia recently sported a wound on the left side of her neck, probably the result of fighting with one of her siblings. Or maybe uncles. Or maybe some external attacker. In any case, it has completely healed.

Below, from left: Wiktor, taking it easy, Kwincia and Mars, both alert, watching the breakfast bowls.

Dorian, with his cerebellar hypoplasia, is not growing as quickly as the others; he is a fussy eater. Whatever wet cat-food I leave out, he will scrape the ground with his paw next to the bowl, a sign that he treats the food on a par with faecal matter. He loves Greek-style yogurt, milk and dry cat-food (especially the premium fish-flavoured sort). Yesterday, I bought some freeze-dry chicken fillet strips (Céleste's favourite treat); I am feeding small portions of this to Dorian away from the others, allowing him to catch up weight-wise. 

Below: first foray into the forest next door for Wiktor and Mars.

Mars is a great little lad, full of energy and with a hearty appetite, though unlike Kwincia, his identical-twin sister, he has a short stumpy tail. If you look at the two of them closely side-by-side, you will notice that Kwincia has a more feminine face. Wiktor shows very mild signs of cerebellar hypoplasia, though with a regular tail he has much better balance than Dorian. Unlike stumpy-tailed Dorian, whose rear legs are splayed outward, Wiktor walks normally, although his head nods very slightly while at rest. And then there's Memphis, 'Fisia',  tabby with a white underside and a white 'tear streak' on the left side of her face. Below: all five together, licking the aluminium lid of a 1kg yogurt pot. Clockwise from bottom: Mars, Dorian, Wiktor, Kwincia and Fisia.

The kittens are spending more and more time outdoors and are discovering the extent of their range. They move as a group, with Dorian in among them (I do worry that one day he might get lost and be unable to find his way home on his own). I must remember not to take anything for granted and to be grateful for the joy that the kittens bring, as well as other items... dead birds and live mice (though the mice end up tortured to death and eaten whole). Below: Wiktor and the remains of a young starling.

Céleste is still managing to breastfeed her little ones almost four weeks after being sterilised! No longer all at the same time, and no longer for more than a few minutes. Like her mother, Wenusia, she has proved herself an ideal mother. Her fur is starting to grow back; I hope she will have regained her beauty by the time of the first snows. However, unlike Wenus, who toilet-trained her brood with military discipline, Céleste has proved remiss in this department. I continue to find kitten poo where it shouldn't be – on the floor beside the litter tray, on the floor nowhere near the litter tray, or in a cat-basket that hitherto had been the exclusive snoozing spot of one of the kittens' uncles. The floors, being tiled, are easy to clean. The cat-baskets are not. And tooth-marks on electrical cables worry me... grown-up cats don't do this.

Below: Wiktor and Mars in the kitten play-house I built several weeks ago out of old boxes.

Wenusia herself, grandmother and materfamilias, makes an appearance for breakfast, stays a short while then departs, popping in once or twice during the day for a meal. But most of the time, she remains outside. My neighbours (summer weekends only) often report that Wenus pops round there for ham and milk. 

The uncles, Czester, Scrapper, Pacyfik and Arcturus, spend most nights roaming the great outdoors; within two minutes of me pulling up the roller-blinds, there's a commotion on the windowsill and a breakfast queue has formed of the above-mentioned toms, plus their mum, plus ol' Mr. Heaps (Hipek), the elderly castrated male who's been with us now for over four months. 

Left: typical brunch buffet scene. All five kittens present, along with Czester the beloved ginger tom, Hipek, white with black patches and tail, and at the bottom of the picture, Arcturus (whom I've left uncastrated). Arcturus remains an even-tempered and undemanding fellow, who gets on with everyone.

The kittens never knew the house without Hipek, so accept him totally. Now Hipek is a good, calm, emotionally stable old cat. He gets on with everyone, and everyone gets on with him – except Pacyfik. For some reason, Pacio will hiss and growl and swipe at Hipek, often necessitating the younger cat's removal from the house. Pacio has learnt to tolerate the kittens (he'd hiss and growl at them too at first), but with Hipek relations remain bad. It makes me wonder whether intolerance of the outsider/newcomer is a genetic thing. One in five mammals is born a racist? Why does Scrapper often snooze beside Hipek and run together with him in the garden while Pacyfik gives Hipek a hard time? Cats from the same litter, same upbringing... different genes.

This time four years ago:
Strange twilight

This time five years ago:
Ageing and the Ego

This time six years ago:
First inklings of the end of summer

This time eight years ago:

Nikon's new mirrorless cameras - too big and heavy for me

This time 12 years ago:
Short, sharp diet proves I'm allergy-free

This time 13 years ago:
More photos from Radom Air Show

This time 14 years ago:
Twilight on ul. Karczunkowska 

This time 17 years ago:
First hints of autumn in the air

This time 18 years ago:
Slovakia – we were not impressed

This time 19 years ago:
Jeziorki – late August cultivation

The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby

My appetite whetted by Paul Theroux, I knew the next book I'd have to reach for would be The Big Red Train Ride, Eric Newby's account of a Moscow-Nakhodka journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Why, it even name-checks Theroux on the front cover, with this quote from him under the title – “The best kind of travel book... it awakened frosty demons in me, and memories I had thought forgotten”.

Theroux travelled from east to west from Nakhodka to Moscow on the penultimate leg of his London-Tokyo-London train journey, whilst Newby focused on the Trans-Siberian alone, travelling west to east. Theroux's journey was in December 1973; Newby's in May 1977. The Soviet Union was not yet obviously on its last legs. Indeed, in geopolitical terms it was approaching the height of its power. Yet the symptoms of what would later be called the Era of Stagnation are obvious in both books – shortages, shabbiness, endemic drunkenness, petty authoritarianism and the immense gulf between official rhetoric and everyday reality.

The sheer size of Russia comes across in the distances between stations. Take Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. One would think, you know, two neighbouring Siberian cities somewhere along the line. Yet they lie 1,088 km apart; Przemyśl by the Polish-Ukrainian border and Świnoujście on the Baltic border with Germany – diagonal opposite corners of Poland – are a mere 994 km apart by rail. Lake Baikal is 636km in length – further than the distance between Kołobrzeg and Rzeszów in a straight line. And even today, this is not a fast train, no Shinkansen or TGV. It's a week however you do it. It is worth watching a YouTube video of the Trans-Siberian Express from recent years; it retains its flagship status (the train is still called the Rossiya) but it resembles modern Polish trains inside, and the stations have had a makeover. However, Google Street View shows that away from the clean station buildings, Siberia's roads are potholed, people buy vegetables from grubby kiosks and live in wooden huts with outside toilets. [Incidentally, this post from 2019 is based on my road atlas of the USSR from the late 1980s.]

In Soviet times, Vladivostok was a closed city, so Western travellers entering or leaving the country for Japan would do so through the port of Nakhodka; this required changing trains at Khabarovsk. Today, travelling in Russia as a Westerner one runs the risk of being imprisoned on some fatuous charge and becoming a bargaining chip for Putin. This journey itself is not on my bucket list. Indeed, I don't even have a bucket list. If I want to see trees whizzing past a train window I can go from Warka on the Radom line down to Kruszyna for about 20 km of this, short enough not to get boring.

Although the two books cover much the same geographical and historical ground, they do so in completely different ways. Eric Newby offers more objective insights, whilst Theroux's book is more subjective. About the Trans-Siberian Express, the railway itself, its place in Russian and Soviet history and culture, I have learned vastly more from The Big Red Train Ride. If Theroux is an impressionist with a broad brush, Newby is very much the details man. Theroux's primarily interest is the people he encounters on trains; Newby is interested in the people, the train, the track, the stations, the landscape beyond the window and the history buried underneath it.

I read the book accompanied by three sources: Атлас железных дорог СССР (Railway Atlas of the USSR, 1988, which I bought in Stanford's brilliant map shop on Long Acre in London in the early '90s), Google Maps Street View, and a YouTube video, 164 Hours on the World's Longest Railway Journey. Eric Newby details his journey, mentioning many of the larger stations along the way; I would find them in the atlas, then jump in to Street View to see how they look today. 

Eric Newby (1919-2006) had a fascinating war record. He fought with the Black Watch regiment in North Africa, then joined the fledgling Special Boat Section, and was captured by the Italians during a raid on Sicily in 1942. He escaped from a PoW camp in northern Italy and was assisted in avoiding recapture by Wanda Škof, a young Slovene woman, whom he married after the war, and who accompanied him on many of his travels.

Their journey across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express reminded me of our Polish parish youth trips to communist Poland at the same time; everything was invigilated by the Party, its people were with us, watching us, we had to visit aluminium foundries and car factories, we had to sit through propaganda films. And so it was with Newby, his wife, and Otto the photographer who snapped the journey; Misha, “the man from the Agency” was with them all the while, telling them what they couldn't photograph (most things of interest) and lining up meetings with chairmen of collective farms and boring visits to cable factories.

Below: taken from a Soviet railway atlas from 1943, the page showing the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, with Vladivostok and Nakhodka visible. To view full size, right-click on the image to open it in a new tab, then click on it in the new tab and use the 'enlarge' tool.

This time last year:
Early onset of Autumn?

This time two years ago:
Cider-making lessons as the season moves on

This time three years ago:
Getting to Sandomierz by bus and train

This time four years ago:
Inspiration

This time 12 years ago:
Food shopping and dietary update

This time 13 years ago:
Photos from the Radom Air Show, part 1

This time 14 years ago:
Offloading PKP's risk at W-wa Jeziorki

This time 16 years ago:
Time to be stuffing yourself with fresh fruit

This time 17 years ago:
First notes of autumn in the air

This time 19 years ago:
Large spider catches fly

Morning ramble through anemoia

The forecast promised clear skies from sunrise until around 10 am, after which time clouds will start streaming in from the west. So last night I went to bed early. This morning I woke up at half past five, fed the cats, ate breakfast and set off before seven. First port of call would be the abandoned plum orchards of Machcin II, to top up my breakfast. The ground was still soaked with dew when I arrived, an Eden-like atmosphere, the sun streaming in  through the trees. Having eaten my fill of ripe plums and prune-plums (węgierki) off the trees, I carried on towards Grobice.

Wave after wave of exomnesia moments; a sense of longing for a time and places from before my birth that are so familiar to me, yet in this life I have experienced them not.
 

The bittersweet tang of losing something intangible yet beautiful, that I have felt since childhood. Something close, personal, familiar, integral with my identity – yet I can't grasp it.

For a moment, the sight of a new pavement being built alongside ulica Zamkowa in Grobice takes my mind off anomalous reminiscences. This infrastructural investment is much needed, good to see work in progress.

Below: but then the sight of this rural suburbia whisks me right off again...

Across the DK50 approaching Sułkowice. That klimat is there; intense.

As the morning ticks away, the sky starts filling with clouds. Below: looking towards the railway line in Sułkowice, and beyond it, the police dog-training school.

Back to Chynów and Jakubowizna by following the railway line. That atmosphere remains with me. Drifting in and out of a hypnagogic dreamworld in which details like time and geography lose all relevance.

Below: from the same spot, looking the other way, the day before yesterday, just after sunset.

This time five years ago:
Age and Ego: Part I

This time six years ago:
Getting There

This time seven years ago:
Best and worst railway journeys in one day

This time eight year:
What's new around Jeziorki

This time 11 years ago:
Hydrology - droughts, floods and sandbanks

This time 13 years ago:
Radom air show - Part 1

This time 14 years ago:
Restricting passenger movement and safety

This time 15 years ago:
Seasonal fruit - eat it in bulk, while you can!

This time 17 years ago:
Russia-Polish 'unification', 1939-style