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

Sir Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey and the Bronze Age collapse

Like his previous film Oppenheimer (2023) Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey has been a film impossible to ignore or overlook this summer; many podcasters and YouTubers I follow have made references or indeed entire podcasts about it.

The story is known to many from childhood – the Cyclops, Circe turning men into swine, the Sirens' song, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso's isle, the Trojan Horse, the return to his wife Penelope at Ithaca.

What interested me in particular was the frequent references throughout the film to 'the peoples of the sea', and a reference to the characters 'living in the Age of Bronze'. Nolan is explicitly connecting the Late Bronze Age collapse with the mysterious Sea Peoples, something that Homer does not do.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics attributed to Homer, who lived in the 8th century BC. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, while the Odyssey deals with its aftermath and Odysseus's ten-year journey home. The Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy, which take place after the events of the Iliad, are recalled in the Odyssey. The historicity of the Trojan War is one for academics to argue about, but there is a consensus view that if there was such a conflict, it would have taken place in the late 12th century BC, around 400 years before Homer's time. So the Trojan War occurred during the Bronze Age collapse.

Why so many Mediterranean civilisations all collapsed within a couple of decades at the turn of the 12th century BC remains a mystery, the Sea Peoples being one explanation. Current thinking points towards a combination of factors – climate change and drought, crop failures and famine, political instability, disrupted trade networks, warfare, migration and internal revolt. The Sea Peoples may therefore have been as much a symptom of the Bronze Age collapse as its cause.

Nolan couples the Sea Peoples narrative onto the idea of 'breaking Zeus' law'. He takes the ancient Greek concept of xenia – a structured reciprocal institution that governed relations between host and stranger, and enlarges it.  A stranger arriving at one's house is to be received, fed and protected; in turn, the guest owes respect to the host and must not exploit their hospitality. Nolan expands the 'law of Zeus' into a more general Christian principle of reciprocity – treating others as you yourself would wish to be treated. 

The sacking of Troy is portrayed by Nolan as an act that contributes to the breakdown of what we'd now call the international rules-based order. Odysseus – his soldiers and indeed the Greek armies – have transgressed the laws of Zeus, and will pay dearly for doing so. Their hubris brings nemesis. He – his soldiers and indeed the Greek armies – have transgressed the laws of Zeus, for which they will pay dearly. 

What links The Odyssey with Oppenheimer? The Bomb and the Horse. A war-winning device that destroys the old order and unleashes a world of moral uncertainty. Odysseus's realisation that "we are the peoples of the sea" is a pivotal point in the film. The enemy is not some mysterious aquatic barbarians from beyond the known world – it's actually men like Odysseus himself. As trust breaks down between kingdoms, so do trade, diplomacy and the restraints governing warfare; collapse becomes self-reinforcing. The Bronze Age was doomed. Ancient Greece was about to enter its Dark Ages.

Ultimately, Odysseus has the gods – in particular Athena – on his side. Odysseus knows he will prevail, he will return to Ithaca and cleanse his palace of the egregiously behaving suitors. Has order triumphed over disorder? 

Nolan ends his Odyssey with Odysseus and Penelope sailing off to the west, with their son Telemachus taking up the throne of Ithaca. Quite unlike Homer's original, in which Odysseus remains on the throne. Nolan seems to be signaling the need for generational change to ensure continuity of civilisation.

Any adaptation of a classic work of literature inevitably views it through the anxieties of its own age. Nolan gives us an Odyssey for a time preoccupied with collapsing international norms, displaced peoples, the fragility of trade and civilisation, and the consequences of discovering that rules can be broken with impunity.

Homer's Odyssey can be viewed through the prism of Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology and Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots as being a 2,800 year-old archetype of narrative structure. The Odyssey is simultaneously a Voyage and Return, Quest, monster story, family-reunion story, revenge drama, coming-of-age story and meditation on mortality. But Homer's essential point is that the journey is there is not to become someone new, but that one can become oneself again.

This time two years ago:
Consciousness everywhere

This time three years ago:
International Awareness Awareness Day

This time six years ago:
Reflections on late-August

This time eight years ago:
Conscious of a waning summer

This time 12 years ago:
Plans for modernising the Warsaw-Radom railway line

This time 13 years ago:
World's largest ship calls in at Gdańsk

This time 15 years ago:
Raymond's Treasure - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Now an urban legend: Kebab factory under W-wa Centralna

This time 17 years ago:
It was twenty years ago today

This time 18 years ago:
By bike to Czachówek again

Little Victories In The Unending War With Entropy

Time's arrow goes one way, from past through the present (which passes in a tiny fraction of a second) to the future. Unlike other dimensions, if indeed time is a dimension. I can walk forwards, I can walk backwards. I can jump up, I can fall down. I can move left, I can move right. But time has only one direction. The reason? Entropy. It's why you can't unstir cream from coffee or resurrect a rotting strawberry. If you have something – anything – it will break. Just a matter of time.

We cannot make time go backwards, but we can slow it down. Take care of your things and they will serve you better, for longer. And save money. 

My daughter's car (below) has been with me now for over two and half years (she's still the legal owner). She bought it in 2020, just after lockdown (we celebrated its purchase with a curry in Ursynów, being among the restaurant's first customers after it re-opened). Before that, it had one owner, the mother of a boy that Moni was at primary school with. A nice family. Good provenance. This 1.2 litre Micra was built in 2005; it sat unsold in Slovakia for two years, after which it was transferred to the Polish market where it quickly found its first owner.

It currently has 147,000 km on the clock, just 7,000km more than it did when I took it for its first przegląd techniczny (Polish equivalent of the annual MoT test) two years ago. 

The car passed the test with flying colours, the guy running the testing station could not find a fault with it, although he made the following observation... "You drive the car sparingly; you don't thrash the engine. You slow down using the gearbox, and driving steadily on quiet country roads that you know well, you hardly ever have to use the brakes. As a result, the disks have developed a slight bloom of rust. Not enough to fail the test, but enough for me to notice. So next time you go for a drive, apply the brakes hard once or twice just to clear the brake disks of any rust."  Will do! 

I am grateful to the car. After a drive to the shops and back (in Warka, once a week), I pat the roof and say to the car "well done!" and thank it for its reliable and economical service. It's all I need from a car.

Another little victory in the unending war with entropy took place under the sink, which over the past year since a plumber last unblocked it, had once again been taking longer and longer to drain. The cause of the blockage – most probably traces of cat food, remnants left in bowls or tins. Ghastly stuff if you think about it – fatty offal mostly. 

Last year's call to the plumber was about three issues, of which the kitchen sink was the easiest to fix, the others being the garden tap and the hot-water tank in the bathroom. Cost of fixing all three – 800zł. The plumber told me that I'd be condemned to regular sink blockages, because when the house was originally built, the run-off was installed at an insufficiently steep angle. "Do everything you can to avoid solids going down there, however small," he advised.

ChatGPT offered me a simple solution to the blocked sink – sodium hydroxide crystals. Sold in Poland under the Kret brand (unavailable in the UK), this is powerful stuff. Clear the house of cats and kittens! Don thick rubber gloves! Open all windows! Don't breathe the fumes! Following the AI instructions for the use of Kret, I poured 200ml of very hot (but not boiling) water down the sink. Then two and a third capfuls of the sodium hydroxide crystals. Then another 300ml of very hot water. Then wait half an hour, taking care to avoid the fumes emerging from the plug-hole.

At last I filled the sink with hot tap water.... No difference. The water was going down very slowly, if at all. But I was prepared for this. I wielded a sink plunger (which I had previously used to zero effect). But now... after the application of Kret, with a sinkful of water... plunger deployed... a couple of hearty pumps, and then a gratifying 'BLGRGRGRGRGLLL' and sudden drainage: the water disappeared as rightfully it should. All good! The Kret had softened and partly dissolved the greasy obstruction, but did not clear it outright. The plunger then supplied the mechanical pressure needed to dislodge the loosened plug. Neither the plunger nor the Kret on their own could shift the blockage, but the combination did. Result!

UPDATE: my daughter offered me some really useful advice: buy a sink strainer! (sitko do zlewu). I found a nice one, Polish-made by PrimPol AGD, enamelled stainless steel, in the local hardware store, for 6.90zł. ]

This time last year:|
The perpetual search for authenticity

This time three years ago:
A dog day's night walk

This time four years ago:
Old soul, new challenge

This time five year ago:
What happened at Monks Wood

This time seven years ago:
Loss, faith and consolation

This time nine years ago:
Summer's wasting away

This time ten years ago:
Warsaw remembers the PASTa building capture

This time 11 years ago:
Drought. It was a dry summer.

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's ski slope at Szczęśliwice

This time 14 years ago:
On the road from Dobra, again

This time 15 years ago:
August storm, ul. Targowa

This time 16 years ago:
Warsaw Central's secret underground kebab factory

This time 17 years ago:
Cheap holidays in other people's misery

This time 18 years ago:
Steam welcomes us to Dobra

This time 19 years ago:
New houses appear in the fields by Zgorzała

More mid-August photos

Back to daily long walks. Third day back in action. Not to overdo it, of course (exercises still on hold), but the weather is clement (no heatwaves, but plenty of sun), so off I go. With my camera. All is good.

Below: deer from the rear. A young female roe deer eyeing me suspiciously... I realise that my rucksack, which had been doused with kitten urine, is giving off a confusing smell upwind. "It don't smell... human..." The standoff continued until a tractor drove past, breaking the spell, and scaring the deer off into the orchard to the left.

 

Left: the strawberries have been picked in June, a second crop has since been planted and is growing nicely. Can't yet make out what it will be... Radishes? The parallel rows of greenery converging on a red tractor caught my eye. Along the horizon, houses and street-lights of Grobice.

Below: an amazing photo demonstrating the sheer productive power of nature. This is one of a pair of willow trees by the farm track between Grobice and Grabina that had been pollarded (all top branches cut off) in the spring; underneath is a photograph of the same tree taken two and half months ago, on 3 May.

Incredible to consider just how much vegetation has propagated in a mere ten weeks!

Below: one of my favourite spots in the neighbourhood leading up to the fork in the road, left to Grabina, right to Adamów Rososki.

Below: the reverse view, looking back from the road from Grabina.

Below: the hunters' pulpit in Machcin II. (The is pronounced Machcin drugi as in 'Machcin the Second'.)

Left: back the same way I came. In my rucksack, loads of plums (both śliwki – plums – and węgierki – prune plums). There's an abandoned orchard in Grabina with biennial-bearing trees that are now full of fruit. Unsprayed with pesticides, untreated with fertiliser. I return with 14,000 paces on the clock.

Below: bonus shot, taken on Saturday, a Sichuan Airlines Airbus A330 freighter at Warsaw's Okęcie airport. The Chinese airline flies a regular freight service to Warsaw and then onto either Budapest or Brussels before flying back to its base at Chengdu Shuangliu.

Below: good news at W-wa Dawidy station – the new-style digital information panels are working! As are the new clocks! I am informed that my train home to Chynów (due 18:14) is running five minutes late; the clock is showing 18:19 and indeed behind me it is hoving into view. What a contrast with a time, just 16 years ago, when W-wa Dawidy didn't even have a single sign bearing the name of the station!

This time three years ago:
Climate atonement

This time four years ago:
First month with solar panels on the działka

This time five years ago:
Qualia meditations

This time 12 years ago:
Public and private land in Poland

This time 13 years ago:
Two Warsaw sunsets over water

This time 17 years ago:
Farewell to the old footbridge over Puławska

This time 18 years ago:
Let's ban cars with engines over 2.0 litres

This time 19 years ago:
Ul. Kórnicka gets paved over

Twanged back (again)

One of the purposes of this blog is as an aide-memoire to myself as I physically grow older. Health setbacks are worth recording as they can serve as lessons on what to avoid and how to recover. I can learn from the experience – as long I have an accurate recall of the incident.

Since starting the blog, I have three times injured by calf muscle by suddenly initiating a sprint on unwarmed-up legs (Here's a recent example). Twang! Instant spasm of pain, like being hit in the back of the leg with a baseball bat. And then a week to ten days of immobility, hobbling, limping and returning to normal. In these cases, I knew immediately what went wrong... and have now learned to avoid doing it again. The urge to sprint for a bus or train is restrained by muscle memory.

But with my back, it's something else – a different process. The root cause is harder to pin down...

Was it that I overdid my exercises (holding plank for over nine minutes)? Or carrying too many heavy things (clearing out bags of rubbish for recycling on Monday)? Overdoing the paces (over 19,000 on Saturday)? A combination of all of the above? At least I know it wasn't gardening. That was the cause of a similar sprain injury of my back in the late March when I had a go at scything away dead vegetation. That twisting-upper-body motion requires warm-up exercises! The result was a back sprain that lasted a week and returned two weeks later.

This time – I honestly can't pinpoint one cause. I would like to know, so that I can avoid doing this again in future!

By Tuesday, I would feel spasms of pain when lifting (even taking the cat litter-tray out into the garden), when suddenly changing positions, when my foot dropped into an expected dip in the earth. OW! That hurt! When sitting or lying down – no pain. To the extent that I would forget about it. Until I try to move. OW! Wednesday was the worst; by today I can feel improvement.

Back twangs don't hit me suddenly, they come on gradually. On Monday, I thought I'd pause all exercises, but I still walked 10km. On Tuesday, things were getting worse so again – no exercises – but again, 10km walked. Wednesday and today – I stayed in; other than short excursions around the garden – no walking. And no exercises. The spasms have lost their intensity, but still manifest themselves if I execute some sudden manoeuvre. 

Today it's better than yesterday. There is healing. So – stop the exercises, don't walk... wait it out rather than push through it. The most important thing is going back to my normal routine. I won't be returning instantly to 30 sit-ups, nine minutes of plank, eight sets of back extensions, 60 squats and ten repetitions of bird-dog extensions held for ten seconds each. I need to build up gradually, taking intense care as I return to the exercises not to overdo it.

A steady decline? More sprains, twists, stiffness, falls even... Exercising is the antidote, But overdoing it can lead to problems too. As ever, finding the balance is crucially important. Have I become too obsessive in my quest to 'beat last year'? Time to take it down a notch or too? 

My father taught me a lot about having the right attitude to living with old age. He would often ask “Why was I so lucky?” I think he knew the answer – gratitude. Being grateful for being in good health.

I must say – the very act of writing about it makes my back feel better!

This time last year:
Weeding the tracks/Rail update

This time three years ago:
Dave: An Emissary

This time four years ago:
Fifty years with Virginia Plain

This time five years ago:
The Curve (and one's place on it)

[A crucial blog post!]

This time seven years ago:
Fifty years on, my last kolonia

This time 13 years ago:
Grodzisk Mazowiecki's pretty station

This time 14 years ago:
Exorcism outside the President's Palace

This time 15 years ago:
The raging footsoldier - a story about anger

This time 16 years ago:
Graffiti and street art