Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt III)

What interests me about my canonical 'past-life' dreams and anomalous qualia-memory events – flashbacks or exomnesia – is establishing the relationship between consciousness and identity. In every dream and flashback, it is the first-person I that's doing the experiencing. Yet the place and the time belong to someone else.

Psychologists distinguish between semantic memory – our accumulated knowledge of facts and meanings (we know things without remembering when or how we learnt it) – and episodic memory, the recollection of events we have experienced. I would break episodic memory further into a event memory, a catalogue of who did what, when, where, why and how, and qualia memory – what it was like to have been there, the sensations – how it looked, sounded, smelt, tasted and felt.

My dreams and flashbacks are not proof positive that consciousness can survive biological death. However, I personally feel it with a sufficient certainty to mitigates any fear of death (as opposed to fear of actual dying, pain etc). I feel I know what will happen afterwards – being born into a new biological container and experiencing memories of this life from the next, albeit faint and sporadic, but perhaps a little stronger next time round. There's an intuitive certainty to that feeling.

But I would like to know how it happens! 

I have been the conscious observer of all my waking experiences since childhood. Flashbacks and dreams speak to another apparent life, in an earlier historic time, while maintaining the subjective experiencing I.

But what exactly is that persistent I? How does identity cross from one body to another?

My belief is that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness put space, time matter and energy into being. These are but emergent properties of consciousness, not the other way around. 

The philosopher David Chalmers famously identified the 'hard problem of consciousness'. We can study the neural processes associated with perception, attention, memory and emotion; brain scanners can map the neural correlates of a multiplicity of types of brain activities.

But why should electrochemical activity in the brain be accompanied by any subjective experience at all? Why should there be something it feels like to see sunlight streaming through autumn leaves, or to hear a Bob Wills recording, or to stand outside a racetrack in a dream?

Physicalism has offered us the explanation that consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity. Whether those explanations can ultimately account for subjective experience itself remains contested, and a final verdict is unlikely to be delivered any time soon. Some would ask if it is ever to be settled.

The radio and the signal

Here's a very simplistic metaphor – the best I have at present, though it remains to be further refined.

Imagine a radio signal emanating in all directions from a transmission tower. Now imagine not just thousands of stations – but countless billions of stations. Enough for every human on earth to have their own. Now imagine not a radio, but a human being receiving that unique signal. That signal is modulated by our individual biology, and yes, our will. This is how I picture the relationship between consciousness and the brain. The signal and the receiver. The receiver gives the signal a particular audible expression. Without the receiver, there is no music to be heard in that room.

One day, however, that radio will finally break down. Yet somewhere, a factory is busy producing another radio. Someone buys that new radio, and tunes it to that same unique station as the old radio. The music is there again. Could consciousness work like that?

Perhaps individual brains don't manufacture consciousness, but receive, filter or localise something that's already there – that has existed since the birth of time.

William James entertained versions of a transmission theory of consciousness, while current idealist philosophers, notably Bernardo Kastrup, have argued that individual minds might be localised expressions of a more fundamental consciousness. The idea of a universal consciousness is present in Hinduism and Buddhism.

There are problems with my analogy. It assumes one signal per one receiver (biological entity). Two radios tuned to the same station receive the same broadcast. Yet they are not the same radio. And you need more than just a radio and a signal; you need a person to tune that radio to a station and experience the resultant sound. If my brain dies and another brain subsequently reports anomalous memories of what I had experienced, would this make that new subjective perspective a continuation of mine? Would there be an unbroken thread of first-person experience? Or merely another manifestation of consciousness within a different organism? The problem of personal identity remains.

Could you, for example, wish that in your next life, you'd like to be, say, Winston Churchill or David Bowie?

I find myself wondering whether the essence of an individual life could be carried forward without its autobiographical details.

Perhaps what survives isn't the recollection of events, names, addresses, relationships, careers and personal achievements, but something more elusive; a residue of experience, an accumulated  response to reality. A particular disposition, or an intuitive familiarity with circumstances encountered before, an understanding of the importance of Goodness and Truth in the unfolding Universe?

The idea is totally speculative. Neuroscience provides no established mechanism by which such information could pass from one brain to another after death – or even before it! Telepathy, which many of us strongly suspect exists – has no underlying theory or vector by which we may explain how it works.

Nor does the fact that consciousness is subjectively undeniable prove that it can exist independently without a physical brain (the concept of 'non-local consciousness'), and therefore eternal or capable of reincarnation.

Religion offers various answers. Some Hindu traditions, notably Advaita Vedanta, maintain that an enduring self passes through successive lives. Buddhism generally rejects the notion of an unchanging individual soul while nevertheless affirming rebirth through causal continuity. Christianity traditionally places its emphasis upon salvation and the survival and resurrection of the person.

I find each approach interesting, but none provides an explanation of precisely how one conscious subject might continue in another body, certainly nothing remotely scientific.

And there's a further question.

If we do live successive lives, what is the purpose? Is consciousness merely gathering experiences, endlessly repeating the cycle of birth, life and death? Or is there some direction to the process?

I incline towards the latter.

This time last year:

To Rzeszów and back, directly, by train

This time two years ago:
Under Rzeszów – subterranean inspirations

This time three years ago:
Another canonical past-life dream

This time four years ago:
Cottagecore – a manifesto

This time five years ago
Ego, Consciousness and Soul

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

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

This time nine years ago:
A few words about coincidence

This time 12 years ago:
Hello, pork pie [my week-long pork-pie diet]

This time 14 years ago:
The meaning of class – in England, in Poland

This time 15 years ago: 
First frost 

This time 19 years ago:
First frost 
[No frost forecast at allright up to the end of October 2026.]

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt II)

From early childhood, I was drawn to America. American TV programmes fascinated me. I particularly remember McHale's Navy making an impression on me as a five-year-old – there was a sense of instant familiarity. The uniforms, the base, the flags, calling the captain 'skipper'. And the reader books at primary school – the Janet and John series, these were m, Anglicised versions of the Alice and Jerry books published in America in the 1930s and '40s. In particular, the book Five and Half Club; the illustrations resonated deeply with me; they spoke of a land and I time I knew, that seemed close.

As a teenager, my interest in American history and culture grew. Eventually I chose to study American Studies at Warwick University. In 1978, I received a travel bursary which enabled me to visit the US for the first time. I was drawn to small-town America, rather than the bright lights or what we'd now call bucket-list destinations. Passing through such towns, I experienced the strongest sense of familiarity. I would find myself feeling, yes, click – a connection, or no, that's changed. But how can a place have changed for someone who's never visited it before? There was that sense of recognition and wistfulness, a slight sense of loss and regret. Something familiar, pleasing to experience, almost within reach, but gone. 

Of course, by the age of 20, I'd already absorbed a great deal about America from television, cinema, books, photographs, Airfix kits and music. It is reasonable to assume that I was comparing the real America with an internal image constructed from all those sources. But that does not come close to capturing the subjective quality of what I felt. 

Yesterday, I saw an online photograph of a 1947 Cadillac, viewed from the side. *PAFF!*. The lines of the car, the sweeping wings, the chrome trim. I could almost smell the interior, though I've never sat in one. The upholstery, the chrome window-winders and door handles, the AM radio, the decorated dashboard, the split-screen windscreen. The solidity of the thing – this was not a Morris Minor, no! I know the sensation of being in that car. Rather, I feel as though I know it.

And the music! Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the big-band era. Louis Jordan. Western swing, jump blues, the race music of the day, bebop jazz. The music generates those qualia exomnesia/anemoia moments for me just as powerfully a photograph from the day.

But there's another dimension to all this. Everything described so far concerns my waking consciousness. Fleeting flashes of recognition, sometimes only a second or two in duration, that disappear the moment I begin to reflect upon them. 

In dreams, the phenomenon presents itself quite differently. These dreams are rare, but remarkably consistent over my lifetime. I've experienced them over seven decades and have been recording them systematically for at least 20 years. I call these my canonical past-life dreams. They are mostly set in America between the 1930s and 1950s. Unlike my ordinary dreams, they follow a coherent narrative, with recognisable settings, plausible sequences of events and none of the bizarre discontinuities so characteristic of dreaming. The unities of time, place and action remain consistent.

More significantly, I experience them from within. The conscious I is present, observing and participating, with the same immediacy of subjective experience that characterises waking life.

Consider one dream set during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. I'm a boy living alone with my widowed mother on a small farm, possibly in Kentucky. On the horizon, a vast wall of dust is advancing towards our house. My mother is getting me to help secure the bedding and tablecloths in a trunk, closing the windows and shutters against the approaching storm. Our dog is whining in the corner. There's no dramatic climax; I'm simply there, experiencing the approaching catastrophe, with all the understanding that something terrible is about to happen.

There are recurring themes. An interest in machinery, a talent for fixing engines. In one dream, as a teenager, I restore a WW1-surplus Mack Bulldog truck, grey in colour, which has been standing unused in a neighbour's barn. The engine finally catches, roaring into life amid clouds of smoke. The sense of achievement is enormous.

Not all these experiences are pleasant. In another dream, my teenage gang breaks into a bonded warehouse to steal liquor and cigarettes. When a security guard wakes as we are leaving, I attack him with intense violence; I would have killed him had my companions not dragged me away.

There is a consistency about the person whose life I appear to be experiencing. He is mechanically resourceful, enterprising, impulsive, sometimes violent, interested in girls, showing and getting into scrapes. And then there's the racetrack. The year is 1939 or 1940. This is Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania. I'm standing outside a horse-racing track, too young to be admitted. The grandstands are modern, with turnstile entrances. It's getting dark. Floodlights illuminate the entrance plaza and car park. Billboards loom overhead. The wet ground is littered with discarded betting slips. Crowds mill around, entering and leaving the grandstand.

I have managed somehow to get hold of a bottle of Rolling Rock beer. I'm standing there, drinking it, watching the people going in and out. It's beginning to rain, and the evening is turning cold. I know I'm not going to get inside. The guy at the turnstile knows me. And that was the entire dream before it moved to more mundane themes. Its ordinariness stands out. No great historical event, no moment of destiny. A young man standing outside a racetrack on a damp evening, drinking a beer, disappointed that he cannot join the crowd and boast to his colleagues about getting in and betting on the ponies. Yet I can recall the scene and its atmosphere. The quality of the artificial light, the wet surfaces, the movement of people, the beer bottle in my hand.

It's the same phenomenon as my waking exomnesia, but in a different medium. In waking life, I experience the atmosphere without the story. In those rare, canonical dreams, the story unfolds within that atmosphere.

Other dreams seem to extend the narrative into the Second World War. It's 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day. I'm travelling south in the back of an open American six-wheel-drive military truck, along with a group of young men in uniform, without insignia. We're on our way to basic training, and shortly we'll be getting our military haircuts. I've just left my girlfriend. Her name is Kelly Kamen. What makes this dream particularly interesting is that within the dream I begin thinking about her surname while the narrative is unfolding. Kamen. The Slavic word for stone. Polish kamień, Russian камень. German Stein. Perhaps her family was Russian-Jewish? The given name Kelly suggests an American-born girl, three or four generations removed from the shtetl. The extraordinary thing is that while the dream is going on, I'm thinking about this, aware that the linguistic knowledge I'm using has been acquired subsequently. Yet I have no awareness of the person who acquired it. I don't know myself to be a man born in London in 1957. I'm the young American in the truck, but with access to knowledge that belongs to a later time.

It's as though the experiencing I remains constant while the biographical identity changes, and the repository of knowledge is somehow accessible independently of that identity.

In another dream, it's the summer of 1945. I'm wading ashore towards a Pacific island recently captured from the Japanese. We're carrying wooden crates from a landing vessel to the beach, containing engine parts and supplies for repairing aircraft. High overhead, against a deep blue sky, formations of shining silver bombers are heading towards Japan. Or another. October 1945. Our ship has docked in San Diego. The war is over. The other men are anxious to get home. My mother has died while I was away, so I'm in no particular hurry. A group of us decides to travel down to Mexicali before going our separate ways.

Later dreams are set in post-war America. In one, I wake in a wooden hotel called the Zig Zag, in a town of the same name. Blood is dripping through the ceiling. Upstairs I discover a decapitated body, and flee in terror, unable to remember what happened the previous night. After waking I searched online and discovered the existence of the Zig Zag Inn in Zigzag, Oregon.

And finally, a hospital. A long, modern, white three-storey building among pine trees. I'm hovering above my body, several feet in the air. A nurse stands at the foot of my bed, looking at a clipboard. She's thinking, “Mr Martin, you will not live until the morning”. I find myself thinking how tactless it is of her to have such a thought. Could these be fragments of one life? A boy growing up in Depression-era America, mechanically gifted, serving in the Pacific War, returning home, eventually dying in hospital sometime after the mid-1950s?

The dates and circumstances fit together well. But dreams can construct coherent narratives from material gathered during waking life. Their realism, however striking, is not proof that the events actually happened.

I have no way of knowing, but wish to know. Epistemically, I would like to know by way of gnosis, direct experience, rather than by trawling through patchy records online trying to find a fit. I have avoided direct searched, not for fear of drawing a blank, but rather because one way or another, it would not tell me much. While I am in awe of the study carried out by the late Prof Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia (and continued to this day by Jim Tucker) into 'past-life cases', they serve only to show that there is a phenomenon present, but the cases go nowhere in terms of explaining how memories from dead people end up being remembered by children. The research into children who report apparent memories of previous lives, notably that begun by Ian Stevenson and continued by Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, raises interesting questions, but has not established reincarnation as a scientific fact. Nor do they offer any explanation for how this phenomenon arises.

More in the next post.

This time last year:
Autumn most splendid

This time three years ago:
How much spirituality do I need?

This time eight years ago:
Whoops! Clumsy

This time ten years ago:
Mystical experiences at 37,000ft

This time 11 years ago:
The staggeringly high cost of tax collection in Poland

This time 15 years ago 
One stop beyond

This time 16 years ago:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)

This time 17 years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!

This time 18 years ago:
Train links to town improving

This time 19 years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt I)

My phone tells me it's raining outside. And yet I see sunshine streaming through the trees. I go out to empty the cat-litter trays. As I approach the hedge at the front of my działka, *PAFF!* – there it is, that old, familiar sense of exomnesia, that moment of recognition, of anemoia. I know this, this precise feeling in response to what I am experiencing. But not from this lifetime.

The orchard, the fence, the lane, the field and distant houses beyond it, the sky... I often felt this feeling in our back garden in Hanwell as a child, knowing of a place to which I had never been. This morning, I feel as I felt then, a soothing sense of continuity of consciousness, a thread of congruence, unbroken, bittersweet remembrance with a sense of regret, like when you sup the last drops of a good cup of coffee. 

Qualia memories have this characteristic – entropy forbids you from physically reliving those moments.

I have experienced this throughout my life, consistently, from earliest childhood. It comes unexpectedly, triggered by a particular quality of light, a configuration of clouds, the arrangement of trees and buildings in a landscape, the smell of the air, a sound; congruence. It's not déjà vu, that sensation of having previously experienced the present moment, though it is similar

It's not I have been here before; it's I have been before. And the abiding question I have is who is meant by 'I'?

And the feeling has – and always has had – a distinctive flavour, an atmosphere, a klimat. It carries with it for me usually a sense of America, roughly between the 1920s and 1950s. Small-town U.S.A. An emotional recognition of the texture of reality, as it might have been experienced by someone living there at that time. How can I possibly know what reality felt like in another place, in another lifetime? I can't. Yet the feeling persists, and has persisted in a consistent, familiar form across my seven decades.

As a child, I visited Poland with my family in the summers of 1961 and 1966, and we went several times to Stella-Plage on the French coast in the late '60s and early '70s. Each country had its own unmistakable atmosphere. Communist Poland felt totally different from the France of les Trente Glorieuses, its years of post-war economic expansion. I experienced both as qualitatively different from West London, still rather drab and grey in the early 1960s.

I can summon these atmospheres today. Not simply memories of individual places, people or events, but a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, sights, tastes and feelings that together recreate something of the experience of being in those places at those particular moments in history. The smell of a café-tabac – newsprint and coffee, fresh baguettes in a boulangerie, a kiosk Ruchu, a klatka schodowa in an old kamienica. Air thick with the smell of low-octane exhausts. The France of 1967 felt different from the Poland of 1966; London in 1965 felt different from both. And these distinctions were apparent to me as a small child, long before I knew much about economics, politics, history and society.

It was about the feel of the place in time. The texture of its reality.

See if you can conjure up the smell of your childhood home. Or the atmosphere of a particular street on a particular afternoon, long ago. The sensation can return to you with astonishing clarity, but try putting it down in words, and all you can produce are some generalised associations. A few bars of music, a particular cloud formation, the sight of a familiar object can summon precise memories of those qualia experienced long gone.

The qualia memories of experience survives within your consciousness. Something that can be recalled, sometimes they can be summoned voluntarily, sometimes they are triggered by a smell or a sound – or sometimes they just spontaneously pop into your mind in an overwhelming, unexpected instant.

What has fascinated me since childhood is that I appear to have an analogous – and anomalous – sense of a world that I never experienced during my present lifetime. This manifests itself in exactly the same way, but fainter and less frequently. Flashbacks, anomalous qualia memories back to a time and place beyond the experience of this biological container.

And here's the question I wish to develop further; if there is persistence of consciousness across biological containers, as it were, how does this work? If we separate ego from consciousness entirely, there can be no identity assigned to that consciousness. If we assume that consciousness is primary, and that in our present forms consciousness is present and observing through the biological vessel or vehicle that we currently are – what of the before? What of the after?

This time two years ago:
Started the day well?
[Before cats, before heart attack]

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

This time 11 years ago:
Respect for pedestrians' lives? Not among Polish MPs

This time 14 years ago:
Autumnal gorgeousness in Warsaw

The autumn deal

Spring is driven by syntropy; autumn by entropy. The breakdown – necessary for the next growth cycle – is here. The year has turned; the chlorophyll begins to breaks down, cellular machinery is being dismantled; nutrients are withdrawn into roots and woody tissues, leaves start to fall and the process of decomposition has begun. The structures of spring and summer are progressively being taken apart. Below: the long, straight dirt road between Dąbrowa Duża and Rososz.

How to dress comfortably for the changeable weather? Hot when the sun shines, colder when it doesn't

Below: on today's walk to the forest next door, I am accompanied by Céleste and her youngest son, Marss (with two 's's). The brothers and sisters are pumping up the volume – growing rapidly.

That determined facial expression is pure Marrs. 

A bright day brings out the recreational flyers. Here's a Sky Arrow 650 TCNS two-seat light aircraft, built in Italy, registered in Sweden, and a frequent sight over Chynów skies this summer.

Below: at the south-eastern edge of the village of Ławki, the sun comes out. bright and strong and hot. I take off my field jacket and remove the liner, stowing it in my rucksack. After putting the unlined jacket back on, I still feel too warm for comfort.

When the level crossing gate bells started ringing after a local train and an InterCity express had both headed north, I suspected some unusual movement on the tracks. And indeed… A diagnostic-measurement wagon (wagon diagnostyczno-pomiarowy) at the end of a rake of coaches heading north, between Sułkowice and Czachówek Południowy stations. 

Hauling the train is an EP09 locomotive (coincidentally I read today that this class of engine will be withdrawn from passenger-train duties before the end of 2028). This particular example, EP09-012, was built in 1991. It belongs to PKP Remtrak, the subsidiary of PKP group that specialises in repair, maintenance and overhaul of passenger rolling stock. (The above two photos are a bit hazy, despite a lot of Photoshop. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, condensation appeared between my lens and the front filter.)

Below: on the path to north-eastern edge of Ławki, and beyond that, Czachówek Południowy station. Although a hot sun was shining on my back, blowing my way were dark rain clouds bearing more rain. 

With the weather as capricious as it is, I decided not to continue on to Czachówek Górny as planned, but to stop at Czachówek Południowy and from there take the train back to Chynów instead. Below: a southbound InterCity express rushes through Czachówek Południowy, on the 'up' line, having overtaken the local service. The sun goes in behind the clouds, and I button the liner back into my jacket as my train arrives.

Two stops later, it delivered me to Chynów; on the short walk home, once again I was overheating.

Such is autumn, the entropic mirror of spring.

This time last year:
Gliwice – much nicer than I had expected

This time 13 years ago:
Poland does poorly in Global AgeWatch ranking

This time 14 years ago:

Warsaw, early autumn – a photo miscellany

This time 15 years ago:

The genius of Donald Tusk 

This time 16 years ago:

Eighteen die in minibus crash

PKP progress on platforms (I hope!)

News from Rynek Kolejowy has set Polish rail users chattering on social media – at long last, state-owned rail-infrastructure operator PKP PLK looks like it might be changing the awkward way that Polish station platforms are numbered.

I have written about this many times before; this is one of the remaining absurdities on the Polish rail network, which has improved beyond recognition over the past 15 years. 

The problem is that each platform edge, which in most countries around the world is simply called a 'platform', is identified in Poland by a combination of track (tor) and platform (peron) numbers.

Let's take a simple example; Warszawa Centralna (Warsaw Central station). The current nomenclature is as follows: Tor 7 Peron 1; Tor 5 Peron 1 – Tor 3 Peron 2; Tor 1 Peron 2 – Tor 2 Peron 3; Tor 4 Peron 3, then Tor 6 Peron 4 and finally Tor 8 Peron 4.  When a train is announced, the announcer will say, in English, for example, "The train for Berlin Gesundbrunnen is departing from Track 2 Platform 3" or  "The train for Vilnius is departing from Track 3 Platform 2." It is easy to get confused! In any other country, these eight platform edges would simply be numbered Platforms 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. 

The problem is particularly acute at larger stations. It has twice caused me to miss connecting trains at Poznań Główny, for example. Below: Platform 11, Track 58 and Platform 11 Track 56 (where's Track 57?).  Under the proposed system, these would simply become two separately numbered platforms – perhaps Platforms 15 and 16. No more need to remember both a platform as well as a track number!

Left: fragment of printed timetable at Poznań Główny. Next to the departure time is the peron number, with the tor number beneath it. The trouble is that the loudspeaker announcements give the tor number first, followed by the peron number („Pociąg do stacji Wągrowiec odjedzie z toru ósmego przy peronie drugim”). While the printed timetables have gone over to Arabic from Roman numerals for peron numbers in 2024, the online timetable (rozkład-pkp.pl) still uses Roman numerals! (So right now, the local train for Wągrowiec is shown as departing Poznań Główny from IV/12).

Three days ago, PKP PLK announced that after completing the modernisation of Mysłowice station on 25 October, it will be renumbering its three physical platforms serving five tracks as five separately numbered platform edges for passenger-information purposes (below). The trial is scheduled to expand on 13 December to Milówka, Sól, Rajcza, Skarżysko-Kamienna and Środa Wielkopolska stations. A nationwide rollout is not yet confirmed; PKP PLK will evaluate the pilot, including passenger surveys, before deciding whether to extend it.

PKP PLK appears finally to have accepted long-standing suggestions from rail users: the numbering of tracks does not need to be communicated to passengers. Below: classic example of this nonsense. Lublin Główny station. Technical track numbering isn't irrational (someone once explained it to me) – railway workers need to know this for operational purposes. It's simply inappropriate as the primary means of directing passengers.

Below: the absurdity reaches its peak in the Tri-City, where the SKM trains between Gdańsk and Gdynia use tracks 501 and 502. No doubt some railway professional can explain the logic (like, why not 401 and 402 or 201 and 202?) Let's just double-check the platform numbers on our phones as we walk down these steps...

My own local absurdity at Chynów station is the fact that there are two platforms, three platform edges, numbered Tor 4 Peron 2, Tor 2 Peron 2 and Tor 1 Peron 1. Where's Tor 3?

********

Polish railways are better than ever, but could still improve. I get on average three emails a week from Koleje Mazowieckie informing me of delays on the Radom line, subject line, Utrudnienia w ruchu pociągów. But then I do get these notifications, so at least there is a system.

I am a firm believer in the aggregation of marginal gains, the philosophy of British Olympic cycling coach, Sir David 'Dave' Brailsford. Introduce an innovation that shaves off a tenth of a second and no one notices. But introduce a hundred innovations, and you've made a potentially race-winning ten-second gain. The same principle applies to Poland's railways. Station signage, passenger information (digital displays and AI-generated loudspeaker announcements), signalling and control systems, new track and new rolling stock have all made travelling by train a far more pleasant experience than in the past. And by introducing logical platform numbering (from the passengers' point of view), another marginal improvement adds to the overall positive experience. And this drives passenger numbers, up 7.7% in 2025 over 2024, which in turn justifies further investment. A virtuous circle.

PKP PLK appears finally to have accepted long-standing suggestions from rail users: the numbering of tracks does not need to be communicated to passengers. Railway workers have good reasons for retaining their own system of track numbering. But what use is that information to someone changing trains, possibly in a hurry, who simply wants to know where to stand? Let the railway engineers keep their track numbers. Passengers just need platform numbers.

This time last year:
A man's wealth expressed in cats
[Since then, my wealth has doubled!]

This time three years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford PiS

This time four years ago:
A slower, drabber, greener, more local way of life might yet save us all

This time five years ago:
Warka's bi-weekly market

This time six years ago:
How's your samopoczucie?

This time seven years ago:

Pavement for Karczunkowska? What's next?
[Still sign of it. In 2022 it was promised for 2026. They lied.]

This time ten years ago:
On relevance and irrelevance

This time 11 years ago:
Apple time south of Warsaw

This time 12 years ago:
Poland gets anglicised as Britain gets polonised

This time 13 years ago:
Ale, architecture and city politics

This time 14 years ago:
The pros and cons of roadside acoustic screens

This time 15 years ago:
Moaning about trains again
[haha! Have a look at this post to see just how much has changed!]

This time 16 years ago:
Warsaw street names – Dolna, Polna, Rolna, Wolna, Smolna. Lost?

This time 18 years ago:
Ditches, landscapes, autumn

This time 19 years ago:
Golden autumn in Łazienki park

Szczecin – Wrocław of the North

Welcome to Szczecin. The benefit of arriving by night train at this time of year is the chance to watch the sun rise over the city as it sleeps. To the left, the cathedral of St Jacob. Destroyed in the war, this Gothic building served Protestant worshippers from the Reformation until 1945 (with a brief counter-reformational interlude); the ruins were rebuilt in the 1970s. Now a Roman Catholic place of worship. 

Below: view from the top of St Jacob's cathedral tower (you can reach it by lift); sadly, the viewing gallery is not open air, as in Gdańsk. In the distance, Dąbie lake (jezioro Dąbie); the far shore of which marks the boundary of the city of Szczecin. Until 2023, Szczecin was Poland's third-largest city in terms of surface area; today it has slipped to number five. Why? Because in 2023, the boundaries of the cities of Gdańsk and Gdynia were extended right out to the edge of Poland's territorial waters, more than doubling their surface areas.

Left: view into Szczecin's Old Town, dominated by the old town hall Altes Ratthaus (with a double 't'). To the south, the Rynek Sienny ('Haymarket'), to its north, the Rynek Nowy ('Newmarket'). A huge choice of bars, cafés and restaurants.

Architecturally, Szczecin reminds me of Wrocław with so many vistas that I'm often having double-takes and reminding myself which city I'm actually in. 

Below: the relatively new (consecrated in 2011) Orthodox church of St Nicholas. Inside the paintings are fresh, the colours vivid, untarnished as yet by decades of patina.

Just across the road from the Orthodox church, on ulica Teofila Starzyńskiego, a late-19th century German tenement building (part of a long-running series of Polish urban facades).

The late-19th century urban planning of Alte Stettin was influenced by what Haussmann had accomplished in Paris – star squares (circuses) upon which several radial avenues converge; wide tree-lined boulevards and diagonal vistas; and unified tenement blocks with commercial ground floors and decorative facades. Below: Ulica Bolesława Krzywoustego, with trees, trams and tenements. This thoroughfare, 35m wide at this point, conforms to the Haussmannian norm of a grand boulevard (generally over 30m in width); it ends in Plac Zwycięstwa, along with nine other streets.

I have photographed the facade of Szczecin's new post office (built 1905) as the Oberpostdirektion Stettin (Stettin Higher Postal Directorate), a magnificent neo-gothic building completed in 1905, a mere 40 years before this became the seat of the administration of the Dyrekcja Okręgu Poczty Polskiej.

Szczecin is one of Poland's great cities, it's certainly worth a visit. If you love Wrocław, you'll love Szczecin.

This time last year:
Six months on from my heart attack

This time ten years ago:
How the Tories ceased to be the party of economic liberals

This time 13 years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi – Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time 14 years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction

This time 16 years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time 18 years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development 

Szczecin from the water

Taking a river cruise around sunset gives new perspectives on a maritime or riverine city, often yielding magnificent prospects not to be experienced on foot. Szczecin is no exception.

Below: pulling away by boat from the centre of Szczecin, beyond the far end of the Bulwar Chrobrego.

Below: flashback to the Royal Docks on the Thames in the early 1980s before they were redeveloped. The entrances to Basen Wschodni and Basen Zachodni, the East and West Basens of Szczecin docks.

Below: floating dry-dock in Szczeciń's Stocznia Remontowa (repair shipyard), currently servicing the Sea La Belle, a Liberian-registered chemical tanker used for carrying epoxy resins (!). It has been here for just over a week.

Below: Is this Cookham Dene? Are we on the upper reaches of the Thames? No, this is about five minutes' north by boat from central Szczecin. And soon it will be autumn in Buckinghamshire. 

Left: looking back towards the Szczecin shipyards. The city offers the joys of boating to its citizens, who have safe inland waters close to hand. The season is over, but it's still warm enough until the sun goes down. 

Below: the wreck of the Ulrich Finsterwalder, a small concrete-hulled (yes!) transport ship built by the Germans in 1942. A circumnavigation of ts 90m-long hull marked the end point of the cruise; having rounded the Eisenbeton-Seefrachter, our boat began to head back for Szczecin. At this point, we are still over 55km from the sea – so much for Churchill's "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain is descending across our Continent." But then I doubt he could have mastered the pronunciation of 'Świnoujście on the Baltic'.

Below: last rays of the sun, setting over Szczecin's north-western suburbs, the telephoto zoom shot...

...and the wide angle shot. Sunset is 25 minutes later here than in Chynów, due to Szczecin's location on Poland's extreme west.

Below: return to Szczecin's port, passing the shipyards on the left bank of the Oder. Marvellous mood. Puts me in mind of Joseph Conrad's description of the Thames Estuary at the beginning of Heart of Darkness or Erskine Childer's descrption of the approaches to the Kiel Canal in Riddle of the Sands.

This time 11 years ago:
Polish politics enter a critical period

This time 13 years ago:
New shopping centre for Jeziorki?

This time 15 years ago:
Mobile and intelligent

This time 16 years ago:
Unadopted – abandoned properties

Szczecin Philharmonic

I first laid eyes upon Szczecin Philharmonic from the 11th floor of the Radisson Blu hotel in November 2016 (photo below). The building, which brings to mind an frost-covered mediaeval Hanseatic skyline, was designed by Studio Barozzi Veiga from Barcelona. It won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 2015 and the Architectural Design of the Year prize in the Eurobuild Awards 2014 contest.

And now, a chance to see the building from the inside, and indeed to take in a concert, not just any concert, but the one inaugurating the 2026/2027 season. This consisted of three pieces; Beethoven's Egmont overture, Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor (which he composed at the age of 20!) and Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 in D major.

Below: the large spiral staircase that can handle peak audience flows between levels before and after performances and during the breaks.

Left: Architecture that seems to pre-shadow Warsaw's controversial contemporary arts museum in terms of their interiors (though it must be said, the exteriors differ as much as a Portakabin differs from a Gothic cathedral).

Below: the auditorium, which seats nearly 1,000 people, was expressly designed to deliver the most outstanding acoustic qualities. This was demonstrated by the guide dropping a one-grosz coin (weighing 1.6g) from the balcony onto the lower floor – the sound reverberated clearly around the concert hall. On either side of the ceiling are stowed thick black curtains (kotary) that drop down to cover the angled acoustic wall panels to prevent deafness when electrically-amplified music is being performed at eleven.

I was lucky enough to watch the concert from behind the orchestra, so for the first time I had the chance to watch an orchestral conductor at work from face-on, rather than just his back. It was a revelation; the gestures, the facial expressions – very powerful.

Below: general view of the foyer area, which possesses a worthy bar, serving a respectable variety of beverages including craft ales.

There were two exhibitions in galleries on the upper floors; one an entirely forgettable bunch of abstract paintings, the other an atmospheric black-and-white photo-reportage of charcoal burners in the Bieszczady hills taken by the Kumor family, Tomasz, Magdalena and their son Michał.

The Szczecin Philharmonic is an absolute must-experience venue for anyone visiting the city.

This time last year:
Compositions in reds, greens, whites and blues

This time ten years ago:
Low water mark

This time 15 years ago:
Łódź to Jeziorki by car in four hours
[See how Poland's road network has improved!]

This time 16 years ago:
What's new on the manor?

This time 17 years ago:
The funeral of Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 18 years ago:
Socialist realism in the boardroom