The Five Newcomers

Here they are - in order of weight. All are grey, like their father. It's too early to tell if any are longhairs like their mother, but the stumpy-tail gene is present in three of them.

Weighing in a 91 grams on the evening of Day 1 (so about 15 hours old), this character: a lovely uniform mid-grey colour on top. Stumpy tail.

The second 91-grammer is grey with white undersides that meet up in a white collar. Pink fingers and toes, and a regular tail.

Next in weight, a pair of 90-gram specimens. Grey, with tabby markings, white undersides and collar. Also has pink hands and feet. 

The second 90-grammer is an overall grey tabby, with no white coloration on the upper surfaces, and another stumpy tail:

Finally, the lightest of the litter, another overall grey tabby, with regular tail. The weight - 77 grams - gave me cause for concern, as healthy birth weight for a kitten ranges from 85-115g. However, as I write this, I have weighed this individual again today, aged 36 hours, and it's a pleasing 87 grams (putting on 10g a day is healthy weight gain at this early age).

Too early to check for sex, or to detect any character traits that might lead to a name-choice (as in the case of their uncle Scrapper who was an evident scrapper from the outset).

Céleste, like her mother before her, is an absolute star when it comes to motherhood. Fussing over the little ones, ensuring all get fair access to nipples, minimising time out of the birthing box to visit feeding bowl and litter tray, Céleste is diligent and scrupulous.

Grandma Wenusia and wujek Pacio both entered my bedroom, looked into the birthing box, and hissed. But then they both hissed at Hipek when he joined the colony as the only unrelated cat, which suggests that dislike of the Other might be a genetic trait. Scrapper and Czester both looked in and registered no reaction whatever. Arcturus hasn't even bothered to visit. The nicest reaction was from Hipek; he came, he looked into the birthing box, and stared at the new life inside for quite a while in silence.

This time two years ago:
Coffee Time

This time ten years ago:
Call it what it is: Okęcie

This time 11 years ago:
Three stations in need of repair

This time 12 years ago
Late evening, Śródmieście

This time 13 years ago:
Ranking a better life

This time 15 years ago:
Paysages de Varsovie

This time 16 years ago:
Spring walk, twilight time

New life (again!)

Around quarter past two this morning, Céleste began giving birth, with the fifth kitten popping out at exactly 03:03. Céleste has been visibly pregnant for the last few weeks, waddling around, but still being capable of a blistering turn of speed when running with her brothers in the garden. 

Since last Thursday, when for an hour or so she lay next to the kitchen table panting quickly, I knew it would be any day now. Yesterday evening, all the other cats moved out for the night – Céleste remained alone in the house. She followed me into my bedroom, where the birthing box stood. I went to bed around nine and was woken up by miaowing; soft bedside lamp on, and there it was, the miracle of new life.

This is the third time I witnessed the birth of kittens; a profoundly moving experience. Each successive time it becomes more so. I can now imagine the kittens morphing into adolescent cats by autumn; prime kittenhood (oohs and aahs) does not last long.

Tiny paws tangled in umbilical cord; bloody fur, lots of licking. Tiny parcels of dark, wet, squealing fur on wet towelling and wet cardboard.

After five hours of Céleste's constant licking off the bloody afterbirth, I can see that the dominant colour among the kittens is grey, confirming my suspicions as to paternity – the grey tabby who'd turn up on the dziaka in early spring.

Céleste is 11 months and 10 days old today, so a couple of months older than her mother was. She has always been a patient cat, never miaowing to be let out or to be fed, just standing by the door or by the bowl; and so it was with her birth. No noise, no drama, just quietly getting on with it.

Céleste gave birth on the same towel, in the same birthing box, in the same place (corner of my bedroom), where she was born. A sense of continuity.  Unlike her mother, who showed signs of anxiety whenever my head hovered over the box, Céleste was perfectly comfortable with my presence around her and her kittens.

So – I'm now up to 12 cats. Wenusia, her children Scrapper, Arcturus, Pacyfik, Czester and Céleste, Hipek the old stray I took in two months ago, plus now the new five of Céleste's. Will I keep all five? We'll see. Assuming there's a female or two in the litter, will I keep them to procreate further? Probably not. 

In the meanwhile, it's Babcia Wenusia, Uncle Scrapper, Wujek Arkcio, Wujek Pacio and Wujek Czestuś to you and me.

Coping with seven is no problem. I just have to buy more cat food. But coping with 12? Again, we'll see.

Why would a billionaire want more money? A man's wealth is expressed in cats.

This time last year:
Birdland

This time three years ago:
De-growth – a personal manifesto

This time four years ago:
Start Late, Finish Late – more on the Speed of Life

This time nine years ago:
Swans' way

This time ten years ago:
Sam Smith, Shepherd Neame and the Routemaster bus

This time 12 years ago:
Rainy night in Jeziorki – no flood this time!

This time 13 years ago:
Wide-angle under Pl. Wilsona

This time 14 years ago:
Ranking a better life

This time 15 years ago:
Questions about our biology and spirituality

This time 16 years ago:
Paysages de Varsovie

This time 17 years ago:
Spring walk, twilight time

The demand chain and behavioural economics

Not far from home there's a scrapyard; hundreds of cars, piled one on top of another, awaiting final breakdown into reusable parts and eventual smelting. 

If only the planet's automotive companies put as much effort into keeping old cars roadworthy as they do in manufacturing and marketing new ones!

Yesterday, I filled up the Micra for the first time since the 19th of December. Since that day, the 21-year-old car has been driven 724 kilometres (450 miles). I'm getting 18.4km to the litre or 52 miles per (UK) gallon. Other than the big weekly shop in Warka (exactly 18.4km away), I hardly drive the car at all. For the first seven weeks of 2026, the car didn't move because there was too much snow, and the salt used to clear the roads is dreadfully corrosive to the car's undersides. I hope to keep the Micra running for many, many years. Following classic-car Facebook accounts, if cars I remember from childhood are still in regular use today, why can't a 2005 car be around in 2070?

The scrapheap on the DK50 at Nowe Grobice is full of cars that I'm sure could have been repaired and kept going for years had there been a will to do so. Many owners get caught in the following trap: "My car's worth €5,000. It will cost me €3,000 to fix. So I will sell it for five and use the three set aside for fixing it to buy a used car for €8,000." And then they end up buying one for ten. "But it's got all the options." The idea that an old car is beyond economic repair is what fills the scrapyards to the brim.

I was particularly sad to see an Audi A2 up there. It was a car built before the current craze for oversized SUVs, a car with an aluminium space-frame body, light in weight and resistant to corrosion. 

With a diesel engine, it could cover 33.3km on one litre or 94.2 miles per (UK) gallon. Surely, this is the sort of car the world needed? Well, it turns out that – no. After a mere five years in production, the last Audi A2 rolled off the production line in August 2005. Today, Audi produces five saloons (also offered in hatchback/estate versions) and eight SUVs. 

The smallest car in Audi's current line-up, the A3, takes up 22% more roadspace (7.9m² vs. 6.4m²); in its base version, the A3 weighs 35% more than the A2. In stop-start urban traffic, the A2 can cover over 18km on one litre of diesel, while the A3 can only cover 14km, what with having to accelerate that extra bulk every time the lights turn green. And for the gentle, rural driving that I do, an A2 can cover over 26km on a litre – something impossible for even the most feather-footed A3 driver [Data via Google Gemini.]

Meanwhile, I am being bombarded by online ads for new cars. No – I will not buy one. I would rather sink thousands of zlotys into keeping the old Micra roadworthy than to walk into a showroom to buy a brand new car.

We talk of 'supply chains'. What about 'demand chains'? ChatGPT defines demand chain as "the sequence of activities through which customer need is identified, stimulated and converted into profitable orders." Note use of the term 'customer need'. Our needs are for most part simple; our wants are complex and latently profitable. The demand chain is about reframing our desires – often spurious or frivolous – as necessities.

I've been interested by the concept of behavioural economics for a long time. It is the main reason why economists can't predict the future: the infinite complexity of the market behaviour of eight billion individuals. Like the butterfly in your garden whose flapping wings unleash a typhoon in Indonesia, one person's decision not to buy a winter coat can result in the closure of a garment factory in Brazil.

Endless economic growth is predicated by consumers' insatiable appetite for more, stoked by the demand chain.  A consumer may begin with a vague want – comfort, status, convenience, security, belonging, self-expression, relief from anxiety. The market then supplies the narrative machinery that frames that vague want into something harder to resist: a need.

How many times have you caught yourself saying "this is not indulgence; this is self-care," or  "this is not luxury; it is an investment," or "this is not about convenience, it's about productivity." A crucial part of the demand chain is the psychological conversion mechanism: transforming an entirely discretionary desire into a seemingly rational expenditure decision. And this works so well in the clothing industry.

For the good of the planet, for the good of your bank account, doing less is not necessarily the answer; the real answer is wanting less. To quote epigramologist Jacek Koba, "happiness is when the ratio of your expectations to your reality is 1:1".

This time last year:
The pareidolias of smell

This time two years ago:
Qualia compilation 7: Motorways at night, Yorkshire

[An unbidden memory from 50 years ago unlocks memories from past life.]

This time four years ago:
Interstices (junction of S7 and S2 expressways just ahead of its opening to traffic)

This time five years ago:
Joys of Spring

This time six years ago:
Jeziorki in May

This time seven years ago:

Spitalfields and Smithfields – more from London

This time nine years ago

That tune going round your head now...

This time ten years ago:
The eyes... the eyes... 

This time 11 years ago:
New old terminal open at Okęcie airport

This time 13 years ago:
Arrogance vs. humility 

This time 14 years ago:
Warsaw looking good ahead of the football-fan influx

This time 15 years ago:
Heron over Jeziorki

This time 19 years ago:
Present rising, future loading

Plato, God and the Afterlife

Threaded through Plato's treatise about the State are many references to God and the Afterlife. It is, after all, natural to assume that in the pre-Modern world practically everyone believed in some sort of God or other. The Greeks had their myths, their polytheistic pantheon of Gods, and Plato assumed that these Gods were associated with the mythos of the Hellenic peoples. Though when Plato refers to God, he does so in the singular. 

In his ideal state, the mythos must be protected. Poets who subvert tales of the Gods, who ascribe evil intent to the actions of the Gods, should be banned (Homer included). Very much in the vein of Putin.

Plato is at his most specific when it comes to setting out his spiritual vision right at the end of The Republic, in the second half of Book X. He tells (through the narrator, Socrates) the Myth of Er. 

A slain warrior who returns to life after 12 days, to recount what he had just witnessed. As Er tells it, when his soul left his body, it "went on a journey with a great company" to a place of judgment, "at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand". This is familiar to the Christian; God at the Last Judgment, separating the good from the bad, the left and the right, the sheep from the goats.

But what happens next is more in the Eastern traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism: "Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser—God is justified."

The soul chooses for itself a new, different, life. The choice of new life is crucial, for it is part of the continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement, with each successive life being better than the last – if the right choice is made. And this choice, claims Plato, must be framed in moral and ethical terms. "Learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always the better life." 

Er speaks of a soul that chose the life of a tyrant, "his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality; he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own children". Our souls are to be "schooled by trial". Plato's recipe for a happy life on this earth is to dedicate yourself to "sound philosophy". 

Plato and I see the process of reincarnation in the Hindu way; a continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement. And so, to the final sentence of the final part of the most influential book in Western philosophy: "Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing."

Saṃsāra.

This time last year:
Mornings with My Cat, Mii

This time eight years ago:
Black-necked grebes hatch

This time nine years ago:
To Warka in the sunshine

This time 13 years ago:
The descriptive vs. the prescriptive

This time 14 yeas ago: 
Noc Muzeów – night of pride in being Polish

This time 18 years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford to keep the grosz
[It's still here. If you find one in your change – keep it.]

Plato and politics

The Republic is remarkable for the light it sheds on the human condition. This 2,400-year-old treatise about making society – made up of flawed humans – work remains even more relevant today than when it was written. Its implications are global, rather than concerning city-states of Ancient Greece. 

Reading Plato today in a 19th-century translation is slightly jarring as it casts Victorian shade over a work which is 2,400 years old; but as I discovered yesterday, the version I read had a massive influence on the development of modern Britain, and thus the world.

Benjamin Jowett’s translation entered university libraries almost immediately after its publication in 1871. It became the dominant English-language academic Plato for generations because of Jowett’s immense influence within the Victorian Oxbridge intellectual establishment. This influence is to be felt to the present day, about which, more below.

The Republic's central premise is a thought-experiment. It posits the ideal state as imagined by 'Socrates' (Plato's narrator – the real Socrates didn't leave any writings). 'Socrates' suggests that the state should be ruled by a class of Guardians, whose one aim in life is to rule the state; they should indeed be brought into the world with this express intention. A caste of high-born philosopher-kings, they should not possess wealth, but be provided for by the rest of the state's citizens – the cobblers, the shipwrights, the bakers, the farmers, the builders and everyone else. The Guardians should be the children of renowned warriors, they should be generalists rather than specialists. Controversially, they should share their wives in common, and bring up their children in common.

Did Plato really believe this to be an ideal form of governance? Or was it a narrative device? A conceit designed to provoke thought – in today's parlance... to trigger?

Plato identifies various forms of government: aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Familiar terms to us today, but Plato uses them slightly differently, attaching different values to them. Tyranny, of course, being the worst, then, as now. But democracy he sees as a form of mob rule, where the majority can hold undue sway over the minority; the free poor can get together and say "there's more of us than there are of the rich – let us pass laws that allow us to seize their wealth." However, avoiding the rule of tyrants was the greatest challenge for society.

Plato identifies the drive for money and power as the key to understanding the motivation of tyrants. Appetite – lust for power, for glory, for wealth – is why rulers slip away from idealised forms of government towards more corrupt polities. You only need to look at contemporary America and Russia to see how true Plato's insights remains some two and half millennia on.

At the heart of politics sits personality and human behaviour. Not ideology. A fucked-up mind within an untiring, driven body, obsessively seeking power, wealth, and in some cases adulation, turning power into wealth and wealth into more power – this is Plato's tyrant. We see this so clearly today. Ideology is merely a means to the end rather than being an end in itself. "Vote for me, because I hate those whom you hate" has replaced "vote for me and I'll give you the rich man's money".

Plato's Republic serves as a timeless warning to societies to watch out for those who seek to rule over us. Plato argues that a decent and stable society can exist only when the qualities of justice, truth and goodness govern both the individual and the state. He commends rule by philosophically educated guardians who subordinate their private interest to the common good. 

Back to Jowett. This ideal filtered through into the British Civil Service (after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854. Its full title was: Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, Together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett. Yes, that Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, who would go on to translate Plato's The Republic.

The result would be a close real-world approximation to a Platonic administrative elite, though moderated by parliamentary democracy. Plato set out that rulers should not seek wealth, that rule should belong to the educated and morally disciplined, and that within the ruling class, appetite must be subordinated to the common good. The Victorian reformers believed that public office should not be a source of private wealth or patronage. Entry into the Civil Service should be by ability, not connections, and an ethos of integrity, duty and competence should govern, not avarice or party interest.

Plato's observations about tyrants' appetites squares with modern warnings about the 'dark triad' of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Rising politicians who display these traits (especially if they are capable of masking them!) need weeding out as they gain power, before their innate characteristics – indeed their personality disorders – can turn into tyrants. 

In my next post, I shall turn to what Plato had to say about God, the soul and the afterlife.

This time four years ago:
The speed of life

This time five years ago:
Does it all come right in the end?

This time six years ago:

Self-discipline and creativity during the lockdown

This time seven years ago:

Russia's Far East on road maps

This time eight years ago:
Heavenly Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Why are all the shops shut today? 

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki at its most beautiful

This time 15 years ago:
Useful and useless in my wallet

This time 16 years ago:
In search of the dream klimat - remote viewing made real

This time 17 years ago:
Zakopane to Kraków in 3hrs 45min
[Less than two hours today.]

On Getting to the End of Plato's Republic

Phew! That was hard work. Four hundred and sixteen pages. I finished this morning, having started reading it over two months ago. And this is my second attempt; my first bash (last autumn) ended about a quarter of the way into the book.

BUT IT WAS WORTH IT!!

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1929, "...the European philosophical tradition is ... a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato posed the foundational questions and set out the conceptual map, over which later philosophers have argued; answering him, modifying him – rejecting him even, but hardly ever ignoring him. And so I set out, determined to read such a crucial text. 

This particular book, my son has reminded me today, spent most of its life in my parents' downstairs lavatory. I guess it served to impress guests, signalling intellectual pretensions, and it might have been something my mother dipped into now and then while seated on the throne. It was neither annotated (as many of my father's science books are) nor even visibly thumbed.

The Republic is part of an anthology, The Essential Plato (with introduction by Alain de Botton), a 1999 reprint of the Victorian translation, by Benjamin Jowett. I now realise that this is not the easiest way into Plato's work. Jowett made zero effort to make the original Greek easy to read, leaving immense sentences that stretch on sometimes for half a page as single chunks. Rather than breaking them down into less ponderous prose, Jowett's text gives off the air of a Victorian mind trying hard to appear lofty. You drift away in successive subordinate clauses, searching for the sentence's principal verb.

Yet Jowett's translation is to Plato what King James Version is to the Bible – it's the version that many generations of Britain's educated elite cut its teeth on while reading the Greats or PPE at Oxford.

So I read the whole book out loud (another reason it took so long – I never took it with me on the train). I read it so that it would make sense to me. If I failed to get Plato's point, I'd re-read the paragraph. Aloud. And as I did so, it dawned on my why my studies at school and university were not as effective as they should have been – I had so often skipped the hard bits. At the meta-level, often while reading Plato, I was conscious of my mind beginning to wander off. So I read slowly, around six pages a day on average, compared to the 20 or so pages a day of previous books I'd read this year. Also, I read it with pencil in hand, making notes in the margins, underlining points I considered important and flagging up with asterisks the key ideas. 

Another thing that irked me throughout was the fact that though ostensibly The Republic is in the form of a dialogue between Socrates (the character through whom Plato speaks) and his followers, the actual 'dialogue' is mostly Socrates' listeners saying things like "Yes" and "True" and "Exactly" and "By all means" to just about everything that Socrates says. With the exception of Thrasymachus, who puts up a vigorous argument against Socrates' (Plato's) point of view in Book 1, everyone else comes across as a cypher, a mere nodding yes-man. The reader yearns for a response such as "up to a point" or "only in some cases" or "that's a bit of a sweeping generalisation, Socrates!" This is no dramatic debate among equals, no challenges, not a true dialogue; rather, it comes across as a narrative device, a framework upon which Plato hangs his ideas.

Having said that, these 416 pages contain ideas that have shaped our world to a remarkable degree. 

In my next post, I shall cover what Plato actually wrote 2,400 years ago, and why his thinking on human psychology, politics and spirituality remains so utterly relevant today. And why I so frequently was writing 'Trump!' and 'Putin!' in the margins.

This time last year:
The platform is in working order (or not)

This time two years ago:
Anatomy of a Moment

This time three years ago:
Ego – self-consciousness – pure consciousness

This time seven years ago:
The Day the Forecasters Got It Wrong

This time eight years ago:
Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Wola became W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 two years ago today 

This time 13 years ago:
From yellow to white – dandelions go to seed
[2026: this happened two weeks ago]

This time 16 years ago:
The good topiarist

This time 17 years ago:
Wettest. May. Ever.

This time 18 years ago:
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras
[My last visit to Zakopane – I've not been back since]

Immersed in the Renaissance

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." – Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949).

The Leonardo versus Michelangelo immersive exhibition at the Norblin Factory's Art Box is compelling and moving. Having recently listened to the Rest is History three-part podcast about Florence of the Medicis and the show about the Mona Lisa (plus, I'm reaching the end of Plato's Republic – a huge influence on the development of Renaissance Italy), this exhibition snaps together so many ideas in my mind.

The Renaissance – a sudden burst of civilisation-boosting creativity in the latter half of 15th-century Italy (at the time a collection of warring city-states) as it emerged from the Middle Ages and Black Death – has shaped our modern world and our modern thinking to a great degree. This incredible flowering of the arts and sciences, the development of painting technique (perspective, oil paints), sculpture; mathematics, anatomy, philosophy and literature, as well as banking and finance, sprang from a singular point in time and space; a gathering together of so much genius. 

Art critics rank Michelangelo as the top painter of the Italian Renaissance; Leonardo comes in at a lowly number four, with Raphael and Giotto ranked second and third. Yet Leonardo is responsible for the world's best-known painting, as well as for his military engineering (tanks, catapults, bastions etc) and anatomical drawings (including some of the first of the central nervous system. All these are on display at the show, along with and his religious paintings. Leonardo was the ultimate Renaissance Man, who believed in the unity of Art and Science. The breadth and depth of his interests is mind-blowing. This was also the man who devised the parachute and the helicopter (though not a working one). Michelangelo, however, focused his talents exclusively on painting and sculpture, and had a far closer relationship with the numinous – God and the metaphysical were never far from his mind. 

An immersive experience, I would argue, is a good substitute for Being There In Person. The 180° close-up circumnavigation of Michelangelo's David, for example, reveals to you the sculpture in a way that seeing it live could never do (in particular the face); the AI fly-through a Leonardo-designed city shows his architectural vision is an innovative way to bring new insights into the geometry of urban spaces. Leonardo versus Michelangelo places much emphasis (as did the other immersive shows I've enjoyed to date) on the historical context; on the role of neo-Platonic thinking in the birth of the Renaissance, the personal life-stories of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, and on their influence on modern popular culture (from The Simpsons to the Da Vinci Code); all the highlights are there and in close-up: the Sistine Chapel, the Last Supper, the Last Judgment. You look at it, read the notes, and get it.

Allow about an hour and half for the whole show, and try to avoid times where school trips are likely to be coming through (it's a popular event). Notes are in Polish and in English. I found the whole show exceptionally moving; following the story of Renaissance is like witnessing an orchard coming into blossom.

The Leonardo versus Michelangelo immersive show ends on 14 June; I highly recommend it.

This time last year:
Warsaw rail scenes in the rain

This time three years ago:
Major rail project for the south of Warsaw

This time four years ago:
Prime spring, Jakubowizna

This time 10 years ago:
Classic car show, Nadarzyn

This time 11 years ago:

Classic vehicles at London's VE-Day 70 celebrations

This time 13 years ago:
Malodorous passengers on Warsaw's public transport

This time 15 years ago:
Inside Filtry – Warsaw's waterworks (Museum Night 2011)

This time 16 years ago:
Warsaw's Museum Night 2010

This time 17 years ago:
On Transcendence

[A really significant post in the development of my thoughts. A crucial read.]

Rain – at last

March and April this year were the driest March and April in Poland since records began. May began in a similar vein; bright days, few clouds, but with a cold northerly wind. This wind helped evaporate moisture from the topsoil. The long weeks of snow cover were helpful but could not remediate in full the hydrological shortages that have afflicted Poland. Walking into the forest in recent weeks, the ground was covered by dry leaves from autumn that hadn't yet mulched down into the earth ; the forest trails were soft sand, like walking on a beach. 

Usually, listening to the UK weather forecasts on BBC Radio 4, I'd could reckon that the frontal systems lashing the British Isles will typically reach Poland in three days' time, although bearing less rain and with thinner clouds. But this year, a dominant high pressure system from the Arctic blocked the typical Atlantic moisture from reaching central Poland.

The climate is changing, and not in any kind of predictable fashion.

The rain finally came on Monday, little at first. There was that sweet smell of petrichor as those large raindrops fell on the parched earth. Yesterday it rained for several hours. What a blessing! Single-digit cold though; for my first walk I put on a woollen cardigan under my waterproof jacket – not enough. For my second walk I pulled out my field jacket with thick winter lining. This morning, my outdoor thermometers read 5°C. 

The rain that fell yesterday was of critical importance for a landscape that has been under significant stress. This year's transition to spring was jarringly dry. This created a 'green drought'. By early May, the agricultural sector in southern Mazovia was reporting significant soil moisture deficits. For farmers and growers, the lack of rain combined with the drying effects of the north wind had put early-season crops at risk.

Yesterday's precipitation gave the region has its first proper soaking in several weeks. The rain fell long enough and in sufficient amounts to penetrate the hard-packed surface layer.

Forests in Poland had been approaching level 3 (the highest) fire risk; yesterday’s moisture has temporarily lowered that danger. The north winds had been kicking up significant topsoil and pollen, which yesterday’s rain finally cleared from the air.

Below: on my second walk, between the rains, Jakubowizna, just ahead of the sunset. This is exactly the spot where Wenusia and I met on 5 January last year, a moment that would flip me into the world of cats.

The region will need more rain over the coming weeks to fully recover from the dry start to the year.

Left: the indentation in the asphalt outside my neighbours' house forms a useful marker of rainfall. It holds water well; the puddle in it right now shows that the past 24 hours have indeed witnessed a decent dose of the wet stuff.

Meanwhile, the ice saints are here, having arrived on cue. Or 'zimni ogrodnicy' as they are called in Polish. Today is St Servatus' day; yesterday was the feast of St Pancras, tomorrow it will be the turn of St Boniface, and on Friday – zimna Zosia, the feastday of 'cold Sophia'.

More rain is forecast to follow over the next few days, with a high likelihood of persistent rain from Friday through to Monday. Good.

With the exception of old Hipek, the cats spent the night outdoors, came in for breakfast, went out to do their business, and quickly returned home for a comfortable, warm, indoor snooze. Céleste is nicely pregnant; I expect she will deliver this year's batch of kittens within the next week to week and half.

Below: with Céleste in our favourite spot in the forest next door, where I'd often come with Wenusia when she was pregnant. The threat of forest fire has been much reduced.

This time last year:
Days such as this will come back

This time two years ago:
All along the watchtowers

This time three years ago:
Blossom, sunshine and trains, Chynów

This time four years ago:
A better tomorrow for the soul

This time five years ago:
Blossom time in Jakubowizna - the apples

This time seven years ago:

The Ice Saints - right on cue

This time 11 years ago:

Then and now: Trafalgar Square (recreating my father's photos)

This time 13 years ago:
Reflection upon the City Car

This time 15 years ago:
Biblical sky

This time 16 years ago:
Travel broadens the spirit
[Today I'd argue that not travelling deepens the spirit]

This time 17 years ago:
Welcome the Ice Saints

This time 19 years ago:
On the farm next door