Below: train-driver's eye view of the tracks south of Czachówek Południowy; double line running ends just beyond the level crossing, then it's single track all the way down to Warka with a passing loop at Chynów. Beyond Warka, still nothing; the work is behind deadline between two and half and eight months depending on stretches. The second line between Czachówek Południowy and Warka, which was meant to have been ready next month, is now due to be ready in June - and I doubt that will happen. Still, one can dream.
Below: just a little bit north of the platforms at Chynów station. It's Saturday, no one's working (last year, Sundays weren't holding back the builders). Today - not a soul about.
Below: view from the station road towards the north-east horizon, just about visible the BP petrol station sign on the DK50, Warsaw's de facto southern ring road.
Below: blessed sight! Jakubowizna. The działka's just up the road apiece. A ten-minute walk from the station. A day of perfect blue skies, my tenth visit this year, by far the nicest weather so far; daytime high today 6C, much the same tomorrow.
It might be sunny, and the day may now be over two hours longer than on the winter solstice, but it's still an early sunset. Before it dips below the horizon, low rays of light illuminate the landscape. Below: the 'road' from Jakubowizna to Grobice.
Below: just outside Chynów station, what I presume to be the station master's barnyard. A bit dilapidated. The railway line lies just behind. Full moon in the trees.
Below: Chynów after the sun's set. Wires span the crushed-velvet sky.
Below: Chynów station, dusk. Note the pedestrian tunnel taking shape; the 'down' track will be built in the foreground, between the new 'up' track and where I'm standing. The tunnel will be extended in my direction and will allow pedestrians to cross safely between platforms - and between the town of Chynów and the village of Jakubowizna.
Below: the road into Chynów, shortly after sunset.
This time two years ago:
The Ilyushin Il-12 'restaurant' disappears from outside my office
This time three years ago:
Walker's London
This time four years ago:
Deconstructing political graffiti - London and Warsaw
This time six years ago:
Europe's peripheral woes
This time seven years ago:
Winter returns to Warsaw
This time eight years ago:
Babcia vs. Roma action, Centrum
This time nine years ago:
Reasons to be cheerful
This time ten years ago:
Skiing in the Beskid Wyspowy
This time 11 years ago:
What's to be done about Warsaw's unmade roads?
This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki in the fog
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3 comments:
Low heating bill? My father tells me gas consumption in their house in Dec-Jan period was lower by 45% than during roughly the same period of the previous winther, when December 2018 warmer than long-term average (yet not as warm as December 2019) and January 2019 hit long-term average (January 2020 beat it by 4.3C degrees).
What we all have saved on heating will be spent on more expensive fruits and vegetables as it gets warmer...
(Continued from the previous post)
Another revelation, again flooding my mind with qualia (?), was that when I lived on the farm in Poland I dreamed of visiting Africa one day, and, in moments of whimsy, I fancied the farm animals to be the beasts of the African bushveld: cats stalking prey, grazing cows, prowling foxes, etc. 25 years later everything was exactly as I had imagined it, only bigger. But bigger only in absolute terms, for when I was a child on a farm in Poland I was 3 feet tall. I couldn’t see over the tops of the grass in the meadow, and cats were nearly waist high. When I was in Africa, I was 6 feet tall, and the proportions were the same. I stroked a domesticated serval and experienced the same tingling in my body as when I stroked domesticated cats.
As a child, your head is closer to the ground - you register smells, colours and sounds you don’t when you’re an adult and 6 feet tall (the familiar arc we trace in life - as you get older you shrink and stoop down and so you are back where you started, you can smell the earth again and smell of it). But if the sense stimuli are powerful enough, as befits the continent of Africa, you experience them from your adult height. Or is it some sort of atavistic memory of where we all came from?
All of which leads me to conclude that you can move to a new place and call it a home (rather than just settle) if it does not clash with your introspections and your cognitive development. Secondly, and at the risk of sounding cliche, that we are very adaptable creatures and that our juvenile development, long as it is, prepares us to be better equipped to deal with novelty: it is common in childhood to project your thoughts from small to big objects, in other words, exercise your imagination. Swallows and Amazons comes to mind, but so do nearly all children literature classics. Two other things: one is that the line: “I had a farm in Africa,” or “I dreamed of a farm in Africa,” resonates with some people at an entirely different level than with others, and that qualia confer a sense of contentment in life, by linking the landscapes of our mind.
@StudentSGH - my gas bill for our big house in Jeziorki for Dec-Jan was nearly 1,000zł lower than last year (1,570zł vs. 2,550zł). Massive fall.
@Jacek Koba - size makes a difference. As a small child, I imagined that Elthorne Park, Hanwell, stretched on into infinity. Probably to America. As a child I had a squint and a lazy left eye, the former rectified with an operation. Returning to the park as an adult, it had lost its sense of awwe and wonder. Atavistic memory - I can't shake it off. The rationalists and reductionists can poo-poo all they want, but they have no idea of what's in my mind, how I recall the experience of qualia from this - or indeed past - lives.
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