Sunset mysticism

Unless it's raining or heavily overcast, a sunset stroll is an obligation. Even if just to the end of the road and round the corner, the benefits of this daily ritual are clear - it offers direct contact with a far greater reality than mundane day-to-day human matters. Watching the sun descend below the horizon is a form of communion with the Cosmos - watching the earth spin backwards away from the sun - a Copernican moment. I realise that I'm standing on a planet in a solar system; once dusk has evaporated, the galactic context becomes clear - in a clear sky, away from the city's light pollution.

Below: ulica Miodowa (lit. 'Honey Street') winds its way into Chynów, the setting sun catching the bark of the willow trees on the left. This scene reminds me so much of the chemins-vicinaux around Stella-Plage, northern France, and childhood and teenage holidays.

Below: up the hill, past the orchards - a brief flashback, towards the brow, what sights await me?

Below: "as the Earth turns, at the edge of night" to quote Nick Lowe, the orchards are being sprayed with pesticides - a reminder to peel or wash carefully your supermarket apples before consumptions.

The moment of communion. The observer is stationary on a spinning planet orbiting its star.

Three minutes later, the sun has disappeared below the horizon as seen at ground level, but the clouds are still illuminated by its rays, giving a magnificent display, below.

No apologies for the repeated landscape below - one of the XII Canonical Views of Jakubowizna, perhaps my favourite, photographed at many different times of the day in different seasons of the year. The rapidly changing moods of the sky, bathed in the afterglow, makes sunset-catching so worthwhile.

"I am a Consciousness moving across the face of this planet..."

This time three years ago:
You've either got or you haven't got style

This time four years ago:
Total eclipse of the moon, Warsaw

This time six years ago:
'Others' vs. 'Our others'

This time seven year:
Reducing inequality in Polish society

This time nine years ago:
Llanbedrog beach

This time 11 years ago:
The Accursed Soldiers - a short story

This time 12 years ago:
Driving impressions of the Toyota Yaris

This time 14 years ago:
Poland's dry summer

This time 15 years ago:
The UK's wettest summer ever

Where does consciousness come from?

"Easy," you might say. "Consciousness is an emergent property resulting from the evolution of Life. It's something we feel as the result of activity going on inside our brains. And it may also be found in the higher-order animals - large mammals... and cephalopods." 

Well - actually, it is not that easy; our paradigm is shifting. If octopuses and squid can be seen to display sentience - why not, in smaller creatures? Why not in the simplest of all life forms?

The leap from Non-Life to Life is something that science has yet to explain. The Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago (I expect the James Webb Space Telescope will help narrow that date down by to within plus/minus a few million years), was the start of our Universe. What happened before the Big Bang - what led up to the Big Bang - is another thing that science has yet to explain.

But happen it did. And a mere 150m to 200m years after Big Bang, the first stars began to form. Within those stars heavy elements were formed from atoms of hydrogen and helium - by-products of nuclear fusion - and from those heavy elements, planets formed. And then after a couple of billion of years - on at least one of the trillions of planets in our immediate cosmic neighbourhood (!!!) - a miracle happened. Life emerged. What was once non-life became living. Simple single-cell life-forms began to evolve, becoming ever more complex animals. Some would go on to form specialist structures called brains, and within those, more and more neurons would appear over time, leading to more neuronal connections and more activity in that brain to process signals from the environment.

In Darwinian terms, the growth of brain power was the result of the survival of the fittest; the more neuronal connections, the better your chance to survive and reproduce. This process - determined by nothing more than natural selection - reached a point (so materialist reductionists would say) when within these brains, something that one could call 'consciousness' suddenly emerged.

Many eminent neurobiologists say that you shouldn't even attempt to inquire about the nature of consciousness - the only worthwhile pursuit, they say, is to look for the brain processes that result in consciousness. This line of thought suggests that consciousness is nothing more an illusory epiphenomenon formed by the sensory inputs that come into the brain from our physical surroundings via our eyes, ears, skin, nose and tongue. And that consciousness is actually just the same as thinking. Therefore, consciousness can be reduced to brain processes. 

This is the 'realist' way of looking at consciousness. The trouble is that science is no nearer discovering a seat of consciousness in the brain than ever it was. Meanwhile more and more scientists are begin to intuit that consciousness is not computational.

But I find the 'realist' way unconvincing; there's an entire Cosmos out there, and all the consciousness that we know of is bottled up within the skulls of a few billion sentient creatures here on Planet Earth? That don't feel right!

So what is it then?

Panpsychism (which comes in many flavours) posits that consciousness is a fundamental property of the Universe; without it, say some philosophers and physicists, matter could not even exist. But the next question - one that divides those who do not believe that consciousness is merely an emergent property of matter - is whether consciousness is something that's present in the background - a kind of cosmic sea within which everything swims - or whether consciousness exists in discreet units; granular consciousness that is not the background, only present within the quarks that form matter, consciousness as a fundamental (rather than emergent) property of matter - along with mass, charge and spin. If indeed it is the 'sea', the 'background', then maybe the dark energy and the dark matter that science has yet to explain is actually conscious. Maybe flora and lesser fauna also experience consciousness - but to a lower degree than what we human feel? If consciousness is an inherent property of matter, it suggests that the non-life/life barrier is not as fundamental as we thought. "Is this table conscious?" asks Robert Lawrence Kuhn in several of his Closer To Truth podcasts on the subject. I'd be happy to accept that the tree from which the table was made did once experience some low level of proto-consciousness - nothing beyond the awareness of existence, of swaying in the wind, of feeling water in the roots, the sentience of being cut down. But once dead - is the wood from which the table is made still conscious? 

Could machines become conscious - when levels of complexity within computers start reaching that of sentient life, could they demonstrate that they too are conscious? Philosophically tricky... If biological life is the only substrate within which consciousness is to be found - no. But if consciousness really is everywhere, and a machine is given the means to merely voice that consciousness - then why not?

With each passing year, scientists picking away at the nature of reality find that it's stranger and harder to pin down than it seemed a century ago. There are so many things we know we don't know; acknowledging that makes us suddenly more open to ideas that once sounded crazy.

Maybe string theory (another hotly-debated attempt by science to present a theory of everything), explains that all matter is somehow connected? We just don't know. But at least today, serious scientists can talk about consciousness openly as a mysterious subject, perhaps a fundamental property that underlies the entire Cosmos and guides its unfolding.

This time last year:
Unpicking the Rational Revolution
[one to read after reading this piece - unplanned - synchronicity!]

This time two years ago:
Ride to Roztocze

This time three years ago:
Poznań and Wrocław - two boomtowns

This time nine years ago:
Scaling the highest peak in Wales

This time ten years ago:
Beaches of the north coast of the Llyn Peninsula

This time 11 years ago: 
The Accursed Soldiers - a short story

This time 12 years ago:
Driving impressions of the Toyota Yaris
[12 years on - still rock-solid! No need to change.]

This time 14 years ago:
Poland's dry summer

This time 15 years ago:
The UK's wettest summer ever

Gloucestershire 1830 and Ohio 1946 - automatic writing

Time for some automatic writing... The aim is to channel, find a voice, a consciousness that wishes to communicate, clear my mind, let that consciousness move my fingers over my keyboard and do the typing. I've had a couple of goes before - this is an interesting genre of literature, because it requires so little creative thinking; just empty the mind, then afterwards do some light editing for clarity and style, but that's it.

This endeavour is fuelled by Super Strong BRNX (12% abv) beer, which I've tried once before - a beer that indeed has voodoo qualities ("Street - the Embalmer"). So - one sip, wait for it to take hold, and let's go...

_________________________________________________

{ A wooden gate, a field, an English landscape, white clouds in a summer sky. A market town on the horizon, church steeple. Pastoral, peaceful. Smell of cow dung, and then the interior of a barn, rough walls painted white, oak beams supporting a roof. Cool inside. West Country accent. Thirty. 1930? 1830? The latter, definitely - no signs of electricity, railways, mass production... A feeling of the year reaching its fecund zenith, a shudder at the thought that another summer will soon be over, another winter on its way, work to be done - a harvest to be gathered in, a daughter to be married. Wood to be gathered. An axe to be sharpened! Much work. Never-ending work - but much more pleasant to be working in summer, on days like this ('loik this'). To market, to sell, to buy, to gossip. Cider at the inn. A new cap - need a new cap; wife can no longer sew this one into something respectable. A new cap. 

{ Duties - there are always duties, muscles ache, but that shows they're working. Sunday soon - the Lord's day of rest, church, hymns and gossip - wife likes gossip - look at this ear of wheat - looks healthy at first sight - but peel away the chaff, the grain has this redness to it... does this matter? Is the whole field like this? There, there. Church on Sunday. Pray for the harvest. My shirt - smells. Sweat smells like piss, doesn't it? Could do with another shirt; a good harvest - new cap, new shirt... Tidings from London; we are blessed with a good king. We have peace. My sons won't be going off to any wars. I am thankful for good neighbours, too. No troubles. We like to laugh. But they did lose a child last winter to diphtheria.

{ You hear me Michael? If you can sense my joy of living - you're right. A loaf of bread, some freshly churned butter, a wheel of old cheese, some pickled onions from a jar in the cellar, a large mug of ale at the end of day's work; a chat with my wife about the day's happenings, little things we saw - yes, Michael, you know I have a happy life. Wasn't always thus - but I don't need to share my past troubles with anyone - now that I feel I have your attention - it's the goods things of life that I want to tell you about. 

{ The sun that shines over my ripening field of wheat, it shines over you Michael. You're older than me but I'm older than you. Does age turn to wisdom? It's that feeling that you are aware of as your third pint settles in, and you feel you've understood everything - but that feeling passes as the fifth pint is pulled. We joke, we laugh - yet I have been blessed by God with the family, friends, neighbours that I have? I could not have wished for more. The weather could have been better - more sunny days like today. But then, had there been more sunny days like today, I wouldn't have learned to appreciate them."

[BOOMF! Sudden change of time and place - from Gloucestershire in 1830 to Ohio in 1946]

A warehouse stacked high with spare parts for trucks. Smell of engine lubricant. 

{ Hell what you doing? Who are you? Don't like my dirty overalls? Hey - I'm not doing this because I like doing this. I just need the money, you know? Had some bad times, so leave me be. Trying to settle down. Just like the judge said. Get a job, do it, keep out of trouble. I'm trying to do this. Who are you? Ah, OK. Remember this - I'm back from the Pacific War. Two weeks in the hold of a troopship - who wouldn't go a bit crazy once on shore? 

{ Leave the judging to the judges. I did what I did, OK? It happened. Paid the price. I'm on the way back to being a valued member of the community. Swear it won't ever happen again. Promise. Don't like my boss, he don't like me - but we can get over that. He's got targets to meet - and I need to keep out of trouble for a while and build me up some capital. But don't you cross me, 'cause I get angry. I get angry when I think about Palau. Why were we even there? I see these guys, in their suits and Fedoras and their '46 Cadillacs and Lincolns - were they even there? And now they judge me? It's easy for a man to get angry. 

{ That's why I love my motorcycle. I sit astride it. Turn the key, kick the starter, drop the clutch - and I'm in another world - slicing through air - with not a thought to trouble me. Big grin. Fuck 'em all. Let it rip. Ride up to the tavern, where the neon light says 'Schlitz'. Meet my old buddies. They're not driving '46 Packards. They're on motorcycles. Another beer? Won't be saying no, Michael.

{ Fucken' sheriff. We were landing on the beaches, this asshole was writing out speeding tickets in Galatea, Ohio. Back to work on Monday, then. Cardboard boxes, that's my new life. Racks and racks of them, piled high. Hell, I can cope with that. Find them, tick them off on the clipboard, make sure it's the right part (don't want piston rings for a Mack mixed up with one for a Kenworth). Spent a lot of time fixing airplane engines for the Marines in the Pacific, keeping our F4Us flying - I know what I'm talking about. Anyone know more about carburettors than me? Could do with another beer, Michael, another ice-cold beer. Any chance of another fucken' beer?" }

No way guy, I'm out of here. First one was easier on my mind.

This time last year:
New phone, new laptop, Part II

This time two years ago:
Two images from my early childhood

This time three years ago:
How PKP PLK's planners should treat pedestrian station users.

This time four years ago:
Foreign exchange: don't get diddled!
[for the saps who pay £250 for €200 at the airport]

This time six years ago:
Defining my Sublime Aesthetic

This time eight years ago:
Porth Ceiriad on the Llyn Peninsula

This time ten years ago:
Jeziorki sunset, late July

This time 11 years ago:
Jeziorki sunset, after the storm

This time 14 years ago:
Rural suburbias - the ideal place to live?

Adventures in Speech Recognition

Let me have a try at dictating my blog directly from my phone - I have never done this before, and I want to see if this technology is going to be useful... 

But first, I have to install Google's Gboard keyboard on my Samsung phone. Should have done this a long time ago - Gboard can handle spellcheck in two languages at the same time, something that Samsung's Android keyboard seems reluctant to do. I open the phone, tap the microphone icon in the Google bar, and speak the magic worlds "Open Blogger". This opens the Chrome browser showing me my Blogger accounts; I have to tap on the one I wish to open; it opens - then I place the cursor in the text box, and tap the microphone icon on Gboard. It works first time.

I must say that the ability to dictate straight to the phone has the potential of being a life-changing technology that boosts productivity and assists creativity [although obviously editing is needed - the software doesn't punctuate.]

And so - off we go... the following paragraph is taken directly from words dictated to my phone.

"I normally set off for my walks with a notepad and pen in my pockets in case I have any thoughts that I want to jot down [manually inserted semi-colon] now I can just open my phone and just start dictating directly into it [comma] and it captures my speech with a great degree of accuracy [full stop new paragraph.] I am just passing now a small farm on the left and in a ditch from the undergrowth the smell of carrion [dash inserted] a dead mammal might be a hair [correction - hare] or it might be a cat or it might be someone's dog that they buried there [dash] the smell is unmistakable [full stop] Anyway I'm heading down towards the railway line for today's walk [full stop] It's Sunday [comma] overcast [comma] but generally the weather is okay [full stop] The wonderful thing about this speech-to-text [hyphens added] software it is nearly effortless compared to typing [comma] especially typing on the tiny phone keyboard [comma] so I'm looking ahead [comma] I think that I'll be doing a lot of this in the future [full stop] It seems to be working very well punctuation is a little bit so of Hawaii [can't remember what I said, and I can't unscramble what 'so of Hawaii' have possibly been] it doesn't seem to be able to put in full stops or commas where needed [full stop, end of trial.]"

Well, there we go - it's come a long way since my first attempts - over 25 years ago, it must be said, back in the UK. Optical character recognition had taken off very quickly - when I installed desktop publishing in our editorial office in 1990, we had a scanner that would reproduce with 99% accuracy type-written texts (this was pre-word processing, pre-email, so contributions would come typed on A4 paper). Rarely did anyone need to check with original because an obvious mistake made by the OCR software couldn't be worked out. However, my first attempts with speech-to-text were only about 60-70% accurate, mainly because the software had been trained on US English accents, not on my upper-lower-middle-class Estuarine English accent. But - a quarter of a century later - with the exception of 'hare/hair' and 'so of Hawaii', and of course the lack of punctuation, it passes the test.

Speech recognition can only improve with time as AI gets smarter, having worked over more data. Placing punctuation where needed requires an understanding of context, often, the placing of a punctuation mark will be retrospective - once the full sentence has reached the end. Will speech-recognition software be able to go back into a sentence it's just typed out to insert the necessary comma, semi-colon, dash, or question mark where needed? Working on a vast corpus of written text, AI neural networks will slowly make their first attempts at punctuating dictated speech. All those proponents of an imminent AI singularity - the moment when AI overtakes human intelligence - should watch this space. If AI is ever to be considered 'sentient', the least it can do is to learn how to punctuate.

But having tried this I can be sure that there will be more dictated blog posts coming soon. What that means for quality and quantity of blogging remains to be seen!

This time two years ago:
A Short Pilgrimage to Bid Farewell to the Day

This time six years ago:
Thoughts, trains set in motion

This time eight years ago:

Rondo ONZ 1 at sunset - the City Sublime

This time nine years ago:
Up that old, familiar mountain

This time ten years ago
More from Penrhos

Quarter of a century in Poland

Life catches up on you... it feels like yesterday that I arrived in Pyry, to a rented house on ulica Gajdy, our home for our first four-and-half years in Poland before moving into our own brand-new house in Jeziorki. I was a couple of months short of my 40th birthday, and after 16 years with one employer, nine years in one job, the chance to move to Poland was too good to turn down.

I arrived on 22 July (the rest of the family arrived a month later), and moved into to a redecorated but unfurnished house which I shared with a thousand blood-sucking Culex pipiens (Polish - komar, English - mosquito? gnat? midge?). My bedroom (I slept on a mattress) walls and ceiling were splattered with hundreds (no exaggeration) dead C. pipiens, each squashed onto a blot of my blood. That summer, 1997, saw record rainfall, the flooding of Wrocław, and the area around Jeziorki/Pyry had several streets under water. From memory, ulica Baletowa and ul. Farbiarska were both impassable.

Arriving with little more than my laptop and trusty Brompton fold-up bike, the first few weeks were unreal - working each day from my new office near Hala Banacha, cycling each way - the weather hot and humid, frequent thunderstorms, and the abiding memory of the smell of ripe mirabelle plums from the suburban trees that had fallen onto the pavement to ferment in the heat. With fruit too small to harvest commercially, mirabelle plum trees have since then largely disappeared from the streets. The other smell that lingers in my memory, that I can easily conjure up, is that of floor polish. The house (new-ish, built at the time of Poland's economic and political transformation, so no more than eight years earlier) was comfortable though with exceptions - the bath was about one metre long because there was no choice in the builders' merchants, the tiles were, shall we say, unfortunate in colour for the same reason. 

That first month, on my own, was strange - a feeling of being on holiday, an entirely different atmosphere to London, yet busy in my new job, working long hours, getting to meet new people, brushing up my (very) rusty Polish, and spending weekends out of town with my bike, which I could take with me by train.  As I wrote in the posts from three years ago and five years ago (see below), by 1997, Poland was no longer a 'hardship posting'. The denominisation of the currency occurred on 1 January 1995, reducing sticker-prices by four orders of magnitude (a set of kitchen chairs no longer cost four million złotys). And there were cash machines! And mobile telephony! Foreign supermarkets were opening all over Warsaw - Pyry was within easy reach of the Auchan and Géant stores, with Rema 1000 and Billa shops elsewhere. Poland was on its way to NATO and EU membership, so the future was less uncertain than it was six years earlier, when there were still Soviet troops stationed in the country.

Twenty five years, of which more than 15 has been blogged here; more than 15 years with a digital camera (I have nine-and-half years'-worth of colour prints in the attic but can't be bothered with the fuss of getting them out and archiving/digitising them all). The digital revolution has also changed my life massively.

Looking back - WHOOOOOOSH - hasn't that time has rocketed past. In hindsight, it was an excellent decision to move out of the UK and to settle in my fatherland, and watch it grow and mature. If there was one thing that unsettles me about Poland - it's Kaczyński. And of course Putin, but that's not one for the Polish voter. Brexit has shown what happens when a politician takes a gamble and dark forces bend the arc of future development in the direction of ideological obscurantism. 

This time three years ago:
22 years on the 22nd

This time three year:
A tale of two orchards

This time five years ago:
My 20 years in Poland

This time six years ago:
PiS, Brexit, Trump and cognitive bias

This time nine years ago:
Portmeirion, revisited, again
[My last summer holiday - not had one since!]

This time ten years ago:
Beach day, Llyn Peninsula

This time 11 years ago:
Down with cars in city centres!

This time 12 years ago:
8am and 26C already

Warszawa Główna - footbridge opens at last

I wrote a year ago about Warsaw's new-old station - Warszawa Główna - opened last March on the site it used to occupy until 1997. Back in July 2021, the footbridge connecting the far ends of the platforms appeared to be almost ready - yet it would be the best part of 12 months before the barriers were removed and local people's and passengers' lives made easier at last. It brings the platforms half a kilometre closer to anyone wishing to access the station from the north or the south.

As is often the case, the delay was caused by a dispute between entities - railway infrastructure operator, PKP PLK and Warsaw's highway authority, ZDM - and the contractor. For months, the completed footbridge stood unopened while responsibility for installing a pedestrian crossings across the roads at either end was being determined. The road crossings are still not there, but (nearly all) the tapes have been removed, and it can at last be used, linking Ochota to the south of the tracks to Wola on the north side. For local pedestrians, this new connection is extremely handy, opening up new geographies, new possibilities for shopping and leisure.

Below: the new footbridge seen from Al. Jerozolimskie, level-access lifts at both ends and serving both platforms of W-wa Główna; nice and wide, and sheltered from the elements with a tin roof.

Having climbed the steps, and looking down from the bridge, I get a little flashback to grey West Ealing, and Jacob's Ladder (below), the footbridge straddling Brunel's Great West Railway, that I still remember from over 60 years ago - the last days of the steam era; the footbridge would suddenly became enveloped in a warm, damp fog as a steam train passed under it. Me in the pushchair as my mother took me to nursery school each morning and home again each lunchtime. Built before WW1, my childhood memories are nearer in time to its construction than to the present day.

Below: looking east, the main lines on the right heading towards W-wa Ochota station, beyond which the railway disappears into a tunnel running under the very centre of Warsaw. W-wa Główna on the left is a terminus station with two platforms serving four tracks (or in British railway parlance, four platforms). Trains from here currently depart towards Łódź via Grodzisk Maz, Żyrardów and Skierniewice.

Below: looking west towards W-wa Zachodnia. The tracks nearest the left are for the WKD (light rail line); the next two tracks are for suburban services, then there are the two long-distance tracks. On top of the embankment are the four tracks that terminate at W-wa Główna. Beyond that (out of sight) - derelict tracks that used to service Warsaw's post-office station

Below: a curious vista, what looks like a scrapyard siding but on closer inspection turns out to be Poland's national railway museum. And it is here that unique examples of Polish engineering have been exposed to the elements, in some cases, for up to half a century. Utterly shameful. These exhibits should all be in a warm shed, restored, pampered and admired.

Below: looking over the rooftops of the post-office station platforms; at night the space beneath comes alive as the neon-lit Nocny Market food court opens for business, full of food trucks, craft beer and post-hipster trendiness. [How this place once looked - click here.]

Below: the north side of the bridge. The woman behind the car has just crossed the bridge and is looking to cross ulica Kolejowa. As you can see, she can't turn right - no pavement, fallen tree. She can either do what I did - dash across the junction - or take a 130m walk (minute and 20 seconds) via a distant zebra crossing.

OK - so it took too long and hasn't even finished, but it's here. Behind where I took the above photo lies Warsaw's 19. Dzielnica (19th District) - a completely new development of flats, offices and shops on post-industrial land. Warsaw is booming.

This time last year:

Consciousness - in your brain, or everywhere?

This time four years ago:
Ahead of the S7 extension - Dawidy

This time five years ago:
2017 participatory budget for Jeziorki - winners and losers

This time eight years ago:
The Second Summer of Cider

This time nine years ago:
North Wales in the sun

This time ten years ago:
Back at Penrhos

This time 12 years ago:
A farewell to Dobra

A better tomorrow - science and technology

I have on my bookshelves comics from the 1950s and '60s in which from time to time, there'd be fascinating articles about the future. How, for example, by the year 1985, it will be possible to fly from London to Sydney in two hours thanks to nuclear-powered space tugs. We would all be flying to work in personal heli-jets.

Futures are all too often predicted on the basis on the present; if over the past three decades leading up to 1957 have witnessed amazing progress in aerospace technology (from biplanes to space rockets), surely that tendency can only be upward? Few paused to ask whether we need to be in the office (Arthur C. Clarke famously did, in 1964, quite accurately predicting remote work by 2014. ). 

The history of human technological progress is full of cases where an individual or handful of individuals could bring about a departure from the established arc of development. One sudden discovery or invention dramatically changes human progress. Some you can see coming, others you can't until they've happened. Who could have predicted the impact the smartphone would have on our daily lives when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007?

Black-swan events - entirely unpredicted, with a high impact - are also lurking in our predestined future. One I've been considering for a while has been disclosure by governments that our planet is being visited by advanced non-human intelligence, ushering in new paradigms in physics, cosmology and spirituality.

Healthcare

Let's look at healthcare; the technology that's just around the corner is gene therapy; having unravelled the human genome, the ability to fix faulty genes will make the treatment of rare genetic conditions easier, but it will also give a more targeted response to common ones such as cancer. The need for proper clinical trials, which can last upwards of eight years, is the main reason why advances in medical science are not swiftly turned into commonplace medical interventions. Fixing what's gone wrong is the main goal of medicine - one that will become far more important in future will be fixing what's natural - the ageing process. Genetic technology extending the human lifespan will, I believe, be well advanced by 2050. A bit more science-fiction would be a pill or process that can raise IQ. The benefit for humanity to raise the IQ of the lowest quintile by ten points would be massive.

The built environment

The construction industry has been slow to adopt new technology. I see three major developments - the first being digitalisation of the whole process, from design to use, based on building information modelling (BIM) or at least an easy-and-cheap-to-use version of it, perhaps augmented by artificial intelligence. Developer, architect, contractor and end-user should all have access (via the cloud) to all relevant files pertaining to a given building including 3D models, energy-use forecasts, instructions, guarantees and maintenance schedules. The second is modular construction, with prefabricated units being mass-produced in factories and delivered to site for assembly. The third is carbon-neutral construction. The CO₂ emissions the come from making concrete is critical; if we can manage to turn methane into four atoms of pure hydrogen and one atom of pure carbon (as graphene) and mix the graphene (in tiny amounts) with cement, the resulting concrete becomes much stronger and therefore not as much as needed for the same structure. The 5bn tonnes of cement produced each year thus account for some 8% of the world’s anthropogenic CO₂. Yet if less than 0.1% by weight of graphene is added to the mixture, concrete ends up 30% stronger. And stronger concrete means less of it is needed, with a consequent reduction in CO₂.

Energy

Fossil fuels are on the way out, natural gas being the last to be extinguished. Renewables will - in time - take over completely. Hydrogen may yet take over, but there's a long way to go; nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. In the meanwhile, I have high hopes in perovskite - a translucent crystal with photovoltaic properties. A Polish company, Saule Technologies, has developed the technology to inkjet print perovskite onto thin plastic film, which can then be applied to any surface turning it into a solar panel. Imagine sticking this to existing buildings - the demand is potentially huge. Speaking to the firm yesterday, they say that there's already demand that would justify building 50 factories to make the stuff. Just one property developer has five million square metres of space onto which to put perovskite film - there's a need for square kilometres of perovskite film every year. Far lighter than silicon panels, perovskite film can be cut to shape, wrapped around objects, tinted different colours. Once the money gets behind it, perovskite will go mainstream very quickly.

IT

The cloud will advance, gobbling up petabytes of data as it goes, sucking in government services, personal data and corporate computing. It will become cheaper, more secure and more effective all the while. AI is set to work on the data and AGI (artificial general intelligence) will emerge into the mainstream. One threat to cloud security will be quantum computing, in particular its predicted ability to crack open any encryption. The battle for quantum supremacy (one of the last things my father wrote down before he died in October 2019) will shape up between the US and China; the outcome could be geopolitically decisive. Will we get from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness? This to me is an existentially crucial question. Either consciousness is merely something that emerges from complexity, and once there's enough computing power to get close to the number of neuronal connections in the human brain, computers will become sentient. Or - consciousness is a property of living things - computers are not living things, so no matter how powerful, they will never achieve true sentience. 

Computers will, I believe, increasingly interact with human biology. Goggles will be coming soon; once we accept how they will change the way we look, our workspace will no longer be the keyboard and screen, but a virtual keyboard and virtual screen, mapped out with our gestures. The concept of 'transhumanism' - using technology to augment human performance - is nothing new. The invention of the shoe, for example, several millennia ago, allowed Homo sapiens to move faster over rougher terrain in pursuit of prey. Glasses came into common use in 14th century Italy. If you wear shoes and glasses, you are already 'transhuman' in the strict sense. Elon Musk's Neuralink Corporation is developing a brain-computer interface. Yet we are already interfacing with data; our smartphones augment our memory (who remembers phone numbers any more?), and instant access to Wikipedia settles many a pub argument over, for instance, how many machineguns a Hawker Hurricane Mk IIb had. Whether we end up having computer memory plugged into our brain remains to be seen!

Human geodiversity - more predictions here.

This time six years ago:
Memory, place and experience

This time seven years ago:
UK Number One in world Soft Power rankings

This time ten years ago:
First flight from Modlin

This time 11 years ago:
Another cycle route to work

This time 14 years ago:
PZL M-28 and Piaggio Avanti - Okęcie regulars

A better tomorrow - human and economic geodiversity

I was lucky as a child to have travelled several time to the continent in the 1960s, holidays in Poland and France - with glimpses of life in Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia along the way. The differences were vast, even for a child, to see and feel and experience.

Just 22 miles across the Channel, France was entirely different to England; the smells (cigarette smoke from Galoises and mais Gitanes; the coffee-and-newsprint aroma of the café-tabac, wine cellars, fresh peaches, rotting fish in Boulogne and rural sewerage); the cars, (Citroëns, Panhards, Peugeots and Renaults driving on the other side of the road), the architecture of course - the typefaces even. Poland was even more exotic - though central Warsaw was relatively affluent, rural Poland was glaringly poor. Czechoslovakia was from another planet - huge red stars on the front of trams and trains, grim industrial town bereft of colour (Warsaw had bright neons), wet cobblestones and black Tatra cars scuttling about like gigantic trilobites. The things you could buy in shops in one country were completely different to those available in another - toys, for example. Warsaw's Centralna Składnica Harcerska was full of toys from across the Soviet bloc (mostly East German or Polish, as I recall); French shops stocked Norev toy cars, British shops had Corgis and Airfix.

Today, you can stroll through any European shopping mall (as I did through Galeria Mokotów) and without looking at the signage, it's hard to tell what country you're in, let alone what city. There's an Adidas, a Carrefour, a Chanel, an H&M, a Reserved, a Zara. The layouts are identical, driven by footfall algorithms. This homogeneity has been caused by globalisation and European integration, but I suspect that the future will see a reversal of this trend outside of our biggest cities, where corporations will hang on. Local character, local colour, local history and traditions and authenticity will be on a returning tide. The idea of going shopping in, say, Bydgoszcz and finding different shops selling different products to those sold in Białystok is appealing. A return to diversity - but within a borderless economic bloc. Will the same happen in the US - a nation of identical strip-malls coast to coast?

Here are my forecasts for how 2050 might well look across three sectors. Barring nuclear war or another deadly pandemic, or any other black-swan event. 

Food:
Locally grown, regionally traded. Artisan cheeses from French and Italian regions have long shown the way. Unique local tastes enjoyed across the continent. New specialities will emerge as a new generation of entrepreneur experiments with ingredients and techniques, seeking genuine innovation in taste. As meat becomes a luxury to be enjoyed sparingly, the gap it leaves behind will be filled by products as yet unknown - but far more likely to come from a local gastro start-up than from a corporation.

Produce will be as organic as possible, though with the knowledge that some pesticides are needed now and then. Human urine will make a comeback as a commonly-used fertiliser (lant - fermented urine, diluted one part to five with water). Brewing will return to being a local activity, with far less space for international brands that need transporting over long distances and mega advertising budgets. Same for mineral waters! New cultivars of fruit and veg will appear, products of human manipulation; old, forgotten ones will return. People from 2050 will look back at our time and wonder how we managed with so few varietals of the produce we ate. Regional distinctions, based on soil and climate, will be exacerbated.

Clothing:
Haute couture and fast fashion will be marginalised. Clothes will be designed to be durable and practical. Again, regional differences will begin to re-establish themselves. Old fabric, worn, but loved, shall be repurposed, authenticity and local provenance will win out over brands and labels. Clothes shall be washed less regularly - to save electricity, water and wear and tear on the fabric. Greys and browns, natural hues, will dominate - loud colours will be shunned as being 'old fashioned'. Craft skills will command premium prices, attracting more young people to acquire mastery in them. And tailors will mend and alter clothes, keeping them going longer. We shall still strive to have our own 'look' - but this will be less homogenous than it is today. 

Transport:
People will travel less, and walk more. Flying, in particular, will be seen as a shameful activity. Rail travel will become dominant mode of travel for inter-regional and shorter international trips, with massive investments in the infrastructure. Light rain and trams will make a comeback. Bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, will be the norm in cities, milder winters will help with this. There will be a strong classic car movement, dedicated to preserving surviving cars from history - but few amateurs will be interested in vehicles from the 2020s.

More predictions soon (healthcare, construction, energy, IT)!

This time last year:
Warka - small-town Poland's moving up

This time two years ago:

Summer działka joys

This time three years ago:

Local round-up

This time four years ago:
New Nikons on the way!

This time 10 years ago:
Work continues on S2, going under the railway lines

This time 11 years ago:
Stand Easy! - a short story

This time 14 years ago:
God Save The Queen - I mean it, Ma'am

This time 15 years ago:
Legoland, just outside Warsaw's borders

A better tomorrow - the lie of the land

Here are my predictions as to the medium-term future of (European at least) society in terms of economic geography. My base year is 2050, so only 28 years away - as distant to us today as 1994.

So - here we are, it's 2050. Our cities are hollowing out; populations are finding new a space in which to live - the near countryside. I'd define this as being still within comfortable reach of the city, a ring beyond today's exurbs - the ring's shape defined by rail networks radiating from each city. The more lines out of a given city, the broader the area that will experience this effect.

Covid-19 has served to accelerate the move towards remote work, working from home, and e-commerce with home delivery, parcel lockers and fulfilment centres also ironing out differences between the city and the sticks.

The remote countryside will have its enthusiasts, but this will be a hardy minority that chooses a more challenging life, three or more hours away from the nearest major city and its amenities.

An hour, an hour-and-half's journey time door to door by train into the city centre is sufficiently far away, and yet remains comfortably close for occasional visits rather than daily commuting. 

The city itself will endure - of course it will - but its role will be more focused. Conurbations of 500,000+ will act as governmental and corporate hubs, centres for regional and national authorities and big-business HQ and shared-service centres. Their reason for surviving is above all their role as a creative hub, where people get together to share ideas and generate new thinking. Universities, theatres and concert halls need a critical mass which doesn't exist in smaller communities. Administration itself can be distributed geographically. The experience of working from home suggests that routine tasks (at least the ones which won't disappear because of advancing technology) can be handled from anywhere. Creativity, however, burgeons when people meet in groups.

Business will change. The notion of sustainability will have sustained. While climate change remains humanity's biggest problem, sustainability will not have been eclipsed by more faddish notions. Investors' horizons will stretch further in time. Many large corporations that we know today will have disappeared, many others will have survived - mainly those that focus on the long term rather than on quarterly results. Shareholder pressure for profits and dividends will ease, again; short-term greed will be less powerful as a driver of corporate performance. A new generation will be content to live in comfort rather than striving for luxury, mindful of the environmental cost of a possessions-based lifestyle.

The presence of medium-sized businesses - strong in their local regions - will become more visible. They will take the place of corporations that no longer have a purpose.

 There are things that local enterprises can provide - food and shelter (agriculture and construction are suited to small teams), furniture, clothing. Craft skills will become popular - courses in carpentry, bricklaying, knitting. Making things, mastering tools and techniques. And not just making things - repairing things. The circular economy will have gained a foothold; the first generation to be materially worse off in absolute terms than its parents' generation will be far better off spiritually and mentally, having turned its back on conspicuous consumption and the economics of built-in obsolescence.

Imagine cars, refrigerators, laptops, being designed with a use-life of 100 years; modular construction with parts which wear out can easily replaceable or upgradable. Given that there are still many aircraft in active service with air forces around the world that are 50 or even 60 years old - this is possible from an engineering perspective. I believe that consumers will want to buy products with extremely long life-cycles, even if the purchase price is higher, total cost of ownership will be lower - with less damage to the environment.

There will remain many things that only the largest multinational corporations can provide - semiconductors, gene therapy or arrays of photovoltaic panels for example. Wherever economies of scale kick in, this is where the corporation will remain strong. Advanced manufacturing needs access to huge amounts of capital to develop new technologies. But whilst hardware will remain the preserve of larger firms, software can be written by small teams from anywhere. Corporations processing food - Kraft or Unilever, for example, or brewing, such as AB InBev - will find it harder to compete with nimbler local firms trading on regional traditions and authenticity.

We'll still need our storytellers and entertainers too - not bland, global megastars filling stadiums for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, but authentic local acts, relevant to their communities. People will want to go out - expect an upsurge in small restaurants, cafes and bars in small towns that today have few or none.

Tomorrow I'll look at a return to the diversity of human geography that I predict will happen - an antidote to the homogeneity of Europe or North America.

[See also How does a 'better tomorrow' look?]

This time last year:
New phone, new laptop

This time two years ago:
Longevity and Purpose

This time four years ago:
New bus stop for Karczunkowska

This time 10 years ago:
Who should pay for railways?
[How America built an electric railway line over the Rockies - over 100 years ago!]

This time 12 years ago:
Grunwald - the big picture

This time 14 years ago:
"Take me right back to the track, Jack"

This time 15 years ago:
The summer sublime

The Earth, and All that is Upon It

I glance up into the garden from my laptop on the kitchen table to watch the silver birches, oaks and pines sway in the breeze. As I grow older and wiser, I am increasingly convinced that they are all conscious - conscious in the manner that trees are conscious. Without powers of observation (other than sensing the soil that holds their roots, or the sensation of movement in the wind), lacking powers of deduction, or ability to focus with intent - just (just!) the awareness of being Alive.

I glance across from the keyboard at a housefly that's examining the kitchen table. In years gone by, I'd have squashed it - slowly moving my hand behind its blind spot, then when I feel the moment for the kill is right - BAM! But not any more. Live and let live; it's not hurting me - it's calm, not buzzing - there's only one fly, not a swarm - so I just let it be. [Paul McCartney finds his way in the beginning and end of that sentence.] Walking around, unhurriedly, the fly disappears behind the laptop, I return to focusing on my work. The fly, just as the tree, is aware of its existence. What it makes of the white veneer surface of the table, what qualia impressions it subjectively experiences - is something I can only intuit.

Left: sentient, observant, alert - a study in attention and intention. Also viewed from the kitchen table, a kestrel surveys the land for signs of voles or field mice.

My garden, home to about a million plants if you include every blade of grass, every weed, surrounds me. It grows. I shall not take a lawn mower to it, nor spray weed-killer or pesticide on it. We symbiose. Neighbours down the road are forever mowing and taking chainsaws to their trees; OK, their gardens look neat, but I have a different aesthetic - more in keeping with the future. I am a steward of my acre; on my watch it shall live and breathe and photosynthesise. 

Yet grass should not be allowed to grow too high around the building - I use a scythe; physical effort is needed to keep the immediate lawn adjacent to the house reasonably trim. Ants, I see, are returning to the doorstep, where they were nesting two years ago - rather than kill them with boiling water, I discourage them with used coffee grounds from the cafetière.

And my solar panels have finally been plugged into the grid by the electricity company, four weeks and a day since they were installed (the electricity company legally has 30 days to do this - they did it on Day 29). It was sunny today from around 10am to 3:30pm, the app in my phone tells me that the panels have generated 18.6kWh, earning me 16.08 złotys so far today (it's 7pm as I write). This is way more than the electricity I'm currently using, but the idea is to balance out with the grid across the year, so I sell the surplus in summer which is then offset against winter usage, allowing me to keep the house warm and dry and mildew-free right through the cold dark months.

We must fight the temptation to endlessly consume in a cycle of waste. The Earth can sustain us all, indefinitely, but only if the affluent part of the global population stops burning through resources at the current rate. 

"Well maybe it's just the time of year

Or maybe it's the time of man

I don't know who I am

But you know life is for learning.

We are stardust

Billion year old carbon

We are golden

Caught in the devil's bargain

And we've got to get ourselves

back to the garden"

- Woodstock, Joni Mitchell (1969)

The devil's bargain? Mindless consumption. Greed and the disillusionment it brings.

Ah yes - the James Webb Space Telescope has started sending images from 13.1 billion light years away - the earliest images of galactic formation. Misfortune has been precluded - but let's not get complacent!

This time last year:
First steps in meditation
[More on this soon]

This time three years ago:
Poetry in the search for eternal truths

This time four years ago:
Koszyki

This time five years ago year:
It's just an Ilyushin (Warsaw's long-gone plane-restaurant)

This time six years ago:
Marathon stroll (31.5km) along the Vistula 

This time eight years ago:
Complaining about the lack of a river crossing between Siekierki and Góra Kalwaria! 

This time nine years ago:
S2 update (nearly ready)

This time ten years ago:
Progress on S2 bypass - photos from the air

This time 14 years ago:
Up Śnieżnica

This time 15 years ago:
July continues glum (2007 - a rainy summer)

Time and Consciousness

I wrote two weeks ago about consciousness and spacetime; I'd now like to separate time from space in the context of consciousness.

A few recent podcasts, in particular Lex Fridman's conversation with Donald Hoffman, have reinforced my appreciation of consciousness as the fundamental property of the Universe. Consciousness, I believe, is not something that emerged as a result of the evolution of life, but something that sparked the Big Bang and drove evolution. Donald Hoffman posits that spacetime is a product of consciousness, and not merely something found within spacetime, here and there, exclusively on planets hosting sentient life.

I want to consider the nature of Time in the context of Consciousness. Stephen Hawking's well-known A Brief History of Time, and Carlo Rovelli's (better, in my opinion) The Order of Time. Hawking's approach is purely scientific - attempting to define time in an objective, empirical manner. Full of black holes and entanglement, the book is the approach of a mathematician and physicist anchored in the 1980s. The term 'consciousness' does not enter in to it. 

Rovelli has the advantage of writing 30 years after Hawking, and so his book is more up to date with recent scientific thinking. Rovelli's big insight is that entropy is the only way of telling the direction of time. A mouldy strawberry will never recover its prime. A strawberry in its prime can only rot - it will never return to its seedling state. Hence, the Universe can never run time backwards. Most reactions are reversibly -  entropy is not. Interestingly, entropy hardly figures in Hawking's book; its first mention is on page 102, and then mainly in the context of black holes.

There's objective time, moving from past into future at the steady rate of one second per second. But - as Hawking and Rovelli both point out - that 'objective' time can be distorted by gravity. From Einstein on, the Newtonian notion of time being fixed across the Cosmos vanishes. Instead, the notion of time as witnessed by an observer at one specific location in the Cosmos takes over.

So time is subjective, rather than objective? Subjective time - time as perceived by you or me. This time cannot be measured by a clock, it can only be felt. We all feel that time passes more quickly as you get older. This is because at the age of 50, a year is just 2% of the life you've experienced thus far, while at the age of ten it is 10% - so at 50, a year feels five times shorter than it did when you were ten. And here, I believe, entropy kicks in. We feel we're getting older, there's less and less time left. So we are more determined as middle-aged adults to get stuff done - pressure a child does not feel. [As an aside, if you stroke your purring cat for five minutes, and then feel guilty that you must leave it and do something else, remember - you've been stroking it for 20 cat-minutes. From the cat's subjective experience, of course.]

You can slow down time, subjectively. Assume the plank position - legs and back ramrod straight, propped up on your elbows. Before you start, open the clock app in your phone, place it on the ground in front of you, select the stopwatch function and press 'start' as you begin holding the plank. And hold. Minute, two, three... four... five? Time's dragging... every tenth of a second that passes seems to do so more slowly. While I'm holding the plank, I listen to podcasts - ones that grip my attention. I focus on what I'm listening to, rather than looking at the stopwatch. Or toggle between the two for an interesting effect of time passing slowly and quickly, simultaneously.

[British spiritual philosopher, Rupert Spira, says that the past is where our forgotten memories go. If you still remember something, it remains - as a memory - in the present. I like this concept.]

Subjectively, your consciousness looks forward in time to an event or events, whilst elapsed time is measured in memories. When did that happen - two weeks ago or three weeks ago? A diary, calendar - or indeed blog - is useful for recalling the objective moment in time, but subjectively, some events stand out more than others. Qualia memories that have a habit of resurfacing from the past. I lived (as I wrote the other day) in Coventry for two academic years, but two specific days stand out far more strongly than all the rest.

Non-local consciousness is a supposed phenomenon that gives rise to remote viewing. The US government's Project Star Gate (parodied in the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney) is claimed to have had one major success to its credit - finding a Soviet nuclear bomber that crashed in the jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1979. This is an example of remote viewing across space, but another project the US government (allegedly) embarked upon dealt with remote viewing across time - the recruitment of 4,000 people who claimed to have the ability to see into the future to ask them to 'view' the year 2050 - from 1978 to 1991. What the experiment's organiser, Stephan A. Schwartz, was looking for was a consensus; salient points that featured across many of the remote viewings. Having predicted - or rather foreseen - the breakup of the Soviet Union and numerous pandemics, it seems they are on to something. [If this tickles your interest, here's a recent talk about it.]

My personal belief is that some of us do indeed have psychic powers to 'see' across space and time, but those powers are weak and they occur rarely across society. But collectively, there could be something in this approach.

The question is - to what extent is this intuition, to what extent educated guesswork, and to what extent a genuine supernatural power to peer accurately into something that hasn't happened yet? If the latter, then how does consciousness permeate across time? If, as some panpsychists claim, consciousness is uniformly spread across space - could it not also be said to be uniformly spread across time? 

And if consciousness exists simultaneously across time - what does that mean for notions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution? From this point of view - my long-held belief in a journey from Zero to One must be examined to consider whether we're at Zero and One at the same time - or is it neither and both? I suspect that the unfolding of the Universe is a one-way process that does indeed follow time's arrow from (imperfect) past to (perfect) future. There's only one way to find out... Live on, in curiosity, in observation.

One for me to ponder on for future posts.

This time last year:
Altered states - higher planes

This time six years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 12 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

Drinking on the move

So here's the plan. I walk 15km from the działka to Warka station, catch an InterCity train with a bar wagon, buy myself a beer - and alight at Piaseczno just 22 minutes (32km) up the line. 

With the modernisation of the Warsaw-Radom line complete, there are now four pairs of PKP InterCity trains linking Kraków and Olsztyn calling at Radom and Warsaw on the way, along with other stations. Among the 23 stops along the route, conveniently, are Warka and Piaseczno. 

The four Kraków-Olsztyn trains are all named (Żeromski, Sienkiewicz, Kolberg and Orłowicz - the first two being famous Polish authors - the second two? Who knows?) and are operated by modern Dart rolling stock - which means there's always a bar. Other InterCity trains formed from conventional carriages pulled along by locomotives may or (more usually) may not have restaurant wagons. 

Below: the bar car of the Żeromski passing the end of my road on its way to Olsztyn, having left Kraków just before 7am. That's where I intend to be... in the bar car of the Kolberg, passing the end of my road.

... And indeed - here I am. Skipping forward four hours, this is the reverse shot - my road flashing by, snapped from the Kolberg's bar car (below). The red dot on the roadway is where I was standing when I took the above shot.

But that's jumping the narrative a bit - back to the walk to Warka. 

I set off from Jakubowizna as the Kolberg departs from Kraków Główny station. This will give me just under four hours; a comfortable stroll without having to hoof it, with time for a sandwich lunch along the way. I check the weather - I should be able to dodge the showers...

Below: leaving Jakubowizna, under a cloud. My journey will be parallel to the railway line for most of the way, preferable to busy roadsides.

Below: new asphalt along ulica Kolejowa, heading away from Chynów towards Krężel, the next station along the line.

Below: fields, orchards and forests, gently undulating landscape all the way to Warka and the river Pilica. Ancestral lands. My roots, man.

Below: a southbound Koleje Mazowieckie train departs from Krężel. Saturday traffic; a handful of people get on, three passengers get off. Bicycles, shopping bags, what have you. 

The trail continues unbroken with the exception of a short stretch that required walking along the tracks to avoid going through someone's backyard before reaching a local level crossing. From then, onward along more new asphalt towards Michalczew (below).

Below: eternal rural Poland, that has for centuries shrugged off invaders, occupants and oppressors. It abides. Michalczew.

Below: Michalczew station. The heavy clouds dropped rain ahead of me, and behind me, but I stayed warm and dry all the way. New asphalt where once was an unpaved farm track, new platforms where once stood little more than a pile of bricks

Below: south of Michalczew, the asphalt runs out, and a reminder of what it was like before the modernisation of the line; mud, puddles and ruts. A new Koleje Mazowieckie Impuls train runs northwards up towards Warsaw.

Below: the main Chynów-Warka road crosses the line at a recently modernised level crossing between Michalczew and Gośniewice stations. The remaining third of my walk will be along the main road between Chynów and Warka.

Below: quiet at the moment, but drivers, they do rush, and there's no pavement. This stretch was, until recently, paved with hexagonal concrete slabs - really unpleasant to ride a motorbike over.

Below: one station north of Warka - Gośniewice. Two staggered platforms set among orchards and fields, a station serving a village of 219 souls. I take a short diversion here from the main road, and have a short break to eat and check Google Maps. From here, it's just 47 minutes' walk from Warka station. No need to hurry. And look! Here comes the Sienkiewicz, right on time, on its way to Olsztyn.

Below: Is this Kansas? Are we in Ohio? No, this is the road into Warka. A town famous for brewing, a tradition that goes back to the 15th century. The modern brewery (right) is part of the Żywiec Group, which is turn belongs to Heineken. A little further along the road and I turn off into ulica Piwna (lit. 'beery street') and the station's just around the corner. But as I wrote recently, Warka station is a long way from the centre of Warka. Visible (just about) on the horizon, the statue commemorating Polish airmen who fought on all fronts during World War Two.

After three hours and a quarter hours of walking including a 10-minute break, I reach Warka station.  Waiting on the platform, I watch the progress of the Kolberg in real time on the Portal Pasażera app.

Punctually, it pulls in to the platform. 

I make for the door of the bar car, hop on, head straight for the counter and order a beer - (Śmietanka - a wheat beer from Browar Jan Olbracht Rzemieślniczy craft brewery in Piotrków Trybunalski). Cheers! Note the small glass - the big ones have all been used between Kraków and Radom and are sitting in the dishwasher. And the brewery's beer-bottle labels are all drawn by Polish cartoonist Andrzej Mleczko. Incidentally, śmietanka means cream, whilst śmietana means sour cream. The landscape comes out better with a glass of cold beer. Cheers.

It slips down a treat - the 22-minute journey is too short for a second, too short for any metaphysical contemplations of passing scenery, but the effect is there. Drinking in trains is a pleasure I first experienced when making my way to university interviews while still at school - to Lancaster, Canterbury, Norwich, Colchester and Warwick. A beer in the buffet car would transport me to ethereal realms of imagination and artistic insights... Alcohol (in moderation of course) and rail journeys go hand in hand.

As I sup up, the guard announces that the next station stop will be Piaseczno; the train starts to slow down. The pleasure is not cheap; the beer cost 15.90 złotys (£2.80), whilst the InterCity ticket cost 10.50 złotys (£1.85) and the train back to Chynów from Piaseczno (19km on Koleje Mazowieckie) 6.76 złotys (£1.20). A grand day out!

While crossing the footbridge to the get to the southbound platform at Piaseczno for the train home, I catch the following snippet of conversation between Pan Heniek and Pan Ziutek, both extremely refreshed:

"Znasz się na malarstwie?" [Do you know about painting?]

"Muszę kurwa coś zjeść." [I have to fucking eat something.]

"ALE ZNASZ SIĘ NA MALARSTWIE?" [repeated in an insistent, aggressive tone]

Just as in English, 'malarstwo' (painting) can mean decorating or art history. I never did find out whether Heniek wanted to know whether Ziutek could help out with painting an old lady's kitchen, or whether he needed a critical eye evaluating a still-life rescued from a skip, or to see whether Ziutek could engage in a meaningful discussion about Cubism with someone whose first reaction won't be "Fidel Castro".

POSTSCRIPT: It has occurred to me that I've walked all the way from my office in central Warsaw to Warka this year - from Świętokrzyska to Wilanowska, from Wilanowska to Jeziorki, Jeziorki to Jakubowizna, Jakubowizna to Warka, from Warka to the far bank of the Pilica river before Warka Miasto was built.

This time four years ago:
Grodzisk Mazowiecki revisited

This time five years ago:
S7 extension - last summer of quiet (not true, as it happened!)

This time six years ago:
Getting out of Mordor

This time 12 years ago:
Ćwilin, conquered

This time 13 years ago:
Sunset across the tracks, Nowa Iwiczna

This time 14 years ago:
The storm the forecasters missed

This time 15 years ago:
Peacocks in the Park