Yesterday - 1 April 2024, the temperature hit 24C. Third hot day in a row. Indeed, on Easter Sunday, the maximum temperature in Warsaw was 25.8C, the highest ever recorded in March. Temperature records are falling with alarming regularity.
Out on a post-Easter walk (15,000 paces), I walked into Chynów bought myself a tin of cold beer at the Moja petrol station, and then back along ulica Spokojna until I reached the pine forest. Beer is unbeatable for quenching thirst on a hot day. Far superior to a sugary fizzy drink or even water. Following the forest's edge, I found a spot at the far end. I pulled out the waterproof jacket from my rucksack and sat down on it, over a bed of dry needles with my back rested on a pine tree to enjoy some feldalkohol – my first since Ash Wednesday. A glorious, meditative, experience. Twigs, branches, moss, warmth, a bumblebee the size of a hazelnut buzzes around me inquisitively. Bliss to be alive. An exquisite joy.
Left: April has just started; this weather is perfect. Summer in April. (But what does this presage for August? Record highs of over 40C?)
In the meanwhile, the sky is clear, no breeze. Bird song. Blackbirds, larks, a cuckoo, the staccato tapping of a distant woodpecker. A buzzard circles over the field between the forest and orchard.
Below: looking across the forest towards ul. Spokojna. All of a sudden, I am minded of the film
Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods, filmed, produced and directed by Jamie Roberts (thanks for the recommendation, Marek!). Here in the forest, peace, warmth, a time for contemplation. Eight hundred miles to the east in Kupiansk, Ukrainians are fighting for their homeland, and indeed for the security of Europe. I am deeply grateful to every one of them and pray for their safety in the bunkers and trenchs of the front line.
Here in Chynów, there's no artillery, no shell-bursts, no toppling trees, no drones buzzing overhead, no Russian soldiers advancing through the wood. Peace and quiet. May it stay this way.
The poignant moment passes; time to get up and walk home. Lent is over; summer is coming – anticipating the warmth and light is the best part of it.
The clocks went forward on Saturday night, on Easter morning. How does one deal with the spring time change? The autumn one is easy – just ignore it. Go to bed an hour early, wake up an hour early. Don't accept that extra hour in bed that they seductively offer us. An 11pm-7am sleep becomes an 10pm-6am sleep.
But what happens in spring? It's not as easy as going back to 11pm to 7am, because we've slipped back to that routine over the five months of wintertime. So midnight to 8am? Tough if you need to be in the office by 9am! And anyway, in autumn, the days are shrinking, nights are long, so where you place your eight hours of sleep is not that important.
But now, the days are getting longer; we'll gain almost another two hours in the evening and another two hours in the morning before the summer solstice. You wake up late, realise you've lost a precious hour of daylight and feel guilty about it all day long.
So – after a second night of going to bed after midnight and then waking up after 8am, I decide that the best way of dealing with the spring time-change should be the same as for the autumn time change. Go to bed an hour earlier. This is both counter-intuitive and unnatural, but at least daylight is optimised.
The clocks going back result in many extra cases of seasonal affective disorder; the clocks going forward result is many extra cases of heart attacks (Google Gemini tells me: "The American Heart Association cites a study showing a possible 24% rise in heart attacks the Monday following the spring time change. A Michigan study found a similar increase in heart attacks on that same day.") Take it easy!
This time five years ago:
Can't find peace of mind
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2 comments:
Re your Monday post, pictures of rake-pulling locos framed by traction current pylons as if in a tunnel always look grand! A catwalk for trains! BTW, there is also a narrow-gauge railway in Lubelskie, with Nałęczów being the terminus. In my school days, we went on bus day trips to Kazimierz, Nałęczów and Puławy. I remember the anticipation of approaching and the excitement of going over the level crossings. Of course, we never spied a train because the railway was defunct for decades. But then, in the late 90s, when the age of corporations dawned and with it the age of corporate junkets, some enterprising folk got the idea of turning the railway into a corporate integration day attraction, hiring the trains out to companies. The last carriage had an open-sided vestibule at the rear end with a mounted beer pump!
@ Jacek Koba
Haha! Nałęczów – on my very first weekend having arrived in Poland in July 1997, before the rest of the family arrived, I got a map of Poland, looking for narrow-gauge networks. I spotted Nałęczów, cycled into Warsaw (on my fold-up Brompton bike) to catch a train there from Centralna. Arriving, I saw that the train was actually running! It had been rented out to a private group, so I couldn't board. I cycled around, an idyllic day discovering rural Poland.
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