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So taken was I by the forest west of Sułkowice (which no map seems to want to name), I returned again today, this time with Moni who had popped over. Learning from my brother that the forest's most prominent feature is an esker, a "long, winding ridge of stratified sand, examples of which occur in formerly glaciated regions of Europe", we decided to check out more of it. Sunlight and clouds added drama.

Below: cross-section through the esker showing the stratification of the sand.

Below: we followed – as far as possible – the top of the ridge, as it snaked around from south to north.

Below: the highest point, Hill 133, marked by a geodesic post. This is over 20 metres higher than the river Czarna which runs between the forest and Sułkowice. This may not seem much to mountain folk, but in Mazowsze – that's a lot! 

Below: a thinning of trees, whitish undergrowth – lichens growing among the moss.

Below: close-up of the forest floor. Lichens and mosses. This part of Poland experienced a total of six waves of glaciation; Czechia, where Moni lives, experienced none. Consequently, she says, the soil in forests there smells different.

Below: towards the south-western end of the forest, a hunter's pulpit. Hoofprints in the sandy soil suggest the presence of deer. May the hunters miss.

Below: on the way back: the bridge over the river Czarna, which separates the village of Hipolitów from Sułkowice.

"I live in a part of the world that is SHUNNED by space aliens."

This time last year:

Hottest September in Poland?

This time two years ago:

Box-top art in the Sublime Aesthetic

This time three years ago:
Trains of thought, insights and 'voices'

This time five years ago:
Parliamentary train at West Ealing station

This time six years ago:
Progress in Jakubowizna

This time eight years ago:
Miedzianka by Filip Springer

This time nine years ago:
Out of the third, into the fourth

This time ten years ago:
Inverted reflections

This time ten years ago:
Observations from London's WC1
and Observations from the City of London

This time 12 years ago:
Civilising Jeziorki's wetlands

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's Aleje Jerozolimskie

This time 15 years ago:
Melancholy autumn mood in Łazienki

This time 16 years ago:
Autumn gold, Zamienie

This time 17 years ago:
Flamenco Sketches – Seville

Anomalous landscapes amid local forest

This is quite something. For some reason known only to geologists, the large forest to northwest of Hipolitów and southeast of Sułkowice contains a hilly ridge running through a landscape that's largely flat. Pines, birches and oak trees dominate the hillsides. The contoured sandy soil is exposed to the elements with several areas each of a couple of thousand square metres appearing to be sand pits.

I visited this fascinating landscape last Wednesday and again this morning, catching a train one stop south to Sułkowice and walking home (on Wednesday I did it the other way around – walked out, train back).

Below: a most unusual sight for this part of Mazovia; I am immediately reminded of Oxshott Heath, a frequent family weekend destination in my childhood, and the forests and dunes around Stella-Plage in northern France.

Below: trekking uphill, suddenly the vista opens up to a vast sand pit.

Below: the second sand bowl, to the northwest, this one popular with the quadricyclist community. Aerial images of this feature show that a lake can form at the bottom; it's now totally dried out without a trace. 

Below: after sunset on Wednesday evening, 25 September, the destination of my equiluxial walk. 

Below: and a few minutes later; dusk descends upon the scene. Through the forest I return to Sułkowice in darkness. It's 3km from here to Sułkowice station; I'm in good time to catch the 19:08 train; three minutes later and I'm back in Chynów.

Below: from geoportal.gov.pl, an orthophotographic map of the area showing the raised land snaking across a flat landscape, with the sand pits gouged out from the hillsides. The questions are: what geological event caused this S-shaped formation to rise some 20 metres above the surrounding flatlands? And were these sandpits once commercial excavations of building sand? (The sandpit at Oxshott Heath was originally dug to fill sandbags used in WW1.) 

Below: from Google Earth Pro, satellite imagery from 2011 and 2020. The maps can be aligned with the orthophoto above by means of the forest road running southwest to northeast. Note how their shape and size had changed over those nine years.

UPDATE 30 SEPTEMBER: My brother Marek points out that this feature is called an esker (in Polish, an oz). The Polish page is interesting in that it says that such features are found in the Grójec district.

"An esker or os is a long, winding ridge of stratified sand and gravel, examples of which occur in glaciated and formerly glaciated regions of Europe and North America. Eskers are frequently several kilometres long and, because of their uniform shape, look like railway embankments."

Below: fragment of a geological map of Poland, the forest west of Sułkowice enlarged, and within lies an elongated feature in orange marked with the number 35. As with many maps offered by the Polish state, there's no legend explaining what the numbers mean, but the location and the shape tally (compare the orange squiggle with the orthophoto above), so I can only guess that all features with the number 35 are indeed eskers, serpentine shapes in a sea of numbers 40 and 38. Whatever those are.

This time four years ago:

W(h)ither the DK50?

This time five years ago:
A change in the weather

This time six years ago:
Zamek Topacz classic car museum

This time nine years ago:
Curry comes to Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Why we should all try to use less gas

This time 11 years ago:
Polish supermarket chain advertises on London buses

This time 16 years ago:
Well-shot pheasants

Equilux, and the struggle between Light and Dark

Equinox (from the Latin, meaning 'equal night') is an astronomical notion referring to the moment when the sun crosses the equator. After that moment during the autumnal equinox (falling either on 22 or 23 September), the sun sheds more light on the Southern Hemisphere; after the vernal equinox (which occurs on 20 or 21 March), the sun sheds more light on the Northern Hemisphere.

We have been led to believe that on those two days of the year, every point on earth receives exactly 12 hours of daylight, and night is exactly 12 hours long.

This is not so. At our latitude, this actually happens a few days after the autumnal equinox and a few days before the vernal equinox. Looking at Warsaw, for example, the day on which we get nearest to a 12/12 split is today, the 25th of September, when the sun rose this morning at 06:27 and will set at 18:26. On Sunday, the day of the autumnal equinox, there was still 11 minutes more day than night. We have the same situation in spring; equilux occurs three days before the vernal equinox (sunrise at quarter to six am, sunset quarter to six pm). On the day of the vernal equinox, there's already 11 minutes more day than night.

So on the scale of a year, we have 27 weeks with more day than night, and 25 weeks with less day than night. Which is quite a good deal given that in theory it should be exactly half and half. A reminder that in the cosmic scheme of things, Light triumphs over Darkness.

Below: the evening before Equilux, between Chynów and Węszelówka.

Below: awaiting the last sunset to be separated by less than 12 hours from the next sunrise until 18 March 2025.

Out of interest: in Macapá, Brazil, a town which straddles the equator, the year's longest day is 12 hours, 7 minutes and 28 seconds (on 21 June); on the year's shortest day it is but 12 hours, 7 minutes and 21 seconds (on 21 December).  Meanwhile, in Longyearbyen on the island of Svalbard, the town nearest the North Pole, the longest day lasts five months and six days – from sunrise on the morning of 19 April until the sun finally sets on the evening of 25 September. And the sun never rises above the horizon here between 26 October and 15 February. These disparities occur because the Earth is tilted at 23 degrees to the sun; the North Pole is closest to the sun on 22 June, the South Pole on 21 December, and on 20 March and 22 September, the earth faces the sun side-on.

This time three years ago:
S7 construction update

This time four years ago:
Covid – we still really don't know where we are

This time ten years ago:

Thoughts occasioned by today being equilux

This time 13 years ago:
The magic of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand's Marlborough region

This time 14 years ago:
Grandson of Poles elected to lead UK's Labour Party

This time 16 years ago:
Give me sunshine!

Łowicz – history, religion and folklore

Each year on 22 September, the world celebrates Car-Free Day, and to mark the occasion, Koleje Mazowieckie offers free travel on its entire network. The provincial rail operator ran its normal Sunday service, and the chance to get to Łowicz and back without paying a grosz was appealing. Łowicz is on the Koleje Mazowieckie network but lies outside the province of Mazowsze; the limited-stop RE3 service from Warsaw to Płock makes the 77km journey from W-wa Zachodnia to Łowicz Główny in a mere 42 minutes. And today – for free. The double-deck train was on time in both directions but crammed; passengers had to scramble over piles of bikes in the vestibules to get to the seats.

And so – on to Łowicz. Below: first impressions of the town – the post office building between Łowicz Głowny station and the old town. Good to be here.

Below: the Piarist church of the Merciful Mother of God, Łowicz. A beautiful piece of baroque architecture from the mid-18th century. The Piarists (the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, or Ordo Clericorum Regularium pauperum Matris Dei Scholarum Piarum) are a religious order of the Catholic Church dedicated to education, founded in 1617. Photographed in late afternoon as the Equinoxial sun starts creeping around to illuminate the western side of the church.

Below: the gorgeous interior. Music quite splendid too. The gilded angels, the silver clouds, the paintings, the marble, the statues, all designed to impress. 

Baroque architecture was designed to appeals to the senses. This was the Counter-reformation at full blast. Protestantism eschewed decoration and song, its black-frocked pastors read and prayed in the vernacular in their bleak chapels. The Catholic Church, however, knew how to draw the crowds on a Sunday after a week's toil in the fields. An hour or so spent immersed the splendour and mystery of God was an attraction not to be missed. Incense and angelic voices, the architecture and rich visual treats drawing the spirit to a closer communion with the Numinous and Eternal. 

Below: the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas, Łowicz.  A neo-Gothic structure dating back to 1420, standing on the site of an earlier wooden church from 1100. Refurbished in the 17th century in the baroque style, it competes with the Piarists' church in terms of gorgeousness. Stunning in the sunlight.

Below: the interior of the cathedral, looking towards the southern nave. The high altar is around the corner and to the left. Magnificent.

Łowicz was home to the primates of Poland from Gniezno, who resided in the castle (now in ruins) to the north-west of the town centre, the cathedral served as their church. 

Rich as the ecclesiastical history of Łowicz is, the town is probably best known for its folklore. In particular the colourful striped cloth used for costumes. 

Left: a plate from the 1960 Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN (a copy of which can still be found in most Polish households today!) illustrating Polish folk costume (stroje ludowe). Those from Łowicz on the right of the middle row. The town's influence on folk culture is out of all proportion to its size. [Incidentally, I'm thinking that Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa would have better been translated into English as the 'Polish Folk Republic'.]

Łowicz has an excellent local museum in the Old Market Square, opposite the cathedral. (Between the two is the Hotel Polonia, where Napoleon stopped to dine before setting of on his ill-fated invasion to Russia.) 

The museum itself focuses on the folk culture and traditions, as well as putting the region into a broader historical context. There's a strong emphasis on the folk costumes themselves; the process of spinning linen into thread,weaving the thread into material and dying the material with vibrant colours.

There are several rooms dedicated to naïve art from the region, with its own characteristic style. Best known are the wycinanki, intricate, colourful cut-outs used to decorate items or as artworks in their own right. Seeing how time-consuming their production is makes a modern person realise just how attached we've become to our devices, how much easier, and less creative, the battle with boredom is these days.

In the gardens stands a skansen – a replica farmstead from the end of the 19th century, showing how rural people would have lived and worked at the time. Below: an 'izba' or room in which families would cook, eat, sleep and spin and weave. Note the decoration: cornflower-blue walls, wycinanki on the walls and beams, and a floral garland hanging from the ceiling.

Below: Polish consumers from whatever part of the country they're from will be familiar with the logo of OSM Łowicz, a dairy-produce company based in the town. The logo refers to the 'paski' or colourful stripes.

Below: two tunes from Łowicz on Volume 1 of the Mazowsze song and dance ensemble (of whom my uncle – my father's older brother – was first violinist). It would be from this LP that was born my earliest recognition of Łowicz as a concept.

Łowicz has not one but two market squares; the Old Market (Stary Rynek) and the New Market (Nowy Rynek), except that the new one is not a square but a triangle, the only triangular square in Poland. Below: fragment of the buildings on the eastern side of the new market.

On the way back to the station to catch the 18:30 train back to Warsaw and then on to Chynów. A final glimpse of the Old Market square. Too many cars – I'm sure this will change before too long.

This time last year:

Góra Kalwaria by train

This time three years ago
Into darkness

This time six years ago:
Summer's end

This time seven years ago:
In which I lose a lot of data from my old laptop

This time eight years ago:
Konin - town of aluminium, electricity and coal

This time 11 years ago:
Car-free day falls on a Sunday

This time 12 years ago:
Vistula at record low level

This time 15 years ago:
Car-free day? Warsaw's roads busier than ever

This time 16 years ago:
The shape of equinox

This time 17 years ago:
Potato harvest time in Jeziorki

Geomancy: in search of magical places

The other night, I woke with the thought which I immediately wrote down: "Places that bring biological energy and healing/places that bring wisdom & inspiration."  I went back to sleep and dreamt I was on my way to a business meeting in London and had to change trains at Hammersmith; the escalator between platforms turned into a stepladder which was getting narrower and narrower...

In the morning I looked up the notion of geomancy on Wikipedia: "The term geomancy was originally used to mean methods of divination that interpret geographic features, markings on the ground, or the patterns formed by soil, rocks, or sand. Its definition has expanded over time (along with the recognized definition of the suffix -mancy), to include any spiritual, metaphysical, or pseudoscientific practice that is related to the Earth. In recent times the term has been applied to a wide range of other occult and fringe activities." Earth mysteries, in other words.

Yes, this clicks. All the stuff about stone circles, ley lines, chakras, feng shui and the like; fine if you live in Wiltshire, but I'd like such a place within walking distance of my działka. A place that resonates with my aesthetic preferences, a place with a strong spirit of place, where everything fits together in harmony. I have been writing about spirit of place more or less since setting up this blog over 17 years ago, yet I am now drawn to a deeper search for what geographical location and alignment of horizon mean for the human experience.

Today I was drawn to return to Hill 126, in the forest to the west of the railway line, between Sułkowice and Czachówek Południowy. Other than a cyclist heading the other way as I entered the forest, I saw no one for an hour and half. It was blissful – the last day of astronomical summer, a cloudless sky, the temperature topping out at 25C. Despite autumn being near, there were no signs of it. No first leaves falling from the trees. No profusion of spiders' webs – just the odd strand here and there. No mosquitos. I could hear woodpeckers, tits and chaffinches. Otherwise silence (broken near the end of my sojourn by the sound of a distant chainsaw). The spell had been cast. The magic moments were recorded on my mobile phone because... (see below)...

I took a series of photographs in the forest on my Nikon Coolpix A. Getting back home, I took out the SD card to transfer the files to the laptop. As I did so, I noticed that every single shot I took in the forest had disappeared. Only one photo, taken on the way, remains on the SD card. This hasn't ever happened to me since taking up digital photography in February 2007. Second coincidence: yesterday on a call, discussing the recent discovery that the earth has an electric (as well as an electromagnetic) field, I mentioned the phrase 'earth mysteries' – and at this exact moment, a gust of wind blew the 20+ kg stone used to prop the front door open so hard, it caused the door to slam shut (and I have two witnesses!). Third coincidence. I'm writing this post and a colleague from work emails me about getting to a business meeting in London and changing underground trains at Farringdon station... (see dream at the top.)

So – hunting those magic places where physical effects have no physical cause is to be my calling.

Incidentally, the list of posts from this time in past years shows how strongly spirit of place affects my consciousness, creating those qualia experiences.

This time two years ago:
Gathering moss – and hops

This time three years ago:
Gdańsk, Northern Europe

This time four years ago:
Herons in Jeziorki, summer's end

This time five years ago:

Sublime September sun, Ealing

This time seven years ago:
Stepping up the pace

This time eight years ago:
Evolution of human consciousness

This time nine years ago:
Farewell to Ciocia Jadzia

This time ten years ago:
By train from to Konstancin and Siekierki

This time 11 years ago:
Summer's end, Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Ząbkowska, Praga's newly hip thoroughfare

This time 15 years ago:
Catching the klimat

This time 17 years ago:
Road to Łuków - a road trip into the sublime

(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop*?

A nice surprise as I walked into Chynów yesterday – a pair of nice new bus stops for the centre of the village! The first one stands where the waffle wagon stood and before it the kebab truck. Frem where will they ply their trade now?

Below: westbound stop for Drwalew, Słomczyn and Grójec. Elegant. I like the metal-framed wooden flower boxes on either side. At last, local bus travel is starting to look respectable. Easy-to-read signage.

Below: the eastbound stop for Sułkowice and Góra Kalwaria, same design.

Below: a poster informs passers-by that this green initiative (presumably intended to get people to abandon the car and go by bus for climate-change reasons) has been co-financed by the provincial authorities.

But is it enough? In my years living here, I've never once been tempted to take this bus either to Góra Kalwaria or to Grójec. The railway line, to north to Warsaw, Piaseczno or south to Warka, does me fine. A cursory look at the timetable explains why:

There are no buses at the weekend. Like, zero. There are three buses in the morning to Góra Kalwaria, four in the afternoon and none at all in the evening, the last bus leaving Chynów at ten to five. Does this service look like you can trust it? Can you buy a ticket on your phone via an PKS Grójec app, the way you can buy a Koleje Mazowieckie ticket? Outside of Poland's agglomerations, the bus as form of public transport is a hit-or-miss throwback to the bad old days. Turn up at the bus stop with some loose change (who knows what the fare will be?) and hope that a bus arrives. Not a form of transport that can persuade the rural citizen to abandon their car for. PKS (Poland's communist-era road communication enterprise) needs to be shaken up for the 21st century.

Below: the next bus stop on the route to Góra Kalwaria, on the DK50 in Nowe Grobice. Poland's rural bus stops are memetic; this old-school one is fairly typical of the genre, but not the sort that people will cycle ten miles uphill into the wind to photograph.

Below: whilst abandoned railway infrastructure evokes sentimental yearning, I can't say the same about disused bus stops. This one is in Widok, the next village south of Jakubowizna. No buses have passed this way since, well, no one can remember. And there's no longer any trace online.

And through Jakubowizna itself, buses would run. This bus stop sign, which I photographed in December 2020, was removed when a pavement was built alongside the main road.

Buses, I mourn them not. Maybe if the Warsaw agglomeration 'L' (for local) bus routes were to run, I might use them, but then the Grójec poviat is not adjacent to Warsaw, and so there's no chance of such a connection. The nearest 'L' bus route runs through Ławki, over 5km (3 miles) from my house.

* (Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop by the Fatback Band (1975)

Form a line to the front

Form a line to the back

Yeah, don't stop

Keep the groove

Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop, don't stop, don't stop

This time last year:
Warka station, dawn and dusk

This time two years ago:
The Monarchy - my arguments for

This time three years ago:
Seaside, Sopot

This time four years ago:
Repeatable moments of joy

This time five years ago:
Spectacularly glorious day, Ealing

This time eight years ago:
Evolution, the future and us

This time ten years ago:
Relief as Scots vote to remain in UK

This time 11 years ago:
The S2 opens all the way to Puławska

This time 12  years ago:
Thundering ghost from out of the mist

This time 13 years ago:
Push-pull for Mazowsze

This time 14 years ago:
Okęcie runway repairs are complete

This time 16 years ago:
I know that painting from somewhere...

A step further towards energy autonomy

Yesterday I took delivery of a energy storage system from Columbus Energy, the next step up from photovoltaic panels. This has two benefits for me and one for the grid. The first is that the huge battery liberates me from power cuts such as the one that occurred for four hours on Saturday; a topped-up battery gives me 48 hours of electricity before it runs down. Given that the longest I've ever experienced was 36 hours, that's plenty. [Even the three-day week caused by the miners' strike in the UK in 1974 didn't result in power outages that long.] The second benefit is lower energy bills in winter. Now, whereas my panels cover between two-thirds and three-quarters of my electricity use across the year, there's still a disparity in the price I pay for power from the grid and the price the energy company, PGE Obrót, pays for power from my panels. 

How it works: once the installers had hooked up the battery and the inverter (both about the size of a small fridge, left) in my garage, electricity from my panels began to flow into the battery until its full. The surplus goes to the grid. Should there be a power outage, my house draws electricity from the battery until the grid is repaired. In winter, when I use 20 times more electricity than my panels generate, the battery draws power from the grid at night at the night-time tariff, and during the day, the house is heated and lit by battery power.

The tipping point occurs in late October, when I have to start heating the house and the panels no longer generate enough power to cover that difference. This state of affairs continues into early April, by which time the sun is shining strongly and I no longer need to heat the house. This means that for seven and half months of the year I'm a net producer of electrical power and for five and half months, I'm a net consumer. [It's worth pointing here out that 61% of Poland's energy is generated by burning coal and a further 10% from gas.]

Then there's the benefit to the grid. Poland currently (as of July 2024) produces 17% of its energy from solar power. On sunny weekends and public holidays, when factories aren't using electricity, the outdated and creaking grid is overloaded. In such situations, the self-sufficient are no longer a burden to the system.

I have paid 32,400 złotys (£6,480)for the system, of which I will receive 50% (16,200 złotys or around £3,240) cashback from the Polish state. Yes, I could be poring over the numbers and trying to work out the return on investment – but I won't. I don't care. I have the cash; what matters to me is reducing my carbon footprint in a country that still generates too much power from fossil fuels, and having greater autonomy from the grid.

One thing I don't like about the set-up is that it all comes from China; hardware and software. I looked carefully at the permissions I'm granting to the system supplier, to handle my personal data (the terms and conditions say the data stays in the EU). However, I'm mindful of what Western security analysts have to say about this; the idea that the Chinese Communist Party ultimately has the wherewithal to spy on my energy use is not really an issue, but that it could – theoretically – cut me off from electricity is a small worry. I would have happily paid more to buy a Made in the EU set-up, but do these even exist?

This time last year:
Plenitude in the Year's Fruition

This time two years ago:
Behold the wonder of the commonplace

This time three years ago
The force-field of fate

This time four years ago:
Hot in the city

This time four years ago:
Resting with the heroes

This time seven years ago:
Polish employers' demographic challenge
[Since then, it's got worse. And it will be worse still.]

This time 12 years ago:
The rich, the poor, the entrepreneur

This time 12 years ago:
Food: where's the best place to shop in Poland? 
[BOYCOTT THE BASTARDS AUCHAN FOR NOT QUITTING ruZZia!]

This time 13 years ago:
Bittersweet

This time 14 years ago:
Commuting made easy

This time 15 years ago:
Work starts on the S79/S2 'Elka'

This time 16 years ago:
Warsaw's accident-filled streets

Touched by Boris

A few days ago, I received a message suggesting that a massive storm was heading towards Central and Eastern Europe. Checking Meteo.pl, I saw that its epicentre is due to move through Czechia and southern Poland. The weather app  on my phone was telling me that Mazovia would be hit by heavy rain in the late afternoon. I got all my paces in before 3pm; shortly after that, the sky darkened and the rain began. No thunder, no lightning – just just intense rainfall. Around 6pm I was watching a The Rest is History podcast – suddenly the banter stopped, the internet buffering had ceased, electricity was cut. Outside, the dark clouds made it as black as night. There was nothing to do but go to bed early.

Four hours later, I was woken by the kitchen lights coming back on. The router reset itself; the internet was back, so I checked social media for news of what was happening. Obviously the south was bearing the brunt, with floodwaters rising rapidly. 

But here locally – what's happening? I checked the Facebook page of the local volunteer fire brigade (OSP KSRG* Chynów) to discover that in Grobice, the next village to the north-east of Jakubowizna, there has been massive storm damage, with roofs ripped off houses.

Today, I went to check. The sun is shining. Stepping out of the działka, the first thing I see is a fire engine in the distance, then a police helicopter flying low across the sky. Other than that – everything's normal. No trees fallen across the road. Not even snapped branches, or tons of windfall apples on the ground in the orchards. Two trains pass each other at Chynów station, both on time. I walk northwards towards Nowe Grobice, turning into ulica Sezamkowa (lit. Sesame Street), then straight into Grobice. No sign of any passing storm other than a few small puddles on the asphalt. People getting on with their garden chores, out for a walk, washing their cars.

But then I pass the road junction in the centre of Grobice and the village shop. Beyond it, I see the scene captured by the fire brigade. The bulk of the mess has already been tidied up, the road is passable, but it's clear what had happened. Some five or six houses and outbuildings have had their roofs pulled away and scattered across the other side of the road. 

Fences had been blown over, garden furniture flung hither and yon, a children's playhouse lifted over the garden fence and into the street. One house, still under construction, has a huge plastic sheet where a roof once covered it; remnants of that roof lie across the road in the grass verge. Overhead a drone is buzzing; probably from an insurance company, assessing the damage from the air. Wreckage is strewn across barnyards, people are tidying up. The damage is highly concentrated. Just 30 to 50 metres up and down the street there's no sign of anything untoward. Old barns, gardens, untouched.

What happened here? Was this a tornado? Later, I'd walk home along the farm track that runs parallel to the south of Grobice. Not even a snapped branch let alone any fallen trees. If this was a tornado, it must have been extremely localised, appearing suddenly over Grobice, rather than leaving a path from south to north or from east to west. 

The rest of my walk revealed no further damage. A puzzling meteorological phenomenon. 

Meanwhile, southern Poland and Czechia are bracing themselves for rising waters as the peak rainfall in the mountains makes its way towards Wrocław and Prague. Lądek Zdrój (where my aunt lived in the 1970s and '80s), Kłodzko and Głuchołazy have been heavily hit by the flooding. 

The storm's fringes have passed central Poland, Tuesday promises to be hot (25C or 77F) and dry. The second half of September and it's still like high summer in my youth. Climate-change deniers – get real.

[Update Monday 16 September. I cannot believe how far the wind carried the roof. I measured it today; 80 metres or 260 feet.]

*KSRG = Krajowy System Ratowniczo-Gaśniczy (National Rescue and Fire-Extinguishing System)

This time last year:
Clinging on and letting go

This time four years ago:
Out in the mid-September heat

This time five years ago:
Poland's ugliest building?

This time 10 years ago:
Weekend cookery - prawns in couscous

This time 12 years ago:
Draining Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Early autumn moods

This time 14 years ago:
The Battle of Britain, 70 years on

This time 15 years ago:
Thoughts about TV, Polish and British

This time 16 years ago:
Time to abandon driving to work!

This time 17 years ago:
Crappy roads take their toll

Immersed in Dalí

Following the huge impression of the immersive Gustav Klimt exhibition, the prospect of seeing Dalí in a similar manner was enticing. Though not displayed in such a vast space as the Klimt show at the Soho Art Center in Praga, the subject matter was even more suited to the immersive, 3D, animated and AI-enhanced experience. Watching fragments of surreal images morphing into one another on the walls, on the ceilings and floors is mind-blowing. Gigantic elephants on insectoid legs marching across weird landscapes, flaming giraffes, lobsters leaping out of the ocean. Dalí's imagination comes to life.

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) lived across such fascinating times. Born six months after the first man-powered flight, Dalí lived well into the atomic age and the computer age. Yet had he still been alive today, the technology would have taken his work further. The promise was there – a pixelated Raquel Welch programmed by Dalí back in 1965 on an IBM mainframe computer. He understood where computers would take art.

Although Dalí's art doesn't resonate with me emotionally, in the way that his fellow surrealist Giorgio de Chirico's unworldly dreamscapes do, it is instantly familiar and unsettling. As famous as Picasso or Warhol – the artist as celebrity.

However, this exhibition at the Art Box in Fabryka Norblina was absolutely first-rate in placing Dalí into context; the influence of surrealism on his art, and his influence on surrealism. His falling out with his surrealist friends as a result of taking the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War and his fascination with science and biology. 

A political reflection: below is a screenshot of Dalí's City of Drawers (1936) taken from Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble (1976). In the film-within-a-film, Budują nasze szczęście ('They Build Our Happiness'), Wajda has his Stalinist propaganda narrator exclaiming: – Popatrzcie do jakiego stopnia zwyrodnienia doszły te dzieła artystów kapitalistycznego zachodu. Nie jest rzeczą przypadku, że postać człowieka zatraciła w ich rękach ludzki kształt, i ludzką treść. ("Look at the extent of degeneration to which these works of artists of the capitalist West have come. It is no accident that in their hands, the human figure has lost its human shape and human content".)

Now here's the thing. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) also liked to juxtapose his figures, did he not? And yet he was not denounced by the Stalinist machine as 'degenerate'; rather, Picasso was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1950 and remained a member of the French Communist Party until his death – despite the brutal Soviet suppression of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Dalí, however, sided with Franco after the Spanish Civil War, and for this, all his old surrealist friends turned their back on him. (I can understand them totally, shunning as I do former friends who supported Brexit or Corbyn.)

Dalí and his wife/muse/manager, Gala, found New York an ideal place to escape from European politics and to build the Dalí brand. Their commercial nous and a gift for self-publicity resulted in the carefully crafted celebrity that we all recognise.

Yet within the pompous bravado was a curious mind, fascinated by subatomic physics, DNA and psychoanalysis. As well as hobnobbing with the celebrity set, Dalí sought the company of people like Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Crick and Watson, and of course Sigmund Freud. 

All in all, I'd thoroughly recommend this show and indeed the entire concept of immersive, interactive art exhibitions. Highly didactic! So much better than simply staring at canvases.

This time three years ago:
Pavement comes to Jakubowizna

This time four years ago:

My local craft brewery

This time 14 years ago:
Time to change gear.

This time 15 years ago:

Spidery autumn

This time 16 years ago:
Early, cold start to autumn

Ten grand a year

What was that? Something has guided me away what I was doing; I'd started watching a documentary about an American WW2 fighter aircraft (the Curtiss P-40) and I'm being told... write. OK then, I close YouTube and open Blogger. What will happen? I wait; the conduit is open.

{{ Nonsense. I'm tugged back. It doesn't work every time, but looking up, the desert sky says "yes". Yup. Nodding my head. Thirty-three palm trees, shimmering heat. Thin, wispy clouds, and a feeling of betrayal? A dog barks in the distance, I stand up and brush the sand off my trousers. Gripping the rail I climb back up into the hot cab. I don't really want to. But the exercise is over, time to move. Can't be any better though? Thirty-three palm trees – nah! Didn't count 'em. It's what they say. C'mon, move. Start the truck. A bottle of gin for the officers' mess? Procurement procedures? Forget about that. Use the money from the crap game. Who snitched on me? WHO? Pete?

Night falls as I reach my destination. I park the truck and head straight for the Schlitz neon. An ice-cold beer. TV. Some laughs with Jack Benny. Aw hell, I forgot about that gin. "Sir! A bottle of gin with my compliments!" About turn, quick march. Back to my next beer. Dollars. Yeah, dollars. Many of them. Parked. Parking. A parking lot. A vacant lot. Parking – two bucks a day. Fifty cars. I pay my man ten bucks a day to look after 'em, I pay City Hall fifty bucks a day for the lot, that's forty bucks profit. Two hundred a week, ten grand a year. 

Another beer, bowl of salted peanuts some olives! Yeah ten grand a year. Jack Benny. Swell guy, huh? Always makes me laugh. Ten grand a year? Whaddya say? Keep City Hall sweet, that's all there is to it. Veteran of the Pacific War, Korean War – who's gonna say no? Invest the profits, build up a chain of parking lots right across the Midwest. A man can dream. Big dreams. Soon as I'm outta uniform. 

Thirty-three palm trees. Why's that coming back to me? Anticipation; another mission looming. No, nothing dangerous this time. Ferry flight south as flight engineer. Senioritas. Americano. Few dollars go a long way. Should be good. Bottle green, bar-room lights through bottle green. ZTILHCS. Reminds me of a movie I once watched.

A time, a place, an industry. Yes, we are all one. Scattered here and there, each with our own stories to tell, except – who wants to hear them? Lost in a muffled cacophony of voices, of stories, some stand out, others are just, well, plain ordinary, just the kind of stories that most folk have to tell. You wanna listen? You're rare. Most folk are in too much of a rush to listen. Me? I wanna get on. No time to listen to you. But you – I want you to listen to me. A life interrupted, trying to get it back together after too much trouble. 

A better man? A worse man? Who can judge, padre? That's how it was. Twentieth Century Fox and United Artists. Did they get it right, or did we play out the stories they showed us?

Another beer, then the long drive back. At least the night's still warm. }}

This time last year:

The ephemeral pleasures of materialism

This time two years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia modernisation – a long way to go
(Two years on: still a long way to go)

This time three years ago:

The Wilderness and the Garden 

This time four years ago:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time five years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów – delayed

This time eight years ago:
English as she is used in Europe

This time nine years ago:
Where asphalt is needed – Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala

This time 14 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 16 years ago:
First apple 

The Ineffability of Consciousness

I continue to be troubled by the relationship between spirituality and scientific method. Does Big-C Consciousness, that precedes all, that is the origin of all matter and energy in the Cosmos, does it will itself to be disrobed by our science?

Our personal subjective experience of consciousness is central to our being. Is it merely a byproduct of human evolution, along with instinct and intellectual capacity for problem-solving, existing only within our skulls? Or is it a fundamental property of the Universe, which we experience locally as essence of our existence? Can we tap into that cosmic, non-local consciousness, our brains being like wifi-equipped laptops that can function autonomously as well as being able to tap into the world-wide web? 

Neurologists have been trying to pin down the seat of human consciousness for decades and still have no definitive answer. Google Gemini frames it thus: "Consciousness is likely a result of the interconnectedness of multiple brain regions rather than a single, localized area. Scientists continue to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness through various techniques, including brain imaging and neuropsychological studies." 

Good luck with that. As with attempts to reconcile Einsteinian relativity with quantum physics.

But scientists will go on trying. Curiosity is an innate gift in us, we have that thirst to understand, both the scientific and the spiritual. But is it enough to know? To know enough? Is it sufficient to know that there are things that we will never know? 

Does Genesis hold the clue?

¹⁶ And the LORD God commanded Adam, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

¹⁷ But the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.

In a talk on YouTube I heard a reference to Stanford professor William Tiller and his experiment with the pH of a beaker of water becoming one unit more acidic after being left overnight in a room in which people had been meditating.... Now, that's should be easy to prove or debunk. 

But do metaphysical phenomena wish to be quantifiably reduced to a physical proof, empirically checked out? 

I don't think so. Which is why his paper has disappeared. Flaky woo-woo; not something he should have even attempted. I have written before about attempts to nail down paranormal phenomena using an approximation of the scientific method. Scientists would be loathe to admit the possibility that those paranormal phenomena might not want to quantified. Even scientists who fully embrace spirituality and religious practices, such as Rupert Sheldrake, still hold out for scientific explanations of the nature of consciousness: "Electromagnetism and light ... I think they're the interface with consciousness," he says in his discussion with Jesse Michels released today. [1:33:31-1:33:47]. But maybe consciousness exists in a realm inaccessible to the scientific method. Maybe consciousness is destined to remain a mystery for the scientific method.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking says that in trying to reconcile the loose ends of physics, there are only three possibilities: 1) it's just a matter of time before science brings it all together, 2) there is no ultimate theory of everything, just an endless succession of theories that describe the universe with ever-increasing accuracy, or 3) this is no ultimate theory of the universe that can describe reality in merely scientific terms, leaving us with an eternal, ineffable, unsolvable mystery.

I revel in the notion of mystery for mystery's sake; mystery as an aesthetic. We all love a good mystery – but we want it solved. We seek closure.

The ending of what is still my favourite film, the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, disappoints so many viewers. Has Larry Gopnik just been diagnosed with an incurable disease? Will Danny Gopnik and his classmates be killed by the tornado heading towards them? Joel and Ethan Coen are saying to the audience: "Please, accept the mystery." I like this. It is realistic. There's rarely closure in life.

Maybe we are not ready – nowhere near ready – to understand the true nature of reality. It is important to preserve a sense of mystery and wonder about the universe, why it exists and where it's heading. Belief that humans have complete knowledge of Cosmic reality and can explain it with mathematical formulae diminishes our sense of awe and reverence, and it is that sense that makes our lives more rich and purposeful.

But whereas full understanding may never come to us, faith is there in its stead. What as I child I'd call 'God', these days I'd call 'Big-C Consciousness'. It is that which that predated and predicated matter; in the beginning was Consciousness, and it has a Purpose, a teleology, a destination, an endpoint towards which the Cosmos is evolving, the Universe unfolds. That gives me comfort and hope. And a happy life.

This time last year:
Summer's welcome extension

This time seven years ago:
All hopped up

[Boiled local hops today to add taste to alcohol-free beer!]

This time nine years ago:
September song

This time 11 year ago:
A traveller's tale (reading this shows how fast Poland has progressed in transport infrastructure)

This time 12 years ago:
One for the record - hot September day (30C)

This time 13 years ago:
MOSTTOMOST

This time 14 years ago:
The half-closed airport

This time 15 years ago:
Last of the summer bike rides to work?

This time 16 years ago:
My own Polish Adlestrop

This time 17 years ago:
Laurie Anderson's chillingly prescient 'O Superman'