Rysiek Szydło died last night; the cancer finally got him. Dreadful, dreadful news. Heart-breaking. Rysiek had battled all the way with fortitude, he had documented his journey via social media. His openness made clear to all of us luck enough to have had no such experience in life so far just how it felt - the pain and nausea of regular medical intervention, the worry, and - towards the end - the inevitability. The impending loss of loved ones.
When Rysiek announced that he had cancer, we all thought why? Why Rysiek of all people? He was one of the fittest people I knew, and I've known him from childhood. Cycled everywhere, vegetarian, non-smoker - so why Rysiek?
And metaphysically - why Rysiek? There was not an ounce of bad in him. The massive outpouring of grief on the news of his death is due to the large number of friends he had - no one could ever say one negative thing about him. So why Rysiek?
An exemplary human being, husband and father to three young children, deprived of him decades too early. Just before Christmas. And a contributor to society; Dr Richard Szydlo, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Immunology and Inflammation, Imperial College London. Medical research for the good of mankind, the day job.
Why? Any notion of cosmic fairness can be pitched into the mincer.
Yet another Błękitna Trójka harcerz departs. I make this the tenth death of a boy I knew from my Polish scouting days in West London. Below: Kolonia zuchowa, Stella-Plage, northern France, August 1969; Rysiek (back row, highlighted) then about the same age as his oldest son is now.
Below: Happy times. Wales, late 1980s or early 1990s, with me on the left, Rysiek smiling as usual, and many friends – I can see Renata, Adam (swigging), Andrzej K, Nick (smoking), Andy S. Photo Ewa C-G.
Below: Rysiek's wedding, Oliwa Cathedral, Gdańsk, June 2012. Over 140 guests, 100 came over from the UK.
He leaves the most positive of memories with all of us who knew him, and all who knew him must also wrestling with the question of why Rysiek, why Rysiek of all people. I really don't know. I am deeply upset.
Memories. Cycling expeditions with Rysiek in the 1980s and '90s - Ridgeway, South Downs Way, Snowdon, Isle of Wight, Picos de Europa, Brecon Beacons and loads of weekend rides around the Chiltern Hills.
Left: Rysiek's infra-red photograph of Jeziorki, taken on 10 May 2010, an image rich in numinous, spiritual depth. The Return to Forever.
Out on the działka, my nearest shops are in Chynów. There's a Mirabelka and a Top Market to choose from. Despite being located right in the heart of the garden of Poland, there's a dearth of local agricultural produce on sale. I was amazed to see Top Market selling fruit from South America, North Africa and the Far East, yet very little from Powiat Grójecki, our county.
Chynów has no farmers' market. If you open Targeo.pl, you'll find that all Chynów can offer is 'sprzedaż przydrożna' - roadside sales. Every Saturday, a number of pop-up stalls appear on the top end of ulica Wolska next to Top Market's car park, selling clothes, shoes and household goods.
At first sight it's odd that living in the Polish countryside, one cannot easily source local products from a local shop. If I want spinach, I have to buy Hortex-brand frozen spinach; even in season neither Mirabelka nor Top Market sell leafy fresh spinach. I can, however, buy leeks, nice tomatoes (malinowe - the best) and potatoes, but little more. No herbs in pots, no seasonal asparagus, no bundles of fresh szczypiorek...
Meanwhile in Warsaw (in particular in big suburban hypermarkets), the selection of food stuffs is mind-bogglingly huge. Whatever you want, in or out of season, local or exotic, you can find it easily. Why is it that agricultural products gravitate to the cities, whilst being unavailable in the places they are grown?
A simplistic answer is that this is due to an imbalance in the supply chain, caused by changing market demand, changing demographics and the response of the big retailers and wholesalers.
Agriculture in Poland is reshaping itself around the demands of modern retail. Here in Jakubowizna, my neighbours who are running efficient orchards have learned exactly what to do to maximise yields and crop quality, and get top zloty for their apples. Yet the left-behinds, who have not invested in manageable orchards, irrigation, crop protection or machinery, and still grow traditional apple varieties rather than those wanted by the supermarkets, are failing to make ends meet.
Beauteous apples destined for the tables of Warsaw
The gulf between rich farmer and poor farmer is opening up quickly. The former are buying up failed orchards, and consolidating them into ever-larger acreages, making it easier to negotiate directly with the buyers. But in the medium to long term, this will lead to falling biodiversity, lost varieties and an ever greater dependence on agrichemicals.
There is an answer. It is for small farmers to go organic and go local. But this needs a greater degree of organisation and sophistication than they can generally muster. Technology has part of the answer, using the tools and apps of e-commerce to make it easier to connect local grower with local buyer.
There is a demand. Everyone who has tasted the apples from my old trees says that while they look far worse than the perfectly uniform jabłka deserowe from the supermarket, they do have a taste which takes them back to childhood - and they are guaranteed 100% free of chemicals. But no supermarket buyer would ever buy apples as blemished as mine. And here's the problem.
It's not just about apples, potatoes, carrots and berries. Locally made cheese and sausage (kiełbasa) is starting to make its way to the big cities, where urban sophisticates give such artisan fare pride of place on their tables when entertaining, along with premium Polish wines. Again, the supply chains run one way - from field to the cities' forks. Na wsi there's little demand for a good, mature goats cheese, fine poultry-liver patés or gamey kabanos made from wild-boar meat. Certainly, the convenience-store chains, whose networks are penetrating deeper and deeper into the countryside, have no mechanism for dealing with individual producers at the local level. For them it's easier to sell packaged cheese slices and generic smoked-meat products from the big players. Add sliced-white toasting loaves, frozen vegetables, beer, vodka and cigarettes, and you have a reliable business model that ticks over nicely right across Central and Eastern Europe.
But it doesn't help the several hundred thousand Polish smallholders who are just a step up from subsistence level.
Technology can play a part. Imagine an app which tells you where the nearest 'wild' orchard is, what traditional varieties of fruit you can find there, and how much a kilo costs if you pick it yourself. Enter the orchard, switch on the GPS-enabled app, the farmer can see you're there, you pick as much as you need, and you pay the farmer directly to their online bank account.
But here's a scheme already up an running, founded by an old friend from Polish Saturday school and from the legendary Błękitna Trójka scout troop, Rafał Serafin. The film's in Polish, but it explains how local food from local producers is ending up on local tables. The pilot project is being replicated, but it needs to scale up to become a systemic solution for left-behind rural Poland. As Rafał says, subsistence farming in Poland is on a scale that tips elections. Read about the EU-funded Prosto od rolnika ('straight from the farmer') project in English as well as in Polish here.
Initiatives such as Koszyk lisiecki and Wiejska e-skrzynka have a big part to play in the EU's Green Deal, to spur recovery after the economic battering that Covid has delivered. This is win-win-win-win. Win for local producers who can get their food directly to consumers, cutting out the middleman. Win for local consumers, who get access to a wider choice of quality fare, produced locally. A win for the environment; less transport, less fumes and traffic. And a win for society, as an entire swathe of the population is lifted out of rural poverty (and thus less likely to vote for populists selling answers that sound simple but are wrong).
Rafał is looking for crowdfunding for a documentary film that will show how to get there in practical steps. One target group that he identifies is the children of smallholders, many of whom emigrated to the UK seeing few prospects for themselves in rural Poland. Rafał wants to make them think of the family farm as an investment opportunity with potential - and offers them a route map to do it.
[I'm amazed how much has been done in the past 12 months, especially given Covid! Czachówek-Warka is nearly ready, still much work to be done on the Chynów station passenger tunnel.]
Such a lovely funeral and wake - so many friends, so much genuine warmth, heartfelt celebration of a life that was long and lucky. The occasion could not have gone better, it was so well handled by the funeral director, Artur Galla, and the Polish church of Św. Andrzeja Boboli in Hammersmith was the best possible venue.
My connection (and even more so in the case of my brother) to Boboli is much stronger than to the Polish church in Windsor Road in Ealing; we'd go to Boboli as boys for Sunday Mass, preceded by Polish scout cubs, then Polish scouts; I'd go to the Polish youth club here in the mid-1970s. Windsor Road, where my mother's funeral mass was held four years ago, became the parish church for the Polish community in Ealing in the late 1980s; my parents hardly even went there, going rather to the more local chapel at Courtfield Gardens for the best part of half a century. However, Courtfield Gardens is too small for funerals, being little more than a large detached family house.
So many people came for my father's funeral - yet so few now of his generation - a tiny handful. I am grateful to everyone who came, who wanted to pay their final respects to my father. It was wonderful that as at the last two funerals I attended, there was a goodly turnout of former Polish scouts from the Third London Scout Troop - 3. Londyńska Drużyna Harcerska Błękitna Trójka - ten of us, including my brother and myself. More than 45 years have passed since then, yet the old ties remain.
The wake at the Łowiczanka restaurant in the POSK Polish centre in Hammersmith was excellent - great food and wine, a wonderful atmosphere - had my father looked down upon us, he'd have been exceedingly happy that he had been remembered, and laid to rest, in such warm and friendly circumstances. He outlived nearly all his male contemporaries who had fought during the war, his life had been long and szczęśliwe - that useful Polish word that means both 'lucky' and 'happy'.
Colonel Ździslaw Picheta died on 23 August in London at the age of 96; his funeral and cremation took place on 5 September - my father attended. The ashes were brought to Warsaw for interment in Powązki wojskowe cemetery today, preceded by Mass at the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army.
Col. Picheta was born on 17 October 1922 in Siedlce into a military family originally from Lwów; called up ahead of the invasion of Poland in 1939, his infantry unit withdrew across the Romanian border. There he was interned, but he escaped twice and made his way to join the Free Polish forces in the Middle East, first under French and then under British command.
In August 1941, his unit, the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade was shipped into the besieged Libyan port of Tobruk, to bolster the mainly Australian force that had been holding out against the Germans since April. Allied forces held Tobruk until the siege was lifted in December 1941. The defenders of Tobruk were the original 'Desert Rats', living in dug-outs, under constant bombardment.
Hospitalised after the Battle of Gazala, in which he served as a motorcycle dispatch rider, he recovered to rejoin the newly-expanded 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division in the Italian Campaign in a training capacity.
Like many soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, he decided not to return to a communist Poland at the end of the war, but stayed in the UK, marrying, raising a family and pursuing a career as an electrical engineer.
Col. Picheta never gave up fighting for a free Poland, however. Within the structures of the Polish Government in Exile, he continued his military duties, maintaining the traditions and keeping the faith when all seemed lost. He was involved in ex-servicemen's associations, in the Polish community in London, in the scouting movement and the Polish Saturday school in Ealing.
I grew up with his sons - I've know Andy since nursery school; Andy went to Gunnersbury Grammar with me for seven years and was in Polish scouts (the 3rd London Polish Scout Troop, Błękitna Trójka, many of whose fathers served in the Carpathian Rifles. Our scout uniforms carried the unit's insignia on a red-and-white background on our breast pockets.
Below: at the army cathedral, with the urn.
Below: at Powązki wojskowe military cemetery. I have been to a few military funerals before, but never with such a large honour guard.
Below: the salvos, from so many guns, were deafening!
Below: Col. Picheta, laid to rest alongside Group Captain Stefan Witorzeńć, fighter ace, leader of 302 and 306 Polish Fighter Squadrons and commander of 133 Wing, RAF.
Below: successive wreathes laid on the grave; here are soldiers on the Podhale Rifles, with their characteristic capes and góralskie hats.
Col. Picheta was laid to rest in the quarter of Powązki wojskowe reserved for members of the Polish armed forces who fought in the West during WW2.
Finally, a photo of Col. Picheta (second from left) at my father-in-law's funeral in 2009.
As many of readers of this blog may know by now, Ziggy Chodzko-Zajko died two weeks ago on 6 August while walking on was to be his 34th pilgrimage from Warsaw to the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa. He was 60. I heard the shocking news the day after his death from his widow Ela, who broke the news as we flew back from London to Warsaw. I was surprised by her composure given the unexpected nature of Ziggy's death; he'd been supping back a few ales with us Warsaw London boys just three weeks earlier.
I was also surprised by the massive turnout for Ziggy's funeral in Góra Kalwaria - it was a most beautiful mass; maybe three hundred mourners, a good number of whom had flown or driven over from London. Ziggy and Ela were a deeply religious couple, and I had a sudden insight today into just how powerful shared belief in God and being part of a spiritual community can be at a time of grief. This was a well-liked man, whose passing became an occasion for coming together to celebrate his life.
At the wake there was an excellent audiovisual summary of Ziggy's 60 years among us - I was particularly impressed by the recollections of his time spent with Ela as lay missionaries in the Philippines. Here they helped build a community centre on the island of Mindanao, at a time when massacres of civilians and kidnapping for ransom were commonplace. Ziggy's willingness to help others was legendary; this came out time and again in the eulogies spoken at the funeral mass and wake.
Ziggy was a member of Błękitna Trójka, the 3rd London Polish scout troop back in the 1970s which is where I first met him, he later went on the Montserrat holidays to Poland which resulted in more than a few of us deciding to move to our fatherland after the fall of communism. Eleven Błękitna Trójka old boys turned up at the funeral (three of whom appear in this photo from 50 year ago). Some familiar faces I'd not seen for over 40 years!
Incidentally, the 243km between Warsaw and Częstochowa takes 10 days (around 30,000 paces a day, sleeping in tents every night). Physically challenging.
Reading Prof Richard Swinburne's excellent Are We Bodies or Souls the other week has given me a fresh perspective on how Christian belief in the Afterlife can square with science and be explained by logic. Although my own convictions on the Afterlife are more eastern (and quantum-physics based) in nature than Christian, one way or another I too am certain that Ziggy's spirit lives on, eternally.
Fifty years. Rites of passage. The summer of 1969; I had just finished Oaklands Road Primary School and was ready to start my secondary education at Gunnersbury Grammar School in September. But first, I was about to leave my zuchy (scout cub) gromada (pack) and be inducted into the 3rd London Polish Scout Troop, Błękitna Trójka.
My last kolonia (summer camp with the zuchy) was in northern France, in the resort town of Stella-Plage. The kolonia was based in Maison Maternelle, a former maternity hospital that had been bought by the Polish community of northern France between the wars; the Polish scouts and girl guides (harcerki) from London would holiday here. Indeed, my parents spent part of their honeymoon here in 1952.
My family first came here in 1967 with friends; I was to return in 1969 for the kolonia in which I would be pasowany (inducted) into the scouts (harcerze). I would return again in 1971, '75, '79 and '80 - and it became a place very close to my heart.
The beach, long and wide and sandy, stretched from Le Touquet in the north to Berck-Plage in the south. Back in those days, Hitler's coastal-defence bunkers still overlooked the beach. They stank of urine and exuded a cold threat even on a hot sunny day. Extensive pine forests flanked the town of Stella-Plage on either side, with a sweet aroma of coniferous resins. Sand yachts would often race up and down the beach when the tide was out.
Below: a group photo of the zuchy, taken by my father; so many familiar faces here - Stan and Adam who were to start at Gunnersbury with me weeks later and stay there for the next seven years; my brother near the front there, and there's my father's dentist for the last 20 years or so, Andrzej and his twin brother Ryszard; there's Rysiek, AdTheLad and both his brothers, boys from my class in Polish Saturday school; and a few here who moved to Poland after 1990 – faces, memories. I'm not in this shot, neither are several more boys who were soon to become harcerze in Błękitnatrójka. Photo taken by my father.
Fifty years. The Rolling Stones were no. 1 in the pop charts with Honky Tonk Women. Ford had just launched the Capri (my father would later have a 1.6 GL in red; we'd return in it to Stella-Plage in 1971) and London Transport had just launched single-decker, one-man-operated E-buses (E for Ealing), the E1, E2 and E3, with a flat-fare, turnstyle payment system (6d adults, 3d children).
This was the cusp of two ages; the sixties, in black and white, were yielding to the colourful seventies; glam rock, Hot Wheels, tank tops and stack shoes. Childhood was giving way to adolescence, primary school to grammar school and cubs to scouts.
It was a momentous time, I could feel the changes coming on. Changes that come in waves, roughly ten years apart. In the summer of 1979, I'd finished my studies at Warwick University; in the summer of 1989, I was visiting Poland just as communism was toppling; and by 1999 I was living permanently in Poland.
Last night the boys from Błękitna Trójka (Third Polish Scout Troop from 1970s London) went for a beer or four at the PiwPaw on ul. Foksal, the splendid multi-tap bar boasting no fewer than 95 different beers on tap. This evening, a smaller delegation from the office visited the original PiwPaw on ul Parkingowa after work, which has a mere 50 different beers on tap.
These two bars are taking the multi-tap concept (as seen in Kufle i Kapsle on ul. Nowogrodzka and Cuda na kiju in the old communist party headquarters on Rondo de Palma) to new levels. Not 12 or 16 beers, but three times - eight times - more. Still, 12 different quality craft beers made by brewers passionate about making something memorable and excellent is a huge advance over what was the norm even three years ago. (Let us recall just how dire the beer was five years ago...)
The days when going for a beer meant a meagre choice between a small handful of mass-produced beers - made by industrial breweries and tailored for an aggregated consumer, defined by focus groups, produced down to a price not up to a standard - are over.
'PiwPaw' needs to be explained to non-Polish speakers. 'Pif-paf' is the onomatopoeic equivalent of the playground 'bang-bang' suggesting gun fire. The pronunciation 'peev-puv' and 'peef-puf' are almost identical. But there's another meaning. 'Piw' is the genitive plural of piwo (beer) - 'of the beers', or beers'. 'Paw' means peacock. So Piw Paw can mean 'The Peacock of Beers' or 'The beers' peacock'. As we can see in the logo (below).
The PiwPaw on Foksal has a range of ciders and perries at one end of the bar, dark porters and stouts at the other, and a wide spectrum of top- and bottom-fermented lagers, light ales, India Pale Ales and bitters in between. The PiwPaw on Parkingowa has a smaller range, though still massive by any measure (plus many bottled beers, so should you be unable to find what you like). You may think that all these unpasteurised* beers with their short shelf life would go off before the barrel's drained - but these bars are so wildly popular even on weekdays that the turnover of stock is satisfactory. [In stark contrast to the multitaps are traditional city-centre watering holes offering Lech-Żywiec-Tyskie; such places are either half-empty or totally dead.]
Helping you get that particular flavour, there's the option of a 1zł (18p) taster, a shot-glass filled with a beer sample. Try several, then buy a half-litre of the one(s) you fancy. Below: Atak Chmielu, ('hop attack') by Pinta, is a favourite of mine (along with King of Hop by AleBrowar). On the bar at PiwPaw on Foksal; in the background you can see around one-quarter of all the beer taps of this establishment.
Choice is what it's all about. The bar staff have been well trained in the stock; if you are after an American IPA with a high IBU (International Bitterness Units), you will be informed what does the trick. The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, which over the years has been denying choice through increasingly oligopolistic practices, has suddenly flipped and said to the consumer - sorry, this has been an anomaly, it's time to redress the imbalance.
Standing at the bar with a half-litre of Ox Bile, a beer from brewers Haust in Zielona Góra with an extraordinarily high IBU of 104, and a taste of, well, ox bile, I pondered on what this is all about - adventure, exploration, reaching out to try something new, pushing the envelope, learning. It is not about swilling back yet another meaningless glass of Tyskie. Which tastes like the last glass of Tyskie, which tastes like Lech. Or Okocim or Warka or Żywiec. [Note to bar person: Ox Bile is pronounced 'oks bajl', not 'ox bee-leh']
And how different the Ox Bile was from our previous round - Dupek żołędny, a dark IPA flavoured with... acorns, from Warsaw brewery Bazyliszek. Trying out such varied ales, made by tiny brewers who really care about giving the consumer something extra-special, become an infinitely greater event than just sitting about soaking in whatever product the global corporation thinks is right for our market.
The Meaning of Life? I think I stumbled upon it half-way through the second beer, but by the time I got home, I'm afraid I'd forgotten it.
* Louis Pasteur must be the only scientist to be name-checked for a process he invented and also for a product that has not undergone the process he invented!
After the best part of the day sightseeing (see separate post) in Gdańsk, I headed off by tram towards Oliwa and its famous cathedral, for the wedding of Rysiek and Blanka. (Rysiek's another old harcerz from West London's Błękitna Trójka, who I've known for the best part of half a century). As I approach the park situated behind the cathedral, I espy a triple rainbow! (click to enlarge). A double rainbow (ROYGBIVROYGBIV*), the two touching, plus a fragment of a third above and to the right. An auspicious sign!
Left:Oliwa Cathedral, looking towards its famous organ. An impressive place for a wedding. I was last here in 1977 on Montserrat - two coachloads of 15-20 year-old boys and girls of Polish parentage going to the fatherland for a religious pilgrimage organised by the Polish parish in Ealing. How different it all looked back then, the cathedral an oasis of splendour amid the drab shabbiness of everyday communist reality.
Below: bride, groom, family and friends on the cathedral steps. Over 140 guests, including 100 or so who made it all the way from England. Mercifully, it didn't rain on the group photo nor on the greeting of the guests. Interestingly, meeting many old friends of my generation living in Britain or in Poland, I was struck by the diversity of ages of their children - from two to 29.
Below: Bride and groom meeting the guests. Outside the cathedral it was chilly for this time of year; just across the Baltic, Stockholm shivered in temperatures of just +6C, a record for early June.
Below: the wedding reception took place in Stara Cegielnia in Rzucewo, near Puck, some 60km away from Oliwa. This beautifully restored brickworks was next door to Zamek Jan III Sobieski, which I suspect had more to do with the area's former Prussian rulers than with the Polish king who saved Europe's bacon at the Battle of Vienna.
To kick off the night's celebrations, Rysiek dons folk costume and with his bride performs a traditional Polish dance (left) before leading off all the guests in a Polonaise.
I wish Rysiek and Blanka a long and happy marriage, full of love, companionship, shared interests and - a trio of little ones.
Above: the view from Rzucewo. In the distance, the Hel peninsula. The celebrations went on until five in the morning, by which time it's broad daylight.
*The mnemonic Richard Of York Gave Battles In Vain = Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet
After a night on the town, beer and curry with fellow Polish scouts from 3. Drużyna Harcerska, West London's Błękitna Trójka*, time to get the 22:17 from W-wa Śródmieście back home to Jeziorki.
Before descending into the underground station, I notice the poster welcoming football fans for the Euro 2012 championships which start in two weeks' time. The wording in English is controversial; "Feel like at home". Now, some voices are saying it should be simply "Feel at home". The "like" is superfluous. I must say it's not the most glaring of errors, as the word 'like' is inserted in, like, every other sentence by today's teenagers, like. Although it doesn't sound 100% right, it sounds, er, like an attempt to coin a marketing slogan like (no avoiding the word!) McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" or KFC's "So Good". At least there's no article, definite or indefinite, squeezed in there - "Feel like at the home" would suggest Czuj się jak w domu wariatów.
Actually, I think the slogan should have been given to a Polish law firm, government ministry or urząd to translate into English. This would have resulted in "Experience the sensation of the verisimilitude of residence within your own place of abode"**.
With the evening's rush over, time to see about those leaky ceilings. Both Śródmieście and Centralna (as I pointed out last week) have pools of water on the platform floors, even when it's not raining upstairs. Above: some strong-smelling chemicals were being applied to the ceiling on Platform 1 by workmen dressed in sinister NBC suits. Picture slightly blurred (1/10th sec, which shows the need for vibration reduction even in an ultrawide lens).
W-wa Śródmieście, which will soon be welcoming thousands of visitors, has not had any pre-Euro 2012 remont work done to it, unlike all the other Warsaw stations from W-wa Wschodnia to Zachodnia except W-wa Ochota.
I'm delighted to see a vast amount of work (at long last!) at W-wa Zachodnia, primarily focused on the provision of proper information and signage. Whether the work will be ready in two weeks' time remains to be seen.
Representatives of Warsaw's youth today; the cultured, sophisticated end of the spectrum (above) and a young representative of the city's somnolent community (below) .
What kind of impression will Warsaw make on the largest influx of foreign visitors ever to descend upon the city since 1939?
* Along with other expats, last night's gathering brought together four of us old harcerze from Błekitna Trójka. I reckon there's around ten of us who were in this West London Polish scout troop in the 1970s living and working in Poland, plus more from Czarna Dwójka from Ealing.
** A little family favourite here... "Circumnavigate repeatedly the cultivated enclosure/in the manner of a diminutive ursine" = "Round and round the garden/like a teddy bear"
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