Lent starts tomorrow!

While I'll still be posting occasional local, weather or feline-related posts, they will be supplemental to the Lenten blogging cycle that starts tomorrow, Ash Wednesday. Lenten blog posts will continue for the next 47 days, until Easter Sunday, which this year falls on 5 April. For the record, jeziorki.blogspot.com has had over 113,000 page views in the past month, and as usual, I expect that audience to plummet (as it always does over Lent), with just a hard-core of readers remaining with me through to Easter as I focus on the spiritual aspects of human life. 

Each year's Lenten blogging cycle stands as a summary of what I believe, feel, intuit, experience about my spiritual quest – does it bring a better quality to life? Does consciousness survive biological death? If so, in what form? Is there a God? If so, how can we understand God? Through lived experience or through the written word? How can belief in God help us in our everyday life? How much spirituality do we need in a biological/material world? Is there one path to God or myriad paths? How can we even begin to understand the Infinite and Eternal? How can we square the Material with the Spiritual? 

More questions than answers; I set off on my Lenten quest fully appreciating that it is our destiny to remain curious.

This is also a time to reflect on what I've learned over the past year, how my own search has led to sharper definitions and more nuance, and a broader understanding of knowing what we'll never get to know. Looking back over previous Lenten blogging cycles, I sometimes see deep moments of insights, whilst at other times I see beliefs that I now find overly simplistic or just wrong. Worldviews shift over time as new intuition clarifies questions. 

I have toyed with the idea of using AI to help me at least order the Lenten posts, but having quizzed ChatGPT and Google Gemini about providing me with a structure around which to write daily content, the answers seemed too glib, too polished, too logical – and so my remaining Lenten readers can be assured that you will be getting writing that comes from me and not from a large-language model. 

This will be my 35th consecutive Lent, my 11th during which I have sought to focus on matters spiritual this my blog. Over the decades, Lenten observance have brought me bountiful rewards in terms of physical health. My Lenten sacrifices such as giving up meat and alcohol, and exercising have turned into good habits – I drink less, eat less meat, and do far more exercise than I did as a younger man. But the spiritual aspect of Lent has become increasingly important for me over time. And this is what the next 47 blog posts will set out to do – outline my current beliefs concerning the metaphysical aspects of life.

This time last year:
Afterglow

This time two years ago:
Metaphysics: woo-woo or fact?

This time seven years ago:
Skierniewice-Łuków line modernisation announced
[PKP PLK still getting round to sorting out the tenders...]

This time eight years ago:
Entropy and anti-entropy in a constant-ruled universe

This time nine years ago:
Truth, spin, bullshit and lies

This time ten years ago:
How much spirituality do we need?

This time 13 years ago:
The Chosen Ones

This time 14 years ago:
Fixies in the snow

This time 17 years ago:
Just the ticket

Why I keep blogging these Lenten posts – Lent 2025: Day 20

Blimey! Nearly three weeks into Lent and it's occurred to me that I haven't yet explained why I'm doing this series of Lenten posts on my blog! As usual, traffic is falling off (around 71,000 pageviews/month on Ash Wednesday, down to 41,000/month now). Why am I scuppering my regular readership to go off on a spiritual journey to the exclusion of my usual content?

AI generated image. Prompt: 'Preacher with Holy Book and Loaf of Bread'

Am I trying to convert people to my way of thinking? No, not really. You either hold that there's a Divine purpose to our lives, to the Universe, or you don't. If you don't – well, that doesn't make you a bad person per se. I'm not out to turn atheists into believers. Neither do I intend to proselytise Christians or followers of other faiths to abandon them for a different spiritual outlook, one that's couched in language closer to the scientific paradigm. 

{{ Anyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. }} Since that intuition entered my consciousness one summer's night in 2021, I've made this a central tenet of my faith.

I'm writing these posts primarily for myself. So that once a year at this time I can confront my beliefs, so I can ask myself the questions that I consider fundamental to life, and that over the years I can return to these posts to see how my thinking has shifted, what new factors have influenced the way I see these spiritual matters, and most importantly – how it has become more nuanced over time. 

This is why each day there are links to the same day of Lent over the previous five years. I re-read past posts; they inspire, they suggest, they set off new thoughts and new ways of looking at old questions.

Though the posts are for a future me, they are also intended to spark thoughts and initiate discussion among readers who find this type of content interesting; if you are among them and you find some area of inquiry here worthy of comment, please do so, or drop me an email. Or mention it when we meet.

Counting pageviews is an ego thing. Reviewing my personal philosophy and approach to life on an annual basis is far more worthwhile.

Lent 2024: Day 20
Do we have Free Will? (Pt IV)

Lent 2023, Day 20
Practical uses of intuition

Lent 2022: Day 20
Free will, consciousness and determinism

Lent 2021: Day 20
No, but who are you really?

Lent 2020: Day 20
Applying Occam's Razor to your religion

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

Little annoyances and optimising your life

Since Blogger (owned by Google) implemented the upgrade of its interface last year, there have been several major improvements introduced that help me cut down the time taken to publish a new post. But there were also a few retrograde steps. 

One of these is to do with copy-pasting links.

[Bear with me here.] The new way requires the blogger to click on the link icon (or use keyboard shortcut Control + K). A dialogue box duly opens. This now requires me to drag the cursor into the box, then press Control + V to paste the link. Now, why couldn't the cursor already be in the box? (It used to be before the upgrade!) Why should I have to go dragging it there? Because there's another box, above it, with the text from which the link should go. But I've just highlighted that text! It should automatically appear in that box! (Again, as before.) And then there's the checking of  'Open this link in a new window'. Unless Blogger/Google actively wants to lose traffic to linked sites, this should be the default - not something I need to check! 

Anyway - my point is this. What once took one click to do after highlighting the text, now takes three, what took two seconds to do now takes six or seven. I may have to do this three, four times for any given post - an extra 15, 20 seconds tops - but over time it all these wasted seconds build up. And they annoy me. A bug or a feature?

What should I do? Send an email to Blogger/Google with my suggestions of how to optimise the interface in the hope that someone will see it and react? Or will they receive my email, nod, yawn, and just leave it unanswered? Say they do notice it and think - "yeah, that makes sense" - will they improve the interface straight away, or leave it until the next major upgrade in a couple of years' time? 

And so I left it, there being more pressing matters, as always, and so the wasted minutes pile on. Now, having taken a decision not to do anything, I cannot be annoyed at Blogger, Google or indeed myself every time I have to drag the cursor to the box and check the 'open this link in a new window' box.

A metaphor for so much that could be optimised in life - but it's easier to leave it as is. Don't sweat the small stuff. Leave it, procrastinate until nudged, live with life's imperfections, suffer them in silence - or take arms against this sea of troubles/And by opposing end them.

This time last year:
The 13th Thirteenth

This time two years ago:
Ghastly June day in London

This time three years ago:
Perfect weather week in Warsaw

This time four years ago:
Further progress is unimaginable

This time five years ago:
Baletowa reopens as rail works move on

This time eight years ago:
Polish doctors in UK offer new healthcare model

This time 11 years ago:
The closure of the Góra Kalwaria - Pilawa railway link

This time 13 years ago:
My blazing bus pic gets on front page of Gazeta Stołeczna

This time 14 years ago:
Storm clouds rising

Ten Years of Blogging

Here it is - from ten years ago. One-sixth (nearly) of my life has been blogged, half (nearly) of my life in Poland has been blogged. My original intention was to follow Jeziorki for one calendar year, over the four seasons... but now it's been 40 seasons, and I'm sticking to it.

For me, the ideal form of communication - a mixture of the written (rather than spoken) word; and still (rather than moving) images. And - most important - the blogging format does not require the closure of narrative that novel writing or movie making requires. I'm not good at inventing endings.

I started blogging to record the changes that were going on around me in the southern edges of Poland's capital; the pace of change has been great, far greater than in the suburban West London from which I moved.

So here it is, copy'n'pasted, a pristine piece of html from 1 April 2007, my first-ever blog post on W-wa Jeziorki.
  Ul. Trombity is one of Warsaw's more fascinating streets. More than one mile/1.6km long, it is full of contrast - new houses, old houses, farmyard animals, wildlife, wetlands; airliners fly over it, trains trundle past it - there's so much to see. The end of ul. Trombity is less than seven and half miles from the very centre of Warsaw (junction of ul. Marszalkowska and al. Jerozolimskie), and yet the neighbourhood has a distinctly rural air. The street is located in the Warsaw district of Ursynów, though on the other side of the busy ul. Puławska. This area, Jeziorki, is a far cry from the blocks of high-density housing usually associated with Ursynów.

That was it! Short and sweet. As I'm in London right now, I can't stroll down Trombity to recreate the photo; little has changed in this vista. Looking 180 degrees behind me, I'd see a glade of tree-stumps where once an orchard stood.

Over those ten years, my writing style has improved, as has my photography, aided by ever-better cameras and lenses. The '10,000-hour theory' posits that mastery can be attained by putting in that time. Now, over those ten years, I've published 2,467 posts. At an average of an hour and half per post, I'm a more than a third of my way there. Assuming my output doesn't drop dramatically (which it might); I should attain mastery of the blog form sometime around by 80th birthday...

Here, then, are the five most popular posts, according to Google...

High over eastern Ukraine     15 Jul 2014              8,641 views
Gold Train Rush part II          29 Aug 2015            7,742 views
D3200 shoots X100              02 Mar 2013             7,616 views
Landing of SP-LPC               01 Nov 2011             6,402 views
Gold Train update                 31 Aug 2015            5,856 views

A mixed bag of subjects; my (tragically) prescient post about the danger of flying passenger planes over the war zone in eastern Ukraine led to a TV interview on BBC's Newsnight; my photos of Captain Wrona's gear-up approach over our garden ended up on an NBC News documentary, while the Gold Rush story... I'm in talks with Discovery Science channel about the Gold Train... Nikon may (possibly) be thinking of manufacturing a full-frame mirrorless camera along the lines of the one I mocked up on the post about the D3200 vs FujiFilm X100...

But above all, this blog has been about capturing change - in Poland, in Warsaw, in Jeziorki. New roads, railway line modernisation, new buildings, development, progress. Again, my initial intention was to lay down a trail for my older self to track back along a timeline to feel that change over the years... and one day, after Michael Dembinski is dead and gone, a boy born sometime in the second half of this century will feel this intense, inexplicable fascination with Great Britain in the second half of the 20th century, and Poland in the first half of the 21st century, and will find the digital echoes of this blog...

Once upon a time, when internet was still spelt with a capital 'I', I postulated that some time in the future, it would allow me to have my very own TV channel with a global audience of ten. Well, moving images with spoken words proved to be beyond my grasp (if you don't master these arts by the time you're 25, you never will), but the blogging form has worked well for me. Here in the depths of Lent, when my readership traditionally plummets, I've still got well over 15,000 page views this month. This is not the same as 15,000 readers - according to Google Analytics, over the past month, I've had 1,280 individual users visiting the blog, so each one visits around 12 times per month on average.

Where are my readers from?

1.	Poland		35.27%
2.	UK		26.24%
3.	USA		14.07%
4.	Canada		4.04%
5.	Australia		2.52%

No surprises there then. This is what I had expected. And an answer to all those who ask czemuż nie piszę po polsku - well, nearly two-thirds of my readers are not from Poland, and most of those live in English-speaking countries.

On, then, to the next ten years, and from there - some more!

This time last year:
Białystok the Dull

This time four years ago:
UK's first town where Poles are a majority

This time five years ago:
Lost legend of rock'n'roll: Johnny Kołyma

This time six years ago:
Stalin's plans to escalate nuclear Armageddon

This time seven years ago:
Warsaw's favourite weekend destination

This time eight years ago:
We are two

This time nine years ago:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams

This time ten years ago:
My second Jeziorki blog post, also from this day

Good thinking, recorded

Lent 2017 - Day 7

Reading back old posts on this blog, I find myself asking more often than not these days whether I haven't already passed peak creativity. Have already I thought all my best ideas? After all, most of the Greats of Popular Music had hit their peak before they were 30, and those that are still around are doing little more than revisiting their greatest hits written decades ago...

Well thought-through, original ideas based on inspired conjectures should be captured, moved forward, then pushed, extended, towards a deeper and wider understanding of our human condition, then shared and tested in dialogue with like-minded people, resulting in better quality ideas, robust, able to stand up to scrutiny, a synthesis, a new standard, a new foundation from which to strive further.

It does take self-discipline to write down those thoughts. For the past ten years I've carried a notebook in my pocket everywhere I go, but sadly too few of my more interesting thoughts have been recorded. The content of my notebooks, each containing about three months' worth of notes, is around 95% work-related and a mere 5% is inspired observations and insights. Some of these thoughts end up in my blog posts, some don't. They'll often not make the mark when subjected to subsequent scrutiny. "I thought that was interesting or inspired? It's banal..."

Many people have had the experience, after four pints of ale quaffed during the course of a long and fascinating conversation with interesting people, that they have captured the secrets of the universe, only to forget them after the fifth pint of ale. Jotting down ideas - then revisiting them when sober - is a good litmus test for whether you indeed stumble upon any philosophical revelations.

As it happens, today I have filled my most recent notebook - begun on 5 December 2016; it was a fresh notebook, bought a few months ago, is sitting in my desk at work. All are around one-quarter A4 in size, all fit in my trouser pocket. Most have elastic bands to hold them together and another elastic band to hold a ball-point pen in place. Below: gathered in one place, my notebooks, going back to 2007.

I should have started a long, long time ago; notebooks and ball-point pens were around all my life. Writing down those startling thoughts is a discipline, but I find myself raising my camera to my eye far more often than taking out my notebook and jotting down some thoughts. This is a good time of year to work on the habit of writing down thoughts as they happen, rather than hope I'll remember them. Looking back at old blog posts, I can see that I've had some good ideas that I did manage to enshrine for posterity - and a good thing too, as I forgotten I ever had them. Going back and re-reading helps cement them in my memory, much like revising for exams helps studying.

Capturing thoughts to my smartphone will no doubt come soon as voice-recognition software and mobile apps will appear allowing me to dictate in the phone and turn my speech into the digital word, to appear directly on screen. But for now, notebook and ballpoint pen must suffice.

Thoughts rush through our mind all day - and indeed all night too, in dream form. Capturing thoughts that can be useful tools in the continual improvement of our lives, towards the goal of fulfilling our potential here on earth should have been a commandment. It's something we should all do, a natural part of the process of human growth.

This time last year:
Spirit of place and our own spirituality

This time two years ago:
Poland's road death toll falls but remains too high

This time three years ago:
Putin: tactical genius, strategic failure

This time five years ago:
My photos turned into beautiful watercolours

This time six years ago:
Silver birches and blue skies

This time eight years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2009)

This time nine years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2008)

Tweeting and blogging

I will have been blogging now for nine years come April. Over that time I will have published over 2,250 posts. Each month, this blog has around 15,000 page views - up from a recent low of 10,000, down from a high of 20,000 (there was a short period where Google Analytics was telling me I was getting 100,000 page views a month, but those were probably bots rather than humans). My blog hit peak view in 2012, and readership has been in decline since. This can be seen below:

The Golden Age of blogging (circa 2010) - when everyone had a blog and everyone read blogs - has passed. But blogging is not dead, just as TV did not kill the radio, just reduced its audience share. In the meantime, Twitter has come to prominence and Facebook has been growing relentlessly.

Below: Google Analytics' traffic tools are far more detailed than Blogger's (both are part of Google). Different results - this is because I've not worked out how to insert the up-to-date tracking code into my blog. Frankly - too much bother; I generally check my traffic stats on Blogger rather than using Google Analytics. Sorry - it's evolved into something way too geekily nerdy for me.

I started on Twitter at the end of 2013, and today I have 455 followers (the average number of followers per active Twitter user is 208). Being good at Twitter isn't easy - you need to spend time on it (in my case mainly during commutes); you need to deliver to your followers - insights, humour, whatever, all in 140 characters; your writing must be sharp and clever.

Why am I on Twitter? If I'm to be honest, it's to drive traffic to my blog.

Why am I blogging? If I'm honest, it's to stake a place for posterity. Initially, I wanted to document that little corner of a Warsaw suburb in which I live, note the way it is changing, place a marker post for future generations. But blogging gives me the opportunity to share observations about Poland, Britain, politics, economics - and the human condition. It gives me something to fall back on to see how my views have changed, become more refined, more nuanced with age. If anything, I hope the future will be brighter, so I will be able to focus more on matters spiritual, the lifelong quest for spiritual understanding. And the Sublime Aesthetic.

Back in the mid-1990s, as I was starting to get to grips with what the internet would be able to do for mankind's development, I posited that in 20 years time, I'd have my own TV channel with an audience of ten viewers around the world. I was wrong about the TV bit - my medium is the written word and the still photograph. And I somewhat underestimated the size of my global audience - and global it is - the bulk of my readers outside Poland are from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and - surprisingly - China (actually slightly ahead of Australia). This is the main advantage of blogging in English  rather than Polish - global audience. Plus for me, educated in England, trained in journalism and with nine years' experience in editing a monthly business magazine, my written English is considerably better than my written Polish.

Blogging has its rewards, not least the occasional e-mail of thanks from a regular reader (one wrote the other day that his morning online starts with the news, the weather... and Jeziorki.blogspot.com). And I blog with my 92 year-old father very much in mind, especially when writing about local matters.

Tweeting is different. As I wrote the other day, the main problem with the 140-character limit is that you cannot develop an argument. This means you can preach to the converted, but you can't convert. This tends to draw battle lines in societies which can quickly spill over into hate speech. With the best will in the world, it is difficult to seek common ground with those whose worldview is different to yours in Twitter. Any egregious behaviour online will end in accounts being blocked; trust in society has been taken down a notch. This is especially true in politics; Poland is but a microcosm of the shitstorm that will hit Twitter in the US in the run-up to a Clinton v. Trump presidential race.

If anything, the direction I'll be taking on Twitter in coming months is to avoid Polish politics and focus rather on the economy, promoting activities that help generate faster growth, innovation and new trade. It is emotionally draining having to deal with trolls who misunderstand your motives and writing. Not a problem I have when blogging!

This time two years ago:
The sad truth about the pavement for Karczunkowska
[Since then one tiny stretch has been paved. Rest is mud.]

This time six years ago:
A haul of wintery wonderfulness

This time seven years ago:
Optimal way to work?

This time eight years ago:
Highest point in Jeziorki 
(photos of the Rampa before demolition)

Poland - it works! revisited

Pride comes before the fall, as Britain's foremost 20th Century metaphysical philosopher, the Reverend W. Awdry oftentimes observed. There I was writing on Sunday about how everything in Poland works properly, and blow me if the very same day, two national IT disasters don't strike at the same time.

The first was the failure of PKP InterCity to anticipate the huge demand for cut-price tickets for the new Pendolino service, which led to its online ticket system (that I'd praised the same day) crashing.

The second was the failure of the PKW (national electoral commission) IT system used for counting the votes in Sunday's local government elections.

It is good to note that the disasters were not just swept under the carpet in a business-as-usual-style cover-up; heads rolled - the deputy head of PKP IC and the head of the PKW. High-profile failure in the public sector is no longer to be tolerated.

While the vote counting continues in many of the regional assembly counts, the mayoral elections have been settled and many will go to a second round - sign of a healthy democratic process.

This morning I woke at five past four to catch the 06:00 train from W-wa Zachodnia to Poznań. Because of the Pendolino debacle I was unable to buy my ticket online, so had to queue up at Zachodnia to buy it. No problem. I ask the lady in Koleje Mazowieckie uniform at the Koleje Mazowieckie ticket office where I could buy an InterCity ticket. She said, "From me." Excellent! "Cash or card, Sir?" Brilliant! The queue was very short, just one person ahead of me, so I set off for Platform 7, where the Warsaw-Berlin express, calling at Poznań, arrived on time. It arrived on time. I found the conference venue on Google Maps (a mere 500m from the station).

The return journey was equally punctual, although my Koleje Mazowieckie train from W-wa Zachodnia to W-wa Jeziorki was 11 minutes late. My only gripes with the return journey were that the free, on-board and much-touted wi-fi couldn't connect with either my laptop or my smartofon, leading me to believe that it didn't, actually, work, and that the Wars restaurant car didn't have any of the ciders it was advertising. The pierogi were good, though the portions (a mere six) were small.

Anyway, I was in Poznań to chair a real estate conference; the keynote speaker was the city's chief architect, who gave a detailed presentation into how the city is developing, how the 'green wedge' policy is working out (a cross of  greenery transecting the city from north to south, from east to west), and a fine balance that avoids diktat on one hand and anarchic free-for-all on the other. The presentation from estate agents CBRE highlighted just how Warsaw-centric the Polish property market is. Apparently there is twice as much office space in Warsaw's Służewiec district as there is in the whole of the city of Kraków.

Apropos of Kraków and Poland working, on Saturday in Kraków I met a Spanish guy who worked in the shared-services centre of a huge American IT corporation. He said that quite a few Spaniards had moved to Poland to escape the hopelessness and unemployment back home. While Spain's GDP per capita on a purchasing-power parity basis may still be some 50% higher than Poland's, that's little comfort if unemployment is nearly three times as high (Spain 24% vs Poland 8.7% according to Eurostat) and the economy is growing at half the pace (Spain 1.6% vs Poland 3.4% year-on-year to Q3 2014).

So major IT disasters notwithstanding, let's be thankful that Poland continues to move in the right direction, even if it often feels like two steps forward, one step back. It's better than the other way around.


This time last year:
Autumn or spring?
[This year, decidedly autumnal. Glum, damp, just above freezing.]

This time two years ago:
Shedding light on unused roads

This time three years ago:
Warsaw to Kraków by train
(an interesting contrast with current rail experiences!)

This time four year:
Warsaw Blogmeet

This time five years ago:
My fixie reconfigured

This time seven years ago:
Not In My Back Yard

This year's hellos - from Review of 2013

As years go, not one to match 2012 in terms of progress (measured in things concrete, like roads). The biggest 'hello' of the year goes to the S2 expressway, linking Ursynów to the A2 motorway and thence westwards to Poznań, Berlin and Lisbon. Below: the section of the S2 between the Węzeł Warszawa Południe  and Puławska. The viaduct carrying ul. Poloneza over the S2 is now connected with asphalt to ul. Ludwinowska, putting an end to the beastly muddiness that locals have had to contend with. Next year - asphalt from ul. Krasnowolska to Poleczki, please.

The eastern end of the S2, yesterday

The S2 took over four years to build, and it still fails to do what it was meant to do - namely, to act as Warsaw's southern bypass. By 2020 maybe. Right now the expressway comes to an abrupt end in scrubland south of the King Cross shopping mall (top left of this picture, click to enlarge).

Another partial hello to the sewers on ul. Trombity. The main sewer is now in place, and checked over by MPWiK (the Urban Enterprise of Waterpullings and Canalisation), but our houses have yet to be connected to the lateral sewer that now runs into our estate. A big big thanks to our neighbour Tomek for all his work on making this all happen. The final connection will have to wait until the end of winter (may it be a relatively snow-free one). Once that's done, we can bid farewell to the septic tank lorry that pays us a visit every other week to take away all our waste-water.

A big hello to Czester the orange tomcat, born on 10 May this year, everybody loves Czester. "He's the chief/He's the king/But above everything/He's the most tip-top/Top Cat".

On the food front, the appearance at our local Lidl (and indeed larger Lidls across Warsaw) of decent beefsteak (Beefmaster by Biernacki) at a decent price (85zl a kilo) has made a welcome addition as an occasional treat. If 2013 was the Year of Steak, it was also the Year of Cider and Shandy, both of these beverages, well-known to UK consumers, making a welcome appearance on Warsaw's supermarket shelves. My favourite Polish tipples here - Warka Perry and Cydr Lubelski. I'd drink Cydr Ignaców (the leading high-end Polish cider), but it's not readily available.

Hello also to hipster bars where craft-brewed real ales bring a multiplicity of taste to Polish beer drinking. The days when Lech, Tyskie and Żywiec was the full extent of one's choice are over - hurrah! My favourite Polish artisan beers - Atak Chmielu and King of Hop.

2013 was also the year of the Rubbish Revolution - the Capital City of Warsaw, along with local authorities across Poland - has been tasked with taking responsibility from householders and businesses for waste disposal. The fear was that the whole thing would go off at half-cock - at least here in Jeziorki it's functioning OK (though the road closure necessitated by the building of the sewers meant that no one came to collect the rubbish in November, but the bills came through anyway).

Hullo in Poland to the world's largest ship, the container vessel Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller which sailed in to Gdańsk's Deepwater Container Terminal in August. The Polish port is one of only five in Europe capable of handling the new Triple-E class ships, which can carry up to 18,000 20ft containers.

Warsaw gained another shopping mall, Plac Unii, situated where ul. Marszałkowska (the city's main north-south thoroughfare) meets ul. Puławska (the main southbound artery out of the city centre). Sadly, a bit disappointing - most of the same shops encountered in any other Warsaw mall.

Surviving a no-confidence referendum (too few Varsovians could be bothered to vote on what was clearly a party-politically motivated poll), Warsaw's mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz launched a one-stop website and phone line through which citizens could report urban shortcomings. The new service, Warszawa 19115, worked OK the first time I used it (the mess left on ul. Kórnicka by the builders responsible for the flood-retention ponds) but not the second time (about a road sign warning motorists of a pedestrian crossing by ul. Buszycka that had been knocked over by a car).

From the New Year, Varsovians who live and pay their taxes in the capital, can get a special hologram to affix to their urban travel card, entitling them to lower-priced public transport. Though controversial, this new scheme does mean I can carry on paying just 250 złotys (£50) a quarter for full use of buses, trams, Metro and local rail services within the city limits (roughly the equivalent in area to Postal London, or Zone 3 on TfL). That's less than £4 a week. Superb, eh, Londoners?

And just before Christmas, I got my first smartphone, enabling me to go truly mobile. I've yet to grapple with the new technology, but at first sight it seems ready to revolutionise my travel time. Blogging is difficult with the small keyboard, but tweeting is easy - we'll see how things develop in 2014.

And one farewell I must publish here - the Ikarus buses that have served Warsaw for the past 35 years finally disappear from the streets of Our City this month. Belatedly, since the old buses were slated for obsolescence in time for last year's Euro 2012 football finals in June. (See this post, from a quarter of a decade ago.)

So - all the very best to my readers around the world. This year, 36,385 people have visited my blog, of whom 22,754 are returning visitors, reading on average 1.54 pages per visit. 31% of my readers are from Poland, 18% are from the UK, 14% from the US, 5% from Canada and 4% from Germany.

May 2014 prove to be an interesting year that brings us much new insight and inspiration.

2012 hellos

2012 was a good year for new things appearing that would significantly improve life in Warsaw and Jeziorki.

Hello to Lidl Jeziorki - despite my initial misgivings, the new store, opened in March has changed my shopping habits; hello to Most Północny, Warsaw's northern-most crossing of the Vistula, opened in March; hello to Google Street View for Poland; hello to Eurolot's new fleet of Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 NextGens (first deliveries in May); hello to the floral rainbow on Pl. Zbawiciela, unveiled in May and which survived a torching, and is likely to become as much a feature of Warsaw as the ten-year old palm tree on Rondo de Gaulle'a; hello to the A2 motorway extended from Stryków (north of Łódź) to Konotopa (south-western edge of Warsaw), opened in June; hello to Modlin Airport (currently closed for runway repairs and ILS installation), opened in July; hello to the Veturilo rent-a-bike system in Warsaw (1 August); hello to the Mars exploration vehicle Curiosity, sending us images from the surface the Red Planet since August; hello to the viaduct carrying ul. Poloneza over the (as yet unfinished) S2 Southern Warsaw bypass, opened in November after three years; hello to some great new works of street art that have appeared this year, commemorating Warsaw's local heros; completion of refurbishment at Warsaw's royal parks (Łazienki and Wilanów) in November; hello to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by LOT, first two deliveries in November and December.

Local hellos to pedestrian crossings on ul. Karczunkowska (by Sarabandy, at the Trombity bus stops and at ul. Nawłocka) and to the massive drainage works between ul. Trombity, Dumki and Kórnicka, started this autumn, and the ponds on ul. Pozytywki (Thanks to Paweł Osiński for reminding me!) Ah! and at last the new cycle- and wheelchair-friendly footbridge over Puławska opened in July. Yes, and the yellow speed camera on Puławska between Karczunkowska and Auchan, which meant that since November, motorists started taking the 50kmh sign by the LukOil garage very seriously.

Have I missed anything else?

Wish list for 2013: connection of ul. Trombity to the sewerage system, a pavement for ul. Karczunkowska. Eleven years we've waited - enough is enough, already!

Lemmings and Poland's "right"*

Today's Gazeta Wyborcza publishes a text by Adam Leszczyński Lemingi zatopią prawicę ('Lemmings will sink the right'). The use of the pejorative term 'lemming' to describe anyone who's not a paid-up PiSite Smolensk conspiracy theory is not new to me. Two years ago (almost to the day) I had an evening meal at the India Curry with Toyah, a commentator on his blog, Lemming, and a commentator from my blog, AdTheLad. That particular evening's discussions are recorded here. Mr Lemming is notable for me as being the first person that I met to use that term (although as an online nickname for himself, with a probable dose of irony).

The term has now come to suggest lemming-like uncritical followers of The System which will lead them all to their doom. Mr Leszczyński's article is comprehensive in its analysis (if you can't read Polish copy it into Google Translate for a rough idea of his drift), but he is suggesting that the Poland's Young Educated Urban citizens, concerned about mortgages, drinking lattes from Starbucks, playing around with their iPhones and iPads, are not in the least bit interested in Smolensk conspiracy theories and just want to get on with their lives.

Yet by mocking this growingly significant part of the electorate, PiS is cutting off its nose to spite its face - you will never win over people you openly mock. Derision breeds derision.

PiS languishes in the opinion polls around the 25% mark. Mainly the disaffected, the economic losers of Poland's economic and political transformation (mainly, not not exclusively).

Smoleńsk was a national tragedy of proportions unparalleled in Poland's post 1989 history. But let's move on, PiS. Stay focused on this and that 25% will dwindle with every subsequent election (and Jarosław Kaczyński has already lost three).

I remember our curry dinner two years ago, at which Mr Lemming interestingly pointed to Germany's two major postwar parties - the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, saying that this offers a closer comparison to where the fault line lies in Polish politics than a viewpoint comparing Labour and Tory, Democrat and Republican.

If PiS are to rise to the stature of German's CDU, they'd do well to ditch the baggage, stop calling the rest of us names, and offer some constructive policy initiatives on improving the functioning of the Polish state, finding ways of financing infrastructure projects and making Poland's economy more competitive.

[* I use the lazy term "right" in the sense of Francisco Franco rather than Margaret Thatcher. My personal brand of conservatism focuses on the individual taking responsibility for their own fate, their own way in life, and not expecting the State to have to help them out along the way. I believe the State should be small and efficient, its work-rate on par with the private sector, not a bloated, over-sized administration staffed by family and friends of Party politicians. How my credo makes me a lewak is utterly beyond me.]

This time last year:
Mazowieckie province tempts with mini- and micro-breaks

This time two years ago:
Pride and anger [Warning - post contains Smoleńsk-related content]

If you're new to my blog, having popped over from Toyah's, do take a look at all these posts.

Sincerest form of flattery

Running a blog like this has its rewards. Last January, I received an e-mail from Isaac, a young Canadian artist, who'd been trawling the internet's vast photo resources for a photograph of a dragonfly that he could use as the basis for a watercolour. He'd come across my pic (below, from this post) and asked my permission to do so.

I agreed, and several months later, I received a scan of his painting (below). Click to enlarge to see the fine detail. One of the advantages of watercolour over lenses and pixels is that the artist has infinite control over depth of field - compare the wingtips in the photo (out of focus) with the painting!


Isaac e-mailed me soon afterwards for permission to use one of my peacock photos as the basis for another watercolour. My photo, taken in Łazienki park in April 2008, is shown below. (Click here for the original post.) And two and half months later, I'm delighted to receive a scan of a second watercolour based on one of my photos!

Below: here is Isaac's watercolour based on my photo. I am deeply impressed by both paintings and honoured that my photographs have inspired them. The comparison between the hours of work that a painting involves and the millisecond it took to photograph it (after a few moments of composing the shot) bears thinking about. Once again, click on the painting to enlarge to see the detail.

More watercolours by Isaac on his blog.

This time last year:
Silver birches and blue skies

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2009)

This time four years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands in late winter (2008)

Random blogging thoughts at the end of the year

I've not posted for two days; a return to Warsaw - no sunshine, no snow, no major events, no inspiration... a good chance to share with you, then, some thoughts about blogging.

Localism, down-your-wayism - year on year, I'm building a picture of life in Jeziorki; the slow process of development of this semi-rural corner of Warsaw, the capital of the EU's sixth-largest member state. This year, as last year, and next year too, local life has been dominated by the slow progress of the construction of Warsaw's Southern Bypass (which will finally connect us to the Outside World by expressway). The new infrastructure minister's decision to abandon plans for a central Poland airport between Warsaw and Łódź means that for the foreseeable future, Okęcie will remain Warsaw's principle airport, and while we can expect more flights overhead, new developments in and around Jeziorki will be limited by zoning.

Looking a bit beyond Jeziorki, I write about Warsaw as a fast-growing city, getting wealthier, more sophisticated and civilised, a city that's working flat out to get ready to host the Euro 2012 football championships (though I must say I'll not be watching any of it). Over the years, Warsaw is visibly changing, getting smarter, more akin to western cities, though the growth private car use has outstripped the city's ability to deal with it. Commuting from Jeziorki could be better. I look forward to more frequent rail services in and out of town, more Park+Rides, an extension to the city centre parking zone and more bus lanes and cycle paths (especially along ul. Puławska).

The economy will feature heavily in next year's blogs - though some posts may end up here on the BPCC's newly-resurrected blog page (after eight months' hiatus). Watching the zloty slide by 12 grosze against the pound in the first six hours of trading today fills me with apprehension - the markets react too violently and in response to short-term stimuli. I must say, personally, I am in favour of a financial transaction tax, although it should be introduced globally. Raising badly needed revenue for sovereign budgets - but also taking the edginess off those pre-programmed transaction computers that can destabilise companies, currencies or countries all too easily.

Creative writing: I've currently got three short stories and a half-completed novel all gathering dust on my hard drive and no real urgency to complete. This past year, I've written around 12 short stories around the theme 'After the War was Over'. Whereas I feel a pressing drive to blog, to engage with my online readers in Poland and around the world, I can't claim to feel that same pressure to press on with my creative writing. I should do though - New Year's Resolution #1: write more.

Photography: Despite my urges when passing through Dixon's Travel to buy a new camera, I can't really justify it. My brace of Nikons (D40 and D80) are holding up fine, very reliable, and the D40 is light enough to go with me everywhere. One camera that really interests me is the Fuji Finepix X100, the spiritual successor to the Leica. But it still have teething problems (battery life, software, filter attachment); I'm sure - given that the camera is such a hit - Fuji will one day bring out an improved version. Once it gets a full-size sensor, focal-plane shutter and and interchangeable mount that takes Leica-M lenses - I'll have one. And should one or other of my Nikons pack up finally and irrevocably, I'll buy a D3100 or D5100. But at the end of the day, the means are not the ends. The end in my case is to edge ever closer to the realisation of the Sublime Aesthetic.

Ultimately, blogging is the act of offering a personal testimony. My consciousness is present in the here and now, my memory shaped by growing up in England* in the late 20th C and by living in Poland in the 21st C. I've witnessed England's slow (relative) decline and Poland's rapid rise. But my consciousness, as it moves upon the face of the earth, is getting older and wiser. There are so many secrets yet to be uncovered, chief among these for me is the nature of consciousness; the balance between human biology (so many unknowns - especially in the field of neuroscience) and spirituality. Science will shed light on many mysteries, not in dazzling ways, but in tiny increments. Another New Year's resolution - to dive deeper into New Scientist each week and keep up with the latest discoveries.

* Ten years ago, I'd have written 'Britain' here.

This time last year:
Beery litter louts

This time two years ago:
Miserable grey London

This time three years ago:
Parrots in Ealing

This time four years ago:
Xmas lites, Jeziorki

From the mountains to the sea

A few days ago, I received an e-mail from the mobile phone of Paul Kaye (left), a Brussels-based Brit currently cycling along the Vistula from its source in the mountains to the sea. He'd picked up on my post about the newly-opened Vistula cycle path that makes its way through Warsaw along the right bank. I replied to Paul's question that the city's flood defence wall along the left bank of the river makes for a good approach to Warsaw from Góra Kalwaria and Konstancin in the south (my blog posts here and here).

Paul has previously cycled the entire length of the Iron Curtain "from Trieste in the Adriatic to Stettin in the Baltic" and has published a book, Fragments, about that journey.

Paul's current trip will total over 1,300km, a similar distance to the one I covered 25 years ago this summer, from the top of Spain to the bottom of Portugal. Today's cycle traveller has the vast advantage of the internet and mobile telephony; to find information and get recommendations of where to stay, to contact people along the way.

Paul's next stops are Płock, Toruń and finally Gdańsk. A Vistula path should really be laid out all the way from the mountains to the sea via all points in between so that cyclists can make the journey without having to make wide detours or competing with heavy goods traffic. The cost of creating a proper Vistula cycle path would be relatively small; the benefits to Poland's tourist industry would be massive.

New laptop - but which one?

My 2002 vintage laptop is on its last legs. At least twice a week it just dies on me at work and requires a 15 minute break to resuscitate. It's slow and confused. Multimedia is a challenge. A new laptop is now a top capital expenditure priority for me - the only question is - which one?

And here I turn to my dear readers for suggestions as to what's reliable, portable and multimedia friendly. As in life, a balance needs to be reached between lightness of weight and a screen that's sufficiently large to handle big photos, with good graphics processing power. Mobile blogging will be encouraged by fast built-in wi-fi internet and a long battery life.

I'm currently writing on a Dell, which has proved more reliable that I could have ever expected (I bought it second hand in late-2004 when it was already two years old), but that reliability is now failing. New Dell? Manufacturing has been contracted out to Foxconn, but then hasn't every laptop? IBM Thinkpads have become Lenovo, Moni's Toshiba has a good guarantee but she encountered problems with her screen and wi-fi within the first month of using it. Hewlett-Packard any good? Acer? Asus? Sony Vaio - people I know with them curse its very name.

I'd be grateful for any user experiences (good or otherwise) and recommendations for something light, robust and compatible (Apple?). Windows 7 - a huge advance over Windows XP? Is OpenOffice really a decent replacement for Microsoft Office (I can't stand Office 2007)?

Orders of magnitude

Well! Back online - what a relief. Still, it was good for the children to be without a computer for nearly five days; time spent in traditional pursuits - song, sewing, piano playing, film-making.

Back to blogging - normal service will resume shortly.

The computer's power supply unit (here Polish has a single word zasilacz; three syllables in place of six) had indeed packed up. And while getting it replaced, I ordered another hard disk drive for the computer - a splendid one terabyte of storage space. This is on top of the 300 gigabytes it already had. So now, there's 1.3TB available to store photos, films and music. I've backed up three and half years of photographs, in high-resolution, taking up just one-tenth of the capacity of the new drive - a mere (!) 100GB. The new hard drive cost 260 złotys, or £55 - which to me is mind-bogglingly cheap compared to how much storage used to cost.

Compare my past computers' hard drives:
1992 Apple PowerBook 140 laptop: 40 megabytes
1995 Apple Power Mac 5200: 2 gigabytes (2,000 megabytes)
2002 PC desktop computer: 40 gigabytes (40,000 megabytes)
2007 PC desktop computer: 300 gigabytes (300,000 megabytes)
2010 Upgrade to the above: 1.3 terabytes (1,300,000 megabytes)

That's 32,500 times more storage space for data - in Moni's lifetime (that first PowerBook was bought so I could work from home after Moni was born). Pricewise - computers cost roughly the same as they did. It's just that they do so much more, so much faster. Plus the internet.

Megabytes. Back in the '80s the word "mega" was a neologism - it meant thousands of times better, faster - mega. The world was at the start of its great* journey towards today's digital era of internet, mobile telephone and satellite broadcasting, the word "mega" signified the most up-to-date, fantastic, incredible anything.

From Urban Dictionary:

Mega:
Adj. Very, really, extremely. Used for more emphasis. Something or someone is really good, amazing and/or wonderful, etc.
1. That's mega awesome, man!
2. That was just mega wrong.
3. Ah, that's mega, mate.

How archaic! A problem with neologisms - especially ones related to technology - they have a short sell-by date. How long before terabytes give way to petabytes? 3TB hard disk drives are now becoming available...

* Note the over-use of the English word 'great'. At a conference the other week, the English chairman sprinkled it liberally throughout his introduction. "If you turned off your mobiles, it would be great." "That presentation was great." "We have a great panel here today." Etc. The epithet should be used sparingly; King Arthur The Great, Great Depression, the Great War etc.

In this regard, the Polish word wielki has maintained its strength and using it trivially actually sounds comical. Król Kazimierz Wielki. Both 'great' and wielki are pretty much exact translations of the Latin 'Magnus', so rząd wielkości = 'order of magnitude', and thus we come full circle...

Life without a computer

Just a holding post from the office; on Friday night the computer's power supply unit failed (zasilacz - a neater one-word Polish term for the item). On Saturday morning I took the computer round to the shop in Ursynów to get it fixed - how quickly it will be ready depends on whether a) they can easily find a replacement for the part b) if there's not something else amiss, such as the motherboard or processor, or ventilation etc. Until the computer's back in the house - no more substantive (merytoryczny - another useful Polish term generally unavailable to the English speaking world) posting. Apologies for not replying to e-mails sent to me over the weekend.

The children took the news of a broken-down computer badly. "Without Facebook or Google, WE WILL DIE!" wailed Moni. Shades of "Dad, F-Troop's fuzzy" from A Serious Man.

TV I can well do without. But not having a computer with Internet access these days is akin to a lack of hot and cold running water.

Poland's English-language blogging community get-together

To Warsaw for the half-yearly blogmeet. The last one was in Kraków in May, now Warsaw plays host. Venue is Legends Bar, ul. Emilii Plater 25, a British eaterie with goodies such as All-Day Full English Breakfast (below, 30 złotys) bangers-and-mash and chicken and leek pies on the menu.

The entire Polandian team, 60% of which is Kraks-based. Island1 and Scatts (from the UK) who got the blog up and running, plus Decoy (from Ireland), Brad (from Oregon, USA). As well as contributing to Polandian, Scatts also runs 20 east, while Student SGH does his Politics, Economy, Society blog.

A big welcome to two new Warsaw bloggers, Kolin (Borsuk na Pradze, who hails from Canada)and Paddy (Pozdrowienia z Ursynowa), as well as Pan Steeva of the re-activated Młochów (Mwo-hoov) blog (two more Brits). And me and my two blogs, this one and Grey Jumper'd Childhood. Plus our regular blog readers and commentators Adthelad (a UK-born Pole like me) and Bob from Colorado (US) to whom thanks for the brilliant suggestion of venue.

And the Muses (below from l to r: Mrs Decoy, Mrs Island1 and Mrs Scatts with daughter Zosia).

So in total there were 15 of us, nine regular bloggers representing seven English-language blogs about living in Poland.

After enjoying Legends for several hours, we moved to Scatts Mansions for more ale and wine and cultured debate (anyone know why we don't eat turkeys' eggs, for instance? Or whether a carp could beat a turkey in a pre-Xmas fight?)