Epigramology by Jacek Koba

"Dogs fetch. Cats bring. Therein lies the difference." An example of Jacek Koba's witty sayings, a few of which have ended up on this blog – Jacek being a regular commentator here for over 15 years. Now he has published a book, Epigramology – Modern Epigrams and Aphorisms, which is an absolute delight. The contents: over 600 epigrams covering modern life, from politics, money, religion, work, education, relationships, travel and... cats and dogs.

Epigrams and aphorisms are an antidote to the expendable content scrolled up by modern media. They require pauses, consideration and return. "The reader is encouraged to dip in and out at random," it says in the preface. Indeed – this book is perfectly suited for confined spaces; it has been designed to be dipped in and out of, during those brief private moments in which the reader can extract meaningful insight. Epigramology should be read in short bursts. Read a few, close the book, pause to think – and then return.

The very title Epigramology sounds half-classical discipline, half-laboratory mishap: the scientific study of the sentence that goes off in your hand. This is the territory of the epigram. A miniature essay that won't waste the reader's afternoon. The book's original subheading was to be "Quintessence, Luminescence and Incandescence", which neatly categorised the epigrams around the three – definitions, insights, and rage.

The epigram is an unforgiving literary form. A weak poem can hide behind atmosphere; a padded essay can take refuge in nuance. But an epigram is out on its own. It must enter, strike, take a bow, and then vanish. If it lingers, it becomes advice. If it explains itself, it becomes a LinkedIn post. If it moralises, it becomes a bumper sticker. Epigramology is a project to revive a classic form that demands intelligence, compression and a pinch of elegant cruelty. It diagnoses our troubled civilisation one sentence at a time.

Personal bugbears I must say intrude somewhat – Epigramology has it in for the urban cyclist in the same way that my blog has it in for the SUV buyer/driver. And this causes me to reflect. Both targets are sublimations of the real villain – Homo inconsideratus incogitans – the inconsiderate unthinking. Czlowiek, który się nie zastanawia (the person who contemplates not).

The book was self-published via Amazon, and I must say that self-publication has now been made vastly easier and cheaper than ever before. AI's role in the publishing process is making big changes. Authors can now check their content for originality – and for epigrams, originality is crucial ("I must have read this somewhere before but forgotten it"). For publishers, AI is a vital tool for protecting themselves against accusations of profiting from plagiarism. Large language models are ideally suited for sifting through everything that's ever been written to ensure that what had genuinely come from the human mind is fresh.

Raise a wry chuckle with your after-dinner speeches by dropping some Koba epigrams into them.

My favourite Jacek Koba quote, one that I have successfully deployed in my life, is "Happiness is an expectation-to-reality ratio of 1:1".

Epigramology is available from Amazon.com (link here).

This time two years ago:
Qualia Compilation 8: Eye operation

This time three years ago:
A date for the history books

This time five years ago:
WinterCity/SummerCountry

This time six years ago:
Homage to Americana

This time seven years ago:
This land is my land

This time 11 years ago:

The day, seized.

This time 14 years ago:
Classic British cars for British week

This time 15 years ago:
Cara al Sol - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Pumping out the floodwater

This time 17 years ago:
To Góra Kalwaria and beyond

This time 18 years ago:
Developments in Warsaw's exurbs

Plato, God and the Afterlife

Threaded through Plato's treatise about the State are many references to God and the Afterlife. It is, after all, natural to assume that in the pre-Modern world practically everyone believed in some sort of God or other. The Greeks had their myths, their polytheistic pantheon of Gods, and Plato assumed that these Gods were associated with the mythos of the Hellenic peoples. Though when Plato refers to God, he does so in the singular. 

In his ideal state, the mythos must be protected. Poets who subvert tales of the Gods, who ascribe evil intent to the actions of the Gods, should be banned (Homer included). Very much in the vein of Putin.

Plato is at his most specific when it comes to setting out his spiritual vision right at the end of The Republic, in the second half of Book X. He tells (through the narrator, Socrates) the Myth of Er. 

A slain warrior who returns to life after 12 days, to recount what he had just witnessed. As Er tells it, when his soul left his body, it "went on a journey with a great company" to a place of judgment, "at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand". This is familiar to the Christian; God at the Last Judgment, separating the good from the bad, the left and the right, the sheep from the goats.

But what happens next is more in the Eastern traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism: "Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser—God is justified."

The soul chooses for itself a new, different, life. The choice of new life is crucial, for it is part of the continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement, with each successive life being better than the last – if the right choice is made. And this choice, claims Plato, must be framed in moral and ethical terms. "Learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always the better life." 

Er speaks of a soul that chose the life of a tyrant, "his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality; he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own children". Our souls are to be "schooled by trial". Plato's recipe for a happy life on this earth is to dedicate yourself to "sound philosophy". 

Plato and I see the process of reincarnation in the Hindu way; a continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement. One life isn't anywhere near long enough to fulfil a soul's purpose. "What was ever great in a shirt time? The whole period of three score years and ten is surely a little thing in comparison with eternity?" "The soul of a man is immortal and imperishable ... there is no difficulty in proving it."

Plato states something that I have long held to be true; that evil is equivalent to entropy. "The corrupting and destroying element is the evil, and the saving and improving element is the good", he says. He compares disease in humans, mildew in corn, rot in wood and the rust of iron with the evils that corrupt the soul: unrighteousness, unbridled appetite and ignorance.

"The soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil must exist forever, and if existing forever, must be immortal," writes Plato.

And so, to the final sentence of the final part of the most influential book in Western philosophy: "Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing."

Saṃsāra.

This time last year:
Mornings with My Cat, Mii

This time eight years ago:
Black-necked grebes hatch

This time nine years ago:
To Warka in the sunshine

This time 13 years ago:
The descriptive vs. the prescriptive

This time 14 yeas ago: 
Noc Muzeów – night of pride in being Polish

This time 18 years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford to keep the grosz
[It's still here. If you find one in your change – keep it.]

Plato and politics

The Republic is remarkable for the light it sheds on the human condition. This 2,400-year-old treatise about making society – made up of flawed humans – work remains even more relevant today than when it was written. Its implications are global, rather than concerning city-states of Ancient Greece. 

Reading Plato today in a 19th-century translation is slightly jarring as it casts Victorian shade over a work which is 2,400 years old; but as I discovered yesterday, the version I read had a massive influence on the development of modern Britain, and thus the world.

Benjamin Jowett’s translation entered university libraries almost immediately after its publication in 1871. It became the dominant English-language academic Plato for generations because of Jowett’s immense influence within the Victorian Oxbridge intellectual establishment. This influence is to be felt to the present day, about which, more below.

The Republic's central premise is a thought-experiment. It posits the ideal state as imagined by 'Socrates' (Plato's narrator – the real Socrates didn't leave any writings). 'Socrates' suggests that the state should be ruled by a class of Guardians, whose one aim in life is to rule the state; they should indeed be brought into the world with this express intention. A caste of high-born philosopher-kings, they should not possess wealth, but be provided for by the rest of the state's citizens – the cobblers, the shipwrights, the bakers, the farmers, the builders and everyone else. The Guardians should be the children of renowned warriors, they should be generalists rather than specialists. Controversially, they should share their wives in common, and bring up their children in common.

Did Plato really believe this to be an ideal form of governance? Or was it a narrative device? A conceit designed to provoke thought – in today's parlance... to trigger?

Plato identifies various forms of government: aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Familiar terms to us today, but Plato uses them slightly differently, attaching different values to them. Tyranny, of course, being the worst, then, as now. But democracy he sees as a form of mob rule, where the majority can hold undue sway over the minority; the free poor can get together and say "there's more of us than there are of the rich – let us pass laws that allow us to seize their wealth." However, avoiding the rule of tyrants was the greatest challenge for society.

Plato identifies the drive for money and power as the key to understanding the motivation of tyrants. Appetite – lust for power, for glory, for wealth – is why rulers slip away from idealised forms of government towards more corrupt polities. You only need to look at contemporary America and Russia to see how true Plato's insights remains some two and half millennia on.

At the heart of politics sits personality and human behaviour. Not ideology. A fucked-up mind within an untiring, driven body, obsessively seeking power, wealth, and in some cases adulation, turning power into wealth and wealth into more power – this is Plato's tyrant. We see this so clearly today. Ideology is merely a means to the end rather than being an end in itself. "Vote for me, because I hate those whom you hate" has replaced "vote for me and I'll give you the rich man's money".

Plato's Republic serves as a timeless warning to societies to watch out for those who seek to rule over us. Plato argues that a decent and stable society can exist only when the qualities of justice, truth and goodness govern both the individual and the state. He commends rule by philosophically educated guardians who subordinate their private interest to the common good. 

Back to Jowett. This ideal filtered through into the British Civil Service (after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854. Its full title was: Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, Together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett. Yes, that Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, who would go on to translate Plato's The Republic.

The result would be a close real-world approximation to a Platonic administrative elite, though moderated by parliamentary democracy. Plato set out that rulers should not seek wealth, that rule should belong to the educated and morally disciplined, and that within the ruling class, appetite must be subordinated to the common good. The Victorian reformers believed that public office should not be a source of private wealth or patronage. Entry into the Civil Service should be by ability, not connections, and an ethos of integrity, duty and competence should govern, not avarice or party interest.

Plato's observations about tyrants' appetites squares with modern warnings about the 'dark triad' of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Rising politicians who display these traits (especially if they are capable of masking them!) need weeding out as they gain power, before their innate characteristics – indeed their personality disorders – can turn into tyrants. 

In my next post, I shall turn to what Plato had to say about God, the soul and the afterlife.

This time four years ago:
The speed of life

This time five years ago:
Does it all come right in the end?

This time six years ago:

Self-discipline and creativity during the lockdown

This time seven years ago:

Russia's Far East on road maps

This time eight years ago:
Heavenly Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Why are all the shops shut today? 

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki at its most beautiful

This time 15 years ago:
Useful and useless in my wallet

This time 16 years ago:
In search of the dream klimat - remote viewing made real

This time 17 years ago:
Zakopane to Kraków in 3hrs 45min
[Less than two hours today.]

On Getting to the End of Plato's Republic

Phew! That was hard work. Four hundred and sixteen pages. I finished this morning, having started reading it over two months ago. And this is my second attempt; my first bash (last autumn) ended about a quarter of the way into the book.

BUT IT WAS WORTH IT!!

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1929, "...the European philosophical tradition is ... a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato posed the foundational questions and set out the conceptual map, over which later philosophers have argued; answering him, modifying him – rejecting him even, but hardly ever ignoring him. And so I set out, determined to read such a crucial text. 

This particular book, my son has reminded me today, spent most of its life in my parents' downstairs lavatory. I guess it served to impress guests, signalling intellectual pretensions, and it might have been something my mother dipped into now and then while seated on the throne. It was neither annotated (as many of my father's science books are) nor even visibly thumbed.

The Republic is part of an anthology, The Essential Plato (with introduction by Alain de Botton), a 1999 reprint of the Victorian translation, by Benjamin Jowett. I now realise that this is not the easiest way into Plato's work. Jowett made zero effort to make the original Greek easy to read, leaving immense sentences that stretch on sometimes for half a page as single chunks. Rather than breaking them down into less ponderous prose, Jowett's text gives off the air of a Victorian mind trying hard to appear lofty. You drift away in successive subordinate clauses, searching for the sentence's principal verb.

Yet Jowett's translation is to Plato what King James Version is to the Bible – it's the version that many generations of Britain's educated elite cut its teeth on while reading the Greats or PPE at Oxford.

So I read the whole book out loud (another reason it took so long – I never took it with me on the train). I read it so that it would make sense to me. If I failed to get Plato's point, I'd re-read the paragraph. Aloud. And as I did so, it dawned on my why my studies at school and university were not as effective as they should have been – I had so often skipped the hard bits. At the meta-level, often while reading Plato, I was conscious of my mind beginning to wander off. So I read slowly, around six pages a day on average, compared to the 20 or so pages a day of previous books I'd read this year. Also, I read it with pencil in hand, making notes in the margins, underlining points I considered important and flagging up with asterisks the key ideas. 

Another thing that irked me throughout was the fact that though ostensibly The Republic is in the form of a dialogue between Socrates (the character through whom Plato speaks) and his followers, the actual 'dialogue' is mostly Socrates' listeners saying things like "Yes" and "True" and "Exactly" and "By all means" to just about everything that Socrates says. With the exception of Thrasymachus, who puts up a vigorous argument against Socrates' (Plato's) point of view in Book 1, everyone else comes across as a cypher, a mere nodding yes-man. The reader yearns for a response such as "up to a point" or "only in some cases" or "that's a bit of a sweeping generalisation, Socrates!" This is no dramatic debate among equals, no challenges, not a true dialogue; rather, it comes across as a narrative device, a framework upon which Plato hangs his ideas.

Having said that, these 416 pages contain ideas that have shaped our world to a remarkable degree. 

In my next post, I shall cover what Plato actually wrote 2,400 years ago, and why his thinking on human psychology, politics and spirituality remains so utterly relevant today. And why I so frequently was writing 'Trump!' and 'Putin!' in the margins.

This time last year:
The platform is in working order (or not)

This time two years ago:
Anatomy of a Moment

This time three years ago:
Ego – self-consciousness – pure consciousness

This time seven years ago:
The Day the Forecasters Got It Wrong

This time eight years ago:
Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Wola became W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 two years ago today 

This time 13 years ago:
From yellow to white – dandelions go to seed
[2026: this happened two weeks ago]

This time 16 years ago:
The good topiarist

This time 17 years ago:
Wettest. May. Ever.

This time 18 years ago:
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras
[My last visit to Zakopane – I've not been back since]

Andrew Marr's 'A History of Modern Britain'

There's never a good time to write a contemporary history. Historical narratives need closure. Loose ends need tying up, threads need to be neatly summarised. Causes linked to effects. The start-point of any history is easier to set than its end, and the choice of where to begin a modern history ends up defining the work. 

I picked up Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain (2007) having watched Adam Curtis's 2025 BBC documentary, Shifty. Curtis starts his look back at what's gone wrong with Britain by dropping the pin on May 1979, from the day Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. On the other hand, Andrew Marr's narrative (which came out as a BBC documentary in 2007 and in book form later the same year) starts in 1945 with the general election that brought in Clement Attlee to Number 10. This was as radical a moment as the one that ushered in the start of Thatcher's revolution. Attlee's Labour government brought in the Welfare State and the National Health Service, it nationalised large swathes of the British economy, it started decolonialisation, and introduced major educational reforms. All this against the backdrop of national bankruptcy and the onset of the Cold War.

Whilst I cannot quibble with either start date when it comes to analysing the state of the UK, I'd say that bringing Marr's A History of Modern Britain to a conclusion in 2007 was settle on the worst end-point possible at which to wrap up. For the shit was months away from hitting the fan. The global financial crisis would usher in austerity, the Tory-LibDem coalition and ultimately lead to the Brexit referendum. But Marr's documentary was in the can before Tony Blair had resigned as prime minister, to replaced by Gordon Brown just after the entire series had aired.

With that major proviso – one that was entirely out of the author's hands – let me go on with my thoughts. I'd very much like to place Marr's History of Modern Britain alongside Shifty as a significant explainer of the forces that shape contemporary Britain. However, they differ greatly in form and in content. 

Shifty begins its narrative when I was already a young man, whilst History of Modern Britain begins 12 years before my birth. I recognise Marr's portrayal of postwar Britain, it's hopes and its handicaps as the world I was born into; grey and drab, but getting brighter year by year as the goodies of consumer market, and innovation in technology and marketing, were rapidly disseminating through society. 

The optimism of Labour, the steady stuffiness of the pre-Thatcher Tories. I remember well the 1964 general election, Labour's victory, its slogan, 'Go Labour!' and prime minister Harold Wilson talking about the "white heat of the technological revolution" that prompted my father to vote Labour (something he'd never done before, nor indeed again until much, much later). Hovercraft, supersonic airliners and the GPO Tower, augmented by fictional visions of the future (Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds) grounded in the heroic recent past (Airfix kits of Spitfires and Lancasters, Churchill tanks, HMS Ark Royal and Commando soldiers). This was all before Shifty's timeframe.

Marr, being a first and foremost a political journalist, is at his strongest dwelling on the political intrigue going on behind the scenes and the personalities. The downfall of leaders, from Harold Wilson through Thatcher and Blair, is well recounted.

Popular culture is neatly covered, but with a strong generational skew towards the 1970s when the author (born in 1959) was growing up. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Ian Dury, the Jam, the Police, the Specials, UB40, Live Aid all get a namecheck or two, but there's no mention of hip-hop or rap, Oasis or Blur – popular music fizzled out with the onset of Marr's adulthood. And indeed mine (it could be argued that compared to the 1970s, contemporary popular music is feeble).

History rhymes. I was reading this book's coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war ('weapons of mass destruction) with the run-up to the Iran war going on ('weapons of mass destruction'). I was reading about Peter Mandelson's contribution to Labour's 1997 election victory just as he was being arrested on charges of abuse of public office. The seeds of Brexit were sown, with a major contributory factor being Tony Blair's decision to open the UK labour market to Poles and citizens of the other seven countries that joined the EU in 2004. Instead of the 13,500 migrant workers forecast by analysts, over a quarter of a million turned up within a year, with many settling in rural parts of England and Wales that hadn't seen a foreigner in centuries.

Marr's prequel to A History of Modern Britain, the BBC documentary series The Making of Modern Britain (2009) is readily available on YouTube to watch (sadly,  A History of Modern Britain isn't). One way or another, I'd recommend reading the book though. And having it on your bookshelf, especially if you or indeed your parents, lived through these years. It's a gripping read and never becomes dull, not even in the minutiae of fiscal and macroeconomic policy details. 

Having said that, Marr is more small 'c' conservative than Curtis – his approach to history more conventional. The two work well together; for me. A History of Modern Britain is an excellent guidebook to Shifty, providing a historically rigorous framework upon which can be stretched the canvas of Curtis's compelling vision.

This time two years ago:
A family 'what-if' and the soul

This time eight years ago:
Work proceeding around Jeziorki

This time nine years ago:
Karczunkowska reopens to traffic

This time 14 years ago:
Goodness gracious!

This time 15 years ago:
Muddy feet, Warsaw 'pavements'

This time 16 years ago:

Cycling and recycling

This time 17 years ago:
Winter clings on to the forest

This time 18 years ago:
Toyota launches the iQ

This time 19 years ago:
Old school Łódź

Lent 2026: day 35 – religion and social control

I am not sold on the idea of organised religions for two reasons. The first is that I firmly believe, I intuit, that everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. There are therefore as many paths to God as people who seek God. This is one of my primary principles regarding human spirituality. I believe that in essence faith is experiential rather than book-taught – esoteric rather than exoteric.

The second reason is that I see religions as all too often straying in their remit from the spiritual into the temporal realm. The temptation for spiritual leaders to appropriate humans' innate longing for the numinous, – the sense of awe – for the purpose of social control is too great. "Believe in what you are told to believe, live according to our precepts, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife" is a simple yet persuasive narrative.

In The Republic, written around 375 BC, Plato (through his narrator, Socrates), engages in his famous mind-experiment of devising the perfect state. Having set up a hypothetical community of mutually interdependent craftsmen (farmers, builders and weavers), which is expanded to include merchants, artists, tutors and warriors, it becomes clear to Socrates and his interlocutors that some form of social control would be required to ensure that the unjust do not end up dominating the just. Socrates postulates the sort of religion that a just state would require to keep  the morale of its citizens high. He is critical of Homer and other authors who portray the gods as morally dubious, and so, introduces censorship to his republic. Strict control of cultural narratives is therefore essential: stories about the gods must be controlled, because they shape the character of the populace. “We must first supervise the storytellers. If they tell a fine story, we approve it; if not, we reject it.” Children absorb stories before they can reason; myths must be filtered at source. The state decides what is acceptable. Plato is saying that rulers need to have systematic control of cultural input.

Seven centuries later, in 325 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine – who had converted to Christianity eight years earlier – convened the Council of Nicaea, summoning 200 bishops from around Christendom to Nicaea (in modern-day Turkey) to hammer out what it was exactly that Christians believed in. After all, he reasoned, if this is to become the official religion of the Roman Empire, it's important to know what it stands for. And thus was hammered out the Nicene Creed, an imperially approved statement of what the Church believes (and by omission what it doesn't). Of course, this wasn't the end of the matter; debate would rage on for centuries – about the nature of the Holy Trinity in particular – but it was a crucial step in establishing Christianity as a global religion, rather than a loose collection of squabbling cults.

Theological debate in the service of empire-building, the Council of Nicaea highlights how the needs of church and state can overlap. And so they did for the best part of a millennium and a half. The Enlightenment led to a clear separation of secular governments from church authorities; the 'divine right' to rule was over. Theocracies are on the retreat (with a few stubborn exceptions).

Is church-going in general decline in the West because people can see through the social control aspects of religions? Has atheism – based on the notion that there's no God because everything is composed of matter – led to societies losing control? In balance, no. Secular laws by and large work effectively, keep trouble-makers in society from causing too much harm to the rest of us.

I have written about the rising numbers of people identifying themselves as 'Spiritual But Not Religious' (SBNR) in the US, as church-going and religious affiliation is falling. In Europe, this is reflected in the term 'believing but not belonging', with many people retaining spiritual beliefs, but disengaging from church participation and doctrine. And there are also the 'Religious But Not Spiritual', who go to church out of a sense of tradition, duty and order, without feeling any spiritual calling. 

I would posit that a fixed proportion of society has some kind of a spiritual calling; for some, there is the need to belong to a faith community and engage in regular spiritual practice (church-going); for others – this number is increasing as the former decreases – a self-authored worldview with an emphasis on spiritual experiences rather than pre-packaged teachings is preferred.

How will this look in the future? I suspect that the SBNRs will continue to grow in number, and this will be seen in a proliferation of YouTube channels and social-media accounts; a whole new stream of people searching for God in their own way.

Lent 2024: day 35
After death what's next? (Pt II)

Lent 2023: day 35
Into the Afterlife (Pt III)

Lent 2022: day 35
Altered states - caffeine and alcohol

Lent 2021: day 35
The science of coincidence

Lent 2020: day 35
Soul and Body

Borderlines by Lewis Baston – review

A present from my brother, a heartfelt thank-you for such an excellent book. Subtitled 'A History of Europe, Told from the Edges', Borderlines sets out to examine the international borders that define our continent, its history, its peoples and their identities. Lewis Baston, a British writer known for his work on political geography, set out on many trips along Europe's borders, from that between Ireland and the UK to that between Ukraine and Russia.

Baston delights in borderland anomaly stories. One such is the village of Baarle, split between Belgium and the Netherlands in such a way that the Belgian part includes 16 exclaves within Dutch territory. These exclaves, in turn, surround seven Dutch areas. Many building straddle both countries; the nationality of a given house is determined by where its front door lies. The root cause of this borderline mayhem goes back to a deal struck between two local dukes in... 1198.

Of huge fascination to me is the way fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its aftermath. A point I only recently got was how Germany's Anschluss with Austria in 1938 was a result of the collapse of the Habsburgs and the splitting of Austro-Hungary into Austria and Hungary. The unification of Germany in 1871 excluded the German-speaking areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; with that gone, the merging of Austria into a greater Germany made sense to nationalists after WW1.

One border mentioned in the book that I recently visited (in May 2024) is the one between Poland and Germany, between Świnoujście and Ahlbeck. Baston points out where the border runs, but fails to mention that right on the German side is a nudist beach (FKK-strand) that dates back to East German times. And he mentions the German train that runs into Świnoujście, but doesn't say that even on the Polish side, all signage and information is in German only, or that złotys are not accepted. 

I have also crossed twice on foot from Poland into the Czech Republic (left), and into Slovakia by car in 2008. My crossing into Ukraine was back in pre-blog days (2005) and entailed waiting a couple of hours to cross over by road.

Baston makes a one-paragraph mention of Akce Kámen, the Stalin-era Czechoslovak provocation designed to capture and interrogate its citizens trying to flee west. A false border was set up in front of the real one with West Germany; StB agents posing as guides would lead would-be defectors through forests across this false border into the hands of imposters posing as US soldiers to whom they would gladly give up information about the Czechoslovak opposition networks before being arrested. I watched a haunting BBC Screen Two drama about this in 1988 (Border) which made a powerful impression on me.

The book mentions the Austro-Hungarian Transversal Railway ("a pet project of the empire that never paid its way") long sections of which I have walked.

For anyone interested in such matters, this book is compelling, and captures the spirit of those lands divided by arbitrary lines drawn by man. Hills, concludes Baston, make for better borders than rivers. The book asks some basic questions: is one's identity defined by language or place of birth? Citizens of somewhere or anywhere? The book ends with a chapter on "the secret capital of Europe" – Chernivtsi/ Czernowitz/ Cernăuți – on, in Polish, if you are so inclined, Czerniowce. In western Ukraine, close to the border with Romania, the city was in four different countries in the 20th century (Austro-Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine). Nicknamed 'Little Vienna', Chernivtsi epitomises the essence of Europe's borderlines optimally for Baston; he mentions his feelings of "nostalgia by proxy", as he sat in a Chernivtsi square, "as if time had jumbled" – I recognise that exomnesia feeling very well.

Borderlines, Hodder Press, £25

This time last year:
Cancel my subscription to the AI revolution
[reading this shows how quickly AI has improved over 365 days!]

This time three years ago:
Rational vs. magical thought

This time five years ago:
Longevity, telomeres and exercise

This time six years ago:
A day of most profound sadness

This time seven years ago:
Vintage aerial views of the ground

This time nine years ago:
Adventures of a Young Pole in Exile - review

This time ten years ago:
Ealing in bloom

This time 11 years ago:
Keeping warm in January

This time 12 years ago:
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it (health, that is)

This time 13 years ago:
Sten guns in Knightsbridge (well, Śródmieście Południowe, actually)

This time 15 years ago:
To The Catch - a short story (Part II)

This time 16 years ago:
Greed, fear, fight and flight - and the economy

This time 17 years ago:
Is there an economic crisis going on in Poland?

Doris Lessing’s On Cats – review

First book of 2026 (I have made it a New Year's Resolution to read more); a big thanks for Moni for getting it for me for Christmas, and a big thanks to Jacek K. for recommending it. A second cat book for me, after Mornings With My Cat Mii (my review here); that book I read last spring when I was the guardian of one but cat, Wenusia. Like Mii, Wenusia was a foundling kitten. Like Mii, she was "a calico, with black and tan stripes on her head and patches on her back, and a belly that was pure white". But now that I've become the guardian of six cats, a book written by someone whose life was usually shared with multiple cats becomes more apt. 

Doris Lessing's On Cats is not about a single feline life lived together with the author’s, but about her life with many cats over many decades, from the semi-feral cats of her African childhood to the aged, three-legged El Magnifico, whose life brought both joy and discomfort, loss and deep reflection to the author late in life.

On Cats is neither sentimental nor a mere succession of anecdotes; it is a series of sharp and often emotionally painful meditations on the creatures that have haunted, challenged and comforted the author across her life. And as a book written by a winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature, the quality of the prose doesn't disappoint. Her observations are those of an artist, not the empirical notings of a biologist, so don't expect science.

The book brings together three short works; Particularly Cats (1967), Rufus the Survivor (1989) and The Old Age of El Magnifico (2000). As such, there's no single narrative arc; rather, On Cats is a set of essays and recollections that collectively form an elegy for the felines in our lives. This approach mirrors the way how cats subtly inveigle themselves enter our lives: indifferently, with grace and charm, yet with an inevitability that shapes the routine of a cat guardian's daily existence. 

Lessing's many trips to the veterinary surgeon shows she cared deeply about the suffering of her feline charges. She writes often about sterilisation and the ambiguity of doing what's right for human society, whilst regretting the loss of her cats' "wholeness". It's a question I'm weighing up. As someone brought up in the country, she brought with her a rural approach to cat ownership after settling in London in the 1950s; her first two females – 'grey cat' and 'black cat' – would have litter after litter, which she'd give away. Black cat had three litters in a single year. Grey cat would kill the first-born of ever litter. In the end, grey cat was sterilised and resented black cat, who'd continue reproducing.

This unsentimental clarity about the rough edges of cat life – illness, rivalry, birth and death – is what gives this book its power and authenticity. Lessing's prose precisely captures feline gestures and moods. The universality of feline behaviour becomes a lens through which we see ourselves: our attachments, our awkward attempts at communication – both between species and between one another – deeply moved by what cats will accept from us and what they will politely ignore.

On Cats is the antidote to sickly-sweet cat YouTube videos with vocal-fried American accents counting down listicles like 'five ways in which your fur-baby says it loves you'. For any cat guardian wishing to peek into the mystery of the human-feline relationship, the book provides genuine and timeless insight.

This time last year:
The use of English in Europe after Brexit

This time three years ago:
The King's Horse (Short story, Pt I)

This time four years ago:
Hoofing it
(Not horses - Nordic walking!)

This time six years ago:
Signals from space - what's the meaning of 187.5?

This time seven years ago:
Ice – proceed with utmost care

This time nine years ago: 
In which I see a wild boar crossing the frozen ponds

This time ten years ago:
Thinking big, American style. Can Poles do it?

This time 13 years ago:
Inequality in an age of economic slowdown 

This time 14 years ago:
The Palace of Culture: Tear it down?

This time 15 years ago:
Conquering Warsaw's highest snow mounds

This time 17 years ago:
Flashback on way to Zielona Góra

This time 18 years ago:
Ursynów, winter, before sunrise 

Mornings With My Cat Mii – review

 A lovely convalescence present from my sister-in-law (thank you so much Jane!), this translation of the modern Japanese classic about the relationship between human and feline thoroughly resonated with me. Written in 1997, but only translated into English last year, it tells of a kitten found and adopted by Mayumi Inaba, a novelist and poet. Like my Wenusia (below), Mii came into the author's life by chance not choice, and like my Wenusia, Mii was "a calico, with black and tan stripes on her head and patches on her back, and a belly that was pure white."

Although the book focuses on the cat, its setting reflects the changes that Japan was undergoing from the mid-1970s on. Land gets developed. Flats to rent are difficult to find. Traffic roars through once-quiet neighbourhoods. Rusty chain-link fences, ancient shrines, vending machines, blossom and bin-bags. New warehouses block out views over picturesque landscapes. Tenants moving on have to leave their cat behind as the new landlord won't take pets. The cat waits for its owners to return; they don't, but other humans start leaving bowls of cat food out for it.

When the author moved from a house with a garden to a small fifth-floor flat, poor Mii was deprived of the ability to come and go at will and play outdoors. I perceive that Wenusia has an excellent life; she spends several hours a day outside, though never straying too far, always returning for food and a cosy bed. I am reminded of Moni's old cat, Jovis, who spent his entire life in small flats. 

The book brought me new insights into how cats perceive their symbiotic relationship with their human 'owner'; the small signs that a cat will give to the human to say 'I appreciate what you do for me'. 

I love it when, sitting at my desk in my kitchen, there's a sudden commotion outside and Wenusia's face pops up on the window ledge outside. Just like Felusia in Jeziorki, she commands the human within to open the window with a simple facial expression: a momentary opening of the mouth. And when she scrambles up onto the windowsill inside, wanting to be let out – I open the window, she manoeuvres her way out with her articulated back, raising her tail so it doesn't get caught in the window as I close it – without having to look back to check that it's clear. And when I return from a day in town, and Wenusia is waiting for me on the drive, and comes bounding up to greet me.

Mii, like Wenusia, had her boyfriends; local tomcats. Sadly, Mii got pregnant the very first time she came into heat; she had a single stillborn kitten, too big to be delivered. Mii had to have her womb removed by a vet, so she never got to realise herself in maternity.

Although Mii and Mayumi lived together a long time, the last five years of Mii's life were beset with health problems. She finally died, aged 20, of old age. Sadly, Mayumi Inaba died of pancreatic cancer in 2014 at the age of 64.

In all my life, there have been only two translators who were so excellent that to this day I remember their names as I do the authors whose books they translated – William Weaver and Jennifer Croft. Ginny Tapley Takemori joins this select company. The book shines with the artistry of an excellent translator, one who knows where to leave in and explain a word from the source language, one who retains the poetry of the original. It is written in a way that I found easy to read and absorb, and convey so much about the subject and the author's mindset. If there's a cat in your life, this book is for you too.

[I can also recommend the Foresto anti-tick collar that Wenusia is wearing. Since I bought it for her, I've not found a single live tick in Wenusia's fur. Before attaching the collar, I found four of the buggers, plucking them out before they started sucking blood.]

This time three years ago:
The speed of life

This time four years ago:
Does it all come right in the end?

This time five years ago:

Self-discipline and creativity during the lockdown

This time six years ago:

Russia's Far East on road maps

This time eight years ago:
Heavenly Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Why are all the shops shut today? 

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki at its most beautiful

This time 15 years ago:
Useful and useless in my wallet

This time 16 years ago:
In search of the dream klimat - remote viewing made real

This time 17 years ago:
Zakopane to Kraków in 3hrs 45min

This time 18 years ago:
The year's most beautiful day?

Book review: Jan Stepek Part 1: Gulag to Glasgow

If your parent or parents went through the living hell of a Soviet deportation, then this book is something that you should not only read, but you should own. Your descendents need to have it as testimony of the harrowing experience that their gene pool had survived. For this book could have been about my mother and her sister Irena, or about any of the hundreds of thousands of Poles who managed to escape the USSR after their deportation thanks to General Anders and General Sikorski. Many of the mothers and fathers of my Polish friends with whom I grew up in postwar London had survived this hell too, and this book, written in English, spells out exactly what they had endured and survived.

Jan Stepek Part 1: Gulag to Glasgow is the biography of a remarkable man, written by his son Martin. It is the story of human resilience and innate determination in the face of the most barbaric of circumstances. The book's power is drawn from the detailed memories of Jan Stepek and his sisters Zosia and Danka, all of whom – miraculously – made it through their Siberian ordeal to the UK, where they managed to live into their 90s. Their story captures the unspeakable privations – the hunger and the cold and the disease that preyed on starved and frozen bodies. 

Arrested on 10 February 1940 (the same night as my mother's family and 220,000 other Polish men, women and children), they were deported in cattle-trucks to labour camps in the north of Russia and Siberia. Here, in inhuman conditions, they were made to work in forestry, felling trees and turning them into timber and furniture, exactly the same as my mother's family.

After the 'amnesty' of August 1941, Poles were free to leave their camps and make their way across the USSR, journeys of several thousand kilometres, to bases on Russia's borders with Kazakhstan where a newly formed Polish army was being assembled, ahead of a journey across the Caspian Sea to the Middle East and freedom. The journey, undertaken in the winter of 1941-42, took place at a time when the entire Soviet Union transport system was being mobilised to halt the German onslaught as it approached Moscow.

The book begins with a look at the families of Władysław Stepek and his wife Janina, who were born in a partitioned Poland. Władysław, from a modest farming family and Janina, from a wealthy family, married in 1921 and created a new life for themselves as osadnicy in the the eastern parts of the newly re-formed Polish state. As osadnicy – veterans in the struggles for independence – they were given land in exchange for building up new communities and a new Poland. Neither Władysław nor Janina were to survive WW2. Their three children (Jan, born in 1922, Zosia, born in 1925 and Danka in 1927) were all teenagers as their ordeal began, shortly after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. They cheated death several times; death through dysentery, typhoid fever, exposure and exhaustion. Above all, this is a story of extreme endurance and the innate human will to survive.

Jan Stepek, aged 20 by the time he escaped the USSR, could encircle his leg with his fingers so that thumb and forefinger would touch. His sister Danka weighed four stone (25kg) as a 15-year old when she reached the Polish hospital in Pahlevi in Persia (today's Iran).

The hunger, and its effects on the human body, are described in such a way that it clicks with the reader. This is not like going on a diet for a week. It is a gnawing hunger with no end in sight. Husks of wheat were often all that they could find. Everyone – refugees and local populations – were in the same boat.

With the hunger came lice, ulcers, night blindness and gastric ailments. Sex – reproduction – was on no one's mind. Survival was all. People helped out as they could; small acts of kindness from unexpected sources here and there saved lives along the way. And yet thousands perished, their bodies buried by the side of the railway lines, outside tented encampments. So many died when salvation was in sight.

Jan made it to join the Polish navy; serving on the ORP Krakowiak and later the ORP Ślązak. His sisters made it to Palestine, where the Polish authorities had set up schools for Polish teenagers (smaller children were sent to camps in Africa or India administered by the British authorities). Zosia and Danka went to the same school as my mother in Palestine, Szkoła Młodszych Ochotniczek ('Younger Girl- Volunteers' School').

The horrors of life in the Soviet system is powerfully conveyed in this book. The greatest fear of deportees or refugees being transported by rail in locked cattle-trucks was that their train would end up in sidings as the locomotive would be redirected for more pressing war needs, such as moving troops to the front. Miles from the nearest settlement, the human cargo could end up being left there for weeks in winter – until everyone inside froze or starved to death. Jan Stepek recalls their labour camp in northern Russia; at least when they arrived they had barracks waiting for them. These were built by an earlier wave of deportees – from Ukraine – who had also been dumped at the same spot in winter but with no shelter other than tents. He says there was a hill on which a group of Ukrainians were made to sleep the night in tents; overnight they all froze to death; their tents were covered with snow; no one knew until the spring revealed that the snowy hill had been covering a mound of frozen corpses.

Whilst there have been many books published in Polish about the Soviet deportations of 1940 and 1941, books in English are few and far between. One that covers the same ground I reviewed in 2017 (Adventures of a Young Pole in Exile, by Ryszard Staniaszek). Both books begin with a description of the life of osadnicy families, life in Soviet labour camps, escape from the USSR with General Anders and his army, and the family's fate in the UK after WW2.

In the same way as the world must never forget the Holocaust, the world must never forget the barbarities of the USSR; the inhuman treatment of tens of millions on human beings on the orders of a tyrant, and the ideology that created him. It is crucial that the English-speaking world understands the nature of the Soviet system and the Russian mentality, which to this day still has little or no regard for human life, which it will grind down, be it Ukrainian civilians or Russian soldiers.

The book is available on Amazon. I encourage you to buy it.

This time last year:
August sunsets around Chynów

This time two years ago:
"Don't call me Czachówek - my name is Gabryelin"

This time three years ago:
Accounting for Coincidence

This time four years ago:
Działka food

This time five years ago:
Proper summer in Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Poland's trains failing in the heat

This time seven years ago:
"Learn from your mystics is my only advice"

This time eight years ago:
Out where the pines grow wild and tall

This time 11 years ago:
Behold and See (part V) - short story

This time 12 years ago:
Syrenki in Warsaw

This time 13 years ago:
What's the Polish for 'impostor'?

This time 14 years ago:
Running with the storm on the road to Mamrotowo

This time 16 years ago:
St Pancras Station - new gateway to London

This time 17 years ago:
Mountains or sea? North Wales has them both

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

For Moni

Before I start - a very serious spoiler alert. Proceed no further if this book is on your current 'to read' list. This post will spoil it for you more than me saying that the ocean liner sinks at the end of Titanic.

So. An award-winning playwright of Pakistani parentage writes about his life, his parents, the religion and culture into which he was born, Trump's America, wealth, racism.

But is he Telling It Like It Is, with the aim of Truthfulness of a reporter or autobiographer? 

Or is he spinning a compelling story, with complex narrative plot-twists to draw you in? 

Before engaging my critical faculties too much, before deciding whether or not to accept the narrative at face value, I should really know the answer to this key question. I did not; I found that just a few chapters in, I had subconsciously filed the book into the genre of reportage rather than creative fiction.

I have purposefully avoided reading anything about the book while reading the book. I did indeed approach it at face value. So this, then, is the autobiography of an American, born to parents from Pakistan who migrated to the US as brilliant medical graduates under a special visa program in the 1960s to begin a lucrative career in America's well-funded healthcare sector. The author himself went on to have a brilliant career of his own, as a playwright and author. 

The book is essentially about his troubled relationship with his parents - especially his father - and their troubled relationship with America, Islam and Pakistan. He dwells on two cataclysmic turning points in the arc of his family's history - 9/11 and the election of Donald Trump.

Ayad Akhtar is confronted by a society that is racist to the core, materialist, and configured in such a way to ensure the rich continually get richer. The poor, meanwhile, are systemically kept on a treadmill of debt and unfulfilling labour, as they toil to pass ever more wealth to the rich, so they can live in ever greater luxury. The book is strong on family detail, on growing up with a family in Pakistan, frequent visits to the Old Country, contrasts between the two nations. 

As I progressed through the book, and its essential premise is being unfolded, I found doubts creeping into my mind. 

Is this a true story - or is it a work of fiction? Or a blend of both? 

As character after character is introduced, I'm thinking - the publishers of this best-seller must have access to some pretty good lawyers to ensure to protect themselves against lawsuits. Defamation. As we meet Riaz, the Pakistani-American financier - were such a person reading this about himself - he'd be seeking counsel for how to extract millions for the accusations levelled against him in Homeland Elegies (bankrupting local authorities across the US on purpose, ones that had happened to have blocked planning permissions for the building of mosques). Or the heart surgeon who, on operating on patients' hearts, specially scratched lesions inside their aortas which he knew would turn into more lucrative surgical work for him in years to come. And how his employer, a rapacious healthcare company, settled out of court with his victims rather than let the secret out.

I reach the end of the book and finally, burning with curiosity, I check Wikipedia. Now here comes the spoiler: "The book is fiction, though written to resemble a memoir. It includes some autobiographical elements; the protagonist shares the name, background, and career of the author." The doubt that had been building up in me (did he really narrowly avoid sleeping with his half-sister, about whom he didn't know, the result of a long-term affair his father had?)

The crossing over from truth to fiction is unsettling when the author is trying to make profound criticism of America, his homeland. The legitimacy of his depiction of wealth, luxury, greed, debt - an utterly corrupt healthcare system, a banking system designed to keep large corporations wealthy, a legal system that is driven by racism - boils down to the question: fiction or reportage?

Great art belongs to the ages. How will future readers come to terms with this literary form? Will it become commonplace to blend fact and fiction in our post-truth era? Or will the conceit be seen to dilute or spoil the author's searing social message?

I wrote many years ago about another playwright who goes on to pen an autobiography. Janusz Głowacki, the hero of his own picaresque 'autobiography' that (I surmise) also strays deep into fiction. My main criticism of Z głowy was that Głowacki downplays the hard work and effort that goes into writing successful plays - I wrote: "one night [Głowacki] gets very, very drunk with assorted ne'er-do-wells in a dive on the Lower East Side; the next morning he tosses off a play that gets directed by Arthur Penn and stars Christopher Walken. But what about the endless hours of writing, re-drafting, searching for the right bon mot or delicate allusion, forceful punchline or hilarious gag?" Głowacki suggests that his path to literary success was effortless, all inspiration, no perspiration. Akhtar doesn't do this. He describes his writing technique, taught by his English lecturer at university, Maria Moroni (again - was she real or invented?). She tells him that you should keep a dream diary and pencil by your bedside, and return your spine to the position it was in when you had that dream to recall it. Akhtar describes beautifully how, when transcribing dreams, you should start with the most vivid part regardless of chronology, capture as much detail as possible - before scrolling backwards and forwards to other parts of the dream as you remember them. And this is how he captures scenes from memory, from life.

Głowacki pulls the same trick as Akhar in Goodnight Dżerzi - a seemingly straightforward autobiography of a playwright that morphs imperceptibly into fiction - this time a Pole in America, being asked to write a screenplay about a Jewish Pole in America - Jerzy Kosiński. And another Polish writer known for embellishing his reportage with some fanciful tales was Ryszard Kapuściński (about whom here).

It was an extremely worthwhile read for me - on so many levels. The relationship between two countries and two cultures; the relationship between parent and child; the critique of America; the concept of autofiction. One line stands out above all the others: "America is money-worship and racism." My thanks to Moni for suggesting I read it - I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This time two years ago:
Britain for Christmas

This time five years ago:
IT frustrations

This time six years ago:
Wałbrzych's Gold Train - the dream ends

This time eight years ago:
Kitten football

This time nine years ago:
The drainage of Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
The Eurocrisis - what would Jesus do?
[Remember - the EU was about to fall apart.]

This time 11 years ago:
Orders of magnitude

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time 13 years ago:
Better news on the commuting front

This time 14 years ago:
I no longer recognise the land where I was born

Droga donikąd, by Józef Mackiewicz

 An important book for me - the first novel in the Polish language that I read of my own volition (before that it was only set texts from Polish Saturday school in London). I was given a copy of the book in the mid 1980s. It had been printed in exile, in keeping with the author's wishes, for distribution to those who opposed Poland's post-war communist regime, On finishing it, I passed it on to the daughter of an opposition leader. Since moving to Poland, I've been looking for another copy. Now, at last, it is freely available...

Written by Józef Mackiewicz in exile in London in 1955, Droga donikąd ('Road to Nowhere') covers the period between the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in the summer of 1940 and the eve of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Set in Wilno/Vilnius, the novel is semi-autobiographical, and shows the nature of Soviet repression from first hand.

Pre-war Wilno was Poland's fifth-largest city. It was predominantly Polish and Jewish, with a small Lithuanian minority. On 19 September 1939, it fell to the Red Army, being in the Soviet sphere of interest as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov (or more accurately, Hitler-Stalin) Pact. The Red Army ceded the city to Lithuania by the end of October 1939; the Lithuanian state had barely seven months to integrate Vilnius before USSR annexed it along with Latvia and Estonia. 

Droga donikąd begins with the annexation of Lithuania, depicting clearly how a small, ethnically diverse capitalist country is swallowed by the communist system. "Our life today is waiting - waiting in queues, waiting to eat, waiting to be arrested, waiting for the next steps in the implementation of communist society". One by one, freedoms are snuffed out, freedom to speak, freedom to do business, freedom of movement. All is done with a semblance of the people's burning desire for justice and equality. Mass rallies (compulsory attendance). Wild applause for speakers (woe betide anyone reported not clapping and cheering). Red flags, bunting, portraits of Stalin everywhere. And one by one, shops, restaurants and other businesses would be nationalised, goods would disappear from shelves to be replaced by shoddier products with unpredictable supply. 

Smuggling became a way of life, especially across the border between the newly created Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the longer-established Belarussian SSR. Author Józef Mackiewicz, like his protagonist of Droga donikąd, Paweł, kept his head down by quitting his journalist's job and buying a horse and cart - to be less visible to the Soviet authorities, and to make a living by transporting goods across country.

Each successive turn of the screw is shown. People start wearing their shabbiest clothes lest they be identified as bourgeois counterrevolutionary elements. The new Soviet overlords, arriving in Vilnius, were expecting to find a city full of capitalist riches - instead they were surprised to see people as (outwardly) poor and shabby as what they had in other Soviet republics. Moral decisions have to be made; within families there are schisms as a daughter joins the Komsomol while her father tries to cling on to his business. Fighting the new order seems pointless; melting into the faceless crowd the best option for most.

Deportations are being planned. The local NKVD was instructed by Moscow to begin drawing up lists of families that were to be deported. The date is drawn up - days before Operation Barbarossa is due to begin. Like Titanic, we all know what's about to happen, as the clock counts down. The targets are the Polish and Jewish middle classes, the property owners, the intelligentsia. They suspect this was going to happen to them; Paweł, the novel's protagonist, is tipped off and makes a break. 

There is a sub-plot about a religious mystic and seer who foretells a miraculous event that will happen in small village - again, on the very eve of Barbarossa. Crowds of believers flock to the village to see the miracle - but will it happen at noon (Polish time) or noon (the newly-adopted Moscow time)?

Sadly, the book had never been translated into English - it offers such an excellent view of what Soviet takeover looks like; it had a profound impression on me, reading it during those years between the imposition of Martial Law in Poland and the collapse of communism has very much shaped my thinking. A rejection of political ideologies, left or right, as bringing suffering rather than any improvement to the human lot.

This time last year:
Words that pop into the mind, unbidden

This time three years ago:
Hops there for the taking
[Hops mouldy this year - too wet.]

This time four years ago:
Two weeks and two days of travel

This time five years ago:
Final end to a local landmark

This time ten years ago:
Independence Day

This time 11 years:
Out and about in Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 13 years ago:
Puławska by night