Imaging future qualia

It’s just gone ten, but outside it is already 25°C. The kittens are back from playing outside. Kwińcia is asleep on my kitchen table next to my laptop (below). 

Wiktor, Dorian and Memphis are asleep in the cat tower, and Mars is asleep on the windowsill. The sun shines; I feel its power. A fly buzzes around the kitchen.

Kittenhood passes all too quickly. Within a few months, the five kittens will have lost their intrinsic kittenish cuteness and will rapidly be turning into normal adult cats. And sadly, for reasons of feline management, I will have to get the two girls sterilised, as dealing with 12 cats plus another ten kittens this time next year would be beyond my abilities and would stretch the budget.

So this is the last summer during which I can rejoice in the presence of kittens – like, ever. The last summer in which I can stretch out my hand and stroke the innocent softness of kittens as they sleep.

Summer will pass. Right now, the front door is open, the windows are all ajar, the trees are beautifully green and the sky is blue. But πάντα ῥεῖ – panta rhei: everything flows. By December – or, who knows, January? – there will be snow, lots of it, covering bare trees and dead vegetation. But there will also be those blue-sky days, with hard frosts and the stark beauty of winter. There may be fewer sunny days in midwinter, but they will happen.

Can I imagine the forthcoming winter? By then, my five kittens will have become adolescent cats, the same size as last year’s litter, who by winter were already larger than their mother. Both Wenus and Céleste are petite for adult cats. How will the kittens’ faces have changed? Can I imagine that transition?

Autumn will come: shorter days, more grey skies, leaves changing colour and then falling, leaving skeletal trees through which the horizon becomes visible. I cannot yet feel its approach; the late-summer heatwaves are bound to come. But I can imagine the first intimations of autumn, especially those clear mornings: dew-flecked spiders’ webs in the garden, wet shoes, chilly air, golden leaves, apple trees and grapevines full of maturing fruit. All of this, less than six weeks away.

I have this blog, now in its twentieth year, so I can go back in time and see my emotional responses to the changing seasons: but always looking backwards rather than forwards. We can project ourselves into the future on the basis of past experience, but the qualia will never be exactly the same twice. I ask myself whether we can dream into the future. [For me, these are exceedingly rare.]

Not only does the Earth spin on its axis and orbit the Sun, but the entire Solar System proceeds around the Galaxy at about 7.32 billion kilometres a year. The Earth circles the moving Sun somewhat like a point on an obliquely mounted propeller (although the geometry is not quite as neat as this analogy suggests).

In six months, the Solar System will have travelled about 3.66 billion kilometres farther along its roughly 227-million-year orbit around the galactic centre. During the same period, the Earth will have travelled about 470 million kilometres around the Sun — half its annual orbital journey of 940 million kilometres. For every kilometre the Earth travels along its solar orbit, the Sun carries the Solar System nearly eight kilometres along its galactic orbit.

Relative to the Galaxy, the Earth will therefore be about 73.2 billion kilometres farther along its path in ten years. Time travellers returning to the coordinates they occupied ten years earlier would materialise somewhere out in interstellar space rather than back on Earth.

Nothing remains where it was. At the cosmic scale, worlds and stars are ceaselessly in motion; at the quantum scale, position itself is not definite. From the quantum to the cosmic, nothing is ever simply where it once was.

But qualia memories – consciousness taps into something intangible, something for which physics has no formula. Intangible yet instantly familiar. From another time – and a very, very distant place.

This time last year: 
Aesthetics of New Asphalt

This time five years ago:
Samsung Galaxy phone camera vs. Nikon D3500

This time eight years ago:
Karczunkowska viaduct takes shape

This time nine years ago:
My father's return to Warsaw, 2017

This time ten years ago:
My father's first visit to Warsaw in 40 years

This time 11 years ago:
What's worse – unemployment, or a badly-paid job?

This time 12 years ago:
A return to Liverpool

This time 14 years ago:
Too good to last (anyone remember OLT Express airline?)

This time 15 years ago:
Poland's Baltic coast as a holiday destination

This time 17 years ago:
The Warsaw they fought and died for?

This time 19 years ago:
Floods, rainbows and hope

Rolling Rock flashbacks

I remember when I first caught sight of a bottle of Rolling Rock beer, imported from the USA, in a Perivale off-licence. It was probably some time in the early 1990s. This was a powerful exomnesia moment, a sense of nostalgia for something I knew I couldn't have normally remembered from this life.

The label was printed in white paint onto the green bottle; the pony's head, the cross-hatched plinth, above all the green, the exact shade of green, contrasting with the white and the blue. The typeface. Everything. An absolute guaranteed purchase.

But the taste? Did the taste summon immediate 'PAFF!' moment qualia flashbacks? Well, nothing memorable. Nothing as memorable as my first swing of Jever Pilsener, Worthington's White Shield (sadly killed off by the corporate bastards that owned it in 2023 after 194 years) or AleBrowar's King of Hop, for example. And yet, look at it. So familiar. Somehow this summer, I have been getting flashbacks to Rolling Rock beer. Yesterday, three. Is it the green of the forest that I see from my kitchen window at this time of year? Is it the green of the landscape through which I stroll?

Rolling Rock (which features in three of my flashback-dream accounts and short stories) was brewed between 1939 and 2006 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. After that, Anheuser-Busch shifted production to Newark. But before that, in 1987, Canadian brewery, Labatt, bought the Rolling Rock brand from the Sundor Group, which had bought it from the founding family two years earlier. Labatt in turn was swallowed up in several more corporate mergers, each diluting the meaning, the relevance and the uniqueness of what originally made the brand what it was. Labatt introduced Rolling Rock to the UK market, around the time that it rebranded the Hammersmith Odeon rock venue as Labatt's Apollo.

So by the time I first tasted Rolling Rock, the visual branding might have been familiar, but the taste had drifted. Taste is a powerful memory jogger. I remember my first taste of coriander (cilantro), chorizo, pesto, and feeling instant familiarity. But not here. Early postwar Americana was not on the tip of my tongue. Today's Rolling Rock is brewed elsewhere; corporate owners no longer insisting that the bottled beer is brewed in glass tanks.

But how did Rolling Rock once taste? I prompted Google Gemini to come up with a recipe that would conjure up the precise qualia sensation of sipping a Rolling Rock back in the 1940s. The answer was surprising. Mixing Asahi Super Dry and bottled Heineken. Rolling Rock was unusual in that it was brewed not only from malted barley and hops, but also with adjuncts of maize ('corn') and... rice. Bottled Heineken would offer the "light, fruity, tang of dimethyl sulphide".  Served not too cold, either. So... "Mixing Heineken (bottle) with Asahi Super Dry creates a blend that effectively engineers-out the parts of both beers you don't want, while combining the traits needed to mimic mid-century Rolling Rock". 

ChatGPT is more specific: "I would expect the optimal blend to contain considerably more Asahi than Heineken. Heineken supplies some characteristics that Asahi lacks: a fuller malt centre, light fruity fermentation character and a grassy, slightly herbal bitterness. Asahi supplies the leaner body, pale colour, adjunct character and very dry finish. Heineken is an all-malt lager, while the current European-market Asahi Super Dry uses barley malt and maize starch. Try two parts Asahi to one part Heineken. That should soften Asahi’s rather severe, carbonic dryness, introduce a little rounded malt and herbal hop character and remain lighter and less distinctly European-tasting than a 50:50 blend. There is one important limitation. Neither beer provides the maize-and-rice combination of classic Rolling Rock. Asahi contributes maize starch but not enough rice in the current UK/European formulation; Heineken contributes no adjunct grain at all. The mixture might therefore approximate the weight, attenuation and bitterness, but not precisely the old beer’s faint mixture of corn sweetness and rice-derived lightness."

So there we have it! I shall have to try it out; Heineken is universally available in Poland (the corporation owns Grupa Żywiec), and Asahi Super Dry can be sourced in Warsaw if I look hard enough.

I shall let you know if any metaphysical magic takes me back to Kentucky or Ohio of 1950.

This time four years ago:
Sunset mysticism

This time seven years ago:
You've either got or you haven't got style

This time eight years ago:
Total eclipse of the moon, Warsaw

This time ten years ago:
'Others' vs. 'Our others'

This time 11 year:
Reducing inequality in Polish society

This time 13 years ago:
Llanbedrog beach

This time 15 years ago:
The Accursed Soldiers - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Driving impressions of the Toyota Yaris
[Son still driving it to this day!]

This time 18 years ago:
Poland's dry summer

This time 19 years ago:
The UK's wettest summer ever

As I walked out one midsummer's morning

I've used this title before – borrowed from Laurie Lee.

The sun rises at a quarter past four. Most people are still in bed until at least seven thirty. Today, I rose, as I do, early – at quarter past five, having gone to bed shortly after nine yesterday evening. And yet I still missed an hour of daylight!

My recent habit of early starts have one big benefit; they extend the length of summer as I subjectively experience it. The addition of two daylight hours a day every day between the equinoxes is the equivalent of stretching summer out by around one eighth. That sunlight can be converted into boosted levels of melatonin, serotonin and endorphin, which bring about blissful feelings. "Increase the joy in your life by 12% - FREE!"

The early, pre-breakfast walk in the sun need not be long (5,400 paces today, 4,900 yesterday for example) but it is optimal for bringing on that sought-after state of elation. On an empty stomach, the transcendental benefits of extended fasting bring on a gently altered state. Before eight am and it is already hot; my armpits are sweaty. The paths are sandy, the smell of pine-resin is in the air.

The cherry season has begun; I know where the unkept, unfenced, unsprayed orchards are. The cherries are ripening, a few are already ripe for picking. Given that there's no health benefit of eating more than one portion (80g) of a given fruit in any one day, a few handfuls is all I need before turning home for breakfast.

Ripening cherries. Never ask me whose.

Two midsummer garden anecdotes to recount… Yesterday morning, around 11 am, I went out to chuck out some kitchen waste onto the compost heap at the end of the garden. On my way back, I could hear stirrings in the bushes. "Too big for a cat," I thought. I took three paces forward, and saw an adult roe deer crashing through the undergrowth, across the path and into the trees, no more than about ten yards away from me. It was so sudden and over in an instant, there was no chance to whip out the phone to catch it. This is only the second time I've witnessed deer in my garden. 

A deer in a nearby meadow, last week. The same one?

And today, around 10 am, sitting in the kitchen, front door open, I was aware that the cats were uneasy… something was up. Scrapper, Czester, Arcturus, Hipek and Céleste were milling around outside… suddenly there was a loud feline shriek and action – cats running around every which way. Then I caught sight of him, again, it was just a flash – the grey tomcat that had fathered Céleste's kittens. She chased after him, evidently furious with him, up the path to the drive. I left the kitchen and ran out after them. I caught up with Céleste, sitting on the drive. She had seen him off; no sight of him. 

Cause and effect

Some seven or eight years ago, a visitor to my działka left an almost-full packet of cigarettes behind. Since then, these come in handy for recreating holiday qualia memory. This is a rare occurrence; twice a year, but only if the circumstances are right. 

Today, they are exactly right. The sun is shining; it is hot (30°C outside), there's no rush, it's a lazy day. The kitchen smells of fried food (breakfast: smoked salmon, fried bacon-style, with scrambled egg, served on bread fried in olive oil) and coffee. I light a cigarette from the gas stove; no puffing on it! I impale it upon a wire stand, angled upward at 45 degrees, it smoulders away, with a jar-lid underneath to catch the ashes. Eventually, it goes out; the smell, however, lingers. Time, now, to open a bottle of craft lager from the fridge. And PAFF! I am sitting at that brasserie overlooking the beach in Stella-Plage. All that's missing is the sea… Qualia memory, recreated. (I've done this in winter too; lots of snow outside, blue sky, sharp frost, and I'm brought back to an alpine bar, high up in the French Alps.)

A few hours later, I am in the back garden, picking wild strawberries (poziomki). As I get down among the weeds to fish out the tiny fruit, I notice the lingering smell of the cigarette smoke on my shirt. Marvellous! The Perfume of the Past. Instant nostalgia for the klimat of times when most people smoked. 

Incidentally, this year I notice no, like zero, wild strawberries with rodent nibble-marks upon them. Another bonus of cat ownership!

This time nine years ago:
Jeziorki's grey herons
Cygnets up close

This time 11 years ago:
Midsummer's Day in Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Kittens at six weeks

This time 15 years ago:
And the Lord spake unto the tribe of Hipsters

This time 16 years ago:
Exit polls can get it wrong

This time 17 years ago:
In search of good Polish beer
[Situation's much better, thankfully!]

This time 18 years ago:
In the Solstice garden

Kodachrome moods

Visually, the most beautiful time of year? The whiteness of the clouds, the blueness of the sky, the greenness of the land. Bathe in the qualia, wallow; relish. Out with the camera, polarising filter fixed, giving a true representation of what I see through my sunglasses. No tweaking of saturation or vibrance in Photoshop – only a slight tweak of dehazing  and texture sliders to pull out more detail from shadows and highlights. The most important thing with landscape photography – to faithfully capture what I saw and felt at the moment.

Below: approaching the end of my lane. Agriculture abounds. It is dry for the time of year; farmers need to irrigate.

Below: to quote Charles Trenet: "Au ciel d'été confond/Ses blancs moutons/Avec les anges si purs". However, to quote George Michael, "All that's missing is the sea". Somewhere south-east of Jakubowizna.

Below: along asphalt new from Machcin II towards Dąbrowa Duża (left) and Gaj Żelechowski (right)

Below: classic Chynów landscape; verdant vegetation of late May, flawlessly blue sky and the dusty track that leads on to Adamów Rososki and Grabina.

Below: round the corner from home, the road to Grobice. New houses are being built here. But just look at that sky... that dreamy sky...

Back in the old days of film photography, my favourite stock for days like this used to be Kodachrome 25 ASA, ultra-fine grained film, or failing that, the 64 ASA version. The film needed to be just slightly underexposed (by a third or two-thirds of an f/stop) to get the best colour saturation. Once taken, the film was sent to Kodak's labs for processing and returned by mail in the form of 35mm slides, in cardboard mounts. For use in slideshows. Getting a print from the slide was horribly expensive and in 95% of the time, disappointing. Today, you can digitally tweak colour temperature, exposure, saturation – dozens of parameters – in Photoshop until you end up with an emotionally satisfying image that precisely matches your qualia at the moment you took the photo. Back then, you got one chance to get it right.

Left: a Kodachrome, taken in... well, this is intriguing. The photograph was taken in 1939. In New York City. At the World's Fair. The Polish Pavilion. The tower standing outside the pavilion was a synthesis of a mediaeval fortress and modern skyscraper. Found on Wikipedia's page about... Kodachrome!

Experiencing such scenes, I get feelings of anemoia (nostalgia for an era I didn't live through) or exomnesia (memories from outside my time and place). Good. They bring deep joy and a sense of connectedness with the Infinite and Eternal.

This time four years ago:
These are signs, tokens

This time five years ago:

Am I a serious man?

This time six years ago:
Sunset's trip

This time 12 years ago
The importance of the rucksack for the body

This time 15 years ago:
How I almost saved Barack Obama

This time 17 years ago:
Some anniversaries missed

This time 18 years ago:
Twilight in the garden

This time 19 years ago:
Hissing of the summer lawns

Lent 2026: day 34 – qualia, sensitivity and attention

Sunrise is getting earlier and earlier in the run up to next Sunday's time change. I woke up this morning at quarter past five*, fed the cats, then caught the sun rising through the trees of the forest next door. Some thin clouds in the sky, but the red orb shines through branches touched by a light overnight frost. Scrapper and Czester, sitting on the window sill, framed this picture. 

A sense of bliss becomes me. All is well. I give thanks. I give thanks for noticing the sunrise, and for being able to revel in it for a moment. After all, this dawn could have been overcast and dull. Qualia like this are to live for.

Our daily lives are a progress through a constant cloud of potential qualia, some of which come to our attention; most, however, pass by without notice. Unremarkable. What collapses the wave function to trigger a memorable qualia experience? Vivid sensory inputs? Or is it more emotional? Is paying attention the answer? 

If so, I have only really started paying mindful attention to what's around me in recent years – yet my mind is crammed with memories from childhood, youth and earlier adult years. 

What selects for the experiences we note, and those we subconsciously overlook? The warmth of the sun on my face on a bright spring day like today, a subtly changing cloudscape, the buzzing of an early bee around my front door, the crunch of dry twigs underfoot. These experiences are the qualia that form the raw texture of reality.

However, at any given moment, there are far more of them available to experience than we are capable of being aware of. The world does not present itself to us in neatly lined-up row of sensations to sample one after the other. We live in a sensation-rich environment, abundant and random, that at times can feel almost overwhelming. 

What we define as 'our experience' is but a thin selection of all possible experiences that could potentially be experienced. So how do we allocate the finite resource of our awareness? Is it something that requires our active effort (attention)? Or is it something passive (sensitivity)?  Something we are born with to a lesser or greater degree? Is it something, that applying discipline to it, we can intensify? Should we sift through this firehose of sensory inputs looking for anything in particular?

One thing I learnt from my father is the importance of observation; to be observant, to notice, to be aware of detail. Attention can be trained, disciplined, refined. But as with talents, it is based on something that's already present. And that is sensitivity. Great artists have it, it opens their doors to perception.

Left to itself, attention drifts. It is captured by novelty, by movement, by threat, by desire, by commerce. It loops through familiar concerns. It returns, again and again, to whatever has most successfully hooked it in the past. In this sense, much of what we attend to is not chosen consciously at all, but inherited – from biology, from culture, from advertising, from habit.

What we notice, what strikes our inward eye to imprint itself on our long-term memory, accumulates over time to shape our inner life, and indeed to shape who we are. And with death, as consciousness passes on, I feel that the strongest of those qualia memories will resurface at some future time in another biological container.

A short walk before sunset; the air is getting chilly. Birdsong. A rising razor-crescent moon. The cats chasing each other down the drive. Qualia. And during the walk, a pleasant and familiar past-life flashback. Short, not particularly intense, but enough to provide me with continuity and assurance.

* While I mitigate seasonal affective disorder in autumn by ignoring the time change and going to bed at the same time relative to the sun, in spring, a different strategy is called for. In preparation for the spring time change, I start to go to bed one hour earlier relative to sunset, so when the clocks go forward at the end of March, I can wake up at the new hour and be up around sunrise.

Lent 2024: day 34
After death – what's next? (Pt I)

Lent 2023: day 34
Into the Afterlife (Pt II)

Lent 2022: day 34
A search for purpose

Lent 2021: day 34
The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson

Lent 2020; day 34
What goes round, comes around

Lent 2026: day 29 – can reincarnation be proven?

The two great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, accept the concept of reincarnation. The great religions of the West, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, don't, while still accepting life after death in one form or another. [Certain esoteric traditions within or adjacent to the three Abrahamic faiths are more open to reincarnation, but they are far from the doctrinal mainstream.] Secular materialism, or physicalism, likewise rejects reincarnation. 

So to the Western mind the concept is entirely alien, on the one hand, it's not passed down in religious education, on the other it's poo-pooed by rigorous rationalism. Awareness of the transmigration of souls in the West only really kicked off with New Age in the 1960s, a movement focused on the unification of body, mind and spirit.

Today, reincarnation is considered increasingly seriously as a hypothesis in the context of life after death. The blending of Eastern traditions of reincarnation with science, and the philosophy of idealism, which posits that consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, from which space, time, matter and energy are derived (and not the other way around, as science believes).

If any one Western researcher has done more serious work into this subject, it is Ian Stevenson (1918-2007), from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Over his 40 years of work in this field, he authored 14 books and 300 academic papers, based on over 2,500 cases of children who claimed to remember past lives. What made his work notable was his systematic methodology. His research focused on children (typically aged 2–6) who spontaneously spoke about 'previous lives'. 

Prof Stevenson studied cases mainly in countries where reincarnation was a culturally accepted belief;  India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Burma and Thailand. He was looking for statements made by the child relating to a deceased individual that could be verified. In particular, he was looking out for behavioural and physical traits that corresponded with those of the deceased. Prof Stevenson's methodology focused heavily on early documentation, interviews with multiple witnesses, and taking care to minimise the possibility of information leakage between families.

I don't intend to highlight any of the cases that he brought to light (if you are interested, ask your favourite AI for a summary of Ian Stevenson's most persuasive cases). What I do want to share with you is what he claimed, and what he didn't claim. He never claimed to have proven reincarnation. His position was more restrained; the cases he published "may point to a currently unknown mechanism of memory transfer." ChatGPT sums up his work as "anomalous but not definitive, sitting at the boundary between psychiatry, anthropology, and parapsychology".

Stevenson emphasised that the information he collected was suggestive of reincarnation but "was not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief." Yet he believed that he had produced a body of evidence for reincarnation that should at least be taken seriously. Reincarnation, he posited, might represent a third factor, along with genetics and the environment ('nature and nurture'), contributing to the development of certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses.

Now, while believing in reincarnation on the basis of first-hand experience, I feel that Prof Stevenson's approach is flawed. The problem I have with seeking empirical evidence to prove any metaphysical subject lies in the problem of using the scientific method as a tool to validate it in front of an innately sceptical scientific community. If they don't wish to accept it – fine. I just happen to do so, and if I need to validate my spiritual experiences to anyone, it is primarily to myself.

I don't reject Prof Stevenson's work, but consider it incomplete and pursuing the wrong goal. If he proves some unknown mechanism linking a living person with a dead one through memory, then why does it manifest itself so rarely? Are most people – even in cultures that accept reincarnation as reality – unable to reincarnate? Unworthy of reincarnation? Or do the hallmarks or a reincarnated soul manifest themselves in vaguer, more subtle ways than direct, literal, links to a real predeceased person?

I personally do not believe that the spiritual realm wishes itself to be proven empirically by science, with experiments, in a formula. We are not simply meant to know – yet. We should accept the mystery of these anomalies as part of our reality, but unless a case is too strong to overlook, we should not dig through archives in an attempt to prove its literal reality. 

Attempts by scientists (who have to endure taunts of 'pseudoscientist!' from their fellows) to prove the existence of a range of psi phenomena using the scientific method (repeatable experiments, peer-reviewed papers etc) are ultimately doomed to failure, not because the numbers lie, but because no one has the slightest idea of a mechanism, a framework, by which they can happen.

So let's say I find medical records of a 'Mr. Martin' who died in the early hours of the morning in a modern hospital building in America in the mid-late 1950s – then what? Does that prove anything? Does it explain my dream? Validate a lifetime of anomalous qualia memories? Would it silence the sceptics? Of course not. Do I need validation? Personally, no. I know what I experience – however, how it happens is a mystery. And I expect it to remain so. For many lifetimes to come.

More tomorrow.

Lent 2025: day 29
Getting On With It (Pt I)

Lent 2024: day 29
Altruism and consciousness

Lent 2023: day 29
Artificial Intelligence creates a religion

Lent 2022: day 29
Meditations on travel

Lent 2021: day 29
The ups and downs of life

Lent 2020: day 29
Prophetic

Lent 2026: day 28 – a case study in reincarnation

How does reincarnation 'work'? I put the word 'work' in quote marks because it suggests a mechanism, a process. To me, It doesn't feel that way. It's more ethereal. Whilst I have experienced a lifetime of what I call 'past-life flashbacks' and 'past-life dreams', I've long stopped looking for names, dates or precise locations. Such a search is futile, and indeed spurious. "Please, accept the mystery." I'm happy with a vague feeling, a familiar sense of the returning qualia. Dreams, I find, offer greater historical and geographical precision. Even so, pinning down a former biological container for my consciousness somehow does not feel to be the right thing to do. So much room for wishful thinking and other cognitive biases. 

Are we destined never to know names, dates, precise locations? That's what I think. But there are well-documented cases suggesting that it is possible. One of the most compelling cases I've come across of a 'past-life memory' corroborated by historical facts is that of James Leininger, born in 1998.

Starting around the age of two, the boy began having recurring nightmares of a plane crash. From his accounts of the dreams, his parents, Bruce and Andrea, pieced together a story far too detailed for a child of his age to invent. James provided specific information that his parents later verified in military archives; he identified the plane as an F4U Corsair and a ship called the Natoma. Research confirmed an escort carrier named the USS Natoma Bay. James mentioned a friend named 'Jack Larsen'. Bruce Leininger eventually tracked down the real Jack Larsen, who had indeed flown with the Natoma Bay squadron during WWII. James described his plane being hit in the engine by the Japanese, catching fire, and crashing into the sea near Iwo Jima. 

Bruce Leininger identified a pilot as James Huston Jr. from squadron VCS-81 on the USS Natoma Bay. The details align; Huston was the only pilot from that squadron killed during the battle of Iwo Jima. His plane was hit in the engine, caught fire, and crashed into the sea, just as the child had described in his nightmares. As James grew older, he met with James Huston’s surviving sister, Anne. After speaking with the boy and hearing his specific memories of their childhood home and family, she became convinced that James was the reincarnation of her brother.

Sceptics suggest suggestibility (where a child absorbs information from a documentary or book and later forgets the source), but the Leiningers maintained that James had had no exposure to WWII history or flight simulators before the nightmares began. By the age of eight, James’s memories began to fade, (common in these types of cases), and by on reaching his teenage years, he reported that the vivid memories had almost entirely faded, leaving him with only an interest in aviation.

I used ChatGPT to examine the veracity of the details. 

Squadron name was not strictly correct (VCS-81 flew floatplane scouts like the Vought Kingfisher from cruisers). There was, however, a squadron VC-81, which did indeed fly from the carrier USS Natoma Bay. But the big disparity between what James Leininger reported as a two-year-old and historical fact is that VC-81 did not fly F4U Corsairs; instead, the squadron flew FM2 Wildcat fighters.

Below: F4U Corsair (left) compared to FM2 Wildcat (right). Google Gemini Nano Banana 2 images. Note the significant difference in the wings and overall size.

Any naval-aviation historian will immediately tell you that escort carriers like the Natoma Bay were too small for F4U Corsairs to fly from. The Natoma Bay was, however, present at Iwo Jima and its squadron heavily involved in ground-attack missions supporting the US Marines' invasion. 

Asking ChatGPT about losses incurred by VC-81 at Iwo Jima, I got this:

"Confirmed loss: Lt. (jg) James M. Huston, Jr. Aircraft: FM-2 Wildcat. Mission type: Strike on shipping at Chichi Jima. Outcome: Aircraft hit in engine (likely AA fire), crashed into the sea. No wreckage recovered. Huston was the only pilot from Natoma Bay (VC-81) killed during the Iwo Jima operation."

I present this case in detail because it is unusual and represents, in my view, an atypical scenario. Striving to identify a real individual is something I don't personally feel comfortable with; while I have put together a 'past-life narrative' of my own, it was not in childhood, but over decades. The 'past-life' feelings have stayed consistent in terms of flashbacks and what I call my canonical dreams; they have not faded.

Another major difference between what I feel and the Leininger case is the time between lives. I sense an immediate overlap; the flavour America of the mid-1950s being so clear to me, so compelling. Death and rebirth within months, or even an overlap. Yet more than half a century passed between the death of James Huston Jr. and the birth of James Leininger. 

Finally – if James Leininger could experience this – why can't more of us? Why don't we hear of more such cases? It suggest that reincarnation is an extremely rare phenomenon.

So many questions...

More tomorrow!

Lent 2025: day 28
Death, dreams and memories

Lent 2024: day 28
Ego, Consciousness and the Environment

Lent 2023, day 28
Can the future affect our past?

Lent 2023, day 28
Understanding the Infinite and the Eternal

Lent 2021: day 28
Higher life forms, imagined

Lent 2020: day 28
The Secret and the Hidden

Lent 2026: day 27 – life after death

The conventional view held by most people today is that as brain activity ceases on biological death – that's it. Game over, Player One. The afterlife is seen as a historical notion, a religious construct that had been created for the purpose of social control, and as sop to the bereaved. 

Yet the conviction that there's no such thing as a afterlife is a modern thing. No one in Europe in the Middle Ages held that view. On the contrary – mediaeval Europeans would have been haggling with their parish priest over how many years they can shave off their time in Purgatory before being allowed into Heaven. To them, the afterlife was a real as the next harvest.

The sophisticated modern mind scoffs. "How easy it was to brainwash illiterate simpletons!"

But has not the sophisticated modern mind been brainwashed too? Through the seductively rational arguments of logic, science and materialist reductionism?

Reality, I believe, is more nuanced; it is not binary.

How do I see the afterlife then? I see it as being as real as one's childhood. We no longer live in our childhood, but we we retain memories of it. Those memories colour and flavour who we are. Those memories come back to us in flashbacks, some vivid, some less so – qualia memories. Some you can summon. Some are triggered (by smells, by music, etc). Some come to us unbidden. Yet there's no atom in our brains that was there ten years ago, let alone decades ago. Molecules, proteins, cells, restructure, recycle, die, grow – and yet memories persist. The neuronal structures of our brains remain the same, but my analogy is of these being bookcases in a library, and memories being books.

Survival of awareness after biological death hinges on one concept – that of non-local consciousness. In our lives, we have nothing but fleeting glimpses of this phenomenon. Déjà vus, precognitions, dreams, synchronicities, telepathically shared thoughts; these are hard to pin down, and impossible to rationalise satisfactorily within the framework of our prevailing scientific paradigm.

But if you place consciousness at the centre of Cosmic reality, as its fundamental property, everything clicks into place. Consciousness is one thing you can be certain of. You are currently aware of the moment? That cocktail of sensory inputs that creates consciousness leads you to conclude that you are alive. Qualia moments, registered in your memory.

And now – a thought experiment. One by one, close off your sensory inputs. No vision, no sound, no smell or taste, no feeling (your bum on your chair). What happens in your mind? Dreams, apparitions, memories will replace the awareness that stems from inputs, from the five senses, and will do so until the sensory inputs are restored.

I have no clue as to explain in scientific terms where consciousness 'goes' after bodily death, nor where it is 'stored', nor how it is 'transferred' to another location (heaven? A subsequent body?). All I know is the frequent experience of a sense of familiarity; the memories of qualia once experienced elsewhere and elsewhen.

I feel this in the form of 'congruent qualia'. Yes, sensory inputs are required as triggers. The wind blowing into my face as I walk towards a warm sun. Lying on the lawn and gazing up at white clouds dotting a blue summer sky. The sound of waves lapping on a beach. Snowflakes falling as Christmas shoppers bustle between brightly-lit storefronts. [Four qualia, illustrated by ChatGPT] 

Earlier today, I was getting these congruent qualia feelings in my garden as I clear the ground under the apple-trees and prune back dead vegetation. Again, bright sunlight, and that experience of exomnesia. It feels so familiar. From some other time, from some other place.

It is not a strong phenomenon but it is ever-present; it feels real to me, as real as my memories of childhood, familiar and comforting. Childhood lives on in memories; past lives live on in weaker memories, intangible; a fleeting sensation, a melting snowflake. It passes quickly, but if you are sensitive to it, you are left with a pleasant feeling, and a sense that there's more to eternity than just one allotted lifespan.

I have no proof, but I feel that with each successive life, the certainty becomes greater, the detail clearer. 

We want to know, "OK – it's a mystery – but how does this work?" What are the vectors that convey consciousness from body to body? Will we ever fully know? Will we inch closer to an answer? Or are we destined never to know?

One way or another, I am convinced that consciousness is not snuffed out with bodily death.

More tomorrow as the fourth week of Lent comes to an end.

Lent 2025: day 27
End of Time II

Lent 2024: day 27
Personality and Belief

Lent 2023, day 27
Being Positive is more than just being Optimistic

Lent 2022: day 27
God and Nationalism

Lent 2021: day 27
Consciousness in other creatures

Lent 2020: day 27
The Physical and the Metaphysical

Lent 2026: day 11 – revel in joy!

Despite Easter being a moveable feast (it can fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April) Lent usually starts in the cold of winter and ends in glorious spring. This year's Lent began amid an unusually long, cold and snowy winter; last Saturday still saw flurries of fresh snow; over the past week ,the temperature returned into positive figures... and today is glorious. One week from snow on the ground to being able to stroll outside without the need for a coat or even jacket.

This has profound implications for mood. The sun, which could and did shine brightly despite the intense recent frosts, now brings warmth as well as light. Much as I love days when the sun reflects off virgin snow cover, the feeling of warmth on the face for the first time since mid-autumn is wonderful.

This morning, for the first time in two months, I started the car and drove to down to Warka to do some big shopping. (After shopping locally with a rucksack for all that time, the ability to buy bulky or heavy items without worrying about how much I could physically carry home, was welcome.)

My early-morning drive to Warka, through the orchards of south Mazovia, was full of enchantment and joy. Qualia flashbacks came one after the other, some from this life. and one or two feeling like those familiar past-life experience. This is a regular phenomenon – the frequency of exomnesia events peak with the changing of the seasons.

In the garden, there are still patches of snow in shady parts, but I can see butterflies and bees for the first time this year, and hear birdsong, great tits and woodpeckers. The digital thermometer says it's 15.8°C outside in the early afternoon. Meteorological spring starts tomorrow; I feel it in the air. 

Joy. I feel joy.

Joy, as distinct from pleasure or fun. Joys are profound and spiritual; the others superficial and physical.

Should we seek a life filled with material goodies, or live for moments of joy?

For me, it's clearly the latter. Joy outweighs here-today-gone-tomorrow fragments of fun. Memories of joyous qualia will resurface again and again in your consciousness throughout your life. Childhood joys come back, rich and familiar. But what pleasures I can I still recall? 

The repeatability of moments of joy has been on my mind for several years; my way to this is through enhanced sensitivity to joy(s) whatever the source, appreciation – and gratitude.

I know what I need to do now – the sun sets a little before quarter past five this evening; a second walk to catch it is in order. The magic hour, the twilit afterglow. 

Lent 2025: day 11
The will to be well

Lent 2024: Day 11
Spirituality vs. the Scientific Method

Lent 2023: Day 11
Personalities and Disorders

Lent 2022: Day 11
Aliens, Angels and Daemons

Lent 2021: Day 11
The Ego, Consciousness and Spiritual Evolution

Lent 2020: Day 11
Dreams and the Afterlife

Lent 2026: day two – the very essence of your being

I am aware of being aware, therefore I am. Awareness – consciousness – precedes thought. Thought is a cerebral process, thought is the passage of electrons firing through neurons and synapses. Thought is about reason, deduction. But consciousness is primal. It is the very essence of your being. Feeling, experiencing, being alive. 

Here, the notion of qualia needs to be explained. Qualia are the subjective, first-person instances of 'what it's like' to have an experience. The word 'qualia' (from the Latin, of what kind) stands in contrast with that which is countable – quanta.

Example: having just drunk my morning cup of black coffee, it would be possible for a scientist to measure the pH level in my mouth, and to compare the metabolic effect of the caffeine on my organism to the state of my blood pressure and heart rate before I drank the coffee. But all none of this data captures the 'coffeeness' of my experience itself. That complex sensation of coffee aftertaste that I'm experiencing right now is a quale (the singular of qualia). As is the feeling that I just got looking up from my keyboard at the horizon through the snow-covered forest, tand he brightness of the sun shining through the trees.

Qualia are the quintessence of your lived experience. They are sensory in origin; the smell of the now-empty coffee cup; the feeling of stroking the long, silky hair of my cat Céleste; the pungent taste of anchovy; the sound of my laptop's 'new mail' alert; sunlight acting on my retina. Sensory inputs all adding up to how it feels to be you at any given moment. 

Those lived moments are experienced and remembered; they return, familiar moments of recognition, tinge your consciousness with their afterglow, then dissipate in a second or two, like a snowflake melting on your hand. But they give you a sense of continuity; despite not a molecule in your brain having been there even ten years ago, those recollections persist.

The youness of you is formed over time from myriad qualia memories, memories of qualia rather than events, as the recollections of doing things, witnessing things, saying things, all tend to degrade over time, changing with each subsequent retelling, shifting in emphasis, importance and tone. But qualia memories remain constant to you across time. Sharp and resonant.

Qualia imprint themselves on your memory, and those memories of purest qualia experience can return to you, summoned, triggered or unbidden. I've just conjured one up – an old familiar one – the qualia memory of the smell of my first day at primary school – the smell of newly-varnished parquet flooring and Magic Marker pens. A qualia memory as sharp as the moment I originally experienced it. And this prompted a new memory, just as vivid, but one I've not had since leaving primary school; classroom door knobs. Knurled brass with concentric 'ribs' – set high, I was not yet five years old – reach up, twist and push (or pull) to open the heavy door... I can see it, feel it in my small hand... as if it were yesterday. Yet it was over 60 years ago.

Our bodies age, but our conscious experience does not fade over time. The experience of being aware, conscious, is as acute as its ever been. This fact to me offers proof that unlike our bodies, our consciousness is not subject to entropy – the second law of thermodynamics; things fade and decay, but qualia memories (as opposed to memories of events) maintain their precise quality, unsullied by time.

This to me is an intimation of the immortal nature of consciousness, or to use language of the past, the soul; the spirit. It is a consciousness that's fundamental, that pervades everything and everywhere in the Universe; consciousness that is present in you and in me, consciousness that abides – unlike matter that is subject to death and decay.

More tomorrow on how I understand that 'consciousness everywhere' idea.

Lent 2025: Day two
The language of science, the language of spirituality

Lent 2024: Day two
How much spirituality do we need?

Lent 2023: Day two
The Nature of Reality Pt. I

Lent 2022: Day two
Objective/Subjective, Ego and Consciousness.

Lent 2021: Day two  
Your life: a miracle? Or something that just happened?

Lent 2020: Day two
The Physical and the Metaphysical; the Natural and the Supernatural

Qualia compilation 12: moderne living

As a child, we lived in a 1930s end-terraced house that my father (inspired by BBC's Barry Bucknall) modernised in the 1960s. My parents were sociable people and would often visit their friends, the majority of whom also lived in 1930s or Victorian houses. The latter made a different impression on the five-year-old me; they had higher ceilings, ornate carvings, ceramic floor tiles, stained glass and draughty corridors. By the mid-1960s, even the Victorian houses were starting to look different inside, with wall-to-wall carpets, brightly coloured curtains and patterned wallpaper. But the world I was born into was still somewhat drab and austere.

I remember two houses I visited with my parents that stood out and triggered anomalous familiarity. Memories of these two will flash back to me from time to time.

Both were newly built and served as harbingers of a new style of interior space. One was a maisonette in Hanwell, another was a terraced house in Hemel Hempstead New Town. This would have been sometime in the early 1960s; these new homes were quite unlike the fussy cosiness of pre-war or Victorian/Edwardian housing. We drove there in our Morris Minor along a short stretch of the newly opened M1 from Watford, my first ever motorway journey – very exciting, and futuristic.

I can't remember the people we were visiting. It could well have been a colleague of my father from work. I do remember, however, that he was keen to show off his new hi-fi, and that my father was very keen to see it. This was an entirely new concept to me, and when we saw it, at first I thought I was looking at a radiator or some form of domestic heating. Then the man took out a record and played some modern jazz. Whenever I hear Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, I get that vibe; maybe that's what he played. 

The maisonette was also a new thing. The very word 'maisonette' smacked of modernity. On Lower Boston Road, it looked like a two-story semi-detached house from the outside, with large windows, white siding and brick, but you had to climb stairs on the side to get in and it was only on the upstairs. A Polish woman lived there, a friend of my mother's; we visited her during a weekday, so maybe school holidays, most likely before my brother was born. 

I associate the this place with the new house in Hemel Hempstead; both were qualitatively different to the way most of my parents' friends (or indeed we) lived at the time; up-to-the-minute, spacious, clean lines, no clutter.

American style. That's what it was. Those two homes that felt instantly familiar; not from the sets of American black-and-white TV shows I watched (I Love Lucy etc), but a lifestyle that I felt I knew from before. The space age was entering the living room.

Below: I asked both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to illustrate the contrast between styles of homes. ChatGPT produced the result that resonated better with my childhood memories.

This time last year:
Springlike Autumn

This time two years ago:
Encouraging more cycle-rail journeys

This time three years ago:

Time's Telescope

This time four years ago:
Justify the buy: Nikon D5600

This time five years ago:
First frost, 2020

This time seven years ago:
Edinburgh, again and again

This time 11 years ago:
Ahead of the opening of Warsaw's second Metro line

This time 12 years ago:
Keep an eye on Ukraine...

This time 13 years ago:
Płock by day, Płock by night 

This time 15 years ago:
Warning ahead of railway timetable change

This time 18 years ago:
Some thoughts on recycling

Fractals in time and qualia memories

We know about fractals and their property of self-similarity. For 2D or 3D fractals to demonstrate self-similarity, they must move, and motion requires the fourth dimension – time. This suddenly clicked with me on a walk the other day as I looked up at white clouds moving across a blue sky.

If you can nest shapes within shapes within shapes over time, why can't you do that with qualia memories?

Fractals are definable mathematically. Conscious experiences, however, are not. And I absolutely agree with Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose that consciousness is not computable. I arrived at my conclusion not through writing thousands of quadratic equations; Sir Roger's assertion sits right with me. It's what I intuit.

Conjuring smells that conjure memories, memories that spark those memories nested in memories. Fractal patterns of qualia. Memories all the way down. Not memories of events, but memories of states of being. Qualia memories. What it felt like to have been there. No parsing of memories using intellect. Just relishing the pure memory of experiencing being. Memories of wet swimwear on a beach holiday as a child. Memories of lobefins clawing their way up Devonian beaches, seeing the sky from dry land.

I mentioned in my post the day before yesterday the conscious sensation I had, as I recognised as familiar this house in nearby Kozłów. That old feeling, the 'past-life' flashback, or exomnesia moment, the anomalous qualia memory. I ask Google Gemini to turn this photo into a poster in the style of Mid-Century Modern...

Yes! That clicks! Congruence with what I saw and felt. Let's have another go, this time with a photo of my house taken three days ago...

Yes – perfect. I know what brought me here.

The flow.

Sensitivity to those deeper layers of consciousness that grant access to qualia memories, from childhood and before. The memory of a feeling, a sense of having been somewhere – sometime – else, while a child, and feeling it just as strongly now. Connectedness that does not limit my consciousness to my biology.

Gazing at the sky will often act as the trigger. Not a uniformly grey sky on an overcast day, but one with white clouds against a blue sky, with the sun shining. This – in a rural setting – is the most reliable prompt for a flashback for me. These are skies I'd see rarely as a child growing up in West London, nor even on 405-line black-and-white television; they were more often seen by me in books or magazines. And I'd have those moments of recognition. I have been conscious of that before.

This time last year:
A little bit more like autumn

This time four years ago:
Sublime farewell to sunny summer days

This time six years ago:
Warsaw-Wrocław-Warsaw-Kielce-Warsaw

This time 14 years ago:
Moaning about trains again
[Amazing how things have improved on Poland's railways since then!]

This time 15 years ago:
Warsaw streets – Dolna, Polna, Rolna, Smolna, Wolna. Lost?

This time 17 years ago:
Ditches, landscapes, autumn

This time 18 years ago:
Golden autumn in Łazienki park

Qualia compilation 11: the Roads to Henley-upon-Thames

Henley-upon-Thames is another of those special places that resides in my memory, a place much visited in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The magnet for us London Poles was Fawley Court, a stately home designed by Sir Christopher Wren, which was for many years after the war a boys' boarding school run by the Polish Marian Fathers. Just north of the town, Fawley Court lies on the Thames, a beautiful setting. The Divine Mercy College closed in 1986 due to falling numbers of Polish boys born in the UK. In 2011 the Marian Fathers sold the Grade I-listed building for £22 million; much of that money being spent on the basilica in Licheń. This transaction remains controversial to this day, not least to the Polish community in the UK who had contributed so generously over the decades towards the upkeep of this historic building.

I must have visited Fawley Court and Henley-on-Thames scores of times. My earliest recollections were of the Zielone Świątki (Whitsuntide) gathering. My parents would go most years, along with thousands of Poles from across the UK. Coaches would bring them from northern towns and cities, London Poles would typically drive; the school's playing fields would turn into a gigantic car park. Open-air Mass and beer tents, walks along the Thames, for our parents, then in their thirties and forties, a chance to meet old friends. Later, in the Polish scouts we'd visit Fawley Court, usually out of term-time for zimowiska (winter camps) or weekend biwaki (bivouacs), which would involve route marches around the nearby countryside. Youth-group visits followed, and then, with my own car, going out to Henley with friends was no longer such a big deal, and trips there – a long walk followed by cream teas at the Old Rope Walk – happened frequently. And then cycling – load the bikes into cars, drive out to Henley, cycle around the countryside (typically to a nice pub), cycle back to the cars.

The town and its surrounding countryside are absolutely charming, the quintessence of rural England. Whilst I have many memories of my many visits to Henley and district, there's one qualia flashback above all that has stuck with me. It is the road to Henley. In the old days, before the M4 or M40 motorways were opened, the route out of West London would be along the A4 – the Great West Road, which would become the Bath Road; through Slough and Maidenhead, then turn off for the A4130, the Henley Road (again, before the A404 dual carriageway was opened). Through Hurley Bottom, and towards Remenham Hill, the Black Boys Inn on the right. And then – down White Hill, over the bridge and into Henley. Alternatively, one could continue along the Bath Road to Twyford, then turn right into the A321 Wargrave Road, and follow the Thames Valley to White Hill and then turn left onto the Henley Road and the bridge, and into town. 

Below: Google Gemini 2.5 rendered this image of Henley Bridge in the early 1960s.

Whichever of these routes we took, I can recall their charms, and that sense of nearing Henley. Then once across the bridge, the hoppy, malty smell of the old Brakspear brewery, the neat, narrow streets. A different world to the terraced sameness of Hanwell, London W7.

[In more recent times, getting there would be along the M40 out of London to Junction 4, then onto the A404 dual carriageway one junction south to Marlow, then along the A4155 to Henley. Quickest way.]

Several journeys stick in my mind. Two by train; on the way to a zimowisko with the Polish scouts, between Twyford and Henley, before Christmas 1972, it was a moonlit night and the Thames had burst its banks, flooding the meadows on either side of the tracks, the full moon reflecting off the waters. And during the hot summer of 1976, I decided to walk along the (live) railway line from Twyford to Henley. I was crossing the Thames by the railway bridge when I saw in the distance an oncoming train. I could neither get out of the way by running forward or running back, so I scaled the cast-iron parapet and dangled over the side until the train passed. Very, very foolish. Earlier journeys by car with my parents, the road bridge into Henley, Zielone Świątki, and a traffic jam mostly consisting of Poles who had motored across from London. And a red and black double-decker Oxfordshire bus.

Above all, the most often flashed-back qualia memories are of the drive through Hurley and Remenham Hill, past the Black Boys Inn (and its questionable pub sign). Be it on a summer Sunday with my parents or later with friends on a minibus excursion of a winter's evening; the atmosphere of the road to Henley stays with me; I recognise those moments when qualia memories of the journey return vividly to me.

This time six years ago:
One man went to mow

This time seven years ago:
Poland's economy: where next?

This time 11 years ago:
Eat Polish apples, drink Polish cider

This time 13 years ago:
Jewish Kraków

This time 15 years ago:
Dismal graffiti yields to street art, W-wa Żwirki i Wigury

This time 17 years ago:
A dove in the house

This time 18 years ago:
Coming in to land from the east

A walk in the sun

Nice start to the day, but clouds are forming, wind in the south-east; time for an early walk. Well, by early I mean setting off at soon after ten. Something tells me the walk will be a long one.

Below: house nestling in the forest, Grobice. Nice light, and I'm using a new pair of circular polarising filters on my standard zoom and long zoom lens.

Below: ulica Graniczna ('border street'), this being the border between the Grójec poviat on this side of the road and the Piaseczno poviat on the other. The road ahead leads to a tiny settlement called Zalesie, a dozen houses or so.

Below: crossroads. Left for Grobice, straight for Kozłów, left for Staniszewice, and behind me for Grabina and Adamów Rososki. Up ahead, asphalt has been laid on the road into Kozłów, though it does not continue through the entire settlement, fizzling out into a dirt track which disappears into the forest that lies beyond. Several new houses are being built in and around Kozłów.

Below: "Kozłów is literally a dump," I am thinking. On seeing this scene, I get a flashback; I'm getting a flashback to a flashback, in fact two flashbacks to a flashback. One was in South Wales, 1960, the other in the woods behind Ruislip Lido in the early 1960s. In both cases, there was a momentary flash of recognition of another time, another place, which felt like America. I felt it here today too. And again now as I look at it. The road? The sky? The vegetation? The wires in the sky? All clicks.

Below: wayside cross, Kozłów. Note the dates; 1917 and 2017. A reference to the apparitions in Fatima – or something more local?

Below: homeward bound, familiar paths. This is ul. Sosnowa ('pine street'), which leads back to Grobice. It may not look like much of a street, but it is one. In Grobice, I buy a bottle of Muszynianka mineral water. Half an hour later, I'm home, having walked 16,000 paces.

This time four years ago
Accounting for coincidence
[Henry Cow – Piekut]

This time five years ago:
Działka food

This time six years ago:
Proper summer in Warsaw

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

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

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

This time 12 years ago:
Behold and See (part V) - short story

This time 13 years ago:
Syrenki in Warsaw

This time 14 years ago:
What's the Polish for 'impostor'?

This time 15 years ago:
Running with the storm on the road to Mamrotowo

This time 17 years ago:
St Pancras Station - new gateway to London

This time 18 years ago:
Mountains or sea? North Wales has them both