The year's Most Beautiful Day

English naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) is said to have claimed that the 18th of May is the most beautiful day in the calendar, when nature is at its fullest, the greenery at its greenest, life is at its peak.

A walk home from W-wa Dawidy via the Jeziorki ponds certainly confirms this theory. The sixth consecutive day of over 20C warm sunshine (indeed today's high was 25C); this is spring in its glory, the consciousness rejoices and observes.

Yesterday, I walked home the same way, and spotted a nesting coot, incubating her eggs, below. As it happened, those eggs would hatch over night...

Below: the same coot (łyska, bald as a) makes her way proudly from the nest in the reed beds to the open waters, accompanied by four chicks, one of whom is seen with her.

Below: another coot chick, this one in the southern pond, a few days older, a bit more plumage on the head. There are dozens on coot chicks on the ponds right now; only a few will survive. Conscious life, nevertheless.

The swans are nesting too - this is the female, sheltering from the hot sun, incubating her eggs. Any day now Jeziorki's next clutch of cygnets will hatch.

Our newcomers this year - grebes. Below: a pair of great crested grebes (perkoz dwuczuby).

Below: a pair of black-necked grebes (perkoz zausznik). Grebes can adjust their buoyancy with their body feathers, swimming low in the water with just head and neck exposed. At this time of year, they are in their breeding finery. And grebes can dive.

Sadly, the grey herons seem to have been driven out of Jeziorki's ponds; two months ago I got some shots of herons being mobbed by gulls and crows; since then, I've not seen any around here. Nor have I seen any marsh harriers or lapwings around the ponds this year.

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

This time four years ago:
From yellow to white - dandelions go to seed

This time five years ago:
The good topiarist

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

This time nine years ago:
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras

The fossil fuel-powered car is dead.

Last Tuesday I was in Katowice discussing Industry 4.0 with representatives of manufacturers - and indeed factory builders. The premise of 4.0 is that the first industrial revolution was about coal and steam; the second saw the advent of electricity and production lines in factories; the third began introducing robots to replace workers - the fourth is about the seamless integration of physical objects and data, vertically and horizontally across the supply chain. Industry 4.0 will see machine talking to machine, ordering parts from suppliers, signalling down-time by re-routing production to another machine and allowing for mass-customisation from the buyer's device.

Present in Katowice were car-makers, for whom another challenge looms - peak car (which I wrote about three years ago, here, here and here) is now a fact across much of the developed world. Since then, the driverless car is becoming ever closer to reality. The notion of spending a large chunk of your income buying a car which spends 95% of its time not doing what it was built for is increasingly perceived as dumb.

Imagine a future where a driverless car appears in front of your door to drive your children to school; it then gets summoned by a woman whom it drives to work, then it takes a couple of pensioners shopping. The driverless car will be in use day and night, owned by a mobility firm, not by the people driven in it, who need never spend tens of thousands of euros, pounds or dollars to actually own it.

I stopped driving to work eight years ago and have not owned a car for seven years. Living in a big city, a car is not something I actually need. I hire a car whenever I need one (rarely); I hail a ride from a taxi app, a few times a year. Otherwise, I use public transport and walk on average 8km a day.

My children are not interested in car ownership - when I was their age, in my early 20s, I was car-crazy. Car ownership was exciting. Today, it's as exciting as washing-machine ownership. We have passed peak car.

In Katowice, there was a sense that the future would be radically different to the past 100 years when it comes to the motor car.

But just how different?

Think about how the digital revolution has changed photography. 2015 was the first year in which more photos were taken than in every single year before that combined. When I bought my last film camera, a used Leica M6 in 1997, little did I think that just ten years later I'd buy a digital Nikon D80, transforming my photography. Back in 1997, I wanted the best 35mm camera there was, and it was to last me decades. It's sat unused for over a decade as digital progress has rendered film redundant, used today by a handful of enthusiasts who love the ritual of the old medium.

The same will happen with the fossil fuel-powered car, says a new report by Stanford University's Tony Seba. He claims that within eight years, not a single petrol or diesel car, bus or truck will be made or sold anywhere in the world! The end will come as quickly, as it did to film photography.

Or will it? It took seven decades for steam locomotives to be displaced by electric and diesel engines on the railways. Why does Prof Seba believe that the fossil fuel-powered car will disappear by 2025?

The tipping point will come some two-three years from now as electric vehicles' batteries hit that magic spot where range exceeds 200 miles, while the price drops, bringing low-end models to market for $20,000 or less. When that moment comes, it will be an avalanche, says Prof Seba.

At the same time, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon and Uber will have completed trials of self-driving cars, which use lidar (laser rangefinding), GPS and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies coupled with self-teaching algorithms to ensure perfect safety.

These two trends taken together will lead to a mass stranding of petrol and diesel cars - second-hand values will plummet. Oil prices will plummet too - Prof Seba predicts a long-term price of oil around $25. Petrol stations and garages will close. The internal combustion engine, with its 2,000 moving parts, is way too complex to compete.

I guess that classic cars and motorbikes will continue to be sought after; enthusiasts will cherish the legends of automotive history - they will be driven on sunny weekends for the nostalgia, powered by fuel sold at extremely high prices by specialist dealers to wealthy connoisseurs. A bit like the enthusiasts who take snaps on film cameras, finding the occasional outlet that still sells and processes film.

Prof Seba's vision is one I entirely subscribe to - I hope it comes true within that eight-year timeframe. Business, consumers and regulators will need to get ready for it.

Go! And do not come back until you have redeemed yourselves!

This time two years ago:
With Blood and Scars by B.E. Andre - book review

This time three years ago:
We can all take photos like Vivian Maier - can't we?

This time four years ago:
Ethereal and transient

This time five years ago:
Wrocław railway station before the Euro football championships

This time six years ago:
By tram to Boernerowo

This time eight years ago:
Food-Industrial Shop, rural USA or Poland

This time ten years ago:
Twilight time, Jeziorki

Long-term memory, awareness and identity

Deep memory - when memories from the distant past metamorphose into something more than synapses and neurons, taking on a supernatural quality - remains something beyond the ability of science to explain. Spiritual memory indeed.

I'm at my father's. It's May - the month we moved into our house on Cleveland Road back in 1970. My memories of the house, the garden, the nearby park are deep-rooted; not the short-term memories of the things I did and the people I met last week - but memories that are an integral part of who I am. Looking across Cleveland Park up towards Cleveland Road in the afternoon sunshine as a 12 year-old, triggered memories of summer holidays in Eastbourne and on the Isle of Wight... beyond the row of houses, the shimmering sea. Spirit of place. Below: the low evening sun illuminates houses to the east of Cleveland Park with a passing raincloud in the background.

And eating a punnet of blackberries this morning takes me back to childhood trips to Oxshott Common, where the blackberries grow in profusion in the autumn. Sunlight triggers those deep memories; emotions are more profound when rays from the Sun, 93 million miles away, agitate the visual cortex.

Short-term memory is believed to reside in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while long-term memory could be stored by DNA methylation or even by prions. Science just doesn't know, let alone begin to explain how our consciousness functions.

But in the meanwhile, our consciousness abides.

To be aware is to be purposefully observant; to quote Jonathan Wood, "consciousness is about searching." At the heart of awareness lies a sense of purpose and understanding - your knowledge evolves, blossoms, expands, your consciousness takes on a many-layered structure. To be aware - to search, to be curious, put your ego - that most manifest representation of 'you' - in the back seat.

The promotion of the ego, the glorification of gratification promoted by the lifestyle advertising that bombards us from all sides, distracting us from the deep search for meaning of our universe. From our own personal perspective, the entire universe seems to have been put into place with ourselves at its epicentre. If it were not for us to observe it, would it even exist? Can you be sure? Because as individuals, in the grand scheme of things, we are insignificant. The existence of an incalculable number of stars that make up our universe puts into perspective our day-to-day troubles.  We need to set the sliders, to balance those two entirely contradictory positions.

We believe ourselves to be unique, and of course we are. But consequential? What is the source of our uniqueness - spiritual? Evolutionary? Extraterrestrial? All three? Extraterrestrial origins? Where do you think the heavier elements in your body have come from? The atoms of which we are made were originally created by fusion within stars light years from here, billions of years ago... "The stuff of life that knit me/Blew hither: here am I," as A.E. Housman wrote.

He we are. Some of us are aware of this fact, most of us, sadly, not. Who am I? The very essence of my identity reside within the long-term memories that remind me where I'm ultimately from.

This time last year:
Language and politics

This time two years ago:
Trafalgar Square, then and now

This time four years ago:
GM's city car for Europe fails to wow me

This time five years ago:
A biblical sky

This time seven years ago:
The parable of the Iron-Filings Factory

This time ten years ago:
Got to get ourselves back to the Garden

A wee small moment in Jeziorki history

...the day the keep fit kit was installed. By the northern end of ul. Dumki, close to where it joins ul. Kórnicka. The weather is awful. At daybreak the temperature barely exceeded zero degrees, and here we are approaching the middle of May. But let's not despair - summer will arrive, and here, less than 2,000 paces from home will soon be functioning an open-air gym, a good motivator to maintain fitness. So - a cycle of exercises will need to be devised to make the most of this municipal munificence. Worth remembering, though, that this is what we, the citizens of 'Green Ursynów'  voted for in the participatory budget for 2016.

Won't be long till the work's all done, the ploughed-up mess that's the upper end of ul. Dumki is restored to its natural state and local citizens can benefit from exercise.

Today was also the day that GDDKiA announced the winner of the tender to build the first section of the S7 expressway from Węzeł Lotnisko to Grójec (the stretch between where the S79 ends and Lesznowola). Any year now, then, work will start to extend the southern stump of the S79, which currently ends in a sincere field, and drag it down to join up with S7 at Grójec, in three states. The first stage - from the airport junction to Lesznowola will be of extreme interest to this blog, as it cuts through the fields between Jeziorki and Dawidy Bankowe, between Zamienie and Zgorzała, between Nowa Wola and Nowa Iwiczna.

Having followed the construction of the S2 and S79 ('Elka') and following the modernisation of the Warsaw-Radom railway line, the prospect of a new expressway coming this way excites me - new viaducts, new junctions - and eventually the prospect of Europe's trunk road network reaching conveniently close to my front door.

Below: I will remember when this was all fields. And they drove an expressway through them.

En marche!

Meaning 'On the move', or 'I'm on my way'. Delighted that Putin's poodles have been soundly routed by the French electorate, I'm on my way from a working lunch about Industry 4.0 with members in Katowice to a meeting with business owners about how to increase the value of their companies in Tarnobrzeg.

Now getting from Katowice to Tarnobrzeg is not easy. By the shortest route, 233km. Via Kraków and the DK79, 255km.  By train (given that our Katowice event finished at 16:15) the first connection would have taken over TEN HOURS, depositing me in Tarnobrzeg at 05:43 and entailing a four-hour wait in Rzeszów between midnight at four am. NO. WAY.

So the alternative had to be bus. PKP seems to have given up on competing on the busy Katowice-Kraków corridor - there are buses leaving both cities headed for the other one every 15 minutes. And they're not expensive - I paid 14zł for a seat in a modern coach that took 1hr 25mins city centre to city centre. The train between Katowice and Kraków would have taken 2hrs 10mins. Stopping at every single station on the way.

A problem I have had with Polish buses is the poor (compared to trains) accessibility to timetables, the state-owned PKS services tend to have timetables consigned to .pdf files; Google searches for specific routes often end in dead links; it's frustrating. Fortunately, enterprising app writers have come up with some good ones. Marta from our Krakow office was on hand to check the times for me, introducing me to busradar.pl; bus connections between Kraków and Tarnobrzeg turned out to be very good, with Jotka and Trans Hans both offering services that depart hourly and linking the two places, 155km apart, with journey times of around three hours.

The connection at Kraków was excellent - I arrived just six minutes before the Jotka service set ofp for Tarnobrzeg. This was not so much a coach as a busik - a Mercedes-Benz minibus similar to the one I took between Szczecin and Berlin last November. Not only that, but the minibus was equipped with wifi that worked part of the way. So the whole journey, from Katowice to Tarnobrzeg, took 4hrs 10mins. Not at all bad. And the cost? 39zł (£8) for 255km/158 mile journey.

Poland has a dense network of privately run minibus companies; the problem is finding which towns are connected by which companies. If you don't know the name of the local, privately-owned company, it's difficult. Type in the town names and 'bus' and Google is less than helpful, But busradar.pl may well be the answer, opening up new travel opportunities.

Motorways and expressways are helping too; new bypasses are being built and by the end of this year a whole lot of new projects will have got under way. Road safety will need to be addressed; the frustration of 'anywhere in Poland is five hours from anywhere else' (as it used to be in the late 1990s) led to stupid and dangerous driving. For several years - in particular since 2012 - the number of fatal accidents in Poland had been falling. Sadly, in 2016 it ticked up over the 3,000 mark once again. Having said that, only 15 fatalities were in buses.

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki spring pictorial

This time four years ago:
Kitten time

This time five years ago:
Warsaw - Centrum to Jeziorki by train with super-wide lens

This time six years ago:
Loose Lips Sink Ships - part II

This time seven years ago:
Jeziorki in the infra red

This time eight years ago:
Some rain, at last!

Early May, Jeziorki

Out and about on a day when at last the temperature finally got spring-like, with a high of 26C. I took the Coolpix P900, which works best on sunny days, its long lens brings me closer to aircraft and wildlife.  Below: a frog puffs up its vocal sacks. It's the height of the mating season, and the southern end of the ponds are noisy with the croaking. "Have you ever woke up with them bullfrogs on your mind?"

Below: not a common pochard, but another diving bird... anyone know what this is? The male watches as the female dives. Whoever left that plastic bottle in the pond deserves ten lashes and a night in the stocks.

Black-headed gulls are nesting at the northern end of the ponds. If the frogs at the other end are noisy, the gulls are noisier still. I spotted three ornithologists snapping local birdlife today. Good!

Up in the air, planes were taking off to the south over Jeziorki. Below: A Polish Air Force CASA C-295M shortly after takeoff.

Below: Another twin-turboprop aircraft departs from Okęcie - a Air Baltic Bombardier Q400

Below: Air China Airbus A330 sets off for Beijing. Don't worry about birdstrike - the gull appears much closer than it is due to the foreshortening effect of the telephoto lens.

Another wide-body regular at Okęcie, Emirates Boeing 777 climbs away bound for Dubai, below.

Across the tracks, I find that the Ballast Mountain has grown - I was expecting it to shrink as track works continue by Nowa Iwiczna - but no - several truckloads of ballast have been recently deposited here.

Below: I'm in Zamienie, and notice a new bus stop has appeared by the housing estate. No bus numbers posted yet - I'm puzzled as to what bus route will pass this way... Will the 737 be diverted via Zamienie, or will the L39 be extended?

Below: the 'road' from Nowy Podolszyn to Zamienie - surely no one's seriously suggesting taking buses this way? The estate in the photo above is about 500m from here on the left.

The bus loop in Dawidy has been under construction since last autumn - no sign of what will happen here. No mention of this investment anywhere on ZTM's website. Will a new bus route terminate here?

Back home, with a storm brewing. Before long, thunder, lightning, hailstones and a short, sharp downpour hit.

Next week will be busy.

This time last year:
W-wa Okęcie modernisation
[A year later - work's still unfinished]

This time two years ago:
I buy a Nikon Coolpix A

This time three years ago:
More about the Ladder of Authority

This time four years ago:
By bike, south of Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Functionalist architecture in Warsaw

This time seven years ago:
What's the Polish for 'to bully'?

This time eight years ago:
Making plans

This time nine years ago:
The setting sun stirs my soul

This time ten years ago:
Rain ends the drought

The Shoot - lessons learnt

Back in Warsaw to sum up the past few days. On the most basic level - a sense of pride in Poland. Poland works. We flew into Wrocław, hired a car, drove to Wałbrzych along good roads, drove back to Warsaw via Łódź along motorways, the hotels were excellent, the food exemplary. Poland has come a long way from being a drab ex-communist country that I felt obliged to make excuses for in front of foreigners. The whole Polska w ruinie narrative just doesn't play - not even in the towns and villages of Lower Silesia. Wałbrzych's special economic zone, factories strung out along ul. Uczniowska. Below: Uczniowska, July 2007. Today, it's a 4km-long strip of activity. The last ten years has seen improvements in Poland's quality of life that cannot be denied.

The Gold Train story is good for business. In three days' filming in Poland, the production company bought 11 hotel-room nights, eight three-course dinners, 11 two-course lunches, hired a large car, topped up a tank of fuel, spent cash on coffees, mineral waters and snacks. I'd guess that in total, some 20,000 złotys were left in Poland's economy - as a direct result of the Gold Train story. And then there's the multiplier effect. The programme will air on Discovery Science in December; it will be seen globally and repeated regularly just as people are making their holiday plans. Thousands of tourists will be thinking - "if we're doing Europe this summer, let's pop by Wałbrzych and catch some of that Gold Train fever." We'd be looking at tens of millions of złotys being brought into the region this way.

What should Poland do about the legend? Tadeusz Słowikowski's last words to me as we left his house were "Try to persuade the Polish government to spend more resources to find the train." Should it though? Surely, individual hunters, armed with satellite images and old maps, poring over hundreds of documents and interviews online, can come up with hundreds of plausible ideas as to where the train(s) could be. I have one - it has yet to be disproved. It can be disproved easily - and a process of elimination is what's needed. Let a hundred gold train hunters present a hundred well-researched, cogent, logical suggestions - open them up to peer review - and then, with the full blessing of the Polish state, conduct a thorough search of the most promising ones. It may take decades, but in the meanwhile, the legend will linger. "This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Film-making. As I wrote earlier, the impact of technology on the process of recording images over the past thirty years or so is incredible. Film crews are smaller, nimbler, more efficient, able to get stunning shots far cheaper. Instead of canisters of unexposed film, the results of all the work is now digital. At the end of every shooting day, the producer disappears to do [data] wrangling - transferring the raw files from the data cards on the numerous cameras to a hard drive that can be sent back by courier. There is nothing more disastrous that can befall recorded footage than lost or corrupted files.

The upshot of all this technological change is the plethora of TV channels that can be set up on a shoestring. Competition that the founding fathers of CBS, ABC, NBC, ITV etc could not begin to imagine. So to attract the viewers in such numbers as to make advertising to them worthwhile, the content must be strong.

This time three years ago:
Digbeth, Birmingham 5

This time four years ago:
Still months away from the opening of the S2/S79

This time five years ago:
Looking at progress along the S79 (how little has been achieved!)

This time six years ago:
Snow on 3 May

This time seven years ago:
Two Polands

This time eight years ago:
A delightful weekend in the country

This time nine years ago:
The dismantling of the Rampa

This time ten years ago:
Flag day

The Shoot - Day Three

The Gold Train legend is usually linked to the nearby location of the Projekt Riese complex - the massive Nazi construction site, of unknown purpose, which - had it been completed - would have covered over 30 square kilometres under the Sowie Góry (Owl Mountains). According to Hitler's architect Albert Speer, this project was consuming half of the Third Reich's cement at a time when the Red Army was pushing westward and the Allies had just landed at Normandy. It makes sense that a project of such such size would have a railway link - hidden from allied reconnaissance aircraft.

We visit one of several known Projekt Riese sites - Włodarz (Wolfsberg), one of three that are open to the public, and the largest. With 3.2km of tunnels, all excavated by slave labour, Włodarz is a frightening monument to Nazi inhumanity.

Below: one of eight underground guardhouses. It is believed that behind this wall there is a another tunnel. To the left, Krzysztof Szpakowski, who runs Włodarz; he has been exploring the area for many years and says there's still many parts of the complex still waiting to be explored.

Mr Szpakowski points out that the tunnels were built to be eight metres from floor to ceiling; two shafts were dug in parallel, one directly above the other. Then the rock between the two would be blasted out to create one massively high tunnel. For what purpose?

Below: one-third of Włodarz's tunnels is under water. Visitors to Włodarz can move about in boats. The rock is gneiss - particularly hard and difficult to mine. Hardhats are crucial, the ceiling is low here.

Below: looking down seemingly endless corridors, one gets the sense of the horror of working down here, shovelling rock into wagons and pushing them towards the open air. Some 5,000 slave labourers are said to have died on this project, of disease and exhaustion.

The scale of the work astounds at every turn. I've been to Wieliczka, the Llechwedd Slate Caverns, the Queen Luiza coal mine in Zabrze - but this place projects a sinister awesomeness I've not experienced before. Below: making our way back up from the lowest levels.

Below: a map of the known tunnels at Włodarz (source: Wikipedia)

After filming in Włodarz, we returned to Wałbrzych to interview the legendary gold train hunter, Tadeusz Słowikowski (below). Since 1974, when he took early retirement from the coal mine, he had doggedly pulled together strands of the gold train story - all the more difficult in the days before the internet, when maps were top secret. Mr Słowikowski first became aware of the story in a refugee camp in Dresden in 1948, hearing from eyewitnesses from Lower Silesia as to what had been going on in these parts during the war. I ask Mr Słowikowski - "Is there a gold train?" "Not necessarily a gold train, but train - trains - certainly," he replies.

Next up:Wałbrzych to talk to local people about the gold train legend. Most had heard about it many years ago - the story about a train-load of treasure, evacuated from Festung Breslau in the spring of 1945, disappearing somewhere around here was common currency.

Final 'GVs' (general views) of the town of Wałbrzych, to show its position nestling among hills.

I shall return to this part of Poland. It fascinates, draws me in; there is so much still to be discovered around here.

This time two years ago:
45 years under one roof

This time five years ago:
May Day in the heat (it was 31C in Warsaw!)

This time seven years ago:
Bike ride across rural Poland

This time ten years ago:
Mazovian landmark from the air