1929-1939... 2008-2018?

In the run up to Remembrance Sunday last November, I'm with my father at Waitrose in West Ealing. He's approaching an old chap in a wheelchair, wearing an anorak, jumper, white shirt, regimental tie, cloth cap, a couple of medals. My father goes up to buy his poppy, and asks the veteran his age. The man replies "I'll be eighty-nine in January." A moment of realisation - my father realises, and the man realises that my father realises - and I realise that they both realise - that at 89 he was too young to have seen action in World War Two.

"I'm 94," says my father. A certain look of guilt flits across the bemedalled veteran's face. "This medal is for National Service..." he begins to explain. At 89, he would have received his call-up papers on his 18th birthday in January 1947.

It dawns on me that to have seen action as a member of His Majesty's Armed Forces in WW2, you would have to have turned 18 sometime in 1944, done some basic training and been shipped off to the Far East (or maybe arrived in north-west Germany just before the end of hostilities). This hadn't occurred to me before - anyone under the age of 91 would not have been there.

Of course there was Korea, the Malayan Emergency, the Mau-Mau, Suez, but these were far smaller-scale conflicts which didn't affect mainland Britain.

Why am I writing this now?

Political risk consultancy Eurasia Group published its risk assessment for 2018, likening the geopolitical risk that this year has in store for Planet Earth and its inhabitants as being on par with the year 2008 and the Great Recession. I immediately see the parallels. Ten years after the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that it triggered, World War Two begins.

Those ten years, fraught with danger as the world staggered from one global conflict into another, must have had left a great impression on all those who followed the news in the papers, on the radio, in the cinema newsreels. There must have been a sense of impending doom, of knowledge that unspeakable horrors were about to revisit the world. And yet - there's so few people around today who remember that climate of mounting unease. My father was just 16 when the Germans invaded Poland and bombed Warsaw. His memories of the 1930s will be less clear than my memories of the 1970s. Of his parents' generation there is no one left alive, no one who would have followed those news stories in detail, understanding the foreign policy aspects, the budgetary implications of rearmament, appreciating from first-hand experience what the previous global war actually looked like.

The lack of that personal link to those days worries me. In London, I watched several episodes of the masterful documentary series, The World at War (1973-74) with my father. It was amazing to see key figures from the war, some 30 years older, now middle-aged or elderly men, recounting their experiences. Among them were Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz - Adolf Hitler's successor. Listening to their testimonies, I could see how important it is for society to have that direct connection to witnesses of war. Those who forget - or misinterpret - or ignore - history are indeed doomed to repeat it.

Human history sweeps in cycles; the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev observed back in the 1920s a tendency for economies to rise and fall in a long wave (as well as shorter-phase fluctuations). These long waves, he noted - going back to ancient times - tended to be 50-60 years long. A reason? Those in charge when things got bad were no longer around to counsel those who were in charge next time round. Memory, history, fades.

I fear that those who advocate rash policies today, policies that wittingly or not destabilise the economy and society, are insufficiently cautious, less wary than they should be, and may be leading us all down exceedingly dangerous paths. Without that handbrake of people who've lived through previous waves of global conflict, we may be going that way ourselves. I am worried.

This time two years ago:
Track works between W-wa Okęcie and W-wa Dawidy

This time four years ago:
The benefits of extending the human lifespan 

This time seven years ago:
New Year's stocktaking

This time last eight years ago:
A walk in the wild winter woods

This time nine years ago:
Now that's what I call winter vol. 12

This time ten years ago:
When the day starts getting longer

Fighting laziness should be everyone's New Year's resolution!

New Year's Eve, morning. I'm off to check the mole situation in the garden. They're back - seven molehills counted on my return from London. Time to deal with them...

I'm looking for my slip-on gardening shoes. Can't find them. I spend three minutes looking around the garage - then give up. Instead, I put on my lace-up gardening shoes.

And then it occurs to me - I wasted three minutes because I was trying to avoid thirty seconds of work lacing up this pair, that was staring me in the face at the outset.

Inside my brain, the following subconscious train of thought was occurring [sound effect of voice echoing as though a muffled loud hailer] ... "The act of lacing up these shoes will take time and effort. Crouch down - lace up one shoe, stand up, crouch down on the other leg, lace up the other shoe, stand up - it requires, as Eddie so often puts it, the 'F'-word - effort. So much easier to walk into the garage and find those old loafers than it is to do all that crouching and knot-tying..."

I go into the garage - it's a mess - the attic remont didn't get finished before Xmas and the builders' stuff is still there, the loafers must me here among all these tools and bags of rubbish and planks of wood and dismantled radiators... Looking hither and yon I get distracted. "Ah! I've been looking for this!" Or "What's this still lagging doing here - they should have dumped this on the skip before it went" and so on...

Really, what I needed was to have done that crouching, laced up those lace-up gardening shoes, and gone outside in them to face the molehills. Two and half utterly wasted minutes - and why? Because I was subconsciously trying to work around a little bit of effort.

New Year and a time to resolve to improve. It's a good time to do this, not so much cutting things out as working out new solutions to old bad habits, in particular to avoid wasting time, to maximise the effectiveness of one's actions. It's a good time to revisit four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix which I guess most of my readers will know, but which all too often we forget about in our day-to-day lives...

The Eisenhower Matrix
URGENT AND IMPORTANT	URGENT BUT NOT IMPORTANT
NOT URGENT, YET STILL IMPORTANT	NEITHER URGENT NOR IMPORTANT

How often do we spend our lives wasting time on things we subconsciously know to be neither urgent nor important, as we set aside things that are urgent and important... because... because...

Well, why? Fear? Fear of doing things we're not comfortable with - or outright laziness? Are the two connected? The mother and father of Procrastination? What do you think?

Something to work on this year. Something to work on every year. Life should be one long process of learning and improvement, something one should never give up on. Consciously, continuously learning, reaching conclusions, putting them into action, checking to see how you're getting on, then moving on up again.

This time last year:
A Year of Round Anniversaries

This time two years ago:
Walking on frozen water

This time three years ago:
Fireworks herald 2015 in Jeziorki

This time four years ago
Jeziorki welcomes 2014

This time five years ago:
LOT's second Dreamliner over Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
New Year's coal train 

This time nine years ago:
Welcome to 2009!

This time ten years ago:
Happy 2008!

Another year in numbers

A good year in terms of health and fitness, all logged for comparison with past years. Walking was good - with a million paces achieved in each quarter, and the four-million pace year cracked for the first time. Walking is good for you!

Less alcohol consumed than for many, many years - I started to keep count in 2014, and each year I've been supping back fewer units and having more alcohol-free days. The 21 units a week was the old NHS guideline (down from 28 units for men); now the guideline is 14 - a tough target but an ambition for years ahead! December, however, remains the least restrained month, with 36 units downed (compared to 56 units in December 2014!). This year, every other day was alcohol free, with two consecutive days off each week as recommended by Public Health England (and 46 days of total abstinence during Lent, as usual).

Measurable and manageable
	2014	2015	2016	2017
Paces per day walked (average across whole year)	9,800	10,700	10,600	11,000
Alcohol consumed (units per week)	33.4	28.0	25.0	20.8
Alcohol-free days over course of year	94	123	155	186
Days without any physical training	234	266	148	83
Portions of fresh fruit & veg per day	N/A	4.3	5.0	5.2

A new metric appears this year - number of days of the year during which I did no physical training at all. This means no sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups or weights exercises. The number is successively declining, as I get more self-disciplined. A big thanks once again to Michal Borzyskowski for suggesting my weights routine (now I'm moving up from 1kg to 1.5kg for the external rotations and from 2kg to 2.5kg for the internal rotations and lateral lifts. 15 repetitions of each.

On to dietary matters - the gurus are now telling us to aim for ten portions of fresh fruit and veg with the emphasis more on the veg than the fruit. All well and good, but preparation time is key - on a day off work like today, I managed eight portions, harder when you're on the go all the time. Still, the trend is good, moving up to 5.2 portions. Expect much more next year!

New Year's resolutions must be sustainable if they are to make sense. In 2014, I kicked off enthusiastically with the exercises, then tailed off early. In 2017, I plugged away for longer, setting myself a clear goal for 2018 and beyond.

But our goals must be more than physical, more than just due care for our shell of foam. Our primary goal must be to deepen our understanding of our sentient existence upon this planet - on a solar system within a galaxy of 100-400 billion stars; one of 200 billion-2 trillion galaxies in our Universe.

To further our understanding, we should pursue two strands of thinking - the scientific; drawing on empirical observations, repeatable experiments and peer review - and the artistic; intuitive, emotive, based on sensations and feelings. The two strands should be interwoven, bound tightly together as one. The aim - to leave those who come after us a better frame of reference from which they can continue to explore, and to move along that infinite continuum from Zero to One. From the bestial to the angelic. And this I wish humanity for 2018.

This time last year:
2016: A year in numbers

This time two years ago:
2015 - a year in numbers

This time three years ago:
Economic forecasts for 2014 - and 2015?

This time four years ago:
Economic predictions for 2014

This time five years ago:
Economic predictions for 2013

This time six years ago:
Economic predictions for 2012

This time seven years ago:
Classic cars, West Ealing

This time eight years ago:
Jeziorki 2009, another view

This time nine years ago:
Jeziorki 2008, another view

This time ten years ago:
Final thoughts for 2007

Eric Ravilious

To my brother Marek - the greatest gift one can give is inspiration...

A cracking Christmas present from Marek - two books of prints by British illustrator Eric Ravilious (A Travelling Artist and A Country Life). Though I'd never heard of the artist, the images, the style, immediately resonated with me, a deep association with the England of my childhood. Despite the fact that he died in 1942 (plane crash off Iceland, one of three official British war artists to die during WW2), Ravilious's style was extremely influential, spawning many imitators.

His engravings could be found in London Transport advertising materials (such as the pre-war Country Walks series) and on the cover of Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack since 1938. The Festival of Britain graphic design aesthetic drew deeply on Ravilious' legacy. But then Ravilious himself studied under Paul Nash, whose influence is clearly visible in Ravilious's work. I can also see similarities with the works of another war artist, Edward Ardizzone, who's illustrated books I'd read as a child.

Perusing the prints, many of which are landscapes, there is a clear bias towards my own visual preferences, rolling roads over folding hills, parallel lines converging in the distance, empty vistas, few people, the light on the land from the moody English skies captured. Ravilious lived for a while on the banks of the Thames at Hammersmith, in a house marked with a blue plaque on the corner of Upper Mall and Weltje Road.  And the rural Sussex and Wiltshire that inspired Ravilious once beckoned me out for many a bike ride when I lived in London.

Below are a few of the images that have struck me with the clarity of their emotional appeal. Having stood where he stood, and felt what he felt, the artist was able to recreate that same sense in another mind at another time in another place. And that is genius.

Below: Caravans, 1936

Below: Chalk Paths, 1935

Below: Train Going over a Bridge at Night, 1935

Below: Wiltshire Landscape, 1937

Below - Sussex Landscape, 1931

Do these images click with you as they click with me?

Thank you Marek for these inspiring books!

This time two years ago:
Dark thoughts at 2015 comes to an end

This time three years ago:
Shots from the sky

This time four years ago:
One-millionth of a zloty 

This time six years ago:
Random year-end thoughts

This time seven years ago:
Beery litter louts

This time eight years ago:
Miserable grey London

This time nine years ago:
Parrots in Ealing

This time ten years ago:
Xmas lites, Jeziorki

Rural Derbyshire, December sunlight

It's that time of year again, and between a soggy Christmas Day and a rather dismal Wednesday, Boxing Day (drugi dzień świąt) was marvellous, weather-wise. At my brother's in Derbyshire, time to walk off the carbohydrates and booze with two walks each of over 8,000 paces. First was on my own, in brilliant sunshine, the second accompanied by mes enfants and their Cousin Hoavis.

Walk One - from Duffield up Hob Hill then down towards the Ecclesbourne Valley and back along the railway line (no trains running).

Walk two - across the Chevin, cutting across the Hazelwood Road, then once more back to Duffield along the tracks.

England at its fineft.

This time three years ago:
Derbyshire in the snow

This time four years ago:
Is Britain over-golfed?

This time six years:
Everybody's out on the road today

This time seven years ago:
50% off and nothing to pay till June 2016

Last shots from Ballast Mountain

All good things must come to an end, and my little Ballast Mountain is coming down, as was inevitable... but for a while, I could stand six metres above the pancake-flat Mazovian plain and get a better view. A place for train-spotting, plane-spotting and quiet contemplation in between (the Relevance of Matter), for a enjoying a top-notch bottle of IPA.

So then - it may be (or maybe not) that I can scale the heights once more, ascending the north slope, or the more challenging south face, but in case I don't, some shots of the Ballast Mountain as it disappears. Below: all looks as it did looking north-east. The new signalling now works, the level crossing on Baletowa is functioning. Note the orange sensors between the tracks.

Below: looking north-west, you can see that just a ridge is left, grassy on one side, scooped back ballast on the other. In the distance Dawidy Bankowe.

Below: looking south-east, same story, just a narrow ridge remains. Houses on ul. Trombity in view.

Below: Google Earth imagery from the summer of 2016; I've marked in yellow the crescent-shaped remains of the full mountain, the original size is marked in red. It was once large enough to ride a motorbike up onto.

Now, bearing in mind that PKP owns the land, there's no rush to do anything with this - it's not like PLK leased the land from a private landowner for the duration of the modernisation works. [See City of Warsaw's official map, below, that shows land ownership - it's visible that the ballast mountain was put up on a piece of land that sticks out from but is continuous to the tracks. Click to enlarge.]

Bonus shot, below. There is a rule in railway photography that the entire train should be in frame, from the loco right through to the rear carriage or wagon - this means typically a front three-quarters view. Rules are there to be broken - but only consciously. This shot of an ET22 electric loco hauling empty coal wagons back to Bogdanka colliery in Lubelskie was taken from ul. Baletowa.

Unsurprising update, 30.12.2017 - it's still here. A snap of two engines, running light towards Konstancin-Jeziorna, taken from the ballast mountain.

This time two years ago:
Hybrid driving

This time four years ago:
Convenience vs. Privacy

This time five years ago:
The messy joys of pomegranate eating

This time seven years ago:
Yuletide break

This time eight years ago:
Washing the snow away (temperature rises by 14C in 12 hours)

What did YOU do in the First World Cyber-War?

It's happening - and let's pray that this time the only fighting happens online and not in our physical world. The global battle of ideas is being played out for the first time in human history on hundreds of millions of home computers around the world. No longer battlefields with bullets and shrapnel flying, the fight is now to win hearts and minds without the mass slaughter of global war. The existence of the nuclear bomb has brought grudging peace between the superpowers - the doctrine of mutual assured destruction ensures that while small-scale proxy wars are still fought, Russia and the West are unlikely to go for full-out armed conflict.

Instead, Russia is taking on the West in a different way. It is seeking to fracture social bonds, dissolve social trust, besmirch our institutions using not lethal weapons but using the internet. To create dozens of civil cold wars in countries around the world.

The social media has become a conduit for making ordinary people, with average levels of education - doubt everything they're told. Why? Because if the default position is "they're lying to us, aren't they?" there will be less outrage about Russia's aggression in Ukraine and the Middle East. "Who knows who's right? Maybe they're all lying? We can't trust anyone these days..."

Bombard the West then, not with bombs, but with ideas. Not one simple set of ideas, like in the ideological days of the USSR, when the Soviet Union projected its world view through Marxist-Leninist filters. Today, all sorts of weird and wacky ideas, of far-right, far-left, far-fetched conspiracy theories - anti-vax, climate-change denial - anything with a bit of traction that the credulous can buy into.

It's not about good ideas - it's about the weight and volume of argument. Just because your argument is better thought-through; just because you understand the consequences of what's at stake and can articulate it, doesn't mean that you will win.

They will shout you down by amplifying the voices of the cranks, whose letters in green ink, in upper case, underlined twice, would go no further than the editor's spike in pre-internet days. Today, every crank has a global audience of ten, maybe a hundred people - link them together, foment fake outrage and you can create seismic shifts in social opinion.

Buoyed up by the feeling of being in a crowd, egged on by the Kremlin's troll army, the dissenters get increasingly aggressive towards their perceived enemies.

And here we have the liberal's conundrum - the liberal's enemy can stoop to verbal aggression to which the liberal cannot respond with counter-aggression - only with better arguments. Liberals should not allow themselves to be provoked.

We end up in our bubbles, rarely straying over into the other side. When we do so, it's because we've been outraged (or they've been outraged), and within a few tweets / comments it deteriorates into a slanging match, as our arguments fail to sway the other side. People are banned /unfriended, and it's all over, but the online conflict spills over into the real world as levels of social trust fall.

It's worth looking at 20th Century civil wars fought over ideology - in Russia and in Spain - how the venom turned human beings into murderous brutes - an enemy with the wrong ideology is dehumanised and their life without value. The aftermath of both wars was as bloody as the fighting, the victors spared not the losers. How will this play out in our cyber war?

Persuasion by argument works when you are dealing with a live human being (not an automated bot) who is able to accept logic and cause-and-effect. When your logical response is met with a stream of vitriolic abuse - time to move on.

It's tiring. In last week's Polityka tthere was a piece which suggests that in Poland, this November alone, 30,000 fake accounts were set up on Twitter. Ready for use in next year's local elections? By whom? Party 'A', Party 'B' - or entities directed from abroad?

Should we get involved in the debates? Should we try to persuade others to appreciate why our destiny as a species, our common journey away from barbarism, towards civilisation, away from the bestial towards the angelic is currently at risk? More at risk than at any time since the Cold War?

Or should we just Let It Be? Walk away from it, not caring as to the outcome?

What will you tell your children, your grandchildren decades from today - that you remember a time when The Big Man didn't rule over you, but when citizens, societies decided for themselves what was good - things were better then...

Did you take on the liars, the pedlars of fake news, the trolls, the haters, those that aim to divide and rule our Western democratic world?

Why didn't you do more to hang on to what you had then?

This time last year:
Solstice sunset, Gogolińska

This time six years ago
Extreme fixie

This time eight years ago:
Poland's worst railway station
(and it's no better two years on. Just two years shabbier.)

This time nine years ago:
Last Christmas before the Recession?

Jeziorki swans and bonus shots

The shortest day. Although the sunset is now getting later, so is sunrise, which will won't start appearing over the horizon any earlier until 3 January. Not much snow compared to Decembers past, and the ice is encroaching the ponds. Below: the swan family, the five surviving cygnets and their parents; soon they'll be having to fly away to find ice-free water.

Hold on - who's this paddling around the middle pond (below)? There were five cygnets with their folks in the southernmost pond - so is this the missing sibling - or has this cygnet flown in from somewhere else, where the water's already frozen?

Below: the photo I'd wished I'd taken but didn't. When I left for London earlier this month, I lent my neighbour Tomek my Nikon  CoolPix P900, and he captured this marvellous picture of a parent swan giving one of its cygnets flying lessons. Perfect composition, focus and exposure.

The new gated level crossings at Nowa Iwiczna and W-wa Dawidy (below) were activated while I was in London last week. Interesting little barrier for pedestrians mounted (to left of frame) for passengers on the 'up' platform. Light dusting of snow, -1C, Tuesday evening. Incidentally, picking up on Ian Wilcock's comment earlier about the premature lowering of the barriers - I timed this, and it was exactly three minutes between the barriers going down and my train town reaching the level crossing. About two minutes too long!

Below: be shocked, Warsaw, be shocked. Monday morning, 18 December, and the PM2.5 particulate concentration is five times higher than the maximum allowable level, while PM10 particulates were three times higher. The result - yellow smog sitting on top of us, the top of Palace of Culture just about clear of it.

Below: final bonus shot - flying in to Warsaw through the fog (smog not too bad this morning), Theresa May and half her government on the RAF A330 Voyager.

This time two years ago:
A conspiracy to celebrate

This three years ago:
The Mythos and the Logos in Russia

This time four years ago:
Going mobile - I get a smartofon

This time five years ago:
The end was meant to end today (remember?)

This time six years ago:
First snow - but proper snow?

The time seven years ago: 
Dense, wet, rush hour snow

This time eight years ago:
Evening photography, Powiśle

This time nine years ago:
The shortest day of the year

This time ten years ago:
Bye bye borders - Poland joins Schengen