One night only: The Crumfel

Moni's school band played their first proper, headlining gig tonight in the school hall. The Crumfel's set consisted of ten songs, of which three were their own material.

I was down the front with the rest of the Camera Dads, all equipped with Nikon still and Sony video cameras. Behind me, the joint was indeed jumping.

One night only: Friday 13th June, 2008.

Automotive miscellany

Cars from the depths of the communist era are rarities in modern Poland. So seeing a 1960s FSO Warszawa 204 filled me with delight - and in such good condition too. Note the yellow 'zabytkowy' licence plate only issued to rare old cars that meet stringent conditions.

The Warszawa 204 was a modernised version of the original FSO Warszawa, a licence-built Soviet GAZ M-20 Pobieda (the forerunner of the M-21 Volga that I used to own in 1980s London). The main change is visible in this rear three-quarter view; the fastback styling of the original has given way to a 'notch-back' and conventional boot.

More common on Poland's roads, though disappearing rapidly, is the FSC Żuk ('beetle') pick-up truck, photographed below in Zamienie on the road between Nowy Podolszyn and Zgorzała. Very much an icon of rural Poland. More than half a million were produced between 1958 and 1998. The Żuk has a most characteristic shape not seen on the roads of western Europe. It was also assembled in Egypt as the Ramses.

And a propos of old cars, our 15 year-old Nissan Micra hit a nice round figure - one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven point one miles (below). Average mileage isn't that high, but for the past six years its barely ever ventured outside Warsaw's city limits. Fuel consumption is still excellent (42 mpg on last tankful), given the car sits in traffic jams much of the time (when it's not bounding up and down over the unasphalted ul. Poloneza). I believe the Nissan Micra K11 will too have iconic status. I do love my one for its character, reliability and willingness.

This time last year:

The weather was stormy (contrast with this year!)
Setting suns, south of Warsaw

Bus blaze on way to town

Eddie and I left home before six this morning, he had to be at the Central Station for a school trip. As we neared Wilanowska, Eddie spotted a huge pillar of dense black smoke in the air. I handed him the camera, he captured the image below:

Approaching, we could see that it was a bus on fire. I parked up a safe distance behind it, and grabbed as many shots as I could.

The scene looked like the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack in Beirut, a communist era uprising or something from a war zone. The heat was intense - even standing at a safe distance. I could hear glass shattering. The billboard behind the bus also caught fire.

Notice the forelorn and rather useless fire extinguisher standing on the empty pavement. The first indication that the driver was OK. Interestingly, according to TVN24 reports, the PKS Piaseczno Ikarus bus was full of passengers - I could not see anyone around. I would have expected them to stand by curiously rather than to run a mile.

What happened to the bystanders? Apparently there were 30 people on the bus - not a sign of them. They must have been in an awful hurry to get to work. Or else illegal immigrants clearing off before the authorities turned up.

Firefighters arrived on the scene rapidly and the fire was out within three minutes of their arrival. Thankfully, the blaze happened when Puławska was still empty. Had the main artery into Warsaw from the south been clogged up with three lanes of stationary traffic - as would have been the case two hours later - the result could have been catastrophic. As it was, no casualties. A massive traffic jam snarled up approaches to Warsaw for several hours. Driving past the spot at 13:30, there was no sign of the conflagration - other than a melted Citylight billboard. Earlier, Moni witnessed the bus being towed away; she says she saw a driver actually at the steering wheel of the burnt-out shell! pożar autobus ul. Puławska WałbrzychskaAnother blazing bus pic on Gazeta Wyborcza's website. Below: a scan of the story, with my picture, on the front page of the Warsaw supplement to Poland's biggest-selling daily newspaper.

Rules for getting news photos into the media:
1) Ignore the 'post it for free' schemes such as Alert24. Yes, you get your photo published, but no, you don't get paid and you hand over all your rights to the image forever more.
2) Work fast. Get a sample, low-res image with an overprinted 'copyright: Your Name' watermark to the picture desks of your target media. If it's good, they'll reply swiftly.
3) If you've got a good pic, haggle. Remember, there's more than one picture editor out there.
4) ALWAYS have your camera with you!
This time last year:
Stormy evening, beautiful light
Giant dandelion clocks (not present this year!)

Recycling for fun and profit

Since May 2007, as a family we've been conscientiously separating household waste. (See this article from last November.) Our savings in terms of money have been significant - instead of paying 64 zlotys a month to have our rubbish removed (two wheelie bins a week at 8 zlots a pop), we're down to two a month - 16 zlotys. Fruit and vegetable waste goes into the garden composter, while glass, plastic and paper are stored separately and driven to Nowy Podolszyn. The recycling bins here, operated by Remondis, are never full, as they often are in Zgorzala. The bins at Jeziorki, mentioned in the November article, have gone, local residents were furious at the mess left by unscrupulous users who treated the site as a general dumping ground for all waste (rubbish was everywhere).

In the six weeks since my last visit to the bins, we got through 134 glass jars and bottles, two 120 litre binbags full of plastics (yogurt cartons and mineral water bottles to the fore) and a 120 litre binbag full of paper and cardboard.

Recycling in itself is not the answer to man's woes; we need to consume more rationally, not be prey to the marketing of the FMCG corporations, consider what we're doing as we spend and be conscious of how it affects the environment and our wallets.

To the Vistula, by bike

Eddie, Moni and I set off by bike to the Vistula. It's just under 15km/ten miles from home, through the Las Kabacki forest. Across the Warsaw-to-Konstancin highway, we reach an interesting hinterland where development is sparse and farmland still prevails. If there's development I would like to see more of, it's sewage treatment plants. Right now, raw sewage is still pumped directly into the river that flows through Poland's capital; no wonder Warsaw has its back turned to the Vistula. Unlike other major European cities, where the riverbanks are lined with cafes, shops, promenades etc., the banks of the Vistula are unkempt and wild. The water is filthy with floating plop-plops.

Above: Bielawa, where the Okęcie-Siekierki coal line rumbles over flat fields on the last leg to the power station.

Right: The railway bridge adjacent to the level crossing. Graffiti on the bridge, now fading, reads: 'Okrzeszyn City, każdy obcy będzie bity' (Okrzeszyn City, every stranger will be beaten).
Symptomatic of backward, introspective attitudes that prevailed across rural Poland, let's hope they are fading, just like the paint that expressed the sentiment.

Above: the floodbank protecting the Vistula's low-lying hinterlands. A good off-road cycle track with views for much of the way out of Warsaw. I wonder how far south it continues? Below: Taken a few days earlier, late evening near Okrzeszyn, a mile away. The dusty road puts me in mind of 1930s America, yet again. Street lighting betrays the presence of suburbia. It's not rained in over two and half weeks.

More development

Taking off from Okecie yesterday morning, I snapped this brand new development of 131 houses, which will be joined by a further 470. The entire 60 hectare site, when developed, will deliver around several hundred cars a day onto the Aleja Krakowska, heading towards Janki 7km away (monstrous jams already!) and into town.

Below: How the site looks today on Google Earth. I wonder how long it will take before the Walendia development appears here.

It appears that the houses here will start at 1.5m zlotys - that's around 350,000 quid. Given that we're 21km (13 miles) from the centre of Warsaw, we're almost talking London money. If you can read Polish, this discussion on Gazeta.pl's real estate forum on the subject of the Walendia estate is very educational.

It's worrying that developments like Walendia are springing up all over outlying municipalities, beyond Warsaw's administrative borders, with no central planning body in place to oversee the growth of the agglomeration.

The current government has plans to create a number of agglomerations to supervise the outward development of Poland's larger cities - this is a move in the right direction. A body administering Warsaw's growth needs to start with good data and forget the oft-used figure of "1.8 million" for the city's population. It's 2.7 million (900,000 residents are not registered or zameldowani). It's a similar story for all the gminy (municipalities) and powiaty (districts) on Warsaw's periphery. The planned Obszar Metropolitalny Warszawy will take in 17 districts/60 municipalities beyond Warsaw's border. This does make sense, but Poland's propensity to grow its administrative sector beyond what's reasonable is a worry.

This time last year:
Poppies in bloom

One immediately knows one's over Poland

Left: An aerial view of Mazowsze taken last week, less than ten minutes after take off from Warsaw Okęcie airport. Click to enlarge, then note:

How flat the landscape is
How narrow the fields are
How villages are strung out along roads, lacking focal points (village green, church, pub etc.)
This is what makes Poland the country it is. Ideal for mobile warfare, from the Mongol hordes to Hitler's panzers. Lack of primogeniture ensured that feudal landowners subdivided their holdings ad infinitum among all their sons, their sons to all their sons, and so on, until we end up with this patchwork of ribbons. Note also that Stalin failed to collectivise Poland's peasant smallholders and merge their lands into rationally-shaped state farms.

Gaze long and hard upon this photo and see in it the very essence of Polishness. This landscape is near Żelazowa Wola, birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin, his childhood inspiration.

I've done some aerial photointerpretation here, locating the photo and added place-names. We're a few kilometers to the east of Łowicz, a better-known centre of Polish folk tradition. Very much Mazovian heartlands (even though today in Łódzkie province).

This time last year:
Goodness! It was raining!
Ul. Nawłocka at night, night buses

I no longer recognise the land where I was born

Back in Warsaw after four days in London, the city of my birth, the city where I spent 36 years before moving to Poland. In Poland now for nearly 11 years, I find visiting London a sadly disorientating experience; returning to Poland gets me in an upbeat mood. I shall attempt to work out why.

The London of my childhood was suburban, courteous, with a high degree of social trust. Ten miles to the east, the Capital of Empire, war-damaged but still exuding a strength and grandeur in its soot-blackened stonework and proud emporia.

There's a nagging perception that many English people nostalgic for their childhood believe that underlying the decline they've lived through are migration and race. I disagree; below is my class photo at Oaklands Primary School from 1968. In this class there are ten children who are either immigrants or children of immigrants, hailing directly or indirectly from Jamaica, East Africa, India, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Lithuania and Poland (myself). That's one a third of my class – and this is 40 years ago.

It's about nostalgia for what one's missing. Childhood in suburban 1960s London was full of certainties long gone in Britain. A job for life, common courtesy, common sense, a high degree of social trust. Returning to London these days, I mourn for what I miss from those days. Many Brits sense that same sense of loss. And this is what makes for a contrast with living in Poland. No one here feels any loss for Poland's totalitarian past. That all-pervasive shabbiness, fear, shortages of basic goods; institutions that fostered social trust torn down and replaced by the Party, people forced to betray neighbours, friends and family.

(Urban) Britain has less optimism for its future than (urban) Poland. Teenage knifings, drugs, endemic obesity, CCTV, political correctness, causes and symptoms of a once-great nation's decline.