Double milestone

Today, 22 July 2012, marks the 15th anniversary of my permanent move to Poland. On this day in 1997, I flew into Warsaw Okęcie airport, made my way to ul. Gajdy in Pyry, where we were renting a house. I moved into it entirely empty - nothing here but a mattress, the suitcase with which I arrived, and about three million mosquitos, all intent on draining me of my blood. By the time the rest of the family caught up with me on 20 August, there were well over 200 squashed mozzies splattered on the walls and ceilings of my bedroom, the repainting of which cost 200 zlotys. I recall the smell of the freshly varnished floors and, cycling to work, the smell of węgierki - small plums, and mirabelki - small apricots on the roadside trees.

I'd worked in Poland on short-term consulting assignments before, but being here permanently still felt like an extended holiday, full of novelty and charm. As work became more stressful, this charm faded (the usual stages of expat emotions) but at the end of the day, I'm much better off in Poland than I would have been had I stayed in the UK, happier, and with a sense of satisfaction at having seen a country pulling itself up from the shambles of communism towards becoming a prosperous democracy.

This also happens to be my 1,500th blog post, another reason to be cheerful!

More from Penrhos to follow.

Back at Penrhos

Although Eddie was here last summer, this is my first return to Penrhos since 2007, indeed this is my now my 15th visit to this charmed place ('charmed' as long as the weather holds). A former RAF base, this has been a Polish resettlement camp after WW2, then it became an old folks' home. There are many barracks surviving from the war (indeed Eddie and I are staying in one, No. 42B).

Over the hills and far away - the familiar stroll across to Rhyd-y-clafdy yields lovely views of an evening. Below: looking north-west, hilly landscape of the Llyn Peninsula. Hay baled in huge plastic bags rather spoils the aesthetics of the scene (but no doubt is more convenient for the farmer).

Below: looking east from the same spot - on the horizon, Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa in Welsh), the highest mountain in Wales. Click to enlarge - you will be able to see the top station of the mountain railway just below the peak.

Back to Penrhos after a filling supper at the Ty Hwnt i'r Afon in Rhyd-y-Clafdy. Eddie and I visit the old munitions store, set back from the main base. It is surprising that this structure has not been demolished or converted into something useful.

As long as the weather holds, we'll have a great time in Penrhos.

Off to Wales

Eddie and I are setting off from my parents' house in West Ealing, headed for Penrhos on the Llyn Peninsula. It's our first visit there for five years (click here to see posts from our last holiday here in 2007).

The weather will remain iffy, so we're not expecting glorious sunshine; we'll be happy if it doesn't rain too much. We drive up in a hired Hyundai i10, a car smaller than the Yaris, it should be more economical on the fuel. In Wales we'll be meeting up with my brother and his family.

I don't know what internet access will look like (last time I had to pop into the public library in Pwllheli to get on line), so no guarantee of fresh posts. Back in London on Saturday 28 August.

UPDATE: Saturday evening, we've reached Penrhos, the BT Fon wifi coverage is better than in West Ealing, the sun is shining. The Hyundai i10 has proved a feisty little mover, nippier than the Yaris - and thrifty too - the quarter tank that came with it in driving off from EasyRent lasted all the way from Luton Airport via West Ealing to Telford on the M54 - about 175 miles.

This time two years ago:
Farewell to Dobra

Royal Parks in the rain

It's Thursday morning in London and the weather continues wet and dull. Eddie and I zoom into town from Ealing on the train to Paddington (a mere 10 minutes), then stroll through elegant streets and mews to reach Kensington Gardens. We intend to walk through four of London's Royal Parks - Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park,  Green Park and St James's Park, passing Buckingham Palace to emerge at Trafalgar Square. Thence up to Piccadilly Circus, up Regent's Street and finally to Oxford Circus, and back to Ealing by tube.

Below: Eddie's umbrella comes in handy more than once as frequent heavy showers rain down on us along our way. Here we are in Hyde Park, the largest of the four Royal Parks on our route, at 142 hectares, almost twice the size of Warsaw's Łazienki Park (which I must say is more splendid in its topography and architecture).

We find that much of the park is closed off for the Olympics, which open next weekend. Eddie and I are forced to take numerous detours from our intended route. We make our way round the southern perimeter of the Serpentine, the snake-shaped pond that divides Hyde Park in two. The picture below, taken from a vantage point above the Serpentine, gives no clue as to the fact that we are standing in the middle of a huge city. Hyde Park's size and layout gives it rural charm.

Below: a royal swan, at its feet a cygnet. There's an enormous amount of bird life in Hyde Park - missing, though, are the peacocks that grace Łazienki Park. Clouds presage another impending shower. In the distance you can see the spectator facilities for the swimming parts of the women's and men's triathlon events that will take place here on 4 and 7 August respectively.



On we go, across Hyde Park Corner (not to be confused, as many do, with Speakers' Corner, which is to the north-east of the park). Across Duke of Wellington Place and we're in Green Park, to see the new RAF Bomber Command Memorial unveiled by the Queen three weeks ago. A stirring monument, one which draws many visitors.

We then passed Buckingham Palace, surrounded by tourists from around the world. The Mall, connecting the  palace to Trafalgar Square, has been fenced off (the underwater ping-pong or something takes place on Horse Guards Parade), so we're forced to go to Parliament Square and up Whitehall to get to where we want to go. Everywhere there are soldiers, replacing the security guards that G4S failed to deliver. The Olympics may be a huge tourist draw, but they are also a major inconvenience to tourists who are here to see the city and not the sporting event.

London is a magnificent city to visit, though I'd not move back to live nor work here, for it is too large, too sprawling, its centre too far from open countryside, its climate too damp. But for Eddie - and I suspect for young people the world over, it exerts a fascinating pull.

This time last year:
Storm clouds over Goclaw, Dolinka under water

This time two years ago:
Round-up of pics from Dobra

This time three years ago:
Conservatism - UK or Polish style?

This time four years ago:
Wheat and development

This time five years ago:
A previous visit to London

First flight from Modlin

After seeing the airport on its open day, time to return to use it in earnest. Nowhere near as convenient as Okecie; it's 55km from our house. After the horror stories in the media about Modlin's opening day (especially about the 12 people not let on the Luton flight because of the slowness of security), we arrived 20 minutes before check-in opened. Others had the same idea - there were over 50 people in the queue for the flight to Luton in front of us. Check-in opened five minutes late, and the first people (a family of three) took a full 20 minutes to proceed to security. At this pace, there would be a return of what happened on Monday... The authorities took action. Suddenly, another three check-in desks were opened, and half an hour later we were air-side. At present, there is nothing air-side. It reminds me of Terminal Etiuda - the worst cattle-shed in the history of air travel, especially when your flight is delayed by seven hours and you are with two small children and its just before Christmas. No restaurants, no cafés, no newsagents, no bars, no duty-free shops - just a few over-priced vending machines. And worst of all - not enough seats at the gate for all the passengers due to board the flight.

Despite everything, Eddie and I boarded the flight on time (above), which departed on time, and landed at 'London' Luton on time. We got through passport control briskly, thanks to our use of the special lane for UK citizens with biometric passports. As it transpired, the machine didn't work, either for Eddie or for me or for the other bloke using the biometric passport lane, but it was so much faster than the other queues.

Time then to find our hire car. WizzAir passes its customers onto a website called CarTrawler, which gets good deals on car rental. I get a Hyundai i10 for ten days for £197 from EasyRent. (And a further £130 for zero-excess insurance cover - car hire companies claw back the low hire charges with extortionate fees for tiny scratches they insist were not on the car before you drove off in it.)  A bus takes us to a distant village where there's an airport car park and EasyRent's HQ. It's not just raining - the deluge is so intense that I can't hear what the woman at EasyRent is saying to me. "It's been like this since Easter," she explains, apologetically. A guy rushes us to the car under a large umbrella; while he's explaining how all the controls work, the driver's seat is sodden. There's no chance of inspecting the car for scratches or minor dings in this weather. We drive off towards London through a biblical downpour, the poor wipers barely able to keep up with the volumes of rain being deposited on the windscreen.


Eddie observes that England is visually richer than Poland, both the greenness of the landscape and the wealth of the houses, many of which are over a hundred years old.

We pass lots of bedraggled schoolchildren labouring home in the rain and realise that while Eddie's been on holiday these last four weeks, it's been term time in British schools, which continue to function until the end of this week. Shouldn't Polish schools have longer teaching terms? I blame Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, PiS premier whose only legacy was extending Polish school summer holidays from nine weeks to ten (and yes, he was a school teacher before becoming a politician). At a stroke, he cut the amount of tuition a Polish child receives by 2%.

And so to London, traffic so bad that I have cramp in my right shin from operating the clutch pedal. Finally we arrive at my parents' house; it's half past five UK time (half past six in Warsaw), seven and half hours after leaving home.

PSLgate: We're not surprised - yet we should be.

Yesterday's revelations in Puls Biznesu that members of PSL (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, the junior coalition partner) have been using public sector sinecures to feather their own nests was taken in its stride by most Poles. "It's something normal, to be expected - this is Poland, of course, sami swoi; jak nie wiesz o co chodzi, chodzi o kasę; ręka myje rękę; ryba psuje się od głowy etc etc etc".

Yet things have changed since the dark days of the Leszek Miller's rule in 2000-2004.

This evening, Marek Sawicki, has resigned as Minister of Agriculture, a post he held since 2007. PSL's leadership has noted that society will no longer accept such behaviour. Back in Leszek Miller's day, scandal broke after scandal with depressing regularity - yet no one stepped down - until Mr Miller was forced out of office by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski - who'd had enough of the man. A technocratic interregnum followed, with Marek Belka as premier, making a brave attempt to cleanse the Augean stables, before the Polish electorate voted in the Kaczyński twins on a wave of anti-corruption sentiment. As it turned out though, the Kaczyński twins formed a coalition which included Samoobrona - a party that was even dodgier than Miller's SLD.

Back to the present.

PSL is the great survivor of Polish politics. It has formed four of the seven government coalitions (albeit always as the junior partner) that have ruled Poland since its return to democracy in 1989/90. It has done so by eschewing ideology, and focusing on a no-holds-barred 'jobs for the boys' approach. Opinion polls usually show support for PSL running around 4%, just below the threshold for getting a party into Sejm. But at election time, the machine gets mobilised, and the party has always managed to get in.

 But the old order changeth, yielding to the new. I wrote about this change just ahead of the last parliamentary elections, showing how the suicide of Andrzej Lepper has thrown into sharp relief the old and the new ways.

Let's hope that the 'organs of chasing' (organy ścigania) do what we pay them to do and nab those kolesie that have been feasting themselves at the trough of public finance. Mister Śmietanko - we want to know what you have been up to.

In the meantime, Platforma Obywatelska, the senior government coalition partner, has a problem. What to do with PSL? Cover up to keep the coalition going? Or show the electorate that PO really cares about clamping down on corruption, thereby risking a rift in the coalition?

Sawicki has walked. Let's see what happens next.

Tomorrow I'm off to the UK for 12 days; I hope that on my return, the situation will have been cleared up and PSL will have cleansed its ranks. In the meanwhile, I thank God that Poland is less corrupt than the Czech Republic or Romania, let alone countries to the east.

[Link to Gazeta Wyborcza's excellent coverage of PSLgate here.]

This time last year:
Cycling the Vistula's right bank

This time five years ago:
Vrots Love

Who should pay for railways?

I came across the amazing story of the Milwaukee Road quite by chance - it was not a story I knew, but it certainly impressed me and gave me food for thought. Just look at the postcard below - you could have beheld this scene 90 years ago up in Washington State's Cascade Mountains (from the Panecki collection of vintage railroad postcards).

The Chicago, Milwaukee, St Paul and Pacific Railroad, to give it its full name, was the fourth railway line to link America's Midwest to the Pacific ocean. The Pacific extension was privately financed. Soon after it opened, in 1909, the line's directors realised that steam was no good on the mountainous sections in winter, where temperatures fell to -40F (which, coincidentally is also -40C). Electricity was the answer. Hydroelectric power was abundant in the Cascade and Rocky mountains, cheaper than coal.

Five electric engines were built in 1919 (at the same time as Poland regained independence!) for the line; the General Electric EP-2 Bipolars, powered by 12 motors, one in each axle. There were no gears; the engines ran silently. (And British gricers take note - this was 35 years before the electrification of the Manchester-Sheffield Trans-Pennine route!)

The EP-2 locos were amazingly powerful (as well as being 100% green); they were technical marvels; totally reliable, not needing any major refurbishment until 1953. Above is a publicity photo from the early 1920s showing an EP-2 in a tug-of-war with two steam engines, which the electric loco won.

By 1925 the Chicago, Milwaukee, St Paul and Pacific Railroad was bankrupt. It pulled itself up somehow, surviving the Great Depression despite going into bankruptcy again in 1935. After a post-war revival in fortunes, in 1973, the line was disastrously de-electrified just as oil prices were going through the roof. The last train ran over the Milwaukee Road's Pacific extension in 1980, the line was closed. Thankfully, 300 miles (480km) has been converted to a cycle- and walking path, which can be returned to rail should the economic need arise.

Above: view from inside the Snoqualmie Tunnel, now part of the John Wayne Pioneer Trail (photo Jose D. Saura). At least the trackbed has not been abandoned to nature (or turned over to the automobile).

America's great economic dynamism of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was built on railways and steel, driven by private entrepreneurs not by state planners. Post-WW2, it was the federally-financed highways that boosted the US economy. The car lobby often forgets that roads are planned and paid for by the public sector. Is there not an argument for insisting that governments the world over have a duty to provide rail infrastructure? Rail operators should be private companies - just as bus operators or car hire companies have no right being state-owned - but rail infrastructure needs to be planned, paid for and maintained by the state, just as roads are.

You quibble? During the 19th Century, Britain became the world's most powerful empire largely because of its intensive railway network, linking coal mine to steelworks to sea port to cotton mills to markets; linking metropolis to the provinces, bringing business and jobs and creating wealth. Yet few of the privately owned railway companies ever made money long-term. They did what they did for the greater good (which in Victorian times was not a silly notion).

Coming back to the Milwaukee Road - back in 1919, no one in Washington DC saw the strategic value of driving electrified rails across the Rockies - had they done so, America might have had Shinkansen style bullet trains before the WW2. But then oil was cheap. No one took a 100-year view of things.

I begrudge a lot of what the state sector is squandering money on. But investing in building and maintaining rail infrastructure is money well spent (as long as it's well managed and transparent). Governments at this stage of the economic cycle need to boost demand - they should do so by investing in infrastructure - creating jobs here.

The economy needs us to move around, to spread our spending, to invest in places money's not yet reached. We need road, sea, air and rail transport in equal measure, just as the arrival of smartphones has not killed off the internet, which has not killed off television, which has not killed off radio, which has not killed the press.

The market will decide the precise proportions, as long as the playing field is level and the process is transparent. If roads are paid for from taxes, why should rail infrastructure be paid for solely from tickets?

This time two years ago:
Grunwald - the big picture

This time three years ago:
"Take me right back to the track, Jack"

This time five years ago:
The summer sublime

The balance between action and procrastination

This week's Economist carries a most significant article - about finding the balance between a) rushing and b) taking it easy. The article comes to the (unsurprising) conclusion that neither extreme is good. Unsurprising?

Maybe not to the testosterone-charged get-it-done-quickly merchants that are responsible for leading the world into economic crisis ("we want higher turnover, higher profits and we want them now"). These alpha males (and males they usually are) are driving their teams ever onwards and upwards - often without thinking where to.

And maybe not to life's whingers, who think that the world is unjust, because their slothful existence has failed to provide them with all the baubles that advertising has led them to believe they are entitled to.

In my blog posts, I've been regularly castigating Poland's public sector for sloth, indecisiveness and lack of motivation - indeed, this is one end of the spectrum that must receive regular castigation. The other end, those bankers and managers, taking risks with (other people's) money also needs to be kept in check.

Finding the optimal way forward is always about balance. Not too quick, not too slow. Not too high, not too low. My mother was fond of telling my brother and me the story of Icarus and Daedalus - "Daedalus interea, Creten longumque perosus..." she would recite, the story of how Daedalus instructed his son to fly away from their Cretan prison with wings he'd fashioned from wax and birds' feathers... "I warn you, Icarus, to fly in a middle course, lest, if you go too low, the water may weight your wings; if you go too high, the fire may burn them. Fly between the two."

Finding the optimal course between two extremes is the key to a successful life. Greed and sloth are two poles towards which modern man has skewed too close in recent years. Greedy men have exploited the lazy - this is mere biology. As sentient human beings, we can determine our course, we must work together towards mutual progress.

This time last year:
The verb 'to fuss' in Polish?

This time four years ago:
Plans for Mysiadło and Nowa Iwiczna