One for the record

Today, Tuesday 11 September 2012, temperatures reached 30C. The air-conditioning on public transport could barely cope. Below: Al. Jerozolimskie looking more like Buenos Aires or Beirut than the capital of a country associated with polar bears running around in the streets.

Early evening, the heat's still merciless. Foolishly, I took a jacket to work and spent the day carrying it around. I read in today's Gazeta Stołeczna (some of it sadly behind a paywall) that the water level in the Vistula has fallen to the lowest since records began in 1799 (58cm) and that interesting historical objects have started to appear from out of the waters... Below: P+R Al. Krakowskie tram stop. Until this time last year, Okęcie - which is what it is. A LOT Boeing 737 comes in to land.

Below: it's sunset at ten past seven. Still hot, but in a curious way; this is September heat - not the same as midsummer heat. Somehow more treacherous... by midnight, it will still be over 20C. Tomorrow, heavy rain is expected.

This time last year:
MOSTTOMOST

This time two years ago:
The half-closed airport

This time three years ago:
Last of the summer bike rides to work?

This time four years ago:
My own Polish Adlestrop

This time five years ago:
Laurie Anderson's chillingly prescient 'O Superman'

Raise a glass to Powiśle?

Here, on the race-track wall at Służewiec, we have the very finest in contemporary Polish street art. Contemporary political satire, witty and intelligent, post-modern in tone, referencing Soviet propaganda, and referring of course to Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz's current crack-down on late-night boozing in Powiśle's hipster hang-outs such as PKP Powiśle, Na Lato and Syreni Śpiew. The caption: "Maybe one for Powiśle?"

The debate referred to is between the well-heeled who live in the exclusive apartment blocks like Holland Park and Patria (who don't like their sleep disturbed by the apparent rowdiness) and the young trendies who claim to have turned Powiśle into one of Warsaw's coolest districts, thereby raising property prices through gentrification - or rather trendification-by-proxy.

Who's right here? Hipsters are Powiśle's answer to the aircraft that fly over Jeziorki: noisy interlopers that keep the neighbourhood from turning to dull mainstream. Mrs G-W: let the klubokawiarnie thrive; they are the life-blood of Powiśle. Anyway, summer's ending, university term-time will soon begin, and those all-nighters will fade into memory until next summer.

And here (right) is the 1954 original (by V. Govorkov). "No (to alcohol)!" The only thing that's missing from the 2012 street art piece is the plate of food. Is this a message to Mrs G-W, or artistic licence?

In Soviet times as indeed today, over-indulgence was a problem. But who should determine the character of a district - the city authorities, or the market? Then there is the issue of the smell of fresh urine and vomit over the pavements...

This time two years ago:
Mud, rain and local elections (Mrs G-W gets a thumbs down)

This time four years ago:
There must be a better way (commuting woes, again)

More from S2/S79

A lovely warm and sunny Sunday; I wonder what's happening along the Elka? A good day to find out. Below: the viaduct carrying ul. Hołubcowa over the S2 is coming along nicely. However, judging by the lugubrious pace of work on completing the neighbouring viaducts that carry ul. Poloneza and ul. Złote Łany over the S2, I cannot see this bridge being open to traffic for at least another 12 months.

Below: looking west from the top of the new viaduct's embankment. In the middle distance the functioning railway line that links Warsaw's Metro to the outside world, beyond that the first of three viaducts taking the Warsaw-Radom and Okęcie-Siekierki railway lines over the S2. Click to enlarge to see an empty coal train returning to Okęcie sidings from Siekierki power station. A LOT Boeing 767 is on final approach to Runway 33 at Okęcie airport, just beyond the trees.

Below: nothing new to report from the railway viaducts; pillars that will bear the second and third lines are nowhere near ready; the metal box girders themselves are ready and waiting. This will be the point where the whole S2/S79 project is most delayed (remember, it should have been ready three months ago).

Below: the southern end of the S79. As I have written before, the north-south part of the Elka just stops dead in a cabbage field. It seems pointless extending the asphalt (and no doubt soon street lighting, crash barriers, acoustic screens and pavements) beyond the Węzeł Lotnisko junction given the total lack of plans to link this up even to ul. Baletowa, less than half a kilometre away.

Below: as I stroll around the site of Węzeł Lotnisko, an RAF Lockheed Hercules C5 flies over (with six-blade props and ECM pods on rear fuselage). The photo, taken with a very wide angle lens, gives an idea of how close this large beast is flying.

It will be ages yet before I can flop out of bed, get in the car and be on the road to Berlin five minutes after leaving home!

This time last year:
To Stara Praga, and back

This time two years ago:
Late summer scenes, Warsaw

This time five years ago:
Roadworks and detours on ul. Puławska in Mysiadło

Happy 85th, Babcia Marysia!

On this day in 1927, my mother Marysia was born, in what was then eastern Poland and is now Ukraine. She lived a peaceful and enjoyable life along with her two older sisters (both of whom are still alive, Irena in Canada, Dzunia in Wrocław), daughters of an estate manager running the forestry assets of a Belgian-born landowner, Kamil de Pourbaix. I have written about the estate, Horodziec, and my grandfather before (click on the Family History label below for access to all the posts mentioned above).

My mother's family were deported to northern Russia in February 1940 after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. Following the amnesty accorded to Poles in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the family made its way to join General Anders' nascent Polish army. [This BBC News article about another Polish girl's journey out of Siberia with Gen. Anders is finely recorded here.] Marysia and Irena managed to leave the Soviet Union with the army; oldest sister Dżunia and their parents didn't - my grandfather died in Kazakhstan. Ciocia Dziunia and my grandmother returned to Poland after the war, to the re-claimed territories of western Poland, while my mother and Ciocia Irka found themselves in Britain, safely under the dominion of King George VI rather than Stalin.

And thank God for that. And for the National Health Service, which has looked after my mother so well through pregnancies and heart attacks and into old age. Babcia Marysia walks without a walking stick and mentally is in tip-top form, as is her husband, my father, Dziadzio Bohdan, who will be 90 next April. In June, they celebrated the diamond jubilee of their wedding, in 1952.

From the point of view of my children, having four grandparents living into old age is a great genetic gift. Besides Dziadzio Tadeusz, who died at the age of 91 years and seven months, the remaining three grandparents are alive, aged 89, 86 and 85 respectively. Having access to the wisdom of the generations is another great gift, and one that eluded me, as neither of my grandfathers survived WWII, and my grandmothers I met only briefly during my childhood.

My mother was 30 when I was born, 35 when my brother was born. Is this the optimal age for bearing children?

I will end this post with the greatest wisdom my mother has passed on to me: Quid quid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem.

'Whatever you do, do it prudently, and consider the outcome'.

Cokolwiek czynisz, czyń rozważnie i myśl o wyniku

A recipe for a life in balance.

Sto lat, Babcia Marysia!

This time last year:
Summer comes crashing to a halt

This time three years ago:
The atmosphere of impending autumn - Mono no aware

This time four years ago:
Time to recycle.

This time five years ago:
They paved paradise

Metro - Second Line question mark

Powiśle station, on the west bank of the Vistula is still flooded, and the City transport authorities and the general contractor work out what to do. In the meanwhile, work on the western end of the Metro is continuing. Here is the corner of ul. Świętokrzyska, formerly a busy east-west thoroughfare, closed to traffic for some while now, and ul, Mazowiecka.


Left: looking across ul. Świętokrzyska ('Holy Cross Street') from Pl. Powstańców Warszawy. This will be the eastern entrance of the Świętokrzyska station, the interchange between the north-south Line One and the east-west Line Two. Though how far east Line Two will get is still a big question mark.

Word is that the the builders will not be able to tunnel through the quicksand that lies under both banks of the Vistula. Will there be an alternative - taking the Metro over the river via a bridge?

But in the meanwhile, work continues. Below: looking westward along ul. Świętokrzyska towards Wola, where one day the second line will terminate. But what of the river crossing?

Worth taking a peek on the forum on SkyscraperCity.com to find out.

And a propos of yesterday's blog post about work on the 'Elka', Gazeta Stołeczna today quotes the highway authority as saying the road will be ready in mid-January (some chance!)

This time two years ago:
Let no one send us to Kielce!

This time three years ago:
World's largest helicopter over Jeziorki

Back to work

The school holidays are over, journey times across town during rush hours return to their usual durations. Transport infrastructure investments continue. Ul. Marszałkowska's central section (from Pl. Zbawiciela to Pl. Bankowy) is closed to trams; and the flooding of the Powiśle Metro station on the second line under construction looks likely to cripple road traffic around the Wisłostrada for months to come.

Meanwhile, work on the 'Elka', the 'L'-shaped road with the S79 dropping down north-south from ul. Sasanki to Węzeł ('junction') Lotnisko ('airport') and the S2 cutting across west to east from the airport junction to Węzeł Puławska is accelerating. The storm water reservoirs for ul. Wirażowa have been filled in and covered by the S79 and the progress on the new railway viaduct at Węzeł Lotnisko is visible. It may not all be ready by Christmas, but by next summer?

Above and below: now that the new viaducts that carry ul. Sasanki over the railway line at W-wa Służewiec have been opened to traffic (the west-bound one is visible to the left), the old viaduct that ran between them is being demolished. Quite a view, especially with the cranes working on the new business district in the background.

Below: now that the new viaducts carrying ul. Sasanki over the railway and what will be the S79 are open, there are new bus stops and new stairways down from them to platform level.

Below: a view from the southbound platform at W-wa Służewiec, looking at the newly opened viaduct on ul. Sasanki. Note the stairways and wheelchair lifts linking the bus stop on the bridge with... with what? There's nothing down here. One day, the S79 will continue northward beyond Sasanki, but for the time being, the S79 will end here, with ramps running onto ul. Marynarska (eastward) and Sasanki (westwards) in both directions. And that 160m-long footbridge (in the distance to the left) also currently goes nowhere.

The early September weather remains most clement; may it remain so, even though the days are getting shorter and shorter and Equinox is a little over two weeks away.

This time last year:
Clinging onto summer - cycling to Powsin

This time two years ago:
Composition in blue and yellow

This time three years ago:
Z-9

This time four years ago:
My favourite aircraft

This time five years ago:
Утомлённые солнцем

It's been a good year for the apples

Apples, apples everywhere. Apple trees from Jeziorki to West Ealing are exceptionally fruitful this year. The one in our garden, nine summers old, only gave fruit for the first time four years ago - then very little - but now its poor structure is creaking from the overload of apples (below). As yet unripe, the fruit is still hard, acidic and lacking in sugar. But after two or three weeks of sunshine, they should be perfect.

Below: untreated with pesticide, our apples are a long way off the visual standards required by hypermarkets these days. I trust ours will be tastier! They will, however, need to be checked before eating for any inhabitants.

Further on up the road and round the corner, on ul. Dumki, there are wild apple-trees whose fruit is ripe and ready to eat (below). Unadopted and growing on the verge of the street, they are there to be picked by anybody - and these are good. Sweeter and softer, and less blemished, than our ones.


It's been a wonderful summer in Poland. Not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry - but fertile, full of flowers and fruit. Although there's not been a drought this year, Jeziorki's finally had a chance to dry off after the snowy winters and spring downpours of 2009 and 2010.

Today, for the first time in over two and half years, I walked from one end of ul Dumki to the other without getting my shoes wet. The reed-beds are moist but no longer under water. The last car passed this way in the autumn of 2009; the road then was boggy and passable only to four-wheel drives with determined drivers.

Wild flowers continue to bloom in the verges and the fallow fields, though the mugwort is getting dry and losing its yellowness. Nawłoć (goldenrod) is still the predominant flower at this time of year (I wonder whether ul. Nawłocka, which connects ul. Trombity to ul. Kaczunkowska, was named after this flower so common around these parts).

Importantly, unlike last year when it came to culex pipiens (gnats? midges? mosquitos), we were not bitten incessantly when out walking. I can only hope that the warm, dry and sunny days will continue long into late-November, then to be replaced by frost and deep, deep snow.

This time two years ago:
Things can only get better

Procrastination: a euphemism for laziness?

Two articles have recently appeared in the English-language online media on the subject of procrastination. The one in the Economist's Schumpeter column is telling the world of business to slow down, take it easy; not to rush into ill-judged decisions. "Become obsessed with deadlines, and you're left with the intellectual equivalent of fast food". I wrote about this a few weeks ago. A riposte has appeared in the BBC's online News Magazine, which slams procrastination as a curse. "Chronic procrastinators, complicate their lives, and probably shorten them, with their incessant delaying and task avoidance... [They] are less wealthy, less healthy and less happy than those who don't delay."

So who's right? Of course, both extremes (unthinkingly rushing into things or delaying they indefinitely) are recipes for disaster. Finding the happy medium between the two requires getting the balance right, using a blend of thought and instinct. As the Economist article says, there are things that cannot be put off at all, such as paying credit card bills.

The BBC's article was followed up by a huge treasure-trove of personal anecdotes relating to extreme procrastination. Things put off for decades (my favourite was about the pregnant woman who asked her husband to put up some shelves. The shelves were eventually put up - by the couple's 16 year-old son).

Learning that Procrastinators-Anonymous.org has been set up has forced me to dig deeper into the nature of task-avoidance. Could a lazy person could have done something like this? Resolving to do something, but doing it much later than initially planned, is less bad than not resolving to do something in the first place. "Less... bad"? Yes, indeed. I'm placing a moral dimension on this. As well as putting off starting something, people often have problems with finishing something they've started. (I must say this is more of a problem for me than procrastination in its basic form.) So - is procrastination synonymous with laziness, or just one aspect of it?

Key to the question is the issue of human will. We learn from Prof. Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University Chicago, author of Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done, that 20% of the population of the world are chronic procrastinators. Whether it's 15% or 25% is not the issue, nor how you define 'chronic'. The point is that many people have a problem in this department. And yes, it holds them back in life, it generates self-loathing or else resentment and envy towards those better motivated and better organised than them.

After Poland's economic and social transformation, some people threw themselves with a frenzy into the market place, set up small businesses, worked all the hours of the day - and slowly, systematically, found they could afford a better, more comfortable life than their less motivated and less hard-working neighbours. Who soon came to resent their new-found wealth.

I still return to my old question - is human will and motivation something we are born with, or taught? If the will is strong enough, it can overcome obstacles - poor social skills, low levels of assertiveness or even intelligence. Strong will, self-discipline, good organisation - nature or nurture?

This time three years ago:
Remembering the outbreak of WWII