After Scotland's independence: then what?

A discussion with a Scottish Nationalist Party member over curried haggis in Glasgow last week plus this post on The Economist's website have prompted me to speculate with a bit of what-iffery...

A referendum for Scotland's independence is planned for the autumn of 2014. Right now, I was told that just over 40% of Scots favour total independence. Not the 51% needed, but bearing in mind the SNP's rise from 28% vote in the 2003 Scottish parliamentary elections via 33% in 2007 to 45% in 2011, a rising tide of support is clearly visible.

So let's just consider the following scenario; by whatever majority, the Scots vote for independence. Acts of Parliament are drawn up to separate the countries (think of the experiences of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union). Conflict of course, is highly unlikely. But consider. The SNP likes to think of Scotland as a Scandinavian country, a European country. Once the eurocrisis has subsided, membership of the eurozone would mark a currency distinction from, well, er... England. Membership of Schengen too - which would suggest border controls at Berwick-on-Tweed replacing those on many flights and sailings from continental Europe. Ireland - part of the UK 100 years ago - has the euro (for good or ill) but is not a Schengen Area country. Would Scotland retain the Queen as its monarch? Would it stay in the Commonwealth?

In such circumstances - what would happen to the name 'Britain' and the adjective 'British'?

Scotland entered into a union with England in 1707, in much the same way that Poland and Lithuania created a Commonwealth by the Union of Lublin in 1569. The result - a nation called Great Britain, has been in existence for over three centuries (whereas the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth survived 225 years).

As a Pole, I can sympathise with a smaller country's ambition to be free of its larger imperial neighbour. But I am also a British citizen by birth - though I've never considered myself English.

'British' is an inclusive term, whereas until quite recently - certainly until the late-1990s - 'England' was a name exclusively reserved for a football team. [See this useful breakdown of terminology within the British Isles.]

Geographically, 'Britain' refers to the island upon which England, Wales and Scotland co-exist as parts of the United Kingdom. After putative independence, 'Britain' (the name of the island) would be as relevant as Hispaniola (the island that contains the two sovereign states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Hispaniola? Pirates of the Caribbean?

So what's left of the United Kingdom should Scotland opt out? Well, the rump-of-the-UK bit would be England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Which would rule out any possibility of Britishness (who has more right to Hispaniolaness - a Haitian or Dominican?).

Would 'UK' therefore take on greater weight? My passport defines my nationality as 'British citizen'. Would it have to be replaced by one that says: 'United Kingdom citizen'? As AndrzejK points out (first comment below), Wales is a Principality, Northern Ireland a Province, so the UK without Scotland would not be a United Kingdom at all.

So - what would a UK-minus-Scotland be officially called? Not UK. Not Britain. Not England. Some entirely new nomenclature would have to be dreamed up. Ideas, anyone?

While at my parents, we watched an interesting BBC2 programme (A White and Christian People - part three of How God made the English) in which presenter Diarmaid MacCulloch posits the rather novel concept that you can be Hugenot, Jewish, Indian, Welsh or Scottish (or indeed Polish) and still somehow consider yourself English. The programme failed to convince.

If - when - Scotland becomes an independent country - I will appreciate what the nationalist Scots will be feeling, having experienced the joy of witnessing Poland regaining sovereignty and independence in 1989/1990.

On the other hand, my own relationship with the UK as a British Citizen of Polish parentage will require revisiting. Unless Wales splits off from England and the island of Ireland unites, a UK passport holder I shall be for quite a while to come.

It will be Great Britain, the country of my birth - not England - that I shall mourn for.

Look on my lack of works, ye tax-payers, and despair!"

Just over two months until the football starts. Looking down over the construction site of the new roads running into Warsaw, it's clear that there is absolutely no way, not even were a thousand athletes to eat a thousand cutlets, that the A2 motorway will be connected to Warsaw in time*. Officially, an August hand-off date is the current target - I don't see that either.

Above: Węzeł Salomea, where the S7/S8 (coming up to Warsaw from the south) meets Al. Jerozolimskie - the main route into town from the south-west. Click on photos to enlarge.

Above: the horizontal sandy scar will be ul. Nowolazurowa; it will cross three lots of railway tracks and finally connect up with ul. Lazurowa, linking the S7/S8 with Wola via Ursus.

Above: Węzeł Lotnisko, the junction of the east-west S2 (the Warsaw bypass - an expressway link from the A2 Berlin-Poznań-Stryków-Konotopa motorway running across the south of Warsaw) and north-south S79, just south of Okęcie airport. So much to be done here, least of all burrowing under the busy Warsaw-Radom railway line.

If the south-western junctions were complete, the lack of readiness of the easternmost stretch of the S2 wouldn't be an issue. But they're not - and they won't be. Tens of thousands of Czech fans will have driven across Poland for the first-round matches to snarl down in horrendous traffic jams outside Warsaw. What kind of impression of our country will this make?

Five years have gone by since the championships were awarded to Poland and Ukraine, and look now. The cities and private sector have generally done their bit. Agencies with a national remit, such as the motorways and highways authority, GDDKiA, and the state railways, have, unsurprisingly shown themselves to be wanting. (The junction of Al. Jerozolimskie and ul. Łopuszańska, a City of Warsaw project, was completed at the end of last year. It's visible towards the top of the first photo.)

For an excellent overview of where Poland's road building programme is right now, visit Student SGH's blog (this post).

* Follow-up comment, June 2012. I eat my words - the motorway was opened (though not completed) in time for the UEFA championships. It would be October before both carriageways were finally completed to motorway standard.

This time last year:
Old-school retail experience: PRL-flavoured carrot juice

This time two years ago:
Easter Sunday - Lent's over

This time three years ago:
Węzeł Lotnisko - site cleared - ready for construction work

This time four years ago:
Classic Polish automobile - the Polski Fiat 125P

This time five years ago:
Jeziorki in Google Earth

Last views of Edinburgh - for now

The city is such an unending delight to the trained eye that my dear readers deserve more. As many photos as I could cram in during a few hours between seminars. No apologies for yet another post with Edinburgh pics!

Above: detail of the Balmoral Hotel, erected in 1902 by the North British Railway Company, whose logo is visible just below the clock, which traditionally runs two minutes fast to help guests and passers-by catch their trains.

Above: The Merchants Hall, on Hanover Street, built in the 19th C. by the Merchants Company of Edinburgh, now hired out for exhibitions and events. The building reflects Edinburgh's mercantile prowess. Columns - Corinthian.


Above: signs that Edinburgh once was also home to a thriving light industry. While Glasgow made steamships, Edinburgh made hat-pins, jewellery and beer.
This is the entrance to Old Assembly Close. The signage caught my eye; abandoned to its fate. The painted sign opposite had some new signboard wantonly fixed on top of it. Right: Šašek looked down here too, and also saw the wire-making establishment of Smith & Fletcher (probably still in business in 1961). You can see just how atmospheric these auld-school signs are in the top photograph, taken two and half years ago.

If Warsaw's most famous offspring are Chopin and Marie Curie, Edinburgh's are Adam Smith (who spent most of his life there) and his contemporary, David Hume, an Edinburgh man through and through. The philosopher is commemorated by a statue on the Royal Mile, though his headwear led me to recall Monty Python's Bruces' Philosopher's Song, which posited that when it came to drinking, "David Hume could outconsume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel". Tourists loved it and were posing for photographs at Hume's feet. Conical hat-wearing statues? See more about this here!

Right: another building which I took from its architectural solidity to be a Temple of Mammon, but no, this is not a bank nor a chamber of commerce, but a real temple, erected by an American Evangelist, D.L. Moody, in 1883, and still active today, although it shares its premises with a pharmacy and kilt shop. Columns - also Corinthian.

The Royal Mile sweeps on, round the corner and down the hill, towards Holyrood House, once the palace of Scotland's kings and queens, though I ran out of time. Incidentally, The Economist's Eastern Approaches blog, has posted this article, written in Edinburgh, considering the impending referendum on Scotland's independence from an interesting Balkan perspective.

Left: Finally - before leaving Edinburgh (I shall be back!), there must be a photograph of the Sir Walter Scott memorial, which was built in 1840. Looking like a Victorian steam-punk space rocket, it is the city's most famous landmark and the largest monument ever built to a writer. Towering 200ft (61m) over Princes Street Gardens, you can climb 287 steps to a viewing gallery for magnificent views of this magnificent city.

Below: Edinburgh awaits - the entrance to the Scott Monument.

More information about travelling to and living in Edinburgh here, the BBC's Travel website.

Edinburgh - architectural detail

Edinburgh's a city for a telephoto lens to pick off architectural detail and to focus on tight close-ups of interesting features. Right: turrets and crenellations atop the Old Woollen Mill, on the corner of High Street and Cockburn Street. (See wider view of this corner on the previous post.)

The Victorian architect is letting his romantic vision run free, referencing Mediaeval castles from an imagined Scots history. The novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) were instrumental in launching the Victorian craze for all things Scottish, and for casting them in a strongly romantic light.

Left: standing on Princes Street, the monument to the Royal Scots Greys, Scotland's most famous cavalry regiment. The many war memorials dotted around Edinburgh testify to how many of its sons Scotland lost to build up and maintain the British Empire. Another memorial, in East Princes Street Gardens, bears the inscription "Peking, 1860" - and the names of Scotsmen who died so that British merchants could go on selling opium to the Chinese.

Right: looking up the part of Royal Mile known as Castlehill towards to Castle (which is out of sight, just around the corner).

Dominating the scene - no, this is no longer a church, this is The Hub, café and restaurant, and home to the Edinburgh Festival (indeed, a collection of festivals of varying artistic merit), which brings normal tourist traffic to an over-priced standstill every August.

The Hub's spire (designed by Augustus Pugin, the man who gave London Big Ben) is the highest point in the city.

Left: New College, home of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. It was originally built in 1846 as a seminary college for the disestablished Free Church of Scotland (it did not have the British monarch as its head).

A colourful floral display highlights the contrast between Scotland's temperate Atlantic climate and Warsaw's continental climate - spring still feels a long way off .

Right: Ionic columns and 'all-square' style of this bank building on Hanover Street suggest solidity and fiduciary propriety.

The recent history of Lloyds TSB (Lloyds TSB Scotland north of the border) shows that the granite-like structure was ridden with more than its fair share of controversy. The original owner of the building, the Edinburgh Savings Bank, was swallowed up by TSB which was then in turn swallowed up by Lloyds.

Left: A seagull atop a chimney pot. In the skies over Edinburgh, the gull is a common sight, not surprising since the city centre is less than three miles from the Firth of Forth, the tidal estuary of the River Forth. No longer belching soot, the chimneys are a prominent part of Edinburgh's skyline.

Smoke and soot gave rise to the city's former nickname, Auld Reekie, though the 1956 Clean Air Act brought the practice of burning open fires in British cities to an end. Since then, many historic buildings have been sandblasted, returning to the city to its original glory.

More Edinburgh shots

As promised, some more Edinburgh photos. A city whose architectural splendour calls for a long lens as well as a wide lens to zoom in on fragments and display broad vistas.

Above: looking across towards Edinburgh Castle from Market Street.

Above: Her Majesty's Register House on Princes Street.

Above: The top end of Cockburn Street, looking down towards Waverley Station, from the High Street.

Edinburgh's skyline; amid the flags, Queen Victoria reigns over her loyal Scottish subjects.

Above: a comparison from a favourite book from my childhood (and indeed Eddie and Moni's childhood) - This is Edinburgh, by Miroslav Šašek. I stood on the bridge over the railway line and immediately it came back to me - here is Šašek's illustration and my photo side by side. The trees have somewhat grown into the view since the book was published in 1961.

More Edinburgh photos to follow!

Lost legend of Rock'n'Roll: Johnny Kolyma

Born Jan Onufry Szwenkier in 1937 in Worochta, in what was then the south-easternmost corner of pre-war Poland. He was deported by the Soviets as a three year-old along with his family to a labour camp north of Magadan in Kolyma in 1940. Miraculously, he survived the Gulag (although his older sister and father didn't) and in 1947, he was repatriated to communist Poland along with his mother and other Poles from the camp. Together they fled to West Berlin, and then, having made contact with cousins in Kentucky, his mother secured them passage to the USA as Displaced Persons.

While his mother found employment as a garment-maker in Louisville, young Johnny began high school where he found studying a bore; he'd prefer sneaking off and listening to the black musicians rehearsing rhythm'n'blues music in the juke-joints and chitlin' circuit venues in the West End of town. It was here, with several other rebellious school friends, they began to play a highly-accelerated form of the music they heard.

Having picked up the rudiments (but no more) of the hot race music that captivated his soul, he reinvented himself as Johnny Kolyma, backed by the Gulag Guards.

His music was about anger, 20 years before punk rock exploded onto the scene. Johnny Kolyma's music was three-chord, twelve-bar blues, stripped down and played fast. Angry, shouted lyrics about anything that annoyed him (which was pretty much everything). Right: the only known photo of Johnny Kolyma taken live on stage at The Airway, Louisville, July or August 1956.

Boy, was that cat mad. Mad at Eisenhower for not nuking Moscow. Mad at Washington's pinko liberal establishment for selling eastern Europe down the river. Mad at teenage America for being insufficiently serious. Mad at the cruelty and indifference of the world.

Johnny Kolyma and the Gulag Guards played local gigs to an increasingly fervent crowd; the gigs were soon noted for the fact that his infectious anger would spread to the audiences who would demolish venue after venue. After a while it was hard for the band to find new places to play. Moving to abandoned factories and warehouses, the gigs would end with local riots sweeping through the immediate neighbourhood. Louisville's authorities soon put an end to the live performances (there were reckoned to have been around 20-30 gigs during the summer of 1956).

Uncompromising, raw and unwilling to conform to what the music companies needed to stoke the Rock'n'Roll explosion, Kolyma and his band recorded one eponymously-named long-playing album; all copies were snapped up by local fans. Attempts at playing gigs in neighbouring cities failed; the band split up in 1958 when all the members, including Kolyma, were drafted into the armed forces. What happened to Mr Kolyma after his spell in the military remains a mystery.

Leaving nothing but a legend and a few hundred records, now fetching several thousand dollars at auctions, Johnny Kolyma and the Gulag Guards disappeared from the scene. Their legendary proto-punk, proto-garage sound deserved a wider audience.

Helpful hints for advanced English students

Many Polish idioms translate directly and literally into English. When speaking to Brits or Americans, feel free to use these Polish idioms with confidence in English, and proudly show off your mastery of both languages. If you know of any more Polish idioms with literal English translations, please let me know. From the mountain, I thank!

O co chodzi? – “About what is it walking?”

Kombinuje, jak koń pod górę – “He is combining like a horse up hill”

Czuję się w niezręcznej sytuacji – “I feel myself in an unmanual situation”

Mucha nie siada – “a fly does not sit”

Nie ściemniaj – “Don't darken”

Bo będzie cienko! – “because it will be thin!”

Nie chciałbym być w twojej skórze – “I wouldn't want to be in your leather”

Świecić pustkami – “To shine with emptinesses”

Coś jest nie tak – “Something is no yes”

Pół biedy – “Half of the poverty”

Nie mam zielonego pojęcia – “I do not have a green concept”

Myśleć o niebieskich migdałach – “thinking about blue almonds”

Przegiąć pałę – “to overbend the big truncheon”

Broń Panie Boże! – “Defend, Lord God!”

Ja sobie dam radę z tym – “I to myself will give advice with this”

Jak cię widzą, tak cię piszą – “How you they see, yes you they write”

Komu w drogę, temu czas – “To whom in the road, ago time”

Wpuścić kogoś w maliny – “To let someone into the raspberries"

Machnąć reką na coś – “To wave hand on something"

Nie ma mowy! – “There has no speech!”

Nie rób wsi! – “Do not make a village!

Gdzie tam! – “Where there!

Co ma piernik do wiatraka? – “What has honey-cake to windmill?

Nie - faktycznie! – “No - factically!

W grucie rzeczy – In the soil of things"

Jedna wielka lipa! – “One great lime tree!

This time last year:
Stalin's plans to escalate nuclear Armageddon

This time two years ago:
Warsaw's favourite weekend destination

This time three years ago:
We are two

This time four years ago:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams

This time five years ago:
My very first Jeziorki blog post

Sunshine, early spring, Ealing

Returning from Scotland, I popped into my parents for the weekend. I arrived in Ealing on a hot Friday morning to witness spring fully under way; cherry trees along St Stephen's Road heaving under the weight of glorious blossom (above) and trees bursting into leaf (right). Spring reaches Warsaw several weeks later; while London is experiencing shirtsleeve weather, Warsaw is still shivering (+6C) with rain and sleet to come. Still, the later spring's arrival, the more welcome it is.

This time last year:
Cycling to work - the season starts

This time two years ago:
Five weeks into Lent

This time four years ago:
Swans pay us a visit