Consciousness, evolution and diet

I was cooking myself some curried cod and couscous for lunch today. Stirring the pan, watching the white flakes of cod come apart, I became aware that I'd soon be eating fish muscles, muscles that once propelled this metre-long creature around the North Atlantic. Until it came into contact with a fishing net. Now, Gadus morhua can live up to 25 years, swimming around, eating smaller fish (including juvenile cod), and reproducing during the spawning season. Not much to do other than swim, eat and reproduce. As I stirred those flakes of muscle tissue into the curried couscous, I pondered upon the consciousness of fish. 

Mammals - including the ones we eat - clearly have consciousness similar to ours. They have evolved in different ways to us humans, yet I am certain that there is a link in the way they perceive the environment around them; they feel joy, surprise, sadness and fear just as we do. Birds too - there's more intelligence going on per cubic millimetre of bird brain than in the same volume of brains (but the same can be said about our brains and elephant brains). Listening to birdsong instinctively tells you that birds are supremely aware. Yet intelligence, creativity, the capacity for abstract thought and the ability to communicate that thought - this is what ultimately sets us above other species. But consciousness is very much present there too; mammals and birds are clearly sentient creatures.

Fish, though? I have tended to see them as automatons of the deep - kept moving by instinct, with no capacity for reflection, emotion or self-awareness. 

Not having any idea of what goes on inside a fish's mind, I have less trouble eating one that I do a cow, a pig or a chicken. I cannot relate to the sheer monotony of 25 years spent in the depths of the North Atlantic. Today, I ate cod for lunch, tinned tuna for breakfast and a slice of smoked salmon with supper, added anchovy fillets to flavour a lentil stew, and ate some cheese (Roquefort, Cheddar), but no meat. I am certainly eating far less meat or poultry than I did when I was younger; but giving up meat isn't going to happen outside of Lent. The occasional treat.

Anyway, we eat more than we need. On those days when I'm too busy to feed myself properly and yet still put in a lot of walking, I'm surprised how long I can go before blood sugar levels fall to that level where I start feeling wobbly. One should really eat enough to keep going and know when to stop. You can't pour more petrol into a car than it uses. And another great dietary mistake we're all prone to is eating too much before going to sleep. "Breakfast like a king, lunch like a lord, supper like a pauper."

As we evolve away from our hunter-gatherer past (that hunter-gatherer lifestyle was 90% of our past as a species!), we need to apply consciousness to our diet. It's easy to let your instincts dictate what you eat, how much of it you eat and when you eat it. The sugar-industrial complex suggests through advertising that we should give in to temptation: "Go on - it's me time!" "Naughty - but nice!" "Indulge yourself!" Bombarded by such messaging, we buy too much and eat too much. Food has become much cheaper as a proportion of our incomes spent on it.

We have evolved high levels of consciousness. We should buy consciously, consume consciously and eat consciously. Eat, mindful of the consequences of what you eat - for your body and for the planet.

[Update, October 2021: Light travels differently through the medium of sea water than it does through air. On land, animals can see a potential predator miles away, and this gives their brains time to devise a strategy to escape death. In the sea, there isn't this luxury. Therefore fish brains are less able to think about the future.]

This time eight years ago:
Tatra museum - my favourite Czech cars!

This time nine years ago:
Donald Tusk and Co. get re-elected

This time 10 years ago:
Poland's wonderful bread

This time 11 years ago:
An October Friday in Warsaw

Railway progress, Chynów

 After five days in Jeziorki, I returned to Jakubowizna on Saturday morning, and have remained here since - I am lucky enough not to have to go into the office, so I shall avoid travelling into Warsaw while the Covid cases continue to soar. Working from the działka - especially on sunny autumnal days - is a pleasure. I punctuate conference calls, editing and responding to emails with walks around the neighbourhood, and I'm impressed at the pace of work around the railway, in particular the roads.

During my five days' absence, new asphalt has been laid on both sides of the northern level crossing, which is now officially and finally open. All that's needed is a new pair of barriers. Today, the asphalt received white lines, traffic signs are up and all looks good. Above all, there's pavement, so my walks between the działka and the station have become safer - although there's still much work to go before the underground passage linking Jakubowizna to the platforms (and to Chynów) is opened. 

Below: new asphalt, new road markings - and new pavement. Looking towards Chynów station from the southern end of Jakubowizna shortly before sunset.

Below: once the underground passage is completed, I will be able to walk part of the way home (the busy part) along a pavement. There's less traffic on the other side. No overtaking! 30km/h speed limit! Safer roads, I hope.

Below: the modernised level crossing awaits new barriers. For the time being, the old ones are in use. Like other level crossings along the modernised line, they come down very early - some three minutes before the train passes, which can frustrate drivers. To the right, the road towards to my działka, which has also been finally asphalted all the way to the junction.

Work on the roads on this part of the project nears completion, but the new level crossing at the other end of the station, by Widok, is still closed. I expect it will be ready within a week to ten days at the latest.

Below: bonus shot - a rather alarming cloud hangs over Mińsk... Mazowiecki.

While it's still relatively warm, I shall endeavour to keep out of harm's way and spend as much time working from the działka as possible. This morning, the temperature in the house (without any heating switched on) was 20.5C, while overnight the temperature outside had fallen to 9C, so the thermal insulation applied to the walls is effective!

This time last year:
Radom line progress and promises

This time two years ago:
A short essay on economic patriotism

This time three years ago:
Things pass, things go, things remain the same

This time four years ago:
Feels like the U.S.A. again

This time five years ago:
In search of Wałbrzych's Gold Train

This time seven years ago:
Warsaw's craft ale revolution kicks off

This time nine years ago:
Poland's president inaugurates Moni's academic year 

This time 11 years ago:
Autumn evening, central Warsaw

This time 12 years ago:
Short-term future of suburban development

This time 13 years ago:
"You'll look funny when you're fifty"

Rural supply, rural demand

Out on the działka,  my nearest shops are in Chynów. There's a Mirabelka and a Top Market to choose from. Despite being located right in the heart of the garden of Poland, there's a dearth of local agricultural produce on sale. I was amazed to see Top Market selling fruit from South America, North Africa and the Far East, yet very little from Powiat Grójecki, our county.

Chynów has no farmers' market. If you open Targeo.pl, you'll find that all Chynów can offer is 'sprzedaż przydrożna' - roadside sales. Every Saturday, a number of pop-up stalls appear on the top end of ulica Wolska next to Top Market's car park, selling clothes, shoes and household goods.

At first sight it's odd that living in the Polish countryside, one cannot easily source local products from a local shop. If I want spinach, I have to buy Hortex-brand frozen spinach; even in season neither Mirabelka nor Top Market sell leafy fresh spinach. I can, however, buy leeks, nice tomatoes (malinowe - the best) and potatoes, but little more. No herbs in pots, no seasonal asparagus, no bundles of fresh szczypiorek...

Meanwhile in Warsaw (in particular in big suburban hypermarkets), the selection of food stuffs is mind-bogglingly huge. Whatever you want, in or out of season, local or exotic, you can find it easily. Why is it that agricultural products gravitate to the cities, whilst being unavailable in the places they are grown?

A simplistic answer is that this is due to an imbalance in the supply chain, caused by changing market demand, changing demographics and the response of the big retailers and wholesalers.

Agriculture in Poland is reshaping itself around the demands of modern retail. Here in Jakubowizna, my neighbours who are running efficient orchards have learned exactly what to do to maximise yields and crop quality, and get top zloty for their apples. Yet the left-behinds, who have not invested in manageable orchards, irrigation, crop protection or machinery, and still grow traditional apple varieties rather than those wanted by the supermarkets, are failing to make ends meet.

Beauteous apples destined for the tables of Warsaw

The gulf between rich farmer and poor farmer is opening up quickly. The former are buying up failed orchards, and consolidating them into ever-larger acreages, making it easier to negotiate directly with the buyers. But in the medium to long term, this will lead to falling biodiversity, lost varieties and an ever greater dependence on agrichemicals.

There is an answer. It is for small farmers to go organic and go local. But this needs a greater degree of organisation and sophistication than they can generally muster. Technology has part of the answer, using the tools and apps of e-commerce to make it easier to connect local grower with local buyer.

There is a demand. Everyone who has tasted the apples from my old trees says that while they look far worse than the perfectly uniform jabłka deserowe from the supermarket, they do have a taste which takes them back to childhood - and they are guaranteed 100% free of chemicals. But no supermarket buyer would ever buy apples as blemished as mine. And here's the problem.

It's not just about apples, potatoes, carrots and berries. Locally made cheese and sausage (kiełbasa) is starting to make its way to the big cities, where urban sophisticates give such artisan fare pride of place on their tables when entertaining, along with premium Polish wines. Again, the supply chains run one way - from field to the cities' forks. Na wsi there's little demand for a good, mature goats cheese, fine poultry-liver patés or gamey kabanos made from wild-boar meat. Certainly, the convenience-store chains, whose networks are penetrating deeper and deeper into the countryside, have no mechanism for dealing with individual producers at the local level. For them it's easier to sell packaged cheese slices and generic smoked-meat products from the big players. Add sliced-white toasting loaves, frozen vegetables, beer, vodka and cigarettes, and you have a reliable business model that ticks over nicely right across Central and Eastern Europe.

But it doesn't help the several hundred thousand Polish smallholders who are just a step up from subsistence level.

Technology can play a part. Imagine an app which tells you where the nearest 'wild' orchard is, what traditional varieties of fruit you can find there, and how much a kilo costs if you pick it yourself. Enter the orchard, switch on the GPS-enabled app, the farmer can see you're there, you pick as much as you need, and you pay the farmer directly to their online bank account.

But here's a scheme already up an running, founded by an old friend from Polish Saturday school and from the legendary Błękitna Trójka scout troop, Rafał Serafin. The film's in Polish, but it explains how local food from local producers is ending up on local tables. The pilot project is being replicated, but it needs to scale up to become a systemic solution for left-behind rural Poland. As Rafał says, subsistence farming in Poland is on a scale that tips elections. Read about the EU-funded Prosto od rolnika ('straight from the farmer') project in English as well as in Polish here.

 

Initiatives such as Koszyk lisiecki and Wiejska e-skrzynka have a big part to play in the EU's Green Deal, to spur recovery after the economic battering that Covid has delivered. This is win-win-win-win. Win for local producers who can get their food directly to consumers, cutting out the middleman. Win for local consumers, who get access to a wider choice of quality fare, produced locally. A win for the environment; less transport, less fumes and traffic. And a win for society, as an entire swathe of the population is lifted out of rural poverty (and thus less likely to vote for populists selling answers that sound simple but are wrong).

Rafał is looking for crowdfunding for a documentary film that will show how to get there in practical steps. One target group that he identifies is the children of smallholders, many of whom emigrated to the UK seeing few prospects for themselves in rural Poland. Rafał wants to make them think of the family farm as an investment opportunity with potential - and offers them a route map to do it.

To see how it works, click here and chip in, I already have.

This time last year:

Progress on the Radom line

[I'm amazed how much has been done in the past 12 months, especially given Covid! Czachówek-Warka is nearly ready, still much work to be done on the Chynów station passenger tunnel.]

This time two years ago:
Down with this sort of thing! Kler, reviewed.

This time four years ago:
Britain's Conservatives turn their backs on economic liberalism

This time seven years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi - Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time nine years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction 

This time ten years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time 12 years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development (How right I was!)

Last embers of summer

Here we go, another birthday... first one without my father, whose advanced years had hitherto given me perspective and hope. I used to be able to say: "How can I consider myself 'old' when I have a father who's 34 and half years older than me!" 

Well, he's gone; my father remains with me in my dreams - I dream of him more often than any other human being; I dreamt of him again last night. In that regular no-man's land dreamscape that's part Warsaw, part West London, we were on our way by bus from Jeziorki to Acton.

My father's death wasn't something I was prepared for this time last year. I had complacently expected him to sail on until 100 at least. His death, however, came quickly, mercifully, and unexpectedly. At the time of my father's passing, I suddenly became the Oldest Member of My Family; and my age is now upon me – although I should still realistically hope for another 25 to 30 years of active life.

I am mindful of the fact that my mother had her first heart attack weeks before her 59th birthday - the first of three, and that heart eventually killed her at the age of 88. Yet despite those heart attacks, she didn't change her lifestyle. She did zero exercise and ate cake for everybody. My father lived to 96 before his heart gave in. Question: do I have my mother's heart or my father's heart?

Update: I received the answer to this question on 5 April 2025. On what would have been my father's 102nd birthday, I had a heart attack. The cause: genetic. My liver was unable to process excess fat from the bloodstream, leading to clogged arteries in the heart. The solution: stents and a lifetime of taking meds.

Meanwhile, summer might be over, but the sun can still shine. My early-autumn birthday is becoming more and more of a metaphor for life with each passing year. 

The sun is out – make the most of it! Don't waste time! Do something! I finish my breakfast, and get a 6.5km walk in before the clouds close in from the south-west bringing rain by the late morning. Manage that – get back for a second breakfast, still no rain - so time for a sunny motorbike ride around the manor. Top temperature today - a wonderful 24C. Rain, accompanied by thunder, came at lunchtime; then office work occupied me while the dark clouds roiled northward. They passed in the early evening, leaving an hour and half of cloudless skies before a perfect sunset to enjoy on a second stroll.

I give thanks for my health, I am grateful that I've so far managed to avoid SARS CoV-19. I did not feel comfortable going into the office last week; the journey home in a crowded train on Thursday was not something I'd want to repeat while numbers of cases are rising dramatically. It feels safe in Jeziorki and in Jakubowizna, but the centre of Warsaw - getting in and out of it in particular - does not.

Time for a quick look at blood pressure, an important indicator to keep track of. Back in June 2017, I had a short episode of high blood pressure (don't really know what caused it), and was prescribed a lifetime of pill-taking. I said no. I will deal with it naturally. More walking, more exercising, better diet. And it seems to have worked - see table below. But as with everything - there's no room for complacency, don't take your conscious mind off it.

	Systolic	Diastolic	Pulse
4/10/2017	115	78	77
4/10/2018	116	79	75
4/10/2019	117	79	76
3/10/2020*	113	80	75

* Reading from yesterday as I don't have a blood-pressure monitor on the działka.

The systolic measurement is holding steady (below 120 is 'optimal'); the diastolic has crept up from 'optimal' (79 or less) to 'normal' (between 80 and 84); pulse stable. The American Heart Association states the normal resting adult human heart rate is 60–100 bpm, so 75 is around the middle there. Readings always taken first thing in the morning after waking up. I can but surmise that the doctor who prescribed me a lifetime's pill-taking more than three years ago has an agenda to shift product rather than to work with the patient for a more holistic approach to their health.

Exercise - so important. Press-ups: quality, not quantity. After filming myself knocking out 75 earlier this summer, I was appalled by how shallow and floppy they looked. So I'm now doing a minimum of 30, twice a day, but each one with a straight, plank-like back (imaginary tailbone tucked under the pelvis and thrust forward); chest down almost to the floor, then up until arms lock.

Walking: less this year than last, mainly because of lockdown. So I'm averaging 11,000 paces a day rather than the 12,000 I managed last year.

Pull-ups and weights: I'm so far ahead on last year that if I did no more until the end of 2020, I've already beaten 2019 in both categories. But of course, I shall carry on with both. And sit-ups, which I wasn't doing last year.

Portions of fresh fruit & veg: averaging 6.9 portions a day compared to 6.1 portions last year (and a mere 4.4 portions back in 2015). And alcohol - at the three-quarter mark of the year, 14.5 units a week average, compared to 17.3 weekly average across the first nine months of 2019. So the UK government guidelines of 14 units a week is within reach.

As the Polish Ministry of Health's slogan has it: 'I'm planning a long life' (Planuję długie życie). Good advice. Life is good, life is worth living, there are Things to be Done, Thoughts to be turned into Books, so staying positive is the key. Time for a walk.

Below: the forest to the east of my działka - pines and oaks.

Below: between the orchards and the tracks, Jakubowizna. A most special place.

Below: today's sunset over Wola Pieczyska, seen from across the tracks in Jakubowizna. Sublime end to the day.

Give thanks to the Lord.

This time last year:
It's that Day of the Year again!

This time two years ago:

Decline and growth

This time three years ago:
Health at 60

This time five years ago:
In search of vectors for migrating consciousness

This time six years ago:
Slipping from late summer to early autumn

This time seven years ago:
Turning 56

This time eight years ago: 
Turning 55 

This time nine years ago:
Turning 54

This time ten years ago:
Turning 53

This time 13 years ago:
Turning 50

Words that pop into the mind, unbidden

 An interesting phenomenon, I wonder whether anyone else experiences this, is sensitive to it - or am I unique? It's not a frequent thing; this is something that happens once every other day or every three days; I'm doing something - around the house, at work, on a walk, and suddenly, out of nowhere comes a word, interrupting my train of thought, a proper noun, a name of a person or place jumps into my consciousness. I must point out that this is soundless, not an auditory hallucination, more like a telepathic insertion.

Over time, I have learnt to notice this phenomenon, and examine it. First of all, I winnow through my immediate train of thought from the past few minutes, seeing whether there's been any thread or link that could have sparked that word, by association. If yes - dismiss. If no, I roll the word around my consciousness, seeking any other associations - with what? With anything I've read in recent weeks, or years even? Again, if it's an identifiable memory that's suddenly resurfaced - dismiss.

But these words which I will share below have passed these filters unscathed. They are genuinely puzzling. None of them I've ever knowingly pondered. Yet *PAFF!* and here there they are.

What's all this about? 

These, then, are the puzzling proper nouns (nazwa własna) that have popped up, just like that, into my consciousness, unbidden, unassociated, unexplained, over the past month. At the beginning of last month I started to make a note of these in my notebook, for future appraisal. Popping into my stream of consciousness in the kitchen, over the laptop, or out on the street, they appeared the following order:

Capharnaum -- Demosthenes -- Pargeter (surname) -- Picayune (newspaper) -- Holy Sepulchre -- Karolinska Institute -- Brickyard 'M' -- Methuselah -- Scutari. What does this all mean?

There are two explanations: one is - this is a physical phenomenon of the brain - not one we understand, but nevertheless something rooted entirely in the tangible, within my skull.

The other is metaphysical, supernatural, magical, mystical, other-worldly meaning - there is some deeper significance, some message that I, Michael Dembinski, should... do what? 

We are entering the Coen brothers' world of A Serious Man again. Was Reb Groshkover a dybbuk, or not? What was the meaning of the Hebrew letters found on the inside of Russell Krauss's lower incisors?

As I said, this is a regular, ongoing phenomenon; random names, place names; proper nouns. 

Let's have a closer look at last month's main selection. Three are from the Bible (Capharnaum, a fishing village to the north of the Lake of Galilee, is mentioned in all four Gospels; the Holy Sepulchre is the tomb is which Jesus was interred after the Crucifixion; Methuselah is mentioned in the Book of Genesis, he lived to the age of 969 years old, and was the grandfather of ark-builder Noah). Demosthenes was an ancient Greek statesman; the New Orleans Picayune existed under that title from 1837 to 1914 after which it became the Times-Picayune. The Karolinska Institute is a research-led medical university in Stockholm, and Scutari was home to a British Army barracks and hospital (of Florence Nightingale fame) at the time of the Crimean War. Pargeter and Brickyard M - too broad to pin down.

They do seem like random misfirings of long-term stored memory; neuroscience, however, has more urgent tasks to take on that looking into this particular phenomenon, so I'm not hopeful of a satisfactory answer from science. Seeking metaphysical answers may take a long time, a fruitless search for meaning. A long wait one way or the other. In the meanwhile - it's fun, it's interesting. I shall continue jotting down these proper nouns as they come to me.

To quote from A Serious Man, "Please - accept the mystery."

This time two years ago:
Hops there for the taking
[Still making hop juice this year!]

This time three years ago:
Two weeks and two days of travel

This time four years ago:
Final end to a local landmark

This time nine years ago:
Independence Day

This time ten years:
Out and about in Jeziorki

This time 11 years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 12 years ago:
Puławska by night

W(h)ither the DK50?

It runs from Ciechanów to Ostrów Mazowiecka; the DK (droga krajowa = national road) 50 is the de facto western, southern and eastern ring-road of Warsaw. And linking Ostrów Mazowiecki to Ciechanów is the DK60, which closes the ring to the north.

Just north of Żyradów, the DK50 crosses the A2 motorway. Now, the A2 forms a part of the European Route E30, from Cork in Ireland to Omsk near the Russian border with Kazakhstan. The central part of this 6,530km-long route is motorway all the way from the port at Hook of Holland, through Berlin, Poland, Belarus, into Russia then Moscow, Chelyabinsk in the Urals... well, nearly all the way - you see there's a gap. 

Heading east, you hit that gap on ulica Puławska, just 4km north of Jeziorki. For international traffic moving between Germany and Belarus and Russia, reaching the end of the S2 means an hour and a bit of crawling through Warsaw's congested urban roads, traffic lights every few hundred metres, and then over 120km of secondary road with just a 66km stretch of new motorway bypassing Minsk Mazowiecki.

The mandated alternative for heavy goods traffic in transit has long been the DK50, indeed it has been for decades before the A2 motorway ever reached Warsaw. The southern part of the ring, from Sochaczew (in the days when east-west traffic used the old Poznań-Warsaw road) to Minsk Mazowiecki dates back to 1977, and was created to keep heavy trucks out of the capital.

The Sochaczew-Minsk Maz transit route (named the 17 between 1977-85 and the 717 between 1985-2000) currently forms the southern section of the DK50. Much of the time, there is a high volume of international heavy goods vehicles with TIR plates, heading east to west and west to east. Over the years, the DK50 has been successively upgraded, in particular with bypasses built around towns and villages that were particularly scarred by traffic. 

Such a village was Chynów, and its neighbour to the west, Drwalew. Work on this local bypass was completed at the end of 2007. The result is that the 'old' DK50 is now quiet, carrying little more than local traffic. Trucks roar past on the 'new' stretch, which at the closest is just 1.25km from my działka in Jakubowizna.

Can I hear them from there? The answer is - yes, when the wind is blowing from the west, north-west or north - but not at all when the wind is blowing from the east, the south-east or south. However, as I walk closer towards Chynów, yes, you can hear the DK50, loud and clear.

But this will change. Within a few months*, the S2 extension through Ursynów will open, crossing the Vistula on a new bridge, linking up across the river with the existing 66km-stretch of the A2 motorway that skirts Minsk Maz to the north. Though not a toll-road, the S2 will be an attractive alternative to the DK50 for much of the transit traffic, despite the ban on trucks over 16 tonnes in weight entering Warsaw between 07:00-10:00 and 16:00 and 20:00.

My guess is that the majority of off-peak transit will switch to the new A2-S2-A2 to get from Żyrardów to Minsk, rather than sticking with the old route. The new motorway/expressway route will be 87km, the current DK50 route is 114km. Not only will the new route save 27km, it will also be at least dual carriageway, whereas much of the DK50 is single carriageway.

But greater change is planned. This is grandly named Obwodnica Aglomeracji Warszawskiej (OAW - Warsaw Agglomeration Ring-road), bearing the number A50. Announced a year ago, the A50 will orbit Warsaw but at a tighter radius than the current DK50-DK60 ring. The OAW is to planned to be opened in 2027 (but as we know, this is highly unlikely). Crucially, the OAW is to be a part of the government's flagship CPK project (central communication port) in Baranów, a giant super-connector airport, high-speed rail hub and motorway network.

Looking at current plans for the OAW, there are four variants for bypassing Warsaw to the south, each of them will be closer to the city than the DK50. Assuming the OAW happens (I have my doubts, mainly as the prospects for mass airport-travel are bleak), the DK50 will be left as a ghost road, as quiet as Route 66 became when Interstate 10 bypassed most of it.

If that does happen, many of the service stations, bars and truck stops along the way will close. This happened when Chynów and Drwalew were bypassed. 

Below: hurtling through at speed, drivers would hardly spot this old bar...

Below: this one, also long-closed, offered more amenities, including truck parking across the road. But it's set off a way back from the new bypass. 

The Chynów left behind by this major international transit route is today a quieter, safer place. No doubt some businesses suffered, but now its people can cross the main street without fear, trucks no longer thunder past and the place has taken on the air of calm and prosperous little country town.

* UPDATE DECEMBER 2021: I was being over-optimistic again; "a few months" turned out to be 14.]

This time last year
A change in the weather

This time two years ago:
Zamek Topacz classic car museum

This time five years ago:
Curry comes to Jeziorki
[didn't stay long - but then not a good one]

This time six years ago:
Why we should all try to use less gas

This time seven years ago:
Polish supermarket chain advertises on London buses

This time 12 years ago:
Well-shot pheasants

The real economy will prevail

A few years ago, Moni visited Berlin for a weekend and concluded that "everyone in Berlin's a DJ." The party moved from one club, where a friend was playing a set, onto another venue, and then another until daybreak and beyond. The pandemic's varying effects on economies around the world has reminded me of that insight.

Substitute 'DJ' with 'service-sector worker'. Like management consultant, PR advisor, travel agent, translator, events organiser. Jingle-writers working on radio ads. 

Now, for this thought exercise, let's imagine for a moment an island economy in which everyone works in the service sector. 

A lawyer needs an accountant, who needs IT support from a firm that requires a social-media expert, who needs a mentor, who in turn needs an accountant, who from time to time needs the services of a lawyer. And sales! And marketing! And new business development!

And so a merry-go-round of invoices is issued, for work done in supporting each other's businesses. Everyone needs technology. Desktops, laptops, mobiles - which need broadband, routers, apps, operating systems and synchronisation. The new oil, as we constantly hear nowadays, is data. IT guys keep everyone's devices connected to everyone else's devices. And everyone needs an office to sit in, and furniture to sit on. And they need to get to that office. And there's the state, which needs money to pay for roads so people can get to their offices and schools to provide the next generation of office workers and hospitals to care for the sick accountants and SEO managers and travel agents, so everyone pays tax - and the accountant accounts for the VAT on the lawyer's bills to the PR advisor for drafting a contract for services rendered to the social-media start-up. Banks lend money here and take deposits there, ensuring financial liquidity for one and all. 

I'm minded of Julian Tuwim's Wszyscy dla wszystkich from 1947, (along with a rough translation by me):

Notice the tangibility and local nature of the economy that Tuwim describes. Shoes, houses, clothes, loaves of bread, essentials of life, made and delivered within your village. No lawyers or accountants or PR agents or network architecture designers in Tuwim's village.

[There's a part of 'services' that's firmly rooted in the tangible economy - maintenance and repair. As I write, there's a roofer on our roof in Jeziorki, fixing a number of minor issues (for the first time in 19 years), before the photovoltaic panels are installed. Repairing things - buildings - cars - clothes - laptops - tools - anything that needs repairing or replacing - is, in my books, part of the tangible economy. As is maintenance - preventing the need for repair.

And then there's retail. The intermediary between manufacturer and consumer. Whether it's the shopkeeper in Chynów selling bicycle inner tubes, scythe blades and broom handles and wire by the metre, the multinational hypermarket in Piaseczno or the courier that delivers goods bought online, retail is an essential part of the economy that we cannot do without.

Then cometh the lockdown...

It swiftly separated the essential from non-essential sectors of the economy.

The tangible economy must continue to function. And in Poland that's what it did. Lidl on the corner stayed open (though only 16 shoppers at any one time, hour-long queue to enter). Construction work on the S7 extension continued (one guy per bulldozer). Factories did what was needed to keep producing, with appropriate distance between workstation. Farmers ploughed, sowed, fertilised, irrigated and harvested their crops. Workshops kept fixing cars, buses and vans. And motorbikes.

Google's Mobility index gave us some fascinating insights into the different responses of economies to the Covid-19 lockdown. The latest one, from 11 September, shows that 20% fewer Poles were in their workplace compared to the baseline established before the pandemic. The figure for the UK was 39%.
And at the height of lockdown, on 17 April, Google reported that 42% fewer Poles were at work whilst 68% of Britons were staying away from their workplace. This is clear looking at GDP in the second quarter; the UK contracted by 20.4%, while Poland's shrank by 'only' 8.2%.

My great fear for the British economy is that it has strayed too far from the tangible, deep into the realms of sophistication. Manufacturing, agriculture and construction represent but 18.0% of the value added to the UK's GDP. In the case of Poland, it's 31.0% (World Bank, 2019). Which means that 82% of the UK's GDP comes from services - and 69% of Poland's. Services that can be postponed or done without altogether are far more vulnerable to the disruption caused by pandemic than 

Listening to business managers and entrepreneurs from around Poland, I can see that some sectors are indeed doing better than others. New inward investment is being driven by corporate refugees fleeing China (for supply-chain reasons), India (near-shoring for better quality of outsourced services) and Brexit Britain (for obvious reasons). 

Some services are more tangible than others. Hairdressing (I'd almost put it into the 'repair and maintenance' category. You can't export hairdressing. But if you can do accountancy from home, you can do accountancy from a cheaper country. The real economy peril that the UK is in right now is that services have become far more portable thanks to IT and globalisation; if services shrink in the same way that manufacturing shrunk, and agriculture before that - what will be left to keep the UK economy going forward? Not something most Brexit voters considered, I'll be bound.

This time two years ago:
Polish railway stations with names in two languages

This time three years ago:
Two weeks - six cities

This time four years ago:
A guide to naming streets in Poland and the UK

This time nine years ago:
A glorious month

This time ten years ago:
My maternal grandfather

This time 11 years ago:
My home-made fixie bike

This time 12 years ago:
Well-shot pheasants

We still don't really know where we are

Up, up, up go the numbers - new cases - a new record. Poland, UK, US - Covid surging everywhere. And although numbers of deaths are also hitting new records here in Poland, they are no longer rising in step with new infections, suggesting that the disease is becoming less deadly, the treatment more effective.

But what of Covid's after-effects? Stories of people who recovered, left hospital months ago but are still feeling far from well are legion. I have read on Twitter that in the US, health insurance companies are allegedly announcing that they won't be extending or writing new policies for people who've been tested positive for Covid-19 - even though they may have been asymptomatic. In the UK, only 8% of the population tested have shown they have antibodies to Covid-19. So a long, long way to go before herd immunity kicks in.

The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, which in early summer seemed to be a sprint, now looks like a marathon. Unsurprisingly, Putin's announcement that Russia has one has turned out to be dubious. AstraZeneca announced that a volunteer involved in clinical trials had shown side effects, and the trials were temporarily halted - this is normal for clinical trials, one can only hope for the best.

Meanwhile, the global economy stutters. Some countries are doing better than others, for various reasons (a separate post about this soon). We don't  know where we are with this - businesses can't plan, are reticent to invest. But the bolder ones are taking bets on how the post-Covid world will look. We just don't know when a post-Covid world will emerge.

Simply from the epidemiological point of view - no one knows. On my Twitter account, I pinned the following tweet from the president of the Polish Virological Society: "We have calculations that show that by 7 April there may be 10,000 cases in Poland and by 11 April, 20,000 cases are expected. We hope that this will be the peak and the epidemic will start to fade away." This, from an expert. Note the two dates: 7 April and 11 April. And between them, a doubling of cases. Right now - even with the massive jump in cases we're seeing in Poland - cases are doubling every five weeks - not four days. And the epidemic is not fading away. I predict the second wave will really smack into us around the end of the first week of November, once the clocks have gone back, once the weather turns to dull grey rain drizzle and sleet, and our physical and psychological immune systems have weakened at the prospect of five more months of darkness and cold.

There are fewer deaths per thousand cases. But what of the long-term effects of the virus on the body? Some viruses (like the common cold and flu) come and go and leave no trace. Others, like herpes or HPV linger in the organism for the rest of your life, just waiting until your immune system is weakened by insufficient sleep, poor diet, stress, or compromised by another infection; then they reemerge to assert themselves again. It seems that Covid-19 falls into this category.

How should governments react? Boris Johnson's communication skills have failed entirely. When something like this happens to a prime minister at a time of unprecedented national crisis, you know his days in office are numbered.

So much depends on common sense within a population, and common sense is a matter of education and innate intelligence. The media noise around the current upsurge in cases will trigger behavioural changes in different populations in different ways. Some will take extra care - stay away from other people as much as possible, wash hands, keeps hands away from face, wear a mask in public, observe social distancing. Some will consciously ignore these guidelines, while others will just bumble on as they have done, not thinking, not reacting, not showing gratitude for good health to date.

A final thought to bear in mind. At the beginning of March of this year, had every single human being on this planet self-isolated themselves for 14 days - at whatever cost - the pandemic would have been over by the end of March. That's it. SARS-CoV-2 would have been dead. History. Wiped off the face of the earth, literally. Yes, there might have been deaths - maybe even a lot more deaths than Covid-19 has caused up to now, but it would have been over. Could we - as a species - have managed that?

This time six years ago:

Thoughts occasioned by today being equilux

This time nine years ago:
The magic of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand's Marlborough region

This time ten years ago:
Grandson of Poles elected to lead UK's Labour Party

This time 12 years ago:
Give me sunshine!