W-wa Jeziorki

What surprises does the weather hold?

2026-10-31T21:16:29.985+01:00

One of the first things I do after feeding the cats in the morning is to check the weather app, to see what's the optimal time for my daily walk. Today, the forecast seemed totally at odds with reality. Rather than simply resign myself to staying in all day because app say 'rain all day', I chose to go out after an early lunch and risk it.

Below: rain clouds are sliding in from the north west. A few minutes later, I reach Grobice and the rain starts pelting down. I wait it out under the shelter in the park, watching the blue in the sky pushing the grey towards the south east.

Below: new pavement that allows pedestrians to walk in safety from Grobice to the DK50 and Sułkowice beyond. Another valuable infrastructure investment delivered!

Below: looking westwards along the DK50 towards the railway line. Note the tractor towing crates of apples; the harvest is slowly coming to an end.

Below: just by the viaduct, a new pharmaceutical warehouse is being built by the DK50.

The blue sky was sporadic and more grey clouds rolled in, soon extinguished the sun. Below: the local Chynów to Sułkowice road rises over the DK50 to the right, the service road winds along the foot of the embankment.

More rain fell on me on the way home. Left: looking across at the station buildings at Chynów, the railway signals mast on the horizon.

Across the tracks, through the pedestrian tunnel, which at the moment is being repaired. The drainage of the tunnel proved to be inadequate; after heavy autumn rain, the tunnel floor at either end was often flooded – and when frozen in winter, it was a danger to people hurrying for their trains. And once up on the Jakubowizna side, here's the view towards Warsaw, below. Just to the left of the mobile base station, you can see the top of Varso tower, the EU's tallest building. Further to the left (amid the power lines), the grey shape of the Warsaw Unit tower.

Below: up the lane, on my way home. This reminds that it will soon be time to drive down the hill to Pan Piotr's warsztat (left) and get my tyres and oil changed for winter.

Another month with a daily average of over 13,000 paces. And October has come and gone without any overnight air frost, and only one morning of ground frost. Climate change is noticeable.

This time last year:

Letters to an Imaginary Grandson (IX)

This time two years ago:
Valencia and manmade climate change

This time three years ago:
On death

This time five years ago:
Improvements on the Radom line

This time six years ago:
Rural rights of way, revisited

This time seven years ago:

Cause of death

This time eight years ago:
Opole in the late-October sunshine

This time nine years ago:
Work begins in earnest on the Karczunkowska viaduct

This time 11 years ago:
Sublime autumn day in Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
CitytoCity, MalltoMall

This time 13 years ago:
(Internet) Radio Days

This time 13 years ago:
Another office move

This time 15 years ago:
Manufacturing a City of Culture

This time 16 years ago:
My thousandth post

This time 17 years ago:
Closure of ul. Poloneza

This time 18 years ago:
Scenes from a suburban petrol station

Losing the plot – paying attention to attention

2026-10-30T10:12:23.252+01:00

I'm about fifty pages into Microcosm by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, the book I'm currently reading. The book is a history of the city of Wrocław, whose turbulent past encapsulates that of Central Europe as a whole (full review in a post in about three weeks' time).

The book's prologue, Götterdämmerung – the fall of Festung Breslau in 1945 – was utterly absorbing. I read through it in one go, full of drama and violence, the clash of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Chapter One, however, jumps back to the palaeolithic times and the beginnings of human settlement. This is not my most favoured period of history... consequently I'm finding it harder to stay focused on this story. As my eyes scan over the words, my mind is wandering...

And I can recall this precise sensation – from school, from university, from reading boring press releases at work in the 1980s. How long is this chapter? How much more of it? It is as dull as sifting through soil looking for tiny pottery shards on an archeological dig. I want to get on to the Piasts and the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs, but I'm stuck on archeological finds such as fish-hooks and flints from the fifth century BC. I want to skip ahead.

BUT NO! STOP!

Here's the fundamental difference in the way my mind works, age 69, and how it did when I was a teenager. I am aware of my awareness. I am aware that the words passing beneath my eyes hold little interest to me, especially after such a vivid opening to the book, soaked in blood and destruction. And now I'm reading about islands in swampy rivers, the migrations of primitive tribes – the Slenzanians, the Marcomanni, the Przeworskers, the Venedi, none of whom I'd ever heard of. A little peek into the next chapter, maybe?

NO! I have learnt enough about learning to know that every detail, every knot along the thread, has its importance. In a good history book, seemingly inconsequential details can acquire significance hundreds of pages later. Skip over one of them, and you might miss a link in the chain of cause and effect.

And so, having caught myself in the act of skim-reading and not taking anything in, I stop. I consider where in the narrative I (literally) lost the plot, and return to that very paragraph. And I start reading again from there. After a page or two of more focused effort, once again I find my mind drifting. And again, I catch myself in this process. Again, I go back to identify the paragraph where my attention began to wander. And again, I proceed with a more consciously determined attempt to read with understanding. Slowly and thoroughly. Got it? Good.

What's going on? I'm recognising that I've stopped taking in the words I'm reading. And, aged 69, I now have the metacognitive control required to bring myself back to the point at which comprehension broke down. And I'm making the conscious effort to go back, despite the temptation to skip ahead.

A teenaged me, reading an uninteresting passage would have experienced the same wandering of attention as I have just now, but not noticed it, and jumped forward to something more interesting. The older me recognises the departure from the task. It's not an increase in the quality and quantity of my attention; it's an improvement in my ability to notice when it slips, and manage it back on task.

Metacognition is the process of thinking about thinking; recognising when one's thoughts have strayed, and consciously steering them back on course. I could not do this when I was young! (Or if I could, I was not even anything I was aware of.) Age doesn't automatically confer this ability; it develops through experience, practice and self-observation. This ability varies between individuals. It is a capacity I have learned to cultivate; this is not as such a universal benefit of ageing.

This time, I try to get into the subject matter more deeply. I look up the Wikipedia page about the Przeworsk culture, and learn something new. Why, I've even been to Przeworsk, unaware that the town gave its name to an Iron Age material culture that existed across southern Poland for around 700 (!) years from the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD. Then I dip into the Marcomanni page, and again I learn something new (the etymology of Bohemia). Wikipedia really is the wonder of our age to anyone with curiosity. In my childhood, any unanswered question that bothered me long enough would have to wait until the fortnightly visit to Ealing Public Library. In the 1960s, curiosity had to survive the delay between wondering about something and obtaining the information that might satisfy it.

Nowadays, curiosity can be rewarded immediately. But instant gratification also makes it easy to pursue another question, then another, then another, until one has forgotten the original enquiry – the dreaded rabbit hole. The internet has simultaneously made it easier than ever to chase up some arcane topic but easier than ever to abandon that chase halfway, distracted by a tunnel leading off the original rabbit hole.

Thinking about this at the meta-level: yes, it's easier today to get distracted (have I got any more new replies or likes to my recent Facebook posts?) but it's also much easier to find out answers to questions you may have.

Back from five minutes on Facebook. Gosh, yes. Self discipline. [I have a craving for dried mango, and have lacked the self-discipline to stop myself from eating 1.2kg of the stuff in under three weeks. Yes, dried mango counts towards my daily fruit-and-veg, but Google informs me that a mere 30g of dried fruit constitutes a portion; eating more than 30g per day has no health benefits. A waste, then, because I didn't have the self-discipline to stop.]

Here's a distinction worth making: when I stop reading to look up the Marcomanni, am I being distracted, or am I deepening my understanding? The distraction takes me further into the subject rather than away from it. Contrast that with Facebook, where I emerge five minutes later knowing nothing more about early Central European history, but quite possibly having forgotten why I put the book down in the first place.

I am not arguing that all distraction is bad; I'm saying that we need to become conscious of where our attention is leading us.

Self-discipline – so important. The clouds have moved away, the sun is out, the cats are asleep – time for my walk.

And as I walk, I ponder more upon this subject further. Getting absorbed into any activity, be it reading, writing or painting – for example, getting into that flow state. Being 'in the flow' means having to expend little to no conscious effort in staying focused; you barely notice the passage of time. You are engrossed. This is the opposite of the effortful attention required to concentrate on something that is not naturally holding your interest. Dozens of distractions are lurking within your easy reach. Getting into the flow state requires the self-discipline to persist through the less immediately rewarding bits.

Our minds have two competing tendencies. One is to wander about, covering ground, seeking novelty, new sensations, fresh information. The other is to settle upon one thing and pursue it relentlessly, to the exclusion of everything else. We all experience both tendencies to varying degrees. The trick is not to eliminate either one, but to recognise which is taking charge at any particular moment.

Metacognition. Pay attention to attention.

This time last year:
Cherish the Morning Light

This time two years ago:
Post-consumerist hygiene

This time three years ago:
October's benign end

This time four years ago:
Disclosure day tomorrow?

This time five years ago:
Coping with time change (go to bed an hour earlier!)

This time six years ago:
A sustainable food system for rural Poland

This time seven years ago:
Sifting through a life

This time nine years ago:
Throwing It All Away

This time ten years ago:
Hammer of Darkness falls on us again
[This is what going to be early in winter protects us from!]

This time 11 years ago:
The working week with the clocks gone back

This time 13 years:
Slowly on the mend after calf injury

This time 14 years ago:
Thorunium the Gothick

This time 15 years ago:
Łódź Widzew or Widź Łódzew

This time 17 years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden

Beating the time-change blues

2026-10-27T14:02:46.955+01:00

The clocks have gone back. All of a sudden, the sun sets at twenty past four in the afternoon. To quote Jacek Koba, "they give you an extra hour in bed in late October, but they'll steal an hour of your daylight every evening for the next five months".

The time change no longer holds any fears for me. I have learnt to deal with the Hammer of Darkness. Stick to summer time the whole year round! Tonight, as for the past three nights, I will go to bed at half past nine (new time) and wake up at half past five (new time) and hang on to that precious hour of evening daylight which they would otherwise have stolen from me.

The only clock to follow is your body clock, not the clock they use to tell you what their time is. (Shame on the politicians for not being able to scrap the nonsense that is the time change. Many people suffer mental health issues as a result of the autumn one, and heart attacks and strokes from the spring one.)

This morning I woke at half past five; by six thirty (seven thirty according to my body clock), the sun had risen, the cats have been fed, coffee had been made and enjoyed, and it was time for an early morning walk. Outside it was +1°C according to my digital thermometer, but frozen dew on vegetation told of ground frost. Puddles, on the other hand were entirely ice-free.

I love these intense autumnal colours. Never mind the temperature; what counts is the clarity of the sky.

Below: looking east at the thermonuclear phenomenon for which we must give thanks.

Below: looking the other way, at a full moon descending in the western skies. As with the sun we owe the moon so much, including our very existence.

Below: with the first frost, it is at last time to gather the sloes, fruit of the blackthorn, prunus spinosa, or in Polish, tarnina. To be gathered after the first frost, for the making of sloe gin. I shall be steeping these in 95% spirytus rektyfikowany for a few months, with sugar to taste. (The red blobs out of focus are rose hips.) Picking blackthorn in the cold, without gloves, mindful of the thorns, isn't easy, still, I have gathered half a kilo, enough for a litre of sloe gin.

Photos from yesterday's afternoon walk. Below: house, car and cat (one of the dozen – Hipek, aka Ol' Mr. Heaps), who awaits my return.

Below: two new houses are being built at the bottom end of my line, near the railway line. The builders are working rapidly to achieve stan surowy zamknięty – 'raw state, closed' – before winter sets in, whereby the unfinished structure is enclosed from the elements, with windows, doors and roof in place.

Below: a Whovian sky, looking towards Chynów station. [Shock discovery: William Hartnell was 13 years younger than I am now when he finally stepped down from his role as the grandfatherly First Dr Who…]

Below: view across the fields to Jakubowizna beyond. This is next June's crop of strawberries, awaiting the straw that protects the young plants from frost and gives the berry its name. My raspberry bushes, on the other hand, are still producing fruit – I gathered 90g yesterday (more than one portion!), and more than double that two days ago.

Below: for apple-growers, this is the busiest time of the years, getting the harvest in before the frosts arrive in earnest. Each crate filled with quality dessert apples is worth 600 złotys at current prices.

Left: Dąbrowa Duża is surrounded by forest to its north and east. I discovered that what I'd assumed for years was just a drive leading to a private property is actually a public road (albeit untarmacked) that's a neat short-cut across the village.

Talking of 'years', it's now nine years since I found my działka in Jakubowizna. An excellent purchase in an excellent location. I could never move back into a city or its suburbs. Green acres is the place to be. Indeed. Having said that, it's always good to know that I can be in central Warsaw in under an hour if necessary. The 08:42 train from Chynów gets me to W-wa Służewiec in 23 minutes, in good time for my 09:30 physio appointment.

Below: the forest between Dąbrowa Duża and Machcin II, leaves beginning to turn gold. In the strong sunlight, the path is easy to tread.

Below: the lane just outside my działka. It will soon be dark, but I will be up well before the next sunrise.

I have just used AI to do my first-ever bit of coding! I wanted to build an app that lets me know, at any time, how long I have to the next sunrise/next sunset. I now have a small box on my desktop that informs me that sunset will be at 16:18 today – in 02 hours, 17 minutes and 10 seconds. I told Google Gemini what I needed, and in simplest terms to explain to me what to do. And so I have used AI to build myself a custom app keeping me aware of celestial movements above me. The whole process of building and testing the app took just over half an hour.

This time three years ago:
Cross-country train-travel tales

This time five years ago:
Mother of Invention

This time six years ago:
Autumnal lockdown walk

This time seven years ago:

End of the warm and sunny part of autumn

This time eight years ago:
Remont of Metro bridge over Puławska

This time nine years ago:
We are what we read, what we watch, what we listen to

This time 13 years ago:
Extraordinarily warm autumn

This time 14 years ago:
On behalf of the work-shy community

This time 15 years ago:
Classic truck cavalcade

This time 16 years ago
Suburban back-roads clogged with commuters

This time 17 years ago:
Autumn gold, Łazienkowski Park

This time 18 years ago:
Quintessential autumnal Jeziorki

Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone

2026-10-23T18:38:20.502+02:00

Having read a book about Siberia, how Russia expanded eastwards to the Bering Straits and beyond, I was keen to compare that story with the westward expansion of the United States. [Many thanks to Bob for suggesting and lending me this utterly compelling book, which has been with me for the past month and half.

The author, Irving Stone, is famous for The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Lust for Life, his biographies of Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh respectively. The title comes from Sam Walter Foss’s 1894 poem The Coming American: "Bring me men to match my mountains, Bring me men to match my plains, Men with empires in their purpose, And new eras in their brains." Stone's book was first published in 1956, 62 years after those lines were written – but already 70 years ago.

The opening sentence of Men to Match My Mountains speaks of building a civilisation; the closing sentence calls the American Far West “the cradle of a culture freer and richer than any the world had known”. These bookends suggest that the opening up of California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado by European settlers was something destined from the outset to develop into a great land – in stark contrast with Siberia and Russia's Far East that was merely plundered for its natural resources, from furs and timber to gold and oil. But the narrative itself is far more complex, and the author Irving Stone focuses on the drive, determination, courage – and yes, greed – of the men who shaped the Far West in the second half of the 19th century.

The book tells several overlapping stories, beginning with the first settlers from the East moving over mountain ranges and deserts to reach California, then a part of a newly independent Mexico. The settlers to this Eden quickly revolted against the rather lax and arbitrary Mexican rule. This was a time when a hundred soldiers was a huge force that could settle territorial disputes one way or another. The next story is that of the Gold Rush of 1849, the subsequent discoveries of silver in Colorado, and their vast macroeconomic and social impact. Interwoven into these narratives, Stone tells of how the Mormons created Utah, and how the federal government clamped down on their polygamous practices. And then we read about the building of the first transcontinental railroad, and the unethical practices of the men who ran it. Finally, we see how the four states became integrated into the political and economic maps of the USA. Throughout the book, the author explains how institutions came about; the rule of law, education, health services, and how Washington DC extended its rule over these territories as they became states.

What makes the book fascinating for me is how much information in it was entirely new to me, or maybe not new, but offering me new insights. Bear in mind that 50 years ago this month, I began my first year of Comparative American Studies at Warwick University – I regret this book was not on the set list (but then it is hardly a revisionist Marxist critique of US history). Stone believes that the West was won by strong individual personalities, not by ideologies.

The most striking fact from the first chapter: to get to San Francisco from Boston or New York in 1840 took the best part of six months however you went. By sailing ship around Cape Horn, it was a journey of 17,000 miles through some of the roughest seas on Earth. Across the Isthmus of Panama it was a shorter route, but with the dangers of malaria and yellow fever ever-present in the jungles, and no regular shipping route up along the Pacific coast. The most dangerous route was across the American continent, west of the Missouri River. To reach California, travellers had to scale the Rocky Mountains, traverse desert, and then face the sheer granite cliffs of the Sierra Nevada. There was, in 1840, not a single road that could take a waggon all the way. Early settlers would have to dismantle their waggons and haul them over mountain ridges using block and tackle. Pianos, printing-presses and entire iron-foundries came to California this way. And the natives tended to be murderously unfriendly.

Stone's writing style gives the book a memorable feel. He seems to have deliberately used the writing conventions of late-19th century newspapers, which he drew on to a large degree for the facts underpinning the narrative. [It's worth noting at this point that Samuel Langhorne Clemens became Mark Twain while writing for a newspaper in Virginia City at the height of the Nevada silver rush, which had lured him there.]

I found the story of the Mormons fascinating. Last week, having made the mistake of drinking a strong cup of coffee mid-afternoon, I was unable to go back to sleep after waking at 2am, so I spent the next two hours reading about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Mormonism, Brigham Young and Salt Lake City on Wikipedia. After the killing of Smith by non-Mormons, Brigham Young led the Latter Day Saints west to Utah. The man had 43 wives (according to Stone, 54 according to Wikipedia), marrying eight in his peak year. For the Federal government, such egregious behaviour was entirely unacceptable, US marshals were brought in to track down and prosecute recalcitrant polygamists. In the end, the Mormons gave in, banned the practice, and by 1894, Utah became one of the United States.

It's hard to imagine that anyone today could dream up 600 pages of a book compelling enough to persuade 12,000 people to follow them and live together in a theocratic community. Joseph Smith did just that, dictating the entire Book of Mormon in about eight weeks in 1829, when he was 23. To this day, there are many Mormons who believe in the literal truth of the Book of Mormon. But then there are vast numbers of believers in other religions who believe in the literal truth of their sacred scripture to be literal word of God – it's just that their holy books have been around for longer.

The story of the ruthlessness of the four railway tycoons who drove the Central Pacific east over the Sierra Nevadas to link with the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 is well told. There are two stories here – the building of the line from the west, up and over the mountains, using large amounts of imported Chinese labour – and the monopolistic exploitation of the line once completed, sucking the profitability out of any business that needed the railroad to get its goods to markets back east. The profits were used to buy Congressmen who effectively kept other railroads out of California. The monopoly created vast wealth for the four men; one of whom was Leland Stanford, who ended up endowing the university named after him. It was only after the Santa Fé railroad reached the Pacific that honest competition broke out – the price of a one-way ticket from Chicago to San Francisco fell from $100 to $10, with special offers down to $1.

I spent a goodly amount of time on Google Maps Street View, poring over images of Salt Lake City, Virginia City, epicentre of Nevada's silver rush, of the mountain passes now carrying multi-lane superhighways of air-conditioned cars where once horse-drawn waggons could not traverse. “They paved paradise. put up a parking lot,” to quote Joni Mitchell.

The opening up of America's Far West is a thrilling story, and Irving Stone does an excellent job telling it. Having read it, I have a better understanding of the tech bros, populism, limitless greed, frontier justice and other aspects of contemporary American society. Having said that, gimme California over Siberia any day.

This time last year:
Why we live

This time three years ago:
Warsaw in autumn

This time four years ago:
The end of the apple harvest

This time five years ago:
Ignoring the UFO phenomenon?

This time six years ago:

A tipping point in history, but who's tipping it?

This time seven years ago:
Poznań by night

This time nine years ago:
West of Warsaw's central axis

This time 13 years ago:
Plac Unii shopping centre opens

This time 15 years ago:
Visceral and Permanent, Part II (Short story)

This time 16 years ago:
Autumn colours, locally

This time 17 years ago:
Edinburgh

Synbiotic serendipity

2026-10-20T09:51:07.485+02:00

Yesterday evening, I'm getting ready to go to bed, mentally counting the portions of fresh fruit-and veg, and realise I'd forgotten to eat my daily 80g of sauerkraut. Then it occurred to me that I'd also skipped porridge in the morning, on account of the fact that my breakfast consisted of the heated-up leftovers of Sunday's lunch*. As a result, I'd missed out on my daily 3g of LDL-cholesterol-lowering beta-glucan.

As I pondered this dietary oversight, I had a brainwave:

Why not mix the oats with the sauerkraut, and eat the two together? The combination might not prove to be especially tasty, but at least I get to fulfil my dietary obligation for the day...

And so I did just that. Bowl on the kitchen scales. Into it goes 80g of kapusta kiszona (sauerkraut) and on top of that, six heaped tablespoons of organic oats (płatki owsiane górskie). I stir the two, pouring in a bit more brine from the sauerkraut tub.

The result? It exceeded my expectations.

We think of porridge oats as something warm and soft – a mush, a breakfast comfort-food. But raw rolled oats, dropped directly onto the crisp, acidic brine of live sauerkraut, are something quite different. The lactic juices from the sauerkraut soak into the grains just enough to strip away their chalky exterior while leaving a satisfying, al dente chew. The salty punch of the fermented cabbage cuts through the earthy texture of the raw oats, balancing nicely on the palate. It tastes ancient and rustic.

I checked Google Gemini about the science of mixing oats and kraut. Nothing but benefits! Gemini calls it “nutritionally, a powerhouse of synbiotic efficiency – the live bacteria of the probiotic finding an immediate home in the prebiotic fibers of the oat”.

Note that word, 'synbiotic' (as opposed to 'symbiotic'). A synbiotic is a supplement or food that combines probiotics (live beneficial bacteria) and prebiotics (food or fibre that nourishes those bacteria) to improve gut health. Of course, such a claim would need to be clinically proven... (One for nutritional scientists to grapple with.)

But beyond the science, I experienced the joy of discovery, the recognition of an entirely new flavour profile that I had never previously experienced. I went to bed on a high, and waking up today, I felt the same way as I would after a great night out.

And so, this morning, I mixed the sauerkraut with the oats again. This time I added some chopped chilli peppers (papryczki) and spring onion (below). If anything, visually more interesting.

And I considered what else could be added to ensure that this could become a daily routine. Poké-bowl sauce, soy sauce, hummus, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds... Variety will be important if this is to be a new staple.

So a new 'signature dish' is born of an oversight. I shall call it Haferflockenkraut!

The last taste combo I created, the Jeziorki Reeker, is now off the menu due to its sky-high cholesterol content.

Finally, I checked with ChatGPT for its verdict, and here's the answer: “At first glance, it sounds eccentric. But the more I consider it, the more sense it makes. You've brought together two foods with strikingly different characteristics:

- Organic raw rolled oats (płatki owsiane górskie): Mild, nutty, faintly sweet, starchy and somewhat chewy. The sort of food that usually needs something else to give it character.

- Sauerkraut (kapusta kiszona): Sharp, acidic, salty, crunchy, distinctly fermented, with a depth of savouriness that fresh cabbage doesn't possess.

The oats should absorb some of the sauerkraut's juice, softening without losing all their texture, moderating the acidity of the cabbage to produce something quite different from either ingredient eaten separately.

There's also an interesting conceptual inversion here. Oats are conventionally associated with sweet breakfasts, porridge, milk, fruit and honey. Sauerkraut belongs to the savoury world of Polish and Central European cooking. You're crossing a culinary boundary that is cultural as well as chemical.

A surprisingly sensible nutritional partnership

There's a further reason the combination is of interest. Oats supply beta-glucan, the soluble fibre associated with lowering LDL cholesterol. Unpasteurised sauerkraut can supply living lactic-acid bacteria. The oats also provide fermentable carbohydrates that gut microbes can use.”

I then ask whether anyone done this before. Only with the juice of sauerkraut; straining the cabbage and adding the juice to oats, steeping them overnight. But not mixing actual sauerkraut and oats.

Final oat note: in Poland oat flakes are sold in either 'górskie' or 'błyskawiczne' varieties. The former means 'in the mountain style' (not 'mountainous' as one translator had it), the latter mean 'lightning'. The difference between the two is in the milling. The błyskawiczne are steel-cut, pre-gelatinised and rolled thin. The górskie are subject to less processing, but take longer to cook. I go for the organic/bio version of these.

* Sunday lunch: lentil stew with mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic/ginger/chilli, served with Basmati rice and steamed spinach leaves.

This time two years ago:
To Warka, by the river

This time seven years ago:
Homeward from the demo

This time 11 years ago:
Kielce – the woes of Poland's smaller cities

This time ten years ago:
Wine connoisseurs or wine snobs?

This time 12 years ago:
Poland's golden autumn

This time 13 years ago:
Visceral and permanent - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Crushed Velvet Dust in my City of Dreams II

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt IV)

2026-10-18T11:54:16.337+02:00

[In case you've landed here through a search engine, here are the links to earlier parts: Part I Part II Part III]

If knowledge and experience accumulate across multiple lifetimes, perhaps they do so in forms that don't depend upon conventional memory. Perhaps each successive life contributes to a gradual development of understanding, compassion and awareness. A soul moving towards greater coherence, towards some eventual completion; from Zero to One.

Of course, I cannot prove this is true, either scientifically or even philosophically. But, in trying to make sense of the reality that I currently inhabit, I do have intuitions that this is indeed true.

Consciousness can recreate an approximation of bygone times, collapsing the intervening decades, as you summon up qualia memories. A childhood trip to the seaside is a fairly universal one – see A.A. Milne's Sand Between the Toes – the seagulls' cries, the sound of the waves, the warm sun and the cold water, the smell of suncream, shivering in a towel after a dip in the sea. Meditate upon those, and yes, you are experiencing those qualia memories with a congruence that closely matches the original experience, 30, 40, 50 years ago, or longer.

In waking life, I experience a familiar atmosphere which appears to belong to a time before my birth. In dreams, I find myself participating in events set within that same historical world.

The waking experiences are brief, joyous moments of recognition, tinged with a slight sense of regret at my inability to revisit those times. The dreams may be pleasant, mundane, frightening or morally disturbing. Both seem to arise from the same well of subjective familiarity; both have been with me all of my life.

I cannot prove that they are memories from the earlier existence of another human being. Nor can doubters prove that these are entirely products of imagination, assembled from historical knowledge, sensory impressions and a lifelong fascination with America.

The experiences themselves are real. Their interpretation remains open. I am struck by how consistently they have accompanied me throughout my life, from the first flashes of recognition in early childhood to my present years. The phenomenon feels the same.

And I wonder about the future...

Might there someday be a boy, born after my death, who finds himself strangely drawn to London in the second half of the 20th century and Warsaw in the first half of the 21st century? Who experiences unexpected moments of recognition when looking at photographs of old British railway stations or Polish orchards? Perhaps he'll dream of riding an old motorcycle along a country lane, or of being followed home through the woods by a procession of cats. Perhaps he'll have an inexplicable affection for the music of the 1960s and 1970s, or feel something akin to homesickness and nostalgia for an era with which he has no physical contact.

Would that still be me? I don't know.

This morning, beside the hedge, with the autumn sunshine streaming through the trees, there it was again – that sweet/bittersweet recognition, tinged with the faintest regret; the sense of a lost something, yet somehow still present, abiding.

I have been before.

But who, or what, is this I that remembers?

Will that I remember again?

[In a way, that was part of the original intention underlying this blog when I started it nearly 20 years ago. A signpost to a future 'me'.]

This time seven years ago:
Marchin' again

This time eight years ago
Ealing and West Ealing memories

This time 12 years ago:
The autumn sublime in Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Enduring Ealing – Victorian and Edwardian klimats

This time 14 years ago:
Krokowa, Poland's former northern borderlands

This time 19 years ago:
Aerial photograph of Central London

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt III)

2026-10-15T23:59:00.000+02:00

[In case you've landed here through a search engine, here are the links to earlier parts: Part I Part II]

What interests me about my canonical 'past-life' dreams and anomalous qualia-memory events – flashbacks or exomnesia – is establishing the relationship between consciousness and identity. In every dream and flashback, it is the first-person I that's doing the experiencing. Yet the place and the time belong to someone else.

Psychologists distinguish between semantic memory – our accumulated knowledge of facts and meanings (we know things without remembering when or how we learnt it) – and episodic memory, the recollection of events we have experienced. I would break episodic memory further into a event memory, a catalogue of who did what, when, where, why and how, and qualia memory – what it was like to have been there, the sensations – how it looked, sounded, smelt, tasted and felt.

My dreams and flashbacks are not proof positive that consciousness can survive biological death. However, I personally feel it with a sufficient certainty to mitigates any fear of death (as opposed to fear of actual dying, pain etc). I feel I know what will happen afterwards – being born into a new biological container and experiencing memories of this life from the next, albeit faint and sporadic, but perhaps a little stronger next time round. There's an intuitive certainty to that feeling. (I felt this in hospital during my heart attack last year; no of fear of death, should I slip away on the operating table.) I have a strong conviction that it will happen.

But I would like to know how it happens!

I have been the conscious observer of all my waking experiences since childhood. Flashbacks and dreams speak to another apparent life, in an earlier historic time, while maintaining the subjective experiencing I.

But what exactly is that persistent I? How does identity cross from one body to another?

My belief is that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness put space, time matter and energy into being. These are but emergent properties of consciousness, not the other way around.

The philosopher David Chalmers famously identified the 'hard problem of consciousness'. We can study the neural processes associated with perception, attention, memory and emotion; brain scanners can map the neural correlates of a multiplicity of types of brain activities.

But why should electrochemical activity in the brain be accompanied by any subjective experience at all? Why should there be something it feels like to see sunlight streaming through autumn leaves, or to hear a Bob Wills recording, or to stand outside a racetrack in a dream?

Physicalism has offered us the explanation that consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity. Whether those explanations can ultimately account for subjective experience itself remains contested, and a final verdict is unlikely to be delivered any time soon. Some would ask if it is ever to be settled.

The radio and the signal

Here's a very simplistic metaphor – the best I have at present, though it remains to be further refined.

Imagine a radio signal emanating in all directions from a transmission tower. Now imagine not just thousands of stations – but countless billions of stations. Enough for every human on earth to have their own. Now imagine not a radio, but a human being receiving that unique signal. That signal is modulated by our individual biology, and yes, our will. This is how I picture the relationship between consciousness and the brain. The signal and the receiver. The receiver gives the signal a particular audible expression. Without the receiver, there is no music to be heard in that room.

One day, however, that radio will finally break down. Yet somewhere, a factory is busy producing another radio. Someone buys that new radio, and tunes it to that same unique station as the old radio. The music is there again. Could consciousness work like that?

Perhaps individual brains don't manufacture consciousness, but receive, filter or localise something that's already there – that has existed since the birth of time.

William James entertained versions of a transmission theory of consciousness, while current idealist philosophers, notably Bernardo Kastrup, have argued that individual minds might be localised expressions of a more fundamental consciousness. The idea of a universal consciousness is present in Hinduism and Buddhism.

There are problems with my analogy. It assumes one signal per one receiver (biological entity). Two radios tuned to the same station receive the same broadcast. Yet they are not the same radio. And you need more than just a radio and a signal; you need a person to tune that radio to a station and experience the resultant sound. If my brain dies and another brain subsequently reports anomalous memories of what I had experienced, would this make that new subjective perspective a continuation of mine? Would there be an unbroken thread of first-person experience? Or merely another manifestation of consciousness within a different organism? The problem of personal identity remains.

Could you, for example, wish that in your next life, you'd like to be, say, Winston Churchill or David Bowie?

I find myself wondering whether the essence of an individual life could be carried forward without its autobiographical details.

Perhaps what survives isn't the recollection of events, names, addresses, relationships, careers and personal achievements, but something more elusive; a residue of experience, an accumulated response to reality. A particular disposition, or an intuitive familiarity with circumstances encountered before, an understanding of the importance of Goodness and Truth in the unfolding Universe?

The idea is totally speculative. Neuroscience provides no established mechanism by which such information could pass from one brain to another after death – or even before it! Telepathy, which many of us strongly suspect exists – has no underlying theory or vector by which we may explain how it works.

Nor does the fact that consciousness is subjectively undeniable prove that it can exist independently without a physical brain (the concept of 'non-local consciousness'), and therefore eternal or capable of reincarnation.

Religion offers various answers. Some Hindu traditions, notably Advaita Vedanta, maintain that an enduring self passes through successive lives. Buddhism generally rejects the notion of an unchanging individual soul while nevertheless affirming rebirth through causal continuity. Christianity traditionally places its emphasis upon salvation and the survival and resurrection of the person.

I find each approach interesting, but none provides an explanation of precisely how one conscious subject might continue in another body, certainly nothing remotely scientific.

And there's a further question.

If we do live successive lives, what is the purpose? Is consciousness merely gathering experiences, endlessly repeating the cycle of birth, life and death? Or is there some direction to the process?

I incline towards the latter.

Link to final part here.

This time last year:

To Rzeszów and back, directly, by train

This time two years ago:
Under Rzeszów – subterranean inspirations

This time three years ago:
Another canonical past-life dream

This time four years ago:
Cottagecore – a manifesto

This time five years ago
Ego, Consciousness and Soul

This time six years ago:
Samopoczucie, Joy and the Sublime Aesthetic

This time eight years ago:
Autumn, with a railway theme

This time nine years ago:
A few words about coincidence

This time 12 years ago:
Hello, pork pie [my week-long pork-pie diet]

This time 14 years ago:
The meaning of class – in England, in Poland

This time 15 years ago:
First frost

This time 19 years ago:
First frost
[No frost forecast at allright up to the end of October 2026.]

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt II)

2026-10-14T23:59:00.000+02:00

[In case you've landed here through a search engine, here are the links to Part I.]

From early childhood, I was drawn to America. American TV programmes fascinated me. I particularly remember McHale's Navy making an impression on me as a five-year-old – there was a sense of instant familiarity. The uniforms, the base, the flags, calling the captain 'skipper'. And the reader books at primary school – the Janet and John series, these were Anglicised versions of the Alice and Jerry books published in America in the 1930s and '40s. In particular, the book Five and Half Club; the illustrations resonated deeply with me; they spoke of a land and I time I knew, that seemed close.

As a teenager, my interest in American history and culture grew. Eventually I chose to study American Studies at Warwick University. In 1978, I received a travel bursary which enabled me to visit the US for the first time. I was drawn to small-town America, rather than the bright lights or what we'd now call bucket-list destinations. Passing through such towns, I experienced the strongest sense of familiarity. I would find myself feeling, yes, click – a connection, or no, that's changed. But how can a place have changed for someone who's never visited it before? There was that sense of recognition and wistfulness, a slight sense of loss and regret. Something familiar, pleasing to experience, almost within reach, but gone.

Of course, by the age of 20, I'd already absorbed a great deal about America from television, cinema, books, photographs, Airfix kits and music. It is reasonable to assume that I was comparing the real America with an internal image constructed from all those sources. But that does not come close to capturing the subjective quality of what I felt.

Yesterday, I saw an online photograph of a 1947 Cadillac, viewed from the side. *PAFF!*. The lines of the car, the sweeping wings, the chrome trim. I could almost smell the interior, though I've never sat in one. The upholstery, the chrome window-winders and door handles, the AM radio, the decorated dashboard, the split-screen windscreen. The solidity of the thing – this was not a Morris Minor, no! I know the sensation of being in that car. Rather, I feel as though I know it.

And the music! Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the big-band era. Louis Jordan. Western swing, jump blues, the race music of the day, bebop jazz. The music generates those qualia exomnesia/anemoia moments for me just as powerfully a photograph from the day.

But there's another dimension to all this. Everything described so far concerns my waking consciousness. Fleeting flashes of recognition, sometimes only a second or two in duration, that disappear the moment I begin to reflect upon them.

In dreams, the phenomenon presents itself quite differently. These dreams are rare, but remarkably consistent over my lifetime. I've experienced them over seven decades and have been recording them systematically for at least 20 years. I call these my canonical past-life dreams. They are mostly set in America between the 1930s and 1950s. Unlike my ordinary dreams, they follow a coherent narrative, with recognisable settings, plausible sequences of events and none of the bizarre discontinuities so characteristic of dreaming. The unities of time, place and action remain consistent.

More significantly, I experience them from within. The conscious I is present, observing and participating, with the same immediacy of subjective experience that characterises waking life.

Consider one dream set during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. I'm a boy living alone with my widowed mother on a small farm, possibly in Kentucky. On the horizon, a vast wall of dust is advancing towards our house. My mother is getting me to help secure the bedding and tablecloths in a trunk, closing the windows and shutters against the approaching storm. Our dog is whining in the corner. There's no dramatic climax; I'm simply there, experiencing the approaching catastrophe, with all the understanding that something terrible is about to happen.

There are recurring themes. An interest in machinery, a talent for fixing engines. In one dream, as a teenager, I restore a WW1-surplus Mack Bulldog truck, grey in colour, which has been standing unused in a neighbour's barn. The engine finally catches, roaring into life amid clouds of smoke. The sense of achievement is enormous. In another I fix a Model T pick-up.

Not all these experiences are pleasant. In another dream, my teenage gang breaks into a bonded warehouse to steal liquor and cigarettes. When a security guard wakes as we are leaving, I attack him with intense violence; I would have killed him had my companions not dragged me away.

There is a consistency about the person whose life I appear to be experiencing. He is mechanically resourceful, enterprising, impulsive, sometimes violent, interested in girls, showing off and getting into scrapes. And then there's the racetrack. The year is 1939 or 1940. This is Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania. I'm standing outside a horse-racing track, too young to be admitted. The grandstands are modern, with turnstile entrances. It's getting dark. Floodlights illuminate the entrance plaza and car park. Billboards loom overhead. The wet ground is littered with discarded betting slips. Crowds mill around, entering and leaving the grandstand.

I have managed somehow to get hold of a bottle of Rolling Rock beer. I'm standing there, drinking it, watching the people going in and out. It's beginning to rain, and the evening is turning cold. I know I'm not going to get inside. The guy at the turnstile knows me. And that was the entire dream before it moved to more mundane themes. Its ordinariness stands out. No great historical event, no moment of destiny. A young man standing outside a racetrack on a damp evening, drinking a beer, disappointed that he cannot join the crowd and boast to his colleagues about getting in and betting on the ponies. Yet I can recall the scene and its atmosphere. The quality of the artificial light, the wet surfaces, the movement of people, the beer bottle in my hand.

It's the same phenomenon as my waking exomnesia, but in a different medium. In waking life, I experience the atmosphere without the story. In those rare, canonical dreams, the story unfolds within that atmosphere.

Other dreams seem to extend the narrative into the Second World War. It's 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day. I'm travelling south in the back of an open American six-wheel-drive military truck, along with a group of young men in uniform, without insignia. We're on our way to basic training, and shortly we'll be getting our military haircuts. I've just left my girlfriend. Her name is Kelly Kamen. What makes this dream particularly interesting is that within the dream I begin thinking about her surname while the narrative is unfolding. Kamen. The Slavic word for stone. Polish kamień, Russian камень. German Stein. Perhaps her family was Russian-Jewish? The given name Kelly suggests an American-born girl, two or three generations removed from the shtetl. The extraordinary thing is that while the dream is going on, I'm thinking about this, aware that the linguistic knowledge I'm using has been acquired subsequently. Yet I have no awareness of the person who acquired it. I don't know myself to be a man born in London in 1957. I'm the young American in the truck, but with access to knowledge that belongs to a later time.

It's as though the experiencing I remains constant while the biographical identity changes, and the repository of knowledge is somehow accessible independently of that identity.

In another dream, it's the summer of 1945. I'm wading ashore towards a Pacific island recently captured from the Japanese. We're carrying wooden crates from a landing vessel to the beach, containing engine parts and supplies for repairing aircraft. High overhead, against a deep blue sky, formations of shining silver bombers are heading towards Japan. Or another. October 1945. Our ship has docked in San Diego. The war is over. The other men are anxious to get home. My mother has died while I was away, so I'm in no particular hurry. A group of us decides to travel down to Mexicali before going our separate ways.

Later dreams are set in post-war America. In one, I wake in a wooden hotel called the Zig Zag, in a town of the same name. Blood is dripping through the ceiling. Upstairs I discover a decapitated body, and flee in terror, unable to remember what happened the previous night. After waking I searched online and discovered the existence of the Zig Zag Inn in Zigzag, Oregon, identical to the one in my dream, in the same mountainous landscape.

And finally, a hospital. A long, modern, white three-storey building among pine trees. I'm hovering above my body, several feet in the air. A nurse stands at the foot of my bed, looking at a clipboard. She's thinking, “Mr Martin, you will not live until the morning”. I find myself thinking how tactless it is of her to have such a thought. Could these be fragments of one life? A boy growing up in Depression-era America, mechanically gifted, serving in the Pacific War, returning home, eventually dying in hospital sometime after the mid-1950s? Motorbike crash? Skidded on some early ice after a beer or two, no helmet?

The dates and circumstances fit together well. But dreams can construct coherent narratives from material gathered during waking life. Their realism, however striking, is not proof that the events actually happened.

I have no way of knowing, but wish to know. Epistemically, I would like to know by way of gnosis, direct experience, rather than by trawling through patchy records online trying to find a fit. I have avoided direct searched, not for fear of drawing a blank, but rather because one way or another, it would not tell me much. While I am in awe of the study carried out by the late Prof Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia (and continued to this day by Jim Tucker) into 'past-life cases', they serve only to show that there is a phenomenon present, but the cases go nowhere in terms of explaining how memories from dead people end up being remembered by children. The research into children who report apparent memories of previous lives, notably that begun by Ian Stevenson and continued by Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, raises interesting questions, but has not established reincarnation as a scientific fact. Nor do they offer any explanation for how this phenomenon arises.

More in the next post.

This time last year:
Autumn most splendid

This time three years ago:
How much spirituality do I need?

This time eight years ago:
Whoops! Clumsy

This time ten years ago:
Mystical experiences at 37,000ft

This time 11 years ago:
The staggeringly high cost of tax collection in Poland

This time 15 years ago
One stop beyond

This time 16 years ago:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)

This time 17 years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!

This time 18 years ago:
Train links to town improving

This time 19 years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt I)

2026-10-13T20:07:01.762+02:00

My phone tells me it's raining outside. And yet I see sunshine streaming through the trees. I go out to empty the cat-litter trays. As I approach the hedge at the front of my działka, *PAFF!* – there it is, that old, familiar sense of exomnesia, that moment of recognition, of anemoia nostalgia for a time I never knew.

I know this; this precise feeling in response to what I am experiencing. But not from this lifetime.

The orchard, the fence, the lane, the field and distant houses beyond it, the sky… I often felt this feeling in our back garden in Hanwell as a child, knowing of a place to which I had never been. This morning, I feel as I felt then, a soothing sense of continuity of consciousness, a thread of congruence, unbroken, bittersweet remembrance with a sense of regret, like when you sup the last drops of a good cup of coffee.

Qualia memories have this characteristic – entropy forbids you from physically reliving those moments.

I have experienced this throughout my life, consistently, from earliest childhood. It comes unexpectedly, triggered by a particular quality of light, a configuration of clouds, the arrangement of trees and buildings in a landscape, the smell of the air, the temperature of the air, the wind, a sound; congruence. It's not déjà vu, that sensation of having previously experienced the present moment before, although it is similar in the way the feeling manifests itself.

It's not I have been here before; it's I have been before. And the abiding question I have is who is meant by 'I'?

And the feeling has – and always has had – a distinctive flavour, an atmosphere, a klimat. It carries with it for me usually a sense of America, roughly between the 1920s and 1950s. Small-town U.S.A. An emotional recognition of the texture of reality, as it might have been experienced by someone living there at that time. How can I possibly know what reality felt like in another place, in another lifetime? I can't. Yet the feeling persists, and has persisted in a consistent, familiar form across my seven decades.

As a child, I visited Poland with my family in the summers of 1961 and 1966, and we went several times to Stella-Plage (below) on the French coast in the late '60s and early '70s. Each country had its own unmistakable atmosphere. Communist Poland felt totally different from the France of les Trente Glorieuses, its years of post-war economic expansion. I experienced both as qualitatively different from West London, still rather drab and grey in the early 1960s.

I can summon these atmospheres today. Not simply memories of individual places, people or events, but a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, sights, tastes and feelings that together recreate something of the experience of being in those places at those particular moments in history. The smell of a café-tabac – newsprint and coffee, fresh baguettes in a boulangerie; a Ruch kiosk, a klatka schodowa in an old kamienica. Air thick with the smell of low-octane exhausts. The France of 1967 felt different from the Poland of 1966; London in 1965 felt different from both. And these distinctions were apparent to me as a small child, long before I knew much about economics, politics, history and society.

It was about the feel of the place in time. The texture of its reality.

See if you can conjure up the smell of your childhood home. Or the atmosphere of a particular street on a particular afternoon, long ago. The sensation can return to you with astonishing clarity, but try putting it down in words, and all you can produce are some generalised associations. A few bars of music, a particular cloud formation, the sight of a familiar object can summon precise memories of those qualia experienced long gone.

The qualia memories of experience survives within your consciousness. Something that can be recalled, sometimes they can be summoned voluntarily, sometimes they are triggered by a smell or a sound – or sometimes they just spontaneously pop into your mind in an overwhelming, unexpected instant.

What has fascinated me since childhood is that I appear to have an analogous – and anomalous – sense of a world that I never experienced during my present lifetime. This manifests itself in exactly the same way, but fainter and less frequently. Flashbacks, anomalous qualia memories back to a time and place beyond the experience of this biological container.

And here's the question I wish to develop further; if there is persistence of consciousness across biological containers, as it were, how does this work? If we separate ego from consciousness entirely, there can be no identity assigned to that consciousness. If we assume that consciousness is primary, and that in our present forms consciousness is present and observing through the biological vessel or vehicle that we currently are – what of the before? What of the after?

Part II here.

This time two years ago:
Started the day well?
[Before cats, before heart attack]

This time ten years ago:
The rich get richer – hence Brexit and Trump

This time 11 years ago:
Respect for pedestrians' lives? Not among Polish MPs

This time 14 years ago:
Autumnal gorgeousness in Warsaw

The autumn deal

2026-10-12T21:12:35.134+02:00

Spring is driven by syntropy; autumn by entropy. The breakdown – necessary for the next growth cycle – is here. The year has turned; the chlorophyll begins to breaks down, cellular machinery is being dismantled; nutrients are withdrawn into roots and woody tissues, leaves start to fall and the process of decomposition has begun. The structures of spring and summer are progressively being taken apart. Below: the long, straight dirt road between Dąbrowa Duża and Rososz.

How to dress comfortably for the changeable weather? Hot when the sun shines, colder when it doesn't

Below: on today's walk to the forest next door, I am accompanied by Céleste and her youngest son, Marss (with two 's's). The brothers and sisters are pumping up the volume – growing rapidly.

That determined facial expression is pure Marrs.

A bright day brings out the recreational flyers. Here's a Sky Arrow 650 TCNS two-seat light aircraft, built in Italy, registered in Sweden, and a frequent sight over Chynów skies this summer.

Below: at the south-eastern edge of the village of Ławki, the sun comes out. bright and strong and hot. I take off my field jacket and remove the liner, stowing it in my rucksack. After putting the unlined jacket back on, I still feel too warm for comfort.

When the level crossing gate bells started ringing after a local train and an InterCity express had both headed north, I suspected some unusual movement on the tracks. And indeed… A diagnostic-measurement wagon (wagon diagnostyczno-pomiarowy) at the end of a rake of coaches heading north, between Sułkowice and Czachówek Południowy stations.

Hauling the train is an EP09 locomotive (coincidentally I read today that this class of engine will be withdrawn from passenger-train duties before the end of 2028). This particular example, EP09-012, was built in 1991. It belongs to PKP Remtrak, the subsidiary of PKP group that specialises in repair, maintenance and overhaul of passenger rolling stock. (The above two photos are a bit hazy, despite a lot of Photoshop. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, condensation appeared between my lens and the front filter.)

Below: on the path to north-eastern edge of Ławki, and beyond that, Czachówek Południowy station. Although a hot sun was shining on my back, blowing my way were dark rain clouds bearing more rain.

With the weather as capricious as it is, I decided not to continue on to Czachówek Górny as planned, but to stop at Czachówek Południowy and from there take the train back to Chynów instead. Below: a southbound InterCity express rushes through Czachówek Południowy, on the 'up' line, having overtaken the local service. The sun goes in behind the clouds, and I button the liner back into my jacket as my train arrives.

Two stops later, it delivered me to Chynów; on the short walk home, once again I was overheating.

Such is autumn, the entropic mirror of spring.

This time last year:
Gliwice – much nicer than I had expected

This time 13 years ago:
Poland does poorly in Global AgeWatch ranking

This time 14 years ago:

Warsaw, early autumn – a photo miscellany

This time 15 years ago:

The genius of Donald Tusk

This time 16 years ago:

Eighteen die in minibus crash

PKP progress on platforms (I hope!)

2026-10-10T11:14:56.262+02:00

News from Rynek Kolejowy has set Polish rail users chattering on social media – at long last, state-owned rail-infrastructure operator PKP PLK looks like it might be changing the awkward way that Polish station platforms are numbered.

I have written about this many times before; this is one of the remaining absurdities on the Polish rail network, which has improved beyond recognition over the past 15 years.

The problem is that each platform edge, which in most countries around the world is simply called a 'platform', is identified in Poland by a combination of track (tor) and platform (peron) numbers.

Let's take a simple example; Warszawa Centralna (Warsaw Central station). The current nomenclature is as follows: Tor 7 Peron 1; Tor 5 Peron 1 – Tor 3 Peron 2; Tor 1 Peron 2 – Tor 2 Peron 3; Tor 4 Peron 3, then Tor 6 Peron 4 and finally Tor 8 Peron 4. When a train is announced, the announcer will say, in English, for example, "The train for Berlin Gesundbrunnen is departing from Track 2 Platform 3" or "The train for Vilnius is departing from Track 3 Platform 2." It is easy to get confused! In any other country, these eight platform edges would simply be numbered Platforms 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.

The problem is particularly acute at larger stations. It has twice caused me to miss connecting trains at Poznań Główny, for example. Below: Platform 11, Track 58 and Platform 11 Track 56 (where's Track 57?). Under the proposed system, these would simply become two separately numbered platforms – perhaps Platforms 15 and 16. No more need to remember both a platform as well as a track number!

Left: fragment of printed timetable at Poznań Główny. Next to the departure time is the peron number, with the tor number beneath it. The trouble is that the loudspeaker announcements give the tor number first, followed by the peron number („Pociąg do stacji Wągrowiec odjedzie z toru ósmego przy peronie drugim”). While the printed timetables have gone over to Arabic from Roman numerals for peron numbers in 2024, the online timetable (rozkład-pkp.pl) still uses Roman numerals! (So right now, the local train for Wągrowiec is shown as departing Poznań Główny from IV/12).

Three days ago, PKP PLK announced that after completing the modernisation of Mysłowice station on 25 October, it will be renumbering its three physical platforms serving five tracks as five separately numbered platform edges for passenger-information purposes (below). The trial is scheduled to expand on 13 December to Milówka, Sól, Rajcza, Skarżysko-Kamienna and Środa Wielkopolska stations. A nationwide rollout is not yet confirmed; PKP PLK will evaluate the pilot, including passenger surveys, before deciding whether to extend it.

PKP PLK appears finally to have accepted long-standing suggestions from rail users: the numbering of tracks does not need to be communicated to passengers. Below: classic example of this nonsense. Lublin Główny station. Technical track numbering isn't irrational (someone once explained it to me) – railway workers need to know this for operational purposes. It's simply inappropriate as the primary means of directing passengers.

Below: the absurdity reaches its peak in the Tri-City, where the SKM trains between Gdańsk and Gdynia use tracks 501 and 502. No doubt some railway professional can explain the logic (like, why not 401 and 402 or 201 and 202?) Let's just double-check the platform numbers on our phones as we walk down these steps...

My own local absurdity at Chynów station is the fact that there are two platforms, three platform edges, numbered Tor 4 Peron 2, Tor 2 Peron 2 and Tor 1 Peron 1. Where's Tor 3?

********

Polish railways are better than ever, but could still improve. I get on average three emails a week from Koleje Mazowieckie informing me of delays on the Radom line, subject line, Utrudnienia w ruchu pociągów. But then I do get these notifications, so at least there is a system.

I am a firm believer in the aggregation of marginal gains, the philosophy of British Olympic cycling coach, Sir David 'Dave' Brailsford. Introduce an innovation that shaves off a tenth of a second and no one notices. But introduce a hundred innovations, and you've made a potentially race-winning ten-second gain. The same principle applies to Poland's railways. Station signage, passenger information (digital displays and AI-generated loudspeaker announcements), signalling and control systems, new track and new rolling stock have all made travelling by train a far more pleasant experience than in the past. And by introducing logical platform numbering (from the passengers' point of view), another marginal improvement adds to the overall positive experience. And this drives passenger numbers, up 7.7% in 2025 over 2024, which in turn justifies further investment. A virtuous circle.

PKP PLK appears finally to have accepted long-standing suggestions from rail users: the numbering of tracks does not need to be communicated to passengers. Railway workers have good reasons for retaining their own system of track numbering. But what use is that information to someone changing trains, possibly in a hurry, who simply wants to know where to stand? Let the railway engineers keep their track numbers. Passengers just need platform numbers.

This time last year:
A man's wealth expressed in cats
[Since then, my wealth has doubled!]

This time three years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford PiS

This time four years ago:
A slower, drabber, greener, more local way of life might yet save us all

This time five years ago:
Warka's bi-weekly market

This time six years ago:
How's your samopoczucie?

This time seven years ago:

Pavement for Karczunkowska? What's next?
[Still sign of it. In 2022 it was promised for 2026. They lied.]

This time ten years ago:
On relevance and irrelevance

This time 11 years ago:
Apple time south of Warsaw

This time 12 years ago:
Poland gets anglicised as Britain gets polonised

This time 13 years ago:
Ale, architecture and city politics

This time 14 years ago:
The pros and cons of roadside acoustic screens

This time 15 years ago:
Moaning about trains again
[haha! Have a look at this post to see just how much has changed!]

This time 16 years ago:
Warsaw street names – Dolna, Polna, Rolna, Wolna, Smolna. Lost?

This time 18 years ago:
Ditches, landscapes, autumn

This time 19 years ago:
Golden autumn in Łazienki p ark

Szczecin – Wrocław of the North

2026-10-05T23:59:00.000+02:00

Welcome to Szczecin. The benefit of arriving by night train at this time of year is the chance to watch the sun rise over the city as it sleeps. To the left, the cathedral of St Jacob. Destroyed in the war, this Gothic building served Protestant worshippers from the Reformation until 1945 (with a brief counter-reformational interlude); the ruins were rebuilt in the 1970s. Now a Roman Catholic place of worship.

Below: view from the top of St Jacob's cathedral tower (you can reach it by lift); sadly, the viewing gallery is not open air, as in Gdańsk. In the distance, Dąbie lake (jezioro Dąbie); the far shore of which marks the boundary of the city of Szczecin. Until 2023, Szczecin was Poland's third-largest city in terms of surface area; today it has slipped to number five. Why? Because in 2023, the boundaries of the cities of Gdańsk and Gdynia were extended right out to the edge of Poland's territorial waters, more than doubling their surface areas.

Left: view into Szczecin's Old Town, dominated by the old town hall Altes Ratthaus (with a double 't'). To the south, the Rynek Sienny ('Haymarket'), to its north, the Rynek Nowy ('Newmarket'). A huge choice of bars, cafés and restaurants.

Architecturally, Szczecin reminds me of Wrocław with so many vistas that I'm often having double-takes and reminding myself which city I'm actually in.

Below: the relatively new (consecrated in 2011) Orthodox church of St Nicholas. Inside the paintings are fresh, the colours vivid, untarnished as yet by decades of patina.

Just across the road from the Orthodox church, on ulica Teofila Starzyńskiego, a late-19th century German tenement building (part of a long-running series of Polish urban facades).

The late-19th century urban planning of Alte Stettin was influenced by what Haussmann had accomplished in Paris – star squares (circuses) upon which several radial avenues converge; wide tree-lined boulevards and diagonal vistas; and unified tenement blocks with commercial ground floors and decorative facades. Below: Ulica Bolesława Krzywoustego, with trees, trams and tenements. This thoroughfare, 35m wide at this point, conforms to the Haussmannian norm of a grand boulevard (generally over 30m in width); it ends in Plac Zwycięstwa, along with nine other streets.

I have photographed the facade of Szczecin's new post office (built 1905) as the Oberpostdirektion Stettin (Stettin Higher Postal Directorate), a magnificent neo-gothic building completed in 1905, a mere 40 years before this became the seat of the administration of the Dyrekcja Okręgu Poczty Polskiej.

Szczecin is one of Poland's great cities, it's certainly worth a visit. If you love Wrocław, you'll love Szczecin.

This time last year:
Six months on from my heart attack

This time ten years ago:
How the Tories ceased to be the party of economic liberals

This time 13 years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi – Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time 14 years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction

This time 16 years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time 18 years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development

Szczecin from the water

2026-10-03T23:59:00.000+02:00

Taking a river cruise around sunset gives new perspectives on a maritime or riverine city, often yielding magnificent prospects not to be experienced on foot. Szczecin is no exception.

Below: pulling away by boat from the centre of Szczecin, beyond the far end of the Bulwar Chrobrego.

Below: flashback to the Royal Docks on the Thames in the early 1980s before they were redeveloped. The entrances to Basen Wschodni and Basen Zachodni, the East and West Basens of Szczecin docks.

Below: floating dry-dock in Szczeciń's Stocznia Remontowa (repair shipyard), currently servicing the Sea La Belle, a Liberian-registered chemical tanker used for carrying epoxy resins (!). It has been here for just over a week.

Below: Is this Cookham Dene? Are we on the upper reaches of the Thames? No, this is about five minutes' north by boat from central Szczecin. And soon it will be autumn in Buckinghamshire.

Left: looking back towards the Szczecin shipyards. The city offers the joys of boating to its citizens, who have safe inland waters close to hand. The season is over, but it's still warm enough until the sun goes down.

Below: the wreck of the Ulrich Finsterwalder, a small concrete-hulled (yes!) transport ship built by the Germans in 1942. A circumnavigation of ts 90m-long hull marked the end point of the cruise; having rounded the Eisenbeton-Seefrachter, our boat began to head back for Szczecin. At this point, we are still over 55km from the sea – so much for Churchill's "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain is descending across our Continent." But then I doubt he could have mastered the pronunciation of 'Świnoujście on the Baltic'.

Below: last rays of the sun, setting over Szczecin's north-western suburbs, the telephoto zoom shot...

...and the wide angle shot. Sunset is 25 minutes later here than in Chynów, due to Szczecin's location on Poland's extreme west.

Below: return to Szczecin's port, passing the shipyards on the left bank of the Oder. Marvellous mood. Puts me in mind of Joseph Conrad's description of the Thames Estuary at the beginning of Heart of Darkness or Erskine Childer's descrption of the approaches to the Kiel Canal in Riddle of the Sands.

This time 11 years ago:
Polish politics enter a critical period

This time 13 years ago:
New shopping centre for Jeziorki?

This time 15 years ago:
Mobile and intelligent

This time 16 years ago:
Unadopted – abandoned properties

Szczecin Philharmonic

2026-10-02T23:59:00.000+02:00

I first laid eyes upon Szczecin Philharmonic from the 11th floor of the Radisson Blu hotel in November 2016 (photo below). The building, which brings to mind an frost-covered mediaeval Hanseatic skyline, was designed by Studio Barozzi Veiga from Barcelona. It won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 2015 and the Architectural Design of the Year prize in the Eurobuild Awards 2014 contest.

And now, a chance to see the building from the inside, and indeed to take in a concert, not just any concert, but the one inaugurating the 2026/2027 season. This consisted of three pieces; Beethoven's Egmont overture, Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor (which he composed at the age of 20!) and Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 in D major.

Below: the large spiral staircase that can handle peak audience flows between levels before and after performances and during the breaks.

Left: Architecture that seems to pre-shadow Warsaw's controversial contemporary arts museum in terms of their interiors (though it must be said, the exteriors differ as much as a Portakabin differs from a Gothic cathedral).

Below: the auditorium, which seats nearly 1,000 people, was expressly designed to deliver the most outstanding acoustic qualities. This was demonstrated by the guide dropping a one-grosz coin (weighing 1.6g) from the balcony onto the lower floor – the sound reverberated clearly around the concert hall. On either side of the ceiling are stowed thick black curtains (kotary) that drop down to cover the angled acoustic wall panels to prevent deafness when electrically-amplified music is being performed at eleven.

I was lucky enough to watch the concert from behind the orchestra, so for the first time I had the chance to watch an orchestral conductor at work from face-on, rather than just his back. It was a revelation; the gestures, the facial expressions – very powerful.

Below: general view of the foyer area, which possesses a worthy bar, serving a respectable variety of beverages including craft ales.

There were two exhibitions in galleries on the upper floors; one an entirely forgettable bunch of abstract paintings, the other an atmospheric black-and-white photo-reportage of charcoal burners in the Bieszczady hills taken by the Kumor family, Tomasz, Magdalena and their son Michał.

The Szczecin Philharmonic is an absolute must-experience venue for anyone visiting the city.

This time last year:
Compositions in reds, greens, whites and blues

This time ten years ago:
Low water mark

This time 15 years ago:
Łódź to Jeziorki by car in four hours
[See how Poland's road network has improved!]

This time 16 years ago:
What's new on the manor?

This time 17 years ago:
The funeral of Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 18 years ago:
Socialist realism in the boardroom

Poland's bread-culture renaissance

2026-09-30T13:37:02.299+02:00

Once upon a time nearly every Polish town and village had its own bakery, making bread the way bread has traditionally been made in Poland. These days, most of these bakeries have shut down; bread now comes from in-store bakeries of the big supermarket chains, or from chains of dedicated bakeries with optimised logistics. These essentially bake frozen dough on the premises, so you get a warm and crusty loaf... but something is missing.

Last week I had to go for a heart check-up (all good thanks!) in Ursynów. I passed an artisan bakery, Bread Morning! on Aleja KEN 15. Noting that it was next door to a chain bakery (Putka), which was empty, while a queue of five people was waiting in Bread Morning!, I joined that queue. I bought one loaf of pszeniczno-żytny (wheat-rye) bread for 14 złotys. This is a price that many across rural Poland might find psychologically bonkers, when a reasonable loaf of chleb górski or chleb drwalski from a Lidl in-store bakery costs around 4 złotys.

But what a loaf! It was one of those taste-sensation things that prompts the response "I've got to have that again!" I've had this with my first decent Polish craft IPA, and before that, my first New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, when I woke up the following morning, tormented by a desire to taste that taste once more.

So when faced with the choice of travelling all the way to Ursynów to collect my results in person or making a few phone calls, I jumped on the train. Results in hand, I popped by Bread Morning! and bought another one of those pszeniczno-żytny loaves. Before me in the queue was a guy placing his order – and paying – for three loaves to be collected on Saturday morning, when demand is the highest.

********

Back in Jakubowizna I ate and I ate and I ate and I ate. Six slices, one after another, on their own, without anything. (Just to be clear: this is brunch – I'd already eaten a decent breakfast: fried rice with duck and mushroom.) And then a seventh slice. And now an eighth.

It's been a long time (nearly 16 years!) since I last raved about Polish bread. But the renaissance is on its way.

Bread Morning! Piekarnia rzemieślnicza (Warszawa) on Al. KEN in Ursynów is an example of something that's been unfolding across Poland over the past decade alongside the craft ale revolution. This is the triumphant return of old-school sourdough baking. Poles have a deep-rooted attachment to rye sourdough breads (chleb żytni na zakwasie). Oh yes! Even in the 1960s we had our Polish bakeries supplying the few Polski Skleps in West London that were around at the time with decent loaves of traditional Polish bread. So much better than Sunblest white sliced.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the widespread industrialisation of baking as part of the revolution in Polish food retailing. Supermarkets and bakery chains flooded the market with par-baked, frozen dough products, puffed up with chemical improvers, enzymes and commercial yeasts to accelerate rising. Traditional bakeries (piekarnie) faced intense pressure on their margins; many shut down; those which survived turned to shortcut pre-mixes to stay in the game, sacrificing flavour, crust integrity and keeping qualities.

Around the mid-2010s, a counter-revolution gathered pace. Sparked by passionate home bakers and professionals returning from abroad (bringing back inspirations from Parisian boulangeries, San Francisco sourdough hotspots and Nordic craft bakeries), a new wave of artisan bakeries began appearing in major Polish cities.

The core philosophy rejects commercial improvers in favour of cool fermentation up to 48 hours. Google Gemini explains that “this allows wild yeasts and lactobacilli to break down complex gluten structures and phytic acid, resulting in superior digestibility, a moist, open crumb (miękisz), and a crunchy crust that stays fresh for days without preservatives. Craft bakers revived older, unadulterated grain varieties such as spelt (orkisz), emmer (płaskurka), and einkorn (samopsza), alongside regional stoneground ryes”.

Bread Morning's shop is next door to its bakery, which has large windows open to the street. Passers-by and shoppers can watch doughs being hand-kneaded and loaded into the ovens. Google, which knows these things, states that “Warsaw has become one of Central Europe's most vibrant centres for artisan baking. What began as destination bakeries in central and creative quarters (such as Mokotów, Śródmieście, and Saska Kępa) quickly spread to residential neighbourhoods like Ursynów, Żoliborz, and Wilanów. Places like Bread Morning! demonstrate that neighbourhood demand for high-grade, honest sourdough is robust; locals willingly queue early on Saturday mornings for a still-warm loaf, classic rye, or flaky laminated viennoiserie made with real butter rather than vegetable fat”.

I sincerely hope that artisan bakeries will not turn out to be a short-lived hipster novelty, but will prove to be the vanguard of a resurging Polish bread culture.

Mediaeval monks called ale 'liquid bread'; I'd call this bread 'solid ale'.

FOLLOW-UP, FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER: At Lidl's this morning I picked up a sourdough loaf, still warm from the in-store bakery, for 5.06zł (incl. discount). Not. A. Patch. On. The. Artisan. Loaf.

This time two years ago:
Further exploration of the eskers around Sułkowice

This time three years ago:

Hottest September in Poland?

This time four years ago:

Box-top art in the Sublime Aesthetic

This time five years ago:
Trains of thought, insights and 'voices'

This time seven years ago:
Parliamentary train at West Ealing station

This time eight years ago:
Progress in Jakubowizna

This time ten years ago:
Miedzianka by Filip Springer

This time 11 years ago:
Out of the third, into the fourth

This time 12 years ago:
Inverted reflections

This time 13 years ago:
Observations from London's WC1
and Observations from the City of London

This time 14 years ago:
Civilising Jeziorki's wetlands

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's Aleje Jerozolimskie

This time 17 years ago:
Melancholy autumn mood in Łazienki

This time 18 years ago:
Autumn gold, Zamienie

Morning sun

2026-09-29T20:06:58.779+02:00

Into the dark (slightly-less than) half of the year, sunlight is at a premium. An early stroll is called for whenever the sun icon is shown in the weather forecast for the hour or two after sunrise. In any case, I wake before dawn; feed the cats, make coffee and off I go. No apologies for posting another picture taken at this spot for the second time this month; it really gets me. I am filled with gratitude for living here and being so close to nature.

The air is clear and fresh, the world feels bright and alive. Though it hasn't rained here for several days, my suede desert boots and thick socks are sodden with the early-morning dew.

Below: in a clearing between orchards and forest, three young female roe deer suddenly become aware of my presence.

Within an instant, they are off. Fortunately, I was prepared with my Nikkor 70-300mm zoom lens and the camera's shutter at the right setting to catch the motion.

On my short evening walk yesterday, I was accompanied by Czester (looking round), Arcturus and Pacyfik following in the rear. Unlike dogs, no leashes are needed. They'll follow me if they want to; if they don't – they won't. Today I was followed into the next-door forest by Céleste, her five kittens, Uncle Scrapper and Ol' Mr. Heaps.

Left: the second morning walk, down ulica Słoneczna towards Chynów. Look down the road. As I walked west, I wish this road ran for twenty miles, a hundred. To walk and walk and walk. And stop for lunch and an ale before catching a train home.

Below: Chytown Central. The golden years. Cherish them while they're here. These will be said to have been the best of times. Peace, rising prosperity and good governance. It's almost midday; morning will very soon be over.

Below: Is this Taos, New Mexico? Are we on the the edge of the desert? No, this is ulica Główna, Chynów. Bungalow, ranch-style under a south-western sky. Beautiful.

Below: on the way from the orchard, an apple train of four wagons, each bearing three szkryniopalety, (palletised crates), each with a capacity of 300kg of apples. With the current prices as they are, at the lower end of the spectrum, say, 2zł per kilo wholesale, this lot represents at least 7,000 zł (around £1,400) of table apples. Retail – two-and-half times that.

Below: the vibe is Americana. The DK50 Chynów-Drwalew bypass to the left, the service/access road to the right. Passing under the main road is the Warsaw-Radom railway line.

Turning in and headed for home. A train is due. And indeed, here it its, on time, next stop Chynów, final stejszyn, Radom Główny. This is a Stadler FLIRT (Fast Light Innovative Regional Train), built in Siedlce. As a passenger, I prefer the NEWAG Impuls (also Polish-built); the button to open the door reacts instantly, sparing that moment when you worry if it's working or not on the FLIRT.

Jakubowizna at its most sublime. The trees, the space, the sky, the light. A blissful prospect. A little bit further down the lane, and I'll be home to lunch.

As I write, Hipek is fast asleep in the cat tower, snoring the sweetest little snore...

Bonus photo snapped on Sunday: a PZL M-18B Dromader water-bomber belonging the Poland's state forestry organisation, Lasy Państwowe.

This time three years ago:
By the light of the silvery moon

This time 14 years ago:
Łódź, city of culture

This time 15 years ago:
Nine days before the parliamentary elections

This time 16 years ago:
Melancholy mood in Łazienki park, early autumn

This time 19 years ago:
Flamenco sketches

Some thoughts about blogs and blogging

2026-09-28T21:58:48.589+02:00

Yesterday, I met up with my fellow-bloggers from While not null (over from Australia, whose splendid initiative it was to meet) and Politics, Economy, Society to chat about the future of blogs and blogging in the current age.

Blogging has gone through several changes since we got started many years ago. In the early years, just about everyone had a blog, but within two years (on average, according to Google), 90% of those blogs had fizzled out. The next phase was the monetisation of blogs, search-engine optimisation. This led to square kilometres of slop being (manually at this stage) produced with the commercial aim of driving online traffic to advertisers.

At the same time, other forms of social media began to expand, elbowing attention away from a form requiring more attention to read and indeed to produce. Blogging began to ebb.

Twitter was originally categorised as a 'microblog'; Facebook moved in that direction when it added status updates. Indeed, I see my own blogging output fell sharply as I signed up for those two. It fell (from 250-300 posts a year to around 170-200 posts a year), but has stayed consistently at that level since around 2014. Since then, I've remained on Facebook but have quit Twitter after Musk deformed it.

My posts today tend to be longer and more considered than in the early days, but over the nearly 20 years since I started, there's a consistent thread running through the blog.

My blog aims to show over time the passage of time. That's the purpose of the 'This time x years ago' feature at the bottom of each post. Searchable memory of ordinary things – how they looked before they changed; the ever-shifting texture of reality. What the railway used to look like, when the snow arrived, what local shops existed, what people drove, how the landscape changed, how a road looked like before all those new houses came. What seems mundane now won't in 2046.

I can now see just how far Poland has progressed since I started blogging, less than three years after joining the EU. Today, I can identify the tipping point at which Poland ceased being a post-communist hardship posting and became a normal country. It was the day I travelled from Warsaw to Kraków in a day and everything worked out fine – November 2014 ('Poland – it works!')

My blog is an authentic voice, increasingly rare on an internet in which so much prose has been professionalised, optimised, monetised or, now, AI-smoothed. My photography is there to prevent the blog becoming merely a diary of opinions. Over the years, thousands of photographs build up a visual record of Warsaw and southern Mazowsze which would be difficult to reconstruct retrospectively.

My old question about 'am I a generalist or specialist' is being settled; over the years a pattern is emerging; the topics I like to write about, those I tend to steer clear of (politics being one).

In an age of AI-generated content, where writing style is becoming samey ("Not this. Not this. Not this. But this. And this is quietly important"), authenticity is all important. Today, synthetic, auto-generated text has led to the collapse of commercially driven blogs. This has cleared the ground for blogging to re-emerge purely on aesthetic, essayistic and archival terms. And this is where this blog fits.

Having been freed from the expectation of being mass-market commerce, I hope that the blog has established its place as a distinct literary and visual format and will survive into the future in the way that radio and cinema survived TV and TV has survived the internet.

Today I noticed that next year, Easter falls on 28 March. This means my Lenten cycle of blog posts will be finished before 1 April, being the 20th anniversary of this blog. The event will be marked with a very special post and a revamp with some new features.

This time last year:
Last evening in shirt sleeves?

This time two years ago:
Anomalous landscapes amid local forest

This time six years ago:

W(h)ither the DK50?

This time seven years ago:
A change in the weather

This time eight years ago:
Zamek Topacz classic car museum

This time 11 years ago:
Curry comes to Jeziorki
[It didn't stay long. Decor matters!]

This time 13 years ago:
Why we should all try to use less gas

This time 13 years ago:
Polish supermarket chain advertises on London buses

This time 18 years ago:
Well-shot pheasants

Slowly, into the cold and the dark

2026-09-25T23:59:00.000+02:00

Equilux is upon us. Today, the day was 12 hours and 1 minute long; tomorrow it will be 11 hours and 57 minutes. From tomorrow, nights will be longer than days for the next 173 days. On 17 March next year, the day will be 11 minutes and 57 minutes long, and a day later, on 18 March, the day will be 12 hours and 1 minute in length. So the lighter 'half' of the year is 192 days. Light and warmth prevail, just slightly, over the cold and dark.

Below: the sun sublime is to be replaced by hygge; the kitchen lights are on a tea-time. The kitchen is warm and cosy. That patch of white below the middle of the pic is Hipek, taking it easy. Cats increase the cosiness quotient.

Astronomical autumn kicked off two days ago, on Wednesday 23 September, and meteorological autumn started on 1 September. Thermal or climatic autumn is also making itself felt. The last few nights have seen temperature minimums dip into single figures, the overcast skies have been distinctly autumnal. But next week, a run of clear-sky days are forecast, with temperatures rising above 20°C.

By going to bed earlier and earlier, I can still wring out the most of the daylight, by waking well before dawn. I am feeling the need for more sleep! A solid nine hours last night, up from summer minimums of seven. Still warm enough in the house not to need heating, a second layer is now called for. The duvet, however, is back, though it's still to warm for duvet + pyjamas.

The last of the cider has been made, one demijohn of perry has been made with local pears (never ask me whose!), and the final demijohn will be filled with grape juice, fruit of the vine and work of human hands, that shall become moderately drinkable wine.

This time last year:
Equilux – the triumph of light over darkness.

This time two years ago:
Equilux: the struggle between Light and Dark

This time five years ago:
S7 construction update

This time six years ago:
Covid – we still really don't know where we are

This time 12 years ago:

Thoughts occasioned by today being equilux

This time 15 years ago:
The magic of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand's Marlborough region

This time 16 years ago:
Grandson of Poles elected to lead UK's Labour Party

This time 18 years ago:
Give me sunshine!

By train to Dęblin via Radom

2026-09-23T23:59:00.000+02:00

Yesterday's post focused on the Air Force Museum in Dęblin; today's will be a reflection on my railway journey there and back via Radom.

Now, until five years ago, Radom had but one railway station, named simply Radom. Since then, the city has been sprouting stations, jak grzyby po deszczu. Coming into Radom from Warsaw, the Koleje Mazowieckie local service now stops at Radom Stara Wola, Radom Północny, Radom Gołębiów and Radom Wschodni before finally arriving at Radom's main station, which had to be renamed Radom Główny in 2021.

The newest of the new stations, Radom Wschodni, opened in June 2025. And this (below) is my first visit. More about this station later.

Dęblin railway station owes its existence and historical importance to the intersection of two major railways built under the Russian imperial administration in the late 19th century. Dęblin was known in Tsarist times as Ivangorod (Ивангород). And here, the Russians built a massive fortress guarding the confluence of the Vistula and Wieprz rivers.

The station became a junction of the Vistula Railway (Kolej Nadwiślańska, opened in 1877); this line ran along the right bank of the Vistula, linking the Prussian border at Mława with Warsaw, Ivangorod, Lublin, and Kovel, in present-day Ukraine. It connected the frontline fortresses of Modlin, Warsaw Citadel and Ivangorod (Dęblin) to the Tsarist heartlands. The first line to reach Dęblin did so a year earlier, in 1876, being a spur off the main Warsaw-Moscow railway. This ran south-west from Brest-Litovsk to Łuków and then onto Dęblin. Joining this line at Dęblin was the Ivangorod–Dąbrowa Railway (Kolej Iwanogrodzko-Dąbrowska, opened in 1885); it was built to get Silesian coal to Russia. Starting at Dęblin, it bridged the Vistula and traversed the Świętokrzyskie hills before reaching the Austro-Hungarian frontier at Dąbrowa.

Today the old Kolej Nadwiślańska is Linia Kolejowa (LK) 7, linking Warsaw to the Ukrainian border at Dorohusk, while the old Kolej Iwanogrodzo-Dąbrowska, connecting Silesia via Dęblin and onto Łuków and the Belarusian border at Terespol is LK 26. So that's that sorted. Now, let's have a little look at the stretch of LK 26 between Radom and Dęblin...

Below: Garbatka Letnisko station, as the name implies, a summer-holiday resort town. Jedlnia Letnisko, closer to Radom is another such town. Both kick-started their resort-status careers in the 1920s, the result of the railway line bringing tourists from nearby Radom and Dęblin to enjoy the Puszcza Kozienicka forest that lay to the north of the tracks.

Below: Zajezierze koło Dęblina station. This pic, snapped from the window of my eastbound train, has the appearance of a vintage hand-coloured black & white photograph. The station has recently been remonted, but, sadly, the clock has already broken (it's really 09:56).

Below: crossing the Vistula. The current steel girder structure is the third railway bridge here, the first being blown up during the First World War and the second during the Second World War. Such is Poland's history.

Below: railway junction south of Dęblin, a freight train, having bypassed the passenger station, makes its way onto the LK 26 before crossing the Vistula.

Below: mounted on a plinth outside Dęblin station, a narrow-gauge Ryś locomotive with tender (class T49). Built between 1946 and 1950, these were a development of the German Henschel Riesa Kriegsdampflok, a standardised narrow-gauge locomotive built in large numbers between 1936 and 1944 for military field railways and construction sites.

Below: around Dęblin's main station building (destroyed during the First World War) stand a number of houses built for the Tsar's railway workers. This one survived.

Below: the south-east water tower, built during the German occupation, and hit by Soviet shells in 1944 (holes visible near the top). In use today as a communications tower for mobile telephony.

Below: Back at Radom Wschodni. Note the escalators, the signs for the airport, and the bus stop on the viaduct from which one can take bus to said airport. In the distance to the left (click to enlarge image), the LK 26 veers off from the LK 8, the main Warsaw-Radom-Kielce-Kraków line. The new station meant that I could change trains here from the one coming from Dęblin to the one heading north to Chynów, rather than going in one stop to Radom Główny to back track via Radom Wschodni again.

It is good that Radom, a city the size of Portsmouth or Newcastle-on-Tyne, has experienced a boom in new stations in the past five years; Radom Południowy and Radom Potkanów (both to the south of the city) complete the set. And finally, a reminder that Radom Główny station, opened as Radom in 1885, was designed by the magnificently named Adolf Schimmelpfennig.

This time three years ago:
It's a competitive world

This time four years ago:
To Rzeszów and back by rail, Pt I

This time five years ago:
Science, Religion, Magic and Consciousness

This time eight years ago:
The house on the działka, coming on

This time nine years ago:
Autumn comes early

This time ten years ago:
Kriegslok passes through Jeziorki

This time 14 years ago:
A little way west of Jeziorki

This time 15 years ago:
The Old Sailor's Tale - part II

This time 16 years ago:
Prague-Jeziorki-Moscow

This time 17 years ago:
The passing of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz

This time 19 years ago:
Summer ends, autumn begins

The air force museum in Dęblin

2026-09-22T20:08:53.888+02:00

Today, being World Car-Free Day, Koleje Mazowieckie once again refused to take money for train tickets, and one could travel all over the network for free. This year, I decided to visit Dęblin, in particular the Air Force Museum. Train from Chynów to Radom where I changed for a train to Dęblin. Just over two and half hours. And on arrival, I discovered that today, being a Tuesday, entrance was free too. Great! Below: 'Attackers' Avenue' and a vista of old Soviet MiGs, Sukhois and Ilyushins and the occasional helicopter.

But the getting there could be easier... Below: Over the Vistula by electrical traction, out of Mazowsze and into Lubelskie, till we come to a town associated with Polish military aviation – Dęblin.

Dęblin (pop. 13,000) reminds me of Warka (pop. 11,500) as it used to be before Warka Miasto opened. Dęblin's one station is a long way from the town centre – three and half kilometres to be precise!

And the town's bus service is pathetic. There are four weekday bus routes, an hourly service from the station to the main market square that departs four minutes before the train from Radom arrives in Dęblin. Left: bus route no. 2; just two buses a day to the railway station, in the early afternoon. That's it.

So it's wait nearly an hour or walk for 45 minutes (I can't complain; it stayed dry and I covered 20,000 paces today). Public transport – not that good. And by car from Warsaw – be warned of roadworks on the DK48 along the way, the museum's website says.

Despite the difficulty of getting here, if you are into military aviation history in the slightest, this museum is a must-visit, along with the one in Kraków. Below: A Polish Air Force MiG-21 in NATO Tiger Meet colours. The air base often hosts pilots from other NATO members. Culture clash! USAF nose-art vs. Polish officers' formality can be seen at the museum.

Dęblin has been home to the Polish Air Force's training school since 1925; today there was much activity with four fast-jet take-offs, many helicopters circling around the base and piston-powered basic trainers practicing touch-and-goes, just the other side of the museum's perimeter fence.

Left: rear end of an Ilyushin Il-28, NATO codename 'Beagle', and in the sky above it a Diamond DA-20 Katana trainer.

Dęblin – where NATO's top guns would whoop it up... but where? The town is decidedly dull. I am a great fan of Poland's progress, and in Dęblin I can see new asphalt and pavements, but, other than four kebab shops and a couple of Viet-Pol restaurants – like, where's the action for the airmen? Below: Ulica Warszawska, Dęblin's main drag. A long straight road that passes the central square, where it becomes ul. Niepodległości. More a rectangular park than a proper rynek.

All in all, Dęblin is not as good in terms of the actual aircraft on show as I remember Kraków's Air Museum to be; my interest not being in the vast display of old Soviet kit at both museums, rather pre-war Polish and NATO aircraft from the Cold War. Thankfully, the good stuff is in hangars rather than exposed to the elements. Below: a British Miles Magister basic trainer that Polish fighter pilots got started on, and behind it a Polish designed-and-built LWD Junak basic trainer from the 1950s.

I did appreciate the indoor exhibition with its focus on the interwar years and the Polish Air Force fighting alongside the RAF in WW2. Below: an interior representing RAF Northolt in the glory days, the peak of the Battle of Britain, when 303 (Polish) Fighter Squadron was the top-scoring unit defending the British Isles.

There was a smaller part of the indoor exhibition featuring Polish aviation within the Warsaw Pact. One chilling exhibit was this large wall-map showing the direction of the thrusts of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe, as planned in the 1980s. By D+3, Polish forces were expected to have been 270km into West Germany

Below: a LIM-2, being a Polish licence-built version of the ubiquitous Soviet MiG-15bis first-generation jet fighter.

Below: flight deck of a Polish Air Force Antonov An-26 (like this one, snapped over Jeziorki near the end of its career).

This time last year
Mińsk Mazowiecki (by Koleje Mazowieckie, for free)

This time two years ago:
Car-free day 2024 - Łowicz

This time five years ago
Into darkness

This time eight years ago:
Summer's end

This time nine years ago:
In which I lose a lot of data from my old laptop

This time ten years ago:
Konin – town of aluminium, electricity and coal

This time 13 years ago:
Car-free day falls on a Sunday

This time 14 years ago:
Vistula at record low level

This time 17 years ago:
Car-free day? Warsaw's roads busier than ever

This time 18 years ago:
The shape of equinox

This time 19 years ago:
Potato harvest time in Jeziorki

Six months with Hipek

2026-09-19T00:01:00.000+02:00

'Twas on the 19th of March that Hipek first arrived; a big old male, white with black patches, sat under the altanka in the garden. He'd had the tip of his left ear cut, which the internet suggested meant that he had been TNR'd (trapped-neutered-returned), a programme to catch and castrate stray cats. At first, Hipek was wary of coming into my house, but over time, he learned to trust me. He could depend on this place for a square meal and a bed for the night as winter edged into spring.

When he first allowed me to inspect him, I found three fat ticks on his body. I extracted them, and fitted him with a Foresto anti-tick collar; since then not one has infested the old cat (those things work).

I'd ask my neighbours about him. He's familiar, but no one knows for sure whether he has an owner. Anyway, six months on, he's settled down here.

Céleste, Czester, Arcturus and Scrapper all got on well with Hipek. Their mum, Wenus, was initially wary. She'd hiss at him. I could see her perspective; "here we are, a happy family, and this interloper comes along competing for resources, possibly spreading disease to my children..." After a while, however, Wenus came to accept Hipek. I now often see the two of them out in the forest together.

However, there is a real problem between Hipek and Pacyfik. Pacio simply refuses to accept Hipek as part of the colony. Pacio had a problem when the kittens were born, but he's got over that. But with Hipek, there's constant hissing, growling and swiping with his paw.

At first, Hipek would not respond, stoically bearing all of Pacio's histrionics. However, within the last few weeks, Hipek has decided he's taking no more shit from Pacio. Hipek is much more massive than the svelte Pacio, and should a fight break out (so far thankfully it hasn't), Hipek would surely prevail. Slowly, he advances towards Pacio. So Pacio retreats behind the cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, a tight space where where the capacious Hipek can't fit. And from the safety of this redoubt, Pacio carries on hissing and growling at Hipek.

And all this despite Hipek's participation in the mission to rescue Pacio in late July.

But everyone else gets on with Hipek. Arcturus, Pacio's biological identical twin brother, will happy doze next to Hipek on my bed or on the sofa. As will Scrapper, with whom Hipek often runs outside. This makes me suspect a genetic vector of intolerance. Why do four siblings, all raised identically to Pacio, accept the Outsider, while Pacio reacts with such vehemence?

And the kittens, who, unlike their uncles, don't know a world without Hipek. Every one of them is cool with Hipek. When out in the garden or the forest next door, Hipek will keep watch as they play. They feel safe. I'll sometimes go to the forest with all five kittens, their mum and Hipek.

Hipek is emotionally well balanced; he always waits for the kittens to eat first before sauntering up to a bowl, and is never impatient nor does he bother me for food or attention. A mild-mannered gentleman. He has learned to respond to his name.

Hipek sleeps with a lovely snore, which I can hear from my bedroom through a closed door. "Cats also snore, but with a prep-school accent," observes Jacek Koba in Epigramology. Hipek usually spends the night in a cat basket on the kitchen windowsill, surrounded by the kittens.

Why 'Hipek'? Subconsciously, is it because of his size he reminded me of a hippo? His alternative name is Ol' Mr. Heaps; his alter ego Hiram Heaps was born in 1838, and used to vote for the Federalist Party.

Long may Hipek live in good feline health. And may Pacio learn to accept Hipek.

This time two years ago:
(Are You Ready Do) The Bus Stop

This time three years ago:
Warka station, dawn and dusk

This time four years ago:
The Monarchy – my arguments for

This time five years ago:
Seaside, Sopot

This time six years ago:
Repeatable moments of joy

This time seven years ago:
Spectacularly glorious day, Ealing

This time ten years ago:
Evolution, the future and us

This time 12 years ago:
Relief as Scots vote to remain in UK

This time 13 years ago:
The S2 opens all the way to Puławska

This time 14 years ago:
Thundering ghost from out of the mist

This time 15 years ago:
Push-pull for Mazowsze

This time 16 years ago:
Okęcie runway repairs are complete

This time 18 years ago:
I know that painting from somewhere...

Late summer, sublime

2026-09-17T10:56:31.655+02:00

As summer slips away, my usual injunction to make the most of it. My daily routine is changing. With the sun now rising well after six am, I am no longer dropping the blinds in my bedroom. I am finding that the early sunsets mean I feel like going to bed earlier, and thus I get out of bed earlier.

Two walks today, a total of 16,000 paces.

I set off for my first walk just after 8am, the sun still low in the sky. The benefit of rising early.

Below: the orchards are groaning with apples again; despite the late frost and dry spring, the harvest looks like it's going to be a good one.

Below: the top end of the farm track from Jakubowizna as it reaches Grobice. One sad piece of news – the small grocery store just around the corner from here seems to have closed for good. I would occasionally pop while on walks, for water, non-alcoholic beer or indeed beer. And salt snacks. But never any bigger grocery purchases. The recent opening of two supermarkets in Chynów may have contributed to the closure of yet another small local shop within walking distance of my działka, the fifth since I bought the place.

Left: the bottom end of ulica Słoneczna as it joins ul. Główna. Just gone midday, and I'm on my way to Chynów for a few tins of cat food and some cleaning materials – and lunch.

Below: driving to the supermarket car park in a four-wheel-drive, Chynów style. Note the digger at work on the left; there's been a major remont of the water mains in Chynów for the past few weeks. Today I got an SMS from the local water utility that there'd be limited water pressure or even no water from 11:00 to 16:00; a good excuse not to cook lunch but to dine out at Loft Chynów.

Yesterday's morning sky was entirely cloudless. By the early afternoon, thin wispy strands began slowly moving in from the west; by the evening, drops of rain began to fall. The forecast for the coming week is rain, rain, rain and more rain.

My aesthetic is sunny. Blue skies I love, any time of year. Grey skies = less photography.

BONUS SHOTS:

Friday 18 September, another lovely day. Making the most of it! Below: over the hill to Grobice.

Below: the apple harvest is underway, the sound of pails being filled is omnipresent as I walk past the orchards.

Below: a field ripe for development, I fear, Grobice.

This time last year:
Flying the flag in Wola

This time two years ago:
A further step towards energy autonomy

This time three years ago:
Plenitude in the Year's Fruition

This time four years ago:
Behold the wonder of the commonplace

This time five years ago
The force-field of fate

This time six years ago:
Hot in the city

This time seven years ago:
Resting with the heroes

This time nine years ago:
Polish employers' demographic challenge
[Immigration and AI seem to be solving the problem today...]

This time 14 years ago:
The rich, the poor, the entrepreneur

This time 15 years ago:
Bittersweet

This time 16 years ago:
Commuting made easy

This time 17 years ago:
Work starts on the S79/S2 'Elka'

This time 18 years ago:
Warsaw's accident-filled streets

This time 19 years ago:
Return to Zamienie

AI: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

2026-09-15T21:18:52.709+02:00

And the LORD God commanded man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” – GENESIS 2:16-17

The thought struck me the other day as I was taking a shower: "Is artificial intelligence the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?"

I put this question to Google Gemini: Gemini said no. Its answer was rational and utilitarian: knowledge is neither good nor evil. What matters is what we do with it.

If AI helps cure diseases, accelerates drug discovery, reduces poverty, improves logistics and removes dangerous or degrading work, then good. If it produces mass unemployment, surveillance, bias, autonomous weapons or catastrophic loss of control, then bad. AI, said Gemini, is not forbidden fruit. It is merely an extremely powerful tool.

OK. So I copied Gemini's answer into ChatGPT and asked it to argue back.

ChatGPT started by attacking Gemini's premise: that Good and Evil can be reduced to welfare calculations – more happiness, less suffering, more healthy years of life, fewer bad outcomes. But, said ChatGPT, this is itself a moral philosophy rather than some neutral position from which all other views can be judged.

More importantly, ChatGPT said Gemini had misunderstood the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; it isn't a story about God telling mankind not to learn things, it is that humanity reaches for the right to decide for itself what is Good and what is Evil.

The serpent's promise is: “Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Now the AI analogy begins to look stronger. AI has given us extraordinary new powers to know, classify, predict and decide.

But greater intelligence does not necessarily mean greater wisdom! Learning how to split the atom before learning how to abolish wars; developing industrial chemistry before understanding the effects of pollution has on the biosphere; building social media before grasping the implications of algorithmically optimised attention for politics, culture and the human brain. All examples of where progress brought about unforeseen consequences.

ChatGPT summed it thus: “The danger is not knowledge. The danger is knowledge without wisdom”.

Back to Gemini. This time it came back with a much stronger argument. I was, it said, mixing up two different stories from Genesis. The Tree of Knowledge is about an inward transformation. Man becomes self-conscious, ashamed, aware of mortality and burdened with moral responsibility. The real story about technological hubris is the Tower of Babel. There, mankind combines its collective linguistic and technical power to build something that reaches towards heaven. AI, said Gemini, is Babel.

Large AI systems are, among other things, extraordinary machines for concentrating human output. “Language. Mathematics. Science. Literature. Code. History. Law. Music. Philosophy.” Huge chunks of human culture are being compressed into manageable computational structures.

Gemini: “Babel begins with one language and ends with many; AI begins with many languages and translates them into a common underlying machine representation.” Babel takes mankind from unity to fragmentation; AI may be taking us from fragmentation back towards unity.

I put Gemini's argument back to ChatGPT. ChatGPT conceded the Babel point, but refused to give up on Eden. Perhaps, said ChatGPT, AI sits at the intersection of both stories.

“Babel explains what we are building. Eden explains why we find it so tempting.”

Gemini had made another strong point. An AI does not judge in the moral sense. It is never tormented by doubts or by guilt, nor does it fear death. All it does is calculate.

So, Gemini argued, the danger is not that we have created a machine that knows Good and Evil; the danger is that we may begin handing our own moral judgement over to something that knows neither.

Gemini called that temptation not disobedience – but sloth!

ChatGPT thought this was Gemini's best argument.

We already know primitive versions of it. “The computer says no.” “The system rejected your application.” “The algorithm has calculated the risk.” Nobody – no human – took the decision. Responsibility disappeared somewhere into the procedure.

AI makes this far more serious because the machine no longer merely processes a decision – it actually recommends one. And this problem will get worse as AI continues to improve. Imagine a neurologist whose diagnosis, based on many years of looking at brain scans, disagrees with an AI system which has repeatedly been shown to outperform human doctors. Who should ultimately decide? If the doctor overrides the machine and the patient dies, has the doctor nobly defended human judgement? Or has he irresponsibly trusted his own intuition over much better evidence?

The same question could arise with judges, pilots, soldiers, teachers, financiers or politicians.

ChatGPT put the dilemma this way:

Epistemic humility tells us to defer to the machine.
Moral responsibility tells us that the decision must remain ours.

That struck me as the most interesting point in this exchange between the two AIs. The biblical Tree represents a mythical point in human history at which we became morally self-conscious creatures; a point at which mankind became aware of moral responsibility. The inflection point that we now face is the awareness of abrogating moral responsibility to externalised judgment.

“The first temptation was: You shall know Good and Evil.

The second may be: You need no longer decide between them yourself.”

ChatGPT made another interesting point. “The danger may not arrive when AI starts getting things wrong. It may arrive when AI starts getting things right so often that exercising your own judgment begins to look irrational. That takes the argument beyond the usual AI debate about jobs, robots and machines becoming cleverer than us. It asks an older question: what is human freedom actually for?”

Once we notice in our lives that AI is consistently making better decisions than we can, would there still be any point, any value, in making our own? ChatGPT's answer was yes. “Because not everything valuable about life is an outcome. Courage requires the possibility of cowardice. Wisdom requires uncertainty, mistakes and learning. Moral development requires the possibility of choosing badly.”

One could imagine a future in which AI helps everyone live longer, violent crime becomes rare, poverty largely disappears and algorithms gently steer people towards statistically optimal careers, relationships and lifestyles. By every measurable indicator, this might be an extraordinary success.

And yet... and yet... who is actually living the life?

By the end of my AI experiment, ChatGPT and Gemini had agreed that Eden concerns knowledge, freedom, judgment, wisdom and moral responsibility.

ChatGPT finally reformulated my question: “Perhaps AI is not itself the new Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Perhaps something stranger is happening. Having eaten from the Tree, are we now building AI to escape the burden of what we acquired? The first temptation was to become as gods by acquiring knowledge. The second temptation was to build an oracle to which we can hand over the moral responsibility of deciding what that knowledge means and what we should do with it. And the danger is that humans will increasingly cease to bear it.”

The danger may not be that machines become human; it may be that humans become more machine-like, “preferring optimisation to judgement, probability to conviction, prediction to wisdom and freedom from error to the freedom to choose.”

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil looks like an ancient warning whose time has come.

[I found it really interesting bouncing arguments made by one AI against the other and back again!]

This time two years ago:
Touched by Boris

This time three years ago
Clinging on and letting go

This time six years ago:
Out in the mid-September heat

This time seven years ago:
Poland's ugliest building?
[Gone before it too ugly to knock down]

This time 12 years ago:
Weekend cookery – prawns in couscous

This time 13 years ago:
Draining Jeziorki

This time 14 years ago:
Early autumn moods

This time 16 years ago:
The Battle of Britain, 70 years on

This time 17 years ago:
Thoughts about TV, Polish and British

This time 18 years ago:
Time to abandon driving to work!

This time 19 years ago:
Crappy roads take their toll

Do you need a monstrous ego to get things done?

2026-09-12T23:59:00.000+02:00

In a further exploration of laziness, I find myself wanting to link the notion of ego to that of energy or drive. What drives a billionaire to strive for further billions? It's certainly not the need to keep the wolf from the door. There comes a point at which another million złotys, pounds or dollars cannot appreciably improve one's material existence – let alone another billion. Once comfort, freedom and security are assured, why bother pushing further?

The obvious answer is that the money has ceased to be money. It's now a score against which some people feel the need to measure themselves against others. Why this need for external validation? Isn't it just a symptom of insecurity?

The question of what makes some people push themselves relentlessly while others are content to coast along through life has fascinated me since youth. Some seem born with an inability to switch off. They build businesses one after another, acquire properties, push for promotion, write multiple books, enter politics, collect honours, climb mountains or run marathon after marathon. Achieving one objective provides no lasting satisfaction because its achievement merely reveals the next objective beyond it.

Others reach a point at which they can say to themselves quite reasonably: this will do nicely.

For much of our human history, we tended to explain such differences morally. One man was industrious, another lazy. One had ambition, another lacked it. Sloth and indolence are sinful – it says so in the Bible. Protestant societies in particular elevated industriousness to the level of a spiritual virtue: hard work was not just economically useful – it was evidence of good character.

Advances in our understanding of psychology complicates that simple distinction enormously. We are now far more aware that humans vary greatly in temperament, impulsivity, conscientiousness, appetite for excitement, and desire for social status. We are also much quicker than earlier generations to recognise patterns of behaviour that may have neurological or psychological components. In everyday conversation we hear, ‘that's a typical autism-spectrum trait’, ‘she's rather obsessive-compulsive’, ‘he's an absolute narcissist’. There is of course the danger of judgmental amateur diagnosis, but ultimately there is no single standard human mind. Our brains differ, and those differences affect what we find rewarding, what bores us and what compels us to act.

What we perceive as ambition can be seen as a question of reward circuitry. One person experiences a tremendous psychological boost from achieving a goal and immediately hungers for another fix. Another achieves the goal but gets an even greater boost from just sitting beneath a tree with a good book. To the first, the second may appear lazy. To the second, the first may appear slightly unhinged.

Ego plays a major role here because human beings are social animals. Wealth does not merely purchase goods; beyond a certain point it purchases rank; it also purchases human souls – influencing how millions of other humans think and behave. “Can I buy a TV station? Newspaper? Political party?” Billionaires compare themselves with other billionaires. Once the essentials of life have been secured, human striving becomes positional. Enough food is enough food, enough warmth is enough warmth. But there's no quantity of status that can be considered ‘enough’.

And yet obsession with status has driven much of human progress.

We live in an age defined by technological advance. Our lives have become astonishingly easier. I no longer queue in a bank to pay a bill sent to me through the post. I buy my train ticket on my mobile telephone minutes before boarding. I can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world, search a library containing nearly all of human knowledge.

But who brought this world into being?

The mythology of capitalism hails the heroic entrepreneur: the visionary individual who sees what others cannot see and wills a new reality into existence. Sometimes that story is justified. But behind almost every technological revolution there are engineers, mathematicians, programmers, researchers, technicians, administrators and obsessive problem-solvers, many of whom are not interested in achieving fame or having more money than they know what to do with.

Civilisation advances because human beings possess many different kinds of drive. We specialise. One individual has the ego necessary to raise money, persuade investors and command an organisation. Another possesses an obsessive fascination with solving a technical problem. Another simply has the patience to spend ten years perfecting something to work reliably without ever breaking down.

The successful institution somehow harnesses these different energies, but which one gets the praise?

And here lies another distinction worth making. Ego may fuel drive, but it doesn't usually provide wisdom. Excessive ego can become destructive. The leader who needs every success to bear his name eventually becomes an obstacle to the organisation they lead. Decisions begin to serve the preservation of their status rather than the purpose of the enterprise. They surrounds himself with people who tell him how brilliant they are. The organisation becomes an extension of the personality at its summit. We can think of many like this – in politics, and in our workplaces (we've all come across bosses like that).

At the opposite extreme stands the ideal associated with Lao Tzu: the leader whose presence is scarcely noticed and who, once the work is accomplished, leaves people believing that they achieved it themselves.

Wise leadership requires finding a balance: enough ego to fuel the drive required to bring something into being, relentlessly pushing forward across obstacles, combined with enough detachment to relinquish ownership of the achievement once it exists.

And this distinction applies beyond leadership. There's creative ego – the force that says “I can make this happen” – and possessive ego – the force that says “everyone must know that I made this happen”. The first one build things; the second often ends up building monuments to itself.

Which brings me back to laziness. Instead of asking why some people lack drive, I should ask why others possess too much of it. Why should the natural human condition be assumed to consist of ceaseless striving? For most of our evolutionary history there was little advantage in expending energy unnecessarily. Energy was precious. If one's belly was full, the weather benign, and there's no predator approaching, sitting quietly beneath a tree was an entirely rational thing to do. Take it easy, man.

Modern civilisation has inverted the logic of biology. Rest requires justification; work does not. The person who says 'I have enough' can appear deficient in ambition. Yet the ability to recognise when enough is enough is a deep a form of wisdom. Slacking off when one really doesn't have enough is indolence.

The billionaire pursuing his tenth billion has more drive than the man contentedly reading under his tree. But it does not mean that the billionaire has a better understanding of what life is for.

This time last year:
Dzieci wojny – Children of War

This time two years ago:
Ten grand a year

This time three years ago:
The ephemeral pleasures of materialism

This time four years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia modernisation – a long way to go
(Three years on: still not finished)

This time five years ago:

The Wilderness and the Garden

This time six years ago:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time seven years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów – delayed

This time ten years ago:
English as she is used in Europe

This time 11 years ago:
Where asphalt is needed – Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala

This time 16 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 18 years ago:
First apple

In Siberia by Colin Thubron

2026-09-10T23:59:00.000+02:00

“Everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom.” Upon this crucial sentence hangs Colin Thubron's In Siberia. Soviet institutions, the fabric of Soviet infrastructure and the people shaped by Soviet communism were all degrading before Thubron's eyes as he traversed Siberia in 1997, six years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This is how rabbit holes go; I started with Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (London to Tokyo and back by train, the return leg taking him across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Express. Fascinated by that particular railway journey, I then reached for a book devoted to it, Eric Newby's The Big Red Train Ride. That left me fascinated by Siberia itself, so on to Thubron.

Colin Thubron, born in 1939, so of the same generation as Theroux, had already written about travelling through the Soviet Union in Among the Russians, published after a journey made in 1982, in the dying days of the Brezhnev era. By the time Thubron returned, 15 years later, the USSR had fragmented and Russia itself was in chaos. This time he concentrated solely on Siberia. He witnessed the fallout: the hopelessness of people left behind among the shards of Soviet megaprojects intended to conquer and develop the tundra and taiga through science, industry and Marxism.

Newby spends several days watching endless forest, taiga and tundra pass his train window. Thubron spends months disappearing into their depths, travelling by train, bus, truck and river boat, hitching lifts and taking dodgy flights into places far beyond the railhead. Newby is travelling through the Soviet Union. Thubron is travelling through what it had left behind.

Akademgorodok, the 'Academic Town' south of central Novosibirsk, gets a chapter. Founded in the late 1950s as one of the great centres of Soviet science, by Thubron's visit it had been hit badly by the collapse of state funding. Scientists had emigrated to the West, institutes were impoverished and serious research projects had been curtailed. Into the vacuum seeped some distinctly unscientific ideas. Thubron encounters underpaid academics pursuing variations on old Russian cosmism, involving mysterious energies, altered states of consciousness and devices supposedly capable of opening normally inaccessible psychophysical realms.

Komsomolsk-on-Amur provides another telling example. The city was founded in 1932 as a great Soviet industrial project. Official mythology celebrated the heroic young Komsomol volunteers who had gone east to build socialism in the wilderness. They did indeed exist, but the labour they supplied was nowhere near sufficient. The state increasingly turned to forced labour, and around 90,000 prisoners worked in Komsomolsk during the main years of construction. The bulk the city and its industrial infrastructure was in the end built by slaves.

Here, Thubron's remark about slavery and freedom takes on its full meaning. The Soviet state could decide that a city should exist in an impossibly remote place, send tens of thousands of people there, compel them to work and continue supplying the settlement regardless of whether what it produced made economic sense. Once that coercive machinery disappeared, the enterprises that it spawned began falling apart, naturally. It was not that freedom was destroying what slavery had built; rather, it was the lack of Moscow's coercion that ultimately showed how dependent those achievements had been upon that very coercion. Building railways over permafrost is not just an engineering challenge.

As with The Big Red Train Ride, I followed the author's journey along maps, online and printed, and dipped into the many places on Google Maps that have street view imagery (albeit from before the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine). These continue to fascinate.

Reading In Siberia, in places I had a distinct feeling of déjà lu – passages of Siberian history were tales I'd just encountered in The Big Red Train Ride: the aristocratic wives who voluntarily followed their Decembrist husbands into Siberian exile, grotesque punishments inflicted by the Tsarist authorities such as tearing out the septums from the noses of snuff users, and the strange survival of strange communities expelled to the east over the centuries. Newby and Thubron had clearly drawn on some of the same source material while researching their journeys.

Both write extensively about the Old Believers, driven into exile in remote settlements after refusing to accept the 17th-century reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. Under communism religion was suppressed but not extinguished. After its collapse, belief flooded back into the space vacated by Marxism-Leninism, though often in peculiar forms.

The dull certainties of communism had disappeared, suggesting the ideology's shallow roots, bereft of tradition. In the place of Marxism-Leninism came Orthodox Christianity, Old Belief, Buddhism, shamanism, mysticism and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs. Thubron has little time for the newly confident Orthodox establishment, whose clerics he portrays as arrogant, pompous, entitled and worldly, prospering amid the poverty of people with a genuine hunger for spiritual direction.

Thubron's Siberia is populated by sects and millenarian religious groups awaiting the End of Days. He also writes about the revival of shamanism after decades of active Soviet persecution. But how do you revive a religion whose traditions were mostly oral, when the people who carried those traditions have been killed, dispersed or silenced? You improvise; you make stuff up, filling the gaps with what you imagine it to have been like. Thubron meets ersatz shamans, some inventing traditions as they go along, complete with plastic antlers and paying clients waiting for consultations in the corridors of shabby apartment blocks.

The most striking difference between Newby's USSR of 1977 and Thubron's Russia of 1997 was the lack of a system. In Newby's Soviet Union, there's always some official somewhere, a permit needed, a guide watching him, regulations, timetables, a place one may or may not visit. Thubron's people have been abandoned by the system. People ignore regulations and scoff at uniformed officials who try to enforce them. The institutions remain, the uniform blocks of flats, the mines, the railway lines, laboratories and factories remain, but the ideology which once explained why they were there has vanished.

The final chapter takes Thubron into Kolyma, the darkest heart of the Gulag. At Butugychag he visits the remains of a forced-labour mining complex where prisoners extracted and processed uranium ore without adequate protection. Accounts from the camp describe men surviving only months in some of the most hazardous jobs. The ruined machinery and abandoned buildings are the logical end-point of his journey: Soviet industrial achievement stripped of all propaganda and reduced to its human cost.

The inhumanity of the system is stark – shocking to those who have not confronted it in their family history. The collapse of the Soviet system was something to be welcomed. Thubron had arrived in Siberia at a bleak point in its history; Soviet tyranny was not replaced in the 1990s by a liberal order that would ultimately lead to peace and prosperity as it did across most of Central Europe, but institutional breakdown, corruption, mafias, unpaid wages, collapsing industries and the sudden disappearance of certainties by which people had organised their lives.

When Thubron writes that “everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom”, he is not claiming that freedom had failed; he was underlining the extent to which Soviet achievement had been grounded on compulsion.

Reading the book nearly 30 years after Thubron's travels through Siberia, we can now see that this was a Russia in transition, after the Soviet state had lost the power to imprison society but before another authoritarian state had assembled itself to take its place. The direction Russia eventually took out of that chaos was not towards ever greater freedom.

Ultimately, I doubt if Moscow will be able to cling on to Siberia – at least the far eastern, trans-Baikal part of it, until the end of this century. Much of this was Outer Manchuria, once ruled by Chinese dynasties – and China wants it back.

This time last year:
Prophesy

This time eight years ago:
Comfort comes in layers

This time nine years ago:
Preference and familiarity

This time ten years ago:
A long day in wonderful Wrocław

This time 12 years ago:
Putin will not heal Russia's tortured soul

This time 13 years ago:
Opole, little-known town

This time 14 years ago:
Raise a glass to Powiśle

This time 16 years ago:
Mud, rain and local elections

This time 18 years ago:
There must be a better way (commuting woes)