I’m not a libertarian…

…But the social and political climate makes me look and sound like one. I believe the state has an important role to play in helping people to live their lives. Indeed, outside of things very personal to us (by which I mean family and the closest friends), I believe the state has the biggest role to play in our lives due to its universal spread and longevity. Almost anywhere I choose to live there will be a state present and we can harness this positively.

But the state doesn’t know best and it isn’t able to tell us how to live our lives. It is not possible for a universal beast like the state to dictate what is in the best interests of individuals. More potently, however, is that the state has no moral superiority to dictate that consenting adults, who aren’t harming anyone else, shouldn’t be allowed to do precisely as they please.

Two particular examples annoy me here in Poland (not to say the UK is great by any stretch of the imagination, but these rules don’t apply in the UK so they are noticeable to me). First is jaywalking. Here, you are not allowed to cross the road at your point of choice and, at a crossing, if the signal is red, you are prohibited from crossing. When I first came to Poland, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that when the road was empty, people wouldn’t cross – these traffic signals are surely there to help us, not restrain us? Seemingly not. What is worse is that the police (and “city guard”) actively look for people breaking this rule to hand out a fine.

Second is drinking in public. Now I don’t want to live in a society that has drunks on every street corner and it is almost impossible to walk to the shop without being threatened by drinkers. But, the law of prohibiting drinking in public is overly harsh. It needlessly stops people relaxing with a bottle of beer or wine in the evenings, at the park with friends. This is enforced equally with jaywalking. It’s as if the police have no crime to solve and Poland doesn’t have a national debt.

The basic premise is the state has no roll in how I treat myself. The state doesn’t know best.

So, I’ve read with interest the idea of further limiting cigarette advertising. Now, I think a time comes when a point is reached with cigarettes. If adults know the well-studied risks of smoking and still decide to start smoking, why should we stop them? Cigarettes aren’t a major cause of social problems (compare a guy going out for a couple of hours every evening to smoke 20 cigarettes to one drinking 20 pints in the same time). Doesn’t it ultimately get to a point where if adults want to harm themselves, we have to let them?

Chopin’s Warsaw

Frédéric (Fryderyk) Chopin is Warsaw’s most keenly remembered son and it’s not difficult to guess why. We have around the city some posters – they’re not new but I like them enough to post now They come from a competition called „Fryderyku! Wróć do Warszawy!” (“Frédéric, return to Warsaw!”).

Piotr Węcławik

My favourite: Piotr Micherewicz

The winner: Piotr Karski

Nikodem Pręgowski

Nikodem Pręgowski

Iza Koniarz

Source: Wirtualna Polska

New Year’s Resolutions

I’ve never made a New Year’s Resolution before. I have never felt the need to drastically change anything in my life at an artificial time. For sure, I have had to change things before, but I have done so at the time they have needed to be changed, whether it was August, May or September. This year, however, I have made some.

1.       Make nice stuff to look after our nice stuff

I’ve always looked after my things to keep them nice. Nothing new here. But, I have been out of practice in making things which can keep them nice, specifically things like wooden boxes and fabric bags. Part of my problem is I haven’t had the tools at hand in the past few years as I have gone from temporary home to temporary home – in the past four years I have had eight ‘homes’ where I have stayed for more than three consecutive weeks. But, I have been in this eighth home since June, so it is more permanent. As an example of things I’d like to keep nice is our new board game, Push. Push is made to a very high standard (as are all Steffen-Spiele games) but only comes in a thin cotton bag. As none of our friends or family have such a game, they at times want us to take the game with us when we visit. So, a bag is required. And there’s not going to be one off the shelf that will do the job. So, back to the sewing machine I go. My first woodwork project will be to make a box for our new Chinese Checkers set. The box for it is nice, but nothing holds the pins, so if we take it anywhere the pins will be loose and easily lost.

Push is a cool game which lots of people want to try...

...but with a light cotton bag not suitable for transporting it.

2.       Recycle more stuff

Well, no excuses on this one: I’ve been lazy since moving here. I’ve always taken full advantage of the local recycling schemes, organising it in my house last year, setting-up an easy system at my mum’s house. But, since moving here, I have been lazy. So, I’m going back to the old ways and making use of the recycling facilities. My only trouble at the moment is: where do I recycle cans?

Electronics, glass, plastic and paper, but nowhere for cans?

3.       Fitness goals

The lack of mass participation triathlon in Poland set me back a bit. I tried to find some information about, well, any and pretty much hit brick walls. I lost my goals, and without goals, I am rubbish at keeping fit. It’s not as if I am fat – if anything I am a bit underweight now – but I don’t have the same fitness levels as I did. So, I have pencilled in two events – the Warsaw half-marathon at the end of March and the Warsaw marathon at the end of September as two events which will focus my mind a bit. My only trouble on this one is how to begin training when there is ice almost everywhere and it’s below freezing most days…

You’ll notice there’s no resolutions about politics or blogging. Politics moves on for me as ever. In blogging, I am intending to do one post a week, but we’ll see. I’m not going to force myself on it and there’s a perfectionist twinge to me: I only want to press publish when I am happy when I can say I wouldn’t add anything more which often takes me far too long.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has 296 steps to reach the top. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2010. If those were steps, it would have climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa 4 times

 

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 18 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 32mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was December 1st with 39 views. The most popular post that day was About.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were polandian.home.pl, facebook.com, slashingtongue.com, android-vs-ipad.co.cc, and englishwarsaw.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for polished cinema, fight for holy cross in warsaw, klub opera, warshawa central 24h open, and palace of culture and science.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

About February 2010
2 comments

2

24 hours in Warsaw August 2010
1 comment

3

The Very Polish Response to a Very Polish Tragedy April 2010
1 comment

4

Winter is coming October 2010
2 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

What’s the point of Labour supporting nominations? July 2010

Back from the ether

My apologies for hardly blogging at all lately. It has been because I have been busy rather than had nothing to talk about. Funny old business this blogging – the more you have to write about, the less time you have to actually do the writing part.

The weather was surprisingly warm throughout November. On All Saints Day we visited the Powązki and Powązki Wojskowe (Powązki Army) cemeteries. I took some photos to make a blog from but didn’t get around to the writing part. It feels a bit late now so one topic to keep until next year. Taking photos in the dusk taught me one thing – get a tripod.

The week after, we attended the European Track Championships (track cycling) in Pruszków. It was quite fun even though the organisers decided to employ a DJ who didn’t really know what was going on all the time, and the lack of information on keeping people informed – not really bothering to announce things in Polish, doing a bit less in French and then only once or twice in English – and not bothering to use the information screens. It was a championships organised in around three months due to the late decision of the International Cycling Union to have elite-level continental championships counting towards Olympic qualification and you could tell it was organised in a bit of a rush: the basics were there, but not much else.

The cold snap began a week or ten days ago. First it was very cold for a few days. I took this as an opportunity to collect as much water as possible. I collect water from an Oligocene spring not far from our flat and managed to bring back around 35 litres. Two days later it started to snow. The snow caused some problems on the Monday with some traffic queues taking two hours on what is usually a five minute journey. For me, it only caused some problems with the degradation of any kind of bus timetable. I’ve given up with the timetable now. The buses will come, hopefully at regular intervals, but they could be late up to any time. Trams are more regular but the jewel in the crown of Warsaw’s transport system is the Metro which has continued to operate normally through the bad weather. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week it was bitterly cold – around -18° C. On Thursday, I left the house expecting the same kind of cold and was surprised with how war it was – around -5° C! Nevertheless, some of my students cancelled their Thursday and Friday lessons which wasn’t so good for me.

This weekend I attended the PES (Party of European Socialists) Activists Forum. Since moving to Warsaw, I have felt that my level of political engagement has been somewhat thin. I’ve been unable to engage with the other British Labour people here and the language barrier has stopped me taking part directly. The Forum gave me loads of ideas about how to engage locally on a European basis and perhaps work better with what we can do as expatriates for the local party. I hope that there is more to come on this in the new year.

That’s all for now. Warsaw is sunny today – the first day of sun I remember for some time (yes, I do have quite a short memory) and the outside beckons – although I don’t know if it will be so welcoming when I feel how cold it is. I am intending to write here once a week and to make it regular so please drop back next week!

Winter is coming

The past ten days or so have felt noticeably colder. On several mornings, drivers have had to scrape the ice off of their cars before setting off to work. Gloves have been a necessity and, given my ability at losing gloves, I made this season’s investment from the budget basket at Carrefour. Still, they’re not a bad pair of gloves and we will see how they last.

What interests me more is how the city is preparing for winter and the inevitable – snow. Aside from the completion of as much building as possible (see my earlier post), I noticed about two weeks ago that the trams had been fitted with small but freshly painted snow ploughs. In the past few days, large plastic boxes have appeared next to paths and roads and which have promptly been filled with grit.

When I first lived in Poland, two years ago, I was bemused by the tendency to clear up leaves absolutely everywhere. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people work at this time of year in clearing up leaves. I thought it was a hangover of the PRL – a job for the sake of a job. After all, in the UK, we leave them for the most part and they just rot away back into the soil. But, I didn’t realise the problems that leaves under snow would cause, both in clearing the snow up to keep things safe and moving, and in how the rotting leaves would cause a stench when the thaw came. The leaves have been falling for the past few weeks and I can’t help but think that Poles named their months wrongly: November in Polish is listopad, from the verb padać (to fall) and liść (leaves), but October still has another week to go and most of the leaves have already fallen. A bit of research tells me listopad or a variance upon that word is used for November also in Belarusian, Czech, Slovenian and Ukrainian but for October in Bulgarian, Croatian and Macedonian. Slovak, somehow, uses Latinate names for months: how did that happen?

The names of months in Polish and most of the other Slavic languages are quite different to the Latin names. In Polish, they are:

1. Styczeń – from stykać - to meet (i.e. the old year meeting the new)
2. Luty – from luty - fierce
3. Marzec – possibly Latin, but possibly from marznąć, meaning “to freeze”
4. Kwiecień – from kwiecie - flowers
5. Maj – from Latin
6. Czerwiec – a czerw is a type of insect from which a red dye was made; czerw- is now the stem of words relating to red
7. Lipiec – from lipa - linden tree
8. Sierpień – from sierp - sickle
9. Wrzesień – from wrzosy - heather
10. Październik – from paździerz - shive – which is a broken flax or hemp stalk
11. Listopad
12. Grudzień – gruda - hard ground (because of the low temperatures)

The snow won’t cause a major problem here. There will be congestion on the roads because of the people who haven’t put on their winter tyres (if you are in a crash during winter without winter tyres, you will have a lot of explaining to do). It will also last a long time, weeks or months before it melts even for just a short time and in this time, the snow will become dirty. Alas, dirty snow doesn’t have the same romantic qualities as fresh white snow.

Polished Cinema

Ask most people what they know about Polish cinema and you are likely to hear only one name: Roman Polański. Yet, Polish film has a rich heritage and two directors in particular are well worth exploring.

Andrzej Wajda burst onto the scene and broke the dour socialist realism mould in 1954 with Generation, a gritty story of an apathetic young man who came to join the resistance in wartime Poland. Wajda pushed the limits of censorship, and as he matured as a filmmaker, his work moved further from socrealism to challenge taboo subjects in society – in particular the role of the Home Army, which was viewed by the Communist leadership in both Poland and the USSR as a hostile and reactionary force. Indeed, in 1958 Wajda made Ashes and Diamonds, honouring the role of Home Army leaders, whilst the purging of Home Army leaders was still ongoing.

In the late 1970s, Wajda, along with Krzysztof Kieślowski and Agnieszka Holland developed a loose movement dealing with moral concerns in contemporary Polish life. In particular, Man of Marble attacks Stalinism and its remnants. Man of Iron, which was a sequel of sorts and was made during the 1980 Solidarity thaw of reduced censorship, examines the role of the growing opposition and included real-life footage from the 1980 Gdańsk shipyard strikes.

There was one subject, which Wajda could not tackle until after Communism: Katyń. Wajda is the son of a murdered officer from the massacre and explores both the massacre and the USSR’s post-war denial. Wajda directly challenged Russia, who were retreating back into denial on the subject.

Kieślowski first came to prominence in the cinema of moral concern movement and his work around this time was highly political, often incurring the wrath of the censors. Towards the end of communism, Kiéslowski made his Decalogue series: ten one hour movies each based on one of the ten commandments. His later, more international work, moves away from politics to engage with human emotion in two works in particular: The Double Life of Véronique and The Three Colours Trilogy.

So next time you’re casually browsing the Polish section in the DVD shop, give The Pianist a miss for the time being and take a chance on Kieślowski, Wajda and Holland.

A version of this article appeared in Impact Magazine, Issue 204. I would like to thank the editors for their help.