Remembering Mum and Dad: All Soul's Day 1 November 2021

 This a re-post from last year.  The sentiments are unchanged and always will be, but I've updated it to take account of the passage of time and the Pandemic.

Forget Hallowe'en.  

Despite all the trick or treating, crazy costumes and horror movies on the telly, here in Poland it's no more than a sideshow.  Thankfully the American obsession with it hasn't reached us, at least not to the same extent.  Indeed, the Catholic Church here, whose priests and nuns provide religious instruction in schools, in a country where First Communion and Confirmation are taken much more seriously than in many places (certainly than back home in Britain) openly and happily denounce Hallowe'en as being Evil, and encourage parents to ignore it and punish kids who join in the fun.  Mind you, they say likewise about the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas.  Which says a lot about the the shape of things here right now.....

No, the big day here is the next day, November 1st.  All Soul's Day.  The old religious festival - that has pagan roots rather than Christian - is the third most important day on the calendar, after Christmas Eve and Good Friday.

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Traditionally, people are expected, and indeed are taught from childhood, to remember and pay their respects to their deceased relatives.  This is done by visits to the graves of parents and grandparents, aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters and cousins who have passed away.  Parents take their children, and often travel the length and breadth of Poland to carry out these devotions.  All Soul's Day itself is a religious holiday with shops and businesses closed (their workers are obviously making their own observances).

Visitors do not only take flowers, as is the norm in the UK.  Far more predominant are the candles, of varying sizes and in a dazzling array of coloured and clear plastic vases.  Most graves end up with two or three bouquets and at least half a dozen candles.  By the end of the day, even the smallest and darkest cemetery is ablaze with the light from hundreds of candles. But Polish cemeteries, at least the city ones, tend to be huge affairs with thousands of graves spread across many acres, so you're talking tens of thousands of candles.  The light from them can be seen from some distance - I can remember flying in one All Soul's evening under a bright cloudless sky and being able to clearly see the patches of golden light that marked the cemeteries in many towns and cities  that we passed.  It's a beautiful and moving sight.

In fact, the whole event is that.  I don't consider myself in any away devout - I have my own set of beliefs that are a kind of Christianity, that I have come to over a lifetime and that comfort me - and do not belong to any recognised religion.  I was christened Church of England, though my teens attended a non-conformist Baptist chapel and ended up marrying two Catholic girls and attending Mass most Sundays (once the kids came along) but was never confirmed in either of the first two and never converted.  I'm not an atheist, but it would be difficult to classify me as Christian either.

Yet there is something comforting in standing at the various graves of my wife's departed, lighting our candle and placing it carefully amongst the others (we are never the first to arrive), then stepping back for some moments of quiet prayer and contemplation.  When the kids were small, my wife would lead them in some traditional Polish prayers and the kids would join in the genuflection and "Amen" conclusion.  I would listen in silence, as I still do, lost in my own thoughts.

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Every time I go back home to visit my sisters and sons and their families, I make a pilgrimage to my home town in Kent.  I've watched it change over the years: the High Street changes, more housing, more people, a one way system and traffic lights. But remaining constant are the graveyards in Church Street, the old one-time council estate where I was born.  In one of them my parents share a grave, with a grey marble headstone and edging, gravel base and flower pots.  Compared to some of the huge headstones that dominate Polish graves, its small beer indeed, but of course it means the world to me.

I clean it up, dispose of any old and dead flowers and weeds, give it a sweep, change the pot water and place my own bunch of chrysanthemums - my parents both loved the flower.  All the time I'm chatting to them, telling them what I'm up to, how the boys are (my dad died before any of them were born but mum was there for all three) and their families and children; I've introduced my two younger children, born and raised both Polish and English, when I took them to visit when they were smaller.  I get some funny looks from people who might pass (few and far between), but that's ok.  I don't pray, at least in the traditional and recognised way, but have a chat and thank my God for looking after them - it's the kind of informal prayer I learned in my Baptist teens and I'm comfortable with it. 

I went back recently, the first time in nearly three years, now COVID has abated somewhat - at least enough to allow travel (with some restrictions.  The town has changed little, and nor had the graveyard. But mum and dad's plot was badly in need of some care and attention, the headstone and surround and pebbles around the flower pots filthy dirty and covered in grime from three years or more of completely understandable neglect. I went to the nearest tap to get a can of water to at least try and spruce it up a bit, but there were no watering cans. A notice requested that mourners bring their own: an old lady passing by told me all the public ones had been stolen.  It made me very sad.

In the next, older part of the churchyard, are the graves of mum's mum, my aunt Rose and my cousin Taff, so I usually stop by and say hello to them as well.  It's all very low key, you could say typically British, but if gives me comfort.  Not in the least like a Polish All Souls Day devotion, which is a real family affair that fills the graveyard with visitors for probably the whole weekend.  I can't remember ever seeing more than a couple of people at any given time when I've been to see mum and dad.

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 My parents would both be over a hundred now were they still alive, both born when the First World War was at its height.  My dad, Wilf, was born in a very small village close to the Kent - Sussex border that has hardly changed since then - I went back a few years ago and it looked exactly as I remembered it in my childhood, when my elder sister lived there, and my late teens when my paternal grandmother died and was buried in the little churchyard there.  After leaving school at a probably young age (as was typical in poor - what would then be considered lower though I prefer the term "working class" - families) he went to work at the local castle as an under gardener.  The grounds were quite extensive and included a small lake in which he planted some water lilies that still proliferate today, even though the place is now owned by the National Trust.

There he met my mum, Floss, who had been born in a small town 6 miles or so away - my home town in fact.  She was working at the castle too - "In Service", was the job title.  Basically she was one of a staff of young boys ans girls who spent long hours cleaning, washing, ironing, peeling vegetables, waiting table, clearing up the mess - I knew it was hard work, but reading sections of Bill Bryson's excellent book "At Home" I have a much clearer picture of what that actually meant.  What you see in Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs or any one of a dozen Merchant Ivory productions is a very sanitised and romanticsed alternate reality. It was really brutally hard work for next to no reward or what we recognise today as workers' rights.

Wilf and Floss met, somewhere, somehow, fell in love and married shortly before World War 2 broke out.  They lived in a small cottage in the castle grounds but had to leave that when dad signed up and marched off to war.  Mum was moved into a brand new council house and lived there for the rest of her life.  I was born there, the only son, with two elder sisters.  It was a struggle at first bringing up the girls on her own, but with the community spirit that existed then, all neighbours mucking in together, she got through it.

Dad, meanwhile, had a year in North Africa under Montgomery, part of the heroic Desert Rats that defeated Rommel's Afrika Corp and brought the area back into Allied control.  Job done? Not a bit of it: after a brief leave off he went again, this time to Burma, where he remained until 1946.  Yes, yes, I know the war ended a year earlier, but it seems there was still work to be done.....  He was wounded twice, neither seriously, met Vera Lynn, the Forces' Sweetheart when he was in hospital recovering from one of them (she spent a half hour chatting to him apparently.....he never forgot that, and it was a cherished memory until he died).  But he survived, and came home to a wife who was a stranger and two daughters who had no memory of him, and with no job and little money.  Like thousands of other young men - he was just 31.

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I can't imagine how they got through it all, rebuilt their relationship, stayed together in our little council house, made me, and brought up the three kids....  I don't think dad was ever paid more than about £25 a week, and he had a succession of jobs: a stoker at the local gas works, a coalman, a removal man, and finally for a number of years a mill operator in a plastics factory.  All dirty, hard jobs in polluting environments. Whether they led directly to the cancer that killed him at the age of just 56 (I was 19 at the time) is open to debate, and nothing can ever be proved now, but I suspect it did.

But he was a lovely man.  He was quiet and placid - possibly a result of some kind of PTSD after Burma? Who knows! - and never had a bad word to say about anyone.  I can't remember him ever raising his voice or getting really angry about anything.  He had an allotment that, with our big back garden, provided the best fresh fruit and veg I've ever eaten.  He smoked (which probably didn't help) and enjoyed the odd night out at the local men's club or British Legion with mum and their friends, veterans all.  A couple of brown ales and that was enough.  He saved my life twice when I very small, both near drownings, but made no fuss either time, and insisted on cleaning my football boots after every game, right up until the last couple of weeks of his life.  He was my hero.

Mum was my rock.  She was always there when I came in from school and refused to get any kind of job until I left school (then took one in a tobacconists and worked there until retiring a year or so before she in turn died of another cancer). She was more volatile and had a temper on her, far more so than dad, and ruled our home with a strong but kindly hand.  Neither her nor dad ever smacked me, as far as I can recall - not more than a tap on the arse anyway - but I was under no illusions about what was acceptable behaviour.  Discipline was gentle but effective.  She was a terrific cook (aren't all our mothers?), and I remember the most wonderful Victoria Sponge cakes, jam roly-polies and fruit cakes for Sunday tea or when we had visitors. I always had clean clothes freshly ironed (difficult I recognise now, as I was a messy kid and always came in from play with cowpat on my trousers, or split seams in my school uniform that needed mending overnight (without a sewing machine)......but she always managed somehow.  She was my heroine.

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I never mourned either of them properly, when they passed.  I was just a kid, fresh out of school, when dad died and in my first job.  Mum and my sisters were distraught so I took on the burden of arranging the funeral, sorting out his final payout from the factory, all that stuff, with the help of Brian Oman, the minister at the Baptist Church.  I didn't have a lot of time to mourn, and then as the main breadwinner had to stay strong for mum and and my sisters.  To help, I hit the drink for several years....... But I got through it.

Then when mum died, I had my own family to think about and stay strong for, for my kids were in their early teens and had been very close to mum.  Again, I had to make the funeral arrangements, then with the help of my brother-in-law sort out the house.  Mum had bought it as part of Thatcher's Right to Buy initiative, but my sister and he decided to move out so there was much packing to be done.  It took some time, and my own precarious work situation to handle (working for a highly aggressive US investment bank that insisted on long and unrelenting hours and didn't take prisoners) was also critical.  So I didn't really mourn her either.

But I missed them both, and still do, all these years later. Hence the annual pilgrimage to the grave that I missed the last couple of years.  The emotional dam finally broke, many years later.  I was ironing, the radio was on, and a particular song came on. There's a verse in there where the singer believes he heard his late father's voice in the cry of a new born son.....  That did it for me: the tears came, long and painfully, but at the end of it I felt much better.  I still can't listen to Mike & The Mechanic's "Livin' Years" without a tear in my eye though.

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They were good people, my mum and dad. 

Farewell, Facebook

 

So the whistle-blower has now testified before Congress and the British Parliament and held firm to her story, despite Facebook's attempts to discredit both her and her testimony.  This should be no surprise to anyone who has followed the story, or indeed the growth and decline of the platform.  Sure, it has billions of users, but the service it now provides and the way it works has changed very much for the worse.

I've had enough.  I'm off.

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Mark Zuckerberg created the platform and founded the company when he was a spotty teenage undergrad at Uni - he never did complete his degree.  It was all very altruistic: a way to maintain contact with friends and relatives, have a bit of fun, organise dorm parties, exchange bright ideas and unused stuff no longer wanted, and have a good old on-line natter.  It worked, so well that it quickly outgrew its home Uni base and spread to other college faculties and then national and international - by which time the Boy Wonder had dumped his co-creators (paying them off, only to be sued for millions more later as the market value of the company soared) and moved out to the West Coast where all the tech action was and remains.  He had also expended his vision and dreamed of world domination - he wanted everyone in the world to sign up and be on the platform all day every day.  He spouted off about how the users could find groups of like minded individuals, and Change The World.  He did that alright, once people like al Queda and ISIS and the Leave Britain campaign figured it out.  Which is not to say Leave Britain was a terrorist organisation - it was no more than a very tech savvy political campaign group that utilised the power of the internet much better than the Remain campaigners did, dragging Britain out of the EU and thus changing the EU and the world in the process.  Zuckerberg must have been very happy that the user data allegedly bought or stolen (depending on who you believe) by Cambridge Analytica and passed on to Dominic Cummings and his mates Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage yielded such spectacular results and proved his prediction correct. FACEBOOK REALLY COULD CHANGE THE WORLD.

It also made him shedloads of money.  As the market value soared, so did his net worth, and the monstrous growth of ad-driven revenue - the real open secret of Facebook's success - dwarfed anything generated by other social media companies (indeed, any other company except maybe Amazon and Apple).

This is when the thing came off the rails, at least in my humble opinion.

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It hadn't taken long before the conversations and interactions I was having with my Friends and Family began to be swamped by garbage.  But it took a while before the pictures of cuddly cats and dogs, old cars and motor bikes, useless surveys planted by advertising companies masquerading as users aimed simply at harvesting yet more data, and memes that were often meaningless or obscene and only rarely funny, began drowning out the good stuff I wanted to see.  

Then the Groups started invading my space.  I joined a couple of work related ones, in the hope that I could find more customers for my fledgling consultancy, but in two, maybe three years I got precisely no interest.  Zero.  Nothing. Not a nibble. And I got really bored of other Group members either complaining that contractor rates were depressed, the system wasn't the same as it used to be (I should bloody hope not!) and whatever happened to Old Joe Soap, what a character...... I left the groups and shortly thereafter the industry itself.  I retired.

The hate speech, already evident, also started proliferating.  This was about 5 -6 years ago, when the so-called Migrant Crisis was causing panic and dismay across Europe, and the Orange Oaf lied his way into the White House using the internet in a way not dissimilar to Leave Britain except with more abuse and racist bullshit to please his redneck support base.  The effects of both events are still being felt today, even if the geography has moved East and the Orange Oaf shown the door (and still fighting tooth and nail to convince everyone he was hard done by).

I had made the mistake of responding to some of this crap - initially arguing with a Brexiteer Friend (who is no longer on the list), and then adding my fourpennorth to the political arguments raging around migrants and Trump.  I neither regret nor retract one word of anything I wrote then, but my received abuse went through the roof.  It was no longer the friendly banter between close(ish) Friends on opposite sides of a discussion, no matter how big the topic under debate was, and morphed into the most vile abuse from total strangers, people I had never met, were never likely to meet and frankly had no desire to do so. 

Since then, my Feed (or whatever it's called these days) is awash with stuff.  My use of the platform has correspondingly shrunk, because I'm no longer interested in it.  On a normal day, I get perhaps 50 new posts hitting my page.  Of that, the majority - maybe 35 or 40 - are memes that in most cases remain unfunny and uninteresting. Often I get the same one from two or maybe three different sources.  Of the remaining posts, half a dozen are appeals to help find a runaway or someone who has conned a sweet shop out of a few quid or something similar, or an appeal to "share this beautiful photo to keep Princess Diana's memory alive" or something equally mawkish.  Perhaps two or three are actually from a Friend or Family member with something interesting to say.  Instead of spending an hour or more a day looking at Facebook, I now dip in and out, maybe 5 or 10 minutes (maximum) each time, perhaps three times.  

And it's still too much.

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Since the whistle-blower has clearly stated that Facebook's algorithms are designed to specifically highlight and disseminate content that could be controversial or unpleasant, and provided documentary evidence to support the claim (the company of course denies it), there is no doubt in my mind that this is not the cool, altruistic link-all-mankind dream project that Zuckerberg originally launched.  I knew that was the case anyway, because I've seen the changes already - as I've written here.

She clearly states that the algorithm does this specifically to enrage people who read this stuff, encourage them to make their own contributions, and maybe click an ad or two, join a Group or so - and thus increase Facebook's revenues and hence Zuckerberg's fortune.  Since he has veto over every decision made by the management team this is clearly something he knows about and supports.  

She also suggested that spreading this kind of content could very well negatively impact a user's mental health, that Facebook knew this but cares more about profits than their users' well being.  This is particularly so with Facebook's acquisition Instagram, apparently.  It's not an app I either use or understand - like Twitter, I just don't get it - but I'm familiar with it because someone close to me uses it and has had personal issues with its content.

As I'm a bit mentally fragile myself these days - another story altogether - I'm finding it increasingly upsetting too, and getting more riled up, more angry, about some of the stuff than ever before.  To give a simple example: the other day something popped onto my Feed concerning the current crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus.  It shared a link to a BBC News website story that was essentially accurate, about the German people's reaction to the relatively few refugees that have managed to get across the border and cross Poland in their attempts to enter Germany - a reaction depressingly brutal.  But what really upset me was the reaction of the Facebook users commenting.  It was angry, supportive of the extreme right neo-Nazi group the story was about, and praising the governments of both Poland and Belarus for their actions.  Even Merkel was slated for her part in this (she has none).  I only read maybe 10 out of 200+ comments, and not one showed even the slightest knowledge of what is happening on that border: every one was racist hate speech, pure and simple.  I made a post (I couldn't help it!) trying to point out some of the facts, expecting to be slated for it.  To my surprise, no-one bit. In one sense I'm happy about that, but at the same time the border tragedy is still unfolding and forgotten already by Facebook.  It's yesterday's news - except for the poor penniless sods stuck in a cold wet forest with no-one to turn to.

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Anyway, that's it for me.  I am closing my Facebook account. Oh, I know it's not the only culprit in this whole social media circus that I have no doubt whatsoever will continue to cause untold harm to millions until or unless somebody finds a way to reel in the companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever, and makes them tone down the hate and police their platforms properly.  And that opens up an entire and even more difficult argument about free speech and censorship and government interference and service vs profit......and I'm not sure that one will ever be solved.  We've come too far down the slippery slope to get back onto the higher ground, it seems to me.

I'm sure I won't miss it.

Back to Blighty - How was it in this post-Covid world?

 

Finally!  

After several months of stop - start planning, largely down to the prohibitive costs and restrictions BoJo's amateur Government chose to apply to travellers to and from the UK, I managed to get back to my homeland after almost exactly 2 years.  Getting to see my grandkids, especially the lad born last year during Lockdown, and visiting my ailing elderly sisters has been a target since early this year, when restrictions began lifting, but it's taken much grief, stress and expense to finally achieve it.

And how was it?

In a word....interesting.

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I'm fully inoculated, as is my wife and my daughter who accompanied me to England.  We have our EU Covid passport documents.  Last month, I visited Switzerland for a couple of weeks, solo, and it was a painless travel experience, no different from a pre-Pandemic Schengen hop.  The only extra document I needed to complete was the online Swiss locator form.  It took two minutes to do, and within 5 minutes I received an email from the Swiss authorities that included a QR code as admission approval.  No-one asked to see it at the Check In and Baggage drop at Warsaw airport.  At Zurich we parked as usual at a Schengen gate, I walked up the jet-bridge into the terminal, collected my bags and strolled out into the Arrivals Hall, where I met my host and off we went.  In fact at no time during the entire two weeks was I asked to show the QR code and only twice the EU Covid passport (when I went into restaurants).

Contrast to a proposed visit to England, and the service provided by the relevant agencies in Switzerland.  The Swiss, pragmatically, adopted the EU Covid passport immediately, and waived the need for a pre-travel test in either direction.  There were no concerns about the efficacy of the Polish vaccination program.  No additional information was needed.  But England?  No.

When I first started planning a trip to bring my kids over, back in May, Poland was Amber listed (as it remained until the traffic light system was finally dumped this month) despite rates of infection and death being significantly lower in Poland than in the UK. This meant we would have to quarantine for 10 days out of the 14 in the trip.  We would have to have PCR tests before departure (so in Poland) and provide written proof we were clear. We would then have to take further tests on Days 2, 5 and 8 while in quarantine, using private Government approved clinics.  There are over 450 of them listed on the Government's website, with test prices ranging from £50 to over £200 each.  Our EU Covid passports were not accepted in the UK: we were told by the Home Office (after half an hour on the phone listening to the worst muzack I have heard anywhere) the only ones acceptable were those issued by the NHS.  I pointed out I couldn't provide those as our inoculations had been carried out in Warsaw - what did the Home Office suggest?  The answer:  "I have no idea.  Try the NHS Help Line.  Or look on the website."   I had already spent two hours doing that, without success, and decided life was simply too short to repeat the exercise.  With a hire car sitting unused on my sister's drive for 10 days, all of these requirements were going to add a good £2000 to the cost of the trip.  I decided to wait until things changed. 

In September, effective October, they did.  A bit.  The EU Covid certificate became acceptable.  The traffic lights disappeared and Poland became an acceptable travel destination again.  I didn't need a pre-departure test nor to provide additional proof, but I would still need a Day 2 test.  I booked the flights, for a brief long weekend - leave Poland Thursday morning, fly home Monday afternoon.  This meant my Day 2 test would be Saturday, and I would be leaving on Day 4, probably before the results were known, but ok.  I filled in my Locator form.  It was not possible to include my wife and daughter on my form, so had to do three.  I had to save the document after every input (Forename - Robert - Save.  Surname - Cooper. Save.  And so on.  And on.  And on.....).  Then you're asked for a Locator reference.  What????  That turns out to be the Order Number issued by the clinic you buy your Day 2 test from.

Back to square one.  I trawled through the endless list of clinics that, according to the Government website, served London and the South East.  They were located in, amongst other Home Counties hotbeds, Manchester, Bolton, Glasgow, Hull and Belfast.  So much for the "Filter by location" option and its South East choice.  In the end I chose one that didn't want to add a Day 8 for good measure, didn't want me to collect the kit in person, provided a return courier envelope and allowed me to select a delivery date and hotel destination.  Nearly sixty quid each plus thirty quid for DHL  Two hundred smackers all in.

That didn't go well.  We arrived at the hotel in Dartford, the Campanile that I have used a dozen or more times over the years, on time but the parcel with our tests didn't.  Nor did it arrive on Day 1 (Friday) when we made our pilgrimage to Edenbridge to the grave and on to my sister and Tunbridge Wells.  Saturday was Day 2, test day and check out day.  Still no package.  I went to the supplier website and called the Help Line.  The number connected me to a different (but similarly named) company who of course knew nothing of my order and could not help.  I asked the hotel for a number of the local DHL depot to call them, and had a row with some twonk who came in a minute or so after me and decided to lecture me on what the hotel staff should and should not be doing - helping customers apparently not on his list.  The hotel couldn't (or wouldn't...) help.  Back to the internet on my phone and excessive roaming costs to try a parcel track on the DHL website.  None of the references quoted on the supplier email were accepted.  Cue a call to my bank in Warsaw to request a reclaim and, inevitably, cancel a possibly compromised credit card.  I'm now locked in a battle to get my money back, difficult when all parties are denying responsibility......

We travelled home without having taken the mandated Day 2 test, so presumably I broke the law. No-one asked to see any paperwork in any case - and the episode goes to show, in my humble opinion, what a mess the Government's travel regulations remain. 

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We packed.  I made up a folder of screen prints for all the Locator Forms (they ran to about 6 pages each) plus hotel and car hire papers.  Off to the airport.  No-one asked to look at the Locators again, and our EU Covid passports were accepted.  We were waved through passport and security.  We boarded.  A 737 MAX, the one that was grounded for two years on safety grounds.  But it was fine: seats very comfortable, very quiet, entertainment streamed to your device rather than on individual seat-back screens. The food was crap, but we're talking LOT here, RyanAir's Polish clone, flag carrier though it is.  We dozed most of the way (early morning flight meaning stupid o'clock alarm calls

At Heathrow, passport control was fine except my daughter's e-passport didn't work (apparently she's too young) but the desk agent rather impressively spoke fluent Polish and they had a nice chat. The car was decent, a Citroen C5 with about 3000 miles on the clock, but because of the fuel shortage only half a tank of unleaded.  We had to take a photo of the fuel gauge, tank wherever we could find a garage selling the stuff, and return the car similarly half empty.  We managed it fine, and had no problems at all finding well-stocked garages.  I wasn't too surprised, since the haulage and petrol industries had spent a week saying there was no fuel shortage, the refinery tanks were full, the issue was in getting the stuff to the retailer garages because of a driver shortage.

Let's consider that.  The Government itself admits to a shortage of 100,000 drivers, which matches what the Road Haulage Association, Shell, BP and other haulage companies were saying.  Everyone, except the Government gave a list of reasons for this shortage, with the industry unanimously stating Brexit as a major contributing factor as many drivers had been forced to go home to Europe as the Government did not consider their trade important enough to grant them visas. Sure, many drivers also left the industry because they retired, or got fed up being away from home for days on end stuck in traffic jams.  Of course Covid played its part with lay-off's and furloughed drivers not coming back.  But hang on a minute: ALL of those were foreseeable (except for Covid, of course) - why has everyone waited until now to start hiring and training (or re-training) replacements?  Such scenarios were, I recall, being mentioned during the pre-Referendum arguments as a reason to Remain, and being branded by Boris and his acolytes as lies, part of Project Fear (which actually never existed - but that's another story entirely).  In any case, the Referendum was over 5 years ago, Brexit itself almost a year - why has no-one done anything in the interim?  As usual, the Boris Johnson It'll Be Alright On The Night rhetoric has seduced an ill-advised and unthinking public and a bevvy of sycophantic rent-a-quote MPs to Do Nothing.  Again.  That's not to say I entirely blame the Government - I don't.  I would have expected the road haulage companies themselves, whether steady Eddie Stobart, Shell's fleet, Asda, whoever, to have been more proactive and taken action themselves to fill their vacancies (as far as possible) with suitably qualified drivers.

Someone has seriously dropped the ball, in my humble opinion, and it's Joe Public who is suffering.  Again.

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Our hotel choices offered another contrast between then and now.  The Campanile, as I wrote earlier, is familiar after years of use.  It's a typical cheap and cheerful transport hotel close to the Dartford Crossing, and thus used primarily as an overnight stay for people - mostly commercial - breaking their journeys on a long haul to the Channel ports.  But the rooms are comfortable if basic, the bar is fine and the restaurant food very good and reasonably priced (especially the Full English breakfast I normally take).  That was before the pandemic.

This time the bar and restaurant were closed, with breakfast limited to a paper bag contained a yoghurt, a cereal bar and a stale croissant.  We found this out when we went down to eat on Friday morning.  There was nothing on the website when I booked and we were not told on check in.  The fabric of the place is desperately in need of some TLC as well.  The room we had was shabby, with a massive crack in the sink.  The hair dryer didn't work. There was no cleaning service - the room was in the same condition (unmade bed, wet towels in the bath) when we got back Friday evening as when we left in the morning.  The staff we had contact with were friendly enough, but unfortunately not very helpful.  I will not stay there again.

In Kings Lynn we booked a room at a Travelodge.  It's a name I'm familiar with but had never used before, and I have to say it was excellent.  From the outside, it looked very similar to the Campanile but perhaps newer, and stood next door to both a very good pub and a Starbucks, so the expected restaurant closure (clearly signposted on the website at booking) was no hardship.  The girl on Reception was Polish, from Olsztyn in the Mazurian lake district, very friendly and very efficient.  The room was spotless, very clean and comfortable, and cleaned and re-stocked with coffee, sugar and milk while we were out on Sunday.  Travelodge caters to a similar market, and is never going to be a Holiday Inn or a Sofitel ot whatever, but doesn't try to be.  It offers a clean comfortable place to spend a night on journey, and in my view hits the spot.  It cost perhaps £10 a night more than the Campanile, so for me represented terrific value: the two hotels were chalk and cheese. 

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The trip itself was fine.  I had no problems at all getting petrol and returned the Citroen with the required half a tank.  We visited many supermarkets because we wanted to stock up on English goods that are simply unavailable in Poland: stuff like proper Walls sausages and bacon, Custard Cream biscuits, Fray Bentos meat pies, Ginsters pasties, and a refreshing tea tree & mint shower gel no longer sold here but that I love.  I will admit to feeling uncomfortable in the supermarkets because of the almost total absence of face masks.  Covid is still with us and will be probably forever, like measles and the common cold or flu, but remains much more virulent.  What seems to be missing from all the Government's "advice" that masking is now optional is the clear warning that there is  no such thing as a 100% effective vaccine, booster or no booster, so that everyone, double jabbed or not, could still catch Covid and pass it on.  Masking probably helps reduce the risk of this, and for that reason alone should be encouraged for the foreseeable future.  Just my opinion......and we kept our masks on, despite the funny looks we were getting all the time.

We ate well on proper English cod and chips with salt and vinegar liberally applied, or a thick gammon steak with fried egg, chips and peas (both in the pub next to our hotel in Kings Lynn) and a superb carvery meal (I took pork with crackling and all the trimmings) at a nearby restaurant where we took my sister for her birthday.  The Abbots and Timothy Thompson ales went down a treat as well, as did my wife's Stella Artois.  As the sun shone on Sunday we went for a stroll around Hunstanton in all its seedy out of season faded glory, the archetypal English seaside resort that remains rooted in its Edwardian heyday.

We visited my old home town to deliver flowers to my mum and dad's grave, a ritual I perform every visit.  After three years' understandable neglect it's covered in stains and dirt, but I couldn't do anything about it because all the watering cans have apparently been stolen: a notice asks visitors to kindly bring their own.  And if that isn't an indictment on how far values have fallen in 21st century Brexit Britain, I don't know what is.  Very sad.

The country itself hasn't changed much.  The countryside remains the green and pleasant land of my childhood, but there are more motorways with more roadworks, and much more traffic (despite the fuel shortage), most of it driving too fast and erratically, especially the big proportion made up of Polish registered freight trucks, I'm afraid to say.  But we managed and my damaged arm held up well - it was the first time I had driven on the correct side of the road and had to use it to change gear since the operation to repair the ruptured bicep, so that was good.  

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In summary, England seems to be coping reasonably well with all the bad stuff of the past couple of years.  The Brexit favouring majority must be satisfied behind their Union Jack patterned dark glasses, but I can't help but feel the worst effects so far have been masked by the recession caused by the pandemic and the money pumped into the economy to support it.  But that can't happen forever, and I suspect the HGV shortage and resulting fuel and food shortages is the first problem to come to light.  More will follow.

The Government, if I can call it that, appears to me more disorganised and chaotic by the day.  Johnson has lost all  sense of reality - that's if he ever had one - sunning himself in Spain (presumably tired after the Tory Party Conference) over the weekend while incompetent Ministers struggled to cope with a gas supply shortage affecting the steel, glass, paper and ceramics industries badly.  There are certainly issues to resolve when the Chancellor directly contradicts the Minister for Trade and Industry, effectively calling him a liar.  A strong Prime Minister would have sacked one or both immediately, but Johnson is not a strong Prime Minister, despite all the bluster and optimistic bullshit so both remain in the Cabinet and the problem rumbles on.  And this should be no surprise, because both are Johnson loyalists to a fault, praising him and Brexit at every opportunity.  He is surrounded by them.

It will probably be three or four months before I go back, as much as I would like it to be sooner, but first I have to pay off the credit cards bills from this trip.  I wonder how things will be then.......

A State of Mind......

 

The thing about depression, I think, is that it's a bloody sneaky ailment.  It creeps up on you suddenly.  You can be feeling perfectly ok, if a bit crotchety or under par, but put it down to factors beyond your control - the weather, tough times at work, latterly Covid - whatever.  Then one day you wake up and it hits you. You are not simply pissed off about these things: you are really really REALLY unhappy about them.  It's beyond anger. Mere frustration is gone. Forget a little bit sad.  You are Depressed.

This can happen relatively quickly, a matter of weeks.  Or it can be dragged out over months - years even.  You don't want to get up.  You don't know what to do, how to face it.  You want to shut yourself away somewhere and wallow in self pity.  Every little thing that is not right (in your befuddled brain) makes you blubber like a two year old.  Your appetite goes.  Your concentration levels drop through the floor.  You no longer see the point in carrying on with your life as it is now.  Self esteem is a thing of the past.   In extreme cases, you think about topping yourself: thankfully I'm not at that level.  You know you need help, need to talk to someone, but put it off - if you're a bloke probably because you think it makes you look soft and a bit wussy.....not "Manly".  Which is of course just stupid and only adds to the problem.

I suppose it's a bit like being a junkie or an alcoholic - or any other kind of addict for that matter.  Until you own up to being one, you can't do anything about it.  Acceptance that you have a problem is the first step to solving it, isn't it?  Sure, it's frightening - the Fear Factor looms large at this early point in the cycle because it means you have to make changes to your life, to the way you are, and change is always hard to accept. It can also often be harder to achieve, whether the change is large or small.  It means stepping out of your comfort zone, even if that comfort zone is an increasingly miserable existence.  But facing your fear is part of the cure (if that's the right word) and you have to gird your loins and get on with it.

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You may have guessed by now that this is a battle I'm going through at the moment - else why write about it?  If this Blog is about anything, it's about me and what I think and do and read and believe (why call it This World, This life otherwise?).  It's a personal thing, and lets the handful of people who read the damn thing - mostly people I know, I believe - understand how I am and what I'm up to, what things are annoying me or have captured my attention at any given time. The answer to that of course is not a lot just lately.

I've written previously about how my retirement has not gone the way I had planned, what with various accidents and hospitalizations, the bloody pandemic messing with my mind, feeling cooped up and bored, a whole bunch of other stuff too long to detail (and little of it important in the broader scheme of things)......  All of this is true, and are factors in the conviction that I am Depressed.  That this insidious ailment has piled in, taken advantage of a mind and body that has without doubt been weakened over the last year and a bit, and left me in, frankly, a bit of a state.  A couple of very minor things happened last month that convinced me that something really was wrong with me beyond just middle aged mood swings - the details don't really matter - so I broached the subject with my wife and one of my kids. 

Their understanding was an immediate fillip, and have helped me accept the situation and face the initial fear.  My son has some training and experience in mental health issues, and was able to advise me and provide me with an initial list of reading materials and apps that may help me, and advised me a little about what to do next (including an advice to seek professional help).  Another understanding relative threw his doors open to me for a couple of weeks, as a means of getting out of Warsaw and away from home, a change of scenery for some rest and relaxation away from distractions to try and get my head a bit straighter and decide what to do next.  I thank them all for their interventions. They have set me on the right road, I think.

It's still early days, but I do feel a little easier.  I know there is a lot still to do to get back to where I want to be - where I should be, both mentally and physically - but it's a start.  The trip did indeed help and the figurative load feels a little lighter.  I have good days and bad days, the shadow still falls on me sometimes, often at unexpected times and without any rhyme or reason, but I feel positive.  I'm glad I spoke out when I did, and more by luck than judgement chose the right people.  

This is a journey, one I never expected to face, and I'm not sure where it will lead me just yet.  I intend to chronicle at least some of it - I hope that doing so will somehow be cathartic, help me work through some of the emotional baggage - and I hope too that many poor people follow the tale.  Depression is a topic that is no longer off-limits, and can now be talked about more openly without any loss of face, so I urge anyone who reads this to Share it with any Friends and Family - especially those going through the same stuff.   Who knows, it may help them too simply by seeing and hearing from someone else going through similar experiences, good and bad, and that can be helpful in my view.  My dear old Mum, God rest her Soul, always used to insist that "a problem shared is a problem solved", and so far I've found that to be truism.  There is space here to Comment and start a conversation on anything I've written about, and I would dearly welcome any dialogue - even it's simply to tell me I'm a bit of a prat and don't know what I'm talking about. 

So....let's go.

COVID-19: Out the other side

 

There is light at the end of the tunnel, at least as far as my personal Covid experience is concerned. After a difficult 15 months or so, I can look to the future with optimism, and start making plans again. And about bloody time, too! I sincerely hope that this will be the last piece I write on the subject, but I’m not betting my home it: there is still way too much uncertainty out there, too many variants popping up and spreading despite all the efforts of science and medicine to stop them. We still don’t know for sure where it came from, or how; the vaccine roll out is going superbly well in some countries and appallingly in others; vaccine shortages will continue to plague the effort and there is no consensus on how often boosters will be needed……

But all things being equal, my family were fortunate to get through it relatively unscathed: just to be certain I have a full physical check up soon with particular emphasis on my lungs (that have been impaired for a few years now after a resurgence of a childhood bout of whooping cough) and heart (my blood pressure remains stubbornly uneven and I’m back on the meds I stopped taking when I retired – and according to my doctor should not have).

But as far as Covid is concerned I seem to have come through it, and I’m out the other side.

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My journey through all this stuff has been no worse than millions of others, I suppose, and indeed better than most. We’ve all faced the same problems of isolation in various lockdowns. My older sister, for instance, close to 80 and living alone since losing her husband getting on for 8 years ago in a little bungalow on the edge of a small Norfolk village, without a car, has hardly left the house for the duration. She used to go on two or three bus outings a week to places like Kings Lynn and Hunstanton and Fakenham with a group of OAP friends. Covid has put paid to all of those trips, at least until next week. Luckily her next door neighbours have kept an eye on her, helped with shopping and made sure she’s safe – the family include in their number a paramedic and a ward sister at the biggest hospital in the area so she could hardly have been in better hands – but she’s still been effectively stuck in solitary confinement. Thank God she has a decent garden! My time in a comfortable flat, with my wife and kids, my dog and cat have been a pleasure compared to that (no matter how gutty it has been some days).

Unlike many, I’ve had no work issues as a retiree. My pension income, such as it is, has remained stable and come through on time every month. I’ve not had to get used to this new fangled WFH – Working From Home – as I’d been doing that for some years anyway between project journeys in my old job, so the tech requirements were familiar and in use already, to keep in touch with people since I finished work. I’ve not had to worry about how long my furlough might last and whether I’d have a job to go back to, as my nephew and sons have. One of them, self employed, fell through the cracks in the Government’s raft of aid schemes and was without any income at all for a good part of last year, which with a family was very tough. Fortunately, so is he (it’s in his genes) and he got through it – now things are opening up he’s working his nuts off to get his career back on track and catch up. Another lost one job and has spent his time since taking qualifications in a couple of things that are taking his career in a completely different direction. Both had their down times, and both got depressed, but again not as bad as many poor people did. Me? I had off days, climbing the wall days and short tempered days, of course, but nothing too serious, nor indeed any more than normal.

My health has remained overall good. I’ve piled on a few kilos because exercise has been difficult for much of the year. This has partly been down to the Covid restrictions, but also because of the accident I had towards the end of last summer that left me with a badly broken big toe on one foot and a torn hamstring on the other leg that, combined, took nearly three months to heal and slowed me right down. I’ve not ridden my bike since last July, for instance – before the accident I was doing 100km a week or more. All of that is manageable though, and now things are opening up I can exercise it off over the summer.

But I did manage to contract Covid – definitely once and I believe twice – so I have a good idea of just how unpleasant even a relatively mild attack can be. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone!

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The first bout was in October, just as I had recovered from the accident and was looking to get out and about a bit. I woke one morning feeling very poorly, with a bad headache, a bit of a sore throat, and feeling very weak and tired. My temperature shot up, so I stayed in bed for a few days. It didn’t seem to get any better or indeed worse, and the symptoms could have been the flu: I wasn’t sure. I dosed up on cold remedies and vitamin tablets, ate piles of toast and garlic bread and drank gallons of warm milk with honey, and felt better slowly. I wanted to get a test but at the time, the local health service was breaking under the strain and it proved impossible to get an appointment. After about three weeks – by now it was November – a drive-in place opened close to us, so my Beloved and I went off one Saturday morning, joined the queue and eventually had the big Q-tip up the nose variety. Not the best way of spending a Saturday morning, but what the hell. It took a few days to get our results, and they both came back negative. But I sill felt bloody awful, and applied to my local GP surgery for a blood test – another three week wait. I still felt pretty rough, but went along and had a blood test in due course. It too came back negative – ergo, I had no trace of Covid.

Come March, I was feeling more or less normal, though still got tired very quickly and had huge problems concentrating on anything for more than about 10 minutes. It took me forever to read a even the best books, and my consumption of online news media shrank to ten minutes or so a day. As for writing anything – forget it. Nothing would come, no matter how long I stared at the page. To an extent, that remains the case today……...this is my first attempt at doing anything since the middle of March. I convinced myself that I was suffering from Long Covid, where the symptoms hang around for possibly months (no-one knows for sure) an medication does not seem to help. Maybe I did – I’m still unsure.

Which is when I contracted Covid again. The symptoms were precisely the same as I’d had before Christmas, if anything not as bad (at least initially) – I didn’t have to retire to my bed, but that was about all. My Beloved had come into contact with it through her boss, who called us on a Friday evening to say she had tested positive. So we all went off to the local centre, kids and all, for the Q-tip. The results came back overnight – all positive. Except me. Once more, my test showed negative, despite my symptoms being exactly the same as the rest of the family and getting worse. But we all had to quarantine for two weeks, which meant my now booked vaccination had to be cancelled as it was due the following week.

By the weekend I felt terrible, and had started to feel some discomfort breathing – not all the time, just now and again. We called the doctor, and insisted on another test, as my blood-oxygen level was also falling. A paramedic in full contamination gear turned up with his trusty Q-tip and advised me to closely monitor that pesky blood-oxygen and if it fell below a set level, call an ambulance. That night it fell very close to the number, and I spent an hour deep breathing as a last resort – I did NOT want to be piled into an ambulance and hauled off to the quite possibly the other end of the country – there were no guarantees I would come home again. It worked, just.

On the Monday, it was finally confirmed I had Covid, a positive test. It was a huge relief – at least now I knew what it was and what I needed to do, and I did it. Basically, that amounted to bed rest, vitamins, garlic bread…..all the stuff I’d done previously. I did it happily. I got through it.

Quite why three out of my four tests came back negative I have no idea. I suspect the first two, back in October/November time, were negative due to the delays in having them. I had been poorly for maybe three weeks before the first, so with an infection tending to last 14 days I must have been over the worst of it and so the Q-tip was unable to find anything up my nose – the virus had effectively run its course and died off (or whatever happens to it). The blood test was also delayed by three weeks or so, so perhaps the antibodies too had gone away – even now there seems to be some argument about how long they remain in the bloodstream in normal circumstances. Hence the first “infection” was simply missed. As to the third one, I had a glass of water just as we were leaving (my family didn’t), so perhaps that simply washed away sufficient gunk for it not to be picked up on the swab – I really don’t know. All I know is that 48 hours later there was a positive fourth test.

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I’ve now had my vaccination. Officially, if you go down with the virus and have to cancel an inoculation, you have to remain Covid-free for three months before you can re-apply and test negative before you get another appointment. But a week or so after our quarantine ended, my Beloved saw an item on the news that seemed to contradict that, so called to check. The health people happily booked me a new appointment without all that wait, so on the following weekend, in mid-April (rather than the expected July) I trundled off to the clinic for my first Astra Zenneca jab.

When I got there, they had no AZ vaccine so offered me Johnson & Johnson instead. As you only need one jab I took it – let’s get it all done. 28 days and you’ll be as near fully protected as you can be, the doctor assured me. He explained that no matter which vaccine you get, there is no 100% efficacy, there is always a chance you will get the illness again, but any vaccine will pretty much guarantee you will not suffer the worst effects and will not end up on life support. Fair enough, I’ll take that.

The injection took a few seconds, I didn’t feel a thing (and I hate injections!) and best of all I have had absolutely no ill effects. No headaches, no sore throat, no high temperature – all of which are possible side effects of the stuff. Not even a small bruise on my arm. He gave me my vaccination certificate confirming what I’ve had and on what date, as a vaccination certificate to keep with my passport, so I’m done and dusted – at least until the scientists decide if and when boosters are required.

A week or so later, the government announced that people in my Beloved’s age group can book for their jabs, so of course she got straight on the phone. She was told she would have to wait three months because she had just recovered from Covid, will need a new test etc etc…...basically, what we had thought originally. She explained that I had just received J&J after being sick at the same time as her, why was that. Cue chuckles down the phone and a bland “Oh, that was a mistake, but it’s done so we can’t do anything. You have to wait three months.”

So it seems for once in my life I’ve been a bit lucky.

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Of course, the weather has stopped me doing a lot – like in all of northern Europe, the Polish spring is exceedingly late this year. But there was one bright day last week, so I hopped on the Metro and went into the city for a look round. Some of the lockdown restrictions have been eased so I was interested to see how the place had changed during these awful times.

The first thing I noticed, even before I entered my local station, was the lack of masks. They’ve been a way of life, normal attire, for so long you stopped noticing them and indeed took more notice of people not wearing them. That has all changed, since masks are no longer mandatory in the open air, so most people have happily abandoned them. It was odd to see people’s faces, mouths and noses, smiles and stubble, lipstick and powder, in all their glory after so long. Much nicer. Some folk, mostly older, were still masking up but nowhere near as many, and they stuck out like sore thumbs – just like in the old days.

On the Metro, however, masking is still mandatory, as the signs on the platforms and train doors and windows impress upon you from the outset. Spot fines can still be enforced by the police if you don’t. I played my usual game of “Spot the Numpty”, aimed at seeing how many people without masks or with masks not covering mouth and nose are in my carriage. Even as recently as January and February this year, you could reckon on probably 20% of people being Numpties, because there has always been – and remains – a significant portion of the Polish population that is guided more by Facebook conspiracy theorists, YouTube fantasists and downright idiots rather than the science and Government edicts and hence reject the very idea of wearing a mask (or for that matter being vaccinated). I was pleased to see that everyone in my carriage, both ways, was properly masked – better late than never, I guess.

I got off as usual at Politechnika, and headed off down Marszałkowska towards the real city centre. Although not yet lunchtime, there were far fewer people around than of old – I assume that homeworking is still prevalent, and as I soon saw many places of business are closed. One place I was pleased to see re-opened was a bar called the Sexy Duck that my Beloved and I used several times last summer, before my accident. It’s just by the corner of the street where she worked, off Plac Konstytucji, and has a good outside terraced area under umbrellas. It sells excellent craft beers – one called Dark Duck is my choice, the closest I’ve found yet to a decent pint of British bitter like Spitfire or Old Speckled Hen, only much stronger – and some good Italian food at reasonable prices. We had some good times sitting there watching the world go by in last year’s summer sun, and were concerned when it closed towards the end of the year: the shutters on the windows suggested it was for good. Thankfully not.

Walking on, I did pass several shops and offices that were definitely closed, with For Sale and For Rent signs pasted to them. Among them was a big branch of Santander Bank at which I opened accounts three years ago (and closed them shortly thereafter), some small food shops, a casino where an old work colleague of mine, back in 2001, ran up some significant debts – the place was run by the local mafia – so he bought himself a gun for self protection (when the project manager found out, he was put on the next flight out and his apartment re-assigned to a mate of mine. When he moved in he found the guy’s farewell present had been to shoot up the apartment: every piece of furniture, tv, stereo and the walls smashed and peppered with bullet holes. Scary stuff!) - and the hotel next door.

I turned on to Jerozolimskie and headed towards the main railway station. Happily possibly the best English bookshop in the city is still open, so I popped in and treated myself to a couple of volumes of memoir on two of my all-time musical heroes, Eric Clapton and Elton John. Happy with that. But there were more business premises boarded up all along the road….. There is, however, new stuff, too: I read recently of a building that had just been topped out making it the new tallest building in Europe, beating London’s Shard by a couple of metres. It’s standing right next to the Central Station and frankly is not that impressive, and it certainly doesn’t look as tall as the Shard. It’s topped by a radio mast that is itself apparently the same height as the city’s National Stadium across the river – which is quite impressive, I guess – and when complete the tower will house something like 60 floors, including residential and office space, a hotel, gym and swimming pool, and half way up three floors of shopping mall. So I guess it will be good when it’s finished.

I crossed to Central Station to check some travel information in the PKP Intercity Rail office. Out of interest I wanted to find what foreign destinations I could buy tickets for – last year I had planned to go to London and thought it might be fun to go by train – I’ve made the reverse journey, via Amsterdam and Berlin, a couple of times – but was told I would have to buy a ticket to Berlin, then separately the London ticket when I arrived in Berlin…..a touch impractical, so I left it. But I was told that Poland was negotiating to join the Eurorail consortium “soon”, so hoped that had changed. Well, the main ticket hall has been re-furbished – and very nice it is too – but the PKP Intercity sales office was closed and shuttered, and looked as though it had been for some time, with no sign of any ongoing works. Later, I checked a few websites to check the ticket availability for a couple of sample journeys, including to Zurich via Vienna, and the London one, and although the services are detailed in terms of departure times, intermediate stations, duration and facilities, not one offered tickets for sale. Most odd.

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I headed for Nowy Świat, because there is a good second hand book shop there that last time I visited had a good selection of English language stuff, and offers a free coffee and cake if you spend more than 50zl. The shop is still open but the selection of English stuff was much reduced – only three shelves, half as many as last time I visited before the pandemic, and most of it was translations of Polish literature or histories. I was disappointed, but perhaps as business picks up it will improve. On the plus side, the guy working there was playing some rather fine Led Zeppelin music.

Walking up Nowy Świat to the Old Town I passed another book shop, that had specialised in academic books (the University is in various premises scattered around the area) but seems to have expanded and now offers a very good selection of English stuff. It’s all scattered around rather haphazardly and you have to look for it, but there was a surprising amount of good stuff, fiction and non-fiction. I didn’t buy, but it’s one for the future.

Again, there seemed to be a lot of closures, and one place I was disappointed to find gone was a small cafe, I don’t remember the name, that had an outside terrace of armchairs and sofas and a good menu of fresh pastries and quiche, donuts and cakes and delicious coffee. I had planned to sit there in the sunshine for lunch and read my current book (an excellent Bill Bryson travelogue) for an hour or so. Ah, well…..never mind.

The Old Town and Square was surprisingly empty, and only a few restaurants were open, so I chose one at random and had a two-course lunch-time special and coffee for 30zl. It was ok, good value but the chicken in mushroom sauce was over-cooked and a bit dry. I went home then.

Overall, the city has changed over the past 18 months or so, and I suspect it may take some time to recover. But Poles are a resilient people, there is no doubt of that, so it will in time and it will be interesting to see how it will differ from before

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At the weekend I did a more local hike, to see what changes have happened in my own suburb. On dog walks I had noticed a number of decent bars that we had used were closed, and I wanted to see what else had happened further afield. The weather was not good, the rain had returned and the temperature dropped again, but what the hell – I needed the exercise.

It looks as though some of the closures were indeed temporary, as I had hoped, and doors were opening again. The biggest surprise to me was the big Tesco store close to where I lived for my first 4 years in Warsaw – it was my local store and had a little mall of smaller shops in the building. I had seen that Tesco is leaving Poland so the store is slated for closure or takeover. It was depressing to walk in there and see all but four of the smaller shops closed down, including what was once a very nice cafe and coffee shop. Tesco itself had reduced its size with probably 25% of its floor space now closed and shuttered off. It all looked very dirty and depressing, and even though it was Saturday mid-afternoon – peak shopping time – the whole place was half empty: very few customers even in the supermarket. A shame, and once the closures are completed probably a couple of thousand more jobs lost (at least until new owners come in).

A little further on is the Las Kabacki forest park, so as the rain had eased I decided to take a look. It’s a place we’ve visited frequently over the years, and enjoyed the several kilometres of bike and footpaths, plus the big bonfire field for grilling sausages, steaks and so on, in past years when the sun shone. It’s always busy, but on this day I saw very few people – on my way in, two young couples walking and laughing, wet through, and a middle aged lady on a completely impractical (at least for the unmade dirt tracks) Dutch bike, red in the face and struggling. But happily, and surprisingly the bonfire field was in use, despite the poor weather. Along one side of it there are perhaps a dozen wooden shelters, open sided and with picnic tables and benches, and all were in use by what looked like family groups, cooking up a storm and enjoying a return to something like normality. The smell of grilling suasages and onions and pickles and the pop of opening beer cans made me hungry so I headed for home.

Despite the weather, it was an enjoyable walk. And 12 kilometres or so was exercise I badly needed. It also showed that things are getting back to something like normality.

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Which begs the question: what exactly is normality, in this Covid world? I will not use the more common term “post-Covid”, because I have no doubt the virus is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.

Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, despite the advances in medical science and care not a single virus has ever been fully eradicated. Smallpox, measles, mumps, bubonic plague, typhoid, polio – they’re all still here, still flaring up from time to time (notably recent polio outbreaks in war zones like Afghanistan and Yemen) and we have simply learned to live with them, with medication and regular inoculation where needed. There are many varieties of flu (and the common cold for that matter), and annual flu jabs are part and parcel of modern life. The vaccines we now have for the flu need to be re-engineered every year to keep track of changes to the virus – like Covid, the various flu strains mutate regularly. At the moment, there seems to be no definite consensus as to how often the various anti-Covid vaccines will need to be refreshed or how frequently boosters will be needed, but the best guess seems to be it will be an annual process, as for the flu vaccines. I’m happy with that.

The question seems to be more about the other measures we’ve become accustomed to over the past year and a half. Masking for instance…….without a doubt the most contentious measure. Masks have been around and worn by the general public for years, especially in the Far East (Japan and South Korea in particular), and to we Westerners it’s always seemed a bit, well, dramatic, a bit odd……. Are these things really going to filter out all the germs and petrol fumes and stuff that plague city life in Paris and Warsaw, London and New York? And anyway, I’m not going to wear ‘em because I’ll look a complete idiot……

Which is to miss the point. The masks aren’t there to prevent the wearer from catching something, not there to filter out the fumes from our gas-guzzling buses and taxis and cars and trucks. No, as any resident of Tokyo or Seoul will tell you – the masks are there to prevent the wearer from passing anything he may be carrying on to other people: the filters work the other way. So all the Numpties on the Warsaw Metro, the Vancouver Transit, London Underground or wherever, were not making an “I’m safe, there is no virus, I’m not going to catch it” statement at all – they were simply being stupid and ignoring the facts (if they even knew them or gave a shit). No surprise, really: they are probably the same clowns who believe the entire pandemic is either a Chinese plot (as Trump insists) to destroy the Western economy, or a scare story dreamed up by the mythical Deep State and Bill Gates to enable them to implant location tracers into everybody for some unspecified purpose (ignoring that fact that the nano-technology that scenario would require is decades away). Both delusions are prevalent on the internet and have their legions of gullible believers.

The key unanswered question on this is how long will we continue to need masking, and in what circumstances? It seems to me the answer to this will not become clear until more people have been fully vaccinated, and agreement reached on how frequently boosters will be needed…….there is simply not enough data to come to any conclusions on these questions yet: too many people remain unvaccinated. This should be no surprise: there are more than 8 billion people to vaccinate, and even with the program to do so being highest priority, that will take a number of years to complete.

Already there is evidence of a kind of vaccine apartheid, where the rich, mainly white, countries like the US, Canada, the EU, Britain and Australia/New Zealand are finding it easier to obtain and disseminate vaccines quicker than poorer countries in Africa, Asia and South America. There are UN appeals for the wealthy to stop stockpiling the stuff and pass it on to the Third World nations. As usual, these appeals are largely falling on deaf ears. How many more lives this situation is likely to cost is impossible to guess – but the number is likely to be in the millions in my view. So I suspect masks will be needed, whether we like it or not, for years to come – countries will need to decide for themselves when and how to dispense with them, and even then I would not be surprised if they remained mandatory at least on public transport, where large numbers of people are confined to relatively small spaces. for a decade or more. So be it: I’m not keen on wearing them, if only because I’ve yet to find one I can wear comfortably without my glasses misting up, but if that’s what it takes to keep healthy then fine.

What about work? Offices are re-opening, but it seems that WFH is going to remain an option for some time. Many companies are now offering a kind of hybrid process, where you can choose to work in the office part of the time, and at home the rest. With the technology available, this is a practical and increasingly common and popular solution. Of course, there are many jobs where WFH is simply not possible – construction and manufacturing, for instance, transport and health care, the entertainment and hospitality sectors – and probably never will be (at least until Isaac Asimov’s Robots become a reality). Other companies are looking at ways of moving away from the model of a massive headquarters building and big branch offices where large numbers of people are based and have to commute sometimes long distances to work. The alternative that seems to be gaining some traction is to develop a network of small, regional sub-offices scattered around where workers live, all connected by internet or whatever, in cheaper local office suites, that will allow workers to feel part of a “company culture” and be able to work with co-employees as if they were in a bigger place of work. It will be interesting to see how that develops……but it will not affect me at all. Any work I do – like writing stuff like this – I can do quite happily at home or in my little allotment cottage near the airport, on a train or holiday hotel terrace.

Travel? Well, it seems to be getting back to how it used to be – Warsaw airport is now busier and offering more flights on more airlines to more destinations, but at nowhere near the previous levels. I can’t see massive growth until there is international agreement on some kind of Covid passport to be carried by everyone who is fully vaccinated and wants to travel. The EU is bringing in a scheme where an e-certificate can be downloaded to your phone as bar coded information to be read by scanners at the passport desk or whatever in airports and presumably railway stations, but it only covers the Schengen and EEA zone countries. Predictably, Britain was invited to participate but declined…..

Similar schemes are being developed covering the US and selected partners, Australia and New Zealnd, Singapore and Hong Kong, and other small city pairs or country groupings. But something global is clearly needed and nowhere near agreed or implemented, and travel will remain in the doldrums until that changes I think. I’ll know more about that soon: next week I’m off on my first journey outside Warsaw – indeed, outside the country – for 18 months: a two week visit to family in Switzerland. As well as looking forward to seeing them, I’m really looking forward to the airport and flight experiences themselves, to see how much things have changed for myself. Watch this space – there will be posts about it all.

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So there we are. Covid is still here and will be probably for ever. But with a little effort, and a lot of luck (and who knows, maybe some intervention from The Bloke Upstairs) I’ve come through it and out the other side. With more effort and no doubt luck, and maybe more help from Him Upstairs, I’ll remain a Covid survivor and can get on with the rest of my life – hopefully for a long while yet. I bloody well hope so, anyway, I have a lot of things I want to do, places I want to go, yet.

I’m still a young ‘un, only 68 for God’s sake!

In defence of the Sussexes

 

I didn't watch the Oprah Winfrey interview that has been dominating the headlines for the last week and a half.  It wasn't shown on Polish tv - at least, not the channels I tend to watch.  I suspect it will turn up on one of the Canal+ ones later - perhaps History - , next time they do a Royal Week and re-run stuff about the entire Royal Family.  There was plenty of news coverage, of course, and all the little snippets that were shown on the BBC News channel and CNN were there.  And I read the coverage on the BBC News and Guardian websites - at least until I got bored with the repetition.  Oh, and like most people I guess, on Facebook I was invited to Like and Share a number of gushing tributes to (in no particular order) the Queen, Kate Middleton and the entire Family, all of which were to a greater or lesser degree factually inaccurate, and pillory the Sussexes for daring to speak out about something that is clearly important to them.   

It seems the silly season has come early this year.  So I might as well add my four penn'orth.  Might upset some people, but what the hell......free speech and all that.

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Young Harry has had what with the best will in the world could only be described as a dysfunctional upbringing.  The second son of the Prince of Wales, he was unlikely to be King, so while much time and effort has clearly gone into rearing big brother William into preparing for that role - quite rightly, because that is how the hereditary monarchy works - Harry, as the Spare in the classic "Heir and Spare" requirement of Royal parentage, has always seemed a little out on a limb.  His childhood, like William's, must have been tainted by the apparent coldness of the relationship with Prince Charles - which in turn merely followed on from a similarly cold rapport between him and his own parents, the Queen and Prince Philip.  It goes with the territory.  As a young child, Harry watched his parents divorce, the entire tawdry episode played out in the media spotlight as the Prince of Wales went off with Camilla (finally, after many years of waiting), and Princess Diana went through a list of "friendships" that ended with her appalling death in a dark tunnel in the centre of Paris, her drunk driver losing control of the car and crashing while pursued at high speed by paparazzi on motor bikes.

As a result, both Harry and William have been less than fond of the paps in particular and certain sections of the popular press more generally - with good reason, in my humble opinion.  Whether because of his more managed upbringing or some other factor, William seems to have come to terms with it better than his younger brother.  Again: Harry left out on a limb.  His youthful indiscretions clearly haven't helped - one particularly unfortunate picture from his Uni days surfaced as a meme this week, that tried to portray him as the alleged family racist that Meghan referred to - which if you think about it for a second makes absolutely no sense at all.

The only time Harry seems to have been happy were his service days.  Two or three tours in Afghanistan flying combat missions in Apache attack helicopters, messing down with ordinary servicemen to whom he was just one of lads, clearly suited his personality.  Since leaving the Army he has been a bit rudderless.  At least until meeting Meghan, marrying her and starting his own family.  In that, he is little different from countless other ex-servicemen who have struggled to cope with civilian life.

Meghan, too, seems to have had a less than ordinary upbringing.  Her parents divorced when she was a kid.  Her family is also somewhat dysfunctional - according to one report only one of them attended her wedding to Harry (I didn't watch or follow the coverage of that so it was news to me this week).  She is of mixed race.  She is also a divorcee. She's managed to carve out a career for herself as a successful  actor in the US, and has been involved in charity work for some time.

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So it seems to me that the couple are kindred spirits.  Their union, unlike many Royal marriages, seems to be based on mutual respect and love.  Harry's willingness to walk away from Royal duties with which he has never felt comfortable, and re-locate to the US to carve his own place in the world with his family seems to me laudable rather than to be criticized - particularly when he has shown a willingness to forego his Civil List entitlement.  They clearly have common interests, including shared charitable responsibilities, and a common distaste for much of the press corps and paparazzi.  

I can perfectly understand their wish to lead a relatively ordinary life, free from intrusion, in which to bring up their kids as "normally" as possible.  I don't believe either of them are idiots: they know they are not "ordinary" people - Harry by virtue of his ancestry, Meghan by virtue of her show-biz past and popularity - and know that, whether they like it or not, they are to a certain extent public property.  But they are 100% correct in their assertion that they still retain a right to some privacy - as indeed does anybody, including the rest of the Royal Family.  No matter who you are, you should not have to look out of the kitchen window and see paparazzi hanging from an overlooking tree, a long-lens trained on you to see if you've got underwear on beneath your bathrobe.  You shouldn't have to beware of helicopters buzzing overhead when you're taking a dip in your pool or taking a bit of sun on a patio lounger.  You shouldn't have to use a security detail taking your kids to a friend's birthday party.  But because the world expects these kinds of intimate snaps - and every movie or sporting superstar, ex-politician or wealthy celebrity chef has the same problem, more or less - the Sussexes will be plagued in this way.

There have been lawsuits already, both won and lost, against the press for intrusive and inaccurate reporting.  There will undoubtedly be more.  Harry and Meghan have made it clear they are prepared to allow selective access to get the kinds of pictures and quotes the "public" seems to crave, in return for a promise of more privacy - which seems to me reasonable enough.  Harry has also made it clear that what happened in his childhood and the way it affected and eventually ended the life of his mother, is not something he is prepared to accept for his own family - and to that surely no-one could object.  Both have also made it clear that further legal cases will be pursued if they feel it necessary - and quite right too, I think.

As for the remark that seems to have captured everyone's attention - about an unnamed member of the Family raising concerns about the colour of the babies' skin - both Harry and Meghan have made it plain that the person was neither the Queen nor the Duke of Edinburgh.  This does not surprise me in the least - I can think of a couple of other members far more likely to make such a crass and stupid comment.  I'm not even sure it should be considered a racist comment at all: it strikes me as being an incredibly lame and insensitive attempt at humour, at a poor joke, than any kind of personal slur.

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In conclusion, the whole affair seems to be a very sad and disheartening re-run, of history repeating itself.  For Oprah Winfrey read Martin Bashir, for Princess Diana read Meghan Markle.  Not much was changed by Diana's attempt at self-justification, and the Royal Family, far from imploding, went along its own sweet way.  I can't see anything changing very much this time, either.  The public will still demand their pound of flesh, the paparazzi will still use every effort, including breaking the law, to get the pictures to support the scurrilous gossip, and newspaper editors will still be quite happy to buy the pictures and print the garbage.  

It's the way of the world.

The GOP's Impeachment shame

 

Forget Trump. 

As widely expected, his Second Impeachment "trial" - in reality, no more than a bunch of finger pointing and name calling - was short and ended with him being "cleared".  Which is to stay the Democrats were unable to convince enough Repiublicans to agree with their contention that Trump is a serial liar, a bully, incompetent, and a dangerously unstable megalomaniac who appeals to a cerain ill-educated and weak minded section of the American population in a way that is frightening and puts the entire country at risk.  It also means that he has not been barred from holding public office, and is thus free to run again in 2024 - the complete bollocks he's made of the job the first time round has been ignored so far.

The verdict was made despite the Democrats making a pretty convincing case.  Anyone who saw the pictures of the storming of the Capitol Buildings at the beginning of January will have been as shocked and dismayed as I was - and I'm an Englishman for whom politics (whether Britiish, European or American) is of great interest but who was not going to be directly impacted by the events.  For any rational American (for which read, not a Trump follower) it must have been terrifying and heartbreaking, the very foundations of their democracy under siege.  The presentations made by the Impeachment Managers went further and showed many pictures from security cameras that showed how close the rioters actually came to the lawmakers and staff in hiding, made clear the bloodlust that had been planted by Trump's words in the weeks leading up to the riot, and showed clearly how those words had been taken as gospel by rioters brazenly stating they "had been invited....by the President of the USA" as they broke through security cordons, trashed the offices inside the buildings and made off with souvenirs like Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi's laptop (that was subsequently offered to Russian agents apparently...).  In a court of law, it would have been an open and shut case, a slam-dunk, despite the loss of lives, reference to which seemed to be lost along the way.  No matter what his apologists say, their blood is on his hands.

But in this case, the jury was composed not of 12 people good and true, considering the evidence and coming to a decision.  No, the jury was composed of 100 lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican (plus a couple of Independents) and a two-thirds majority was needed for the 67 votes that would give a "guilty" verdict.  This meant that 17 Republicans would need to vote against their own President.  That was never going to happen.

Not because the case was not well made.  In years past, when politicians of all stripes had integrity and conscience, there would have been no issues crossing the aisle and voting to do the right thing and convict.  But today's Republican Party is clearly NOT the Grand Ole Party of Abe Lincoln.  It's not even Ronald Reagan's GOP.  Or that of Bush One or Two.  

These events have shown it to be Trump's Republican Party.   Which is to say it's packed with selfish, money-grabbing, conservatives with an interest only in their own advancement with no real thought for their electorate - the American people.  They have tied themselves to Trump's malodourous coat-tails with no thought except to remain in power - no matter what it takes.

Separate Mexican kids from their parents at the border and lock them in cages?  Sure - the rapists and drug dealers shouldn't have come here in the first place and dragging their brats with them was stupid.  We'll build a big, beasutiful Wall and Mexico can pay for it.  Withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords?  Damn' right - it's costing American jobs and damaging our great clean coal industry.  Trade war with China?  Oh, yeah - they're stealing our ideas AND our jobs.  NATO?  Why the hell should WE pay to defend Europe from Russia - Putin's a good guy.  Climate change?  Fake news - it's all a plot by the Chinese to break the great American economy.  COVID?  Fake news!  It's just the sniffles, take an aspirin.  Inject bleach, it kills it in like 15 minutes or something!

And while Trump was spouting this shit over the last four years, apparently intelligent men like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and others (over 170 of them) sat back and quietly agreed, because that way they would keep their seats.  A few - a very few! - men and women of principle like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse and Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins stood up and said hang on a minute, this President is wrong, he is dangerous, he needs to be stopped. I suspect they will be out of Congress come the mid-terms in a year or two as their reward.  Another Republican shame.....

It was to be expected that McConnell would behave like this - the charlatan has built a career in the Senate since 1985 on doing anything and everything possible to obstruct and make it difficult for Democrats to do anything.  He has always put himself first and takes whatever path seems to serve him first, the Party second, his Kentucky constituents third and the rest of the country nowhere (outside the US doesn't exist)  That's why he was House Leader.  His crass comments at the close of the trial, all mealy mouthed platitudes, admitting finally that Trump was wrong, and should be held accountable in a court of a law are all very well - but if he really believed them why the hell didn't he say them much much earlier?  Simple: because he doesn't believe them - but they might play well to his gallery.

But Ted Cruz baffles me completely!  In the primaries, when the Republicans were choosing their candidate back in 2016, Trump destroyed Cruz's bid single handed in one debate.  He called Cruz a horrible person, a liar, incompetent, and "everyone knows his old man was with Lee Harvey Oswald" before the Kennedy assassination.  All lies, but Cruz was incapable of coming back and dropped out.  Now to me, a normal man of means (Ted Cruz is like most Republican senators, and especially Harvard graduates and practicing attorneys, not short of a bob or two) would slap as many law suits on Trump as possible, call him out and (legally) destroy him.  At the very least he would have nothing more to do with him, and most certainly would never support him in House or Congress.  He would certainly NOT become Trump's biggest cheer leader and supporter, kow-towing to his every whim and defending even the most obscene and ridiculous policy statements.  As an example of the venal, self serving toe-rag Cruz is without peer: I assume the reason he's grown that shabby beard is because he can't stand looking at himself in the shaving mirror any more.

These men seem to be representative of today's GOP, however, and all the time they hold sway there is the possibility that Trump may be able to make a comeback, no matter how distasteful and dangerous that may be.  And Trump knows it.  So does his unwashed redneck voter base, and no matter how abhorrent that may be there are enough of them around still to allow the comeback we all dread.  For that reason alone, moderate Republican politicians should be ashamed of themselves for allowing a bunch of unprincipled demagogues take over their party.

How to put it right is the big question.  

The GOP, it seems to me, needs to take a long hard look at itself, and re-define what it wants to be, what are its core values and beliefs, what is its agenda.  Should it have a global view, like the old days, or merely local, like Trump's?   Right now, it's Trump's plaything, and that doesn't seem to me a good place to be.  Trump is not really a Republican: the GOP has never been anything more than a vehicle to achieve power and follow his own agenda.  There is an interview around somewhere on line in which Trump was asked, some thirty odd years ago, if he had political ambitions.  His answer was along the lines of, "No. not now. But if that changes I'll go Republican because they're stupid and I'll be able to do what the hell I want."  How true that was - and another big reason why Republicans should be ashamed.

Having re-defined itself (if that's even possible) then that should be its electoral platform and the party hierarchy must stand up to Trump and bring him into line - or else expel him, and let him form his own party to deliver his own political agenda.  The danger for the GOP is that the conservative, right wing vote will in this way be split, thus making it harder to regain office - especially if the Democrats are making their agenda a reality.  Over the next few years the white vote will be in the minority as population demographics show the Black, Hispanic and Asian American sectors growing faster - and voting patterns show these groups more likely to vote Democrat while the Republicans appeal more to white and older voters.  

The GOP has to get it right now, or it could find itself out of power for a long term.  But if that is the price of lancing the Trump boil, then it has to pay the price or risk a repeat of the past shambolic four years from 2024, and potentially paving the way for a Trump Dynasty - Don Jr, Ivanka and maybe her husband Jared Kushner are allegedly interested in carrying the torch forward after the old man.  

An interesting few years lie ahead, that's for sure.