This World, This Life

  The more attentive of you may have noticed that, apart from the odd pithy comment in relation to either the terrible situation in Ukraine and/or the Tory government, on my TravellinBob Facebook account and This World,This Life FB page, I've not written anything - or at least posted anything here - since the end of March.  So I thought as the chilly and damp Polish spring gives way to a (hopefully) hot and sunny Polish summer this weekend, I should explain myself. First up, there have been some technical issues on the Blogger platform I use for this and, so far, I've not been able to fix them.  The View Count function seems to have stopped working, for a start, and when I log off I get a message saying that the system has been unable to comply with my request please try later (I'm paraphrasing there, but you get the gist I'm sure) then logs me off anyway......  At least, I think it does, on the basis that if I come back to the site later (be it after a minute, an h...

  It's been almost a month since Putin's minions invaded the country.  A month of bloodshed and murder.  A month of desperate people - two million or more of them - depserately fleeing for their lives, taking whatever pitiful belongings they could manage in suitcases and Ikea bags, mostly women and children as their menfolk remained at home to defend their home land (and perhaps perish in doing so).  The images on the television news programs, both here in Poland and on the BBC World channel, haunt me night and day..... It's also been a month of mealy-mouthed platitudes from the leaders of the Western Alliance (or whatever epithet you want to use): of Biden and Johnson, Macron and Stoltenberg, Sholz and Blinken and Truss. Stating their admiration for the Ukrainian people and President Zelensky.  He is no more the stand-up comedian, but a lonely, heroic figure, prowling the ruins of Kyiv and posting mobile phone videos aimed at shoring up the morale of the popula...

  Sad to see today that Rodney Marsh, the great old wicketkeeper of Australia's wonderful 1970s and early 80s cricket team, has died at 74.  He was a hero of my youth, when I discovered and started playing this wonderful old English institution, and that team was one of the finest ever to play the game I came to love and still miss playing (although the love has turned to apathy....) I remember when they came to England for an Ashes tour in the early 70s - I can't remember the exact year - boasting one of the best fast bowling attacks in history in Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson.  They were both incredibly quick and agrressive bowlers, with beautiful smooth actions: from long run-ups they would pound in and still be accelerating as they hit their delivery stride.  Able to move the ball either way off the seam and with brutal bouncers (in the days before helmets and chest protectors) they were a fearsome proposition for even the best batsmen.  Behind the stumps ...

  Not quite 10 years ago, shortly before the Euro 2012 football championship co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, I was lucky enough to spend a weekend in Kiev.  I had a great time, and liked the place a lot.  I came away thinking that I'd like to see more of the country, not least the Crimean Peninsula with its Black Sea beaches, long hot summers and a free and easy culture that appealed to the aging hippy in me.  I posted a lengthy blog about the trip, complete with pictures I took around the city: it's at  The World According to Travellin' Bob: Kiev - Euro 2012 (travellin-bob.blogspot.com)  if you want to see more.  But here a few extracts from it:  "We went back the following evening, as it was getting dark, and it was super.  There was a carnival atmosphere still, and we spent a good couple of hours wandering around eating McFlurry’s from the inevitable McDonald’s outlet, riding the carousel and enjoying the street entertainment.  ...

It’s years since the BBC ended its Grumpy Old Men series, in which a group of middle aged men, including Rick Wakeman, Bob Geldof, Jeremy Clarkson and John O’Farrell (and a host of other actors, writers, broadcasters and comedians) expounded on a wide range of issues, great and small, that quite frankly pissed them off. It was great fun and I found myself agreeing with a lot of it. Around that time, I was working in  Bulgaria and together with three colleagues, all of us of roughly the same vintage, used to meet up in an English pub close to the hotel and stage our own version of the show. Together with copious amounts of beer (local and imported) and delicacies such as cottage pie, burger and fries, and a local dish called a pork sword – it was a 12” long skewer of pork sausage meat and onions, grilled to charcoal and served with chips, and apart from looking frankly obscene actually tasted pretty good – we used to spend hours complaining about this that and the other, and re...

  NOTE: Some readers may find the following comments offensive. Who decides when a term or word, particularly one derived from an old and established word, becomes offensive? Tottenham Hotspur FC has spent the past three years conducting a survey of its fans, including on-line questionnaires, focus groups and all the other opinion-forming tools used by consultancy firms (that were no doubt closely involved in the process) to decide whether using the.....errr....Y-Word in the stadium or in other forums to describe themselves was acceptable, and if not what term to replace it with.  Leaving aside the costs involved (consultants of any description don't come cheap) this seems a frankly ridiculous exercise driven by a need to be seen "politically correct" - something imported from the US that is in my view equally ridiculous. Look in any dictionary to see the definition of the word - if it offends you, please look away now - "Yid" and it will invariably describe it ...

  So.....another update. I've received some good and helpful advice from various people - a  lot of it common sense, but also some helpful links and questionnaires/workbooks from specialists.  It's all good - the information sheets that came with the workbooks in particular gave me a lot of information that has eased my muddled mind, though the workbook stuff and assorted advice over creating mood diaries and so forth is a lot to take on board.  I have to confess I've not made any practical steps to start working through all of that - whether rightly or wrongly I'm not sure yet. Partly that has been down to time.  Despite all the stuff I'm trying to work through, I still have all my everyday things to do, and despite being notionally retired, a house husband and father, there's a lot of it.  Shopping, cleaning, sometimes ironing, cooking, walking the dog - it all takes up time. Add to that keeping this blog running and responding to the comments I'm getting...