Nexus

Sometimes, history and the individual collide. Or at least the divergent strands come together. I'm writing this in Vilnius, which for nearly 20 years now has been the capital of an independent state of Lithuania. Prior to that, it was a regional capital of the Russian Empire, in its Soviet and Tsarist forms, although there were intervals when it was a regional capital of Poland.

Yesterday I visited two cemeteries here, the Bernardine and the Rossa; in both places the vast majority of the residents were of Polish culture, to judge by their names and the baroque sensibilities of the gravestones, tombs, mausolea and columbaria in which they were buried. It was noteworthy that the few Lithuanians buried there seemed to have chosen very artistically different gravemarkers for themselves, one or two of which displayed influences from the wood-carving folk culture I'm familiar with from the Hill of Witches and the Hill of Crosses, not to mention some of that inter-war vaguely Bauhausy look which can be seen in the Contemporary Art Centre just up the hill here.

It was strange to see those few Lithuanian graves among all the Polish ones, a reminder that historically, in this region at least, ethnic Poles outnumbered the local Lithuanian population; over half the city's population in 1931, and Lithuanians only 2% – behind Jews and Russians. (Even today, Vilnius is supposed to be home to a native Polish population of about 19%, readily distinguishable by their characteristic 'eastern' accents from their brethren of the modern Polish state.) So the Lithuanians were a minority in these cemeteries among the Poles, who themselves are now a minority within this new Lithuanian state. Not long ago, of course, all of these communities were subjugated to the Empire, based in faraway Moscow, plenty of whose children are to be seen and heard in Vilnius today.

My knowledge of the Lithuanian language is limited, principally based on knowing how to say a couple of verbs ("I'd like", "you have", "where is") and an ability to mispronounce nouns from the dictionary with preternatural confidence. My knowledge of Russian is slightly better, though; a combination of learning the alphabet at my grandparents' farm one bored summer millennia ago, together with recognising those words which have cognates in Czech and Polish, means I can avoid starvation or imprisonment in desperate situations. More than once here, when my Lithuanian nouns have run out and there isn't time to dive for the dictionary, I've resorted to this makeshift Russian to obtain food and directions.

But I always insist on trying a little bit of Lithuanian first, just to make it clear that I am historically sensitive to the recent past, and I do not assume that all the former subjects of the Empire know the Imperial language. Plenty do, of course, although those tend to be adults in their thirties at least; and even here in the capital city one finds old people who still know nothing but Russian. (When talking to the young, though, I normally go straight to English after my four Lithuanian words run out; as is often the case in this part of the world, the young know that escape from the cultural ghetto of a language whose total number of speakers is less than the population of a large average Western city lies in English. Not the political hegemony of Russian or Polish, then, but another kind.) That's my gesture of political correctness, you might say. And certainly, the overwhelming insistence that only Lithuanian be used in signs and public writing demonstrates that there is no place for either Russian or Polish, even though these are the mother tongues of almost 40% of the city's population. Yesterday I passed by an office which was a publishing house for Russian literature; the sign on the door announced this fact in one language only. Guess which one. Taip.

But even though the formerly oppressed culture is reacting to its former oppressors in such an uncompromising way, it itself is shifting with the times, too. The Lithuanian language has traditionally always marked a distinction in women's surnames between married and unmarried. Mr Surblys' daughter is Miss Surblytė, and his wife is Mrs Surblienė. (This is even more confusing for us poor foreigners than the Slavonic 'Kowalski'/'Kowalska' doublet. "Are you two father and daughter or not? Then why've ya got different surnames?") Recently, though, shades of Anglo-style feminism have started to manifest themselves here; a woman campaigned to have her name on her ID card changed to a form which did not reflect her marital status at all, and after a struggle, she was granted this request. Now it is acceptable to choose such a variant, and a couple of public figures have chosen to do so. It's not a tidal wave yet, and my local lady friend Neringa tells me she's quite happy to change her name when marriage comes calling. But it's a start, proof that nothing is fixed forever, especially not in matters of culture.

'Neringa' is a classic Lithuanian feminine name, originally that of a giant sea goddess who created the sand bars of the Baltic coast, for reasons which escape me, but which were undoubtedly very important in that particular myth. After all, the sand bars had to be created so that Russians and Germans would have somewhere to go for a cheap seaside holiday; ask Thomas Mann or the Soviet Baltic Fleet. (Rich Lithuanians go to Turkey, Egypt or Spain now, like everyone else.) And my 21st-century Neringa herself could be a goddess – not a giantess, but one of the small cheeky ones who hide behind trees and stones and make unexpected suggestions to travellers in an innocent voice and cute accent.

As a goddess, she'd be in good company, because wow, are there some goddesses here on these streets. I'm sorry, Poles; I'm sorry, art girls of Berlin; I'm sorry, Romanian girls from mid-size provincial towns, but the women of Lithuania have got you all beat. Whether they're tall, lissom, blonde or sandy-haired, with those cute Scandinavian-style bob noses (often the native Lithuanians), or small, dusky-eyed, full-lipped (often the Russians), they all dress in as alluring a way as possible, carefully accentuating whatever needs to be emphasised. This is a very fashion-conscious town, and much effort has been expended on buying (probably by parents and boyfriends) and selecting (in cabal with trusted girlfriends and cable TV) the most drop-dead (drop-deadest?) fashions available – heels of Alpine height, skirts which are basically belts with attitude, accessories which cost more than their mother's salaries. At this moment, jeans so tight they'd make a Scotsman feel generous are the mode; one feels that the actual nakedness beneath them would be something of a letdown, as not even the fittest skin could surely be so taut. Although I guess it would be so hard to remove said jeans that this is merely a theoretical consideration anyway.

They wouldn't get those jeans off for me, though, no fear. The halcyon days of the early 90s, when any podgy idiot with a Western passport and no criminal record could have his pick of the East's lovelies, are long, long gone. A renaissance in national confidence – most people in England probably have at least an idea where Lithuania is, even if it's only as the place where one's barmaid or au pair comes from, or a nation which beats us in Eurovision – plus open borders, rising living standards (there are a lot of expensive cars in the streets, the Trabants and Ladas are absent from all but the poorest areas now) and the realisation that Western women's dedication to parity and equality have given the smart, sexy and nominally more household- and husband-oriented Eastern woman an advantage, all mean that tubby old Jimbo-likes would not find a future bride on the endless sunlit catwalk that is Gedimino prospektas, the main drag and shopping street leading to the touristy heart of Vilnius' old town.

No, if a foreign lecher was to go babe-hunting in this place, he would have to search among the projects surrounding the town centre, the shabby, untidy blocks of stack-a-prole housing which characterise so much of this region. I got pleasantly lost in these districts yesterday morning, changing buses almost at random as I tried (without too much urgency) to get back to the town centre after an excursion. These are the areas with Socialist-style names of sadly heroic aspirations, like 'Brotherhood', 'Mercury', 'Victory', or named after fraternal comradely places like Vietnam or Nicaragua; where the 'poliklinikas', the adminstrative offices, the supermarkets (more like 'below-average-markets') all look identical, where the balconies are falling off; the paving stones are uneven; the older women all wear babushka-style headscarves; the manhole covers bear Soviet Cyrillic lettering rather than posh modern Lithuanian words; the mobile phones are older and more battered; the hair dye more obvious; the skinny men in car parks try to roll their own smokes from discarded butts, and the power antenna which links the trolleybus to its overhead supply cable quite frequently falls down, requiring its driver to jump out and pull it back up again using a line in the back of the bus. People here know fewer languages, earn less money, have to work harder to make an impression, to achieve anything, in fact, presuming that the challenges of life outside the golden circle haven't ground such ambitions out of them completely. These would be the girlfriend farms for the unscrupulous, perhaps.

But I have other motives for being here, personal in a different way. I grew up listening to short-wave radio, one of the many ways I found for experiencing the world outside the rural/suburban comfort zone I came from. The interval signals of Radio Moscow, the two versions of 'Podmoskovnyje večera' which announced their presence – the eerie electronic version played on Eduard Artemjov's homemade synthesisers, and the odd big-band supper-jazz version – are forever part of my mental landscape, burned into my mind over endless nights under the sheets with the radio. But as a kid I never paid too much attention to the political messages which they were carefully designed to transmit; the cultural stuff was more interesting to me. One heard something of the individual 'republics' of the Soviet Union in this way, but somehow it never really struck home that these were nations, as individual and independent of Russia as Scotland, Wales and Ireland are of England. (Being English myself, though, and thus part of my own imperial culture, I didn't think too much about those nations then, either.)

But the winds of change (down in Gorky Park, etc.) blew, and as I became able to afford better shortwave receivers, so the information they brought me changed rapidly in nature. In 1990 I bought a Sony ICF 2001, at that time pretty much the best commercially available non-specialist shortwave radio there was. And among the crackle and static of the African stations and a live rant by Fidel Castro, the formerly state-sponsored stilted speech of Radio Vilnius suddenly took on a life of its own. Names like Landsbergis and Sąjūdis were heard, the transmitter signal suddenly louder, a little distorted, as if the engineers were trying to make their station audible at all costs, even that of sound quality – something an engineer would traditionally sacrifice his life for. Which of course, some people there ended up doing.

I followed the news of the assault by Soviet troops on the television transmission tower in Vilnius, the news of the deaths. Most shockingly, my new friend Radio Vilnius reverted to type, briefly mentioning 'disturbances' before returning to the bromides of Gorbachev, 'reconstruction' and 'dialogue'. In the famous short story 'Flowers for Algernon' by Daniel Keyes, a mentally subnormal man is given the powers of a genius; but as they wear off, his fall from the heights of mental achievement to his previous condition is heartbreakingly described. That's what this felt like.

On that radio, I followed the news of the August coup attempt against Gorbachev; Yeltsin's rise to power; Lithuania leading the way in simply saying they weren't going to listen any more; and the end of the Soviet Union, just in time for Christmas. I took that radio with me to the newly free countries of Czechoslovakia and Poland, this time as my link home via the BBC World Service. And in 1995 I took that radio to the international students' hall of residence in Lodz, Poland, where I met a group of Polish Lithuanian girls, studying English at the university. At that time, the Polish government offered study and job opportunities to citizens of other countries who could demonstrate Polish origin; this generous offer was exploited to the hilt by many people from the former Soviet states, many of whose Polish roots extended merely to a vaguely Polish-sounding surname, and whose given names were usually Sasha, Olga, Natasha, and who knew fewer Polish words than the average Briton. But there were real ethnic Poles there, too, including one called Ewa in the group I just mentioned.

Ewa was a brunette of average height who looked vaguely melancholy, not a great beauty but distinguished by large, soulful eyes. (Polish women's beauty often lies in the eyes, along with a certain modesty of bosom.) And it turned out in conversation that her father had been the director of the Vilnius TV tower during the Soviet armed assault in 1991. As she told the story, she had been home alone that day when the KGB came looking for her father; she claimed not to know where he was. He managed to evade arrest at that time, although he was later detained; the experience disturbed him, and he later left his family altogether. She too had been marked by that time, and later had her own personal troubles. I lost contact with her, but recently through mutual friends I established that she'd overcome her woes and had ended up in Ireland.

Coming to 'Eastern' Europe had provided a succession of shocks to me, as I saw places and met people who had lived through the history which had seemed so abstract to me back in England. But for some reason, the story of this one girl and her experience resonated with me, as I had been listening 'live' on my radio to those events as they unfolded; now I was face to face with a participant in those events. At this point, the story of history, the experience at a distance of that history through media, and the presence of a real person who had lived through that history personally came together in a nexus of life/media/life which has remained with me ever since.

I've been to Vilnius several times since then; this may well be my fourth time here. I have visited the television tower already, too; the errant bus journey I wrote about earlier was made yesterday, while trying to escape from the unremarkable suburb in which the tower is located. (To be fair, some of the surrounding blocks have seen a lick or two of paint since I was last there, and there are a couple of new supermarkets. Oh boy, the supermarkets, and most of all the shopping malls! The latter, particularly, have multiplied like the proverbial mushrooms after rain, and you can now orient yourself within the city with reference to any one of eight or ten major malls. The locals seem to have taken to consumer culture with gusto.) So I can't really say that I experienced a particular epiphany this time, as I sat in the revolving restaurant in the dome 160 metres/525 feet above the ground, looking at the clouds slowly rise from the city, the house-islands surrounded by a sea of forest, while groups of schoolchildren zoomed about joyously, glad of a day away from classes, and unburdened by history.

But it's been eight years since I was last in Vilnius. When I came down from the tower and made my way past a shiny new memorial slab commemorating the names of the Lithuanians who were crushed under Soviet tanks in 1991, I noticed that one of the surnames was the same as that of a student who I had taught a couple of years previously in Warsaw. The dead man's Christian name was defiantly Lithuanian; my ex-student, very much alive, a small, ebullient and pierced blonde lady, has no knowledge of having any roots other than Polish. But somewhere in the joint Polish-Lithuanian history those families had a common root, and in a distant way, I had a connection between both of those people, both of those cultures, and the history which had shaped them, and brought me here.

--

14.59 val., 5. birzelio 2010 m.

Kul

My mother called me by the name
I'd had so long before:
But after decades serving here,
I remembered it no more.
Now I should weep, I should be sad,
For what is past and gone,
But tears won't bring my old life back,
So I must carry on.

6 March 2005

1981 was king of pop

This Guardian commenter sums up all that I loved about pop music – popular music – as I grew up. Most popular music today – what we hear on the radio and see on TV, the music which most of the population know about today – has nothing on these old classics, which were so radical and innovative. All of these records (oops, with one exception) were Top 5 hits in Britain in 1981/2. God, I’m old. Kids today, don’t know they’re born, etc.

“Mainstream music 1981. Soft Cell, an obviously homosexual singer able to appear on kids' telly backed by a synth, all the sound coming from one voice and one instrument. The Human League, probably the first Christmas number one without a drum. Adam & The Ants, making up for the lack of drums by having two drummers and angry staccato guitar attack, Burundi meets Bermondsey. OMD with two top five hits about a mediaeval French saint. The cartoon goth Lolita Clare Grogan paving the way for Katie-Jane Garside et al. Japan reached the top five with the closest to a 4'33" cover version you could get. Laurie Anderson reaching number two with performance art. Rockabilly revivalists, ska superstars. Angry, quirky, hopeful, hopeless. The good, the bad and Queen. Anything and everything could be successful.

What do we get nowadays?

Karaoke Factor.

God help us all.”

Apologies for dodgy sound/video quality, this is YouChoob after all. And anyway, plenty of people fetishise the scratches and hiss of old vinyl records; let’s look at the oversaturated colours, muffled sound and frame skips as modern equivalents thereof.

Here are the same tunes as a Grooveshark playlist, for those of you who would prefer just to stream the soundz.

Pastoral visit

This is the flyer announcing the annual pastoral visit to the houses on my estate here in Warsaw, and my own translation of its text. The thoughts and comments of my non-Polish friends would be especially appreciated. (But Polish opinions are valid too; you can click on the image to enlarge it, if you wish to dispute the accuracy of my translation.)


ROMAN-CATHOLIC PARISH
OF THE MOST HOLY VIRGIN MARY, MOTHER OF MERCY

"He that receiveth you receiveth me"
Matthew 10:40

Dear Parishioner,
In accordance with the custom accepted in Poland, as part of their pastoral work, every so often priests visit the Families in the area of the parish entrusted to them by the Bishop.

Receiving a priest paying a pastoral visit into one's home is an act of publicly testifying one's faith. At the same time, it is also a sign of the unity and the living link of the domestic Church which the family is, with the parish Church, and likewise with the diocesan and general Church.

This year the priest from our parish of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy, will arrive on his pastoral visit on 05.01.2010 from 4 pm.

We ask for the presence of all the possible members of the Family during the pastoral visit.


The Marian Fathers

wiwiw

1. Start

This essay is a result, albeit indirect, of discussions I've had with many friends, male and female, over the years, on the subject of what I really want in a woman. For most of my life, of course, I haven't really known; I suspect most young people don't really know what they want in a partner. I've always thought that that's one of the most challenging and difficult questions a person can ever ask themselves – 'What, in all honesty, do I want?'

Perhaps this consideration marks my transition from 'innocence' or 'naïveté' to 'wisdom'. The fact that I can now make the following assertions may be a sign of having finally reached a certain level of maturity, after one divorce and various other relationships which have ended in greater or lesser degrees of failure – although the marriage ended in a better way than some of the other relationships which came both before and after it. And this realisation has come just in time; I don't have many years of potential attractiveness to women left, so if I'm going to avoid dying alone, I'd better start work. (Oh, and let me say right off that I am fully aware that I'm not George Clooney, or even Sean Connery. But you, for your part, are not Angelina Jolie or Gisele Bündchen, either. Trust me. :P )

I also know perfectly well that it's unreasonable to expect all, or even a majority, of the aspects listed below to be present in one individual. There are no ideals in this world, and human nature is such that even if we did find perfection on earth, we'd find some reason for dissatisfaction with it. But it's like the great philosopher Grace Jones once said; 'I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect for you'. That seems like the most realistic goal to strive for. Nevertheless, you have to have some higher goals to work towards; even if you don't reach them, the effort you make in trying to attain them can be an end in itself.

2. The mind 頭

I feel it's important to make a distinction between intelligence and intellect. I'd go so far as to say that the majority of people I know, irrespective of their education or class, are intelligent, in the sense of being able to process information from the world around them and take decisions on that basis. True 'stupidity', defined as a failure to do that – either because of stubbornness or mental/physical incapacity – is in my experience a rare thing. However, it must also be said that I've largely had the luck to meet intelligent people, and I haven't been cursed with many stupid bosses, family members, friends of friends, or other such people as tend to infest our daily lives.

One way in which intelligence can manifest itself is in pragmatism. This doesn't necessarily have to mean a hard-hearted, brutally cold dollars-and-cents attitude to living; indeed such a person would be very antipathetic for me. The kind of pragmatism I'm thinking of would, for example, after conceiving of a plan to travel to a far-off country for six months, start checking out living expenses and accommodation options, rather than simply setting off straight away without a second thought. There's nothing wrong with having a spontaneous thought or idea to do something; less admirable is a tendency to rush straight into actions without thinking them through (at least partially) and imagining what their consequences might be. Most people I know have that degree of intelligence, at least most of the time. (Although everyone goes crazy sometimes, of course; that's just the price we pay for being organic lifeforms. ;) )

But aside from this basic kind of intelligence, I need a person with a certain kind of intellectual life. I define this as a keen and curious interest in matters beyond the purely everyday and quotidian. This can manifest itself in a thousand ways – a keen interest in music (this especially; music is of central importance in my life), theatre, literature, politics, the visual arts, hairstyles, architecture, any or all of the above, and other things as well which I might not have thought of right now. The cultural, the aesthetic, the philosophical, the speculative, is a part of life which I simply can't do without. And also, no cultural experience is ever fully valid unless you can share it with someone else, even if their opinion of it is the total opposite of yours. Why do we go to the cinema with friends? So we can share our experiences and opinions of the film. It's a lot less fun on your own, and it's even more fun if the film provokes a lively discussion afterwards.

Something I couldn't really deal with in a partner is a very deep attachment to a formal religion. This might not seem like an intellectual matter, but it is; the wholesale acceptance of religious propositions and dogmas, as laid down in ancient texts (or in the interpretations of those texts by someone closer to your own cultural community) shows a certain readiness to accept things unquestioningly, an unwillingness to challenge received opinions, and a possible willingness to try and force those opinions upon others, regardless of their own spiritual inclinations or searches. An awareness that humanity is not the centre of the cosmos, that we are all interconnected with the biosystem of the Earth and by extension the rest of the universe, and that there are plenty of phenomena yet to be explained, is properly humble and justifiable. But a belief that a big sky man, who created all of infinity in exactly the form it has now, is going to torture you forever for not living according to a cultural skill-set developed centuries ago, is not.

Everyone writes 'sense of humour' on dating profiles, and that's certainly important too. I read somewhere that a person's intelligence can be correlated to their sense of humour, and that people who fail to find things funny are often lacking in conventional intelligence. (Although not always; witness the fact that autistics have great difficulty understanding humour, while being capable of other great mental feats.) What counts, though, is that a partner's sense of humour should be compatible with yours; if one of you finds something hilarious and the other reacts with a face similar to a month-old Presbyterian fish, then you won't have a good time together. More importantly, humour is one of the most important tools for overcoming adversity – whether with each other, or shared together in the face of external challenges. My humour is, among other things, very linguistically and culturally based; this is one reason why, despite my knowledge of other languages, I think my ideal partner would also have to know English to a reasonably high standard.

3. The heart 心

You can call this personality or temperament or character or whatever else comes to mind, but it has to take its place here, in the centre of this discussion. A woman who's a genius literary critic with the body of a supermodel is no kind of partner if she's an arsehole with a terminal sense of self-entitlement and a fondness for other people's money.

When I did one of those daft Facebook quizzes a few months ago on my most desired quality in a woman, I checked 'compassion'. This came as a surprise to many people who read it, who assumed I'd go for intelligence, or possibly a sense of humour. As mentioned above, both of these are very important to me; but in the end, compassion is the thing I seem to need most, and feel the keenest lack of in my daily life. I always think of the word's roots in Latin, which might roughly be translated as 'with-feeling' or 'together-feeling' (as reflected in German Mitgefühl and Polish współczucie). When I'm feeling something strongly, she should at least be able to understand that mood, if not share it completely. Obviously it's unreasonable to expect any other human being's moods and feelings to synchronise perfectly and exactly with one's own; nevertheless, there has to be some commonality of feeling between two people who want to live together. So, looking irritated when I'm happy or laughing, being unable to suppress giggles when I'm crying or depressed, staring at me blankly or acting bored when I'm trying to figure out something confusing or disturbing – these would be deal-breakers.

Another element of my ideal partner might best be described as 'conversation'. This can be interpreted in a literal sense, obviously; the flow of an intelligent, warm-hearted, good-humoured conversation, passing freely and easily from silly to serious, from high to low, from deep to shallow and back again, is one of the most pleasant experiences I know. And there is nothing worse than sitting around in silence with someone, struggling to think of things to say; it's even worse when you know from past experience that she does have subjects to talk about, but simply can't express herself. (The language issue is also relevant here.) It's a bit like having a good car which simply won't start, however many times you turn the ignition key. But conversation also refers to genuinely exchanging one's views and opinions; when two people just talk past each other, one saying 'I think A, B and C', and the other 'I think X, Y and Z', then they are not really communicating, and not really forming any kind of bond with each other. It would be like setting up two TV sets face to face, and ultimately just as pointless.

My ideal woman also needs to have a certain kind of courage. On one hand, the pragmatism and level-headedness of which I spoke earlier is important; on the other, however, that can't become fossilised into timidity, or even a fear of doing anything new or outside the borders of routine. That courage can be expressed in many ways; a willingness to confront a difficult truth (about herself, me, or other important people), talk about it, and deal with it openly; a readiness to 'roll the dice' and try new ways of life, if the old ones are obviously failing to bring about the desired results; and the bravery to accept a situation which can't be changed, rather than spend energy uselessly trying to change or avoid it, instead devoting that energy to devising a new approach to the problem. (Oh, and 'the wisdom to know the difference', while we're heading into teatowel/bumper-sticker territory. Just because something's a cliché, that doesn't mean it's not true. ;) )

4. The body 体

All together now, 'Yay!' This is the only bit anyone's really interested in – men because they like comparing another set of body fantasies with their own, women because they can criticise my shallowness while secretly comparing their own appearances and those of their colleagues/competitors with my criteria. I might have to disappoint you all, though. :P

The cliché is, of course, that the guy says, 'Oh no, physical beauty doesn't matter to me at all, I'm only interested in your inner beauty.' Naturally, such statements are profound bollocks of the first order. (If I was only interested in emotional and intellectual validation, I'd get myself a sympathetic tabby cat and train it to meow appreciatively at Douglas Adams and William Gibson references.) I very specifically want to live with a woman because of the physical and sexual element implied in that kind of relationship. I do not intend to live in celibacy for the rest of my life; I already tried that, it was called 'my marriage'. :D (And that wasn't so much her fault, anyway.)

Biology, of course, dictates certain basic truths. So obviously no-one who is over-fat or over-thin, over-old or over-young, is going to make the grade. Other than that, though, I don't seem to have any special triggers which invariably awaken irresistible lust in me. As far as pure sexual attraction, without any other considerations, goes – well, the tall, the small, the bony, the bosomy, the bouncy, the fair, the dark, the melanin-blessed, the melanin-deprived, the Mazovian, the Mexican, the Maharashtran, the fifteen-year-old (yes, I admit it; they can be fully woman-shaped at that age, and you all know it), the fifty-year-old, the freckled, the the flawless, the smooth, the scarred, the pierced, the smooth, the loud, the quiet, and all kinds in between have all floated my proverbial boat at one time or another.

But we can't deny the importance of what used to be called (before that damn silly TV show took the expression over) 'the X-factor', that incalculable and unpredictable extra element in a personality which makes the person come alive for you. Ya got it, or ya don't. And what works for me won't work for you, and vice versa. We all know people of our acquaintance who are perfectly pleasant-looking, who are symmetrical and proportional in every acceptable way, but who just don't do it for us – they don't have our corresponding X-factor. I have met a couple of pairs of female identical twins, seemingly indistinguishable in every way, and preferred one to the other because of this X-factor.

Attractiveness is an utterly unpredictable thing. I have met women who seem physically flawless, indeed several who have been professional models, and found them to be meh; I have met others with a crooked nose, one eye not quite straight, bamboo-tall, barrel-round, narrow of bosom, heavy of hip, bony of knee, wild of hair (not all of these things refer to the same girl, by the way :P), but who've driven me crazy with desire. No-one can ever know what will do it for another person. So ultimately there's no real point in thinking too deeply about such things. (If we are going to talk about any particular archetypes, though, I will admit to a lifelong love of tall, thin studenty girls with long, straight brunette hair and glasses. But small, blonde, womanly or mature persons with good eyesight should not feel discouraged at this point. As I still fail to resemble Brad Pitt [or even William Pitt], I am not in a position to lay down too many stringent conditions. Right? :D )

This is probably the time to admit that I need a certain degree of sexual experimentation. Of course, the standard, Church-approved missionary hump does have its place, especially early on. And one cannot eat haute cuisine or do the whole Japanese tea ceremony every night; sometimes one just wants a pizza and a beer. ;) But anyone who lives on only one kind of food will be unhealthy in the longer term. If a potential partner considers even the slightest variations on the basic theme to be unacceptable and perverted, she would ultimately be denying herself and me a whole potential world of pleasure, and most importantly, pair-bonding. That’s what sex is for, let’s remember. It's something which would need time, patience and a willingness to make mistakes; after a while, every couple finds their comfort range, the 'grammar' of love-making which they can use to express their feelings. But that has to be a whole language, and not just one word.

5. Other bits

A couple of other points on the map of my little fantasy-land; no smokers, I'm afraid. Together with the obvious reasons (smell, ashes, expense), my grandmother, to whom I was closest of all of my family members, died slowly, horribly and visibly over a period of months from lung cancer. And I simply wouldn't want that to happen to anyone I love or care for.

Secondly, no dog-lovers. (I'm a cat person, as regards pets.) The main reason for this is an easily explainable childhood trauma; on my grandparents' farm when I was about five, their large black dog decided I was a chew-toy, took my arm in its mouth, and tried to drag me off somewhere. It didn't even break the skin, but my mother and grandmother started yelling, the dog started barking, I started crying, and it was all generally noisy and unpleasant. Since that time, I have had a dislike of being near big dogs, especially in confined spaces; the 'friendly' ones like small ponies who put their paws on your shoulders are worst of all.

But I have an ideological objection to other dogs, too, especially the ones which fit in handbags or are owned by very old ladies, as well as the mutant-rat kinds and the ones with circus mirror-distorted faces and bodies. One of the things I find hardest to forgive humans for is what they've done to dogs – breeding them over decades to accentuate physical features which are deemed to be charming, or even simply amusing. This has left the poor unfortunate results of this genetic engineering with a multitude of health problems – breathing, vision, walking, all damaged by the human desire to create 'cute' animals. When God or the aliens finally come to judge humanity, the treatment of dogs might count against us as the real genocide; perhaps the willingness of the first domesticated canines to work with humans has a parallel with the American Indians who welcomed the first European settlers with food and assistance, only to be cruelly abused thereafter. So I'm afraid pretty much all dog-lovers are excluded.

A final note about children, a relevant subject for every woman, whether she wants them or not. I personally am not convinced I would be a good father, for reasons connected with my own past; I don't feel I would be able to create a new, reasonably functional human personality when my own is so flawed. You could call that an act of cowardice, but I'd disagree; I have no problem with taking risks with my own life, but I wouldn't want to risk someone else's, especially when they had no choice in the matter. Nevertheless, perhaps because I'm getting older, I tend to think that the right woman might change my mind; after all, raising a child isn't supposed to be a job for one person, and perhaps I can find someone who'll help compensate for my flaws (and for whose own flaws I can compensate). As for marriage, I've tried that; my main problem with it is how it changes the rest of the world's view of you. I don't rule it out forever. But I've learned that when people really want to be together, no piece of paper can stop their feelings; and when people really want to separate, no piece of paper can make them change their feelings.

6. End

Feelings. Ah yes, them. After about 3200 of these useless words, it all comes down to human feelings – those things I've always tried to avoid, which still attack me when I'm least expecting them, and which I can only handle with the help of someone else. What I want, in the end, is what I see in the streets around me; the young students holding each other tight at the bus stop; the married couple who know each other's jokes backwards, but treasure them like you treasure your favourite pair of warm old socks; the old couple who walk arm in arm to church on a Sunday morning, as they always did.

That's what I want. Is that unreasonable? ;)

(Any applications for the position of Official Girlfriend may be submitted to the usual addresses. :D )

Guinness = yuk

Someone else obviously agrees with me about the horrible stuff. :)

Sláinte!

It's St Patrick's Day, the commemoration of a proto-Welshman who spent most of his life arguing and fighting with everyone he knew, probably in reaction to having been abducted by pirates as a child. He got so mad at said pirates that he went back to their home island and Christianised the lot of them - as brutal a vengeance as I can think of, even today. ;)

I don't actually know any technically 100% Irish people at the moment, although I did meet two nice Irish people in Spain, of all places. One was a priest from somewhere in County Dublin, who for some reason was studying Spanish at the residency course in Jaca in 1989, a gentle and good-natured soul who had the kind of quietly wise air which one expects (and rarely finds) in the religious. The other was a bloke from Cork who I worked with in Sabadell in 1991-2, who had earned his scars teaching in an inner-London comprehensive school, and also worked as a hotel barman, having had the, er, unforgettable experience of delivering room-service to an unclad Alison Moyet.

I've never been surprised at the fact that many Poles have gone to Ireland and felt at home, often much more so than in Britain. As historical nations Poland and Ireland, after all, have plenty of things in common: a devoted attachment to Catholicism, especially some of its more pagan manifestations (blessing newly-purchased cars or newly-opened football pitches, churches full of Mary(=Gaia) with Jesus off to one side looking vaguely out of place, big on the saints, images and rituals); a joyous attitude to drink, food and a good time (none of your imperial self-restraint here); a history of being oppressed by very un-neighbourly neighbours, who frequently attempted to obliterate the indigenous cultures; a history of emigration in search of a better life, which led to extensive and culturally important diasporae all over the world; a very mixed reception in those host countries (witness 'Polack' jokes and Irish jokes); an ability to transform those host cultures into something unique (think of the great Irish writers in English, then consider writers & scholars like Joseph Conrad, Jerzy Kosiński, Lewis Namier and plenty more); now free and independent states making their way in the European Union and the 21st century.

So raise a glass of Żubrówka or Porter, Smithwick's or Harp (but not Guinness, which is fit only for exterminating vermin), and wish both great nations all the best!

3

Put your pebble on the pile,
Pass your baton in the race-
The finish isn't yours to see,
Be satisfied you took your place.

16 February 2005, 09:19

2

Since I've written at least four times since your last message, and that was more than a year ago, I thought it was best to remove you from my friend list.

How would you define friendship? For me, it's exchanging ideas, be they emotions or news or opinions. If there is no exchange, no awareness of the other, then there is no friendship.

And I'm not going to simply collect people like those collectable cards that kids have, just to have 500 'friends' of whom the vast majority I never hear or learn anything. Behind every square of pixels on the screen stands a human, and that goes for me too. And humans are not collectable cards.

I don't wish you ill, far from it; I wish you only success and happiness in what you do in life. But the lack of contact between us means it's time to move; you into my past, into your future.

1

Culture shows us what we are
and what we could become,
Rehearsing what we might yet do
And showing what we've done.
It gives shape to the shapeless clouds
Which we could never name,
And gives support to halting thoughts
Which used to hobble lame.

watching: Mika Motosugi
reading: 'Japan Edge'
listening: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mikrophonie I (also listen here)

Ten things are weird about me

1. I have never eaten a taco, burrito, or enchilada; in fact, I am not even sure what the latter two are composed of.

2. I have no need to set an alarm; irrespective of what time I have to get up, or even what time I go to bed the previous day, I somehow always contrive to wake up in time for whatever I have to do.

3. The last two songs I performed in front of an audience were 'Hallelujah' by Leonard Cohen and 'The one I love' by REM.

4. The last time I drove a car was in June 1991.

5. Despite being a firm adherent of logic and rationality, I firmly believe that the number 13 will bring me good luck in any situation I encounter it in. (This is probably connected to my birthday being on the 13th.)

6. On this same basis, I always walk under ladders whenever possible.

7. I started to learn Japanese in 1979, when a high-schooler in Otaru, Hokkaido, entirely unprovoked, sent me an airmail letter in Japanese. But even now I wouldn’t be able to sustain a simple conversation in Japanese.

8. I always sit by the aisle in planes, so that I can walk around and go to the bathroom a) as efficiently as possible, and b) inconveniencing as few other people as possible.

9. Sometimes I tune my radio to white noise (the ‘snow’ sound of an empty channel) to help me clear my thoughts and relax.

10. I always speak English to airport staff, even if I speak the local language well; I feel that they could use the practice. But I always conclude my transactions with them by saying ‘Thank you’ in the local language.

What are ten weird things about you?

America!

Have just returned from spending the inter-semester break in central Florida, staying with Gary (old chum from my early days in Lódz), who descends from there, and teaches high school there now. Nevertheless he is nostalgic for Poland, and recently bought some land near Sokolniki and had a wooden highlandsman-style house built there. His summer palace, he says. Anyway, it will be (slightly) more pleasant to spend summers there than in the brutal heat of Florida.

It was nice when I went there though; clear blue skies, temperatures in the late teens to mid-20s the whole time I was there. Mostly clear, although some rainy bits (and even a tornado warning, one day! but nothing came of it); certainly a world away from grey, wet old Poland. When I left Tampa airport on a Thursday morning it was 24°C; when I returned to the Fatherland (on Friday afternoon, time travel gets weirder coming from west to east), Warsaw welcomed me with -7°C. :D

Yes, it's a seductive lifestyle. It's all so cheap! Especially with the dollar now being worth less than what we wipe our bums with in European toilets. Gary told me, 'Bring two empty suitcases, you'll fill them up,' and he jested not. I bought cheap books (wonderful things; histories, anthropology, linguistics, travel, and 'economics for freaks') and cheap clothing; as Gary comes from a family of teachers, his parents know where to shop for discarded goods - factory rejects which to the untrained eye appear perfect, but are not deemed good enough for regular sales - and so I got suitcases full of Ralph Lauren & Calvin Klein shirts and trousers for two or three bucks each. I also went to the legendary WalMart and stocked up on cheap underwear and towels, while I could. I even treated myself to a mini-computer (not yet available in Europe) for several hundred dollars less than the price I wd have paid in a British shop.

And of course, it's all flat and clean and relatively well-organised. We travelled around four states (heading from central Florida northwards, nipping into Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi while heading along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico - the 'redneck riviera', they call it), and I don't think there was a hill or dale you could justify with the name of 'geography'. Very swampy in places though; supposedly the area is crawling with alligators, but I never saw one. Not the season, I suppose; also, I didn't have the number to their agents, and you know those people never do anything local. ;)

But it's all built on credit, of course. Wiser Americans are counting their pennies and making care they haven't invested in anything, making sure they have land, gold or other long-term assets carefully hidden under the bed. Which, of course, they protect with their guns. I shot a gun! It was a specific request of mine, to do that when I came over. Gary got a small handgun (basically a pistol) from his mother :D, bought some ammo at WalMart (yes, you can buy rifles and ammunition and all of that over the counter, just down from the tyre centre and across from the furniture section), and while we were in a wood in Mississippi, I mercilessly and brutally killed some plastic bottles. (adopts deep voice: I AM A MAN NOW. :D) I can see why they like shooting things, it's such fun!

But driving along the flat roads (heading north to the South, as they joke there), listening to the radio - with country music's endless messages reinforcing a sense of defensive, aggressive pride in being a 'plain-speakin' God-fearin' man who does like his daddy done and don't take no crap from nobody', and then the talk-show presenters whose nationalist simplicities echo the same concepts, and the religious broadcasters who take four words from a Biblical text and flog them to death like horses in a Roman amphitheatre - seeing the fat people shop at WalMart and eat 'all they can eat' at the roadhouse diners (but some of the food is genuinely yummy, such as a local fish called pollock which is like a delicate kind of cod), seeing the black people's ill-repaired wooden houses quite literally on 'the wrong side of the (railway) tracks' from the white sections of town, you know that there is still something at the heart of this country which isn't as it should be.

I talked to Gary's high-schoolers a couple of times; they were reassuring in their normality, not ignorant future-murderer Christalibans as we might think, but perfectly recognisable types; some quite intelligent for their age (17ish - a strange feeling for me, to now be talking to people born in the 1990s) and most friendly and curious about the outside world. Gary is bringing them over to Europe for a trip this summer, and I might run into them in Kraków. :) But most of them have never left the US, often because their families can't afford to - or if they did, it's because their fathers are military personnel. So Iraq and Afghanistan are very relevant topics; the 'support our troops' and 'proud parent of a soldier' stickers you see everywhere are not braggadocio, but genuine expressions of love and concern. And the concern is real for a couple of the boys whose SATs (Student Aptitude Test scores, the end-of-school exams they take to determine where they'll study) aren't so good, and have decided to join the Army and the Marines, following in family traditions.

I think that for the English, the dissonance, the culture shock we encounter when going over there is always much greater than it would be for a European. They don't expect it to be a culture similar to theirs, because they are conscious of speaking a foreign language when they go there, or have anything to do with it. But we English, perhaps, somewhere in our heart of hearts, think that Americans should be more like us because of the (more or less) shared language. (But it wasn't that shared when the owner of an Alabama diner was saying something benevolent to me as I left his fine establishment; I couldn't understand a blind word the man was saying for the best part of a minute.) The truth is, of course, that England is much more a part of the European cultural continuum. The USA has evolved along very different lines, and even though I'd like to visit again (and buy its cheap products and admire its overly-bosomed women - do they all get implants at birth, or what?), I am still sure that it would be far too different a psychic landscape for me to ever inhabit comfortably. I think. :)

Love what you do

Part of the modern-day angst which we are all alleged to suffer from these days lies in the apparent lack of division between the concepts of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’. It’s claimed that advances in technology such as the Blackberry and the net-enabled mobile phone make us virtual (in both senses) slaves of our employers (or of our employment, at least) wherever we go.

Now it’s true that my life does look like that, at least superficially. I am most often to be found in symbiosis with a laptop as I struggle with other people’s bad English and unclear thinking, in my capacities as teacher, proof-reader and translator. But in my case, I am simply doing what I am best at. Because of a combination of factors – principally a challenging father who didn’t allow lazy thought or speech to go uncriticised, plus a light sprinkling of what I’m sure is Asperger’s-syndrome fairydust – I have a natural inclination to and talent for spotting discrepancies of detail, inconsistencies of language, sometimes at great distances; a good proofer has to spot the same term which was used on page 2 and not again until page 220, and ensure it’s spelt & used in the same way. As an example, very bored people can check the spelling of the term ‘Kali Yuga’ on pages 145 (chapter 20) and 272 (chapter 45) of the first English edition of Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s pendulum’.

This is the type of thing which I both notice and feel as almost a kind of affront, as a fundamental wrongness which my instinct simply finds impossible to let pass, much as a gardener views an insect or a weed. Normal people let such things pass, as being at worst a minor irritant if a genuine confusion of meanings is caused, and usually just a matter of no real importance. Not me, though; my righteous indignation at coming across such mistakes and manglings is matched only by the satisfaction I feel at rectifying them. I read somewhere that the autistic’s desire for routine and repetition stems from a desire to control at least one small part of the endless onrush of data from the vast, mad world outside her head. So perhaps my talent for languages and language on both the specific & general levels is ultimately just a form of some similar kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. :)

Whatever, I can’t really deny that I get a particular satisfaction out of what I do, whether that be untangling the tortured syntax which Slavonic languages seem to specialise in (What’s wrong with relative clauses? Why do you hate them?), correcting an earnest but under-informed physics professor’s over-use of the present continuous tense, or later the same day seeing the light of recognition dawn in the eyes of a student to whom I’ve just explained the same grammatical point. In fact, I might say that over the years since graduation, I’ve been able (semi-consciously at the beginning, more deliberately in recent years as I’ve become more aware of my real nature and abilities) to narrow the gap between ‘that which I must do to earn & maintain income and social status’ and ‘that which I must do to satisfy my interests and desires (intellectual, even if not spiritual, cultural, physical, etc.)’. Now isn’t that just a long-winded way of saying that my work/leisure divide is close to being bridged?

So I sit by the window in a well-lit café, with the pleasant distractions of attractive waitresses, good European coffee or hot chocolate; losing myself in my work or not, as I choose; entering or leaving at 8am or 3pm as the whim & the sunlight take me, just so long as the work gets done by deadline. (I have the habit of setting deadlines for a day or two after I know I’m likely to finish the work; that gives me the advantage of being seen as a fast worker if I finish beforehand, and also allows me some leeway if something unexpected does happen.)

But there is a snake lurking in this little Eden. Despite all the advantages I’ve described in such loving detail above, a subtle but deep dissatisfaction remains, which keeps me in bed listening to BBC Radio 4 longer in the mornings than I should be, which occasionally makes me pretend to lose E-mails or their attachments, or spend too much time talking to faraway persons on messenger programs or Skype. Why should this be, if the work I do is so closely in tune with my own sensibilities, interests and obsessions? (At least if nothing else, this proves that I’m not really that autistic; if I was that far lost in the hermetic world of the ultra-male brain (as some have described the condition), then no food, news programme or sultry post-Communist siren could stop me from obsessively adding every missing hyphen in ‘long term’ from here till the next World Conference of International Mathematicians for Dullness & Tweed Jackets.) :)

No, the problem is this - it’s still work. No matter what intellectual satisfaction I get from it, I am still beholden to someone else, still following someone else’s orders as opposed to my own whims & caprices. And the psychic burden of knowing that this element of compulsion exists somehow takes away the pleasure of the work, even though the work itself should be intrinsically pleasant of itself for me. So what does that mean, when one has a deep-seated desire to avoid work and its responsibilities, even when that work is ideally suited to one’s skills, abilities and inclinations? Does it indicate that the concept of ‘work’ has such a negative effect on our attitudes that it can poison and degrade anything we do and call by that name? Is this the fundamental problem underlying our dissatisfaction with our lives? Would we enjoy what we do a lot more if we didn’t call it ‘work’ and think of it as work?

Or am I just a lazy git? :D

Leon Niemczyk

A word for this great actor, one of the best known in Poland, who died last week at the age of 83. Although he was born in Warsaw, he lived for many years here in Łódź and was considered a son of the city. (More about him here in Polish.) This is my picture of his 'star' on our very own Avenue of the Stars, which runs down the main drag in the town centre and is studded in the Broadway manner with stars commemorating famous people from the Polish film & TV world; you'll see that someone has left a commemorative candle by it, as is the habit in this country. Niemczyk was not fussy about the roles he took; he starred in high art films by Roman Polański and in the cheapie soap operas beloved by grannies everywhere in Poland.

Best name for a politician

I have no idea how successful this lady was in her campaign (for the local elections here in the Łódź area), but you have to admit she was born (or at least married into) the profession, with a surname like this. :D

The Book Meme

This idea comes from the English conservative political blogger Iain Dale; books being so important in my life, I thought I wd fill out these questions for myself, and I invite your answers to these same questions. You can answer privately or here in the public space, I don't mind. :)

1. Name one book that changed your life.
I can't say that a book ever has. Certainly my life would have been poorer without 'I, Claudius' by Robert Graves and 'Europe: a history' by Norman Davies, as much as any books I can think of.

2. One book you've read more than once.
So many of them... if I love a book, I read it again and again, and I can discover new things in it every time. One which I picked up again for the bazillionth time recently is 'Lords of the horizons: a history of the Ottoman Empire' by Jason Goodwin. Not written like a 'normal' history at all; more like a novel or a play, with a cast of bizarre characters and humorous, macabre anecdotes, not chained too tightly to chronology, but leaving you with a genuine feeling of having lived through a human experience.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island.
'The Isles', another Norman Davies history. I only understand Britain and England (two different things) when I am far away from it. And Davies' writing talent makes his books endlessly re-readable.

4. One book that made you laugh.
'Humorous' authors I like, such as P J O'Rourke or Hunter S Thompson, are just as often downright astonishing and occasionally deeply serious. For sheer fun, I like Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a small island'; this American lived in Britain for 30 years, and retains a sense of how lovably absurd us Brits can be.

5. One book that made you cry.
'Margrave of the marshes' by John Peel; this witty, unpretentious, sweet guy dominated British music for 40 years. Why do the best people always die before their time? Also 'Wild swans' by Jung Chang; how brutal life in China has been for most of the past 100 years.

6. One book you wish you'd written.
'Foucault's pendulum' by Umberto Eco; such a mix of ideas, humour, intellectual challenge, and (a nice change from this author) some characters I can identify with. If I could do something like this...

7. One book you wish had never been written.
Anything 'written' by a reality-show contestant or a model, for starters. :) Otherwise hard to think... even reading 'Venus in furs' by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or 'Juliette' by the Marquis de Sade, though extremely morally challenging and at times repulsive, serve the function of making us go into the darkest and most dangerous hidden corners of our personality. If you want to read something you probably wouldn't normally want to read, try 'Chopper' by Mark Read; a former hitman from the Australian underworld details his crimes - but more importantly, subjects himself to rigorous self-examination as to why he (and others) behave in such a way.

8. One book you're currently reading.
'Collapse' by Jared Diamond; how human behaviour affects environmental change, and vice versa. And 'The golden age of myth and legend' by Thomas Bulfinch, a collection of the Greco-Roman myths (with others) from the Victorian period which greatly influenced that time's literature and thinking.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
'Don Quijote' by Cervantes; lying around in both English and Spanish for years, I can't quite get started with it.... And 'American gods' by Neil Gaiman - all the evidence indicates he's one of our era's best storytellers. I must finally find out for myself.

10. Now tag five people.
Indres, Knur, George, brother, Tanya. I doubt whether they will answer, though. ;)

What we all want

Consider this, folks;

Men tend to dislike women who are perceived as whiny, clingy, possessive, dependent. It would seem that we want our other halves to be more independent, more determined, assertive (yet not too confrontational) and rational. Much as men perceive themselves to be.

Women, in my observation of the species, see men as aggressive, insensitive, unfeeling, closed-minded. It seems they want their men to be empathic, understanding, conciliatory, open-minded. Much as women perceive themselves to be.

So for all our talk of trying to understand the opposite sex, is it in fact the case that all we want is another version of ourselves? Is the whole human race basically narcissistic?

Former empire syndrome

I just returned from a week's holiday in the Baltic countries; I'd never been to Latvia, although the other two countries and their languages are relatively familiar to me. I do enjoy travelling! I suppose technically, as an Englishman, I've been 'travelling' ever since I started working abroad in 1990, but after having lived in Poland for so long, even going back to England feels like travelling abroad. Ever since I was a child I knew that my future lay abroad, and I have no plans to return to England - unless I was offered a job there, whose parameters would be so unreal that I don't even bother imagining it in any detail. (A senior professorship, for example. :) )

I have always had a sympathy for the smaller countries in Europe, the ones which don't suffer under the burden of some great imperial history which they have to remind themselves of time and again. The larger nations - the English, the French, the Poles, the Spanish - seem to have a certain element of their cultures which reflects a common psychological complex; I call this the 'former empire syndrome.' They place a very great deal of emphasis on their history, their languages, how lucky other foreigners are to be living in their countries, etc. I don't mind nations being proud of their past (although every nation has a dark stain or two somewhere in its history), but it bothers me when the xenophobic and nationalist elements start to emerge in popular culture, and in how ordinary people perceive the rest of the world.

Poland's entry into the European Union was soon followed by the election of a rightist, nationalist-Catholic government whose coalition parties strongly opposed joining the EU; so on one hand, the Poles are glad of the chance to travel and work freely, but on the other hand, a lot of political discourse in this country is rather anti-'Brussels', anti-supposed interference from foreign countries. The Poles' long history of foreign domination, culminating in a period of 123 years when there was no Polish state on the map of Europe, has predisposed them to a suspicion of foreign interference, and a consequent desire to protect their own identity and culture.

As for my own identity and culture, I have never seen being English as a source of automatic pride. It's just one of the things I was born with; like when you play poker, you are given a hand of cards at the beginning, and you have to play with it. Being English for me is like having blue-green eyes and having a tendency to be fat; they're simply something I use in everyday life. I use my eyes to see with, I use being fat to push into and out of crowded buses and trams, and I use being English to work as a teacher and translator. I know intelligent, reasonable and compassionate English people, just as I know such people from Poland, France, Mexico or wherever; just as I know stupid, stubborn and thoughtless English people, Poles, French etc. I have other problems with the English way of life (or at least, the southern-English middle-class way of life which I come from), though, but that's another story. :)

I have often wondered how many people, like me, would choose to live the majority of their life in another country, among foreigners, returning home only occasionally to see family and friends. It has not historically been a 'normal' way of living, to deliberately isolate oneself from one's own culture, language and background. But will it become more common in the future?

The rise of the right-wing government has caused many of my Polish friends abroad, who had originally planned to work there just for a short time, to consider staying abroad permanently. Poland has had many waves of exiles and emigrants in the past, reacting to the political difficulties in the home country; it is a strange and disturbing feeling, at the beginning of the 21st century, to think that it could be happening again.

Christmas in Poland

A couple of words about the typical Polish family Christmas, and the ways in which it differs from what we know here. Strange as it all may seem to the English, of course, it means a lot for Poles, as I suppose Christmas does for all people of Christian culture; childhood’s dreams are formed at this time of year, and they stay with us for our whole lives.

In common with other European cultures (there was a reference in the Times to the British Queen’s household doing the same, where it is described as a German custom), Poles ‘celebrate’ Christmas as we would understand it on the 24th. Traditionally the family assemble and begin their meal when the children of the house see the first star of night-time through the window, which depending on your latitude (it’s worth remembering that Poland is roughly one-third larger than the United Kingdom, while containing one-third fewer people) is some time between 3.30 and 4pm at that time of year.

The Polish Christmas table is laden with a variety of dishes, but two rules are strictly upheld; no meat is permitted, in the manner of a traditional Lenten fast, and there must be an odd number of dishes on the table. Also, a place is traditionally set on the table but left empty, in case a stranger should come by needing food and companionship, far from his own people, on this most important family holiday.

The absence of meat doesn’t deprive Poles of a wide range of dishes, but of all the most commonly encountered foods traditionally eaten at that time, pride of place is given to the carp. This will often have been bought at the local market or supermarket – still alive, sometimes, for the father of the household to decapitate in the bath – but in the countryside, it may well have come from a local pond or river. Other traditional Christmas dishes include broad beans, jellied fish, herring, mushrooms of various kinds, and a stewed-fruit compôte which has a distinctive smoky taste. Also various kinds of oatmeal and horseradish are found.

But before anyone tucks in, the oldest member of the household takes the communion wafers (distributed free at the local church for precisely this purpose) and says a prayer for the family’s health and happiness in the New Year. Then, each person present takes a piece of the communion wafer for themselves. Custom then requires each person to offer their wafer to their neighbour, who breaks a piece off for himself to eat, while exchanging good wishes. Everyone does this with all the other people present. When the wishes and communion wafers have been exchanged, then the feast commences.

The children’s favourite time, the opening of the presents, normally comes around when the meal has been completed, which would normally be between 6 and 7pm. It is important in Polish custom not to specify from whom each present came, as they are all deemed to have been brought by ‘Saint Nicholas’ (Mikołaj); this custom may have originated to spare the blushes of poorer family members being ‘outdone’ by richer ones.

In most families, if they have the stamina, the feasting and talking continues until everyone goes to the midnight mass (traditionally known as the ‘pasterka’, or shepherds’ meeting), where Polish carols are sung by candlelight. As in the English tradition, many of the carols preserve older, archaic forms of vocabulary and musical modes, which as it does for us, imparts some of the magic of former times to those present. Perhaps because Poland has suffered so many discontinuities and external threats in its history, the Polish church has no ‘modernising’ or ‘reforming’ movements in it, serving as it has done for centuries as a living link between today’s people and their ancestors. Poles return home from their midnight service at about 1am being very aware of having participated in this continuity of community.

The ‘First Day of Christmas’ (the 25th) sees more breakfast feasting (meat is permitted now, including the delicious ham and sausages which I would recommend to every visitor to Poland), and is traditionally the time for visiting and inviting other family members. The 26th is when people go to see their friends or more distant relatives; people may also go to cemeteries to say prayers by the graves of their deceased relatives on this day. The Polish nation is a society which extends in unbroken succession from the past until today, and the Christmas holiday is just one of the year’s occasions which reminds them of that.

Watch your language

When people discuss the future, they invariably think either of the immediate future, the next five, ten or twenty years, or they get lost in fantasies of the far future, when all notions of our civilisation have long since passed into history or mutated into the unrecognisable. This is OK, after all someone has to think about these things, and we need places (both physical and intellectual) to which we can escape. But the kind of future-gazing which has always interested me most is the medium term, the point just after I and everyone I know has died – a world which has recognisable continuities from what we know today, but is markedly different to ours. This, of course, is the basis of my piece Lechistan 2150, which is online here.

People frequently ask me which of the four or five thousand recognised world languages are worth learning, and I have recently been considering which of them are really going to matter in that mid-term future. These are not the languages that you yourselves need to learn, unless you are young, ambitious, or want to be in a position to teach your children or grandchildren these languages. When you find your retirement fund has been taken over by the Chinese, and that your software is all written by Indians, you’ll be glad you listened to me. :)

You might expect me to say it ;), but I still believe English will dominate this medium-term future. However, I suspect that a process of ‘Latinisation’, i.e. the break-up of the single language into different dialects, will begin. But it won’t end as Latin did, in mutual incomprehension. In the future people will speak two versions of English; a ‘standard’ version which almost anyone throughout the world can comprehend, and a ‘local’ version which will be so interlarded with local vocabulary and phonetic & grammar patterns derived from local languages that it will be barely recognisable as English. (This phenomenon is called ‘diglossia’ in linguistics.) The difference from the model of Latin after the collapse of the Roman Empire is that modern communications will ensure that this ‘standard’ version of English also survives, and will act as one of the world’s linguae franca.

The question I find most interesting, however, is whether this local English will replace or absorb the already resident languages. Here in Poland, a conversation between teenagers can include so many English words mixed into the language (for humorous or ‘cool’ purposes) that a casual listener, not knowing Polish, may wonder briefly whether they’ve happened across English speakers from somewhere unfamiliar. (By the way, Polish is actually a language I expect to still be spoken in 200 years’ time, albeit after some mutation, because its cultural tradition and the number of current native speakers will sustain it.) But languages like Dutch, German and Danish, which are physically and linguistically close to English, culturally influenced by it and increasingly by unrelated languages brought by immigration, may prove unrecognisable in the future to current speakers of those languages.

Chinese, of course, will be another great future language. Harnessing a capitalist economy to a dictatorship with reasonably effective control of around a quarter of humanity will make China (and the Chinese diaspora, when they lose their fear of investing in their homeland) an economic superpower of a kind we fear to imagine right now. But there is no single ‘Chinese language’, but a succession of mutually incomprehensible dialects, unified only by the Chinese script. And the languages of the southern seaboard, Cantonese most prominent among them, are numerous and proud. But Beijing’s insistence on disseminating Putonghua, the ‘Mandarin’ version of the language which unites the north of the country, appears to be paying off; even those outlier territories of East Asia such as Singapore, Indonesia and other places settled by Southern Chinese teach Putonghua to their local Chinese communities. And when ethnic-Chinese businessmen realise that the party really doesn’t mind you getting rich and glorious, then they will only reinforce the already formidable power of ‘Communist’ China. So the Mandarin tongue and the near-uniform written language should lead China into the next two centuries. Ganbei! :)

If anyone doubts why Arabic is going to count so much in the future, then they must have been hiding somewhere very pleasant and very isolated for at least the last five years, and probably longer than that. Islam is going to be inevitable in the 21st century and beyond; it is the Moslems who are having children in sufficient numbers to replace themselves, unlike the majority of Western populations. There is no point in complaining about it; a future Europe will be light-brown in colour and more likely to be having Fridays free, in between cursory visits to the mosque, rather than Sundays free, in between not going to church at all. :)

The question with Arabic is that, not unlike Chinese, it is not a single and unitary language spoken throughout the Arab world; the version spoken by the Africanised Arabs of Mauritania is incomprehensible to the Iraqi or the Upper Egyptian. Educated men are taught the Classical Arabic of the Koran, and a modified version of this same version (called Modern Standard Arabic) serves as a lingua franca on television and radio, so that Arab broadcasters can ensure their message is ignored and despised by all their brothers. But the man in the souk, while he may understand the basics of this language, does not regard it as his, as a ‘mother tongue’; it is a tool for the intellectuals and the citified folk. (A more detailed discussion on this by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is here.) However, once again the question of increased access to modern communications arises; al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite TV service, has transcended its national base and become a regional, cultural and global force. In the future, as the price of receivers and transmitters decreases, and the common man gets access to high technology, I believe that the diglossia factor will kick in more fully, and that Arabs will handle MSA as easily as their own dialects; and having lost its cultivated, snobby perception, it will form a unifying force as strong as the English language is today. But the ideology it conveys will not be Hollywood, McDonalds or MTV.

Indonesian will probably be the biggest surprise to anyone reading this list, as (tsunami aside) it’s not a part of the world we’ve heard much of in recent years. But to my mind some important factors will make this a key language in the future. Firstly, it’s easy to learn; not many irregularities, word formation is regular, easy to pronounce. And it (together with its twin Malay) serves as a lingua franca not only for the 250 million inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago, but also for Malaysia and Singapore, the former being an important manufacturing base, the latter a financial hub. And Indonesia itself, thanks to its internationally-run sweatshops (which local entrepreneurs will soon take their cut from), has considerable economic potential. Also, as the world’s most populous Islamic nation, it will have an increasing say in the world’s destiny; events in Bali should remind us of that.

Hindi might not seem necessary; we all know that India is playing an ever-growing role in the world economy, as anyone in Britain or the US who’s had to call directory enquiries or a computer helpline in recent years will know. The educated of the Indian middle-class number over 150 million, and they speak English, sometimes better than the English do. (Listen to Indian actress Aishwarya Rai (and look at her) to hear what I mean.) So why does Hindi count? Because it’s the link language for the rest of northern India, and the workers need managers who can interact with them; and again, it’s the language of a worldwide diaspora (follow the tide of the receded British Empire, from the Pacific Islands to Wembley). But won’t they all speak English? We mustn’t underestimate the power of nationalism, or its slightly more attractive cousin, ‘culturalism’; identifying with an indigenous, non-Western, non-European culture will be a powerful motivator in the future.

Spanish is probably an obvious choice, another ‘language of the conqueror’ which covers a multitude of races and cultures. Spanish apparently recently overtook English as the language with the second-greatest number of speakers. The key moment here will be when the economic power of South America, freed from decades of CIA-sponsored dictatorships, links up with the increasing cultural awareness of the US Hispanic population, who are continually predicted to outnumber the white European-descended population any moment now.

French isn’t a difficult guess to make either. Whereas the French and Belgians are, like other white Western Europeans, not replacing themselves at a sufficient rate to sustain their existence beyond the next two or there hundred years, their places are being taken by their colonial children, of Arab and African descent. I suspect that, as I said earlier about English, a kind of ‘post-French’ will evolve, full of influences from those peoples. What about the economic side of things? Well, sooner or later all that labour and creativity will be harnessed, and as technologies trickle down from the rich West that doesn’t want it, some of it will be exploited and put to uses no-one has imagined. The rich cultural heritage of France’s past will blend with the variegated non-white and non-Christian future in a way that Molière would never have imagined…