You will be summoned to appear...

Here's one that people who grew up in a democratic country with laws and customs based on liberal ideals, individual liberties, and a minimum of ministerial discretion will simply not believe.  But it's true.  (On the other hand, democracies that are more recent, and whose past is of a different sort, may seem more like the former totalitarian states they sometimes are.  After I first posted this message, Charlie Baker referred me to the example of Japan, amongst others.)

Anyway...

Back when Christopher Cleisthenes Thomas Paine Hingston was born -- 24 March 2009 -- I was living in Cambridge, UK, looking for work and subsisting on the dole.  The plan was for me to find work, which I naively assumed would be fairly quick and easy for someone of my education, relative intelligence, and wide ranging experience -- and then for Ola and Chris (in utero) to join me in the relative comfort of the UK, particularly Hingstonia (my nickname for the area in East Anglia where most of my cousins now live). But the economic crisis was faster moving, deeper and crueler than anyone anticipated, and my naiveté more naive; so, in spite of my credentials and experience (and possibly owing in part to my age), as Chris's due date approached I had still found nothing in the way of work, and I had not reserves of money, just the dole.  Many people suggested I bring Ola to England to have the baby.  I am not sure we could have done this, but in any case, it seemed at least arguably dishonest.  Middle England was already angered that the UK dole seemed to be going to loads of undeserving, freeloading foreigners.  Ridiculous stories circulated, thanks to the infamous tabloid press and those gullible enough to read it.  The atmosphere was unpleasant.  I didn't want to bring Ola to England until I had a job.  It seemed only a matter of time.

Had I left England temporarily and come to Poland for Chris's arrival, I would no longer have received the dole, and it might have been very troublesome, possibly even impossible, to sign up for the dole again upon returning.  I had not reserves and would have had to beg or borrow money for the trip, and I was very tired of that sort of life.  And so I was afraid of ending up caught either in Poland or England with nothing and no way out.

Though there are said to be numerous 'benefits cheats' in the UK, and some of them seem to live pretty well (according to the tabloid press), I certainly wasn't living in comfort, let alone luxury.  Winter in Cambridge is frigid by English standards (Cambridge is very exposed to weather from the north and east), the daylight meagre, the landlady was most niggardly with the heating, the flat poorly constructed and lacking in insulation.  Ola and I spoke by Skype (an Internet videophone service).  She put on a brave face and never harped at me -- though I now know how anxious and angry she actually was.  All in all, my life was beginning to assume the contours of a Russian novel combined with a John Cassavetes movie.  (The landlady, in particular, was going to end up in the opening chapters of Crime and Punishment if she kept turning the heat down.)

The dole paid just barely enough for modest housing (a bed-sit in a grubby neighbourhood called Abbey) and food, but not quite enough for that plus transportation, which is why I did a lot of walking and stayed home whenever I didn't actually have somewhere to go.  Home wrapped in my duvet, because during the day the heat was off.  Autumn and winter weather in Cambridge is awful anyway, so going out just to be out was not much of a draw.  Gale force winds and lashing rains, early nightfall and frequent fogs.  Those who counter that it can't be as bad as Poland don't understand the relative nature of climates and how people adapt to them.  Poland is much colder, but also better prepared.  Buildings, even the crappy ones build in the 60s and 70s, are well insulated and well heated.  The equipment may be outmoded and the heat inefficient, but at least it is there and it doesn't leak through the walls as it did in Cambridge.

To get to Poland for Chris's birth I might have tried lying to the authorities, but I long ago learned that lying to highly suspicious people is damned difficult and generally not worth the effort.  Of course, telling the truth to such people is often not worth the effort either -- but it is sometimes necessary nonetheless.  I'm not very good at lying, and I don't enjoy it.  So I didn't go to Poland, hoping Ola would forgive me.

Some day she may forgive me, but so far she hasn't.  If I'd known then what I know now about a wife's capacity to remember every detail of every mistake her man has ever made, I would have gone to Poland by any means necessary, and had I been caught that would have just been part of the story.  Too late for that now.  However, if you happen to be young enough to learn new tricks, then learn this one: there are many things a woman will not forgive, and one of them is not being present at the birth of your child (assuming it's a child you share with the woman in question).  Let nothing -- certainly no law or bureaucracy or a sense of fairness -- get in your way.  So far as I know, there are no exceptions to this precept.

Not being present in Poznan, it was not possible for me to accompany Ola to the Greater Poland Hall of Records, the epi-centre of regional bureaucracies, to bestow upon the young master his long, allusive, instructive and evocative name.  However, Ola and I had discussed the name many times, and I saw no reason to worry.  I am, I admit, a name freak.  For me names are the past and the future, they are sign posts, hymnals, arias, elaborate concoctions of cultural chemistry.  At least they can be -- and they should be.  Where do they come from, what do they mean, what magic do they bestow?  Are they mere fashion accessories, like Tiffany and Britany.  (Why not name your kid Lumpen Proletariat and be honest about it?)  Or are they deeply encoded predictors of the future, like so much DNA coiled in preparation for the moment when something unlocks its power?

I believe a name should be chosen carefully and should be imbued with as much meaning and promise as possible.  Meaning can, of course, come in several forms.  Still, when young parents tell me they named their bonny wee one a particular name because they liked the sound of it without even enquiring into the meaning, I think they must be very dull clods to have foregone such an important and influencial opportunity.   Having spent so much time and effort on choosing Christopher's full name, including the order of its parts, I assumed my wife (and more importantly her flotsam parents) would never unilaterally alter it at the last moment unannounced?  I will probably never learn exactly how it happened, but somehow Christopher Cleisthenes Thomas Paine Hingston because Christopher Hingston, tout court.  Worse, no one told me.  I found out one day by looking at the wee fellow's Polish passport.

When I found out abut the mistaken recording of the lad's name, Ola and I agreed we would get it fixed.  (For once my prediction of what this would mean proved more accurate than Ola's.  There is probably nothing in life more exasperating than a simple thing as interpreted under Polish law and transformed by Polish bureaucrats.  For months since our return to Poland in June, various things got in the way of us getting on with it, but we didn't think there was any reason to hurry, so it wasn't until 15 February that we gathered up our documents and toddled across town to the Hall of Records -- a Socialist Worker's crumbling concrete mid-rise (once the tallest building in town) full of highly polished black and white marble halls that resemble British and American banking halls of the early 20th century.  Comforting in their way.  Unfortunately, the place is staffed by unreconstructed Socialist Workers, who are smart enough to realize that their jobs are meaningless and their work counterproductive -- so that if they ever stop even for one moment filling in their forms, stamping them, photocopying them, reviewing them, filing them, comparing them, rejecting them and starting over again, they will almost certainly lose their jobs and their precious if not exactly generous pension rights.

Gay Pride Parade 2010 - Passing the Zamek.

Over the entrance way, where it ought to say "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here," there is a grim frieze made of concrete showing earnest, heavily muscled workers loading boats, welding boilers, marching in parades, and tightening bolts on a tractor.  The boats are now made in Korea, the boilers are made God knows where but not Poland, the parades are nowadays likely to be on the order of this year's Gay Pride Parade in Poznan (fewer than 250 marchers surrounded by at least 2000 policemen from all over Poland -- to protect the marchers, who were wearing rainbow wigs and dressing in hot pink jumpsuits, from the skinheads who had threatened to bash their queer heads in), but the tractors I've seen in Poland appear to be exactly the same ones shown in the frieze, that is, about 50 years old and in need of constant repair.

First we registered Meggie.  That would have been easy, but Ola had not headed the written instructions to the letter.  We had come on the wrong day, it seemed, and so we were treated to a belittling lecture by a bureaucrat who, judging from the extraordinary tidiness of her office (not a paper in sight) had possibly risen above the level of actual work and was now seated with the higher and holier 'pure belittlers.'  The lecture didn't last all that long and amounted to little more than 'How dare you not follow our instructions?  We are very important people.  And, frankly, you are not.'  Those of you who wonder at the wisdom of my not learning Polish after so many years of living in Poland should consider that scene in detail and imagine what would have happened if I could have understood the ancient cybil's delphic words and been able to tell her exactly what I thought of her, her tidy office, her puny job, and her... well, you get the idea.  Even without knowing Polish, I have managed while here to be convicted of libel three times (I still wonder how I can libel someone in a language he or she doesn't know and be tried and convicted in a language I don't know), and to have so thoroughly pissed off a policeman that I had to spend two nights in jail.  If I knew the language, I'd be doing 25-life; we can be sure of it.

Reconstruction of full-scale
Athena of the Parthenon (12.6 m)

After the pouting and whimpering, her Thou Shall Nots and our Mea Culpas, we managed to register Meggie with her proper name.  Almost.  Poland doesn't allow one to have more than two names plus one's surname.  So here behind the Iron Curtain (it's still here; now it's simply internal and residual rather than external and integral) Meggie is Margaret Athena Hingston, while in the free and easy West, she will be Margaret Athena Boudica Nausikaa Hingston.  Margaret is a name with some history in my family that goes back to Greek and means pearl.  It's also a common name in its Polish version (Małgorzata), just as Christopher is in it's Polish version (Krzystof).  That matters so that the children aren't teased while in Poland, at least not because of their names.  And its a nod in the direction of the nationalistic grandparents, which helps.  Athena is, of course, the Greek goddess of a lot that matters, starting with wisdom.  In recent times, particularly in places like Poland (smothered by the wet blanket of Catholicism) the importance of ancient Greek culture to everything we are and can ever become is widely overlooked in favour of the gibberish of simplified Christianity and its Jewish predicates.  Important stuff, of course, but nothing compared to the importance of Greek culture.)  Boudica was the ultimate woman rebel in Roman Britain.  Her husband, a client king in an area north and east of London, cut a comfortable deal with the occupying Romans and so was something of an opportunist twat.  When he died, leaving his estates and titles to his wife and the emperor jointly (a common practice of the time, a means of continuing the arrangement), the Roman governor of Britain decided to intervene.  Boudica was divested of her inheritance and publicly beaten; her daughters were raped.  Boudica didn't go quietly.  She roused the native Britains, took on the occupying Legion and succeeded in sacking three important Roman garrison towns.  Had another Legion, battle hardened but fresh and freshly provisioned, not been moved into place quickly, the Romans might have withdrawn from Britain altogether.  The point is, she didn't take bullshit from anyone, and I hope my daughter never does either.  Nausikaa is a name particularly important to me for two reasons.  First, it is the name of the princess who rescues Odysseus in Book 6 of the Odyssey; though very young at the time, she acted with great tact and foresight.  This matters to me, because I haven't shown that much of either, and I hope at least one of my children displays a greater than fair share of both.  But there is some irony in the name as well, for its etymology is 'burner of ships."  In other words, tact and foresight are great, but retreat is out of the question.  I identify with Odysseus and his travails (and with Elijah and his), and I am certainly a man who rarely retreats (as I hope my children will also rarely retreat.)  In other words, here's hoping our Margaret, wee Meg, is something of a chipette off the old block!

Poland doesn't allow more than two names plus one's surname....  What's that about?  Why not?  What is the compelling state interest in the number of names a child has?   For a country that claims to admire Margaret Thatcher, why not auction the names or make people pay by the letter -- at least that would make some sort of sense, and be a way paying for whatever additional paperwork is required by longer names.  But it gets worse.  The troglodytes of Polish bureaucracy can, if they got up on the wrong side of the bed or have been without sex for weeks or simply want to stomp on your privates, actually refuse to accept a name merely because they don't like it.  They'll have a hard time doing this if the name is one belonging to a Catholic saint -- since all those names figure in the Polish calendar.  But try registering Süleyman, Montezuma or Mandela and I wager you'll hit a high, hard wall in a hurry.  With a bone shattering smack.  There is an appeal process, of course, but it is up to the parents to demonstrate that the name should be accepted, not up to the functionary to demonstrate that the state has a legitimate reason to deny it.  The presumptions, as lawyers call them, run all in the wrong direction.  See what I mean about the continuing existence of the Iron Curtain?

The connection between the former Poland and the present Poland is more explicit than you might imagine.  The law that allows these dreary drudges to behave this way was enacted in 1960.  Say, wasn't that the height of the Cold War.  Hadn't Nixon and Krushchev been discussing kitchens?  Weren't we gearing up for the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis?  Władysław Gomułka was premier of Poland but the brief period of slight liberalisation known as 'Gomułka's Thaw' was already over and turning into a period of renewed and increased Soviet-inspired clampdown.  Gomułka is a complex figure in Polish history.  Depending on which moment you chose to examine him for, his heart may, in theory, have been in the right place, but he knew who was boss and wasn't going to the Lubianka just to die a patriot.  This is one form of Polish bravery -- realistic bravery.  The other form is the far riskier more audacious sort shown by Piłsudski's battles with the Red Army in 1920-21, by the Warsaw Uprising ('44) and by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ('43) before it.  Poles can undertake inspired and inspiring suicide missions like few other Europeans, and sometimes they get away with it.  However, sometimes they just hunker down and hope for the best.  In any given situation, I suggest it is impossible to predict which direction they will turn.

In Poland, 1960 was not a period brightened by a flowering of individual liberties -- even something as simple as choosing a name was ultimately the prerogative of the state.  Social engineering was the order of the day.  If I had to guess, I'd say the number-of-names-law was enacted because having too many names revealed 'bourgeois tendencies,' while the approval of names law came about because they didn't want kids being named John Wilkes, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, Jozef Piłsudski or Tadeusz Kościuszko.  That would be my guess, but it's only a guess.  (Germany has similar laws even thought it has been a model democracy for decades -- most of the time acting under an international microscope, so that when something carries even the slightest taint of totalitarianism, the Germans are generally pretty swift about correcting matters.)  In Poland, I expect the Catholic Church has played its part, too.  Talk about totalitarians, or at least monopolists.  A perfect combination of Generalissimo Franco and John D. Rockefeller Sr

Always an interesting comparison between Germany and Poland -- also usually an unfair one.  At the end of the Second World War the German legal system had been so completely corrupted by Nazism that an amazing and brilliant decision was taken.  The entire German Civil and Criminal Codes were rewritten.  At least that is what I have been told.  Every single Nazi enactment, no matter how innocuous, was repealed, but not piecemeal.  They did it by scraping the entire statue book down to bare wood, and starting over, layer by carefully applied layer.  More wonderful still, this was not done bit by bit or in phases, but all at once.

But when the People's Republic of Poland became the Republic of Poland, not similar happened.  Not in Poland and, so far as I know, not in any of the former Communist countries of central and eastern Europe.  Instead, they've been muddling along -- much as the UK has been muddling along with a manifestly undemocratic system for centuries, making tweaks here and there to convince itself that it really is a democracy.  West Germany got a shiny new system, overseen by experienced democracies of three fairly distinct types.  East Germany hardly changed at all, except the names changed.  KL Sachsenhausen became Camp 7.  The Gestapo and SD became the Stasi.  And everywhere the word National appeared in front of the word Socialist, it was crossed out.  Of course, they exchanged the charismatic and reasonably well-tailored Adolf for the thuggish gray proletarian, Wilhelm Pieck.   Poland's trajectory was nearer to that of East Germany than West Germany.  In 1960 Poland's Soviet approved leader was Władysław Gomułka.  Gomulka is a far more interesting figure than most of the East Germans.  He had sympathetic moments and in his own way tried to liberalise Polish society (by minute degrees, of course).  But when Moscow played the music, Gomułka danced whatever steps he was told to dance.  The results overall were not good.  The state-favouring legal code should have been scrapped, and should still be scrapped, but the Poles show no interest in the project.  The hope of most westerners like me is that the European Union's laws will eventually overtake Poland's and render them obsolete (which they already are) and impotent (which unfortunately they are not yet).  In my view, this process cannot happen soon enough.

Meggie's name registration was relatively easy -- though frustrating and irritating.  Christopher is going to be (has already been) much tougher.  For one thing, these people delight in telling you that you are subject to the rules, but they refuse to tell you before hand what the rules are or where to find them.  Seriously.  They wait until you have broken a rule, and then they say "gotcha."  It turns out, for instance, that changing a child's name is very easy if done within 6 months of birth, and very difficult thereafter.  Why six months?  Who the hell knows?  If they know, they aren't telling us.  Chris is now almost 23 months old, so well past the six month deadline.  We must now petition the grand poohbah of names, but first we must explain to the assistant poohbah exactly why we wish to add the name Cleisthenes to Christopher.

Huh?  Because that was always supposed to be his name, is the name we chose for him, and it was left off by mistake.  Gotcha.  The rules say there must be a 'compelling reason,' and mistake, we were told, is not a compelling reason.  (I wanted to say, "What if I tell you that the reason he didn't get his middle name is because his meddlesome cave-dwelling grandparents didn't like it -- not Polish enough for them -- and forced my wife to comply with their ignorant wishes?  And what if I told you that if you don't change his name then I will 'go postal,' starting with my egregious in-laws and ending in this very office?Would that be compelling enough for you?'  Fortunately, I didn't.)  Instead, I took a more lawyerly approach: what are the compelling reasons, I asked at least three times?  But they weren't biting; I never found out.  Someone (not a bureaucrat) suggested a compelling reason for changing a child's name might be if one had named one's child Dog Shit.  Well, if one had named one's child Dog Shit it probably wasn't by mistake, and if the cretins in the name approvals department had let it through the first time, then there was no reason to have an approvals department.  Having now thought about it rather a lot, I'm convinced that mistake is one of the few possible compelling reasons.  But they don't agree, and all the presumptions are on their side.

Cleisthenes of Athens (born c. 570 BC;
developed democracy 508 BC).

Why Cleisthenes, they asked, is it ideological?  Who were these Cleisthenes?  (At first they thought it was plural, possibly because of the terminal "s".)   Before I could say anything, Ola said 'yes' to the ideological question.  I feared another Gotcha was headed our way, ideology being something of a curse word these days, but oddly enough saying it was ideological seemed an acceptable answer to them -- at least after I explained who Cleisthenes was.  I didn't explain that there were two of them, one a tyrant, but stuck strictly to the one who invented democracy.

But we still aren't over the hurdle.  Because this is a "difficult case" and there is still no "compelling reason" it must go up the ladder to the Grand Dragon and Imperial Wizard of Names.  When the time comes, we will be summoned to appear....