ELDER POP - thoughts on becoming a father late in life

It's Better than Faulkner. It's Dostoevski!

2011-11-16T23:37:00.000+01:00

A Brief Introduction to a Major Misalignment.

My marriage to Ola (Aleksandra Świder) never made a lot of sense, but it happened: 29 November 2008, Saffron Walden, Essex, England. No one came to the wedding from my wife's family. None of them, except my wife, has ever been on an airplane. Airplanes scare them. None of them, including my wife, can drive a car. Cars scare them. No one came from my California family (the branch of the Hingstons from northern California. There were never many; my brother David and I are the last exemplars, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with each other). My English family (the only blood relations to whom I feel close) and several English friends came. Ola was already five months pregnant with Christopher. The bride wore grey -- an outfit, I later discovered, chosen by her mother.

Why didn't this marriage make sense -- at least as much sense as most marriages? In part because my wife and I come from (and adhere to) very different cultures. I don't simply mean California and Poland; I mean much more specific and irritating misalignments as well. Though my wife understandably dislikes the terms, I find it pretty much accurate to describe her family as trailer trash and troglodytes. No one reads books (they actually ridicule those who do). Her brother has a large collection of online imagery, mostly naked girls with lots of black leather and metal studs, piercings and tattoos. Whatever turns you on, eh? No one reads the newspapers. Ola refuses to vote. She probably does not know who the current President of Poland is. She is not stupid, but she is conditioned to live in a cave, and she has never broken free from that conditioning.

The focus of Ola's mother's social housing flat is a large (and far more expensive than she can afford) flat screen tv that is left on most waking hours, including during dinner, blaring away about everything that is unimportant -- the weather, local road accidents, or the Polish soap operas. The woman has never been outside Poland, and has never had a desire to be outside Poland, even though the German border is just two hours away, and Berlin, one of the most interesting, cosmopolitan cities in Europe, is just three hours away. Germany is not every Pole's idea of heaven, granted, but for the price of the flat screen tv, she and her husband could easily have had two all inclusive weeks on a Greek Island (at pre-collapse prices).

Ola's father, until he died earlier this year, was a clownish long-unemployed alcoholic who, after years of playing the same moaning overture over and over, killed himself with drink. He'd threatened to do so often enough -- and had spent large amounts of his own mothers', brothers', and sister's on various fruitless forms of rehab and other juju (but wouldn't do anything that involved accepting responsibility and making a commitment, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which he predictably told Ola was "stupid.") By the time he died, I think nearly all of us had our fingers crossed. For once he didn't disappoint.

He could be pleasant enough in person, at least in comparison to his wife; but Ola told me he frequently said bad things about me behind my back. Even to my face he ridiculed my books and the admittedly eccentric middle names I, with Ola's appoval, had chosen for our children. Parochial is far too kind a word for such a person. What a relief, I thought, when he finally cashed in his tiny stack of chips. However, I quickly discovered that his death meant that his malicious, paranoiac scold of a wife was left insufficiently occupied and free to search for more victims. Me, for example. She's an evil harpy. Even more than most evil mothers-in-law, she somehow thought she was the mistress of all she surveyed. Killing her would be a favour to humanity -- I only hope someone does it while I am out of the country. Tempting as it may be, I am sure I won't bother, but just in case I indulge my nobler instincts one day, I've sent an email to my friends in the police department saying that if something should happen to her -- if someone should pound a rusty nail into her head, for example -- they should simply come over and pick me up. I'd almost certainly have done it, or I'd have a receipt from whoever did.

But my wife and I had children, beautiful, wonderful children, and that fact imposed pressures and motivations to continue no matter how troubled and troubling our home became. We tried marriage counselling, and I made more frrequent and desperate use of my long-term psychaitrist, Dr Jack Dusay, whom I speak to on the telephone. Marriage counselling is generally good if both parties want to use it to make progress. If either party -- and it usually ends up being both parties -- prefers to use marriage counselling as a sort of boxing gym for perfecting one's left jab and right upper-cut, with the counsellor acting as both coach and referee, then progress is the last thing that will happen. In fact, getting stuck in a rut is the only thing that can happen. My wife and I talked (and too often screamed) past each other, and, increasingly, we each began to think the other some sort of strange, irrational, cruel and unworthy creature from another planet. Or worse. I thought Ola would become more American, or at least more Western European, in her outlook, behaviour, aspirations, ambitions, etc. She seems to have thought that, by living in Poland, I had agreed to become Polish. And not just any Polish, but troglodyte Polish. Not a chance.

Lately my wife began to scream at me, largely without explanation let alone discernible rationale: "You're a monster! A liar! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" That she did this in front of our bewildered and anxious children did not improve matters. When I asked what I had lied about, or why I was a monster, I got no answer, just a repeat performance at higher volume. So I've had to guess at her reasons. I lied (in her mind, that is), each time I said the house was dirty and I wished she would do more cleaning. I was a monster each time I pointed out that long ago we had decided to share the housework (including the shopping and cooking) more rationally, so that I had more time to write, but that, in spite of our agreement, I still did 100% of the shopping and 99% of the cooking (my wife makes better coffee than I do), as well as at least 50% of the laundry, and 100% of the taxi service. Ola's mother is a compulsive ironer, the sort who iron underwear and kitchen towels and just about anything made of any kind of fabric; Ola has not touched an iron in the seven years we've been together, so far as I can recall.

You can read our various cruel and squalid rants in the many emails that follow. My wife said repeatedly that I was "harassing" her -- harassing has a specific legal meaning in Polish family law, and allows the harassed party to have the other party arrested and jailed for 48 hours. There is no hearing; the party claiming to be harassed only has to convince the police. Perhaps I should point out that, although the law is gender neutral, its enforcement is not. I rather doubt that any Polish woman has ever been detained for harassing her husband, though plenty of Polish men have been driven to drink, or worse, by their harassing womenfolk. Ola charged me with harassment roughly a year ago, after I had been forced by the noxious fumes of too much shrewishness in a confined space to carry her meddlesome mother out of our flat and deposit the snarling ferret on the stairs (unharmed, I am sad to say) -- at which point Ola and I wisely separated and made the first tentative steps toward divorce. But a month later our daughter was born. My shrink convinced me that Ola was most likely acting under the influence of powerful discombobulating hormones and would soon enough calm down as she nursed our latest child. So, for the sake of the children, we reconciled and things moved along more or less acceptably (though unevenly) for many months.

Perhaps I was once again harassing my wife, but if so it was unintentional; I just wanted to live in a clean house, like the clean house that I had grown up in, and for that matter like the clean house that Ola had grown up in. Yes, though the Świders are troglodytes, Mama Świder keeps a spotless house -- devoid of books, art and examples of culture, but gleamingly clean. I eventually found out that the spotless house Ola had grown up in was a very sore point for her, for she considers her mother an obsessive cleaner, and felt the wicked old bat had spent far more time cleaning than in loving her children. I'm sure that's true -- but as Auden said, Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. Just as often, they don't return it; they pass it along to the next sap who wanders by and can be made into a victim. What Ola seemed never to have understood is that it is not her mother's cleaning that is the problem, it is her inability to love her children, or anyone else. She probably thinks she loves them, and she can put on a good show, but it isn't love at all -- its control. Do anything other than what she demands of you and the snarling ferret appears in an instant.

It never occured to me that there was a better, clearer, more honest way of saying what I needed to say than, "Please clean the house." Perhaps if I had undertaken some sensitivity or motivational training I would have known a better way. But then again, I don't think it's my job to motivate my wife to clean the house. Wives have been cleaning houses for millennia. It's supposed to be genetically encoded. As a "new man," I was prepared to do lots of the housework, but not more than about 40% of it, particularly in view of the fact that my wife had given up her job to be home with the children. Even when my outrage at our squalor was at its worst, as when I boiled over about the fact that the inside of our house too often looked like a gypsy camp after a week-long orgy, I didn't think I was behaving badly or unreasonably. Rather, I felt provoked beyond the bounds of decency. Our house is almost always so messy and dirty that's it's embarassing to have anyone over. Often I even felt ashamed whenever someone came to read the electric metre or the gas metre. The Faulkner characters I think of in respect of our squalid life are the Snopes. Amazing characters -- but possibly not so fun if you are living the story. My wife didn't seem to mind being a Snopes, but I did. As my shrink recently remarked: I really can't see you as a guy with rusting wrecked cars up on blocks in the front yard. Got that right.

A Word about Privacy and Confidentiality -- the Word is Bollocks.

Are the emails that follow "private," deserving the status "confidential"? Those of you who know me well know I am not sure such status exists at all and that I find complete transparency a much preferred solution to the inherent problems of communication and honesty. If you don't want to be quoted, don't write and don't speak -- certainly don't write or speak to me. So, with the encouragement of one of my better read and more insightful friends -- the one who, after reading many of these emails commented that, together, they are "better than Faulkner," amounting in their brutal intensity to something like Dostoevski -- I have decided to throw everything up on the web and to let people with the energy and interest to read through it all decide for themselves. To a writer, even one going through the painful collapse of his marriage and theft of his children, comparisons to Faulkner and Dostoevski are high praise -- and a temptation too great. If even half true, it would be a shame to bury this stuff away.

I have not removed or changed names, but other than my own name, my wife's name, her mother's name, my children's names, and my shrink's name, I have shortened them to a degree that I expect only real "insiders" will know who is writing or being written about. I have not honoured any prior requests, and will not honour any subsequent requests, for confidentiality. If I decide that an email should go up, it will go up. Some of you will be shocked by that, perhaps embarrassed by what you wrote or the way you wrote it, perhaps disturbed or offended by the whole grotesque enterprise. Some will urge that I ought not to subject my children to these tales of the pain and tumult of their early life -- but I don't know any person who, upon becoming old enough to read this sort of thing, would not wish to know about his or her origins, no matter how unpleasant the tale. By the time my children are old enough to be able to find this blog, and to want to find it, they will be old enough to start delving into it, asking the right questions and, with luck, finding answers that make sense for them and motivate them to do better than Ola and I have done. By putting all this up on the web where they can find it, the children will, at very least, have more than one view of what went wrong and why, and plenty of detail with which to judge the actions and motivations of everyone involved.

OK, then; let's get started....

FROM Andrew Hingston

SUBJECT Would like to Skype, please

DATE 5 November 2011 16:21

TO Mimi, Mark

Hello --

I'd like to check in with my Marriage Mentors, if possible. Let me know some possible times. Hope all is well in the Lost Ghetto. Things a bit crazy here.

-- Andrew Hingston

Zakrzewo (Dopiewo), Polska

________________________________________________

This string of emails from 07/11/11 is in reverse chronological order. You may be less confused if you start at the bottom of the string and work your way to the top.

FROM Andrew Hingston

SUBJECT Can we Skype?

DATE 7 November 2011 16:47

TO Mimi

After you read the emails between me and Ola, let's Skype, OK?

I think Ola is coming unhinged. I may be the catalyst, but I am not the reason.

-- Andrew Hingston

Zakrzewo (Dopiewo), Polska

FROM Andrew Hingston

SUBJECT Point Counterpoint

DATE 7 November 2011 16:02

TO Ola Swider-Hingston

Ola,

I react strongly when you behave childishly and petulantly and in a deliberate effort to piss me off, like saying the house is clean when

in fact it is filthy.

I had just cleaned off the buffet when you deliberately put the baby carrier down on it rather than taking it across the room to where it

should go.

You scream at me and call me a monster and say "Fuck you!" to me in front of the children.

Given how far your moods swing, and how fast, I think you may be suffering from some sort of mental illness. You are very unpredictable and beset by drama. It can't be good for you, the children, or anyone else. I would like to help you, but you don't want my help. So I urge you to get help from someone -- it may be that your therapist is not enough, or is not the right therapist for you. I don't

know. But you are acting like a crazy person. Believe me, I know.

I assume our plan for me to pick you up today at 6pm is now cancelled. However, you are very unpredictable, so I don't know. Are you and the children coming home tonight or not? Please let me know as soon as you can.

And please get help.

Sent from my iPhone

Andrew Hingston,

On 7 Nov 2011, at 15:42, Ola Świder-Hingston <alexabuona@gmail.com> wrote:

It is you who heralds and blackmail: " if you do not put this away I will through it outside of house", "do not sit down. You

can sit down after 16.00 if you did this and this..." etc etc. do not tell me I scream you do not becausc it is not true. You say I

do nothing - it is not true. So it is impassible that we live together.

Sent from my iPhone

Ola Świder-Hingston

Dnia 7 lis 2011 o godz. 15:27 Andrew Hingston <ahingston1492@gmail.com> napisa"(a):

Ola --

Please stop before you do something you regret all your life. Telling you that you do not keep the

house clean is NOT harassing you. I haven't been shouting at you, or swearing at you, but you have been doing both to me. You need to pull back from the edge of the abyss. You need to check with your

therapist, with your friends, with everyone you can think of -- including my friends -- before you hurt

yourself and the children.

As for respect. How can I tell you that you are not keeping the house clean with respect? Everything I

say to you you interpret as an insult. It's impossible to talk to you, because you are ultra-sensitive and

react out of proportion to things. I don't know what you want -- expect to be left alone and to be allowed to do things your way, even when I think your way is wrong.

You are supposed to be my life partner. But you blackmail me all the time by saying you will leave and

take the children. That is blackmail. Stop it.

-- Andrew Hingston

Zakrzewo (Dopiewo), Polska

[Not sure where the tag went, but this is obviously from Ola to me, and must have been sent between before 15:27]

Ok. So good bye. I will take my stuff and children stuff and leave you. People can try to help me if they

do it with respect. You try to do it by screaming, insulting and with psychological force. It is not help.

Sent from my iPhone

Ola Świder-Hingston

From: Andrew Hingston <ahingston1492@gmail.com>

Date: 2011/11/7

Subject: Re: Blah blah blah

To: Ola Świder-Hingston <alexabuona@gmail.com>

I am not going away. I am going to tell you that you are not keeping the house clean or

showing the children how real life needs to be lived. If you think you are, you need a great

big dose of reality. That's where other women -- Mimi, Marta -- can help. Your mother

cannot help, as she is the source of the problem. She brainwashed you. You need to

break through into a better life.

-- Andrew Hingston

Zakrzewo (Dopiewo), Polska

2011/11/7 Ola Świder-Hingston <alexabuona@gmail.com>

I want to say it again: if you think I do nothing go away from my life.

Sent from my iPhone

Ola Świder-Hingston

Dnia 7 lis 2011 o godz. 14:44 Andrew Hingston <ahingston1492@gmail.com> napisa!(a):

Ola -- I have no idea why it upsets you to have people talk about you,

especially when all they are being is helpful and humane. You should talk

to your therapist about that. Do you imagine that people are trying to hurt

you? Why? Why would anyone want to hurt you? Can your seriously

believe that Marta wants to hurt you? Why would she? She is being

helpful. And I am glad you are talking to her, because she is a lot more

worldly than you are, and more experienced in life. It's not your fault that

you have led a sheltered and unrealistic life. I blame your parents,

especially your mother. But such a life cannot continue -- even though the

transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is bound to be scary and a bit

painful. For one thing,we have the children. They need to learn to deal

with real life, not with a fairytale life. I think you believe that somewhere

everything is easy and everyone is always happy and everyone gets all the

sleep they want. That place does not exist.

-- Andrew Hingston

Zakrzewo (Dopiewo), Polska

2011/11/7 Ola "wider-Hingston <alexabuona@gmail.com>

Do not talk to Marta about me and about changing me (" she learnt....").

No I did not change. I was always planning when important.

Do not invite Marta to "help" cleaning. I do not want that. You through out my mother from house when she was only help clean.

_______________________________

To be continued. As you might imagine, it takes rather a long time to do this sort of thing. And I do have other things to do. But I hope to catch up eventually.

Cat got your tongue

2011-10-21T13:15:00.001+02:00

This is another marker, so I remember to write about the latest adventure in our lives. In spite of being told by a number of people that it's normal for Maus to be a bit behind in speaking -- as he has to process two languages -- I some time ago began to notice that he doesn't just have trouble producing words, he has trouble producing several consonant sounds. I did try to keep my wits about me and not start a family ruckus, but it was becoming evident that there might in fact be a problem. When Ola's best friend and her husband came here three weeks ago, they did us a huge favour by asking questions about Maus's inability to talk meaningfully. He is very good at expressing himself, but without the correct words, a bit like my efforts in Polish.

So, finally, we took him to a speech expert earlier this week. She gave him several little tests -- very playful and noninvasive -- and then concluded that he has a tongue that is attached too far forward in his mouth, making several sounds impossible for him to produce. I'd heard of this phenomenon;apparently it's not uncommon and can be easily fixed. Thank God. Maneuvoring through the Polish medical bureaucracy is not so easy -- a total bummer. But we'll get there -- perhaps by the end of next week.

Maus will also soon be starting nursery school soon. We found two good ones in our area, and have chosen the more structured one of the two, because Maus needs more structure in his life. He gets plenty of "license" at home. More on that when I have time to go back and fill in all these ""stubs," as Wikipedia calls them.

It's a question of counting...

2011-09-19T19:34:00.001+02:00

According to our vet, Primrose ought to have given birth last week or over the weekend or, at the latest, today. But earlier today Ola pulled out our Dog Encyclopedia, where it is written that pooches have a typical gestation period of 62 to 72 days. TODAY is Primrose's 62nd day. So it's no big deal that the old doggie is still lumbering around full of milk and puppies. I will keep you posted.

Arrival of the puppies...

2011-09-19T08:27:00.000+02:00

Of course, I must go back and fill in the many missed entries since last spring. But now is a mementous thing. Primrose is about to have her first (and only) litter of pups. Just five of them, if the sonogram was reliable. Not sure how many boys, how many girls -- and except for the name Lily, we haven't chosen names. P is now one day overdue. But until now she has been eating and following us around and as energetic as a heavily pregnant dog could be.

But this morning at quarter to eight, she started circling nervously, and cleaning herself emphatically. Those, we are told, are the first signs. We can expect the first puppy to appear in about two hours. Amazing. I will add photos later.

Great Chicago Fire

2011-06-21T11:43:00.002+02:00

This is just a marker to remind me to write about the troubles Ola and I have had, and how they nearly resulted in conflagration in May / June 2011. Fortunately, we pulled back from the brink.

Which way is home?

2011-06-19T21:42:00.004+02:00

This is just a marker to remind me to write about our search for the right place to live.

You call that a vacation?

2011-06-19T21:41:00.002+02:00

This is just a marker to remind me to write about our vacation in May. It was a corker.

Fluid Dynamics

2011-06-19T19:45:00.003+02:00

1 June is Children's Day in Poland. If the date falls on a school day, as it was this year, kids in school generally go on outings. Teachers don't expect homework. And lots of parents give their children gifts or treats. Kids not yet in school also get some sort of gift or treat for the day. Fortunately, Hallmark has not yet reduced it to card giving -- it feels like a genuine sort of holiday, though its origin is not clear to me.

Maus's tricycle recently broke -- it was just 2 months old and came from a reputable shop, so of course we took it back and complained, and of course at the moment of complaint the shop reverted to communist mode of thinking and stared at us in disbelief and then asked us to fill in a questionnaire and then told us to wait two weeks for an 'adjudication.‘ How’s that for customer service, eh? We’d thought of replacing it, or possibly of upgrading to one of the very small bikes that are made for young kids these days. Fortunately, I surfed the web a bit first. One website that seemed to know what it was talking about advised against bicycles before age 3 or even 4. The argument being that younger children haven't developed sufficient balance, strength or coordination. My observations of Chris jibe with that. He trips over himself pretty easily, and ability to concentrate (even on remaining upright) is limited. So we'll revisit the bike topic again next spring. In the meantime, we faced a gift-gap.

We want to encourage him to run around and simply play with as few constraints of preconceptions as possible. So I bought him what in Poland is called a handball (though it is nothing like the handball I remember from New York). In Poland a handball is a half-sized soccer ball, made with the same sort of materials and patchwork of hexagonal pieces as a traditional soccer ball. Rolling it, kicking it, throwing it would all be good for the little guy's coordination, strength and balance, I figured -- and in the meantime, we could have a lot of fun together, rather than the frustration predicted for giving a bike to a child unready for it.

So I bought the ball, and it has been a great hit. We take it to the park and the playground and play together. Other kids sometimes join in. Primrose plays with us too for a while, then wanders off, nose to the ground.

But all this, which is once again true, was interrupted for a few days, about ten days ago.

One day, after we had played with the ball in the park, we went down to the river, Chris proudly carrying his ball in both hands, refusing to give it up. He now understands that he is not supposed to go closer to the water than about two metres unless he is holding my hand. And he’s quite good about it. What he did not understand, it seems, is that heaving his ball into a flowing river might cause some problems.

"Heaving his ball" must be understood in context. Chris is 26 months old. Throwing his ball with all his might will, 90% of the time, result in it going about one and a half metres. He still throws underhand, and the ball is large enough and just heavy enough that throwing it requires both hands and all his strength. But this time he really heaved it -- achieving a long lob o at least four meters, a personal best (to date). It plopped down in the slow moving river just a little beyond the range at which I would automatically have waded in to get it. I have waded into the Warta before, and I know that the most likely things to be found beneath it's surface are beer bottles, thousands of them, many of them broken. There are also all sorts of rusting detritus that can pierce human flesh with ease. I was wearing rather nice shoes. It was clearly a case of sacrificing my shoes, or myself -- or a $10 half-sized soccer ball. After a moment's thought, I decided against both contracting tetanus (or worse) and ruining my shoes.

In defence of my choice, which made me feel cowardly and unfatherly, I assumed the ball would soon drift to the river's edge, so why bother with ruined shoes and wet trousers, let alone ambulances, amputation and life in a wheelchair? But the damned thing stubbornly stayed near the centre of the river beyond reach, mocking all my assumptions about what happens to the stuff that is thrown into a river. Somehow, I thought it all either sank or drifted to the edges. If not, why not? But far from drifting closer to the edge, where it would have got stuck into the reeds and grasses and have been easily retrievable, the ball stubbornly drifted more toward the centre of the river, where the current was strongest.

This made no sense to me; it still makes no sense to me. (if you know the answer, please tell me.) I was sure the ball's motion would exhibit the effects of some sort of drag factor and get pushed out of the main current toward the slower moving water at the sides. But it didn't happen that way. Chris watched it all very closely. His eventual understanding of fluid dynamics, when he evolves one, is almost certain to be better than mine. Unless one is a scientist, these sorts of things are intuitive -- such as the idea that an iron ball must fall faster than a feather -- and it takes something very special and very strong to dislodge the results of childhood conclusions and replace them with observed facts.

There was still another possibility for rescuing the ball. Primrose. "Get the ball, girl!" To my gob-smacked amazement, she jumped right into the river and paddled madly, getting to the ball in no time. A regular Lassie. She likes water, but not swimming. She rarely goes beyond the depth at which her paws are touching something (in the Warta, most likely broken bottles). I had never before seen her swim nearly to the centre of the river, and I didn't expect her to do so this time. But she performed brilliantly, heroically. But then she made her only mistake. She tried to get the ball into her mouth. But her mouth was just a bit too small for the task. She might have herded the ball, but she is not a herder. She is a hunter, a retriever (actually a type of pointer). Trying with everything she had, she succeeded only in pushing the ball farther away -- and in making me worry if she weren't going to drown in the process. A lost ball would have been nothing compared to a lost Primrose. Eventually, weary and embarrassed, Primrose returned to shore. Maus and I cheered her wildly, but we still didn't have the ball. Primrose accepted our applause, but one could see that she thought she ought to have done better.

The river, and therefore the ball, were not moving very fast even at the centre of the current. It was easy to walk faster than the flow. I remained convinced that the central current of the river would push the ball toward either of the sides and eventually cause it to catch in the intermittent shrubs, reeds and grasses that grow along the river's edge. (Einstein, speaking of science, said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. This applies also in everyday life, though it happens quite often. Being certain of something does not make it so.)

We had Chris's stroller with us, but using it along the river’s edge is not that easy, even though there is a path most of the way. Hoping the presence of two sunbathing girls lying on the nearby grass would dissuade any thieves that might have contemplated snatching the stroller, I left it in situ and put Chris up on my shoulders. This is currently his favourite position for watching the world, and he is remarkably observant. We set off loping along the river bank, hoping our little ball would tire of the game it was making us play and come close enough for me to grab it without too much commotion.

In fact, the ball exhibited several of Chris's own characteristics of the moment. Obstinacy, teasing playfulness, deafness to my imploring voice, disdain for instructions, a certain slyness, a propensity for mischief. All the ball lacked were a radiant smile, twinkling eyes, and a pure, silvery, high-pitched squeal of delight.

With Primrose alternately tagging along and running ahead, we went down the western side of the river for half a kilometre, to the point where the ball had to decide (yes, I know I am anthropomorphising a half-sized $10 soccer ball) which channel of the river it would take around Cathedral Island (Ostrów Tumski). Had it chosen the other one, it would have encountered patches of bog that surely would have stopped its progress, though they would also have made retrieving the little thing a royal muddy mess. But, being a clever blighter, it feinted toward the boggier channel and then swung back into the faster flowing, wider channel. So, with Chris on my shoulders, we attempted to get to the other side before we lost sight of the ball. We headed to the Cathedral Island Bridge and crossed over to Cathedral Island itself. As so often in spring and summer, the island was crowded with tour buses of nuns, priests, and brain-washed school children -- including, I noticed, a large contingent of buses from France, where they have far more interesting (and authentic) Gothic cathedrals than one will find in most of Poland.

Chris and I got down to the bank of the river just in time to see our little ball alter course away from the shore and back toward the centre of the river. Now I was sure the Gremlins were in charge. I had to laugh. How did it do that?

I was also thinking, "Where's the silver lining in all this?" I see everything I do with my son as an educational experience for both of us. Either I am teaching him something, or he is teaching me something, or the Gremlins are teaching us both something. Or Primrose is teaching us all something. Most often it's a combination of these things. I wondered as we walked, What's the best lesson in this for wee Master Maus? I wasn't sure. I still felt bad for not having jumped in to save the day at the start -- even though doing so would have been dangerously stupid. Definitely not the right lesson to teach. There is such a thing as overdoing it, and I don't want Chris to overdo everything in life, working himself into a lather over small things, rendering himself too tired or frustrated for the big things. Proportion is something I lack totally, but I don't want Chris to suffer from that condition. It makes for a tough life. However, I also don't want my little guy to quit too easily or to get the idea that half-sized soccer balls are infinitely conjurable with the flash of a credit card.

We kept on for a while, tracking along the shore, watching the little ball as its short playfully lyric voyage became a sort of epic. At the far end of Cathedral Island, where the tracks to the little Poznań-Garbary railway station cross over the river on a very rusty and shabby looking railway bridge, the river ceases to have a passable bank. Shrubs, reeds, mud and all sorts of rubbish block the way. Neither I (with Chris perched in his observation post) nor Primrose could continue, though Primrose made it a bit farther than Chris and I. Unable to continue, we waved goodbye (in Polish one waves pa pa) to our errant little ball and wished it an exciting journey. That is, Chris and I wished it well. Primrose was still a bit miffed at having been bested by a $10 half-sized soccer ball.

We rather wearily walked back over the Cathedral Island Bridge and along the grassy bank to the Saint Roch bridge, about two kilometers, perhaps a little more. I walked and Chris rode. Of course, I babbled on about all the fun the little ball would have, and all the things and places it would pass on its way to wherever it was going. I mentioned that it might even make it out into the Atlantic Ocean if it kept up as it was, and perhaps go all the way around the world. Mistakenly, I said it might go to Gdansk (I should have said Szeczen). Or it might stop someplace along the way and be found by another little boy or girl who didn't have a ball. I'm sure this is the usual happy-talk one says to children in such circumstances -- and I don’t advocate altering the tradition. However, I expect Chris, even at 26 months, was already hoping I'd get something stuck in my throat. Really, dad, it was only a ball. But thanks for trying to get it back for me. That was pretty cool, dad. We had fun, didn't we? Yes, Maus, we definitely had fun -- I expect I will remember it all the days of my life. I hope so.

After a few days of mild grumpiness about the lost $10, I went back to the shop to buy another ball -- only to find that the sale during which I had bought the previous ball had ended, and the price had increased by 25%. Damned Gremlins -- clearly in cahoots with the little ball and the retailers. They probably got a cut. Sometimes the only appropriate this to say is Welcome to Poland.

Firsts...

2011-04-24T18:03:00.000+02:00

The weather in Poland has been glorious lately. Not too hot (which it can be), with a slight breeze, few clouds or haze, lots of sunlight, and a bright-shininess that can make even crumbling 70s socialist architecture seem beautiful. It being Easter weekend, we decided we would take the kids and do something. We weren't sure what, and we are not always very decisive, or very informed. But there is Google, and Ola came upon a list of things for kids. One thought was to rent a car and go out into the country. Unfortunately, most of the rental cars in Poznan had already been rented for Easter, and the ones that were left were far too big and the rent rate correspondingly expensive.

We eventually decided to go to the New Zoo, to which neither Ola nor I had ever been. It isn't really that new, but there is still an Old Zoo, so the names have stuck. The Old Zoo, which now has very few animals and is mostly what in America is a called a petting zoo or a farm-animal zoo, is in a grotty part of town, and falling apart. Crumbling concrete, rusty steel. All very sad. Both Ola and I feared the New Zoo might be more of the same -- but it was not.

One way to get to the New Zoo -- easily the best way, especially if you are a child -- is to take the miniature railway from beside Lake Malta, which follows the edge of the lake, then tucks into some woods before coming to the zoo's entrance gates. Lake Malta, a man-made lake that is devoted to rowing, kayaking, canoeing, and small-scale sailing, is not terribly far from where we live -- and easily accessed by tram.

The usual chaos of life with small children helped to slow us down -- for example, Christopher poohed and needed to be changed just as we were ready to leave. As a result we got there later and had less time at the zoo than we would have liked, but it was enough for a first visit. The ride on the miniature railway was very exciting for Chris, and it was just the beginning.

In fact, even before the ride on the train, Chris had a first of sorts. I have bought him ice cream before, but he wouldn't eat it. I think it was too cold. This time I bought him a single scoop of strawberry from the vendor next to the train's waiting area. To my amazement, he tucked in like an old pro. The weather was warm enough that I had to help out now and again -- lest he become smeared in sticky pink glop -- but mostly he ate it himself and had a good time doing so. We don't give Chris many sweets (Meggie is still wholly on mother's milk), so I didn't feel guilty for introducing him to ice cream, knowing he would be allowed the stuff all that often.

The New Zoo is expansive, thoughtfully designed, and calmly lovely. For some reason it was almost deserted. We went first to the elephant park, which is enormous, but because one views it by looking down into it from above, everything is visible. There are both Indian and African elephants, which seem to treat each other as equals and friends. One of Chris's favourite books is Elmer, the story a colourful elephant who wants to fit in with the herd and so finds a way to dye himself grey. The herd, with some helpful rain, succeed in persuading him that there's nothing wrong with being a colourful elephant. Indeed, every herd should have one. I certainly hope Chris never wants to be grey -- I hope he never feels life would be better that way. I went through much of my adulthood wanting to be grey (from midway through Yale until I left lawyering in 1989); I am determined that my children will not choose that route unless they really want to and it works for them. I does for some people -- my mother, for instance. But by definition, it's a rather grey life. In any case, Chris was fascinated by the elephants, standing at the rail of the observation deck and watching them for several minutes without making a noise or moving.

We also saw some Bactrians (two-humped camels), which look exactly as though they'd been dreamt up by Dr Seuss. They are possibly the most ungainly and unattractive furry beasts I've ever seen. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture.

I've often wondered at the practice of signage in Poland. It seems wildly inconsistent, to the point of irrational. You do sometimes get the feeling that they are having a laugh at the visitors' expense. It's as though a huge team put it all together without any member of the team consulting any of the other members. The New Zoo's map is like that. The map is carefully colour-coded, and every exhibit is precisely numbered. But the colour coding and numbering don't related to the way the exhibits are actually laid out. Furthermore the bus-stops within the New Zoo (which is so vast that one moves from one general area to another by bus, a practice I remember from the San Diego Zoo, which I visited when I was about 8) were not where the map suggested we would find them. It didn't matter -- we weren't in a hurry. The weather was great. Chris was finding it all wonderful, and Meggie was sleeping.

The last exhibit we saw was the Tiger House. Though it was very good, and as humanely designed as an enclosure for very dangerous animals can be -- it was terribly sad to see these awesome animals pacing about with nothing to do and no where to go. Fortunately, I could not read the Polish announcements of how few of these creatures still live in the wild, and how fast their habitats are disappearing. That really would have depressed me. There are times when not knowing the language is a blessing.

The world is changing so fast. That is something of which a parent of young children becomes acutely aware. There is almost certainly less difference between my visit to the San Diego Zoo 49 years ago and Chris's visit to the New Zoo of Poznan yesterday than there will be between yesterday and whenever he has young children and wants to show them wild animals. For one thing, if the so-called developed nations (and the undeveloped ones that want to become developed) don't manage to rein our greedy selves in fast, many of the wild animals won't exist, even in zoos.

It's frightening how much we know about the damage our profligacy is doing -- and the pain and privation we are inflicting on our own children and grandchildren as a result -- and how little we are prepared to give up to slow the pace of that damage. I know very decent people who drive very indecent cars. I know very skillful designers and architects who think that being required to consider things like energy-use when they design a house or office building is just left-wing cultural fascism. The oil and coal and natural gas industry people amaze me. They see to think we ought to use up everything we have and then get serious about finding better ways of doing things. What about the few remaining wilderness areas that will be forever ruined, the animals that will become extinct, the beauty and quietude destroyed, in the process? The idea that there is pollution on Mount Everest is very frightening to me. But I know people who think it is none of their affair because they will never see Mount Everest. As long as they can get from point A to point B without having to share their precious personal space with members of "the general public" it's OK by them. They pay their taxes, Goddamn it.

I hope Chris and Meggie both climb the great mountains of the world. And I want them to breath pure area when they do. And not only from a pressurised bottle. I owe them clean air and water, wild animals, and genuinely quiet places.

There is one consolation in all this -- though consolation is certainly an ironic term for it. As the world's population increases, the likelihood of mass "culls" also increases. Influenza killed about 50 million people between 1915 and 1920. The next mass pandemic will kill two to five times that many, I have read. I hope Chris and Meggie (and Ola and I) are not amongst those killed, but if we are it will serve us right for having done nothing to prevent it. And by prevent I don't mean develop and distribute better drugs -- the Bill Gates method. I mean slow down. A lot. As soon as possible. I mean grow enough food for six billion, and then not go any higher than six billion.

What if....

2011-04-24T15:00:00.001+02:00

God-parents. Hmmm. I don't know who my God-parents are. Perhaps I never had any. My brother's were our uncle Peter and aunt Christine in England, the father and mother of my very dear cousins Chris and Richard, whom, along with their wives, Maureen and Gillian, I regard as my closest family. Peter and Christine gave David a beautiful red leather bound gilt-edged Bible and Anglican Book of Common Prayer when he was probably about 12 or 13. David probably still has them. The bibles I have, and certainly for an atheist (well, really, an agnostic, but you know what I mean) I have quite a few, are all ones I bought myself.

I am not altogether certain of the traditions or etiquette of God-parenting, but my dim understanding is that they have some part in the baptismal ceremony, if there is one, that they accept responsibility for seeing that they child or children are brought up "in the faith" (if there is one), and that, most importantly, in the unlikely but not impossible event that both natural parents die while the children are still young enough to need parental care, the God-parents will step in, take the children into their home and hearts, love them, rear them, and do the best they can for those young ones whose lives will have been shattered by events.

Ugh. What a grim thing to ponder -- as brutal as, perhaps even more brutal than, pondering what life would be like if suddenly the children were to be killed or maimed. Yet I imagine every parent considers both these conditions from time to time. There is nothing to do to prepare the parents for the possibility of a child dying before time, but one tries to do what one can to address the possibility of one's own premature death. Tries to think of who, what, and how to minimise the damage to the most precious and incredible things in one's life.

What if...? In my family there are a great many people whom one would automatically exclude as possibilities -- either because they are too old (like Chris and Maureen, Richard and Gillian) or because they wouldn't have a clue what to do (like my brother and sister-in-law, whose own childlessness has made them self-absorbed to the point of nutty). If you tell my brother that you have a cold, he is more than likely to suggest trying some traditional remedy. No use pointing out to him that the life expectancy of most of the people who resort to traditional remedies for things is significantly shorter than the life expectancy of most Westerners, who prefer instead to go to the local pharmacy. At least he has not so far suggested homeopathy -- for at that point I would have to write him off as a irredeemable nutter.

Looked at from the other side, there are not a lot of family members whom I would feel all that great about including in the pool of possible God-parents, either because I don't know them that well, or because what I do know I don't much like. So, notwithstanding the closeness of our consanguinity, I would not want my children to end up with them. A Romanian orphanage might be better -- at least there would be an element of chance. The same is true on Ola's side. Much of her family is comprised of the kind of Poles who think being Polish is the best thing there is, that Pope Jan Paweł II never said anything stupid, dangerous or incorrect in his life, and who view Poland as heaven on earth. They don't go anywhere, don't read anything, and still suffer the scars and deformations of Poland's 45 years of communist rule. The idea of my children being raised by almost any of them is frightening and angering.

Chris and Maureen are in their 70s. Richard and Gillian are in their 60s. If any of them was twenty or thirty years younger, I'd ask them straight off -- and feel very secure of the love and upbringing my children would get from them.

My friend Ron Krausz is a couple of years younger than I am. He's already a grandfather, but as energetic as all get out. He very fortunately found and married just the right girl, almost 35 years ago, and together they have defied the statistics ever since. However, he and his wife, Susan, have four sons of their own, only one of whom is firmly settled. They are committed to the idea and reality of family and all it entails, and are the epitome of humanity and generosity of spirit. Though they have had enormous success in their lives, they remain unpretentious and unsnobby. They live in an exceptionally beautiful place that, until recently was a small agricultural community 90 minutes from San Francisco. Unfortunately, San Francisco filled up with billionaires and people living like billionaires, and too many of them discovered the small exceptionally beautiful place where Ron and Susan live. It rather blighted the place, to some degree. But Ron and Susan resisted the trend (which they could have joined) to "bling out," and so they still live on the less spectacular side of town, amongst real people, many of whom have lived their for several generations. Good for them.

Chris and Maureen have three children, two natural, one adopted. One of them, and his wife, are as outstanding as Ron and Susan; the other two are a bit difficult, though their own kids show every sign of turning out well, which is the litmus test. But I don't know them well enough to ask.

The son, the not-bonkers one, fell in love with and eventually married a not-bonkers girl from the local town. Not quite knowing what else to do at the time, he opened a shop selling, as he puts it, "nothing anyone needs," which has been an incredible success over the years. They don't let things go to their heads. They live in a small, very quiet village in Suffolk, surrounded by trees and agricultural land, where they have converted a former flint and brick schoolhouse into a slightly quirky and very lovely (and welcoming) home. There they have raised two wonderful, beautiful, clever but not snotty or creepy kids, one of whom has just entered university and the other of whom is at the local high school and a very gifted drummer. All these people (parents and children both) are genuinely kind, generous, patient, thoughtful, undramatic, reasonable, and yet also fun, adventuresome, relaxed, imaginative, and full of joie de vivre (allowing for small amounts of the usual teenage angst).

They would be ideal. And so we asked, and unfortunately, while they were very thoughtful and not at all dismissive, they turned us down. As a rational decision, it's impossible to fault. Their daughter is just 20 and wants to be a writer -- which is possibly not the sort of aspiration every parent holds for his children, seeing how unlikely it is to bring much in the way of material comforts. (As a struggling writer myself, I can say how frightening it is not to have a place to go each day called "work" where the expectations are clear and the work, even if dreary, is at least something certain, and how very frightening it is not have money coming in regularly.) Their son is about 15 and still very much a wildcard. That is, he will either zoom to the top of whatever he does or he may flameout along the way. He has an incredibly engaging personality, and, as already mentioned, is an exceptionally talented drummer. However, like his older sister, he too has aspirations to succeed at something that few people succeed at (being the drummer of a successful rock band). As I said, it's not entirely unreasonable that their parents are keeping some resources (not just money, but understanding, encouragement, love, etc.) in reserve for their children, who may well need a bit extra if their dreams don't quite come true or take a few detours on the way to becoming true.

Ron and Susan. Fingers crossed. Of course, these sorts of tragedies happen very rarely. But they do happen. I had a friend at university who was such a child, and unfortunately his parents made the wrong choice -- and his life, while materially comfortable and intellectually challenging (he's a lawyer with a superb firm in New York), has been emotionally difficult as a result. There is nothing that can make up for love, real love, for a child. Nothing. So, in contemplating the unbearable and unimaginable, that is what matters. Of course, other things matter, but not nearly as much as one might think. Money is helpful, but not necessary. Love involves all the things that do matter. Because of love one will work hard and keep at things until one succeeds. Because of love, one will grow up generous and patient and caring for others. Because of love, one will tell the truth -- because ultimately lying is hurtful. Because of love, one will be courageous. And on and on and on.

So we have been looking for people who can, we know, deliver that, or will do everything possible to deliver it. We are still looking.

A father's last words...

2011-03-27T15:15:00.003+02:00

He had had at least two serious heart attacks in the last five years, which, however, had prompted him to make few if any changes in his life. He smoked gaspingly. He drank way too much, frequently binge drinking to the point of aggressive sloppiness. He loved to tuck into large portions of his wife's delicious traditional Polish cooking. His idea of exercise was to recline on the couch and watch football on his plasma screen TV. He'd lost his job a few years ago (not the first time, Ola told me) -- ostensibly invalided out because of an overlong recovery from an operation on his small intestine.

In fact, it was alcohol that sank him -- as it always did. He received a small disability payment each month, and seemed to want nothing more. I never heard of him trying to find another job. There was a lot of football to watch. By contrast, his wife worked 10 - 12 hour days as a nurse, starting at six in the morning. Nursing is even less well paid and more downtrodden in Poland than in most countries. Once she got home in the late afternoon, she kept on working at all the household chores -- including keeping their apartment spotlessly clean and ironing everything that could be ironed. Though her work ethic is admirable even astounding, she is not an easy woman to get along with, and I don't like her much. Of course, she's my mother in law, so she and I naturally have our conflicts. She has also caused me more unpleasantness than I like to remember, including two nights in the Poznan police jail, and considerable expense redoing her decorating work in our apartment.

There is some very strange stuff hidden away in the Świder family (as there might have been in my family, had my brother and I not decided to "out" it all in favour of as much truth and sunlight as we could muster), but I haven't figured any of it out. Brother and sister (that is, Łukasz and Ola) don't speak. Father didn't work; mother never stops working. Ola doesn't work; her brother has three different jobs (he didn't learn of his father's death until the following day, because he mustn't be called at work). No one reads or shows any interest in history or literature or science or much of anything. No one is obviously happy, though that doesn't surprise me. They aren't stupid, but they do an excellent job of pretending to be. They are cave dwellers in some metaphorical sense. And yet I can't figure any of it out -- what is the cause of their strangeness? Who benefits from it? Why did I marry into it? These are complex but worthwhile questions. The thing is, I cannot answer most of them by myself? And no one else, including Ola, shows any desire to answer them.

I have again digressed. The reason is that Ola is angry with me, though won't say why, and is again threatening divorce, though that seems more extreme than ever. Our marriage is probably better and stronger than it was six months ago. Our marriage counselling bears fruit, though slowly and only with a lot of cosseting. We argue weekly instead of daily. And the children are fantastic.

But again I digress.

The late morning of the day he died, Ola's father rang her up to ask her about the battery recharger we had left there (to charge batteries for Chris's many toys). Her father wondered if, because it had berths for four batteries, it necessarily had to recharge four batteries at a time. Could it recharge two or three? The fact that he chose to ask Ola was meaningful, because of all the people in the world to ask, the one least likely to know the answer may be Ola. She isn't technically inclined at all. It may have taken her a while even to understand the question. He might have called his son, someone who loves gadgetry. He might have called his brother, Mariusz, a worldly person, or his cousin, Janusz, an even more worldy person. Or he might have called a friend from one of his former jobs. Or he might have gone to Google. But he called his daughter. I have to assume that he called her for some reason other than to learn the answer. We'll never know, of course.

Ola found his call very sad. Among other things, she felt guilty for not recognizing that he was ill and within hours of a catastrophic event that would kill him.

I tried to point out that his call, though a call for help, was on the smallest possible scale. He may have just wanted to hear her voice, and since he had no other reason to call her had used the excuse of the mysteries of rechargeable batteries. When he wasn't drinking, I believe Ola was his favourite (as daughters often are for fathers), but I know very little about it and am simply guessing.

What Ola should take away from the conversation, I suggested, was that her father on the day he died wasn't particularly anxious, wasn't in pain, didn't need anything. She shouldn't feel guilty for not having seen through his smoke screen, because it was not a smoke screen, just the way he felt on the final day of his life. And that should be seen as something good. He wasn't angry or sad or particularly ill. He wasn't grasping or blaming or wriggling -- all of which he could be. He reached out to a family member to hear her voice -- the voice of someone he loved. Several hours later he died -- as we had all known he would sooner or later. Probably sooner, since he did not ever choose to protect or improve his health.

As often happens, his last words can be invested with more poignancy than they probably deserve. Asking about recharging of batteries seems an almost clumsy metaphor for the process that we had all hoped he would embrace -- the recharging of his own batteries. Calling the family member least likely to know the answer to his question seemed, too, characteristic of a man who was often lost and inclined to asked the wrong person for directions. He meant well (when he wasn't drinking), and he liked to be kind to people (when he wasn't drinking). When he was drinking, everything changed.

Now our children will have only one grandparent, Ola's mother. How long that will last is open to guesswork, because she too smokes like a chimney. She is one tough old bird, but her iron constitution can't last forever.

Say it isn't so...

2011-03-09T16:56:00.028+01:00

If you know me well, and have any inkling of my views on religion, which are only slightly more measured and nonviolent than those of my English cousin Christopher, then this posting will surprise you indeed. Sit down and get yourself a drink.

On 3 May, Christopher Cleisthenes Thomas Paine Hingston and Margaret Athena Boudica Nausikaa Hingston are to be baptised. Shock horror -- I told you to sit down.

There are two reasons for this obvious contradiction -- fortunately, neither of them has to do with hypocrisy. One reason is that the kids will be baptised into the Church of England. Of course, the Church of England is no closer to the "truth" than the Church of Rome, but it is less totalitarian and therefore inherently more questioning, pluralistic and humanistic. Furthermore, baptism into the Church of England has both tactical and strategic significance, in that it will greatly lessen the chance of the Church of Rome ever laying claim to them.

In a country such as Poland, where Roman Catholicism is the default position, and everyone is assumed to be Catholic unless proven otherwise, that is important. If there are some whacko cults I regard with more heebie-jeebies than others, our friends in Rome deserve an especially high rating. If you wonder why, just look at any recent photograph of that madman Benedict XVI and you will know. Polynesian Cargo Cults deserve as much if not more respect. Of course, I must admit that the current head of the Church of England looks like a character out of The Hobbit, but at least he never headed The Inquisition. He seems, in fact, a very gentle and human man by comparison with his counterpart in Rome.

Rev Robert Gamble

The second reason is more difficult for me to explain, though I will try. The man who is conducting the baptism, Robert Gamble, is a friend whom I met not long after moving to Poznań in late 2003. Robert, a Bostonian and Harvard graduate, about ten years older than I am, came here shortly after the fall of Communism. He has a publishing company in Poland named Media Rodzina, which means Family Media. It publishes family psychology books, books about dealing with addiction other unsocial behaviours, the better sorts of self-help books, as well as books for children and young adults. He has (or had, I am no longer sure which) interests in a radio station and in a television production company, all pretty much devoted to the same sorts of things. He lives in the same sort of 1970s Socialist Workers' housing that Ola and I live in. If he has any pretensions, they are not clear to me.

His skin is so fair that even in Poland he appears to suffer a constant case of intense sunburn. A big man, with a roundish head, there's not much white or pale blond hair on top (said the man with the shaved head). He's dresses like a beloved professor at a New England liberal arts college, which is to say very sturdy walking shoes with rounded toes and thick soles, khaki trousers, Harris tweed jacket, rather rumpled shirt of no particular colour and, almost always, a woven woollen necktie of Gamble tartan (of which there are many versions, most of which seemingly including coffee and food stain motifs within their patterns).

Bob is an ordained Anglican priest and a man who believes truly and deeply that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God, died to redeem mankind from sin, and was resurrected and united with God the Father in heaven. He doesn't try to prove it. He doesn't force it upon anyone. He believes it. For him that belief is the essence and the sine qua non of Christianity. No belief, no Christianity. He is, in fact, the head of the Anglican Church in Poland, but it's a part-time, unpaid position. I suspect one can count the number of active Anglicans on all one's fingers and toes. Given that when we first met Bob asked if he could count me as an Anglican, and given that I explained that I am about as Anglican as Richard Dawkins and he still went ahead and counted me (with my approval), one has to regard the Anglicans in Poland as a very rare if not endangered species. Perfect for my present purposes.

For Bob the essence of Christianity is faith in Jesus as the son of God. For me, however, how one behaves is more important than what one believes. My impression of Bob, from many years of knowing him, and based entirely on how he behaves in life and the example he sets for others, is that he is the most Christian person I have ever known. He thinks of others almost to the exclusion of himself (he thinks of himself only to keep himself mentally and physically healthy). He is generous but not flamboyant or splashy about it. He listens without judging. He teaches by example, and explains patiently and without bombast. He is kind, truly the essence of kindness. He has very few prejudices that I know of -- the one I do know of is, I would argue, more the result of an incorrect presumption than a deeply rooted character flaw. He is always in good humour, but not superficially so. In sum, What's not to like?

Should either or both of my children grow up to be much like Bob, I would think it miraculous and wonderful, and be extremely proud of them for showing such wisdom. So I thought it wouldn't hurt a bit to let him have some contact with them and splash them with as much holy water as he thinks appropriate. And if it helps to keep the Pope and his ilk (the obedience fiends) at bay, well then, I shall think that a kind of bonus.


Rabbi Herschel Gluck

Since I first thought of this, I have thought of another person who sets a very high example of human goodness. He, too, is a religious person -- an independent Lubovitcher Rabbi in Stoke Newington, in London. His name is Herschel Gluck, the perfect name for a man with eight children who smiles his way through life.

Since Ola and I are planning to take the kids to England shortly after their baptism, I though I might ask the Rav, as he is known to many, to give my children a blessing. Can one ever have enough blessings? Again, the real purpose is not religious, but humanitarian. Both Bob Gamble and Herschel Gluck are singularly good men -- examples for us all. I overlook their religiosity because their religiosity doesn't matter to me. Their humanity is unimpeachable. Good people come in all shapes and sizes, and in all religions. It's the good people we should hope for our children to emulate. There is an important implication in what I have just written. Ultimately, we should hope that our children emulate us -- and do so because they have seen and understood that we are good enough to be worthy of their emulation.

I wrote to the Rav and the Rav said yes. Of course, he would; that is the sort of a man he is.

Too good to be true...

2011-02-26T17:50:00.000+01:00

Yesterday Ola, the kids, and I went back to the Regional Bureaucratic Centre (not it's real name, which I don't even know, but its function) to learn the fate of our petition to amend Christopher's name by the addition of Cleisthenes. If you have been reading along and paying attention, you will remember that Poland permits only two names plus a surname, so in Poland it will be Christopher Cleisthenes rather than Christopher Cleisthenes Thomas Paine. We were also able to learn the National ID number (called a Pesel number) for Margaret Athena.

It was remarkably smooth sailing, and not an impossible amount of time waiting in the corridors. Chris, as he generally does, charmed everyone including the security guards. Being a 23 month old, he can be a lot of work. He will take off and get into mischief in the blink of an eye whenever he gets the chance. At the Bureaucratic Centre he disappeared for a second and we found he's climbed halfway up the grand staircase. No harm done, fortunately, but a 23 month old is not always fully in control of all his muscles; he could have tripped, fallen, and rolled down the staircase. He didn't, but these possibilities are real, and heart-stopping to his parents. We don't want to stifle his adventurousness. At the same time, we want him to reach a ripe old age with all his limbs intact and his brain functions unimpaired.

After the Bureaucratic Centre it was time to go to the Polish Passport office. Ola had done her homework and was fully prepared with photos, birth certificates, and the other things Poland requires for passports. Ola's needed updating to account for her married name, which, following Polish tradition, is now Swider-Hingston. Christopher's needed up dating to account for his newly formalised middle name. And Meggie needed one, so that we can all leave Poland on a vacation we have been planning to see Roman-Moorish-Jewish Spain.

There was quite a lot of paperwork to fill in, most of it repetitive. (I think I had to write our street address three times on each application form, and I couldn't figure out why, since that is one of the things that databases are meant to do.) As there was no grand staircase, Christopher took the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the water cooler-heater, the cup dispenser, and the capacity of the drip-tray. In a jiffy he was soaking wet and so was the floor of the passport centre. Fortunately, Ola is prepared for our intrepid boy's exploits (up to a point). She had packed a complete change of clothes. Responding to Christopher's charm and delight, the staff of the office seemed not the least bit irritated by his antics, though the looks we got from other customers indicated a high degree of disapproval, which went up the older people got. It is difficult to know exactly what to do, but I think Ola get's the balance right. First importance is Chris. He needs to be safe and cared for. He also needs to feel encouraged to explore and experiment, and therefore can't be bombarded by "No," "Don't touch that," and similar things. But he must also know that the world contains other people who have rights -- such as the right not to have their work made substantially more difficult and the right not to have their personal space made intolerable. After that, what people think matters less and less.

We got out of there just as the place was closing (it closes at 15:15, but I have no idea why) We had been there at least two hours, but the children had behaved as well as could be expected, which is to say that neither had started crying. Most amazing was that the passport office was able to tell us when to return to collect the passports. 25 March -- the day after Christopher's second birthday. This is better than the "We'll notify you" I had been expecting -- the kind of indeterminate non-answer I have come to expect from bureaucrats everywhere, but especially from those in this country. It's a tiny bit unfortunate, because it means that we will not be able to celebrate Christopher's birthday in Spain, which had been the plan.

A modern watershed

2011-02-25T10:53:00.000+01:00

Yesterday marked a watershed moment in my relationship with my son. I was working in the university's main library, writing my fable based on the life and deeds of Georg Elser (a terrorist in Nazi Germany). In one of the reading rooms, huddled over my iPad, my mobile phone rang. This happens to someone in the room fairly often -- and still there is no sign asking people to switch their phones to silent mode. I answered immediately, asked the person to hold (without knowing who it was), and went out into the hallway, where it is considered acceptable to speak on mobile phones.

Thinking Ola was on the other end (her picture was on the screen) I said "Hi, sorry you had to wait."

There was silence for a second and than a great big "Nam!" Nam is Christopher's equivalent -- so far as we can tell -- of "Right on!" It seems it cannot be said softly or slowly.

I replied, "Hi, Little Guy, what can I do for you, my wonderful one?"

"Nam. Nam. [Chortle.]"

Ola quickly grabbed the phone and said, "Sorry. He pushed the buttons by himself. I was taking care of Meggie."

Sorry? Okay, if it happens every half hour for the next 3 years, it might become irritating. But as a first time, as evidence of watching, paying attention, and learning, as a moment that can only happen the first time once, a glorious exclamation of challenge and success, that Nam was just wonderful. I have been fueled by it ever since.

Nam. (Add it to your lexicons.)

Invitation from the Grand Poohbah...

2011-02-22T12:20:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, a Monday, Ola called the Hall of Records to see if any decision had been taken on Christopher's name amendment. Apparently ther has been -- but they won't tell us on the phone, and they say that both parents must be present. I am not sure what this protocol might mean, but someone it seems negative. Fortunately, we do not have to bring a translator with us. But I interpret that to mean only that the decision is complete (if not final) and that there is nothing more to discuss at this stage. If we don't like what we hear, we may have to go on to another appeal.

In the meantime it is -15 degrees C outside (5 degrees F), so traipsing around with small children is out of the question. We'll wait a few days and see if things improve.

Колыбельные мира. Украинская.

2011-02-20T21:04:00.002+01:00

A friend from Belarus, an artist who is making paper cutout portraits of Chris and Meggie, came by today to show us some designs. He's a marvelously eccentric guy, and hugely talented. Like many artists (particularly Belarusian artists, I imagine) he lives on air, cigarettes, hope, friendship, black coffee and alcohol. I always have a great time in his company. Today he gave me, Ola and the children a wonderful gift. He pointed us to these animations by a Russian animation team. They are all folktales/lullabies, many with a bittersweet quality. I don't understand the languages, and I can't read the Russian titles, but I recommend them nonetheless. I have looked at five or six so far, and I guess that there are at least 20 altogether. It would be a hard heart that wasn't touched by them. Explore them, and be delighted by them, whatever your age.

What friends are for...

2011-02-17T13:32:00.000+01:00

Ola and I have a friend -- Agata Pierzchała (Pearsh-OW-wha) -- who started as my friend about six or seven years ago. She was then studying English at the university in Poznan, and I needed help with translations. She's very tall -- about 185 cm, I think -- very beautiful, always very cheerful, and a lot of fun to be with. She's now about 26. She switched her studies from English to French, then got into a financial fight with the university, and has never finished her degree. It hasn't kept her back. She's never had trouble finding jobs -- a combination of attractiveness, honesty, attitude and intelligence -- and has tried loads of things. Having worked for a Polish mid-level women's clothing retailer in Poznan, she was offered a chance to manage their shop in Gdansk. That worked out fine, but she missed Poznan, and so found an even better job here and moved back. Onward and upward, or Je ne regret rien.

The impression I want to convey is of someone who doesn't belabour things, or indulge herself unnecessarily, but simply gets on with whatever needs doing. Or whatever she wants to do. Or both. She doesn't have children herself yet (she's just 26), but she's comfortable and confident around them. Judging from Chris, they like her too.

Chris, who has not entered the stage of shyness around strangers, immediately fell in love with Agata, and she with him (though perhaps a bit more with Meg, who is as cute as a button and has begun smiling a lot). I was in the kitchen cleaning, putting away food, and finally preparing something to eat. Ola and Agata were cooing over the brood. Chris's bathtime quickly passed, and about 9.15 the first attempt was made to get him into bed. He was not having any of it. Ola worries whenever he cries, and he has quickly learned that crying will throw her off-balance. She is convinced that crying means trauma. As a result, whenever he cries she tries to intervene and take a very active role in soothing him. You can almost read the "Trickster" sign flashing over his wee noggin.

Agata and I were in the kitchen listening on the baby monitor as Ola and Chris were having their tug of war in the kids's room. He cried and she soothed him, or tried to distract or amuse him, or all of the above. Agata, whose confidence is both genuine and justified, finally said to me. "Ola should stop talking to him. If she decides to be with him when he goes to sleep, that doesn't mean that she has to play with him or amuse him. She's giving him reasons to stay up. It's enough for her to be there. By engaging with him, she's only prolonging the whole thing."

I think she's right, but I hadn't thought about it in those specific terms. It is usually I, not Ola, who puts Chris to sleep. After he bathes, at about 8, we read or play together in a semi-darkened room, with music playing softly in the background. At 9-ish the main light goes out, leaving only the LED light coming from the music system and the air purifier, which together make just enough light to count as a nightlight.

At that point I become sleepy even if Chris doesn't. Something Pavlovian about darkened rooms. He generally continues to play, sometimes asking me to read to him -- though there is no longer enough light to do so. He and I do not speak much or engage, but he knows I am there. He sometimes comes over to me and gives me a kiss or curls up on my arms, but usually he carries on with whatever he is doing and I sooner or later fall asleep. This drives Ola crazy, since she thinks being there for him involves being able to talk to him, play with him, interact with him, and most of all watch out for him, until he falls asleep.

Were I able to stay awake, I probably would. But for as long as I can remember a darkened room has caused me to fall asleep. I have missed the first act of many operas because of this phenomenon. But last night, listening to Ola interacting with Chris, and listening as well to Agata's critique, I realized that with me Chris gets into far less drama at sleep time. He plays. I become quiet and eventually fall asleep. He runs out of things to do and falls asleep too.

At that point he is often not in his bed, but on the floor (which is thickly carpeted, and so both warm and soft). I wake up within an hour of falling asleep -- I have entered that phase of life when I have to pee several times a night. I transfer him to his bed. He nearly always sleeps through the night. Lately, he awakes at 8.15 each morning with uncanny precision.

I asked Agata to talk to Ola about this, and I think she did. At least Ola seems less worried about it all.

You will be summoned to appear...

2011-02-17T12:27:00.292+01:00

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....

Recent Family Photos

2011-02-14T11:56:00.003+01:00

Click in the White Space above to be redirected to photo montage.

This scrapbook design personalized with Smilebox

Almost painlessly

2011-02-02T15:55:00.158+01:00

The previous posting, dated yesterday, was actually begun about eight days ago. I thought the blog software would post it as of the date I started it, but in fact it posted it as of the date I pushed the "Publish" button. Duh. Live and learn (if I'm lucky).

From today Ola and I have had a no-more-baby-bottle policy in place for wee master Chris for more than a week. There have been times when I wish we could put the genie back in the bottle (so to speak). Here's one reason why. Until he gave up his bottle it was very easy to predict his need for food. Immediately upon waking: 300 millilitres of warm kaszka from a bottle, which would not only feed him but bring him palpable delight and establish his location for about 10-15 minutes (as he always lay down on his "kaszka pillow" to drink his kaszka). The pattern would be repeated without variation every 90 to 120 minutes throughout the day, ending with his final bottle just before lights out (sometime between 21.00 and 21.30). We knew well ahead of time when he would become cranky, and better still we knew exactly what to do about it. Furthermore, we knew he was getting a more or less "rounded" diet, even if if was monotonous and narrowly prescribed. It satisfied -- even delighted -- him, and that mattered greatly, though I hoped he would show more curiosity. As a food lover I dread the idea of having a finicky eater for a son. I look forward, instead, to many trips together to foreign countries and ethnic restaurants, in which we will sample mysterious things that Ola, for example, would never dream of trying.

A further attraction of kaszka as the sole or main part of a child's diet is its relative tidiness. All one needs to make it is a source of very hot water (an electric kettle in our case), a box or bag of kaszka, a bowl or beaker in which to whip it up, a whisk, a measuring spoon, a baby bottle and nipple. Once made, which takes all of about 3 minutes, the stuff goes into the bottle, and the bottle goes into the kid's mouth, from which it does not generally emerge until it is empty. Et voila! A satisfied, nourished whippersnapper with a minimum of mess. Spills are minimal, as the stuff is thick enough that it has to be sucked out of the bottle and doesn't otherwise spill. 250 milliliters is guaranteed to hold the wee fellow for at least 90 minutes.

Here's yet another reason. Going to the supermarket is greatly simplified. We needed to buy kaszka and occasionally to buy baby food to mix in with it (as a rather forlorn attempt at introducing variety into Chris's diet). There was a unvarying demand -- roughly one box of kaszka per day, which made shopping almost automatic.

Now, however, ...

It's not clear from minute to minute, let alone hour to hour, what Chris will want to eat at any given moment. The only predictable features are that, however little he is given, he will only eat half of it, and the other half will find its way into some corner of the apartment (or into an increasingly hefty Primrose), and that, at least half the time, he will want whatever we have just run out of or are just about the run out of.

This is in sharp contrast to his consumption of kaszka, of which he either finished or nearly finished every bottle. Now he greedily takes his vanilla cookie (for example), crams it halfway into his salivating gob and wonders off to another room. A few minutes later he wanders back into view wanting another cookie. For a day or two we thought this meant he had finished the first cookie. Ha! The apartment is a minefield of soggy, half-eaten cookies. It turns out that mixing dry vanilla cookie with childhood saliva creates a form of strong-bonding adhesive. As it dries it sticks to whatever it has been laid down upon with true tenacity. A putty knife, a pneumatic hammer, and a power sander may well be the next things we purchase for our parenting toolkit.

Along with all this, food shopping has become a great deal more complicated and fraught with potential error. However much he loves vanilla cookies one day, he may loathe them the next. That he loves one kind of fruit yoghurt or fromage frais does not mean that he will love one that, to an adult, seems identical to it. We are therefore faced with a much longer shopping list and the real possibility that quite a lot of what we offer our wee Curnonsky will receive (at least temporarily) a very emphatic thumbs down. Fortunately, he does revise his opinions; but not according to any predictable pattern. There are other quirks, as well. He is at the moment delighted by grapes. He watches me eat one, asks for one, receives it, but doesn't eat it. He hordes it. Eventually it ends up in some unexpected place. Unfortunately, Primrose does not like grapes. Instead they get stepped on or roll into some corner under a piece of furniture. We will, I expect, still be finding grapes years from now.

Still, he has made this big transition more or less painlessly. And it needed to be made. He is not particularly finicky so far as we can tell, and he seems to take genuine delight in tasting things, though he was never one of those children who put everything in their mouths. Until a few days ago, the only things Chris ever put in his mouth were one or more of his fingers, and the nipple of his kaszka bottle. At least we didn't go through the stages where parents imagine their young one drinking bleach or some such horror. We were surprised by his interest in wine -- he would, and still does, sniff it intently. But he didn't drink it. So far, so good. He continues to offer about half his food to Primrose. This wouldn't be so bad were she able to work off the additional calories, but in fact she is getting fat -- poor thing.

Who cares about craziness when you've got....

2011-02-01T16:22:00.001+01:00

Those of you have been reading this blog from the beginning will know that Christopher's relative "backwardness" in some respects has long driven me to distraction (also driven me to yelling, but more about that later on). By the way, use in this posting of the word "today" actually refers to about a week ago. It has taken me that long to write this, proof-read it, and post it. Some weeks are like that, as I am sure you know -- especially if you have children.

From about his tenth or eleventh month -- that is, from about the time Ola and Chris arrived in Cambridge (UK) in 2010 -- I have allowed myself cyclically to become intensely panicked about the fact that Chris has, until today, only taken food from a baby bottle. Not from a training cup (called a sippy cup by some, but not by me), not from any other kind of cup, not from a plate or bowl or anything else. Until this morning, Chris had eaten no solid foods of consequence. Perhaps even today he has not truly crossed the solid foods demarcation, since what he has so far eaten today can at best be called glop (for example, the results of holding a vanilla cookie in his intensely salivating mouth for about 15 minutes. Still. I think it can be counted as progress that today's glop did not come through the nipple of a baby bottle. This, for me, is a cause for unalloyed joy.

As a "modern parent" I have been buying and reading (or reading in) various parenting books. Each includes some varient of "At this age (X months) your bundle of joy will be wolfing down steak au poivre with a good claret or a bold and buxom Rhone, followed by a snifter of Calvados and a good cigar." Sort of. Comparisons are odious, but they may also be inevitable. In my feeble, febrile mind, descriptions of what children should be eating at any given age older than eight months made the gruel Chris was sucking from a baby bottle look worse than backward. Indeed, lots of children start on solid food at about six months, some even earlier. The transition is mostly made by the end of year one. Not our Chris! One way in which he unquestionably takes after both his parents is in terms of stubbornness. If Chris indicates that now is not the time for something, one had best pay attention, for nothing will move him from his ground.

Ola, who only panics at the sight of blood (a drop will do), was as patiently insouciant as ever. "He'll eat solids when he's ready. He'll be ready when he decides to eat solids." That tautology would calm me down for about 3 months at a time, but after three months I would freak out again: "Our son is falling behind! He'll be out of step with the world. Other kids will ridicule and ostracise him. He won't have enough nutrients! His brain will ossify, or liquify, or vapourise, or whatever brains do when they haven't enough nutrients. Oh Shit, shit, shit!" (All this would be delivered faster, shriller and at higher volume than usual, accompanied by much flapping around like Chicken Little on crystal meth.) This hoopla would generally result in nothing more helpful than heightened blood pressure (me), tearfulness (Ola), and probably some sort of minor and still easily reparable (at this stage) psychic damage to the little guy. Nothing catastrophic, but we're definitely talking net negatives here. However, I was afraid that his not eating solids was even worse, that it would leave him permanently behind.

All I know about child rearing is what I've read in portions of a handful of books, and what I have learnt by watching my friends, usually at a distance, all of whom have made rearing kids look more or less easy. Jeez, my buddy Ron Krausz and his wife Susan managed to have their first two children while Ron was in law school, and if that ain't difficult, nothing is. My experience of law school is that it pretty much renders one infertile. All the books say that every child is different and that each one progresses at a different pace -- but none of the books I looked at said that a normal kid might still be taking all his food through a silicon nipple as he neared the age of two.

Earlier this week, under the pressure of my latest panic, Ola and I had a terrible argument about this very subject. She was threatening separation and divorce, and even suicide (Poles are as excitable and dramatic as Ashkenazy Jews, Italians, and opera divas, so this sort of "I'm going to kill myself" stuff can only be taken seriously when it appears in a coroner's report). Still, it was altogether way out of hand, and I was smart enough, for once, to recognize it. I sent an SOS email to about twenty friends, most of whom have known me for many years and have seen me through more than one freak out.

Of these twenty or so friends -- a floating band of wise people and smart people whom I think of and sometimes refer to as my Advisory Board -- six or seven wrote back with thoughtful messages -- not sympathy, but practical advice, which is worth a thousand times what sympathy is worth. Of all the practical advice, one very simple message clicked: NO MORE YELLING. Some variant of this came in several messages, but it actually leapt out from just one. (Thanks to Charlie Baker, whom I have known since high school -- who managed to put this message into words that were clear enough and simple enough that they got through my thickly bullshit encrusted cranium.)

No more yelling is important in general, of course. Most people stop listening when yelled at. Yelling is fearsome. It is an inherently aggressive act. Cortisol takes over the recipient, so that if an exit isn't available fright becomes the order of the day. Fright in turn results in more aggression (in the form of counter-aggression) or extreme passivity -- neither of which is helpful.

In specific, no more yelling has finally been revealed as important here because all my yelling was not actually addressing the problems at hand. I was "issue spotting," as it is called in law school, but there was no problem solving. I must first acknowledge that the problems as I saw them may not have actually been problems. Problem solving in such cases is at best wasteful. Perhaps Chris's eating habits were not going to result in rickets or scurvy or mental retardation. Perhaps he, clearly a clever lad, would find a way to take all his meals from a baby bottle throughout life without drawing unfavourable attention to himself. Perhaps the only problem was that daddy was a complete jerk and periodic nutter, and a total panicker. Well, perhaps -- but are we necessarily talking in terms of mutually exclusive categories? In any case, so long as I was yelling, nothing else was happening, except that my marriage was getting closer to dissolution.

So I stopped yelling. Two days ago. I had one very short relapse today, but other than that, no yelling. Ola was very upset by today's short relapse (exactly three words -- Yes you did!), but I am still pleased with the overall result. Vastly less yelling than I've managed in a long time -- notwithstanding a certain amount of what feels like provocation. Among the things I learned from my Advisory Board was that marginal depression -- that is, some apparent diminution in the amount of serotonin washing through the brain, but not enough diminution to cause the engine to seize up completely -- is associated with yelling. This is acedotal evidence only,and not enough to count, but it happens to accord with my own experience exactly: I am far more likely to find myself in a state of anger, and in a mood to yell, when I haven't taken my meds first thing in the morning. A full day skipped makes for very a very noticeable decline in mood and patience. Very noticeable. Still, these sorts of delays in adding oil to the engine fall far short of what it might take to send me to the scrap yard. Nevertheless, taking my meds every day before lunchtime is important. When I forget, someone usually suffers.

Chris's bottles sailing away

What made Chris start eating this morning? I don't exactly know. We've been offering him solid food for months, but he would get no further than pushing it around on the plate and then heaving it over the side to an accommodating Primrose. Today, we had a ceremony for saying good bye to his baby bottles. We got them all together. We found a box big enough to hold them all. Ola and I, and Chris of course, decorated the box appropriately. Then Chris, bless him, put each bottle in the box. It was all very solemn and respectfully done.

Pa Pa Bultelki = Bye Bye Bottles

After that, instead of truly solid food, I made him his gruel (called kaszka in Polish) and served it in a bowl. Same stuff as always (though slightly thicker, so it would stay on the spoon). He began with his usual word of negation, which sounds almost like Nyet, but with a very soft t, being spoken by Edward G Robinson or Grover the Grouch while vigorously shaking his head from side to side, creating a vry difficult to describe doppler effect. Somehow I decided that I had to get some of it into his mouth, so he would recognize the taste. He decide that was not going to happen. I progressed from there to me getting it all over his face. He didn't cry -- he's a touch one. But he didn't back down either. For some reason I retreated to the kitchen (probably to get a cloth to start cleaning up). Ola came to me in the kitchen and whispered: "He's eating." Sure, enough, there he sat, spoon in hand, getting about one half of every spoonful into his mouth, with the rest drippling down his front. We haven't looked back since.

More about craziness...

2011-01-20T14:13:00.000+01:00

As I wrote before, I do not generally use the term crazy in a pejorative sense. It's almost a compliment as I use it -- signifying unusual, spontaneous, outspoken, courageous, eccentric, unguarded, adventuresome, etc. Seen in that context, try to imagine someone who is not at all crazy. I doubt I (or very many of us) would wish to spend a lot of time with such a person -- safe and sane they might be, but also rather dull, or so I imagine. The perfect midlevel IBM executive of the late 1960s.

But then there is another side to craziness, too, lurking in the more positive qualities. For along with being unusual comes a sense of aloneness. Individuation gone a little too far. Not always, perhaps not often. Indeed, most of the time, this feeling isn't very strong and doesn't matter very much -- but once in a while it becomes acute and painful. People are social animals, which is why, for all but a tiny few, being isolated from others (voluntarily - Saint Jerome; or involuntarily - Bradley Manning) brings on a kind of madness. I am smarter than the average bear, but some people I know are much smarter than I, and a few are smarter than the whole zoo, jungle, forest, wilderness, whatever. That fact, which can amount to an inability to communicate fully since others "just don't get it," is also isolating in its way. I cannot even imagine the sorts of things people like Newton, Goethe, Gauss, Einstein, Feynman, and Hawking find amusing -- the jokes that make such people (one or two in every century)laugh. There can't be many people with whom they can communicate fully. Their loneliness, particularly if they don't allow themselves the luxury of also doing things at which they are simply good, as distinct from brilliant (Feynmann's bongo playing, for example) must sometimes be quite painful at times. Hawking says that his isolation -- physical as well as cerebral -- has actually allowed him to get on with his work. But one wonders if that is not in some degree sour grapes. It has not prevented him from marrying twice. I believe he even has children, though, if that is true, I imagine it may have required the help of a doctor since the great physicist is wholly paralysed and wheelchair bound. Would he wish to lives as he does, and accomplish what he does, if he had a choice? We will never know.

I wish I were neither crazy, as I mean it, nor bi-polar. But I am both and that's life. I simply have to press ahead and to work harder.

The same twitchiness and anxiety attach to the other characteristics common to my understanding of craziness. There is a potential for pain and aloneness in all of them. That potential rarely rises above the level of a kind of background hum, like the sound even the finest music amplifier makes beneath and behind the music it is amplifying. But once in a while...

And that is the problem (if it is a problem) with a crazy person loving another crazy person -- even though it is inevitable that another crazy person is the only kind of person a crazy person will love. I can state this as an inevitability because, first, most of us a in some degree crazy in at least some contexts, and, second, because love involves recognition and familiarity. The crazy one amongst us won't recognise or feel any familiarity with the uncrazy ones -- who will amount to a different species altogether.

Even crazy people are not very crazy all the time. They also know what it means to be crazy and are therefore likely to sympathise with its painfulness and be able to decode and identify its often difficult to decipher significations (such as the phenomenon, common to crazy people when deep in a funk of craziness, of expressing the opposite of what they mean: saying "I hate you" when they mean "I love you," and that sort of thing). So. most of the time, a crazy person is exactly the right person to love and care for another crazy person.

However, when two otherwise loving and mutually moderating crazy people dive into the funk of craziness at the same time -- which is almost inevitable since something as basic and outside their control as three rainy days in a row can be enough to momentarily flip both their craziness switches -- the consequence can be pretty damned awful. Two crazy people being crazy at the same time are not twice as crazy as one crazy person, they are more like 20 or 100 times more crazy. Not only are they more crazy, but their craziness tends to accelerate, like some sort of atomic reaction.

I am not, of courrse, propounding objective science -- these are my own observations, from inside my own craziness. But for me at least their relatively objectivity and predictability are born out by their reappearance from time to time in my own life. Sadly, one such time -- when all the loopiness in me and Ola lined up perfectly -- came in October and November of last year, just a few weeks before Margaret was born.

Some of it had to do9 with Ola's mother, who manages her own family with an iron fist, and had decided she was going to manage mine the same way. As you can imagine, her wilfulness and mine clashed, and Ola, unsure what to do, chose to side with her mother instead of her husband. Everything spun out of control fairly quickly. I spent two nights in the jail of the Old City police station for so-called cooling off (not difficult, since I didn't have a coat and was cold the whole time). Following that, reconciliation took some time. Ola and I both adopted unbending, irrational positions. I went to London to get away, coming back to be with Ola for the birth of Meggie. That didn't happen because we were still too unbending and afraid of our own vulnerability. veggie was born -- superbly -- without me. Fortunately, sanity kicked in pretty quickly -- so that I was able to see Ola and Meggie the next day (4 December).

More about Meggie later. For now I only wanted to point out that craziness is crazy. Of course it is, you say. But, no, I mean really, really crazy. It's really really crazy because most of the time it either doesn't matter or is even a slightly positive force, adding energy, colour, and imagination to an otherwise pretty dull world. However, when the proverbial butterfly flaps its wings one too many times -- the effects multiply and amplify in awful and seemingly uncontrollable ways, and pretty soon volcanoes erupt, tsunamis spread, hurricanes rage, and so on.

Commentary

2011-01-20T12:41:00.000+01:00

Once in a while I post something on which one or more of you chooses to comment. You write to me about it via email. So far no one has ever sent a comment through the "comment" box that is part of the blog itself. I'm not sure why, but can guess. Discretion? Habit? Dislike of those little boxes currently so much in favour for controlling, limiting, and focusing comments and other webmail? Preference for directness or anonymity, or both?

Unfortunately, it's my kids who will eventually lose out. Please remember that, as strange as it may at times seem, this blog is really for them.

Since I have so many gifted, generous, thoughtful friends, and since they are so much a part of who I am and how I try to do things (by soliciting advice, even if I don't always follow it), I wish that when you choose to comment you would at least seriously consider doing so through the blog itself.

Thanks.

What goes around...

2011-01-14T15:15:00.000+01:00

From my posting in which I wrote that only a crazy person would marry a crazy person, and also from using the same phrase in a few recent conversations, I've learned that the word "crazy" is subject to the phenomenon of political correctness -- whether the word is applied to oneself or others.

This surprises me. First, because I don't use the term pejoratively. I suppose I use it more in the way it was used in Beatnik slang -- "That's a crazy rhythm" -- to mean different, original, unusual, eccentric. But not quite that, or that only, because I definitely mean something more specific by it, though not pejoritive. I will try to explain what in a moment.

Second, I use it because I find it useful (a tautology, I know) -- descriptive in a very general sense, not overly detailed. Third, I use it because my cohort (highly educated, creative, and generally politically incorrect people, a large percentage of whom are as crazy as coots) regularly use the term without causing offence to each other. Most of us are not psychiatrists or psychologists or medical or social researchers of any kind. We rarely feel the need to distinguish the finer points of craziness when talking and writing to each other. If I say that Charlie Baker, for example, is crazy, he knows what I mean and is most unlikely to take offense because, well, because he is crazy and is wise enough to know it. He also has very little (perhaps nothing) to lose by being identified as crazy -- appearances count very little in his life. Other crazy friends of mine don't mind being crazy within our circle, but for various reasons (often sad, but legitimate) they can't afford to have word get out. Jobs, for example, might be in jeopardy if word got out, even though the person has been doing his job to a high standard for years and the evidence indicates there is no connection at all between his craziness and his ability to function in his workplace.

This is just that old ugliness -- prejudice -- the use of irrelevant evidence, such as colour or ethnicity, to draw a false correlation. Craziness correlates with loads of things, but not with an inability to think, or write, or sing, or whatever. As near as I can tell, the things craziness correlates with are nearly all difficulties for (or limitations on) oneself, not difficulties for others.

I find the term crazy works quite well for describing someone -- myself a prime example -- whose reactions to certain outside stimula are disproportionate and intensely dramatic or self-destructive, or both. That's me! And that's why I am able to use the term crazy of myself and others who react disproportionately, no matter what their particular diagnosis or the specifics of their symptoms. Craziness, as I mean it, has very little to do with any specific medical condition, or more particularly with the medical condition I have been diagnosed as having: Bi-Polar Disorder, Type II (soon to be renamed, if it hasn't already been, Bi-Polar Spectrum Disorder, signifying that not even the professionals can manage to be more than approximate about it).

That said, when tending to either extreme of my bipolarity, I will also be crazy, which makes the extremes MORE extreme. Yet even when exhibiting no signs of bipolarity, I will still be crazy -- because craziness is a matter of responses (usually disproportionate, always a bit wonky) not a matter of structures or chemistry. Mental illnesses, like bi-polarity or schizophrenia, are structural -- not the result of learned behaviors -- while craziness is about how one responds to certain stimuli, which means they are all about learned behaviors.

Have I confused you yet? Probably just bored you -- as I don't think I have any great insights into this stuff. My real insight is that craziness, as I mean it, is different from mental illness. Here's an example of crazy. I am ultra sensitive to being lied to. I even flip out when an obvious liar, say a used car salesman, lies to me. Exagerations, plesantries, flattery -- I can perceive any of them as lies and may flip out in consequence. Where did this absurd sensitivity come from? I am not exactly sure, even after years and years of psychiatry (most of it crappy, but the last decade of it very, very good), but conventional wisdom point the finger at one or both of my parents. My parents, like many people of their generation, drank a lot more than is considered wise today. The cocktail hour was rigorously observed, and there was no such thing as just one. I remember wine with dinner, but that would have been in the mid-sixties and later. Whether they drank wine as well as cocktails before the sixties I have no idea. If someone lies to me about anything to do with love, then once I figure it out (assuming I do) will seathe with anger to a degre and in a manner more or less comparable to Israel's response to the homemade fireworks that occasionally fly out of the beleaguered ghetto of Gaza toward places like Sderot, causing considerable inconvenience and anxiety, but not much else. That is to say, I will launch a full-scale war against the person who has lied to me, complete with white phospherous, and the numbers of dead and seriously injured will be in a ratio of roughly 100:1 against that person, metaphorically speaking.

Why? I can only suppose it was because at some point in some distant past someone tricked me into loving them, which is to say into trusting them with my love. And I hurt and hurt so deeply and completely that I have never got over the hurt, never forgave the hurt even though I can no longer remember the circumstances or the people involved in creating that hurt. The hurt is all I remember, and its half-life is never ending (or, perhaps more precisely, is the same as my life, assuming I don't pass it along to my children). In fact, to say I remember the hurt is incorrect -- the hurt is simply a part of me. Press that particular button in some way -- intentionally or not -- and I will launch all the fury I am capable of in your direction.

That's just one example. Fortunately, there are not many more touch points in my repertoire of craziness. Pretending to love me, or lying about loving me, or betraying my love, will do it. Betraying me includes abandoning me or breaking a promise to me. Belittling me or ridiculing me will sometimes do it. Deliberately lying to me about nearly anything may well do it. If there are other things, they are probably just variations of these things. The craziness is not in deploring or detesting these things, or in finding them unacceptable. The craziness is in declaring war , and in believing war to be justified and appropriate and even proportionate. I mean, some bimbo deludes me into thinking she loves me, and persuades me to believe her hard luck story, and swindles me out of $1000 or so. And for this I go totally ballistic, even to the point of suing her for the money. Costing me more than I lost and spending enormous amounts of time and energy that ought to have gone into more constructive matters? Now, that's crazy! But I did exactly that five or six years ago.

From the Economist - 16 December 2010

2011-01-08T11:29:00.002+01:00

Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older

Age and happiness

Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years’ worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can’t please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).

Painfully obvious

2010-12-08T18:20:00.000+01:00

The following phrase describes something clear to anyone who thinks about it dispassionately: "Only a crazy person would marry a crazy person." Provided you know the person is crazy, why would you marry him or her? Why would you marry someone with AIDS or someone with Lou Gehrig's Disease or someone convicted of mass murder? You wouldn't unless you were somehow a bit off.

Duh. This cannot be a surprise to any thoughtful person who is honest with himself or herself and others. Nevertheless, I didn't think about it until recently -- which I now take to have been deliberate, if unconscious, avoidance. Does this mean that I am now blaming Ola for things that went wrong? Not really -- blame is the wrong concept in any case. I am pointing out that she is responsible and accountable for various facets of our recent meltdown, and that she needs to think about how and why. Only if she agrees to accept responsibility and accountability for her part in things will we be able to make our marriage (and therefore our responsibility to our children) work. I think we can, and I hope we will. This is no small challenge. It will at times be painful. It will many times be frightening. Each of us will try to squirm out of our part and blame the other one.

In sum: both of us are nuts. How much? I don't think it matters. What matters is that we both are. It isn't my bi-polarity that is in the dock here. That is a medical condition for which I receive excellent medical care. The bi-polarity is largely and perhaps entirely a red herring in this context.

It's not my or Ola's medical problems that are preventing us from being what we should and need to be. It is our psychological problems.

I will continue with these thoughts as they gel. I will also keep my promise to in-fill the missing bits of the meltdown, as revealed by emails and sms messages I both sent and received. The thing that prevents me from doing either at the moment is time. But time will free up. (I hope.)

She's here, and she's great!

2010-12-05T17:01:00.000+01:00

Right on schedule, on the day the doctors predicted some eight months ago, the latest wee Hingston -- to be named Margaret Athena Boudica Nausikaa -- arrived at 10.23 am, following a relatively short labour (about 7 hours in total, with about 1 hour of pushing). 3610 grammes in weight, 58 cm in length. A very pert cutie indeed, resembling an Eskimo. Mother and daughter are both healthy, though mother went through a truly natural childbirth (no epidural, not episiotomy) and is a bit banged up at a result. I have just read that episiotomy is now out of fashion, as it creates problems of its own that may be more severe and long-lasting than those caused by natural tearing of the perineum. So, despite the pain, it appears that once again nature is smarter than we are.

I will ad photos as soon as I can get them onto my computer and uplo

Probably not my Last Will and Testament

2010-12-03T13:26:00.004+01:00

According to my advisor on belts and braces, Laurence Mann, I am an absolute nincompoop (my word, not his) to provide so much information about my bank accounts on my blog, so I have redacted much of it. For the cyber-thieves who read my blob, you had your chance and missed it. At least, I hope you missed it.

I also award the prize for perspicacity to Alexander "Sandy" Lourie, a law school roommate and friend, who was the first and only one of you to read this posting and ask, "Hmm. Are you possibly considering anything we should talk about first?" Fortunately, the answer is a genuine No. It would have been no anyway, because I am currently in Poland, where such things are a crime and a sin, and where I can be detained (i.e. jailed) just for mentioning it as viable (if that's the right word) alternative. (Switzerland this aint.) Given my history over the last fifteen or so years, and my recent battle with the forces of darkness (Ola's mother), I think Sandy was right to raise the question. Thanks, buddy. A ten złotych note will be on it's way to Sandy as soon as he sends me his address.

Unfortunately, Sandy failed the "Do the math" quiz. In a moment of heart over head, thinking I might like some TLC, he invited me to Chicago to recuperate from recent ordeals, write my book, and whatnot. I pointed out that Chicago is (1) very cold, just like Poland, and (2) full of Poles, just like Poland. It's a long way to go to end up in a very similar place. I could add that Chicago politics have a long history of corruption and the Chicago police a long history of brutality. So Sandy did not score two thirds of a hat thrick (known as a "Ha!" trick) and did not win a second ten złotych note. But with a single ten złotych note one can still buy three beers in Poznan (2010 prices), and get a little change back as well.

Herewith the redacted reversion:

My trusts and estates teacher in law school, a man known as Dr D----, exhorted his students to write ----- as soon as they had any property at all, and to keep updating them throughout life, as things changed. I have very little property other than -----, ----- ---, and --------, but at the end of November I finally got around to having a will drawn up. The original is held at the soliciters Hewitsons on Newmarket Road in Cambridge, England. It's very simple. Other than my physical assets, I have some bank accounts with NatWest, ----------------------------------------------, and some more bank accounts with Bank Zachodny - WBK, -----------------------------------------. I expect to move to a new country relatively soon, and when I do, there will be more bank accounts. The most sizable holding is my share of my late mother's estate, in the form of a trust, of which my brother David Hingston (who lives in San Francisco) is trustee. When last I heard from him, the trust assets were held in a brokerage account managed by ---------------------------. Aproximately one-third of my share of my mother's estate was delivered to me and has been held in a brokerage account with --------------- of --------- and Omaha, which is a subsidiary of ------------------------- Bank. Hewitsons have been appointed executors of my will. Enquiries should be made to them.

Fast and Furious

2010-12-03T11:08:00.000+01:00

At about 4.45 this morning I received a text message from Ola telling me she was in hospital and contractions had started. She didn't want me there. She had her toxic family to support her. Apparently her godfather (who he? perhaps the uncle called "the gangster") offered to pay for a private midwife, something Ola wanted even though nothing indicated that she needed anything other than the same care as every other young mother in Poland. Had I not just spent a lot of money on lawyers, getting out of Poland, getting back to Poland, hotel rooms, etc., I might have come up with the cost of a midwife in spite of feeling it was money for nothing, just a silly status symbol (none of Ola's friends who recently had children -- three of them -- had private midwives).

At about 7.35 Ola wrote again to say that no private midwives were available. Still didn't want me there. Just wanted me to know how much pain she was going through.

I wrote back telling OLa I would come if she wanted me, but only if she said as much and also apologised for all the pain she had recently caused me.

I heard nothing more and assumed her phone had been shut off or run out of power.

Then, as I was typing this I got a message from her: "She is born and she is healthy. :-) My family wasn't there. There was a student to become midwife and doctor."

Not entirely sure what the last sentence means, but it's all rather sad. She still hasn't asked me to come to her and the baby. In fact her most recent messages on the subject were telling me not to come and to leave Poland as soon as possible.

This is pure daytime television. I expect this blog to go viral any moment -- and then to be syndicated and serialised. Finally, I will have some real money from doing what I like to do: write.

More soon, I'm sure.

Well out of order...

2010-12-02T10:24:00.069+01:00

This posting is out of chronological order because, as Harold Macmillan noted, events are the most difficult things to control -- they have a habit of arriving much faster than they can be digested. Eventually, there will have to be quite a lot of in-filling, but since the infilling will be with emails and sms messages that are already completed and stored, I don't have a fear of losing the older items so much as loosing the newer ones, which are happening as I write and not otherwise recorded.

Just when you think it's safe to return to Poland...

Those of you who have been reading along in email format will know that I left Poland on 20 November, took a minibus to Berlin, then flew to London. You will also know why -- a Polish police drama fomented by my toxic mother-in-law, who ranks in toxicity with anything ever made by American Cyanimid. I stayed a few days with friends in London, then a couple of days with my cousins Richard and Gillian in Thaxted, Essex (near Stansted Airport). Since my forced separation from Ola and Chris is threatening the long term welfare of Ola, me, and especially our children -- so much so that, surprising to many of you, I would prefer to leave the lot of them to manage on their own and their grandmother's machinations than to spend the rest of my life bailing an ever-sinking boat only to achieve inevitably soggy results -- I have been making an effort to reunite our family, with the only condition being that we reunited as far from Poland and Ola's toxic family as can be reasonably achieved. My methodology has not been obvious to all of you -- in fact only one of you guessed at it -- but there's more than one way of accomplishing desirable ends, and the least obvious, most round about way occasionally achieves the best results...though, I admit, not always. In any case, not everyone learned his negotiating methods at Weil, Gotshal & Manges (where, in my day, Kruschevian shoe-banging was not unknown, and long strings of filthy language at high volume were standard fare), which is why it often works -- if everyone did it, it wouldn't work. (I more than once saw a rough-hewn Weil, Gotshal lawyer eviscerate a smoothly polished Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer, simply because the Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer was completely disoriented.)

So far, in this particular enterprise, the results have been mixed. After much good-cop / bad-cop (with me in both roles, because Steve Martin and Harvey Keitel were otherwise engaged), I was, on Monday night (29 Nov) invited to come to Poland to be present at, and participate in, the birth of our daughter. I came the following day on the worst airline in the world -- Ryan Air. Thanks to an unseasonable snowfall in the UK, there was a real chance I would get no further than the airport lounge, but surprising us all, the plane took off (only two hours late) and landed at Poznan airport in the mid-afternoon. Ola, looking everybit her 8.99 months pregnant, but radiant and very beautiful, met me at the Stary Brewer shopping centre, with Christopher, aka Mr Maus. We did various things. I bought stuff for Ola and Chris, including a nice haircut and colouring for Ola, so she will feel beautiful in the hospital, and some supposedly comfortable, very stretchy German pyjamas, for the days and weeks following the delivery.

We also met for coffee with Robert Gamble, a man whom I have more than once described as the only true Christian I know, who offered some thoughtful suggestions for how we might procede to heal our wounded and poisoned marriage. (On the subject of Robert's Christianity: I see him as a true Christian because of his behaviour, without regard to his faith; he tells me that his behaviour results from his faith. Who knows? In any case, I sometimes prefer the Old Testament approach -- more blood, less forgiveness.)

Ola and I parted in the early evening, so that Chris could have his bath and get to bed at a reasonable hour. Ola went to her parents. I gave her money for a taxi. I, having received my keys and an okay from Ola, went to our Kazimierza Wielkiego apartment. Ola had warned me that it was a mess -- though someone, presumably Ola's mother, had cleaned up my blood from the kitchen, which I found a bit disappointing, as I had hoped to take a photograph for old time's sake. The place was, indeed, a mess. Everything was everywhere. I started to clean up.

And then I noticed that one very valuable thing was missing, and another very valuable thing had been made considerably less valuable. A bit of background is in order. In England I bought Ola an iPhone. This was a silly extravagance, because she only uses a fraction of its capabilities. Nevertheless, she got an iPhone because I knew she would feel bad if I had an iPhone (I actually use the thing rather intensely) while she had an ordinary phone. Then, when we moved to Poland in June, we discovered what we already knew: that Poland is at least a generation behind the UK in nearly everything, including mobile phone service. They have iPhones and other smartphones here, but it's not possible to buy smart-phone services without also buying a smartphone on the instalment plan. So we bought two smartphone service contracts (SIM cards and data packs), used them with our iPhones, and took home two brand new and very valuable smartphones which we were going to sell on one of the internet auction services (eBay or its Polish clone, Allegro).

Remember that I had bought both iPhones, so in theory these two phones were mine -- to balance the account, so to speak. Arriving at the same answer another way, under Poland's community property law Ola owned half of the iPhones, no matter who paid, and I owned half the new smart phones, no matter who paid. Each of the new smartphones cost in Poland roughly the same amount that an iPhone cost in England: rouhly $800. $1600 is not a trivial amount of money, especially in Poland. It's almost 5000 zlotych, which is more than many people are paid for two months' salary. This is not a loss I find easy to absorb.

When I asked what had happened to the phones, Ola first played dumb. "What phone? I don't know about any phones. You made this up." Hmmm. That approach is pretty easy to deflate. So she tried another. "You must have done it yourself." That approach is even easier to deflate, since the phones were there the night I was taken away, and one of them was no longer there the night I returned. I had been locked out of the apartment the whole time in-between.

Okay, craziness can be expected in this loopy country. But the connection between missing, presumed given-away by someone without the right to give them, phones and the bits of our daughter is hard to fathom. Nevertheless, Ola said I must leave Poland immediately and go abroad. That she never wanted to see me again. The usual litany.

That went on for a couple of days -- I can no longer remember how many. I moved out of the flat, expecting the SWAT to arrive any moment and not wishing to do any further research into the conditions obtaining in Polish jails. For the last two nights, I have been staying in a hostel in the centre of the city. Not a bad place, and no craziness, except when some pokes in from

We can afford some luxuries, but we are not rich. I am not rich. Ola is not rich. Ola's inability to manage money, or even to be aware of how much she is spending and on what, is bleeding our resources at a dangerous rate. For example, Ola has forced me to spend a lot of money since this adventure began -- on a lawyer, on travel, on lodging, on telephone service, on all sorts of things. The idea of someone -- anyone -- giving away an $800 dollar phone that, at most, only half belongs to her, is blood boiling to me, especially when Ola always wants more and more of everything.

Ola has always had very bizarre ideas of "property" and even more bizarre ideas of "accounting." When she worked as a teacher of disabled children, she made barely enough enough money to live. Teachers everywhere are underpaid, but in Poland they are paid starvation wages. I didn't have to kick in very often, but didn't mind much when occasionally I paid for something that, strictly speaking, was Ola's responsibility. Nevertheless, she seemed to have adopted the attitude characterised as "What's mind is mine and what's yours is also mine." In Ola's case, this was beyond discussion. Any mention that she was living beyond her means, or expecting me to fund her deficits, would result in a torrent of erroneous arithmetic. I am not a terribly generous person much of the time, though I give money to the homeless and money to various charities. In sum, I believe that those who can pay, should pay, and that those who can't pay should asknowledge as much and make their situation clear. Muddying the waters with creative accounting is hardly helpful. But more than once in this relationship, I have been surprised by large bills for things I knew nothing about. The first few times, I chalked it up to inexperience. Now I am beginning to think it's a deliberate pattern of passive-agressive behaviour.

You can't tell the players without a scorecard

2010-11-25T18:21:00.063+01:00

Dear readers --
The next several entries, like the immediately previous one, will be founded on the texts of emails, or in some cases sms messages, that I have either sent or received since 16 November, the day of the Great Schism. You'll very soon get lost without some sort of scorecard and gazetteer.

Here, then, is a beginning to the scorecard (to be augmented as necessary):

Poznan - a city of approximately 580,000 people [in 2010] located in western Poland, almost exactly halfway between Warsaw and Berlin. Once a major banking, railway, and commercial center, an important (by Polish standards) industrial centre, and a Residenz of the German Imperial family (Kaiser Wilhelm II built a 600 room palace there, which was completed in 1910), now a rather forlorn place, waiting and hoping to be rediscovered. I believe this will eventually and inevitably happen -- because geography almost demands it. Nevertheless, it may take a long time, as the central government in Warsaw sucks everything significant toward itself, leaving the historic provincial capitals with little. (The model is essentially that practised in France, where Paris sucks everything into itself.) The centre of Poznan, which divides into distinct areas of Polish-Italian Baroque influence and German-Wilhelmine influence is often pretty. Everywhere outside the centre is blighted by the effects of 45 years of communist city-planning (a joke), architecture (an abomination), and construction (a disaster).

New construction in Poznan has so far been undistinguished, even shabby, and generally opportunistic, with quick profits the sole motive in most cases -- with one singular exception. The Kulczyk family (the wealthiest family in Poland) have given much thought to, and spared no expense on, a shopping centre called Stary Browar (the old brewery). I spent many years in the shopping centre business and I know of no better centre anywhere. Stary Browar has the very rare distinction of having revitalized its part of the city, rather than destroying it, as many shopping centres have done (including most of those in or near Poznan). Still, despite its success, it exists because of the corruption for which Poland was noted at the time (which has since decreased substantially). Without any proper authority to do so, the mayor of Poznan sold a city park to the Kulczyk organization to facilitate construction of the second phase of the centre. Money changed hands, and some of it is said to have found its way into the Mayor's personal account. Half the park disappeared into bricks and steel. The mayor was charge with and eventually convicted of corruption, but remained in office until last week, owing to the fact that, in Poland, the presumption of innocence continues through all appeals. Appeals can and usually do take years. That is a lot of innocence for a man whom almost everyone believes to be guilty, Amazingly, the mayor convicted of corruption was re-elected for another four year term (his third, I believe) the day I left Poznan. It has been noted by many that Poland likes strong leaders -- going back to Pilsudski at least -- and overlooks their faults so long as they keep order and share the wealth at least somewhat. That is part of why Poland is called White Africa by some English businessmen I know. Strange that Poles, who by and large are racists, would go out of their way to be labelled "Africans."

Swider - the name of my wife's family. The word means drill or auger in Polish. Very applicable to my wife's mother, even though until she married Ola's father she had another name. It's as though she were destined to become a Swider.

Krysia - short for Krystyna. My wife's mother. A nurse in one of the many hospitals of Poznan. The hardest working person in the Swider family, by far -- but everything comes at a price. She has been the centre of her universe for so long that she doesn't brook any interference from the outside. I, her son-in-law (but actually a year or two older than she) have no intention of following her narrow-minded, lower-class orders, and she knows it. Until recently we have quietly and politely loathed each other. In the last month or two our loathing has become more pronounced, and on 16 November it erupted like a long dormant volcano. It is Krysia and Andrzej's horribly lopsided marriage, I am convinced, that has caused Ola's father to become and remain a pathetic, spineless alcoholic. This view of things, I should add, is derided by other family members as "Andrew's Theory." As typically happens in the case of alcohol-damaged families, the non-alcoholic members of the family, whether consciously or not, have some degree of vested-interest in the alcoholic remaining the object of blame, pity, and remorse, In the case of Ola's family -- it is her mother who is the great enabler as well as the sun about which the planets revolve (to adopt a particularly Polish metaphor). For apparent warmth and energy she exacts the price of total control over the family.

Andrzej - my wife's father. An alcoholic who has lost several jobs because of drunkenness and now lies about the house all day in his underwear watching television, no longer trying to find work, not bothering to get dressed. He can be dry for days or weeks, sometimes for months, but when he goes on a bender he takes everyone with him, shrieking, moaning and threatening suicide. As a potential suicide myself, I generally wish he would just get on with it. I'd gladly buy him a length of rope and would even tie the noose for him if I thought he'd use it. He has a heart condition and hypertension; he therefore has enough medicines at home to do the job any day he works up the courage. He never will; he's a coward. Studied for a degree in pharmacy, but left (or more likely was ejected from) university. Most recently a dispatcher of ambulances -- one of many jobs he lost for drunkenness. A brutish, piggish man who, when he sits down to dinner, takes the largest portions and choicest bits for himself and does not even wait for his wife to sit down before he starts eating. Makes fun of people who read books.

Lukasz - my wife's brother. Approximately a year and a half older than my wife, a pharmacist. According to my wife, he's a racist and anti-Semite. About the time I met my wife (six years ago) she lent him her laptop computer. Six months later he returned it, full of pornography. I am not relying on her word for it -- I saw it myself. The entire hard drive was taken up by pornography. A very curious way of saying thank you for letting me use your computer. A few years ago he dropped his girlfriend of many years, moved out of the family apartment into one of his own, and more or less limited his family contact to one afternoon per week -- Sunday -- when he comes to dinner and delivers his weekly laundry bag to his mother for washing and ironing. A very creepy fellow.

Ola - short for Aleksandra. My wife. Born 5 October 1979. A former teacher of emotionally disturbed deaf children, now a full time mother. A decent though not very strong or worldly person -- totally under the thumb of her disreputable family. It's clear that Ola has wanted to break free of the Swider gravitational pull for some time. Her boyfriend prior to me was also American. When he dumped her, which he did very ungraciously, she fell apart, thinking her ticket to America had disappeared. Then I came along. I do not think my wife is a gold-digger in any way (she is largely unconcerned with money, but also assume there is always enough for what she wants); I think there is a large part of her that simply wants to get away from her appalling family. At the same time, she is not very strong, and she hasn'thttp://uk.linkedin.com/pub/christopher-hingston/20/aa5/406 the courage to defy her mother.

Christopher - also known as Chris, Little Chris, and Krzysiu. Full name Christopher Cleisthenes Thomas Paine Hingston. My son with Ola, born 24 March 2010. (Named for his first cousin, once removed, Christopher John Hingston, of Saffron Walden, Essex; the most irreverent and iconoclastic, but also most generous and big hearted, person I know. A fighter against fascism in all its forms, but something of a fascist all the same. It is this extraordinary combination of virtues, frequently inconsistent and sometimes contradictory, bordering on anarchic, but still demanding that certain things be done as "they have always been done," that inspired me to name the wee man after him..) Chris is seemingly very bright, but developmentally held back in some ways that his mother has so far refused to acknowledge and investigate. For example, when I left Poland a few days ago, Chris -- already twenty months old -- was still taking all his food from a bottle. Most children would have started to investigate solid foods at about six to eight months, ten months at the latest, and would now be eating almost only solid foods, which perhaps a bottle before bed. Chris can therefore be said to be more than year behind what might be expected of him. His mother is not the least concerned. I am concerned that she is somehow manipulating him into a "one down" position, much as I assume her mother manipulated her and her brother into similar positions.

Meagan - also known as Meggie, MegMeg, and NutMeg. Full name to be Meagan Athena Boudica Nausikaa Hingston, if my wife names her what we have already agreed upon. She probably won't; she didn't with Christopher, so I had to have his name changed while we were living in England. I am not found of Biblical names, particularly Christian names; I prefer pagan names, particularly those from ancient history and mythology, as well as names connected to insurrections and revolts. Thus Athena, patron goddess of just about everything that matters, including the seeming opposites of war and civilization; also namesake of the birthplace of democracy. So, too, Boudica, a real rascal, taking on the Roman empire and getting away with it for a time. Nausikaa is more complex. If our second child had been another son, I would have named him Odysseus, the heroic traveller; as it will be a daughter, I have instead named her for a pivotal character in the Odyssey, the precocious princess who offers succour to Odysseus mid-way through his journey home. It is significant that her name means burner of ships, a phrase (sometimes rendered as burner of bridges, or burner of boats) repeated several times in this blog, and a major metaphor in my own life. If more people burnt more bridges, boats, and ships, there would be fewer stupid decisions made. Fiorello LaGuardia, one of my heroes, said, "It doesn't matter if I burn my bridges; I never retreat." That is an attitude toward life that I hope both my children adopt early and follow continually.

Poles, on the other hand, like to give their children the names of Catholic saints, a generally unheroic, blindly obedient, and loathsome lot of martyred shits (I exempt Francis of Assisi, who was more of a rebel than most people assume), many of whom were proto-fascists and totalitarians (e.g. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order), nearly all of whom based their lives on service to some very peculiar ideas of what Christ wanted, and absolutely subservience to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Ein Volk. Ein Reich. Ein Fuhrer. Or close enough. Ola's and my compromise was therefore to give the children an ordinary Christian sort of first name (though Meagan is neither ordinary nor Christian; but Meagan was Ola's idea, and she has final say over girl's names), and then pack them full of wonderfully obscure but meaningful middle names. However, Ola, once again under the spell of her very pedestrian family, and without telling me, when it came time to register our son's name, registered it only as Christopher. Once I discovered this, I fixed it; but I did so only in the UK. So far as I know, Ola has never properly amended the boy's registration in Poland. So my wife named our son something different to what we had agreed, and she didn't even tell me. I found out by looking at his birth certificate and passport. I fear the same thing will happen to Meagan. Sadly, Meagan isn't even a real name; it's an old Welsh diminutive of Margaret, so the true name is Margaret, and the Welsh spelling of the diminutive is Megan, not Meagan. Meagan is the name of a handful of Hollywood starlets born in the last thirty or so years. Geez, what kind of legacy is that? But so long as Athena, Boudica and Nausikaa follow, I have little fear that my daughter will grow to be a goddess, rebel and burner of ships in her own right. If, however, she is only Meagan, then I will always worry for her. Superstitious? You bet I am.

Another sort of brûlé

2010-11-24T18:15:00.165+01:00

Many days later -- an email to my friends....

From: Andrew Hingston

Sent: 11/19/2010 7:23:58 AM

To: Hingston Andrew Laurence

Subject: Separation

Ola and I have separated. I am leaving Poland soon. Two or three weeks. Tuesday night (16 November 2010) she and her mother were moving furniture around in the apartment, despite an express request not to, on which I compromised to saying move whatever you want except one particular bookcase (mostly filled with my books and Chris's books and toys).

Ola's mother, who is an ignorant, pushy broad to say the least, was really getting on my nerves. She insisted on moving the bookcase I did not want moved, and had already packed up the books I had recently received from Amazon and definitely did not want packed up. I asked her to leave; I got some lip. I then told her to leave; more lip. I then screamed at her to leave; more lip. So I picked her up and carried her outside, tossed her shoes and coat after her, and then closed the door.

She called the police and then, presumably realizing that the police might laugh at an irrate mother-in-law complaining about being tossed out of an apartment that isn't her own, she told Ola to make a complaint against me. Which Ola duly did, silly, docile woman that she is. The police came and started shouting at me in Polish, a language I truly cannot stand the sound of. I kept saying "I don't understand your fucking infantile gibberish, you silly brutes; please speak to me in a white man's language if you expect me to pay any attention." They kept shouting in their gibberish. This escalated quickly and marvelously, like a duet in one of Mozart's best operas. It could have gone on like that all night, but one of them grabbed me from behind; I grabbed the other's nuts, gave a squeezy twist, and heard him scream. Alas, the scream came from surprise rather than pain, as it was hard to get a decent (or should be be indecent) grip through his kevlar crotch armour.

Then the first cop pulled my legs out from under me, causing me to crack my head on the tile floor, whereupon they both stepped on my head until my nose made a funny little crunching noise and blew like a geyser. The one who had pulled my legs out then managed to step on the door of the dishwasher, breaking it -- so much for the new, spiffy Electrolux dishwasher that I had recently paid for. Handcuffs, hammerlocks. Worried about him and the future supply of Polish police, I asked the junior cop (a trainee with braces on his teeth) how his balls felt, and got my foot jumped on in reply. Covered in blood at this point, with two broken fingers into the bargain, though I don't remember when or how that happened, and in fact didn't notice it for until a day later when the little darlings swelled up purple and plump like aubergines.

I got hauled off to the police station and told I would spend 48 hrs in jail prior to my initial hearing with the procurator (prosecutor). Did I need anything? Yes, I did; I needed my meds. Someone went off to the apartment to get my meds. But then they decided that, before letting me have access to my meds, they must go through a verification process to assure that the afresaid medications were really meds and that I really needed them.

That makes sense -- as police are inherently nervous about drugs in jails, Can't have the prisoners tripping or enjoying themselves, can we? Fine. But the way they do their verification is simply silly. First, we had to go to an all night doctor in a hospital miles away where they have some sort of contract to do this sort of thing for the police -- They in their kevlar SWAT Team jumpsuits, I in handcuffs and covered in blood. The doctor, about thirty, not very attractive (a rarity for Polish women), looked at my meds, decided her competence extended only to half of them -- amlodipine for bloodpressure and allopurinol for gout -- and confirmed they were what they said they were.

Of course, she couldn't actually confirm that I needed either of them because my blood pressure when she took it was 145/80 -- about where a very healthy person's blood pressure would be after having just been arrested in a third world country whose language is unknown to him and stamped on by the police. As for gout, she could have verified that had she been willing to do an expensive blood test. But in Poland someone has to pay for these things, and they couldn't put in on my bill, so they waived it. Being an internest, and Poland having only recently decided that psychiatry can be used for something other than persecuting political prisoners, she didn't feel up to passing judgement on my psychiatric meds (Efectin/Effexor/Efexor [depending on country] 150 ER, which is venlafaxine extended release; and Priadel, which is lithium carbonate extended release), so off we all went to an all-night shrink in some nightmare of a psychiatrict facility with rusting bars on the windows and peeling paint, who went through the same non-verification process. Basically, he looked at the meds, then he looked at me, then he said, "Yeah, why not."

Then it was back to the police station/jail (stone and brick, dating from the 1880s), for a bed time story and some warm milk. The jail had an absurdly convoluted check-in procedure, worse than any hotel, made even worse by my medications (which the chief jailer simply could not figure out, in spite of the fact that it's four tablets in the morning and two tablets at night, and doesn't change). Having been handcuffed and stamped on at about 7.30 in the evening, at about 2 am I finally got to bed.

Jail, I discovered, is a sensory deprivation experience. There is no natural light (there is dim incandescent at night and brighter but not quite brighter dlourescent during the day), and no clock. Every surface is smooth and rounded. The bed is actually a wooden platform, raised about 85 cm off the floor, like an alter. In a room I guessed to be two metres wide by four metres deep, there were three of these alters or morgue tables -- it's difficult to call them beds. Where the fourth one might have been, there is a child-sized table bolted to the four, and too child-sized stools, also bolted to the floor. The door is heavy steel (not bars, as in the movies), which a viewing hole that can be opened only from the outside. Very quickly I had no idea how long I had been there. Boredom is instant and acute. The only remedy is sleep, but even though a prisoner in Poland is innocent until proven guilty (it says so in the Constitution, so it must be true), he mustn't be allowed to sleep more than the prescribed 8 hours of semi-darkness permitted to him. The mattress, having a thickness and comfort level comparable to the sort of thin cushion sold by IKEA to prevent their folding wooden chairs from bringing about hemoroids, must be rolled up and stacked in the store room at 6 am. The two army blankets must be folded and stored at the same time. From then until 10 pm there is nothing to do but to think lovingly of one's mother in law, while contemplating her slow evisceration with a rusty spoon, or perhaps her demise by the infamous death by a thousand cuts, or perhaps by the breaking of every bone in her body, starting with her middle-ears and moving on to her toes and fingers. In the time one is forced to remain awake with nothing to do one comes up with several imaginative scenarios as well as several varients on the classics.

I had been dragged off in the middle of cooking dinner -- chicken and vegetables in mustard sauce, to remind me of happy days in Burgendy. So I wasn't exactly dressed for the occasion. Just khaki trousers and a longsleeved t-shirt -- no jacket. Fortunately, I was wearing shoes when they grabbed me. The jail was cold and drafty. No wonder they worry about suicide and take one's belt, shoelaces, watch, rings, and everything personal, away from one.

The food is worse than you think, and as it is not served at exactly the same time each day, its appearance doesn't help reset one's internal clock. Every meal -- of which there are three per day -- consists of four slices of rye bread, a tiny wedge of processed cheese spread, and three or four slices high-fat garlic-flavoured balogna.

Imagine my surprise when the charges were finally read to me on the 18th of November, after two days in the slammer, and they said nothing about fondling the private parts of a policeman and nothing about Ola's mother being drop kicked from the apartment for extra points. All it said was that I had committed "crimes against the family." (Why not crimes against humanity while we are at it? Why not just make up crimes hither and thither?) Turns out that my telling Ola that she is lazy is a crime in Poland. And that is what I was charged with. Dear me, will wonders never cease? No, they will not. When I asked what the penalty might be -- thinking 1000 zlotych or 15 hours of picking up trash in the park -- I got a real shock. I might get to spend 2 years in a Polish prison for calling my wife lazy. Geez, I am fifty six and not all that healthy -- why didn't I simply murder my mother in law? The most I would have got for that is life, and in all likelihood, life would mean about 8-10 years. There's always next time.

But alas, I have places to be and people to see. So it's time to say goodbye to this almost former communist toilet of a country and find somewhere where things make sense.

Sent from my iPhone

Andrew Hingston - Poznan, PL

+48 668 497 339 [This number no longer works, in case you are thinking of calling me.]

Children: continuing lessons in humility

2010-11-24T17:59:00.003+01:00

The date of this entry says 24 November, but that is misleading. I wrote the draft at least ten days ago, but a lot has happened since then. In subsequent posts, I will try to keep the dates straight. Also, in this and subsequent posts, I hope to be able to provide photos, as I usually do. I can't do that now, because I am finishing this on a demonstration computer in an Apple Store in London and it's not possible to access my photo files.

If you've been reading along in this blog, then you know that just minutes before we were reunited with our much loved Primrose, after more than two weeks of separation and anxiety, Chris simply fell asleep.

That is the sort of thing that fills me with a kind of joy difficult to name -- I will call it the joy of recognition until I think of something better. I am referring to my recognition that Chris knows something important that I have forgotten, and that, if only for a moment, he invokes the same knowledge in me. Falling asleep at what an adult thinks of as a exciting moment is just one example. Peeing in the middle of the carpet is (perhaps less obviously) another. To some these things will appear as nothing more than the extreme egocentricity of childhood -- I want what I want and I want it now. But to me it isn't just that: it is also the fundamental fact that children live in the moment and accept the needs of the moment as no adult seems able to. How many times have I endured extraordinary discomfort (and how many more times has my very pregnant wife, Ola) because we can't find a public toilet? Yet children let loose in the same circumstances, sometimes to the amazement, alarm or chagrin of their parents. Some parents, I have noticed, are embarrassed by the imperatives of childhood pees and poohs, but I take delight in them: good for you, you little rascal -- how jealous I am of your "uncivilized" sense, and how ashamed I am of my "civilized" ridiculousness. When you gotta go.... As so often, Diogenes of Sinope (my favourite philosopher) knew best.

Moving now to the other end of the gastro-intestinal-urinal pathway.... Last night I decided to cook a better than usual dinner for me and Ola. Canard a l'orange; pommes anna; braised cabbage with wild mushrooms. The first and second dishes are classics of simple French cookery; the third is a classic of Polish cookery that goes well with the first two. For all sorts of reasons, I generally cook a tip-top meal two or three times a month. First, there is always something to celebrate. This is an important thing to realize. Every day can be and should be a celebration of something; only our egotism and fatigue get in the way. There is nothing to stop us from celebrating other people's victories, even when they are our defeats. Why not? It's a question of perspective. Second, I love to cook, have studied and practiced it seriously (sometimes professionally) since I was 16. I rarely tire of it, and when I do it is a sign that something is terribly wrong in my life, that all joie de vivre has drained out of me and a deep depression is on the way. It gives me enormous satisfaction, both in the process and the results. It is also a source of relaxation for me -- though sometimes a white-nuckled relaxation that others think of as stress. Cooking is not easy if you want to get it right.

As Ola undressed the wee fellow and slipped him into his evening bath with a dozen rubber ducks, a rubber whale, and three rubber frogs, I set about my gastronomical tasks. First, the pommes anna, because they take forever to prepare but can then cook without supervision while other things are done. Should you look up a recipe for this particularly good potato dish in a book or on the Internet, you'll find there appears to be nothing to this dish other than potatoes, butter, salt, pepper, garlic (optional), and heat. The very significant ingredient left off the list is practice, for like many especially simple dishes this is one in which frequent practice yields the best results. Indeed, the whole difference between unfortunate and magnificent lies in the details of heat, timing, types of potatoes, and amounts of butter, salt and pepper. Unfortunately, until last night the last I hadn't cooked pommes anna for eight or ten years, so frequent practice was not part of my batterie de cuisine. No matter. I could only do my best --and my best turned out pretty well if not exactly right.

There is no particular need for any arcane equipment to make pommes anna. A small (preferably nonstick) frying pan with high sides and a short handle is probably the best tool for the amateur -- one reason being that it will yield the right amount of finished product for four adults, and the potatoes will not stick to the pan, which they are likely to do with any other sort of pan, no matter what precautions one takes. Most people who cook already have something like this, or close enough.

Many years ago a friend bought me the most glorious of copper pots: a proper moule aux pommes anna from the inspiringly traditional cookware shop in Paris, Dehillerin. Dehillerin is a mecca, the toy store of all toy stores for professional and amateur cooks who visit Paris. My moule had been in storage for years. It was discovered again sometime last week while I was unpacking a box of other kitchen items.

At Dehillerin there are small moules aux pommes anna and large ones; thank God my friend bought me the small one. It makes enough for eight hungry adults. All sorts of potatoes can be used for this dish. In general, older potatoes (high in starch) are better than younger ones, as they crisp up better. In Poland at this time of year, older potatoes are just coming to market. Poles generally like small, young potatoes and consume them as long as they can. The older, larger ones signal the end of the young ones, and tend to arrive, as they have this year, only in mid-November. They make better potato pancakes, better mashed potatoes, better french fries, and better pommes anna.

If you are using a small pommes anna mould, as I was, you will need between five and eight potatoes of good size. (For a small frying pan, probably only three to four.) For any other pan, you will have to guess at the amount, but fortunately potatoes are cheap. Wash them, peel them, then slice them thinly in uniform slices. This can be done with the slicing blade of a food processor or, for the full experience, use the French tool known as a mandolin (also available from Dehillerin). In theory one can slice the potatoes by hand, but most amateur cooks would be at it 'til the end of time, and the results would be too far from uniform.

While you are doing the peeling and slicing, clarify 500 grammes of good butter. Clarified butter, if you don't know, is butter from which the milk solids have been removed. Pure milk fat, in other words. The milk solids help butter to taste like butter, but they also mean that things cooked in unclarified butter will be far more likely to stick to the pan and will begin to burn and turn bitter at a lower temperature. So best to clarify the butter, which is easy enough. Melt it in a sauce pan. Let it froth up until the froth begins to colour slightly and to look brittle (a sign that the proteins have denatured, which is to say cooked). Let the melted butter sit in the pan a minute or two, then pour the results through a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter, a piece of cheesecloth, or a sheet of paper towel. Should you wish to get a bit fancy about it, you can add several (I used five last night) crushed cloves of garlic to the butter either as it is melting or immediately afterward, and let it infuse as long as you like. Filter the bits out before using the clarified butter. The result will be quite subtle but still fragrant of garlic.

Swirl a spoonful of vegetable oil around the inside of the pan or moule (including its lid), making sure it is well oiled throughout. The reason to use oil is that it sticks less than butter, even clarified butter. Then dip each individual slice of potato into the warm clarified butter and place it in the moule. Go round and round, creating an overlapping effect, as you would for any sort of potato gratin dish. Every few layers add salt and pepper to taste. This is one of the things for which experience is the best teacher. Too much salt, for example, will ruin the dish; too little will leave it very bland. (Whether you start with salted or unsalted butter makes less difference than you might think.) I cannot say how much salt is the right amount, for much will depend on your personal tastes, the type of potatoes, whether you use coursely or finely ground salt, sea salt or refined salt, and so on. Traditionally, white pepper is used, but I like the pungency of black pepper and, this time at least, used that instead. Another time I might have used white, and other times I might also have added either or both of allspice and nutmeg. One can, if the urge strikes, also add minced shallots, chopped chives, chopped chervil, parsley, sliced black or white truffles, pimenton, paprika, and just about anything else that strikes your fancy (saffron results in a great dish to go alongside lamb or chicken); but none of that frippery is really necessary, and once you've added them you no longer have, strictly speaking, pommes anna. If you fear for your vascular health, you can do the whole thing with olive oil, but then you will have really changed the basic dish beyond recognition, so call it something else.

If cooked at too low a temperature, you risk creating lumpy mashed potatoes. At too high a temperature the results will be a crisp outside with a raw inside. After checking a cookbook, I cooked mine in a convection oven (a 'fan oven' as it is called in the UK) at 210 degrees C. Thirty minutes with the lid of the pan or moule on, and then about thirty more with it off. For the second stage, with lid off, set your timer first for 20 minutes and watch closely after that. The top should be crisp and golden brown, but not even slightly burnt. Once you judge the dish to be done, turn off the oven, leave its door ajar, and let everything cool down a bit (but not completely). As it slowly cools, the potato cake, as it is sometimes called, will pull away slightly from the sides of the moule. Run a knife around it, as you might for any cake, then turn it out into serving dish, which can, in fact, be a cake dish.

In this latest attempt, the lowest layers stuck to the pan and, once turned out, the whole thing looked rather less than perfect. How to avoid this? The recipe I looked at said nothing about putting a ring of baking paper in the bottom of the moule, as one might for a cake, but I may try it next time. Will it prevent the delicious golden crust from forming on the underside? It may, and if so that may matter because when turned out the underside becomes the topside. The trick used to create the perfect creme brûlée can probably be adapted to pommes anna: a small blow torch. I might also try lining the bottom of the moule with aluminum foil. That will let the cake slide out of the moule without a problem, but may itself stick to the potatoes. As I say, experience is the best teacher. Be prepared to try more than one solution, and keep your sense of humour. It's only a potatoes, after all.

I won't give you the recipes for the other dishes or we will be here forever.

Chris's bath ends at 8 pm, give or take a few minutes. Then it's time for toweling off, which he loves, for lotioning up (we dread him having nappy rash -- he is so unhappy when he does), for getting on a clean nappy (a real drama most times -- God knows why), for the ritual of choosing the pyjamas (sometimes very important and sometimes of no consequence at all), and slippers.

Then, I am delighted to say, it's book time; he already loves books. My wife and her family have no interest in books whatsoever. Very strange. The result, I suppose, of several disadvantages: of growing up poor and unable to afford any sort of higher culture, of Ola's father being an alcoholic television addict lost in his own haze, of Ola's mother working so hard that she never has time for a book, and of Ola herself being intellectually lazy. She didn't do very well in either high school or university, and I suspect it's largely because she doesn't like to read. But this may be a chicken and egg problem. In six years of knowing these people I have never seen any one of them read a book. I used regularly to give Ola books, but when I realized that she never read any of them, I stopped. She must have a dozen or more books from me, neatly lined up on her otherwise neglected bookshelf, none of them read. As Dorothy Parker noted, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." My wife is not an exotic or meretricious flower, of course, or even a plant, but you get the idea. Culture, alas, is not her thing. It worries me that Chris may take after his mother and her family, which would be tragic. So far at last he seems quite interested in books.

He has books in both Polish and English and flips through them often, without the need of any outside encouragement. Of English language books his favourites are Maisy's Amazing Big Book of Words, My Mummy and Me, Ten Little Rubber Ducks, The Very Hungry Caterpiller, Zog, Little Mist, My Daddy Loves Me, and What the Ladybird Heard. All great fun to read with him. He rarely sits through an entire story -- five pages is a lot -- but he shows quite a lot of attention in short spurts, noticing even the tiniest details in the illustrations. Lately he asks me to read a bit, then asks his mother to read a bit of the same book (often the same bit). Back and forth. Lights out at 9 pm. At that point there is generally a small drama as he resists going to sleep, but by 9:20 I can usually rely on him having gone to sleep for the night. There may be a a disgruntled murmur or two at 11:30 or midnight, but he rarely wakes up until 7 or 8 in the morning.

I therefore timed our duck dinner to be ready for 9:30 or 9:45. The duck was ready (a bit too ready, but Ola like most Central Europeans likes her meat very well done), the potatoes were ready, the cabbage was ready. The wine (nothing special -- a tempranillo from Toro, a bit too fruity) was open and I had already had a glass. In Chris's room, thanks to the child monitor in the kitchen, I could hear that Chris was still bouncing around merrily. A half hour later, he was still bouncing around. If I had gone in at that point it would have been like giving him a shot of coffee, so I stayed out and tried to stay quiet. At 11:30 he finally fell asleep. Ola was exhausted. Dinner was beyond its sell by date, though not actually ruined. Still, who wants to start a rich duck dinner at 11:30 at night?

Or, as Ulysses S. Grant put it...

2010-11-09T22:05:00.009+01:00

Back to normal indeed. As Grant put it, "Life is just one God-damned thing after another."

This morning I took Krzysiu and Primrose for a morning walk in the foggy autumn weather, wet leaves thick in the park near our apartment. We went down to the Warta river, our usual journey, but for some reason Chris was not very much into puddle stamping and preferred that his daddy carry him. He loves riding on my shoulders, little legs straddling my neck, little hands grasping (and at moments of excitement slapping) my bald head. I hold him by his ankles, or by at least one ankle as I try to steer Primrose in the same direction as Chris and me. Once we are away from traffic, I let Primrose off her lead and then it is easier to keep Chris safely in position.

But today Chris was both needy and uncooperative, a rare combination for him. Intimations of the terrible twos, I am told. Whenever I didn't have hold of both ankles he would slide one of this legs back over my shoulder so that pretty much the only thing that kept him in place was his willingness to stay there -- rendering the whole arrangement extremely precarious. At the time in question, I couldn't let Primrose off the lead, because there is a point in the journey where, given the chance, she will bolt for a place where she believes she will find cast off chicken bones (and too often does). There I was, with Chris threatening to fall of my shoulders and Primrose threatening to puncture her esophagus and die of peritonitis. Who was Hobson anyway, and why did he contribute his "choice" to our lives?

As it happened, it was Chris's turn to bring about a family crisis. He took a header off my shoulders and only my amazingly sharp reflexes (not always, but fortunately this time) averted disaster. I kept hold of his left ankle and though I did not stop him from smacking the pavement with his forehead, I did certainly slow his rate of acceleration and break his fall. I had him dangling in the air like a prize fish just caught. However, there had an ominous thud (or so I thought I heard), and far from his usual practice of laughing at adversity, he cried and cried and cried, inconsolably.

Ola is usually the one to rush Chris to hospital for what sometimes appear to me to be very ordinary calamities. Today I was worried about things that are in no way ordinary: concussion, cracked skull, or damaged neck (but not, for some reason, damaged ankle), and so I was the one to say, "Grab your coat, we're taking Chris to the hospital." Ola was angry at me for nearly killing the wee one, but fortunately tizziless.

The healthcare system in Poznań, which sounds fine in theory but is exasperating in practice, is to have all children's initial diagnoses done at one particular hospital in central Poznań. Once the diagnostic team in this hospital have made their assessment, they direct the children to the hospital or clinic in the city best able to deal with the problem. These front-line diagnosticians do almost nothing other than the basic assessment; they function as a gateway, registration centre, and hub. I don't even know if this central hospital has beds and wards and the other things one thinks of as essential parts of hospitals.

If the diagnostic hub operated with the speed and decisiveness of the best trauma units, and if the decisions of where to send the children were coordinated with the recipient hospitals and clinics, the system might work. The fact that it avoids duplication of expensive diagnostic equipment and laboratory functions would probably seem advantageous. But, as today proved (not for the first time), the waiting line of ill children and anxious adults is a long one and moves slowly, and the fact that kids with high fevers and respiratory infections, kids with conjunctivitis, and kids who've mistaken laundry detergent for something good to drink or have caught their fingers in the door are all waiting in the same line seems like less than perfect management.

The one or two front-line assessors, and their two or three primary assistants, are often on the phone or talking to parents, paramedics and ambulance drivers. The true functionality of this theoretically efficient model is therefore open to question. Triage, to the extent it is practiced at all, appears to be nothing more sophisticated than first-in-first-seen; oddly enough this is not the practice at the delicatessen counter of our usual supermarket, where the order is grumpiest is seen to first, an inducement to appalling behaviour. Behaviour in the hospital waiting line is, by comparison, docile, even submissive. No one wants his child to be pushed to the back or struck off the list altogether.

Poland's national health system is probably bankrupt (no one seems to know, but I have read this speculation in the reliable press), so there may simply be no money to make changes. Fortunately, the doctors, once one sees one, are generally first rate, careful and sympathetic, though they are not always very communicative. An American parent expects to be told what is going on and to be given options as well as information. Polish parents expect neither, and thus the doctors, unless they have practiced in the west (many have) or have watched a lot of American TV, are a little surprised by people like me. More scars of communism that will take many years (and a lot more long-term prosperity) to change.

We sat and sat. Two hours passed before anything really happened other than signing into the system. Christopher was amazingly well behaved, chirping cheerfully and offering his little bag of cookies to other children in the line. Finally a doctor took Chris's history. Another sent him off to the x-ray department. Once the x-rays were ready a conference ensued. No damage to the skull or neck appeared in the x-rays. That did not, however, rule out concussion. Fortunately, all the signs were that he either hadn't suffered one or it was very mild. He was walking as well as before. He was babbling the same and as much as before. He had not suddenly fallen asleep or started twitching. He showed the same degrees of curiosity and energy as usual. His eyes operated as they should. Reflexes normal. All good stuff. And so, some four and a half hours after it all started, we were sent home with the standard list of things to watch for in concussions, plus two I hadn't heard before. Don't let him watch television, and don't let him play on the computer. The worry is that flickering images may trigger a seizure.

It's exhausting, this stuff, as any of you who have been through the frequent near-death experiences of children will know. The little guy is not exhausted, of course -- he has no idea what he has been through or how close was his brush with disaster -- but Ola and I know and we are knackered.

We all fell asleep tonight before eight o'clock. But Chris woke up an hour or so later, happy as can be, demanding to be read to. His favourite book of the moment is in English, written by the amazing Julia Donaldson (I say amazing because her books that I have seen are all tip-top and there seem to be no end to them) and her current illustrator, Axel Sheffler. Polish children's books, by comparison, are mostly tired old nursery rhymes illustrated by someone brought up on cliches and treacly romanticism. Fortunately there are also some British and American children's books translated into Polish -- including the Dr Seuss books, which are published by our saintly local publisher, Robert Gamble.

Chris, Ola, and Primrose are all asleep again. The apartment is as quiet as it ever gets (except during a heavy snow fall, when all of Poznań becomes silent for a short time). Everyone is home. Everyone is alive. I have the hope that tomorrow will not be any worse than today, which is the kind of hope that sends me to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of ice cream. I feel I have deserved it.

Back to normal...

2010-11-08T13:09:00.000+01:00

It's extraordinary the difference that having Primrose home makes.

I would swear that Chris is laughing more and louder, and sleeping better. I would swear equally that Ola and I are bickering less and laughing more as well. As the blues song says, "You don't miss your water 'til your well runs dry." The return of Primrose is like spring rain -- real nourishment for the soul.

Speaking of rains, this morning, as Chris, Primrose and I went out into the rainy weather to get some fresh bread for breakfast (Polish bread is extraordinarily good), Chris was in a mood to put his new rain and snow boots to the 'puddle test.' That meant making an effort to jump in every puddle between our flat and our preferred bakery, about 300 metres away. He did pretty well, too, though it meant that forward progress was slow. Lots of circling about to make sure that no puddle was missed.

On the way back he grew tired and asked his daddy to carry him. As the parents amongst you will know, this is a privilege not a chore (most of the time), and it puts the little guy in a position where I can give him so many kisses that he finally objects and bats me on the nose. Lots of laughter.

Still, as we got close to the flat I knew that he would like a few more puddle jumps before facing his mother, who tries pretty hard to keep him dry, clean and out of mischief. So I put him down. He made straight for the widest, deepest, muddiest puddle he could find, waded out into the centre (where it was deep enough that it nearly topped his boots), and then lost his balance and fell. Oops. Soaking wet in very cold water is not is preferred position in life (more the humiliation of it than the discomfort, I think), so the laughter quickly shifted to screams of misery. Sorry, no photo, but you can probably imagine.

Fortunately, we were just two minutes from home and Primrose decided to be cooperative. Straight home in daddy's arms again. Into a warm bath and a new set of clothes.

I would not trade any of this for anything. Of course, should he now catch a cold, I will be blamed for being so stupid as to let him get wet. "Yes, dear" I will say. But Chris and I will know. It's a guy thing.

Clarence earns his wings...

2010-11-07T03:13:00.167+01:00

If you don't understand the title of this posting, don't worry; I explain it at the end.

Early yesterday I was contemplating the strange imbalance and injustice of two recent events in our lives. First, someone about 50, fairly tall, wearing a bright yellow jacket and a black baseball cap, described as 'homeless' and 'drunken,' had, under the relentless gaze of halogen lighting and CCTV cameras, on the city's busiest shopping street, in full view of witnesses, stolen our beloved, beautiful and extremely trusting Bavarian Bloodhound, Primrose.

We'd heard not a word about her since, other than rapidly alternating sympathetic and critical noises from our friends. Generally, these oscillating noises took the form of "Oh, no, not Primrose!" followed very soon after by "How could you be so stupid as to leave her even for a moment?" They mirrored our own feelings exactly. The emptiness of personal disaster wrapped in the shame of knowing one's own part in the event.

From the moment of her theft, we had come up against official indifference and bureaucratic black-holes (the police of Poland solve all problems with forms in triplicate) and commercial paranoia (for a week the managers of the shopping mall where she was stolen openly refused to help, insisting "It is not our responsibility that your dog was stolen," lest we turn around and sue them for their negligence (the dog was, as they knew, stolen from their property). They'd obviously been watching too much US-based (sur)reality TV. The idea of suing someone for negligence in Poland is absurd -- there are more fun ways to waste one's time and money).

We'd also discovered (not for the first time) that alongside the official and commercial unpleasantness of life in Poland, there is a parallel but very different world of deeply caring, truly humane people who think nothing of going far out of their way to help a stranger. These two worlds exist in such close proximity but sharp distinction that they have each become predictable even though they are largely incompatible (like quantum mechanics) -- one learns to step from one world into the other, but not always at the times one wishes to.

During office hours everyone with a job is an unsmiling Praetorian guard, protecting something deemed to be very important. While evenings and weekends, or away from work, everyone is a Good Samaritan or better. I view this as one of the scars of the communist era -- the grim face of officiousness, 'customer service' from a time without customers only supplicants -- but perhaps that is too simple. Nevertheless, it is reliably so. Doing anything official in this country will bring about a sudden awareness of life's capricious cruelty, followed by an ear-ringing spike in blood pressure. Things informal and serendipitous may, on the other hand, inspire one to stay in Poland, vacation amongst its lakes and forests, meet the girl of one's dreams, get married, have children, and buy a wonderful dog from a kindly old vet. Just as I did.

Contrasted to the theft of Primrose was an event far simpler but as telling: the non-theft of Ola's purse. On Thursday evenings Ola and I go to marriage counselling from 6:15 - 7:15. Our counsellor's office is in Wilda, south of where we live. An hour or so before our session Ola takes Kryzsiu (k'ZISH-oo, or k'SHE-shoe, or just SHISH-oo, depending on your hearing and capacity for transliteration) to her parents' apartment in Winogrady, near Cytadela (north of where we live), where babcia Krysia and dziadek Andzrej (grandmother Christine and grandfather Andy) spoil the little guy for a few hours. After our session Ola normally goes back to collect the young master, while I head home to get dinner ready.

This past Thursday we, instead, went to Winogrady together after our counselling session to get some things for Chris that had been left at Ola's parents' apartment -- winter clothing, a few toys and books, and some documents. There was enough stuff that, along with Chris and his baby carriage (one of these SUV-type all-terrain baby carriages that costs as much as a small car, but is much harder to park), we decided to take a taxi home rather than ride the trams and busses. (Now that Ola is in her final month of pregnancy, taxis are becoming the only practical choice more and more often.) We packed all the stuff into the taxi and got home just fine.

Then Ola realised that she did not have her purse. No wallet, no cell phone, no keys. Oh, cholera -- as they say in Poland when something really bad happens. Ola's response to moments like these is to have a first-class tizzy with all the fixin's -- tears, weeping and wailing, spinning about like a Dervish, gnashing of teeth, biting of nails, renting of garments, and a total lack of rationality. After one of these episodes had run its course, I got her to call the taxi company, as I was pretty sure the purse had been left in the taxi. Where else?

Fortunately, taxis in Poland are now all connected by radios, mobile phones and GPS systems. She called the taxi company. The taxi company called the taxi driver. The taxi company then called us back and told us the obvious: No purse anywhere. Sorry. This did not shock me: a taxi driver's life is a hard one.

Next set of calls -- to banks -- was one Ola stubbornly refused to make. Don't ask me why, since in Poland there is no automatic stop-loss for lost and stolen credit cards. I'm sure Kübler-Ross would say Ola had been in denial, grieving for her lost purse. She was clearly still suffering the effects of shock and tizzification. Give it a minute, I thought to myself. Get her to eat something. Try the usual soothing words, a kiss and a cuddle. By this time it was after 10 pm. It's amazing how time flies during a tizzy -- one's own or someone else's.

As I have almost certainly mentioned many times before (because I still don't believe it), we live on the fifth-floor (by American reckoning; fourth floor by European reckoning) of a 1970s socialist workers' block of flats without even a hint of an elevator. As a result of our altitude, people do not generally ring our doorbell; people we don't expect never do. It was therefore something of a shock when the doorbell rang at that exact moment -- like a deus ex machina in an old play. I spontaneously burst out, "I'll bet that's your purse!" This brought on another brief bout of tizzying, which ended abruptly when I opened the door and there stood a young couple, not Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons (both active in Poland, by the way), but holding out Ola's purse and asking if she were the owner. Cash intact, cards intact, iPhone intact, keys intact. They had seen us leave the purse behind when we packed the taxi, had then grabbed it and jumped in their car, chasing us all the way back to our home (the address for which they had on Ola's documents). They had then been stalled a while (enough time for a tizzy and a half) by the fact of notoriously poor parking in our neighbourhood. I gave them a handsome reward, but I am quite sure they didn't do it for that.

Why hadn't anyone behaved that way about Primrose, I wondered yesterday morning. Mornings have been my worst times for missing Primrose. I suspect it has had to do with the absence of that happy-making moment when Christopher awakens, climbs out of his bed, and toddles off to find his Primrose, shrieking with 110 decibel delight when he does so.

2000 Złotych Reward

We had put up posters all over the city. We had handed out hundreds of leaflets. We were offering a very sizable reward. I had twice visited the intensely depressing animal market in Sielanka, where we were told a thief might try to sell her. We had put ads in the newspapers and on the internet. We had wasted profligate amounts of time explaining things to the imbecilic police and arguing with the highly trained professionals of Stary Browar shopping centre. We had notified local vets, the kennel club, the hunting clubs (Primrose is, nominally, a highly desired hunting dog -- though the only things she has ever hunted are the ducks along the Warta, which she has never come close to catching), and everyone else we could think of. We had even confronted the only suspect the police had turned up -- obviously one of their usual suspects, a truly pathetic drunken loser from the poorest part of the poorest street in central Poznań. And all we had got from it were weariness, crankiness, and a need for marriage counselling.

Today had been a fairly typical Polish Saturday -- up to a point. After Ola phoned a shop on the other side of Poznań to confirm that it had exactly what we wanted, in the colour we wanted, and that the thing would do what we wanted in the way we wanted when used in conjunction with something we already owned, we trekked off to the shop only to discover that the girl on the phone had simply said yes in answer to every question put to her. In Poland this is called customer service. Normally, I would have dusted off my highest dudgeon and flown it around the shop on the end of a long pole (excuse pun), but it was a rainy Saturday, this sort of nonsense is actually a fairly normal occurrence in Poland, and we were all weary and woebegone. We went back to the tram stop to wait for a tram home.

The No. 17 came and went while Ola was jabbering on her cell phone. OK, no problem. There will be another. When it came, I interrupted her phone conversation to say, peevishly, "Are we going home, or what?" Her one word reply, wide-eyed and quasi-hysterical, was, "Primrose!" Unlike my wife, I initially adopt a spirit of skeptical detachment at moments like these. I then go through my lawyer's rosary of Who, What, Where, When, and Why, while trying to figure out just how the unexpected found me without warning. My questions to Ola got few answers, because Ola's questions to the man who phoned her were so different to mine. Fortunately, she had the caller's phone number and his address. But not his name! Nor how he had found our phone number. Nor why he thought the dog belonged to us. Nor how or when he had acquired the dog. In fact, after fully fifteen minutes on the phone, other than the phone number (which a mobile phone records automatically, thank God) and the address, which can be misheard or misremembered), Ola had learned next to nothing. Still, it was the first positive or substantive call we'd received since the night of 19 October, when Primrose had been taken.

The man on the other end of the phone had been thorough enough to ask Ola loads of sensible questions, attempting to make sure we were the dog's true owners. What was the tattoo number in the dog's ear? (Very difficult to read, but it happens to be Y152.) What colour was the collar she'd been wearing? Was she overweight or underwieght? Could we show him her birth certificate and her medical book -- the sorts of documents only a legitimate owner would have? So while Ola hadn't asked any questions, the man had done a manly job of things. Somehow that gave me a lot of hope; because of his thoroughness and care for details, my skepticism slowly melted and turned to excitement. We went home on the next tram to get her papers. And then we headed over to Łazarz (the neighbourhood where Ola grew up, and the one in which we were about to be reunited with Primrose). Łazarz translates to Lazarus, which seems somehow fitting.

Primrose and her new Uncle Zbigniew

The man who rescued Primrose and returned her to us is a handsome, stocky, 53 year old, round-headed Pole with a good pokerface who returned to Poland five in 2005 after more than twenty years in Spain and some time before that in the USA. He had fled communism when called up for the army and had become a refugee, first in the USA, then in Spain. I wondered what had drawn him to Spain. It was a long story, he said. (When I hear a man say that, I believe the probability is that he means: I thought it was love; it wasn't; I'd rather not talk about it.) He now runs a travel bureau in an odd backwater of Poznan, specialising in Iberian holidays, plus a little pension specialising in tight-budget visitors to the Poznań Trade Fairs. He has the luxury of an office with a working fireplace. We sat together there, amidst memorabilia of his years in Spain, talking about dogs, drinking Polish beer and Albanian brandy. He also had the one and only Primrose -- a fact confirmed as soon as we saw her and she saw us. Jumps, licks, barks, laughs, much wagging of tails. The only reason Chris didn't yelp his ear-splittingest yelps is that he fallen asleep in his baby carriage just before we arrived -- young children have the most exquisite timing.

Zbigniew Oleszczyk-Molenda (God knows what Spaniards did in pronouncing such a name, but presumably the Molenda part of it was easier) is truly a gent of the old school. He had, we soon learned, spent nearly as much time and effort finding us as we had in trying to find him and Primrose. He'd eventually turned up one of our notices posted on the Internet. He'd had Primrose since 20 October, the day after her abduction, had recognised that her true owners must we sick without her. He'd bought her from a homeless man in the Stary Rynek for 50 złotych (about $18). He'd fed her on roast chicken breasts and good quality dried food, bought her a new collar and lead, bathed her (no kidding), walked her, taken her on a fishing trip and to the woods for play time, and had even taken her to the vet for anti-worming pills, a flea and tick treatment, and a microchip scan.

Why hadn't the vet turned up the fact of her having been stolen? Why hadn't the microchip told him how to find us? Because he had taken her to a vet in Warsaw, a friend of his. We hadn't notified the vets of Warsaw, thinking it more likely that she would be taken west, probably to Germany. Zbigniew and the vet had looked for, but had never located, the microchip -- supposedly in the left side of her neck (where EU law says it should be, even though the usual Polish practice is to put it in the upper left shoulder). I know it was put in because I was there when it was -- but why it didn't show on the scan is something I hope to find out this coming week. Micro-chipping costs about $200, so there is, sadly, an incentive to cheat, planting a dummy (or nothing) and saving the chip for another insertion.

It became clear that, from his two weeks of caring for her, Mr Oleszczyk-Molenda had fallen in love with our Primrose. I was even a bit sorry to have come between them, for his affections were reciprocated. He couldn't praise her enough -- telling us what we already knew, that she's beautiful, intelligent, loving, patient, clever and very special. He mentioned that she slept in the bed with him -- something she does with us, too. Then he told us that he'd had a similar Bavarian Bloodhound (of which he showed us photos), which three years ago had been murdered by Polish peasants in an eastern borderlands village because they thought she had been killing their chickens and ducks. His heart had been broken, he said. And yet his tone was one of understanding and foregiveness. "That part of Poland is like 100 years ago. They don't know. A dog to them is nothing special. A duck is special. A duck they can sell or eat." It had taken him three years to get over the death of his Beta, of whom he showed us pictures (she looked very much like Primrose, the same distinctive colour, the same searching eyes), but now he said he was ready for another dog as much like Beta as possible.

He didn't want the reward we had posted. He wouldn't even accept payment for the expenses he'd incurred. What he wants, he says, is one of Primrose's puppies. He has certainly earned it. Now we must go through the business of finding a boyfriend for the old girl (who has not had puppies before). In Poland, if you want a pedigree dog to have papers, this involves rather a lot of paperwork (no surprise there). It also requires that she have been competed in at least three approved dog shows and have received good marks in each one.

The three dog shows have already been done, thank God. (It's a schlep to these dog shows, which start at the crack of dawn.) Breeding her may, however, require a hip x-ray to measure her degree of hip displasia, a condition that seems to affect many German breeds, most notably Alsatians. In severe cases displasia can eventually become crippling and life-shortening. The best breeders require an x-ray, because they don't want their lines afflicted with serious displasia. (Breeders receive payment for services usually as a claim on one of the pups (worth as much as 500-1000 Euros). They want to claim relations to as many champions as possible, and don't want a pup with displasia showing up in their stud book -- very bad for business. They may, however, waive the pup and take money instead -- in which case any latent or actual displasia will not be much of a problem for them.) We know that Primrose has a slight degree of displasia, because it's visible on examination. (Her rear legs are very slightly knock-kneed.) We hope it won't cause any problems for breeding her, and we take comfort from the fact that in her three shows she scored two very goods and one excellent (gold medal), which should not have been the case if her displasia were serious. The problem with these things in Poland, as with many things in this pervasively corrupt country, is that all the dog show judges are in cahoots with all the breeders and trainers, so they routinely give marks that have nothing to do with the actual quality of the dog in question. At one show we went to, in Wrocław, a single breeder (also a prominent vet) won four Best of Breed (for four different breeds, of course) and one Best of Show. Asking someone how this was possible, we were told what we expected to hear: she's a very important person in dog circles.

Now we have our Primrose back. She's asleep on our bed at the moment, right where we would expect her to be. Zbigniew has offered to babysit (I mean, of course, doggy-sit) whenever we like. I think we have made a new friend. And we finally have the incentive we need to get on with breeding Primrose, something we have long thought about doing, but always put off. And so our family is still growing, since, in addition to the impending arrival of Meagan, we will keep one of Primrose's pups. Husband and wife, two children, one of each sex, and two Bavarian Bloodhounds -- sounds like the perfect family.

The most patient of dogs

What did Christopher do when he finally awoke to see Primrose staring at him? He didn't believe it, of course. Until she licked him. And then he knew. He hasn't stopped being delighted since. Poor Primrose; he does test her patience, but so far she is coping. (I apologize for the poor quality of the photo -- I took it with my phone in a very dark room. Still, you can see that Chris treats Primrose as his personal footrest.)

The reference to Clarence's wings? It's from a Frank Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart -- It's A Wonderful Life. In the film Clarence is a rather hapless guardian angel, fairly long in the tooth, who has yet to earn his wings. Jimmy Stewart, playing a character named George Bailey, gives him plenty of chances. By the end of the film, Clarence has performed all the necessary good deeds, and George Bailey has triumphed over adversity. If you like sickly sweet endings, this is the movie for you. It is frequently shown at Christmas time. Its greatest moments, in my view, involve Lionel Barrymore, who plays the villain, an Ebenezer Scrougian character intent on ruining George's life and everyone else's too. But we have a sickly sweet ending of our own: come over to our place and meet Primrose -- all will be clear. As for me, if there are angels, and if my vote counts at all, then Zbigniew Oleszczyk-Molenda has more than earned his wings. We could not be more grateful.

Why am I here?

2010-11-02T23:13:00.000+01:00

Two of my good friends are lately reminding me that I am here, first, to write books and, second, to learn Polish; but in any case not to find a stolen dog or any of the other things I have been labouring at since we arrived in June. This is true, and I have no answer to these friends except to say that I have only fallen behind schedule, I have not given up.

Today I went to the library for the first time in weeks. I worked on Polish.

Emails with an old friend...

2010-11-02T15:11:00.003+01:00

Given how peculiar, pugnacious and grumpy I can be, and how judgemental, it sometimes amazes me that I have many friends, let alone many very good friends of long standing. The things that get me into hot water most are my odd views on such matters as discretion, decorum, privacy, good manners, and so on. I tend to think my good buddy Diogenes of Sinope had it right: most of these things are impediments to good living (meaning living as a good person) rather than means to accomplish a good life. I am aware that almost no one I know agrees with me. It does cause friction.

However, as I have said at other times, I try consciously to live as a good person, which I consider to be far more important and possibly more difficult than being a nice person. Sadly, at times I fail to respect the possibility of being good and nice at one in the same time. I am suspicious of nice, which results from appearances, and try to base my judgements on evidence of true goodness, which I believe results solely from actions. Intentions are a mid-point that one can argue over forever.

I have good friends. My three greatest friends come from my first couple of years at university, and so we have been friends since 1974 at the latest. There are also my cousin Chris (for whom our Chris is named) and his wife Maureen, with whom I became friends in about 1981. Until recently (and, I hope, again in the future), there has been the extraordinary if implausible Dr Fisher, whom I first met in 1988. He is an extremely good person (though very difficult to know in any degree because of his extreme self-containment), but also, as I recently explained in this blog, he has in my view become too complacent, hypocritical and faux middle-class of late, and therefore impossible for me to embrace. Perhaps one of us will change, or mellow, and then we will become active and warm friends again. I hope so. For now we remain potential or cool friends. All these people occupy complex and important periods of my life, and all of them have taught me more than I can even acknowledge to myself, let alone to them or others. There are also former girlfriends who have, each in her own way, brought me to the place I occupy today. I think particularly of Suzanne E., Erica R., Phoebe Z. and by no means least, Aine T. Without the wisdom, and often very selfless love, of each of these women, I doubt I would be a husband or father today.

One of the results of my bi-polar disorder is that I do not trust my own ability to navigate. From this I have developed the habit (some would say compulsion) of sharing everything with everyone. I turn, and have always turned, to these people to help me calibrate my internal gyroscope and, so far at least, they have always taken the time and care to do so. Even so, we are not always on speaking terms, because we do occasionally drive one another to distraction (or worse). I am, to put it mildly, a demanding person.

The theft of Primrose has brought forth various responses from my closest friends. Not a peep from Ron, possibly because his own world is, I feel sure, still as seismically active as can be, so that he has no time for others, especially those far away. He is a caring, but not a sentimental person, and partly because of allergies that he has had nearly all his life, he has never been especially close to pets as far as I know, so he may not understand the feelings involved. Obvious love and support have come in large doses from Mark and Mimi in California -- dog lovers of the old school, whose generations of yellow Labradors have always been full members of the family, sleeping on (or in) the big bed. Empathy and advice from Peter in New York, a Siamese cat person but a wise old salt all the same.

The following extract of my recent correspondence with Peter gives a picture of how it is to have (and to be) old friends.

Peter (in response to posting of "Just another Sunday..."): This sucks. If you can afford it, find the best Bavarian bloodhound you can, check her/him out, and buy him or her. Do it to distract yourself, and the three of you can start anew. the whole matter breaks my heart. I would be beside myself--hard to avoid cliches in this dept.

Andrew: I don't see how we can just replace Primrose -- she means too much to us, and we are sure she is out there somewhere, probably not all that far away. What if we got one, and then Primrose showed up? Two Bavarian Bloodhound bitches would be a bit much, especially as bitches who haven't known each other since puppyhood generally don't get along at all. It's a tiny apartment, and Meagan's arrival is sure to make it tinier.

Most decisively, we have not given up believing (more than just hoping) that we will find Primrose or she will find us. We have put ads in the papers, ads on the websites, notified the vets, notified the border control, notified the hunting organisations, notified the national police (arrogant), notified the city police (stupid), notified the kennel clubs, put up loads of posters and handed out loads of leaflets. Our adrenaline is up, as it has to be in order to get all this done; flushed with adrenaline, we naturally believe that our efforts will be rewarded. It isn't beyond reason that they will be.

But the road is rough, and we are worn out, emotionally as much as physically. Everytime Ola sees a particular photo of Primrose (one where she is looking at the camera) she starts crying. I've cried too, but mostly I just clench my teeth and tell myself that when I find the guy who took her I am going to beat the living shit out of him. Ola and I are not bickering quite as much as a week ago, and are slowly learning how to work together, though it requires some extra effort from both of us. I am grateful that Ola is even willing to try, for I see that I can be a real asshole when I am under emotional pressure or working without enough sleep.

We certainly are not going to get a new puppy when our next child is due on 3 December. Even I am not that crazy. But all of us miss Primrose very much -- it doesn't seem to diminish much, let alone stop.

Peter: I understand your points, which you make with great eloquence. Cats are notorious for not getting along, and yet I replaced one who fell out our kitchen window one dreadful hot night in 1991 with the current Pippa, whom her stepsister, Portia, embraced. They lived inseparably until Portia succumbed to life's difficulties in 1998 -- probably from the effects of bites from snakes and spiders in Nicaragua. My point is, vixens and bitches have great tolerance for each other. I would be over the moon if Primrose were to reappear, but if she doesn't, I will advance my argument further: the appearance of a puppy along with Meagan would provide the three of you with great joy -- and a bit of chaos.

That stated, you must of course do what you think wisest. It is the easiest thing in the world to dole out advice 4,000 miles (I think that's about right) away.

Whatever else happens, I hope my son and daughter grow up to be blessed with friends as good as those I am blessed with -- and if those friends should happen to nice into the bargain, I will (perhaps grudgingly) not object.

One month from tomorrow...

2010-11-02T10:14:00.003+01:00

Today is 2nd November, election day in America -- and likely to be a massacre of the Democrats, though what is less clear is why. I am increasingly glad to be out of America, since I can no longer feel proud of what it does or what it stands for.

One month from tomorrow our new child, Meagan Athena Boudica Nausikaa (how's that for a name?), is scheduled to arrive. None of us is ready. So much to do. Many things to buy.

Making a six egg omelet

2010-11-02T09:48:00.000+01:00

As the old cliché goes, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. One sure way to break eggs is to leave a carton of them too near the edge of the kitchen counter, and then turn away for a second as a very curious young fellow decides to investigate the matter. This happened yesterday, the first day we did not spend almost completely on finding Primrose. The fact is, we don't know how much more we can do. We have tried all we have thought of. We continue, but now mostly we repeat things we have already tried. And we begin to lose hope -- knowing that the chances of finding her now have shifted from the possible to the miraculous. Christopher is, as always, a source of incredible inspiration and wonderment. Last night, he and Ola and I played together and read and wrestled and tickled for nearly two hours before he went to sleep -- it was the most wonderful two hours I can remember in a long time.

Just another Sunday

2010-10-31T23:15:00.002+01:00

Today I went to Sielanka animal market again. I'd forgotten that the clocks of Central Europe changed last night, so I got up at 5 am, thinking it was 6 am. As soon as I realized it was an hour earlier than expected, all the energy drained out of me and I wanted to return to bed. Just for an hour, I told myself. I set my alarm and went back to sleep. My alarm didn't wake me. I don't know why. No doubt it was something I did or didn't do, but whatever it was, I overslept until after 9. I did eventually make it down to Sielanka at about 10. It was the same sad scene as last week, though there were fewer people because many people had left Poznan for tomorrow's observance of All Saints' Day, for which one traditionally goes to one's ancestral home (i.e. where one's parents and grandparents are buried)..

Still, the scene at Sielanka was sad because there is so little need for it. People sell the puppies and kittens of their family pets rather than paying to have their pets spayed or neutered. Pure economics? I doubt it. Somehow the dictatorial Church's edicts on going forth and multiplying apply, in Poles' thinking, to animals as well as humans. Poles would rather their little darlings had more little darlings.

However, Sielanka is not a happy Dog Show of superior specimens. Many of the animals for sale are loved, but quite a few already show signs of being unwanted and unloved. They are problems to be dealt with -- and if you make a bit of money, then good for you. None of these critters will ever win best of breed or best of show -- almost none of them (make that 0 percent) has papers. A few have been to the vet and been inoculated. This weekend the favoured breeds by number were Labradors (of which I saw several beautiful examples -- yellow, brown, and black), Yorkshire terriers (complete with the usual ballet tutus, clown suits and other nonsense), and Cocker Spaniels. This week also saw a fair number of Rottweilers. I played for a while with two possibly pure-bred German Shorthaired Pointers that melted my heart. Had we a garden I might well have brought them both home -- just 200 zł each, and cute as could be.

But again there no Primrose. Where can she be? 2000 zlotych is a big reward. It's two and a half times what she cost. It's the monthly salary of a secretary, a busdriver, a primary school teacher. In fact the amount of the reward seems to surprise people -- I imagine some of them wonder, "Why so much?" They probably think she must have swallowed a diamond ring.

Sometimes, I just don't get this country or the people in it.

Compensation

2010-10-30T23:35:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, through means that I am still unclear about, Ola received the name and address of a man whom the police suspect of stealing Primrose. Ola didn't receive his name and address from the police, of course -- they aren't permitted to share that sort of information, but they also are temperamentally disinclined to share any information at all (rather like their precursors, the Polish communist era secret police). Excuse me, can you tell me the time? Yes, but why do you want to know? What is your name?

It was about 4.30 or 5.00 in the afternoon. I was putting up posters in Wilda, a grotty part of Poznań that is, in spots, becoming gentrified (and where gentrified is quite attractive). I had just seen a man walking a beautiful posokowiec bawarski bitch the same size and colour as Primrose -- but it wasn't Primrose. About the same time, I received an SMS message from Ola on my mobile phone saying that she was going to speak with the guy who had been identified as the likely culprit. Part of me wanted to tell her not to go -- accusing a drunken thief of being a drunken thief can get one a black eye or worse. On the other hand, I have for years been encouraging Ola to be more adventuresome and assertive, and this seemed like a very bold and positive, if slightly reckless, move on her part. So I simply texted back "Wow."

She went. Brave woman. The man lives about 12 minutes' walk from us, in what may be the grubbiest street in our part of town (ul. Rybaki), in what must be some sort of social housing. The facade of the building dates from the late 19th century; there is an archway originally meant for horses and carriages, I suppose; once through the archway the building appears to date from the 1960s; there are a series of four courtyards. Our man lived all the way back in the last entry of the last courtyard.

He wasn't home when Ola went. I breathed a sigh of relief when I learned that. Once I got back from Wilda I decided to go for myself. As all of you know, I am a pugnatious character by nature, and I somehow had the idea that everything would go my way and I'd be a hero. In fact, I got nowhere. He was home, but he was separated from me by a locked, intercom-controlled, entrance-way door. He sounded drunk, slurring his words into vocalic mush at about 7 in the evening. There was a woman's voice, too, which sounded harsh and angry. That was as far as I got. They neither spoke nor understood English. I didn't hear Primrose on the other end of the intercom, which was a clue, since in our flat as soon as someone rang the intercom she would start singing like a prima donna.

We went back this afternoon, together. Chris came too, in his baby carriage. Ola went upstairs to speak to the drunk, while I stayed down and amused the wee man. As we knew, the police had come yesterday and had led him away in handcuffs for an interrogation downtown. He was resentful, and he tried to extort a small amount of money from us to keep him in beer for another hour or two. He even threatened Ola with a lawsuit for defamation. Before you ask what to me seems like an obvious question -- how had Ola defamed this particularly unimpressive specimen of homo sapiens? or put more generally, how does one defame a person whose reputation is all negative already? -- I should point out that in Poland the laws of defamation are so bizarre that had the man been able to find his way to a lawyer, and had he been able to lay out the facts without pissing or vomiting all over himself in the process, he might well have hit the jackpot, though probably a very small jackpot. Of course, he was bluffing. He wanted to settle the case for ten zlotych, about $3.25, enough for three good beers or four bad ones at the corner liquor store. He claimed he deserved "compensation" for all he had been through with the police, whom he compared to the Gestapo. I said that if he deserved compensation he deserved it from the police, not from us. I further said that if he found and returned our dog he would receive 2,000 złotych, the reward we were offering (one month's salary for someone at the level of postman or bus driver), but until then he would receive nothing. He whined a bit more about compensation and beer and how much he loved dogs. The whole neighbourhood knows he loves dogs, he grumbled.

Sorry, no photo

2010-10-28T23:31:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, in the midst of trying to find Primrose, arguing with Ola, and just generally feeling cranky and miserable, there was a moment of perfect enlightenment.

Chris had just had a bath. He had been dried off but was not yet re-nappied or clothed. I was picking out what clothes to put on him. He was standing naked in the middle of the new royal blue rug we'd recently bought for his room.

And then, a surprise to me and him both, he peed right in the middle of the carpet, looking impishly like the famous Belgian fountain boy. I started laughing. It was the perfect thing for him to do -- christening his room, so to speak, and reminding me of the inherent simplicity and fallibility of life at the same time. Kids teach us so much (if we let them and have time to pay attention), most of which we once knew but have worked hard to forget. Thank god for these wee reminders (forgive pun).

I wish I'd had a camera. But I didn't. So you will just have to imagine.

Emptiness and pain

2010-10-27T13:55:00.001+02:00

I have endured the loss of both my parents (only one of whom I loved), and of several of the people who have mattered most in my life -- teachers, mentors, guiding lights of various intensities. I have had only a few people I know of my own age die, and so far none of them has been a close friend. As far as I can tell with relatively little experience, death is a pain nothing like this -- for it is final and irrefutable. That is both its curse and its blessing. There is no possibility of return. It's cold and cruel, but with time it recedes.

This, rather, is some intimation of what the McCanns must feel over the abduction of their daughter Madeleine. Of course, it can't be the same -- yet, at the moment, I cannot imagine a feeling that is worse. Also, I should admit that at the time the case was incessantly in the news I thought something was strange about the McCann's obsessiveness and it's world-wide scope, something undignified and slightly off-kilter. I am sure people feel the same about me. However, now the McCanns' unending aches and moans are all too reasonable.

As the McCann's, through their own naivete, allowed their daughter to be abducted, I, through my naivete and tendency to rush through things, allowed Primrose to be abducted. I bear the responsibility for putting her in harm's way, a fact that magnifies the pain with an admixture of guilt and shame. Was I reckless? I thought not -- and now I think otherwise. Yet people tie up their dogs in that exact spot all the time.

Without Primrose, our family is incomplete. Christopher doesn't laugh in the same way or at the same times or as fully. I don't go for long walks to watch my glorious, ever-playful beast course across the wetlands near the Warta in pursuit of ducks she never catches. Ola cries, is sullen, is silent -- a black hole of sadness. Today for the first time, I too cried. Ola and I argue and fight and argue and fight, each thinking the other could and should be doing something more to find our amazing Primrose, a creature more bi-lingual than I will ever be, more trusting than was good for her, more loving than I have words for, more beautiful than any other creature I have ever been close to, including my very beautiful wife and son, who after all are merely human. Primrose transcended the obvious categories. She most definitely was not "merely dog." Everyday I spent with her she revealed to me something new about the universe and those who inhabit it. I am neither kidding nor exaggerating. Those who watch animals closely are often in awe of them -- I was in awe of Primrose. Her grace while running was jaw-dropping. Her playfulness heart-filling.

I am angry, frustrated and incredulous at the callousness and pettiness of officials who, in theory, are there to help. Unable to find help, I fantasise a grim revenge of finding the dog-thief and gutting him like a fish, after first breaking each of his foul larcenous fingers, one by one, and stamping on his mangled hands until he tells me where my dog is. It's only fantasy, for now. I understand how soldiers whose comrades have been killed or captured will sometimes unhinge and go on revenge binges, for I am pretty close to the same feeling. It certainly doesn't help that in my rushing around I have forgotten to take my medicines for two days, and now, as a result, suffer the bizarrely disorienting headache associated with withdrawal from the drug I take (including sound effects approximating the sound of a Jedi light sabre), and the painfully clenched jaw of a natural born psychokiller. It seems as though no one in any sort of position to actually do anything useful has any desire to do so, that there is a massive, cold-hearted bureaucracy arrayed against us, and that Cover Your Ass has replaced Arbeit Macht Frei as the cynical order of the day -- not only for the earthworms making policy at Stary Browar HQ, but for the cockroaches interpreting policy in the Polish police. And if someone wants to tell me that it's unseemly to compare our family pain to the pain of those who went through concentration camps, I will ignore that person, since it will be clear that he or she doesn't know the truth. In fact the concentration camps were meant to break people, to break their will, their commitments, their loyalty and humanity. By their surviving inmates they were almost always described in infernal terms -- and two of the most infernal things about them were their arbitrariness and their unpredictability. The sentences were always indeterminate from the inmate's perspective, though the security apparatus often knew roughly for how long a person would be incarcerated. though this information was never given to the inmate. That, then, is the basis for my comparison -- the arbitrariness, unpredictability, and indeterminacy of this punishment are as close to a stay in Dachau as I hope I ever experience. Arbeit Macht Frei is one of the great lapidary ironies of modern history. It feels true, it seems true, it seems as thought it ought to be true. But it isn't always or necessarily true. All the work we have done to find Primrose will not necessarily set her or us free. It may only serve to exhaust and embitter us further.

Today, in desperation, we had a meeting with a private detective. It was Ola's idea, about which I was skeptical, mostly owing to cost. But fortunately, the man in question, with whom we spent an hour, was honest enough to admit that the role he could play would be very limited, amounting to making suggestions, which we would have to press forward on our own as we thought best. He had no particular contacts within the police force that he could exploit (though he had been a policeman). He didn't know anyone sufficiently important in any of the private security firms to call in any favors. And he seemed reluctant to go too far with this whole project lest he become known as the Ace Ventura Pet Detective of Poznan. I can understand, I suppose, but all I want is the safe return of Primrose. He was not suggesting anything of which Ola and I had not already thought or been told by others. We left no wiser than we were when we went in, except that he told us the police are obligated to give us the video, and photocopied for us the law that says so.

We then went to the police station for the third or fourth time. Again the time-wasting silliness of having to spell our names (a few times), Primrose's name (a few times), and go through the main details of the case (a few times) because no one will give us the Case Number or the name of the lead investigating officer. These are state secrets that only police officers are allowed to know. Unmedicated and fuming at the entire world, I took Chris and went around the corner to see our friend (with whom Chris always has great fun) "Auntie" Marta Bartkowska, a talented architect in the making. Marta has a beautiful little boy of her own, Kuba (Jakub), now five, and has an easy, energetic, uncomplicated way with children. She's full of sparkle and joy, and they respond in kind. We, on the other hand, are cold and grey -- God knows the effect we are having on Christopher. But we can't help it.

The police may be obligated to give us the video, but they didn't give us the video. Some "out clause" in the statute says they don't have to if they think it is not in the interest of solving the case. In other words, the police are entirely unaccountable. How it helps the case for the police to do nothing, and to actively impede our efforts to do something, is beyond me. It makes no sense.

Fortunately, Stary Browar executives have had a change of heart. Not completely, but mostly. They still won't allow us to have a copy of the video, but they did allow us to see the video. It contained some clues that need to be followed up. We are doing our best, with very little help. The help we are receiving, and for which we are most grateful comes from all sorts of sources, some of the quite unexpected. One of the most helpful is a Stary Browar employee who is clearly risking his job by helping us -- for him procedures are intended to help, not hinder, and things have to make sense or they aren't worth doing. I predict he will have a difficult but very worthwhile life.

We've decided that instead of trying to appeal to people's better nature, we will appeal to their greed. So we've posted a reward of 2,000 złotych for Primrose's safe return. Two thousand złotych is what Ola made in a month as a teacher -- it isn't much in dollars or euros, but it's quite a lot for the sort of person who took our dog (presumed to be homeless or at least poor) and his friends.

I must go to Stary Browar and hand out leaflets. I think this disaster may end up ruining my marriage and therefore my relationship with my son. It's unbelievable how much a dog can enter into the very heart of one's life.

Animal Market

2010-10-24T22:54:00.000+02:00

Sunday there is a market for animals of all sorts at the far southern end of Poznan, an area called Dębiec that looks a bit like a low rise South Bronx, if you can imagine that. It is a poor area. Nothing is beautiful. Shopfronts are either covered in metal anti-burglar grates or are boarded up or are smashed up. The market, a bus ride away from the center of Dębiec, is called Sielanka.

Let's call her Beatrice

Several people told us to check there, because it's an obvious place to try to sell a stolen dog. Most of the dogs have no papers, and no one is going to ask many questions. One person I've spoken with while looking for Primrose told me that she had had a dog similar to Primrose stolen and had been able to recover it there. The person who told me that is a homeless person, what in New York would be called a bag lady. I don't know her name, though she knows mine (I don't remember telling her, but possibly Ola did). Until I know her name, I'll call her Beatrice, after Dante's more famous (and more beautiful) guide. No cerberus in sight, but she has a large Alsatian male crossed with something else, and a medium sized wire-haired female whose lineage I can't even guess at. Beatrice, cheerful but wily (as her condition demands of her), often begs in the street in front of the entrance to the Stary Brewer shopping centre from which Primrose was stolen. Perhaps I've watched too many episodes of Law and Order, but somehow I have the idea that it's people like Beatrice who pay the most attention to things like stolen dogs. They live in the street and are likely to notice what others never do. That's my theory, at least, though I admit that a lot of street people are quite whacky and perhaps inclined to notice things that aren't there, while overlooking the things that are. I have also been talking (in my pidgen Polish) to janitors, street sweepers, shop assistants, street kids, punks, and various homeless and nearly homeless people, cadgers of cigarettes, beggars of small change. Someone saw something. In the one frame of the surveillance video that I have been allowed to see, there are people standing about. Where are they now that I need to talk to them?

A long way from home

The bag lady offered to take me to Sielanka, saying she had to go there anyway because someone there owed her money. So I met her at 7 this morning at the tram stop. It's a long tram ride to Dębiec, I discovered. And then a long wait for the bus to Sielanka. I had forgotten to bring a hat, and it was cold. The bag lady had her two dogs with her. She's not very big, and the Alsatian, named King, was playing her up, so I took him. The female dog, named Martinka, was a perfect sweetie. We all got to the Sielanka market at about 8.30. It's not only an animal market, I discovered, but a general market as well. Fruits and vegetables, flowers and artificial flowers, various dry goods and household supplies, lots of pet supplies, and so on. Some of the animals on sale are probably intended as food rather than pets. There were thousands of chickens, some rather exotic, but most not. And geese, and ducks, and quite a few turkeys looking thinner than their American cousins.

There were rabbits, and fish, and exotic birds including some stunningly beautiful birds that I would ignorantly call parrots, but that are probably something else -- pale pink with bright red stripes. There were a few cats, but not as many as I expected. There was someone selling lamas, and someone selling very small ponies of the type one might see in a petting zoo or a provincial circus. There were thousands of pigeons for sale -- they had a pavilion all to themselves. There were a small number of cuddly rodents -- guinea pigs, and that sort of thing.

And there were dogs. Mostly puppies, some not really old enough to be separated from their mothers. They were held under coats to keep warm, or in blanket or towel-lined cardboard cartons tied up with string. A few people were clearly not new to this; they had signs, provided real information, and in some cases could show lineage and provide papers. There were just two Posokowiec Bawarski puppies, two brothers not older than eight weeks. There were no other hunting dogs that I saw, unless you count want to count Alsatians, Labradors, and cocker spaniels, which I wouldn't. Most Labradors these days are family dogs; and in Poland most hunting is done in forests and not on wetlands. There was something that looked like a German shorthaired pointer puppy, very cute and floppy in the way of puppies, with enormous paws and dangling ears, but whose seller insisted it was a Viszla, which is an Hungarian pointer that looks like a copper-coloured Weimaraner. Not a chance the dog was a Viszla, but I have no idea what it was.

What there wasn't was Primrose.

We have procedures....

2010-10-23T13:26:00.002+02:00

Today the nightmare of our dog's abduction was raised to new levels of intensity by the callousness of the mid-level executives of the Stary Browar shopping centre in Poznan, from the steps of which Primrose was abducted on Tuesday night. And by the absurd disorganisation and defensiveness of the Polish police.

But first, so you can connect the dots, a bit of interim background. Primrose was abducted Tuesday night sometime between 7.30 and 8.15. She was on the property of the Stary Browar shopping centre at the time, tied up to a sturdy metal pole. There were, and still are, no notices saying "Please do not tie your dog here -- we can not be responsible for dogs left here," or anything similar. Why am I telling you this? Because the executives of Stary Browar have made it relevant.

The place were Primrose was tied up was well lit and directly covered by at least one CCTV security camera, possibly two. It seemed the safest place to tie her up, and since the area is full of foot traffic and the security levels are high, there appeared no cause for worry. People tie their dogs up there or nearby all the time. Who, one has to wonder, would be reckless enough to steal anything in those conditions? Well, we know someone was that reckless, and there is a video of him doing it, even though at the moment we still don't know who it was or what he did with Primrose.

Enough background. Stary Browar gave the security camera footage to the police on Tuesday night about 10 pm. I know because I was there when they did. Ola and I then went to the police station on Wednesday morning, for a follow-up interview, to which we had been expressly invited. We said we would be there about 10, but didn't get there until 11.00 -- we are rarely very punctual, but our increasing tardiness lately comes from Ola's being increasingly pregnant and Chris being increasingly demanding. I have not learned how to compensate. Setting the alarm clock an hour earlier doesn't really seem like an option. We would just sleep through it.

It hardly mattered. Once we got to the police station we were told there would be a two hour wait. It was a cold, windy day so we went to a cafe up the street and somehow managed to entertain Christopher until it was time to return to the police station. When we finally had our interview it was surreal, as I've come to expect from the Polish police. The woman conducting the interview knew nothing at all about the case, even though a police statement had been given the night before. "Oh really, and where was it given?" At Stary Browar, the scene of the crime. "That doesn't count, then. A statement must be given in the station." What do you mean, 'it doesn't count?' "Procedures say that statements must be given in the station. But don't worry, that is what you are doing now." But now is more than 14 hours later. "Those are procedures." That pretty much sums it up -- procedures but no results. She also asked if we had the remainder of the dog's leash, and any other physical evidence. Yes, the police took them last night. "Oh really."

I asked when we could see the videos of the crime. "There are videos? No one has mentioned videos." The police took a copy of them with them last night. "Oh really. Nothing is noted." You said there isn't a file, so how could anything be noted? "Exactly." But there are videos -- the Stary Browar security team have videos. And they gave copies to the police last night. "We will need to look into it."

When will you look into it? Every hour that goes by reduces our chances of finding our dog. "We have procedures. We are professionals. You must speak to the person who is in charge of the case." Who is in charge of the case? We thought you were in charge of the case. "Me? No, no. Who told you that? I don't do this type of case." So who is in charge? "I can't tell you who is in charge. You must call this number." She wrote down a telephone number and gave it to Ola. What is the case number, so that we can refer to it when we call? "Only the person who is in charge of the case can tell you that."

The telephone number the police woman gave to Ola is a number that never answers. People think Franz Kafka was a surrealist when he wrote about Central Europe -- no, he had it dead right. Every detail spot on and burnished to a high lustre.

That eye-opening experience chewed up about 4 hours altogether, more if you count travel time. At the end we were all despondent, Ola was angry, I was angrier, and Chris was ready to tear the place apart, partly because he hadn't had a nap.

The next day (Thursday) I went back to Stary Browar to see what I could learn, if anything. From the one frame of the video that I had been shown by one of the security staff (he said he wasn't allowed to show me the video, but could show me one frame), about all one could tell about the thief was that he was tall, thin, and wearing a distinctively bright yellow jacket and what looked like blue jeans. The real key is the bright yellow jacket. They aren't in fashion. One sees something similar perhaps once a week. Imagine my heart-racing surprise when I saw a person fitting the sketchy description coming out of Stary Browar just as I was going in.

I went immediately to the information desk, told the girl (the same one who had been there the night before) that I thought I had just seen the thief and asked her to call the police. Poor dear, she appears to suffer from some form of Addison's Disease, because every time she is faced with a stressful event she more or less turns to jello and is unresponsive. After a few moments she woke up and finally she called the police. Twenty to thirty minutes later two separate units of police arrived in two vehicles, one a squad car and one a Canine Team van. Of course, by then the possible thief had disappeared. I spent 45 minutes, until about 8.30 pm, with one of the police units looking for the guy on the streets of Poznan. No luck.

It having become clear that the police considered our stolen dog case as something completely beneath their dignity, comparable to littering or public drunkenness (two crimes that the police overlook in Poland), Ola said we should hire a private detective. What that will cost, I worried. But it didn't take long for me to work out that the cost in money was already being exceeded by the cost in pain and anxiety to all of us, not least to Christopher. So I told Ola to check it out. We have a first meeting with a detective early next week. I am beginning to think that no one in Poland above the grade of litter-picker actually works on Friday, Saturday or Sunday in Poland. Presumably that makes the lives of thieves much simpler and less risky. Steal something on Tuesday. Figure that Wednesday and Thursday will be chewed up with bureaucracy. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nothing happens. And by Monday the loot is gone, the trail is cold, and everyone is well rested from the weekend and ready to get down to work.

While Ola called private detectives, I went to speak with the security staff at Stary Browar. They had been the most helpful people on Tuesday and I hoped their humanity would continue. First I went to the information desk, which is the de facto hub of Stary Browar activities other than shopping. The young man at the desk knew about the case and rang straight through to the security team HQ. They told him they couldn't give me the video except with authorisation of one of the shopping centre management team. The young man gave me the name of Ryszard Łaba, a big kahuna in the shopping centre, and his email address. "You must write to him and request the tapes. Normally he says yes very quickly. People often want tapes, and he usually says yes. Just wait here -- he speaks English, I think, so he will probably reply in about thirty minutes."

It was then about 3 pm. I sat down and immediately wrote an email to Mr Łaba from my mobile phone:

Dear Mr Łaba --

Tuesday evening between 19.30 and 20.15, from the stairs at the Półwiejska entrance of Stary Browar, our family dog was stolen. The SB security cameras filmed the theft.

At the time of the theft, I immediately informed, first, the SB information desk, then the SB on-duty security staff, and finally the police. The SB security staff was helpful and professional throughout the process. The police who came were also courteous and tried to be helpful, but the police in Poznań seem very badly organised. My wife and I went to the police station the next morning and were told there was no record of the statement I had given the police on Tues night. We had to do it all again. Yesterday the police told my wife to call again today to speak with the officer in charge of the case. My wife did that but was told there was still no officer in charge, and to call again next Tuesday. This is, if you will allow me to say so, insane.

Every hour that goes by the chance of recovering my dog goes down. The police are not being very helpful as an "organisation," though individual policemen are doing their best.

If I can identify who stole her, that is the best chance of finding her.

PLEASE LET ME SEE THE FILMS AND LET ME HAVE A COPY OF THEM ASAP.

Dkziękuję.

Andrew Hingston - Poznan, PL
+48 668 497 339

By the time I sent the message it was about 3:15. I sat down to wait. Nothing happened. I waited some more. I went back to the information desk (which I had never really left). "Oh, it's getting late. They leave at 4 pm. You should run over there any see if you can find anyone to help you." He told me where to find the management office. Two minutes later I was there. It was 4.02 pm. Someone answered the intercom and I went up to the office. The lights were already out and the last two workers, both women, were putting on their coats.

"What's this about?" the young woman (who spoke English), asked curtly without first introducing herself. I explained as briefly as I could. "There is nothing we can do now, you will have to come back on Monday morning." I decided that was not going to be of any use and so I said: Of course there is something you can do now: you can give me a copy of the video. "We can't do that, it's against procedures." Procedures should be adapted to situations. "There is no one here to authorise this." They have telephones, don't they? "You must leave now; we are closed." I am not leaving without that video. "We must then call security against you." Good, tell them to bring a copy of the video. "You think this is a big joke." No, I think this is my family's dog that has been stolen -- furthermore, it was stolen from Stary Browar property, under the watchful eye of Stary Browar security cameras. The only joke here is that the so-called management of the centre goes home at 4 pm. I spent 15 years working in the shopping centre business in one way or another, and I never once went home at 4 pm. Mr Łaba can authorise this in a minute. I have already sent him an email about it.

"Mr Łaba is ill. He has been ill for two weeks. He will be back on Monday." Fine, however, I was told to write to Mr Łaba. I followed procedures. Get him on the phone. I want to talk to him. "I told you that he is sick and that you can talk to him on Monday." And I told you that I am not leaving without the video. The difference is that what I say makes sense, and what you say does not. If Mr Łaba is so important that he does not delegate simple matters like this to other staff, then he must expect to receive calls on all kind of subjects, including this one. Otherwise the centre would collapse. In any case, a man who is well enough to know that he will come into work on Monday, is well enough to talk on the phone.

"You think you are very clever, but you must leave or I will call the security." By this time I had learned that the younger harpy's name was Paulina. Listen, Paulina, I can't stop you from calling security. I don't even want to. So far the security staff have been the only helpful people at Stary Browar. They would have been even more helpful except that people like you get in their way. If you want to go home tonight sooner, rather than later, just give me a copy of the video. If you call security, you should figure on being here for another hour at least.

She conferred with her companion. "We are calling security now." Okay with me; please ask them to bring the video. We sat for ten minutes as they looked at their watches and tried to think up ways of intimidating me.

But then I received one of the benefits of being such a cheerful friendly guy, always interested in the people of my adopted city. In walked two security types. One was from central casting and looked more or less like Lucca Brazzi, only younger. The other looked like Sonic the Hedgehog (a common haircut these days). Sonic had met me in a bank while waiting in line. He considered me his good chum. You should have seen the looks on the others faces as he reached out and shook my hand. At that moment I think the two women wondered if they would ever get home. Sonic (real name withheld to protect the innocent -- you'll see why in a moment) took a seat across from me while the others stood. He took a copy of the Stolen Dog leaflet I was carrying with me. He read it. He asked pertinent, insightful questions. He called his manager over in security HQ. His manager invoked the sacrosanct procedures that had come down from Sinai with Moses. He thought some more. He made some more phone calls. It turns out he was trying to arrange for copies of the videos to be handed to the police, and for the police to then hand them directly over to me.

After another 20 minutes two policemen arrived. They may have been put on the Stolen Dog detail for punitive or discriminatory reasons. One of them was the shortest policeman I have ever seen. About 5'2" feet tall (I am only 5'6"), and so festooned with cartridge belts, handcuffs, bullet-resistant clothing, mace cans, radios, a pistol, etc., that he appeared to be as wide as he was tall. The other looked North African in appearance, not a common appearance in Poland. I can only imagine that someone of North African appearance in the Polish police must expect to receive all the worst assignments. Anyway, they meant well, although like all the other police Ola and I have spoken with, they seem to have spent more time in the higher study of excuse making and yarn spinning than in the purposeful pursuit of thieves and other criminals.

Finally, having fulfilled (with time to spare) my promise to Paulina and her chum to waste at least 90 minutes of their precious time, I agreed with a proposal that Sonic made. He would give the police a copy of the video. They would take it directly back to the station. I would leave the office. And the Stary Browar security team would continue to help me however it could. I sensed that "help me however it could" had some meaning beyond the obvious, -- his good-will had been self evident from the start.

So the harpies were allowed to leave, no doubt to fall into the waiting arms of their glamour dates for the evening, while the police took a copy of the video back to the station.

Notwithstanding his comment, I wasn't prepared for this email, which Sonic sent to my personal email address:

I hope that the police will finally start doing something and take proper care of your case. I feel really sorry that you've been treated in such an absurd way. I also hope that everything will turn out fine and you will find Primrose. Maybe try giving an ad to newspaper such as ''Echo Miasta'' or ''Metro''. Also try visiting Stary Browar very often, because today we were kicking the thief out of the toilets, because he is homeless and he often stays there. Unfortunately we didn't know it's him and we let him go.

Cheers.

It suddenly becomes clearer why Paulina the office harpy kept saying "Stary Browar is not responsible. Stary Browar is not responsible." I am not at all sure that Story Browar is not responsible -- and now, it would appear, neither are they. In the beginning they probably weren't responsible, or only a little responsible, but there are principles in law that say that if someone takes a bad situation and makes it worse, that someone takes on some of the responsibility. Does that principle apply in Poland? I don't really care, so long as I get some genuine cooperation and my dog is returned. But if small-minded, obstructionist people make finding her and getting her back more difficult, then I see no reason to forgive those people or to make their lives easier. What, after all, have they done for me?

Primrose, sweetie, we want you!

2010-10-21T00:14:00.004+02:00

Whatever residual good will I had for the Polish police (or for any police), was ground down further today by the hopelessly unprepared and haphazard police officer who interviewed me and Ola about the theft of Primrose. In fairness to the woman, I will note that because we hadn't anyone else to look after him, we had to take Chris to the police station. For reasons that will become clear if you read on, he through a mega-tantrum. It was possibly only because the interview officer had two daughters of her own, that She had a copy of the report I did last night in front of her, but kept asking for information that was already in that report. I can imagine when suspects are interviewed, asking the same question over and over makes a certain about of sense, hoping to catch someone in a lie. But when the person making the statement has no incentive to lie or withhold important information, and when the facts of birthdate, weight, colour, and type of dog are not likely to change from form to form, why not adjust the police tactics to suit the situation?

It all didn't start well this morning. The policemen with whom I spoke last night told me to go to the Stary Miasto police station at 10 am today, and that everything would would ready for me (us) when we got there. But a seven and a bit month pregnant women does not move according to a ships's chronometer, or even to a British Rail station clock. She may want to be at a place by ten, she may plan to be at a place by ten, she may even have her heart set on being at a place by ten -- but it will be eleven before she arrives at her destination, as sure as the Pope professes to be a Christian. And so it was.

When we finally arrived at the police station we were told that the processing officers were all backed up, and it would be two hours or more before one could see us. Please come back in two hours. OK, but all the 'Murphy's Law' coaching and intensive Zen training in the world will not prepare me for stuff like this. Y5es, I know we were an hour late when we showed up. Had they mentioned that, I would have folded graciously. They did not. I did not.

Primrose

2010-10-19T23:37:00.002+02:00

8 weeks old (with Tulip)

Tonight between 19.30 and 20.15, while I was shopping for the evening meal (it was to be roast chicken with potatoes and green beans, one of my all time faves, but it didn't happen), someone stole our beloved Bavarian Bloodhound, Primrose, from where she was chained up at the entrance to the shopping centre in which the supermarket is located (Stary Browar, for those who know Poznan).

The thief, like most low-end criminals, was not very observant or terribly bright. He took her from a well lit place under an infilade of two CCTV cameras that, fortunately, were working at the time (always a question with technology in Poland). Polish law does not allow me to view the films until after the Police have reviewed them -- an out of date law probably intended to prevent embarrassing moment for highly placed officials, including those who might accidentally receive envelopes full of unmarked bills while on camera. Tomorrow I should be able to see the films carefully. I will reserve further skepticism for the efficacy of Polish police methods until I see what happens.

Going to the woods with Ola (2008)

So far both the shopping centre staff and the Poznan Police have gone absolutely according to book: that is, I've had to fill-in some forms, which I did in English because my Polish is still useless. However, none of the shopping centre security staff reads English, so an employee of the centre did an unofficial translation for them, which they aren't really supposed to use, since they can only use my actual statement, which they can't read. They gave a copy of my statement, but not the translation, to the police. The reason for not giving the translation is that it was "unofficial." Tomorrow morning at 10, I have an appointment at the police station on al. Marcinkowskiego, a draughty 19th century stone building, complete with broad stair cases suitable for Hollywood actresses to make grand entrances, draconian holding cells befitting the Gestapo, and also carpetless wooden floors (not parquet, just thick planks often well worn and splintery) that make very eery noises which transmit throughout the building, but also very few working computers, typewriters, telephones, or even toilets. I know, because I have spent far too much time there during my years in Poznan, only once even vaguely against my will (I had to pay a fine).

Always in the picture

Forget about blaming chaotic Poland for this state of excellence. I've had to report things (usually small thefts) to police in several cities in several countries. I can say that it's the same everywhere. Policing, like far too many things, is dominated by paper -- the people who must deal with the paper are temperamentally, and in terms of training and practice, unable to deal with paper. They became police to catch (and if lucky, kill in a big high street shootout) bad guys. They don't want to fill in reports all day. And so they've never learned how to do it properly or quickly. A police officer who is male and can type? Not likely. A police officer who call spell, who listens carefully, who checks things twice, who isn't jittery from too much coffee and too little sleep? No way. The result is that while some grade school dropout with a substance abuse problem is taking my dog somewhere for God knows what purpose, I've got to go through the infernal "We are know you has been filled out that form, but now please to also being applying your pen (black only ink, for sure) to this form, now, yes, OK, thank you?"

A special rapport

I hope Mr Scheiskopf the thief just plans to sell her and not to do any sort of harm to her. This is likely, but she's a skittish dog at times and may bark a lot. If the thief doesn't know much about animals (and if he did, would he steal one?), he may soon tire of her barks and try to silence her by force. It's possible to do, but will require a lot of force. She has never been ill-treated in her life. The whole mess makes me wish this were just a nightmare from which I would soon awaken, no harm done. The breed is highly regarded in Poland for its hunting and trail following skills; someone might well pay quite a lot (by low-end criminal standards) for her, if they had any idea what they were looking at.

Primrose's sense of humour - my favourite photo

Damn. Chris will be mortified, if he understands at all. He will certainly know that Primrose is missing. She is generally to first of us to greet him in the morning, and he reciprocates by getting out of his bed and going to sit in the large folding metal crate that serves as her dog house. They follow each other around all days, conducting various colloquia to which the rest of us are never invited to contribute.

More news tomorrow. I hope it's good.

Second Intermezzo - Thank God for...

2010-10-15T17:41:00.000+02:00

In the beginning there was IKEA ...

Thank God for whoever invented the magnetic head screwdriver. Without this breakthrough in technology, the possibility of ever finishing the assemblage of an IKEA children's wardrobe (which I bought a week ago, took five days to start building (mental preparation) and have now spent two wonderful days building with the help of my son Christopher "Maus," Master Buiilder and Manager Extraordinaire). We are about half-done. I think we might finish today, but at the moment he has hidden some of the parts from me (specifically two of the door hinges). Since he and his mother have gone off to practice walking through piles of autumn leaves, he is not available for the intense interrogation that Professor John Yee of the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) has assured us all is proper, justified, and entirely legal. Until the little man gets back for his afternoon waterboarding, I am flummoxed as to how to proceed. Terrorism and strategic sabotage are, it seems, alive and well on the fifth floor of ulica Kazimierza Wielkiego 10.

Instructing the team ...

In the meantime, annihilation of carefully assembled piles of desiccated leaves might, in theory, piss off our rapidly ageing and extraordinarily grumpy maintence man -- if he were not generally, by this time of day (1 pm), already too drunk to notice any displacement of leaves, or much else. In any case, raking the leaves up an infinite number of times saves him the trouble of doing anything more arduous, such as cleaning the stairwells or replacing the burnt out light bulbs, both of which would require that he be able to stand up without the aid of a rake to lean on.

First critical inspection ...

Whenever he needs to top up his alcohol levels he discovers some totally unneeded and unwanted kindness that he supposes we desire from him, for which he then demands at least the price of two cans of beer (5 złotych -- about 1 British pound). When she occasionally slips her collar, he makes a great show of carrying Primrose in his arms up to our fifth floor walk-up. The haggling over the right sum to pay for this can go on for a while, but I rarely pay more than 10 złotych, since Primrose is probably on her way home when he grabs her and she would have come home anyway.

Like this, please ...

It isn't the act of kindness itself that persuades me to pay the man, but the fact that he stops brushing his teeth at least a month prior to making these demands (a practice not sanctioned in Prof Yee's memoranda, but he may have assumed the answer was obvious). Fearful for my health, I resort to flinging coins from a distance -- a practice to which, I have noticed, he does not object. If he hasn't already, he will soon figure out that I fling money not for the miniscule chores he undertakes, but simply to keep he at least three metres away from me. At that point the assaults will increase, and war will have to be declared. For now these minor border skirmishes are at a low intensity and do not threaten the household budget.

There's only one way to be sure ...

As seems almost universally the case, for every useless, falling-down alcoholic man in Poland, there is some incredibly hardworking woman who chainsmokes. Ola's parents are an example, as are our maintenance people. The wife does the work of two (and is thin as a stick), though I expect her husband (a very well fed sort of fellow) is the official office holder. The poor woman does the all work then has to put up with a husband whose only function appears to be to hold up a rake once in a while. when he isn't performing little acts of kindness for the gullible and easily intimidated inmates of this asylum. Thirty years ago I saw this phenomenon in France; it may signal a particular economic stage in the development of a country. I am told that in most of Africa women do all the real work that ever gets done. Somewhere in this blog I have already noted that Poland is known among some Brits I know as "White Africa." The metaphor runs deep, as the best ones always do.

Not bad for a beginner ...

But none of that skiving off nonesense for me and my son. When I refer to him as a Manager Extraordinaire, I am being only a bit facetious. This wardrobe is his first project as Manager, but I would say he's got the hang of it already. First, state the goal clearly. Second, get the work force to buy into the goal. Any misgivings or grumbles should be dealt with at this stage -- preferrably in a humourous and non-threatening way. Third, show that you (the Manager) are fully capable of doing the work you are asking others to do. Forth, train your work team in the best practices for the work they are doing, never forgetting the importance of safety and hygiene in all work related matters. Fifth, show that you trust your team by disappearing once the work begins, thus allowing them to get on with job. Six, return to the worksite at random moments to see how things are getting on and to keep the team motivated and on schedule -- here again, a jocular tone will often serve as well as a cattle prod. Chris has grasped all of this -- and, needless to say, he didn't learn it from me. I am a terrible manager. I make people nervous; they know I am only waiting for an excuse to fire them; I nit-pick; I never leave people alone; I call too many meetings and waste enormous chunks of time with claptrap; and so on. But Chris is a master. I see him leading some great organisation someday. I probably won't live to see it -- but I will be proud as hell anyway. And he will know that I am proud. For his entire life, he will know -- just as I know that my father was and still is proud of me (though I, too, wonder exactly what he is proud of, I know he is proud.)

Intermezzo

2010-10-15T17:39:00.000+02:00

Intermezzo may not be exactly the right term. As I understand it, an intermezzo is usually a light, uplifting trifle between two more substantial items. The term is frequently used in Classical music to describe a transitional piece of no dramatic or thematic consequence (as between two acts in an opera). The French equivalent -- entremet -- a term also used in cooking, something I know more about than I do about classical music -- refers to the sort of "palate cleansing" function of a sorbet or similar fillip between principal courses. But what I am writing about here is more like a serious car crash between two long and lovely drives through the countryside, which is why I think intermezzo should be understood ironically.

Increasingly, bit by tiny bit, circumstantial clue by miniscule circumstantial clue, I think my wife -- whom I love, even though at the moment it is far from easy to do so -- is nuts. As in bonkers. As in loopy, crazy, not connecting all the dots -- you call it what you will, but you know what I mean. And if you don't know what I mean, consider yourself lucky and skip ahead a few instalments. Now, when I say nuts, I am not talking pathological or psychotic. No visitations from aliens looking for a source of food for their starving civilisation, no visions of Our Lady of Central Poznan hovering above the bus station. No, just a little of what my own psychiatrist (more about that in a moment) calls "overdetermination."

Full disclosure time (again): I am nuts, which is why I have a psychiatrist. My father was nuts. My grandfather was nuts. My great grandfather was nuts. Four of my five aunts and uncles on my father's side were nuts, and the fifth one might well be nuts, too, though he insists he is not. Cousins across God knows how many continents, also nuts. All depressives, all probably bi-polar, as one says these days, though that diagnosis (and its antecedent, Manic Depressive), were not in vogue as early as the family started to exhibit the symptoms.

On the other side of my family tree. that is to say, my mother's side, I imagine my mother and very likely her mother were deeply traumatised and not totally functional starting sometime shortly into my mother's early twenties. If my older brother's family analysis is correct Grandfather on my mother's side, known as Brick (because of his hair colour), was an old perv; while grandmother was lucky, or at least careful, to die young. In other words we are talking about dysfunctional with a capital D on both sides of my family tree. I have already mentioned somewhere in the blog that my father was gay and a very heavy drinker, while my mother was withdrawn, unemotional in the extreme, impossible to please and mildly but chronically depressive.

In the male line of the Hingstons: depression, or manic-depression. In the female line (through my mother): God knows what, but some sort of sexual hanky-panky seems a fair guess. Or at least I am circumstantially persuaded. (Credit where credit is due: my brother, David Hingston, first suggested this to me, based on a great deal of circumstantial evidence he had gathered. Anyway, that's it for me: Bi-Polar type II (which means I am more likely to be deeply depressed than absurdly euphoric, and when I am euphoric it is more likely to seem like nothing worse than too much coffee than a full-steam-ahead methamphetamine bender). I would say, looking back, that my father was the same. About the others I don't know enough to form even a guess. One thing I suspect about my father's drinking is that it amounted to self-medicating, for when he drank too much it was nearly impossible to tell -- he just seemed normal. He didn't like and wouldn't take (not consistently) the psychotropic medications that were available to him, but in that regard we shouldn't forget that the first really useful anti-depressants without dire side-affects (the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs, as they are known), have been widely available for less than thirty-years. The previous generations of anti-depressants were not kind, to put it mildly. My father died in 1989 (age 69) as a result of liver failure and multiple organ degeneration related to long-term alcohol intake. I turned out that he'd been working on his death for a long time. During the Second World War he contracted malaria in Burma -- which was never properly treated, as it was war time and more of the usual blah blah blah. After the war his older sister nursed him back to health. Following malaria he should never have drunk another alcoholic drink, for malaria (or at least some types of it) chews up one's liver. After that, perhaps related to his secret life, and certainly not helped by the damage already done by malaria, he had all the main types of hepatitis, a fact I didn't know until he was in the hospital for the last time. Hepatitis of all types permanently damages the liver. So it didn't take too many drinks before dinner and glasses of wine throughout to push him beyond the point of no return. The question may be: why didn't he die a lot earlier? And I suppose the answer to be: Hingstons are a stubborn lot, and generally don't leave until they are damned well ready.

By the way, the drug I take is not an SSRI, but a closely related drug of a type known as a Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI). In terms of outward effects there is no differences between the two types of drugs. Its just that SNRI target two neurotransmitters, rather than one. At the dosage I take (150 mg / day), the boost is almost exclusively to my serotonin levels, so in effect I am taking an SSRI.

As often happens, I've taken a detour. Still, if you have time to read blogs, then you have time to take the scenic route, so I won't apologise too profusely. I began by writing about my wife -- and to the long way around to show that I actually have some personal experience of these matters, both in observing others and in experiencing them myself.

More about my wife later. Now I must go to the supermarket and buy Pampers and dishwasher detergent, and fabric softener, and a number of other things that contribute to our quality of life.

Dr Johnson says... (Part One)

2010-10-05T15:51:00.003+02:00

"It is by no means necessary to imagine that he who is offended at advice was ignorant of the fault, and resents the admonition as a false charge; for perhaps it is most natural to be enraged when there is the strongest conviction of our own guilt. While we can easily defend our character, we are no more disturbed at an accusation than we are alarmed by an enemy whom we are sure to conquer; and whose attack, therefore, will bring us honour without danger. But when a man feels the reprehension of a friend seconded by his own heart, he is easily heated into resentment and revenge, either because he hoped that the fault of which he was conscious had escaped the notice of others; or that his friend had looked upon it with tenderness and extenuation, and excused it for the sake of his other virtues; or had considered him as too wise to need advice, or too delicate to be shocked with reproach; or, because we cannot feel without pain those reflections roused which we have been endeavouring to lay asleep; and when pain has produced anger, who would not willingly believe, that it ought to be discharged on others than on himself?" -- Samuel Johnson, from The Rambler.

I am no great follower of Johnson (as my cousin Christopher is), and haven't read him seriously since university, but the quotation just given is appropriate to this series of postings, because I am thinking of a rather Johnsonian (or would-be or could-be Johnsonian) man, another Doctor as so happens, whom I have known since the late 1980s, and whom I once called my best friend in England and sometimes even my best friend. Our friendship has died away, owing to many things including neglect. He has done nothing specific or directed against me to lose my friendship -- other than what I shall soon recount, which I admit is not much at all, and not directed at me -- but the friendship has been fading and asymmetrical for a long time. Rather than have it simply evaporate, as some friendships do because of lost connections or time or distance, I decided to end it. With a bang, not a whimper.

This is a very oft remarked on and mostly deplored aspect of my personality. I hate grey areas and subscribe more fully than most people to such ideas as "all or nothing," "you're either with me or against me," and my favourite of these, "you're either part of the solution or part of the problem." Unsubtle, I acknowledge, but clear enough in their simple ways and very good markers for most situations. Related to this are also my disdain of certain distinctions that most people I know embrace or at least take for granted, for example, the distinctions between private and public (hence this blog, which is entirely public), and the distinctions between family and non-family. One should always choose those closest to oneself, not have them foist upon one through some claptrap manipulation of common heritage -- blood may be thicker than water, but that simply means we are more likely to choke on it. There are, however, distinctions that I believe are worth encouraging, and worth enforcing, and one of them is the distinction between genuine and fake, which strikes me as an ethical as well as an aesthetic distinction.

Those of you who know me really well may know that my favourite philosopher is Diogenes of Sinope, the principal founder of the Cynic School of philosophy, which through various turns eventually evolved into the Stoic School. (Among Diogenes' distinctions, he regularly bested Plato in debates in Athens, and, less importantly, the date of his death (misidentified as 322 BC, for it was 323 BC) is somehow involved in the hocus-pocus of Yale's Skull & Bones.

The most widely known story of Diogenes is of him carrying a lamp around Athens in daylight, "looking for an honest man." He deplored deceit, preening, hypocrisy and sham of all kinds. He felt about good manners much as I do -- they are not "good" at all, but deceptive markers. Von Ribbentrop, the Champagne salesman, had good manners; Churchill, the Champagne consumer, had appalling manners. The former was a fake aristocrat, the von arising from a sleight of hand with a branch of the family that was entitled to it. Churchill on the other hand was a real aristocrat who throughout his life refused to accept the titles available to him, as he wished to serve in the House of Commons. This one example pretty much sums up my view of the differences between the real and the fake.

Returning to Diogenes, he thought dogs preferable to people, because he considered them more honest and reliable. (This is the origin of the name Cynic, which comes from a root word for dog.) He was a prankster, very much the Abbie Hoffman of his day, and even managed to ridicule Alexander the Great to his face and remain both alive and on speaking terms with the man. (Yes, I also admire -- and pity -- Abbie Hoffman. He just didn't know when to back off. Some of us don't.)

The problem, really, has been the extraordinary trajectory of my friend Paul's life. Extraordinary, almost impossible, but perhaps not entirely admirable, I feel, and perhaps not even all that honourable (if the distinction between genuine and fake is acknowledged as important). You must decide for yourselves; after years of internal debate, I have decided for myself.

As so often in questions such as this, history has played a part. His very early life was spent living above the garage of his father's removals business in Romford, which for those who don't know is a town in southern Essex, usually but not always considered to be within greater London. It is economically and socially a part of what might be called "the outer East End" of London. Not exactly Dagenham, but much closer to Dagenham than to Knightsbridge. Romford was very much a part of the Thatcherite phenomenon of Essex Man, the transformation of the long established British, Southern European and Asian working class voters, traditionally Labour voters, into lower middle and middle class Conservative voters, and particularly into a small but very vibrant entrepreneurial class, which the UK had lacked for some time, and for which Thatcher claimed credit. Lord Sugar, the computer entrepreneur, and John Bercow, the once virulent Thatcherite and currently very difficult to categorise Speaker of the House of Commons, might both be characterised as examples of Essex Man, though I am not sure either completely fits the profile. They have climbed far indeed, but they are still not judged wholly on merit by everyone -- and there are many doors that remain closed to them.

The terms working class, middle class, etc, have implications in British society that the more or less equivalent terms in the USA and Canada (and perhaps Australia and elsewhere, but I don't know) do not. A blue collar worker is a blue collar worker because of his job and probably (though not necessarily) because of his education. But there is nothing to suggest he is doomed to stay in that category or that his children will remain in that category. In the New World, money is probably the most important determinant of position -- and money, as we know, has a tendency to flow outward and downward as least as much as inward and upward. So the old adage of rags to riches to rags again in three generations has a lot of truth to it in the New World.

In Britain however, it is possible to be an aristocrat and simultaneously too poor to feed one's family -- and yet one will remain an aristocrat, and one's children, malnourished as they may be, will be regarded as aristocrats as well. It may take generations to remove the sort of stain that in the USA can be washed away in just a year or two -- and, yes, aristocracy is a stain like any other. Similarly, if one's grandfather were working class, then all the money in the world will not persuade certain people that you are not working class as well. Essex Man and the increased social mobility he betokened helped to fracture these strictures, but did not do away with them entirely. If you grew up wanting certain sorts of jobs, and the prestige and security that came with them, it was going to be very much easier for you if you had the right background, or at very least, the right accent. (End of Part One)

And then suddenly...

2010-09-29T14:19:00.001+02:00

Suddenly, yesterday, Ola and I stopped fighting. Perhaps we both sensed at some level that we were getting too near an edge that it might be easy to fall from, but difficult to climb up to again.

We worked together to get Chris (Krzysiu in Polish, pronounced k'She-shoe or even She-shoe) up and fed and dressed and ready to go. We worked together to get Primrose on her leash and out the door for her morning ablutions and round the block walk. We worked together to get the workers who showed up at 8 am to put the new high-tech German radiator in the right place in the living room (which doesn't mean they did, only that we tried -- I took a closer look this morning: the damned radiator must be taken out and reinstalled, but Hey, Welcome to Poland!) We cleaned and tidied without fighting. We had a very satisfying late lunch of roast chicken, roast potatoes, cauliflower in cheese sauce, and salad (if that sounds like British food, rather than Polish food, it was, and very nice too). And as far as I remember, not one sour, sarcastic or high-decibel word was spoken from either side.

That truce didn't quite last through noon today. As I was cleaning up a slippery mess to which I had contributed by leaving a bowl of cooling chicken stock too close the the edge of the kitchen counter, where either Chris or Primrose was sure to find it (in this case P), Ola very suddenly realised that she had an appointment with her gynaecologist at noon. Yikes. All hands on deck.

We are amongst the slowest moving animals in the world when it comes to getting out the door and on our way to anything, and Ola is at least two times slower than I am (I at least am capable of brief spurts of manic swiftness, but Ola's motto is and has always been, "Slow and steady wins the day...." I quickly switched from bleary eyed lethargy into command mode. "Right, then, call your doctor and tell her you will be late; put Chris's shoes on (actually I may have said She-shoes' shoes, which is a bit of a tonge-twister until you've said it a few times); where is his hat? What should he wear? Where are my keys? (I still haven't found them, damn it. though I had them this morning when I took Primrose out.) All this command mode stuff on my part makes Ola -- you guessed it -- slow down to a virtual crawl. This is the role of the worker in a communist state. It is ingrained behaviour to say or appear to say Yes while meaning and acting out the part of No.

However, I believe it is also the role of women in respect of bossy men, especially husbands. Ignore them, and drive them crazy by adopting, just at the precise moment that will cause the highest blood pressure, behaviour antithetical to everyone's immediate interests, including your own. Women always take the longview, while men rarely do. Getting to the doctor's office on time is not half so important as telling one's husband, nonverbally if at all possible, who is really boss. I try to imagine sometimes the reactions, both mental and physical, of Cousin Chris (who gave his name to our darling Chris) to his wife Maureen, or of Amos Krausz to his wife Dorian, or of Amos' son Ron to his wife Susan. All these men are (or were) used, in their way, to saying "Jump" and seeing people jump. All have been CEO's of their own businesses. But not one of these women I've just mentioned would ever have jumped. Hunkered down is more like it. At the same time, I don't know if they started screaming back, throwing cutlery, or simply closing their ears and moving forward in self-possessed step-wise motion. Or perhaps they did something even trickier (and if so, what was that trickier thing they might have done?).

In war and diplomacy, what I am talking about is called "intelligence." One does one's best to ascertain one's adversary's strategy and tactics. One then assesses her available and acquirable resources, her strengths and weaknesses, and her past behaviour, apparent motivations, and relevant psychological traits if any (Stalin's paranoia and deeply superstitious peasant nature, for example). Then one convenes one's war cabinet -- in the case of most men, these are his drinking buddies or college chums or professional colleagues. At clandestine meetings and telephonic conferences held at odd hours, some sort of pathetic counter-strategy is hammered out in haste. But the counter-strategy never works. It never has worked in millions of years of attempts. The counter-strategy's real purpose is simply to give the man a grain of hope that someday he might actually triumph. Of course, he never will.

Nor should he, if you think about it. The women are always way ahead of the men on issues of family, child-rearing, home-making and so on. Men go off and fight. If they are fortunate and have certain gifts, the go off and make lots of money and become incredibly powerful and bedecked with prestige (which redounds to their wives, free of charge). They conquer and claim vast (or not so vast) landholdings upon which they erect, per their good wife's wishes and often minutely detailed instructions (which may, and often are, conveyed indirectly, increasing the likelihood of acrimonious altercations further along), a dwelling thirty or forty times bigger than the one they might ever need or want to clean, featuring a lot of expensively imported building materials poorly suited to the climate. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are few enough to be counted on the fingers of one hand. By the way, all this is true no matter what socio-economic slice of life they have been lucky enough to land in. It is as true of the 40 square meter just-starting-up flat as of the 4,000 square meter mansion with separate five car garage..

And no matter how much money one has to spend, it is never quite enough, but always almost within reach. And that's the trick -- to be almost always within reach.