I snapped a photo of one of the graves, adorned with a flower that my wife happened to be carrying, and thought little more about it – just two more Polish airmen among the thousands of fallen. It was only when I got home and looked at the photos that the dates struck me. Both men, A. E. Kleniewski and R. Wysocki, died on the same day – December 17, 1942. This immediately suggested to me that they must have been crew members on the same plane – so probably a bomber or a night fighter.

Kalkara Naval Cemetery, Malta

Anyone with any interest in World War II knows that the battle for Malta was one of the longest and most desperate of the entire conflict, but it was won by late 1942. The siege had been lifted by the middle of October and the Allies had gone on the offensive in the Mediterranean (Rommel was on the run in North Africa, Operation Torch started on November 8th). Airfields on Malta were being used to provide air cover in North Africa, but you would expect aircrews lost on these operations to be buried near their targets, if they were found at all.

I googled A. E. Kleniewski. It turns out he has his own Polish Wikipedia page. A decorated and commended airman, Alfred Edmund Kleniewski (born 1918) escaped to France and then England following the fall of Poland where he joined the 307 Polish Night Fighter Squadron (307 Dywizjon Myśliwski Nocny “Lwowskich Puchaczy”). By 1942 he was serving in No. 138 (Special Duties) Squadron – the chaps who flew SOE agents, covert radio sets and other Nazi-bothering paraphernalia across the length and breadth of occupied Europe (including into Poland).

Flight Sergeant Alfred Edmund Kleniewski died when his Halifax (DT542 NF-Q) crashed near Żejtun, Malta, shortly after takeoff on the second leg of a flight from Egypt to the UK. He was wireless operator on the flight. Five other crew members (Krzysztof Dobromirski , Stanisław Pankiewicz , Zbigniew Idzikowski , Roman Wysocki , Oskar Zielinski) and 11 passengers were also killed.

Five of the six Polish aircrew (clockwise from top left): Fl/Sgt. Alfred Edmund Kleniewski, Sgt. Roman Wysocki, F/O. Stanisław Pankiewicz, F/O. Krzysztof Leon Dobromirski, F/O. Zbigniew Augustyn Idzikowski.

One of the passengers was Major (Lord Apsley) Bathurst, whose World War I citation for the Distinguished Service Order reads, in part:

Near Kadem Station he was held up by a body of the enemy, whose strength was double his own. He charged, killing 12 with his sword, the remainder being put to flight.

Lord Apsley was MP for Bristol Central at the time of his death (as well as serving in the Arab Legion). His wife, Violet Bathurst (Lady Apsley) took the seat after his death in a 1943 by-election.

In 2003 Lord and Lady Apsley’s son, Henry Bathurst, 8th Earl Bathurst (then 76) was involved in a brief car chase with Prince William (then 21) that got him on the front page of various newspapers. According to the BBC:

The spat happened when the prince’s VW Golf overtook the earl’s Land Rover on a country dirt track in Lord Bathurst’s 15,000-acre estate in Cirencester, Gloucestershire.

It was on Lord Bathurst’s property and so he hit his horn and gave chase. He wanted to overtake the police car but, instead, it stopped him.

Prince William drove on but the police officer had strong words with Lord Bathurst.

… and so the world goes round.

Polish people don’t see this as odd because they regard these missing elements as obtainable but expensive rarities, in much the same way that a British person wouldn’t think it odd that octopus sandwiches don’t play a larger role in the nation’s diet. But it is odd. In every Western European country I’ve been to people regularly eat pork and chicken but also beef and lamb (or mutton – lamb is always expensive because supply is limited, but it’s certainly not a once-a-year thing).

I know that you, dear readers, can probably lay your hands on a venerable Polish beef or lamb recipe with a wave of the Google wand but I’ve lived here for four years now and you can’t fool me. Have a meal in Poland at a restaurant or somebody’s house or in the presidential palace and nine times out of ten the main course is going to be pork or chicken. I refuse to believe sheep and cows can’t be raised in Poland (the hilly bits in the south look like perfect sheep country and the flat bits are surely made for cattle) so why is there no tradition of raising and eating them?

Pork and chicken are very nice and Poles have a thousand ways of making them even nicer, but their almost complete dominance is very puzzling. In fact, their dominance is so stark that it must be a symptom of a powerful cultural force at work in Polish history. It can’t just be a geographical thing, like the factors that make rice rather than wheat the staple of Asia. But what is this factor? Was it a Communist thing? Were sheep regarded as bourgeois? Are Angus longhorns fifth columnists? When I ask Polish people why they eat beef and lamb so rarely they cite its high price, but that’s just another way of saying that it’s unpopular. If only one person in a thousand ate chicken, it would be more expensive than caviar.

The cheese question is even weirder. The classic Polish cheese is twaróg – a very soft, young cheese made without rennet. All European cultures have an equivalent but, strangely, in Poland it’s the only kind of cheese they make. Here’s an interesting quote from Ewa Spohn, who knows a lot more about cheese than me:

The missing ingredients are bacteria. A good cheesemaker is really a virtuoso in the management of bacteria. Describing how this biochemical miracle works would fill a whole library, but in short, a cheese that does any maturing at all, whether it’s cheddar, Rocquefort or Camembert, starts life as a vat of warm milk to which the cheesemaker adds the right type of bacteria. They are given time and warmth needed them to multiply and create the by-products that give cheese its flavour and texture.

So adding the right bacteria is key and is something that Polish cheesemakers, with a handful of exceptions, don’t do, relying instead on the bacteria that are naturally present in milk. We see the result everywhere: the familiar bland, fresh white cheese that goes sour pretty quickly. Some producers experiment by adding herbs and spices to the basic product. For example, in Korycin, near Białystok, and Wizajny near the Kaliningrad Oblast, members of the Korycin and Wizajny producers associations showed us how they add various flavourings like caraway, olives and basil to their cheeses. The finished cheeses don’t differ hugely from each other and neither type is a million miles away from the typical fresh, white Polish cheese you see everywhere.

Twaróg – the Moon isn’t made of it

The more I think about this the odder it becomes: making hard, mature cheese (an excellent way of preserving the protein in milk for the long term) is an incredibly ancient human discovery, but seems to have passed Poland by or been forgotten. Poles are a lot of things but they’re certainly not stupid, so how did this happen?

The absence of pastry also intrigues me, and it’s something I’ve written about before in The Polish pie mystery. My conclusions from the numerous comments under that post are that:

1) Pastry does exist, but it’s almost always found at the bottom of sweet tarts that I strongly suspect came to Poland through Napoleonic and Austro-Hungarian influence (the fact that ‘pastry’ is just called ‘ciasto’ lends support here I think).

2) There are some obscure Polish recipes that are something like filled-pastry pies, but, again like the beef and lamb recipes, you never come across them in real life so I don’t regard them as real Polish food.

What were the forces that so stunted Polish cuisine? I would genuinely love to know. It’s the The Bourne Identity of food. If you can also shed light on why the screwdriver was suddenly invented in Germany in the 15th century (the screwdriver is only 500 years old!), that would be good too.

Last week it was the tale of a Polish housekeeper and her first-hand account of the breakdown of her employers’ marriage. The segment, billed as a “domestic thriller” was called A Domestic and caught my ear because it was based around a Polish character. It caught my ear even more forcibly when I quickly realised the actress playing the Polish character wasn’t Polish and had a very hazy idea of what a Polish accent sounds like. This became particularly hilarious when they slipped Polish phrases into the dialogue.

Nie ma problemu

Mariola, the eponymous domestic, is played by Lydia Leonard, who is of Anglo-French-Irish extraction. I’m sure she’s a lovely lady and highly talented, but why couldn’t the BBC have found a Polish actress to perform the part? There must be thousands of them kicking around London these days.

From rain to gutter

Maybe there is a good reason why Polish actors and actresses can’t be employed by the BBC – something to do with equity cards or some other sophisticated showbiz shenanigans I know nothing about. This was only part of the problem. The writer, Peter Jukes, seemed to be just as hazy about Poland as the actress was about the accent. Mariola, like every other domestic in the history of drama, is terrified of being sent back to to her rubbish country if she makes any waves, which is a plot device that hasn’t made any sense for a Polish character since 2004. This is partly explained away by making her an ethnic Pole from Belarus, which kind of begs the question why he didn’t just make her Belarusian. She also has some bizarre superstitions. I’ve heard the one about not putting handbags on the floor because it encourages money to escape, but is there really a Polish superstition saying you shouldn’t buy your wife shoes because she will walk away from you, or gloves because she will wave goodbye? Maybe it’s a Belarusian thing.

The BBC television sitcom Lead Balloon also features an “Eastern European” character played by a British actress. Magda (definitely not Polish then), played by Anna Crilly, spends much of her onscreen time being perplexed and stolid, as in this scene where we learn that Eastern Europeans have apparently never come across sophisticated concepts such as lying so as to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

And to finish, a sketch from Armstrong and Miller that looks like it’s incredibly insulting to Poles, but turns out not to be…

There are two possibilities: either there are no lamps for sale in Krakow, or I’m looking in the wrong places. If the first is true, I’m going to start taking a lot better care of the lamps I have because they must now be worth a great deal of money. If the second is true, I will have to reconsider my prejudice that lamps should be sold in electrical appliance shops and address the possibility that they are, in fact, sold in gardening supply or hat shops.

I have made two extended trips to Galeria Krakowska in the past week, something that is almost as difficult to admit as it is to endure. On neither occasion did I find a lamp to buy. Home furnishing shops, the ones that smell of lavender and are impossible to extract wives from, do not sell lamps but they do sell endless varieties of candles and candle holders. Apparently, a return to burning wax or whale oil is currently the most accessible means of illuminating my bedtime reading.

The big electrical shop, a branch of Saturn, sells every imaginable electrical device apart from lamps and kilowatt range free-electron lasers. I toyed with the idea of buying a 48-inch plasma and playing a looped DVD of a switched on lamp with the brightness turned right up, but apparently nobody has yet released one – a gap in the market I will be leaping on.

21/2 hours of relentless 40-watt action (Bonus Director’s Commentary and Bloopers)

The real problem, and this is not the first time it has become apparent, is that I still lack of proper sense of how Polish urban spaces work. Put me down in a British town that I have never visited before and I am certain that I could find a lamp or a fish and chip shop or a copy of a street map in minutes – I just know what kind of streets to look on for the right kind of shops. I’m sure there are lamp shops out there, but I have no idea what they look like or how to find them.

This is a genuine and annoying problem that previously vexed me when I needed to buy a roll of parcel tape (W H Smiths), but it is compounded by the weird transitional state of the shopping experience in Poland. At first glance, it looks as if Poland has all the shops you could ever possibly want. In fact, at the shiny new Galeria end of the market, there is a superabundance of a very limited number of types of shops and almost nothing else.

In Galeria Krakowska, for example, there are seven or eight jewellery shops, all selling essentially the same watches and earrings, at least 30 clothes shops, also selling barely discernible products, and a dozen electrical shops selling slightly different forms of iPhone and laptop. The rest of the space is taken up with a couple of mega pharmacies, a supermarket and a branch of Empik. That’s it.

I know this is also the case in shopping malls elsewhere in the world, but the problem in Poland is that the glittery Galerias have been laid down on top of a highly impoverished strata of existing shops. Outside of them there are a few absurd hardware stores, an extraordinary number of wedding dress shops, endless second-hand clothes emporiums, the occasional bicycle shop and nothing else. Trying to buy an interesting or original birthday or Christmas present is almost impossible. It’s either standard high-street tat that you could buy anywhere in the world, stained glass angels and humorous Jewish figurines or a spanner.

I suppose what I’m really moaning about here is the lack of a broad bespoke luxury sector to cater to the whims of pampered middle-class folk such as myself – giant Stilton wheels, hand-made Faroe sweaters and things of that kind. With that humbling realisation in mind, I’m off to Ikea where I’m sure they have numerous lamps that will cunningly cater to my supposedly sophisticated eye for good design and solid workmanship at prices that can only mean Vietnamese sweat shops.

This week was the first instalment of spring. I hope you enjoyed it because the next one is due around the middle of August. Looking through my window now I notice a fog so thick I can barely see the other end of my myopia. I guess this means it’s getting cold again. I’ve seen more fog in this town over the past three years than I saw in 20 years in England. I will never take English-fog jokes seriously ever again. When the milk-thick conspiracy clears in the morning I will be greeted by a hideous foretaste of early Polish urban spring—probably the most ghastly season since “Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” was sold to Cadbury.

Who hath not seen yon limp pale yellow grass so like your hair after a 4-day winter boat of fever

Never visit a Polish city in March, even in years when March has been swapped with late October for no apparent reason—it’s not worth the risk. Apart from the feverish grass and the stick-dead trees and the sunless buildings caked in salt there are the snow-melt piles. Snow-melt piles are, as the name suggests, piles of stuff left behind when piles of snow melt. The piles of snow are created by the incredibly efficient road-and-pavement-clearing people. Unfortunately they do not contain only snow—all kinds of other frozen stuff gets vigorously shovelled into these heaps. As the snow-melt pile melts, several levels of civilisation are revealed:

Day 1
A generalised level of black grime that makes you acutely aware that just breathing city air is about the same a smoking intravenously.

Day 2
General litter consisting almost entirely of discarded leaflets for instant credit being handed out by that dodgy guy still wearing a Santa Clause outfit in the middle of January.

Day 3
An enormous quantity of dog crap. I wish I could put it more nicely, but this is the stuff of urban grit… and speaking of grit…

Day 4
Grit. Grit mixed with 700 thousand cigarette butts. According to my calculations, cigarette butts are the principal ingredient in that stuff they spray on the roads to prevent you gracefully brake-sliding into oncoming buses.

Day 5
Just some amorphous dirt. Where does all the other nasty stuff go? Items two through four are just gone, although there has been no obvious intervention by people wearing hazmat suits and grave demeanours.

English-language home page of the Central Anticorruption Bureau.

Hooray, a questionnaire! Kliknąć!

Doh!

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL POLANDIAN READERS, CONTRIBUTORS AND TO THE WORLD IN GENERAL.

…and then Father Christmas murdered my brother and stuffed him in a sack… honest

* * *

President of Poland hypnotised… twice

* * *

Miraculous vodka pool discovered in Lublin

* * *

Does my dictatorship look big in this?

* * *

Polish crowds eagerly anticipate first disaster of 2011

Startling revelations being poured over by the world’s media include hints that Jarosław Kaczyński might be “a bit suspicious” of the Russians and that Radosław Sikorski spelled the word “zucchini” wrong twice on a shopping list.

Among printouts of secret emails sent from Poland’s far flung embassies and notes written on the back of unpaid gas bills are tantalising glimpses of the high-powered world of international diplomacy. Highlights include:

• Poland’s ambassador to Ireland, Tadeusz Szumowski, begging to be allowed home before he has to eat his shoes…

• An inter-office competition to photoshop the most amusing moustache on Angela Merkel…

Not official Polish policy

• Warnings from the the Polish consulate in Nottingham that the locals are getting dangerously close to perfecting a recipe for bigos…

• Complaints from embassy staff in Moscow that Putin has hidden all their toys and is a “horrid, nasty man”…

Putin a “big meanie”

• An application from the Hotel Kinga, Pcim, to accommodate secret CIA prisoners (rejected on humanitarian grounds)…

• Details of a black propaganda operation aimed at ruining the reputation of that “smug bastard” Colin Farrell…

Polish authorities have expressed a desire to “talk” to Island1, who is believed to be in hiding somewhere under the bed.

Fire up Photoshop and send your own efforts to polandianguest@gmail.com

A virgin meat tenderizer lacking the normal 30-year aggregation of pork blood and gristle.

Using a meat tenderiser effectively requires years of training and Polish genes. The act of whacking a lump of raw meat with a studded hammer is so enormously satisfying that the amateur is prone to bludgeon away with ever increasing glee until the meat is little more than a reddish film and much of his kitchen has been reduced to a splintered ruin. I’ve been through that many Ikea kitchen units this way.

2. The Sofa Bed
The foreign visitor to a Polish flat will be struck by the fact that there are no bedrooms. This can cause considerable anxiety, especially if you have been invited to stay the night. Do not be alarmed, Poles do sleep and they do have beds, they are just heavily disguised as sofas. It is, in fact, almost impossible to find a sofa in Poland that isn’t also a bed. I think there’s one from the Bronze Age or something in the National Museum.

The classic Polish sofa bed in traditional god-awful colours.

Polish sofa beds differ from the sofa beds common in the West primarily in that they are less likely to sever fingers when being deployed. They do, however, share the characteristic of being about as comfortable as dentistry carried out with a brick. Sleeping on a Polish sofa bed is similar to settling down on a small range of granite hillocks. There is usually a crumb-filled valley in the centre into which sleeping partners are irresistibly and uncomfortably drawn. This goes a long way to explaining why every Polish person you meet has a back complaint and a crumb phobia.

Polish sofa beds are gradually going out of fashion and are often to be seen dumped, broken and slashed, in dingy courtyards like the victims of gangland slayings.

There is no mercy for ex- sofa beds

3. The Gap Under the Bath
The gap under the bath is one of Poland’s leading contributions to civilisation. I’m talking about fitted baths here—the boxed in ones. In every British bathroom I’ve been in the vertical side of the bath enclosure comes down to the floor, in Polish bathrooms there’s a 4- to 5-centimetre gap at the bottom. Why is it there? So you can stand closer to the bath. Whenever you need to bend over a British bath—to clean it or to mix your gin brew for example—you have to splay your feet awkwardly or risk repeatedly stubbing your toes. The Polish gap under the bath allows you to slide your feet underneath, allowing for a much more balanced and comfortable stance.

Whoever invented this deserves the Nobel Prize for Cunningness. I can only assume it occurred to somebody who spent a lot of time washing clothes in the bath (still a common activity) or a Christmas carp enthusiast.

Also works for dogs

4. The dangling socket
Every Polish home, no matter how recently it was built or renovated, has at least one electrical socket that dangles from the wall in a manner that looks potentially deadly. Electrical arrangements in Poland scare the bejeezus out of me generally—why aren’t all plugs earthed, why do you get alarming blue flashes whenever you plug things in, are sockets next to showers really a good idea? I once had a landlord who was an electrician. On one occasion I overheard his daughter complaining that he had installed underfloor heating in her bedroom that actually set fire to the floor, to which he responded by cursing the inadequacy of wiring sold by Russians. I lived in total darkness, too afraid to touch a light switch, for six months.

That’s not going to be good for anybody, is it?

In the UK, sockets are secured to the wall with screws. In Poland they seem to be held lightly in place by inadequate clippy things and sheer willpower. Tug a plug out too enthusiastically and suddenly all kinds of electrical guts you prefer not to think about are dangling around in full view. Once they are out, they will never go back in, not matter how often you shove at them with the end of a broom like a great big girl.

5. Multi-option windows
Given the inadequacy of Polish socket technology it is surprising to discover that this country has the best windows in the world. I’m talking about those fabulous double-glazed units with the handle that twists to three positions:

1. Locked, to protect against dangerous disease-bearing winds and foreign neighbours;
2. Open, inwards of course;
3. Kind of open and leaning backwards. This is the one that freaks out foreigners. The first time you discover it you experience a heart-stopping moment in which you’re convinced the whole thing is falling out of the frame. It’s a classic living-in-Poland rite of passage.

I have no idea how Poland managed to get it’s hands on such cool windows. They have a Scandinavian feel to me, which may or may not be confirmed by looking for the manufacturer’s label if I can even be bothered.

6. The World’s Worst Art
I don’t know if anybody else has noticed this, but Poland has the world’s worst amateur painters. Visit any Polish family home and, somewhere, you will find a smeary abomination on canvas created by somebody’s aunt or nephew or criminally-insane first cousin. They grip your attention in the same way that a capsizing super-tanker does. Meanwhile, your brain attempts to escape through you ears.

Or simply line your rooms with decaying leaves for the same effect.

It’s not so much the poor technique and the inexplicably banal subjects, it’s the hopelessly gloomy colour palette that gets me. Most of them look as if they have been painted underwater using pond mud and occasional rotting banana skin highlights. I keep meaning to go to the National Gallery to see if this is a universal Polish style, but I’m going to have to wait until there is plentiful bright sunshine and multiple stimulants on hand in case I need to be snapped out of a potentially terminal muted-colour psychosis.