Letter 3

Gee this is going to be a good book. See how smoothly chapter two has just blended seamlessly into chapter three. I found out how you do it. You type a whole load of pages and then just plonk the cursor down anywhere and call it a new chapter. Fredrick Forsyth told me about it and he should know. After all, he made a great job of that Ulysses book didn’t he? Perfect punctuation in that last chapter about Molly Bloom’s dream Perfect too was the West German countryside. A bit too perfect for my liking really. It wasn’t so terribly different to England, apart from the architecture of house and church, but it was all in such good condition that I thought it somewhat sterile. Everything just had to be perfectly painted and the flowers in the window boxes had to be just so. Old buildings were all restored so well that they had little character and a missing roof slate or a weed ridden garden now and again would have gone some way towards giving me the feeling that there were humans living in the houses. If the English were a race of anally retentive manicurists as I described them, then the Germans were a race of anally retentive engineers. Their gardens were well engineered with rows of flowers looking like their owners only had them in the garden because they couldn’t afford bricks. The roads were perfect, the telegraph poles were perfect and kids standing at the school bus stops were as well dressed as Hansel and bleedin’ Gretel are in the fairy story books.

Perhaps I shouldn’t criticize it because the people are probably perfect too. But I’d already seen enough of that sort of thing, that sort of culture. I was eager to set my eyes on East Germany again where the customs officers were some of the nastiest pieces of work on the planet and everything is falling to bits. The border hove into sight (notice the word hove. Not bad is it? I might use it again later) after a few hours and after passing through the West German side we drove a kilometer or so and rounded a corner only to see a queue of cars at least half a kilometer long. We knew at once that we were entering a communist or, as they like to call it, a socialist country - queues are a distinguishing feature of them all.

It was obvious that this was going to take a while so it gave us a chance to try out our campervanning skills for the first time. We re-arranged all the boxes so that we could reach the gas cooker, made a cup of tea and a sandwich and just sat there in the queue with the heater and the radio on, sitting high up above all the little motorbike engined Polish Fiats and the plastic bodied two stroke Trabants. We were the center of much attention and discussion amongst the other drivers who all stood around with long faces pushing their toy cars along in the queue to save their precious petrol which they'd all queued so long to get. We must indeed have looked like rich Western tourists sitting in our Mercedes with the engine running all the time. Little did they know that we couldn't switch the thing off without having to push start it.

An official approached us, took our passports, visas and car papers and put them on a long, covered conveyor belt to send them down to the officers in little glass booths who would process them. The men in the glass booths could stop and start the belt as they wanted and it was strange sitting in the van further down the queue and watching our documents go past us. Upon reaching customs it was a welcome relief to find that they weren't as nasty as they had been the last time we were here, although they didn't seem to like their customers very much. They asked a few questions in a gruff sort of manner and wanted to know if we were carrying a radiotelephone or firearms. I opened the side door of the van and asked the inspector to take a look inside. He knew exactly what I'd invited him in for. I held up a carton of cigarettes, he took them, stuffed them inside his jacket and left without a word. Then they ran a trolley with a mirror on it under the car and told us to go. Apart from the long wait it wasn't a bad experience at all although nothing like the West German border guards who wished us a good trip and smiled a lot.

As we drove off we saw others who hadn't come off as lightly as us. Three cars were outside the customs sheds being systematically dismantled, their owners watching and waiting impassively. The seats were out on the ground, petrol tanks removed and pieces strewn all over the place. There were very strict rules for transit tourists traveling through East Germany. You were not allowed to stop anywhere except at designated petrol stations and shops, where they tried to extract much needed Western currency from you. They also checked your speed constantly with radar and fined you in West German marks if you were driving at above 100 kilometers per hour. It seemed to me to be an admission that something in their economy wasn’t working if they wouldn’t accept their own East German currency for speeding fines.

If you stopped and engaged anyone in conversation or deviated from the transit route they would catch up with you and put you through a makeshift roadside court after which they also fined you in West German Marks. The name of the game was to get as much hard currency out of you as possible while you were passing through. At each road junction where it's possible to turn off the transit route, there was an observation tower occupied by two men with binoculars who kept the police informed by radio. Of course, the transit route through the country was the showpiece so that tourists wouldn’t get too bad an impression of the place but even so, the road surface was very bad by Western standards and the countryside looked as though the farmers all went on strike ten years ago and hadn’t returned.

The petrol stations were grey, grimy places in bad repair and stinking of diesel, with petrol pumps in need of painting and holes in the concrete of their forecourts. Nearly all had cracked windows held together with sticky tape, no water to wash windscreens with and everything made of metal was rusting to pieces. The toilets at these places didn’t have paper in them or locks on the doors. They stank too and needed a coat of paint, although I doubted if they’d get it in a hurry, and when they did it would probably have been in the ever-popular communist gray. There was an all-pervading sense of grayness which matched the weather perfectly. For some reason gray was the most used color in East Germany. Service stations and factories, cars, trucks and agricultural machinery - all gray. If almost everything had to be painted in the one color I wondered why it had to be gray? Why not pink or blue? - gray’s miserable. Perhaps all their battleships had been sunk but nobody had told the paint factory.

The roads on which we were travelling were Hitler's original autobahns laid all those years ago in concrete sections and even now, some fifty years later, still waiting for a surfacing of asphalt. As we traveled over these big slabs of concrete the tires made a regular clicking sound like being in a train. From time to time we drove through small strips of forest - larches and silver birch trees - they made a welcome break from the monotony and I found myself wishing they'd go on for a little longer. The contrast with West Germany is not worth describing. Communism just doesn’t work and one day soon it has to fall in a heap because it simply can’t keep up. Nowhere is this more evident than in the difference between the two Germanys where, if you didn’t know, you would say that the inhabitants of the two countries were from two completely different races.

Much more interesting than the countryside were the various forms of transport which we shared the road with. For some unknown reason all cars and particularly trucks from Eastern Bloc countries are ugly. I'm sure that the general populace doesn't find them attractive and their designers know what good looking cars look like so why it is that communism produces such gross ugliness in automobile designs I am at a loss to understand. Where are the commie designed Ferrari, Porsche or Jaguar equivalents I wonder? Good looking design, regardless of manufacturing quality, costs no extra so why? Perhaps the system destroys the artistic and the creative instincts in people.

Most remarkable were the Polish cars in East Germany, or rather, what was in them. Poles are perhaps the world’s most active independent trader\smugglers and nowhere are they more active than on the route between Poland and West Berlin. It’s the only Western city they don’t need a visa to visit and they can complete the round trip from the Polish border to West Berlin and back in a day. In West Berlin they can sell agricultural produce such as meat, eggs, tomatoes and so forth at markets or direct to shops at eight to ten times the price they could get for it in Poland. Even so, by West Berlin’s standards, the prices of the goods they smuggle in are still dirt-cheap. In Warsaw meat is rationed and you have to bribe the butcher with a bottle of vodka to get a decent cut but in West Berlin you can buy all the Polish meat you want.

On the return trip they take all sorts of things, some of it sheer rubbish. They go around car wrecking yards and pick up old tires which are worth nothing in the west but which people back home have to wait months to get hold of. They even take home and sell ordinary free supermarket bags because it’s a commodity the system in Poland can’t produce in any quantity and certainly not with any quality. It’s considered quite trendy to be seen carrying a Western supermarket bag around in Warsaw. Generally, Poles buy the cheapest, worst quality western goods possible because they’re still better quality than anything produced anywhere in the Eastern Bloc and there’s a ready market for them back home.

The tiny 625cc motorcycle engined Polish Fiats we passed along the road were, without exception, loaded to the gunwales. We saw one car with literally thousands of small, individual cartons of orange juice covering every square inch of space but the driver’s seat. The roof rack also was stacked high with orange juice too and its overall weight was evidenced by the sparks, which flew from the back of it as it scraped the ground on the bumps. I looked in the mirror as we passed it and even the right hand side of windscreen was covered in orange juice drink cartons. The driver couldn’t possibly have seen anything behind him. He was completely cocooned in the stuff and if he he’d had a collision he would have made headlines.

“Man Drowns In Orange Juice in His Own Car”

Just imagine running into the back of this mobile orange juice pool. There’d be a big bang and suddenly your whole world would turn orange as it splashed across your windscreen. It would be like driving into the navel of the world, a citrus mega-flora heaven where they play Scott Walker records all day and you lay around bombed out on LSD listening to Al Ginsberg and Timothy Leary lectures. Some cars carried all manner of unidentifiable rusting metallic junk in such quantities that, from behind, you wouldn’t have known there was a car and trailer under it all. None of it looked useable to me but Alicja said that it was the raw material they wanted – Polish steel mills turned out crap and any Western steel was worth having.

Other cars had roof racks and trailers loaded down with engine parts, gearboxes and car wheels. Weeks later, in Poland, we decided that it would be a good idea to carry a second spare wheel for the van. We bought a used one from one of these traders who’d bought it at a wrecker’s yard in Germany. We had to pay twice the price we would have paid for a new one in Germany but there was no option. He was the only guy who had one. I estimate that he made at least a month’s Polish wages on the deal but it was cheaper than going out to the West to buy one.

But back to East Germany. We drove at the legal limit of 100kph all the way through it and weren’t overtaken once because everyone was either driving to conserve petrol or was so loaded down with contraband that they couldn't go any faster. When we reached the Polish border there was a queue of about three-kilometers for trucks and half a kilometer for cars. More sandwiches and coffee. The queues were moving very slowly and we kept the engine running because we knew we wouldn’t be able to start it again. After a while a customs officer asked us to turn it off because of the diesel fumes. We explained that our starter was broken, thinking that maybe they would get on and clear us through customs quickly just to get rid of us. They didn't, and we waited.

There were three booths in a line, one after another which we thought were all Polish because they were all painted the same color (you guessed it, gray). The first one turned out to be East German and the official who processed our papers asked us in Polish if we had any vitamins for him. We didn't know what he was talking about and asked him what he meant.

"You don't have any vitamins for me"?

"I don't think so", said Alicja. "We have a few aspirins and stuff in the van."

"These vitamins could have a percentage", he said

Alicja looked blankly at him and he opened the door of his booth so that we could see the bottles of booze on the floor he'd been given by the people before us. I'd already seen the person in front of us giving him what looked like two wristwatches. We had no alcohol so we gave him a carton of cigarettes and he waved us on to the next booth. Customs officials throughout Central & Eastern Europe are, without exception, on the take and the most expedient thing to do is to accommodate them with a bribe of some sort. You can stick to your guns and insist that you are not obliged to pay anything but you may have to wait for hours while they go through your car. Worse still, they simply keep you waiting and hand you onto the next shift. I’ve known people who have waited for 2 days because they had nothing to give to the customs officials but the customs officials thought that they had.

Having got past the East German side we moved up to the Polish booth where the officer told us to stop the engine because he couldn't breathe for diesel fumes. When we said we couldn't stop it because we'd never start it again, he replied that he couldn't let the car through because our papers were not in order and anyway, if we couldn't start the van, then it was unroadworthy and we could on no account enter Poland with it. He didn’t even look at our papers! He told us to go to the side of the road, park up and “switch the fucking old antique of a thing off”. As he walked away he muttered that he didn't have time to mess about with us and he'd maybe come over and attend to us when he finished his shift. He probably thought we’d capitulate quickly with a bribe as Westerners are notoriously impatient but we thought we’d have some fun and wait him out.

We weren't worried at all. It was a nice sunny day, I needed a rest from driving and we didn't have any appointments to keep. I’d made sure to park on a slope so I could get the van started again and we drank tea, rearranged the boxes once more and tried to get some sleep. He came over about three hours later and apologized saying that he'd had a very hard, stressful day because two of his colleagues were on leave and the work load was heavier than usual. We waited for him to finish and then, without a word between us, I opened the dash pocket. There was nothing inside it but a packet of cigarettes with an American ten-dollar note sticking out of the top of it. I inclined my head towards the cigarettes but he looked for me to hand them to him. I didn’t make any move towards them so he pulled a stamp and inkpad out of his pocket and put his hand out for our documents. I handed him the cigarettes and our passports, which he stamped and walked back to his booth. I ran the van down the slope a little way and started it in gear, looked in the mirror and let out a big screaming WHOOOOP! I’d cut the ten-dollar note in half and I still had the other half for the next greedy bastard customs officer we came across. I vowed next time to run a horsehair through each cigarette with a needle too because apparently it makes you cough like a Russian delivery van.

To put these bribes into perspective for those readers who are not familiar with the ways of the Eastern bloc, a Polish customs officer at the time earned the equivalent of fifteen American dollars per month and if I’d have been straight he would just have taken ten from us. Poles who go to West Berlin to sell their illegal meat, butter and eggs make something like twenty-five dollars per trip. Depending on how close to the border they live and the availability of produce to sell they can do three trips a week. In this way they can earn themselves something like five times the customs officer’s monthly wage in just a week! Faced with this enormous financial disparity the customs officer can search their car and confiscate their goods or he can do the smart thing and take a few dollars from the driver in return for his turning a blind eye.

It seems to me that when a country pays its customs officials so little in relation to what most of the people he interviews each day earn from smuggling, that country is inviting bribery and can’t expect it’s officials to remain incorruptible. No matter how well principled the customs man is, sooner or later his kids are going to want new shoes or something and he's going to take what the driver offers him. It's ironic that all across Poland there is an acute shortage of meat while every day vast quantities of it cross the border into Germany in private cars. Heading south it was immediately apparent that Poland was a little more human, a little warmer to a visitor than East Germany albeit still very austere. Driving through the place felt much safer to us than East Germany because Alicja speaks the language and we have our relations here to help us if we run into problems. It was by now late afternoon and we had hopes of reaching Warsaw and a welcome meal and a bed at around midnight.

East Germany for the most part suffers from the effects of collective farming and we didn't see anything which you could call a farm there at all, just the odd corrugated iron tractor shed and fields of the same crop stretching for miles into the distance, all very boring. But in Poland we drove through dozens of villages with little mixed farms with a few ducks, cows, geese, chickens scratching around, maybe a couple of pigs and always a horse or two. We drove on past duck ponds, haystacks, and fruit orchards. In the villages the peasants were returning from the fields carrying their scythes over their shoulders, dogs following at their owners heels. Old women with wizened faces and headscarves stood talking on the pavements or sat on wooden benches in the gardens. And as the light began to fade we could see candles flickering in the village cemeteries.

The road, although narrow, was surprisingly well surfaced and we were making good time but as darkness came upon us we realized that the roads had no reflectors of any sort. There were no cats’ eyes in the middle of the road, no white lines, no arrows on bends and it was difficult to tell where the roadsides ended and the fields began. Shortly after dusk we began to come up behind horses and carts all of which were dark in color and not one of them had a reflector or rear light. By the time we reached the city of Poznan it had come on to rain. Poznan was a large city which did have a few dim street lights around the place but it also had large holes in the road which were filled with road colored water and I couldn’t see them. Had the streetlights have been over the holes it wouldn't have been so bad but as it was, driving was dangerous. We gave up our hopes of reaching Warsaw that night; I'd been driving and waiting at border posts for 15 hours and figured it was time to throw in the towel.

We looked for somewhere on a slope to park for the night. A hotel was out of the question; we had to sleep inside the van to avoid having our gear stolen. The land all around was flat as a bottle of Bulgarian lemonade so we found a muddy lay by at the side of the road and reasoned that for a packet of fags we'd be able to get a tow in the morning. I slipped a blank into the pistol we’d bought in Germany to scare off would-be muggers and we went to sleep on the boxes in the back. Awake at five thirty, I put the kettle on for coffee and found that our milk had gone off.

“Fuck”
“Why are you swearing?”
“Because the fucking milk’s gone off”
“I thought you weren’t going to get annoyed at small things anymore now that you’re not working”
“You’re absolutely right my dear”
“So?”
“So, I’m looking forward to a lovely cup of black coffee”
“That’s it; see…not difficult is it?”

She was right. I made the coffee and sat sipping it in the driver’s seat.

“Oh shit”
“What’s up?”
“That portable toilet chemical stuff we bought has leaked all over the bottom of my coat”
“How come?”
“Oh shit shit shit”
“What?”
“Look at it. It’s all over the bottom of my shoes”
“I thought you weren’t going to get annoyed at small things anymore”
“That wasn’t me that was you. Look at it, I’m fucking annoyed”
“Look, here comes a truck, ask him if he can give us a tow to get started”
“You ask him”
“I don’t speak Polish”
“Yes you do, you speak enough to ask for a tow”
I got out of the van and walked up to where the truck had stopped. The driver wound the window down and raised his eyebrows. I couldn’t think of the word for tow and so I asked him if he thought the weather was going to be fine. He said that the radio was the best place to find that sort of information. I agreed and looked at my boots. He asked if that was my van over there and I told him that it was but that it was a bad product. I knew it was a stupid thing to say but my conversation was limited by my small vocabulary. Then I asked him if he could start the van for me and he looked at me kind of suspicious like and wound the window back up. I didn’t know what to do so I went back and told Alicja who thought it was hilarious. I was still telling her about it when we heard the guy start up and drive off. It was another hour before a garbage truck came along and agreed to give us a pull to start but the thing was too light and the wheels spun in the mud. After the garbage collectors had left I tried the starter and the engine burst into life. I hadn’t thought about trying it before and we found, subsequently, that it would always start first thing in the morning when it was cold.

We eventually arrived in a grim looking Warsaw at eleven in the morning feeling tired and dirty. We hadn’t told Alicja’s mother exactly when we would be arriving, only that it would be in spring and we wanted to surprise her. Had she known our exact ETA she would have stood in queues for a week all over Warsaw trying to get extra food. We’d bought boxes full of food with us from Germany. A surprise it was, but more for us than her. She'd rented out the spare room, in which we were intending to stay, and we had nowhere to sleep. The lodger, a young woman from the country who was studying in Warsaw, was at home when we arrived and we could see that she was worried about being thrown out with nowhere to go. She went off to her room and a few minutes later we could hear her sobbing her heart out. We tried to reassure her by saying that we’d sleep on the floor that night and then find a relative to stay with but she said she’d feel guilty for being there in the middle of a family reunion and lots of other Polish stuff I couldn’t understand.

After an hour, during which Alicja's mother telephoned everyone she knew, the lodger was placed with friends on the understanding that she could return when we’d gone. I ran her and her luggage to the new place in the van and we paid a hundred American dollars inconvenience money to the people who were going to house her. I wondered out loud about inconveniencing these people but Alicja’s mum said it was a Godsend to them as the whole family didn’t earn that much in a month. We no longer needed the suitcases we’d been lugging about for so long and we gave them to the girl. They weren’t anything special and the wheels no longer worked but she was thrilled to bits. I saw why later, hers were made of papier mache.

When we returned to Alicja's Mum's apartment we had to carry the entire contents of the van up six flights of stairs because the lift was out of order and her mum was adamant that the van would be gutted by thieves in no time if anything was left in it. I was getting utterly sick of carrying our things up stairs. The last time was in Brussels when the lift had been broken in the Jaques Brell Youth Hostel. This time we had a big van full to the brim, I was dog-tired and it took the best part of two hours. At last there was time to relax and we both took a welcome bath. I was glad we did because the hot water went off the next day and only made the occasional brief appearance over the next six weeks. A year later we were still getting letters from my Mother in Law saying “we had hot water for a whole month”. Yes this was Poland all right, land of the occasional hot water and pre-loved scaffolding. We remembered experiencing exactly the same situation 4 years before when we were here. As soon as we found that the water was hot, everyone took a bath because they never knew when they'd get the next one.

The hot water supply in Polish cities is not an individual thing, you don't have your own hot water service, it comes from a great big central water heating plant usually located on the outskirts of town. It’s is pumped through underground pipes to the apartment and office blocks all around the city and to see steam rising from manhole covers in the middle the roads is a familiar sight. The city councils are forever renewing the pipes and, as they don't have the money required to buy good quality Western pipes, they quickly disintegrate in the corrosive hot water and they have to do it all over again. Hot water is not a service to be taken for granted in Polish cities - it's a sporadic thing.

For those fortunate enough to have telephones it’s common practice all over Polish cities to call friends and family and ask if you can come over and have a bath at their place. People seldom refuse these requests because they knew that it can be their turn not to have hot water next time. If you don’t have a telephone you either just turn up at your relatives apartment with your towel or you stay at home and heat water on the gas stove in pots and pans. The hot water that heats all the apartment and office radiators works on the same principle and when that goes off people have to be resourceful. I’ve seen people heat half a dozen house bricks on the gas stove and place them on two cold bricks on the floor and rotate heaps of these hot bricks around their apartments to keep warm. The person who’s actually heating the bricks on the stove has the warmest job but he/she nearly suffocates from carbon monoxide poisoning because of all the gas being burnt in the kitchen.

As for the pre loved scaffolding, it looks as though it’s been in service since before the Bolshevik Revolution. No, I’m wrong – before the Industrial Revolution. You don't see scaffolding in this sort of condition in the West because workmen would refuse to use it. No insurance company would insure people working on it. It’s all bent and rusty and the clamps which hold it together are on their last legs. When you see it erected on the side of a building it looks like a heap of rust colored sticks just blew up against a wall in a hurricane. There's no such thing as new scaffolding so, as it falls by the wayside, it's replaced by wooden saplings of varying lengths taken straight out of the forest and nailed together.

On our second night in Warsaw we went out to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant which offered, on the menu, such imaginative delicacies as Roast Piggy, Chicken with bamboo and Goat in fire. In Australia we were frequent visitors to Vietnamese restaurants and we knew what Vietnamese food should taste like. This wasn’t remotely like it and included things like beetroot, Polish sausage, turnips and pickled cucumber. The restaurant staff was all North Vietnamese who had been sent to Poland to study mechanical engineering, had married Polish girls and applied to stay here. They were interesting guys and, as we were their only customers at the time, they entertained us.

They told us that they'd been given an intensive Polish language course when they first arrived and this was something that had equipped them for living in Poland afterwards. When they were officially given permission to stay in Poland the regulations didn’t allow them to hold work permits but there was no law to prevent them from opening a business. They'd spent a considerable amount of time wondering what kind of business they could go into with limited funds and they finally decided on a restaurant but there were problems - none of them had ever cooked before, they didn't have any recipes and couldn't find woks to cook in.

Being mechanical engineers, designing and making the woks had been within their realm of expertise but, from my observations, they could have done with a few lessons in carpentry - the hand whittled chopsticks were a trifle lumpy and tasted of, I believe, pine sap. The next stage in their project had been to comb every grocery shop and market in Warsaw looking for authentic ingredients but they only found one - rice. This explained to our complete satisfaction the distant tang of burnt cabbage which hung around in the background of each dish we sampled. When combined with the fact that it had been cooked by mechanical engineers in home made woks, who hadn’t visited Vietnam in years and had no culinary training whatsoever, I would venture to say that we had experienced a Vietnamese culinary delight without parallel in its country of origin.

Things were ridiculously cheap for us in Poland and we ate out at the very best restaurants every day even though, in a city of one and a half million, there were only a handful of restaurants worthy of the name. One night we went to a very formal and posh place where the waiters spoke English. They didn't have a table for us as they were fully booked but said that we could get a meal in the other room at the grill. We sat down at the bar\grill and the waiter\chef told us that they only had one meal on the menu, steak and chips. We ordered one each. Mine was a pretty good steak but it was a little underdone, so having checked the price, which was a whole $1.50, I asked for another one.

"Another steak please, well done." "Thank you very much sir", he said, thinking I was complimenting him on his cooking of the last steak rather than giving him an order for the next one. I ate two underdone steaks that evening.

Inflation here, they say, is running at something like 80% p.a. and it really brings it home to you when you get into a taxi and there is a little piece of paper informing you that you must multiply the meter reading by 13 to get the current fare. We bought a few odds and ends for the van one day and they came to a price which was too much for the cash register. The shop assistant had to divide the price by four and ring it up four times on the cash register which was made for service in times when the currency was stable.

Alicja's Mum had had a fridge on order for over a year and was still waiting for notification that one had come into stock for her. The next time we were passing the shop we went in to inquire about it. The manager found the paperwork but told us that he had no idea when a fridge would be allocated, what size it would be or whether it would be of Polish or Russian manufacture. “It's the luck of the draw”, he said. “I have no control over it”. We thought we'd try cutting through all the crap and offer a bribe. There wasn't much beating about the bush. I showed him a ten-dollar note, he asked us to choose which fridge we wanted from the storeroom and we had it delivered immediately. This, of course, meant that someone else's mother who'd had a fridge on order for God knows how long, would miss out for a while longer. The cost of the fridge was the surprising part of the deal, it was $22, it looked good and it worked when we plugged it in.

Things generally were better than on our visit four years previously, the shops were better stocked, there were a few Western cars on the streets and, in Warsaw, the odd splash of color on buildings. Diesel for the van cost 3.35 cents per litre and we made arrangements to have long-range fuel tanks made and fitted. Commercials had just started to appear on Polish television. They were terribly amateurish but what else could be expected? They were the first form of advertising ever to appear on Polish TV. We saw a sign one-day in the city. It was for the film Dirty Dancing but had been translated into Polish as "Rotating Sex.

In the subway in Central Warsaw every day were some old buskers, pensioners supplementing their income, not just the odd one but a whole orchestra. They sounded good too, much better than Freddie Dix of Chipping Norton fame. On May the First, a big day throughout the Soviet Union, we watched a Polish country and western group perform in the street singing in English with American accents -down south American accents. They were word perfect although they probably didn't speak a word of English. Next came a very passable trad' jazz band, again singing in English, "everybody wanz mah babbee but mah babbee dun wanz nobbudy budmee" I felt a little sorry for them because they were good and lively but no one in the audience seemed to be entirely with it, no foot tapping and no applauding the solos and only a small attempt at applause at the end.

Photocopying too had just found its way to Warsaw but there were only about ten photocopiers in the whole of the city. You still had to fill in your name and address on a slip of paper so that you could be traced in case you were duplicating subversive literature, but nevertheless, four years ago there was not one commercial copying outfit in Warsaw.

A few days later I disgraced myself when we attended a Polish military funeral. It was for a man who had been an army Colonel and which, apart from the family, was attended by four busloads of army personnel. They were tall young soldiers with straight backs, razor sharp creases in their trousers and bags of spit and Polish or was it…pol?. This may need clarification. I didn’t mean Polish. I didn’t mean to imply here that they were Polish and carried bags of spit. Heavens no - I don’t know what they were carrying in their bags!

The coffin arrived in a gray van just like the regular vans you see driving around Warsaw - no distinguishing features at all to let one know that it was a hearse. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage and a mournful sounding military band led the way with the slow marching soldiers behind them, followed by the coffin with friends and relatives bringing up the rear. At first I had the impression that it was going to be an impersonal affair with the army taking over the proceedings and the family being somewhat left out of it. But it was well organized and when we arrived at the grave, the army stood in line to one side and let the family go to the front. They had organized a microphone for the two speakers and throughout the entire proceedings, three soldiers stood at the grave side straight as ramrods holding red cushions on which were displayed the man's medals. The army's demeanor in the event was respectful and dignified. In fact I formed the impression that it was a good way to run things because people weren't left wondering what to do, what protocol should be observed, and so forth.

There were, at various intervals, orders being given to the dozen or so soldiers who were standing behind me - orders which I couldn't understand, and when the order came to fire the salute, I didn't know what had been said. Suddenly, very suddenly, from out of the gray, an officer standing in front of me bellowed out a word, there was an enormous bang, I screamed "FUUUUCK" and hit the ground. I thought he'd seen a bomb dropping or something.

When I opened my eyes and took my hands away from over my ears I was lying on a heap of freshly dug mud staring over the edge of the grave straight at the coffin. I was dressed in my brother-in-law’s suit which now had mud all down the front of it and his cuff links were all gummed up with mud too. Of course, I did know that this wasn't exactly the way in which I should deport myself at such an occasion, but it was automatic. I looked up to see if anyone was left standing. Of course, everyone was. Although they didn't speak English I was sure they were all familiar with the word fuck - it's international. I got to my knees. They were all horrified at my behavior and stood there looking down at me with gaping mouths. All, that is, except for this one guy of about thirty years of age who started giggling under his breath and had to excuse himself. I saw him standing at the gate smoking as we were on our way out and he took one look at me, turned away, and started laughing again.

The cemetery was beautiful, covered in trees, it was like being in a forest and quite unlike Anglo Saxon burial places which by comparison seem cold and reserved and lack feeling. There were small bench seats at the ends of many graves that had obviously been built by the relations so that they could come, sit quietly and remember. There was a touch of unruliness about the place that seems to me to reflect the Polish spirit. I don't mean scruffiness, no, it was more cared for than most Anglo Saxon style cemeteries. It was more a naturalness, a wildness, a few weeds, primroses, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots and that sort of thing.

One thing which did strike me as being unusual was that there were a number of newish graves on the headstones of which there was a persons name and birth date but no date of death. I was told that they had already been built, bought and paid for by people who are still alive but presumably don't want their death to be a burden on others. I regarded it as plain morbid and defeatist and I wanted to kick the owners up the ass and tell them to start living again because people with that kind of mindset are already a burden to others. Anyway, when I was at the cemetery I saw a peculiar thing. In amongst all these strange Slavic names on the headstones, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, one stood out. His name was Edmond Russell and I wondered how come he ended up there. Perhaps he was a tourist like me who went through a red light or maybe he'd been at a military funeral and had a heart attack when they'd fired the guns. I want to meet him when I get to heaven. I want to get pissed with him and have a good laugh about Polish cemeteries.

Alicja's uncle and aunt recently bought a farm about 40 km from Warsaw. It has an enormous barn with a concrete floor and electricity - ideal for messing around under cars - so we’ve been going down there to work on the campervan. On the way there is a road sign saying Moscow 1200 km and every time I see it I am reminded that we are only two days drive (if the roads are any good) from the capitol of Gorbyland. It seems very exotic to me.

Funny how Russians have this way of honoring their politicians and leaders by naming cities after them isn't it? And then sometimes they finally get around to admitting that the guy was a real bastard and rename it after someone who's in vogue at the time. I mean, there's Ho Chi Minh City, St Petersburg, Stalingrad, Leningrad, etc. etc. Us good guys don't have Nixonville, Churchilltown, Reagan City or Thatcherville etc. do we? I'm sure that one day, when all these poor sods have finally got color television and hot running water, and the rest of the World is living on the moon, there'll be a Gorbograd or Gorboburg or something.