I am aware that what follows is the most self-indulgent piece of writing I have ever committed, and also that it is about ten times too long for a blog piece, but it makes sense for me to keep it here.

This was first published here in July 2018, when it made even more sense.

I am re-posting it now on special request. I love special requests.

1.    Prelude: Why at all and why now

6 July 1988 was the day my life changed for ever. People often say this sentence for effect, others rush into using it without much thought, but in my case it would be hard to argue against its suitability. On that day I arrived at Heathrow on a British Airways flight from Warsaw, and what was planned as a three months’ students holiday turned into a lifetime of an ever expanding ever changing devotion first to London and in time to the whole of Britain.

Now that it is coming up to a round anniversary of my English landing, I have decided to commit an abridged version of my first 30 years in England to keyboard. The main reason for this is that as time goes by I find myself doubting my own memory of my English beginnings and I think, was it really me sitting on my own, on that plane one row ahead of the smoking section, excited to the point of bursting? Well, I must have got here somehow so chances are it really was me, but just in case my ageing memory mangles actual events beyond recognition sooner than I am dreading, or I forget large chunks of it beyond rescue, I came to the conclusion that now is a better time to write my English memoir than it will ever be.

The second reason for writing this story now is the sudden urge to tell my children how they came to be what they are and what their mother was like when she was not much older than some of them are now. There is a little more to this reason, and it’s a bit morbid, in the memento mori sort of way. Both my parents died in the last few years, and I have recently come to a painful realisation that I had always known relatively little about their younger years, it was always just fragments of stories without proper beginning or end, of incomplete people and places, and now I will never know any more about any of these stories, people and places, in any greater detail. So, dearest children, I am writing this for you, ready or not.

As I retrace my early steps around London, I might, belatedly, notice and acknowledge significant milestones along the journey and spot, retrospectively, that elusive moment, if indeed it can be pinpointed to a single moment, when I became British, and I know it was a long before the day the Mayor of Wandsworth sealed it with a limp handshake.

I know that despite living in England for the majority of my life, technically, I am not and never can become English, an accident of birth or some other cosmic glitch successfully prevents me from it, I am reluctantly aware of it and I have learnt to live with it, the same way I’ve learnt to live with my frizzy hair and rather large nose, but I prefer not to dwell on any of these irritations in the hope that the hair, the nose and the technical non-Englishness do not define me.

The final reason is pure vanity, I simply love the sound of my own typing on the keyboard.

2.    A long way to Heathrow

In July 1988 I had just completed year three, of five, of English and Linguistics Master’s degree at Lodz University. During that academic year a group of young graduates from University of York visited our department and worked as our teachers for the year. In our student jargon we called them natives, short for native-speakers of English, a relatively rare species in our English department and as such coveted by all students, as a much more desirable alternative to being taught Conversational English classes exclusively by Polish born and bred academics.

The York natives of 1988 were also more or less same age as us. This presented an opportunity I was not going to miss. As Poland was still a communist country at that time, it was not exactly easy for Polish citizens to travel to England, and before this current opportunity presented itself, I was slowly resigning myself to the fact that after graduation I would settle into teaching English to children and adults of Poland, talking to them about great monuments of British culture without having seen them close up. The route to Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Wembley Stadium was tricky and remained firmly beyond many people’s reach at the time.

First, I needed an official invitation from a British host, somebody who would be kind enough and bothered enough to go to the Polish consulate in London, complete the invitation form, have it signed, stamped, ‘ authorised’ and then post it to me. With the invitation in hand, I could apply for a British visa at the British Consulate in Warsaw. The visa section of the British Consulate in Warsaw was only opened a couple of hours a day and so it was accepted as norm to queue for weeks until you were seen at the counter. There was a queue manager, a new one every week, selected from fellow lovers of Britain in the queue. Their duty was to make sure everybody on the waiting list reported regularly to tick off their names confirming they are still in the running. Applicants from outside Warsaw were allowed to tick their names once a week. I remember making three trips on three consecutive Wednesdays, a two hour train journey from Lodz to Warsaw just to tick off my name. There was no other way to remain in the game, or at least none that anybody thought of at the time. Once you were at the visa application desk, the process was surprisingly simple and my passport was stamped with something called a promise of a visa within minutes. The actual visa was only given on arrival in the UK. This provisional visa allowed me to go to a LOT or BA office to book a flight. Airlines were not selling tickets to people without a visa promise.

I set off to work in early October and as time was limited, any subtlety of approach had to be abandoned. I began courting the York natives aggressively as soon as I learnt their names. There were two girls and a guy. I briefly evaluated my chances as well as the wisdom of trying to become a romantic interest of the guy, decided against it as leading to a potentially messy outcome and instead, zoomed in on one of the girls. Cecilia became a frequent guests at my parents’ flat, where I regularly inflicted my mother’s baking and my father’s broken English on her. We spent weekends in Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk together. I regaled her with history of Łódź. I was very thorough about the origins of local textile industry, its German and Jewish influences, the full caboodle. I dragged her through darkest, dreariest recesses of the city’s museums, remembering to read up on their most impressive exhibits the night before so I could bore her numb with minute details of their provenance and significance.

I allowed Cecilia a short Christmas break but as soon as she was back I engineered a New Year’s trip for all the young natives to the pride and joy of every Polish travel agency, Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. We spent a few merry days hiking in the snow by day and drinking raspberry vodka by night. We welcomed 1988 in at a forest clearing, having been driven there in an actual one horse sleigh, jingling all the way. Good time was had by all. So much so that when the new term started I assessed that my friendship with Cecilia had reached sufficient depths for me to casually raise the subject of The Invitation. She was only too happy to help me, glad in fact to be able to repay me for all my hospitality. Cecilia’s mum did the deed and I was suddenly one step closer to eating fish and chips from the back pages of the Evening Standard.
A word in mitigation. You know the type of films set among American teenagers where a guy pretends to like the girl for a bet and then gradually falls for her? The same happened to me and Cecilia. I did not fall in love with her, but what started as my shamelessly calculated campaign to elicit the invitation had with time evolved into a real friendship and we had stayed in touch for several years afterwards. Also, as she revealed to me much later, she had been fully aware of what I was doing all along but as she was new and more than a bit lonely in Lodz at the time, she actually welcomed my overzealous attention. Win win.

I was on the first available BA flight to London as soon as I summer exams ended.

3.    A failed Pole

I was picked up at the airport by Renata. I am not entirely sure who she was exactly and how long a chain of acquaintances separated her from my parents was, but somehow they managed to find her, and there she was, whisking me all the way to Willesden Green in her clapped out white Astra. She proved to be a true life saver in those first days and weeks, as she took it upon herself to mother me discreetly but firmly. I never learnt much about her, except what I could see for myself. She was a rather shy, reserved Polish lady in her late thirties, with a considerably older possibly second generation Pole for a husband. They had a teenage daughter who was away on holiday at the time of my arrival, so Renata let me stay in her room for a couple of weeks, charging me £20 per week. I had brought 640 US dollars with me from Poland, which my dad had somehow managed to conjure up from the same box of his magic tricks he pulled out Renata from.

Nothing could have prepared me for that first evening at Renata’s house, the ambush was complete.

As soon as Renata unlocked the front door, I became aware of a rather large group of people chatting loudly in the living room and kitchen. I was ready to feel really bad, as it looked like Renata had gone all the way to Heathrow to pick me up despite having a house full of guests, but just then Renata announced, in Polish, her face beaming with joy and excitement, hey, everybody, she is here now!  Everybody greeted me like a celebrity, they guided me towards an armchair, I was given something to drink, and then all these people suddenly gathered around me and looked at me with a mix of curiosity and something approaching tenderness. Awkward, was all I managed to think, but then an elderly man said, welcome to England, child, now tell us all about Poland, what is the national mood really like, how are people bearing up, anything in the offing? I stared at him blankly for several seconds to buy time. I then hastily arranged my face into the most patriotically concerned expression I could convincingly pull off and said something non-committal and vaguely cheerful, how people are keeping strong and hopeful and they pray a lot. It transpired that Renata had invited all her friends and relatives for an opportunity to meet a young Polish woman fresh from the boat, plane, same thing, from Motherland who would no doubt impart all the latest political news and gossip, undistorted by censorship and media’s sensationalist take on it. Little did they know that my life in the last year had revolved around courting Cecilia, fantasising about London, and stressing about essay deadlines, leaving me no time to pay attention to politics or social mood in the country. I did not know anybody in either pro, or anti-government movements, and despite my best attempt to bullshit my way out of, it had fast become glaringly obvious that Renata’s guests had wasted a journey to her house that day.

I realised that all these long-term expats knew more and cared more about what was going on in Poland politically and socially than I ever did. In the summer of 1988 Poland was still a Communist country, it was to be another year until a well-liked Polish actress bizarrely announced the end of Communism on national television. I had lived all my life under the rule of the Polish People’s Party and that was the only reality I’d ever known. I didn’t question it, I was never unhappy about it, I didn’t fight against it, I just enjoyed a carefree, contented childhood in what I considered sufficiently comfortable surroundings.

As far as I could recall, politics had invaded my safe cosy world only twice during my childhood in Poland. First, on the day Martial Law was declared one grey Sunday in mid-December, as my parents listened with silent dread to the general’s long sombre speech, I could hardly contain my joy on hearing that school was out from now until January. Christmas break was usually just a short few days’ affair at the time and three extra weeks sounded almost too good to be true!  I was 15 at the time.

Second time the side effects of the regime burst brutally into my carefree existence a couple years later, again in December. On that occasion I got frostbite after I stumbled upon a queue for lemons and spent four hours standing outside a fruit and veg shop in sub-zero temperatures. Lemons was not something you walked away from in those days. I have suffered from red nose and rosy cheeks in cold weather ever since, but it hardly qualifies me as a victim of oppressive Communist regime. I still drink black tea with a slice of lemon every night, which might have a symbolic meaning, but I think it does not go any deeper than the fact that I do not enjoy tea with milk.

The General and the lemons both flashed through my mind now as I sat in the middle of Renata’s living room in NW10, but I had nothing more current or remotely relevant to offer the small expectant crowd. I felt a fraud and a big fat failure as a Pole. This feeling, which lodged itself in my brain on that day had grown alarmingly with every passing year. It has since acquired the size of Poland itself and is being permanently stored in the darkest corner of my guilty conscience.

I reminisced about that evening several times over the next couple of decades, as it marked a starting point in my ongoing uneasy relationship with so called Polish diaspora in Britain.

Now, however, as the sun set on my first day in Britain, Poland and its political woes were the last thing I wanted to think about as I was getting ready to explore London the following morning.

… And cut!

My story is still only just beginning. However, my publisher (yes, really) advised me to stop here, and to say that those of you who would like to read more (who wouldn’t?), can look forward to the book version of my English beginnings in mid-2020.

There is a powerful scene in The King’s Speech when Colin Firth’s stammer-ridden George VI shouts, to a deafening echo, ‘I have a voice!’.
After that, things begin to look up for him.

Watching recent developments on the Lib Dem General Election campaign trail, I can report with growing confidence that North Cornwall is on its way to discover that it does indeed have a powerful voice and that it can stand up for itself in Westminster.

North Cornwall is one of the Lib Dem designated target seats in the current election, where they believe they stand a realistic chance of replacing the current Tory MP with a Lib Dem one.  The cautiously optimistic view among their supporters is that they are on the right track to achieve just that.

The number of people who turn up to volunteer, offer encouragement and support to Danny Chambers, the Liberal Democrats Parliamentary Candidate for North Cornwall has been overwhelming of late. There is nothing quite like a General Election to bring out community spirit around here.

The young, the old, and everybody in between flock to the modest Lib Dem headquarters in Launceston ready to knock on doors, fold leaflets, and put the kettle on. They bring their eager anticipation, barely concealed excitement and jumbo packs of jammy dodgers. They know they have a real chance to make a difference, and to add a splash of yellow to the monolithic blue map of their part of the world in the early hours of the 13th of December.

I spoke to a few volunteers who are drawn to the Lib Dem North Cornwall headquarters in Launceston on a daily basis to assist elect Danny as North Cornwall next Lib Dem MP in December.

I asked them what brings them there, what motivates them to join in the campaign to oust the current Conservative MP for the area.

This is what they told me.

‘Poverty is a very real issue for a lot of local people. Minimum wage is not being implemented here, what with the gig economy, seasonal jobs, zero hours contracts, at the moment a lot of people are being caught out by the Universal Credit payments delays. I see a lot of van drivers, so there jobs, but there is no security.’

‘Tories tend to brush poverty under the carpet, and poverty is a big issue in North Cornwall. Danny Chambers will be the champion for poor people, he will fight for fairer funding for Cornwall. I know a lot of people who rely on food banks on a regular basis to survive, and they are not unemployed, they are working poor. The fact that we have food banks in Cornwall is a shameful state of affairs.

We hope that when Danny is elected as our Lib Dem MP, he will work hard to get rid of food banks, by increasing investment in the region, which will create jobs, will bring new opportunities, will inject new life into our area’.

‘What we are hearing on the doorsteps is that things were better here when we had our last Lib Dem MP, Dan Rogerson. People tell us stories how Dan solved a lot of their problems, was showing interest in their lives, unlike the current MP.  The mood that I pick up when canvassing is cautious optimism, hopeful that when Danny wins, North Cornwall wins. People take our leaflets, read them, ask us questions, so the message from the doorsteps gives us hope, it’s a positive sign that they are willing to listen, and that they are thinking what choice they want to make, and how it is going to affect their lives.’

‘People are impressed by our Green policies, by Danny’s understanding of climate change issues. Even Brexit supporters respect our Green policies and the fact that our candidate is from farming background, he knows our problems, he knows the difficulties we face. People respond very well to Danny, they respect him for who he is and what he stands for.’

‘Brexit is a damaging distraction from what we in North Cornwall should be concerned about. What we should really consider when making our voting choices should be dictated what is best for our local area, and having somebody who grew up on a local farm and went on to become a local veterinary surgeon really is as good as it gets in terms of suitability to represent us in Parliament.’

Another volunteer told me that she got involved because she is has had enough of Brexit and enough of the Conservatives who have proven bad for the region, who are failing here. I am hopeful, she told me, that there might be some hidden Remainers in the area who do not advertise their Remain sympathies for fear of antagonising their neighbours, but hopefully they will make their sentiments known at the ballot boxes. I am also counting on growing numbers of Leave voters who are slowly changing their minds, three years is a long time and some of them might be getting a better understanding of what Brexit will actually mean for us in Cornwall. Farmers and fishermen begin to realise that Brexit is not going to be good for them. They put up Leave posters in their fields, but I sense a budding awareness that Brexit would in fact be damaging for them.

And then there are those who voted Brexit but changed their minds. These people are telling us that they are going to vote for us, which makes sense, because, if you take Brexit out of the equation, North Cornwall is more likely to vote Lib Dem than Tory. Let’s hope there are people out there changing their minds as we speak.

Our current MP likes to take credit for everything, so he takes credit when it’s not due, we see him as a limelight-hogger, but I have not seen him do anything to better the lives of local people. Our schools and the NHS are underfunded, the bus network is being cut down, and food banks are everywhere. I have every confidence that Danny is the right man to address all our most pressing issues.

Our previous Lib Dem MP, Dan Rogerson, did a lot for Cornwall, and we are hoping that Danny will be given the chance to continue Dan’s work very soon. Cornwall has been by and large ignored by the Tories in terms of funding, as they believe in small government they have cut spending on everything and we really suffer the effects of this now. We have not seen any investment, and this lack of funding is bringing degeneration here, we are seeing job losses, we are seeing stagnation.  Danny is our best hope for revitalisation of our local area. I cannot overstate how much people are looking forward to overturning the current Tory majority here.

How would I feel if Danny wins? Brilliant! It would mean victory for Cornwall. Danny listens to people, and he understands local issues.

A week in, dust begins to settle allowing an early shape of this election campaign to emerge. Main goals, in no particular order, are, get Brexit done, cancel Brexit, keep Corbyn out, get Boris out, get the second referendum.

Tactical voting, pacts and alliances seems to be what it’s all about. Except it shouldn’t be. Blinded by Brexit we are running a risk of overlooking what should be a primary consideration, namely, the person behind each name on the ballot paper. Who they are, what they stand for, and if they are currently in office, how they have been doing so far.

I stopped being surprised at life’s little surprises long time ago, so when I found myself in a ringside seat for the prelude to this campaign in a deeply rural part of the country, I just ran with it.

Traditionally, October half term is the time when we, as a family, explore a part of the UK we have not been before, or revisit the parts we are particularly fond of. It is also the time when I arrive at an annual realisation that there is indeed life outside London. My metropolitan arrogance is taken down a notch as I am reminded that it is possible to have a fulfilled existence without the trappings of urban life.

This year our pumpkin season short break took us to Launceston, North Cornwall.  We were visiting our son, Matt, who had been working at North Cornwall Liberal Democrats Headquarters down there for the last few months. It made sense to check on him and bring him warm underwear. Matt told us not to worry about booking a hotel, he had it all under control. I began to worry. As it turned out, I needn’t have, he did well.

I knew we were likely to meet Danny Chambers, the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for North Cornwall, whose campaign Matt had been put in charge of. What I didn’t know was that we would be staying as house guests at his farmhouse.

It might be worth mentioning at this point that I am a lifelong Conservative voter and a no regrets Brexiteer.

Small talk kept us going for a couple of hours, we carefully avoided eye contact with the huge elephant in the corner. It was only after the last crumbs of homemade scones were cleared away that the B word was mentioned.

Danny sounded genuinely incredulous when he asked me my reasons for voting Leave. The conversation ran its usual course, the NHS bus, Turkey membership, refugee quotas, sovereignty, naivety, ignorance, emotional voting, patriotism, you name it. We skipped the fish and the bananas, as these do sound rather silly.

The discussion got as heated as it possibly could in the circumstances. We were all aware of the awkwardness of the situation. Danny was talking to the mother of his most trusted employee, I was talking to somebody who offered us a place to stay for the night. It was wise to cool down, as the only alternative would have been to walk out into cold damp Cornish night and stay there. Not clever.

We steered the conversation away from Brexit and onto a safer territory of local farming matters, and that is when it became really interesting. Danny is North Cornwall born and bred, his parents had a farm nearby, Danny himself is a neighbourhood vet. He knows farming first hand, he knows how hard it is, what dedication it requires, he speaks farmers’ language. He knows farm animals, he treats them, injects them, cleans their hooves and teeth, he delivers their babies. He has been doing it for donkey’s years. He understands how weather affects farming, he speaks about climate change from the position of somebody who has been on the receiving end of it for a while. He is the perfect man to represent North Cornwall’s interests in Westminster.

And yet. He is up against the Conservative MP, Scott Mann, also a local lad, and an ex-postman. So far so head to head. Scott Mann’s parliamentary voting record, is where their paths diverge. I’ll spare you googling time. Scott Mann generally votes against laws to promote equality and human rights, against the right for EU nationals already living in the UK to remain in the UK, despite government’s assurances on the subject, and, what is possibly most significant for somebody from rural part of the country, he consistently votes against measures to prevent climate change.

How on Earth was this man elected, and re-elected as an MP for Cornwall? One word. Brexit.
Make no mistake, I want Brexit, I do, I was hoping for a Halloween one. What I don’t want is for people all over the country to vote for the wrong person for their region based on Brexit and Brexit alone ignoring what is good for them locally.

I never viewed politics at such close range, so that weekend at Danny’s was an eye-opener. I don’t really have a witty closing sentence, I wish I did.
Oh, wait, I do. Vote Danny Chambers for North Cornwall.

https://www.dannychambers.org.uk/

Below, Danny tries his best to remain polite in the face of my out of control brexiteering under his roof, whilst my husband looks on and my daughter strives to retain her sanity by building a house of cards.

Sixth Form is upon us.
Day one could have gone better.
Amelia’s magical mermaid hair had been labelled ‘extreme’ and she was told to ‘get rid of it’ by next week or risk being removed from a lesson.

Amelia stormed in back home in a thunderous mood. She sat us down around the table and told us that she valued her education extremely highly thank you very much, and she saw the above threat as counterproductive to the very goal that her Sixth Form should be primarily if not exclusively concerned with, namely making sure that they were providing her with the very best education they were capable of providing her with. She struggled to see in what way her turqouise tresses might adversely affect the quality of her own or anybody else’s learning or emotional wellbeing.
She continued in a similarly impassioned manner for a while, front row family entertainment at its best. I was spurring her on mentally, whilst secretly fantasising about her repeating the same wronged teenager rant to her teachers the next day.

And then, when she finished, I quietly got out my phone and typed in
‘how to fade out blue hair dye’.

Being a responsible parent really sucks at times.

Empty Nest Syndrome is hitting me hard, punching well below the belt. The eery silences in the kitchen, the quiet absences in every room, the full fridge, the empty sofa, the list goes on. Our once five-strong family had shrunk to two persons, and  average age of household members shot up by 20 years overnight. We buy ready made meals; hardly worth cooking a Sunday roast for two, is there? We sit at opposite ends of our 6ft long kitchen table staring at a line of empty chairs and doing our best to keep the conversation going, but we lack focus. All the drama has been sucked out of dinner time banter. We try to talk about something else rather than the kids. Surely, we can do better, we have lives of our own. Or do we? 

After nearly 25 years of putting them first and myself later, and only if there was any time left, I am truly lost without them. The 8 hours or so a day that I tend to devote to paid work, are not that bad, but even that time feels strangely empty now that I do not need to worry about Parentspay, PE kit, summer concert pickup, food tech ingredients for Friday, and a working calculator for maths exam. There is nothing else to think about so I give work my undivided attention. What a weird feeling that is! But it is evenings and weekends when I struggle the most. 

My husband seems to be coping much better with our dramatically reduced head count. Being a man really is an enviably simple task. He flicks through 300 channels as if nothing had happened. He scoffs his Dairy Milk that he doesn’t need to hide from anybody any more with ridiculous contentment. He carries on as normal. It’s almost as if I am the only one who has been abandoned and forgotten by our grown-up offspring. 

I am telling myself to stay strong and I think positive thoughts. After all, my son really wanted that job in Cornwall and the girls’ school trips end on Thursday.  

– Today is Tuesday, right? The cleaner should be here by now. I wonder what happened to her. Has anybody seen her? She is not here, is she? 
I amuse myself thus, talking  half to myself half to other family members who are busying themselves around me, making coffees, buttering toasts, packing lunches. I don’t expect any meaningful response to my musings. 
– She is in Poland this week. She went for 10 days, she is going to Zakopane, and she is also going to the place she is from, I forgot the name of it.
I stop stirring my cappuccino, everybody else freezes too. All eyes on my husband. 

– How on earth can you possibly know this??
– Honorata and I chatted last week. She told me. She will be back next Tuesday.

He gets up and makes his grand exit, leaving the rest of us to pick up jaws from the kitchen floor. Being up to date with domestic logistics has never been my husband’s forte, to say the very least. Until now that is. Clearly. Last  month ushered in a few ground-shifting changes to our family daily routine. Husband has been working from home.  Nobody knows how long the current arrangement is going to last, least of all, I suspect, my husband. For the time being we treat it as an interim order of things, and carry on as normal as we can. Husband walks the treacherous path of the Working From Home jungle with surprising skill, even if it is sprinkled with a dose of coy curiosity of a newcomer. He is showered, dressed and at his desk by 8am. He goes on short walks around the neighbourhood twice a day, he makes sure he breaks up for lunch, and he switches from sedentary (Google Chrome) to horizontal (Netflix) at 6pm sharp. He makes us hot dinners mid-week and he takes our son for driving lessons mid-morning. He has worked out where our local mobile vet lives, and he knows all the builders in our street by name.   In fact, now that I am thinking about it, it makes perfect sense that he should know where and how long for Honorata went on holiday. 

Where does the work-at-home husband scenario leave me? Interesting question.
I have never been a domestic goddess, my husband was always much better in that role. His cooking and sewing skills had always made me look amateur. But now that his day no longer includes 3 hour commute, he is posing a real threat to my one and only remaining title, the MD of the Family. If he is already more familiar with our cleaner’s summer plans, keeps up with which offspring is off to where, why and what time on Saturday and remembers to buy milk, then whatever next? 

Tonight comes a major test. Rubbish bins need to be taken out. To date, he has never remembered to observe this weekly ritual unprompted. My future in the family hangs in the balance. 
It’s safe to post this tonight. He never checks social media or blog sites during the week. Unless….? 

Today Poland, my country of origin, celebrates International Children’s Day with family days out, fun fairs, sweets and ice-cream. As a nod towards this tradition I planned to write a Proud Mum Moment sort of blog today. Just as I was mentally pencilling in my opening line, an email came from my son, with his own blog piece. He does not publish anywhere (yet?), he calls what he does a ‘subscription only’ blog. Without further ado, I give you Matt’s blog piece. Proud mum moment after all.

Dear Reader,

Thank you for joining me on my exploration of London’s Communities. This is my first piece. Your thoughts always welcomed.

A Roll of the Polish Dice

What: Piątki Przy Planszy – Friday Polish Board Games
When: Every other Friday
Where: Lewisham Polish Centre, Waldram Park Rd, Forest Hill, London SE23 2PP
Cost: Voluntary donation of around £2 for room use
Number of attendees: 15-20
Food and drink: Bring Your Own

Organised by: London Polish Cultural Group – Meet Up Group
Community Type: Social, Cultural, Language

Crowd: Friendly, welcoming, mainly 25-40 years old, professional, all Polish-born, English speaking skill is variable, not all that keen on board games, easy-going, some geeky (remember it’s board games), and entertainingly chatty.

Possible to make new friends…? A small core group of 4-5 seem to go frequently enough to be friends. You would certainly know a few faces after a couple of visits.

Skills Required: Polish Language
Learning Potential: Polish language learners: come one, come all!

If only…? There were pictures online of what to expect, i.e. which games.

Inclusive: 0.5/5 for non-Polish speakers… 4.5 for everyone else.

Welcoming: 4.0/5

Overall Rating: 3.0/5

In a tweet: No-thrills, simplistic, good fun route into London’s Polish community. Basic level of Polish required, liking of board- and card-games recommended. Come as an outsider and leave feeling part of a hidden little group.

Link: https://www.meetup.com/kulturalny/events/259707102/

My experience:

“I knew I’d stumbled upon something special when I felt surprised to still be in the UK.

This happened when I had popped out to the Co-Op across the road to pick up some beers. I was suddenly surprised to be hearing everyone speaking English. My ‘holiday-mode’ had already kicked in by this stage.

I’d come from the Meet Up group across the road in the Lewisham Polish Centre. The evening’s event was the playfully alliterated ‘Piątki Przy Planszy’, which translates to ‘Polish Board Game Fridays’ to give the Slavic rendition a run for its money.

I’m not an active member of the Polish Community – at best a passive observer over the years who guardedly kept his distance.  Occasionally I’d dip my toe in Polish school on Saturdays, a holiday to the Polish mountains, and another one-last-attempt at reviving the language. One more linguistic dash was in store that night I suppose.

The night began when I arrived late to a room full of Poles, huddled around three sets of tables. Someone whose name I promptly forgot shook my hand, welcomed me and then motioned me over to the table playing the most active game. It looked very simple too. This was ideal, the more rules a board game has, the less inclined I am to play it.

I sat down and watched those around me play. I remained almost mute.

I knew I was about to speak more Polish than I had since my Babcia’s funeral.

The language skills I had to offer weren’t much, so internally, I was preparing to instantly bemuse everyone with my grammatically broken drivel.

Imagine a long-jumper preparing to leap knowing his thighs were tied together.

Drum roll… The big reveal came … and went as I threw out a few Polish phrases: anti-climax. Nobody pretended to notice my mistakes, but they were pretending. A couple threw the occasional suspicious glances at me.

I crawled my way over a few minutes of conversation in this more foreign than not language.

Then, to be fair to my table of board gamers I showed my hand. I explained I was British-born, in London, to a Polish mother, and have repeatedly picked up and given up the language over the course of my 24-year-long lifetime.

So the expected rough landing was not so rough at all. That said, I did get a few doting mothers telling me in their (broken) English that I spoke very ‘cute Polish’.

***

There were some 15-20 players there, mainly 25-40 in age, the age tail-end drifting off around 55.

The atmosphere was hushed on the table pressed into the corner, a drawn-out battle of complex stratagems and wits. This was taking its course through tokens and figurines exchanged over a board with a Viking-themed landscape. Those around the table held themselves in thought like chieftains of old as they considered their next moves. On the other table, a Scrabble variant was being played with applaudable concentration.

We played a game with dice and dominoes first, that fortunately needed few words to be spoken. One only exclaimed missed opportunities and amusing clashes of hands: “Hopla! … Ojejku!” I would join in the chorus, keenly aware that my enthusiasm found its expression cloned from what I could remember of Babcia shouting when playing board games with me some 15 years earlier.

The Lewisham Polish Centre had once been a priest’s home. It is housed in a tall Victorian house, just off Lewisham in a mainly residential area. The downstairs area was where we played, a small ground floor cum salon, populated with identikit school tables and chairs. It felt homely as an estranged aunt’s house might.

It took quite a while to get round to the “what do you do for a living?” realms of conversation. This was welcomed on a Friday evening.

I learnt to play Tysiąc – a card game which apparently “every Pole knows.” Seeing that my three instructors around the table spanned two and a half generations, there was some weight to that claim.

A few rounds into the game, helped by a generous portion of Whiskey and Coke from the player to my right, my language skills started to flow back. I was able to worm my way through sentences ever faster: with more bravado but no fewer mistakes.

That was the backstory to my geographical confusion in the Co-Op. I felt fully enveloped by the Polish hub in Lewisham. So much so, that asking for my three beers in English felt laborious. The twisting of familiar sounds, “ffaankyuu”, was enjoyably strange. Maybe it’s the whiskey talking, but I had a good time.

***

By the end of the evening, I’d made it ‘inside’ the community. A base level of Polish eased the journey to be sure. Gone were the stereotypes I secretly harboured of London Poles… oh, what a cliché to end on.

After talking about mountainous holidays, the best Polish eateries in London and many things in between, I had become comfortable in this seemingly closed group. Looking back, it was a group of casual Friday-nighters, sharing memories of a country, which they once called home but now resembled a holiday spot.

Here it was too that the atmosphere of holiday and home mixed, and it took little more than a board game.

My 16-year-old daughter, whom I absent-mindedly allowed to blossom into a fully-fledged Marvel fan within my very nest, had read my Endgame review.

It was not good news.
I learnt that I was racist, sexist, speciest and generally ignorant. This is what she had to say;
Mummy, this is 2019, you cannot say Chinese, you say Asian.

‘Girl power moment’? Really? You liked that? Did you not see that it was a cheap nod to what Hollywood believes that feminists would like to see?

Dried up reed?? Seriously?? That is just offensive. Groot looks nothing like a piece of reed. If you really felt the irrestible need to compare him to a piece of vegetation, you could have researched some unusual types of trees to find the best match.
And Captain Marvel is not technically an Avengers film.
Otherwise, not bad, not bad at all.

My 13-year-old smiled sweetly, as she does; good effort, mummy, really well done, you are getting good at it, you should keep going.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! 

In the spirit of if you cannot beat them, join them, I watched Avengers: Endgame last night. I have lived with Marvel fanatics for years but somehow avoided catching more than a glimpse of it so far. As a self-proclaimed highbrow cultural snob, I never had much time for comic book derived entertainment. Except Spiderman, I like Spiderman. All that changed last weekend when I found myself in Sutton Empire sitting through Captain Marvel with my dear husband. Having seen two Avengers films in the space of three day, I now consider myself perfectly qualified to give an opinion.
My biggest fear about Endgame was its, already legendary, length. I have a perfectly healthy bladder, but I feared the sinking feeling of things dragging on interminably; Tolkien cinematic trilogies still give me night sweats. I needn’t have fretted. Surprisingly, Endgame finished before I felt the first twitchy urge to check my watch, sneakily, so as not to invoke the wrath of Thanos in my slobbering emotional wreck of a husband in the seat next to me. It all hurtled towards an emotional finale at brisk and steady pace, and did not feel like it was too long, even for a massive sceptic like me. One star earned already.
I am awarding the second star for humour. There was enough of it to lighten the mood, but not too much to turn it all into a Deadpool style farce. Yes, I watched Deadpool, both of them. They were okay. Back to Endgame. 

My second biggest fear when it comes to deep space blockbusters is that it will all feel like a massive pile of laser beam nonsense with no substance beyond the crackling sound of supersized steroid-pumped creatures  flexing their techno muscles and stretching their rubberised suits to breaking point. True to type, Endgame does have its share of big guys sulking and posturing in intergalactic wasteland, but it is kept within tolerable limits. Thanos is the biggest offender here, and he made me want to shout, what is your bloody problem, man!, a couple of times, but then I looked at his face, a grim warning what might happen to your upper lip area if you carry on smoking into middle age, and I just felt sorry for the guy. 
Third star goes to the relative brevity and award-winning clarity of the final battle scene. I am aware that complex multi-species battle scenes are unavoidable in films featuring interplanetary conflict scenarios and this is another reason why, by and large, I stay clear of such productions. Endgame’s be all end all  battle is kept mercifully concise and to the point, the stone studded glove is being kicked about in a fashion akin to fast paced football game. Nice.
An array of characters in full fancy dress come to the rescue at the crucial point, which I appreciate can be an emotional moment for those who know exactly who the Masai warriors like people are. My husband recognised their silhuettes before they even came into focus, and melted with joy accordingly. 
The turning to dust process was visually pleasing and seemed like a neat way of tidying up your spacecraft rubble.
Fourth star, yeah, let’s go crazy, goes to  the way all the emotional stuff is dealt with. Even without getting many references to the previous fifty films in the series, the film has enough of its own tear-jerking content to pull at a newcomer’s heart strings. Personally, Black Widow’s last, tenderly spoken words, before she plummets to her death, will probably stay with me the longest, with Iron Man hugging his dad close second.

The final, fifth, star goes to the feel good factor, which I realise ties in with the emotional stuff, but I really feel like giving this film five stars, so will keep it separate. My review, my rules. My favourite  feel good scene came when all the female characters lined up to help each other with whatever task was at hand. True girl power moment. 
Don’t get me wrong. There were oodles and oodles of it that went straight over my head. Like what’s the deal with  Thanos’s blue tin daughter? Why is she drifting through space with Iron Man at the beginning of the film? Where does the Chinese girl with pink butterfly antennae fit in? Or the talking (only just) dried up piece of reed? I am happy to file these questions away as unsolved mysteries of the Universe. 
So there. Five stars. Good entertainment all along.