A review of September invasion in the streets

Another invasion is in progress; these days in a form of electoral litter swamping both public and private places. Watch this space for a visual review soon.

Celebrating the atumn

A glorious hazy Sunday, so bright and warm it could easily be mistaken for a one in May, if it wasn’t for a light fungal smell to the air. It’s a perfect time for a proper session of relaxed weekend cooking, using only simplest produce the season offers. On the menu today – a spicy pumpkin soup, humble chicken roast with chestnuts, and an unsophisticated apple cake. All rustled up in under two hours.

The sounds: October breeze; noises from the nearby school football pitch; Jamie Saft trio playing Zorn’s Book of Angels (a reminder from Kraków);

The meal washed down with a bottle of South African wine. And, of course, there’s a good thing to share.

English apple cake. A slim, moist cake, best served warm, that will keep for a day or two wrapped in foil.

• butter – 130g
• unrefined caster sugar – 130g
• ‘eating’ apples – 3
• the juice of half a lemon
• ground cinnamon – 1/2 teaspoon
• demerara sugar – 2 tablespoons
• eggs – 2 large
• plain flour – 130g
• baking powder – a teaspoon
• fresh white breadcrumbs – 3 tablespoons
• a little extra sugar

Set the oven at 180 degrees centigrade. Line the base of a square 24cm cake tin, about 6cm deep, with a piece of baking parchment.

Put the butter and caster sugar into a food mixer and beat till light and fluffy. Cut the apples into small chunks, removing the cores as you go and dropping the fruit into a bowl with the juice of the half lemon. Toss the apples with the cinnamon and demerara sugar.

Break the eggs, beat them with a fork, then gradually add them to the butter and sugar. Sift the flour and baking powder together and fold them gently into the mixture. Scrape into the lined cake tin. Put the spiced apples on top of the cake mixture, then scatter with breadcrumbs and, if you wish, a little more demerara sugar.

Bake for fifty-five minutes to an hour. The edges should be browning nicely and the centre firm. Leave to cool for ten minutes or so before turning out. Eat warm. Enough for 8.

printable version

Kraków revisited

In the age of commerce taking over our lives the book has become a commodity, not any different from meat or a toilet roll. No wonder then that books are designed, promoted, sold, and bought in the way basic commodities are handled these days. Thousands of titles get dumped in heaps in megastores where customers are given those tacky supermarket baskets to shop with. Intimidated and disorientated by the space and sheer mass of printed paper on display, you are likely to forget what book you are after. The staff, equally lost or untrained, is never very helpful either.

Within a 10-minute walk from Kraków branch of
empikmegastore(pełnakulturaczydogłębnazgroza?)
we found a bookshop which is a true escape from the world the megastore offers. A marvel. Off the beaten track, but still in the centre. Well-hidden, but easily accessible for the curious who don’t follow the crowd in the Square. If you are into English, a good read, independent media, wooden floors, real music and radio (not muzak), peace and quiet, coffee and home-made cakes, you’ll feel at home in an instant. The place defies an easy description and we won’t attempt at any, which is part of the surprise when you are there one day.

Four souls lost in Smokovec

Indeed, this may easily happen to an unsuspecting casual hiker even while coming down a mountain. That’s why most innocent forms of socializing, chatting or a playful conversation, on a trail may lead straight to a trap. Mountains demand absolute concentration and abandonment of many comfortable lowland habits and social conventions. Screaming with joy seems so out of place here, farting, for that matter, so natural…

The southern slopes of High Tatra range possess the power to silnce all but most gregarious people. A short, mere 2 hour, hike along Magistrala is a rewarding experience. One after another, the massifs of Lomnica, Prostredni Hrot and Slavkovski come to the fore, dark and awesome against impossibly blue sky. Crisp October air, dense with concentrated scents of a short mountain summer, evenly diffuses light over the walls and pillars of bare rock so that from a distance they take on some soft texture of umber velvet. Look the other way, and you’ll see sloping expanses of dark alpine green, washed with blots of fiery atumn yellow and red; and down below, melting in the haze, tiny roofs of Smokovec scattered over now barren woodland, a painful reminder of ‘vichrica’ in November 2004.

Later in the evening, a good dose of aquatic pleasures in the basement of nostalgic, off-season Grand.

Albert found in Kraków – the sentence completed

We deserved this break for a variety of reasons, one of them being our 10th anniversary, another one the celebration of… a much greater magnitude to that of Global Village.

Happy Golden Jubilee Albert and remember, there are some magic places in Białystok too.

GV lost in Kraków

At long last, we happily grabbed the opportunity to get away from the strains of placement tests and group forming. We deserved this break for a variety of reasons, one of them being our 10th anniversary, another one the celebration of … (those in the know, please finish this sentence).

The spell of glorious autumnal weather only adds to the attraction of the place. Within more than a decade, Kraków has become yet another showcase of Europe, putting on a heavy layer of cosmopolitan make-up over its weathered face. Yet, it’s still Kraków we learned about at school, visited on school trips and read about. A city thriving on its past and reminding us with dignity of the fact that there is more to Poland than this ongoing ridiculous and shameful tug-of-war political rivalry a few hundred kilometres down the same river Kraków is on.

Weird words

1. rock in small particles or other material worn or broken away from a mass, as by the action of water or glacial ice.

2. any disintegrated material; debris.

In biology, detritus is non-living particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies of dead organisms, fragments of organisms or faecal material, and is normally colonised by communities of micro-organisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material. The term is used to refer to organic fragments intermixed with soil on the land, but more commonly refers to material found suspended in water.

There’s more to this word, however. Some contemporary users, brimming with creative ideas, readily extended the meaning into a metaphor for self-recycling culture. Read their rebellious manifesto.

Poetry section

Poetry section added to lalki.

English poems

On Sunday afternoon, while selecting English poems for Białystok Theatre Academy students, we stumbled across these two amazingly beautiful pieces, originally written in Greek and Polish. Read both and compare.

Zbigniew Herbert – The Envoy of Mr Cogito
Constantine P. Cavafy – Ithaca