That’s the headline in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza. They led with the same story yesterday, the one about British workers demanding jobs for British people. Yesterday’s front page article was surprising in that I was able to read it through without flinging the paper on the floor – and it was written by Jacek Pawlicki. Sure, […]
With a trip to Kraków on the cards, I decided it was time to go up to the attic and dust down a guidebook to the old town. The book I came across, blocking a hole in the thatch, was called simply Kraków and was published in 1951 with a print run of 20,300. I […]
It’s not always politicians and economists that are the most convinced that privatization or at least commercialization are the answers to everything. Here’s an astounding piece of neo-liberal thinking from a Doctor Talarek that appeared in this week’s Polityka in an otherwise interesting article about the massive numbers of people who die – not just […]
The Eastern Europeans are at it again: getting all coy and mystical about The Meaning of Life and language’s inability to grasp it. Eastern European writers have the Big Questions tapped, you understand, but language can’t cut it. Yes, I’ve been reading Sandor Márai again, this time a collection of short stories called Magic, which […]
Out of the top corner of my eye, while sitting on a bar stool the other night, I saw the strapline on a Polish rolling news channel on the TV. It said “W Brukseli o kryzysie” or “In Brussels the crisis [is being discussed].” It got me wondering, and this is what I wondered: which […]
A few days after I got warned by the government that I had to choose a pension fund or let the randomised computer choose for me (see last post) I got a letter (no stamp, but my name was on it) inviting me to contact a financial adviser. I rang up this guy and demanded […]
This week I received a stern letter from the guvmint telling me I had not yet chosen which Pension Fund to “invest” my pension contributions in. If I had not made up my mind which horse to back within ten days, the missive said, one would be chosen for me. Naturally it was too much […]
Gazeta Wyborcza’s man on Greece is Jacek Pawlicki. He has recovered somewhat from the shock of his interview on Wednesday with a Polish shopkeeper in Greece. Asked whether she feared for the safety of her shop the redoubtable lady said no, the rioters were only targeting the likes of multinational chains and banks. And your […]
Apropos of nothing really, except that there are dioxins in Irish pork, which Poles have been known to eat. On state newscaster’s website there is a FAQ list, from which I note that “sauces with pork/ham content” are not affected. What, no pork?
Part of the government’s master plan, enthusiastically supported by Gazeta Wyborcza (boring the country where the main serious media agrees with the government), is to put an end to early retirement in Poland. Keep cracking the whip over the backs of aging proles: that’s the ticket. Perhaps, to give the neo-liberals their due, the system […]
