That was a long day between the last entry and this ... but as Morissey would say, some days are bigger than others. The eponymous news of sad report is that on tuesday night last my house was broken into. I think I distrubed the burglars when I returned very late at night, as the back window looked like it had been gone out of at great speed. Fortunately, I have nothing that anyone else thinks is of any worth and nothing was taken. Evidently, they were looking for money, not metaphysics. The front window was broken in their attempts at entry, which was a bit breezy for a few days till it got fixed. The police came out the next day, but as Donal - the owner, my boss - had told me to put everything back as best I could, there were certainly no usable fingerprints when surfaces were dusted. As things stood, I was just glad they decided to go out the back and not through me out the front. For that reason alone, I'm glad i left the keys in the back door which one guy evidently used to get out. I learnt alot from the policewoman as to what is and is not good for getting prints off. Apparently keys are crap. But here I am, no harm done, sipping warm echinacea brew from a kind Fionnuala, listening to Belle and Sebastian (of Franscesca fame) on a headset - which even has its own microphone if I want to sing along! - and so as Bono would say, 'don't let the bastards get you down'. Donal, the home owner, or like God the absent landlord, was very calm about the whole thing. Apparently, it's happened twice before in the house and he understood that they were probably just lashing out at the capitalist property owning system when one of them peed in my bedroom! The carpet I'm glad to say, not the bed. Anyway, that's my bad experience exorcised! Now on to the much expected second installment of the days of Poland.
The second day began with a struggle for consciousness that sleeping beauty knew all too well. Ciaran and Richard were up from the crack of dawn, but Liam, Peter and your good narrator were lost to the world in the land of dreams and forgetful things and wanted to stay so till at least our toes were nibbled upon by a mischievous spring squirrel. But no, the intrepid Ciaran, Irish explorer used to temperatures of 32 below zero wanted us up, dressed and ready to go or else he would enter Neverland and get us. I distracted him with what is traditionally known as 'tea's gambit'. 'Get me a cup of tea and I'll get up, Ciaran. Good man.' I could see from the confusion on his face that my ruse was beginning to work. 'Ok, and then you'll get up ...?' 'Yes' and I turned over on the clean and comfy bed with a secret smile of vistory as I once again entered the magical wardrobe of Narnia. Then after the 'that tea tastes terrible', the 'you go in, i'll be in a minute' and the 'i'm stinking, I'm waiting for the shower' I finally arrived at consciousness with something of the semblance of decency, and found that Ciaran, Richard, Peter and Liam were already there welcoming me with looks of disdain. This was bread and jam to me, as indeed was the bread and jam which I proceeded to eat, and then off we went on our second day of our adventures in Winnie the Poohland.
We had lunch in the square, sampling more of Polish cuisine. I had borsch, which is beetroot consumé soup which it takes a good actor to eat without showing obvious displeasure. But as a mother would say, 'it's good for you'. Not our particular mother - she regularly feeds me buns and thinks deep-fat fried battered fish is the healthy option - but the general mother. By the way, talking about displeasure, if you are stuck for a syllable sound in Polish try the s sound from pleasure, as nearly everything dubious has the s sound from pleasure. Back to the food. Peter had Zurek, soup which has a boiled egg and fatty bacon in it but he didn't like it. I did like the Zurek and generally enjoyed most of the Polish food, especially the Rushkie Pierigos, pasta parcels full of a potato, cheese and onion paste mix, topped with fried onions. The fried cabbage was particularly tasty, and the Polish salad was lovely - very fresh, but softened by some oil which takes the edge of the sharper flavours. Then we went by way of the Cathedral and had a good look this time. We travelled to Czestochowa in the late afternoon and needed to do so with three trains and two changes, each change requiring quite a sharp movement from one 'Pelon' to another as we followed English Richard (of Rodomsky, named after his location by Ciaran as it turns out there are two English Richards in Poland and Ciaran knows both of them.)
Then we got to Czestochowa, and I found it more attractive than Wroclaw. I like the way it has its long central avenue lined with trees, and has the Jasna Gora monastery at the end of this, right in the centre of town. I found this most unusual, and probably says something about the religiousness of Poles. (I'm giggling because I know what's coming in a few days, and I'm already trying out that Poles Dancing joke in my head!) But as Ciaran said on his blog (which I think should be viewed as the Gospel according to Mark, and mine as the Gospel according to John, his being much more brute factual and mine being much more philosophical and made up) then in the evening we retired to Ciaran's two girl love shack, Peter went to sleep and Liam and I ganged up on Ciaran in a debate about why Ciaran should realise that Fawlty Towers is comic genius and that he is just wrong. This being a matter of dogma, it was of course a bad choice for disputation. So this entry was more like the characters of a play in transit, while the next entry will be more like the second act of the play, which I will entitle 'Ciaran and the streaming snotter'. Of this, more the next 'day', but the following is what is known in the business as a teaser.
Nina led us on down the other side of the hill, but then as I loooked back round to where Ciaran had been, I found him gone and in full flight half way down the hill. Nina and I looked at each other silently inquiring if this was a normal phenomenon, the first with respect to Ireland, the second with respect to Poland, and then we looked back to Jesse Owens. By this time, Ciaran was doing about the 100-metres-in-ten-seconds speed and not looking like stopping. (For the benefit of anyone who does not know Ciaran, not only is this not normal, but normally it's not possible.) He avoided a massive rock slab on his left and a smaller one on his right, and just kept going. There was nothing any of us could do, much like one generation looking on the exploits of the next. All we could do was pray. At which point an Irish prayer came to mind. There is an Irish prayer on Ciaran's kitchen wall that reads in its beginning 'May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back'. Just earlier that morning I had asked Ciaran what he thought this really meant, and he confessed he also didn't know. But then in a split second I had the realisation that Ciaran was in the process of showing me its meaning. And true enough, the grassy road inclined towards him and met him and enabled him to slowly slow, and then stop. Nina and I were already half way down the hill towards him and as he turned I could see his poor face drawn and ashen pale, his hand grabbing his chest in evident discomfort and a great snotter hanging off the end of his nose. This was a moment that doesn't happen often in the life of Ciaran, so moved by great sympathy and friendship, I reached for my camera. But by the time I got the snap, the snotter had passed.
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