Darn That Dream

After my 5-week post-Dresden silence, here we go again. I've got a couple of pieces planned, but I thought I'd kick-start Quality Footwear's autumn range with a link to some amazing period footage of the Ahmad Jamal Trio.

As if the music and the footage itself wasn't great enough already, it's worth watching out for the legendary saxophonist Ben 'The Frog' Webster milling around behind the bassist Israel Crosby. He's the rather surprised-looking character in the pork pie hat, smoking a cigarette and clearly enjoying his day off. Hemingway said that the key to a great book is how much good stuff you can throw away; perhaps the key to a first-rate jazz band is how many incredible musicians you can leave loitering on the sidelines.

So, until next week, enjoy.

Dresden, a Contradiction

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep, wrote William Wordsworth as he stood on Westminster Bridge in London at dawn over 200 years ago. Standing on a bridge over the river Elbe in Dresden at sunset on Saturday, the exact opposite seemed true. The statues of the Baroque old town, silhouetted against the glowing sky, appeared to be coming to life. The blackened forms of the startled seagulls or darting swallows became indistinguishable in colour and tone from the frozen human forms that tower above the riverbank. They became part of the city, their raised hands and open books seemed suddenly urgent and contemporary. The ghosts of Dresden were among us, talking to us, preaching and arguing.

At least that's the way it seemed to me. The world has always been pervaded by a sense of timeless historical dialogue. Just because Plato, or St. Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche or Albert Camus are no longer living does not keep them out of the public domain. We are free to attack them, defend them, disagree with them or develop their ideas. And in Dresden as night settles onto the city, I have to wonder whether it was the sculptors' original intention that the birds and the sunset should somehow awaken their creations in the ambiguity of darkness. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk, Hegel told us. That is, knowledge (the owl) comes always after the event (the day). But in Dresden it seemed like an illustration of that truth. The representatives of history, knowledge and wisdom, like Hegel's owl, come alive only as the sun begins to set.

Dresden was once one of the most beautiful cities in Europe before it was destroyed by controversial Allied bombing raids towards the end of World War II. It has been impressively rebuilt and is once again a wonderful, if scarred, place. The lovely old town was bombed into near oblivion, but has been painstakingly reconstructed. So, too, has the Church of the Three Kings. The next afternoon we climbed to the very top of the rebuilt church to get a view of the city. Sprawling before us against the lush green backdrop of the Elbe valley and the Saxon Wine Road were resurrected Baroque masterpieces next to the East German high-rises, and the still-recognisable zig-zag layout of medieval street plans leading to the gleaming glass constructions of post-1989 capitalism. And yes, there they were, my statues. Frozen still and a stony grey in the early autumn sunlight, their voices had dimmed since the previous evening.

After 20 minutes or so staring out at 'the Florence of the Elbe', we climbed back down through the clock tower. Casting a last glance at the three giant bells in the steeple, motionless and silent, I descended the next flight of stairs. And then there was a sudden, frightening explosion of sound. An apocalyptic racket was raging and shaking the tower; the bells had started up. Instead of escaping the deafening noise, I hurried back up into the tower, where I found Olya, Spider and Debby standing by the bells, their fingers jammed tightly in their ears as they stood on the trembling wooden floor. It was beautiful; it annihilated all other thoughts and words, an extreme silence that shook us to our very bones.

Another Dresden contradiction was in full swing. This was no historical dialogue with the statues; this was the voice of unconquerable Time, drowning out mortal words and deeds as it rang its wrought-iron truths across this strange city. Sometimes, the bells told me as their violent, beautiful cacophony echoed through our bodies and vibrated in our toes, history isn't a dialogue at all. Sometimes history is just telling us to shut up for a minute and listen.

Moonshadow, Moonshadow

This week, I realised for the first time that a moonshadow is not just a Cat Stevens song. Having spent most of my life in cities, I am used to viewing the moon as a rather tame object, rolling around above the neon and the high-rises in a pale soup of light pollution. But out here in the vast, lake-littered forests close to the Russian-Finnish border, the moon is a violent thing. I stepped out of our cabin one clear night at 2. 30 am and there they were; long, sinister shadows cast by the silvery light in the sky, the mud and the shacks of the little settlement shimmering in a ghostly pallour.

This moon is a strange creature; the shadows it casts in our imaginations vary wildly between different people and cultures. My favourite dictionary definition of all time, from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), is the superbly lazy description of the horse as a Beast well-known. A little unfair to horses, perhaps, but reasonably accurate. The moon, on the other hand, may be described as a Beast unknown.

Let's look at the evidence. The Polish anti-Stalinist poet Antoni Słonimski, with a healthy dose of Central European idealism, saw the moon as possessing great symbolic value. It was the last outpost of purity in a world that was both politically and morally corrupt. In his poem, 'In Defence of the Moon', he urges:

Let the moons turn unchanged in their courses

Let the sky, at least, remain pure

John Keats, on the other hand, saw the moon as the head of a sort of celestial royal family. His famous 'Ode to a Nightingale' states, with satisfaction:

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays

Beautiful words, and I think of them often as I gaze up at that Buckingham Palace in the sky. But trust the British to put everything into a hierarchy!

My favourite, however, will always be the wandering Tang Dynasty poet and scholar Li Po, one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. As he spent his life roving around the enchanted forests of ancient China, he saw the moon as a friend and a drinking companion. He had only to lean up against a tree with a cup of white wine, look up at the heavens and he would be in good company.

I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For her, with my shadow, will make three people.

Plenty to mull over, then, as I sit here back in St. Petersburg typing up my notes on this Beast unknown; no, the Beast unknowable. Outside the window is the noise and the glow of the big city, the glare of the misleading electric lights. Here, too, we cannot quite trust what we see. What was it that Nikolai Gogol, St. Petersburg's own glorious weirdo, warned us all those years ago?

Beware the hours of darkness, when the devil himself lights the streetlamps in order to show everything in a false light.

But that's another story.

Imagined Communities

The first thing that struck visitors to the old Intrepid Fox rock pub in Soho was the sign on the door: No ties, no football colours. A pretty modest dress code, as London dress codes go, and it wasn't one I was ever in danger of breaching. If they'd banned leather jackets the place would have been empty, but football scarves? No problem.

Times, however, are notorious for changing. Cycling to work today, proudly sporting the new 2010-2011 Brentford away shirt, I was basking in an irrational sense of pride. The sun was shining, I had the excellent new Invalids tunes on my iPod as I raced over the bridge, and I was wearing the colours of my local team. But why should a thirty-year-old man feel proud at the ability to pull a T-shirt over his head in the morning?

Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities defines a nation as a community that is dreamed by a group of people who, by and large, will never know each other personally. Membership, as it were, is "perceived". We have a common history. We remember the same things, forget the same things. We can feel proud that a writer or a band or an athlete happens to come from our particular political entity. Nationalism feeds on the irrational. As A. J. P Taylor once observed: If men were sane, there would be no history.

If men and women were sane, there would probably also be no football. In many ways football clubs, like nations, are also imagined communities. We have our "government", the people who run things on a day-to-day basis, but much of what we understand as a football club revolves around memories, rivalries and shared myths (FA Cup Quarter Final 1989, a 4-0 victory over Fulham in 1992, promotion at Peterborough the same season) that can set even the most rational of pulses racing.

Why is it that we can feel offended by the existence of rival teams, without whom the entire game would be meaningless? And why did I feel immense schadenfreude at Fulham's Europa League Final defeat in June because of my disdain for our local rivals, and yet I get on very well personally with every Fulham fan I've ever met?

This is where the tribal element comes into play. As England's nationhood was shaped by defining themselves 'against' French culture and values, football supporters, too, are fond of defining ourselves in the context of what we're not, rather more than as what we are. Even the Brentford matchday programme now bears the legend: Real Football, Real Fans. But where are the football and the fans not real? It is tempting to answer: The Premiership, that rich breeding ground for fairweather fans and glory hunters who mistake a Sky TV subscription for a season ticket. But then, I know plenty of fans at that level of the game who are much more dedicated than myself. The truth is back in that pesky grey area, and grey is a lousy colour for a football club.

"In football," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

But as I arrived at work and got off my bike, I remembered that we're pretty damned complicated ourselves.

The Roaring Twenties

One of the surprising things about turning 30 last week was how quickly it was to look back on my twenties as an easily definable period of my life. Opened in 2000, closed in 2010, a neat and tidy decade to file away with the follies of youth. The world doesn't always work this way. For example, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm identified a long 19th century (which ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) and a short 20th century (which ended with the collapse of communism in 1991). It is therefore extremely likely that many lives also cannot be conveniently divided into decades like pieces of birthday cake, but seem instead to be one sticky pile of chronological dough that refuses to take any recognisable form. A messy clump of years.

So I'm reasonably happy with this tidy, well-ordered gift to hindsight that, should I ever inflict an autobiography on this world, will neatly fit into one chapter entitled something awful like 'The Wild Years'. My first, rather modest order of business as I stare forward at this gaping, blank slate of a decade, is to yet again try to maintain this blog on a regular basis. This will range from the usual (currently extremely sporadic) output of articles and poems, to simply pasting links to news items or videos that I feel like sharing. I'll say it now publicly so that there's no reneging on this promise to myself: Anyone who visits Quality Footwear regularly will find frequent updates and new material.

Timothy Garton Ash has been a regular source of quotations on this blog so far. Presumably unwittingly, he also played a part in the course that my twenties took. It was reading his book The File in my late teens that definitively tipped the balance in favour of my later choosing, aged 20, to study in Berlin as opposed to one of the more picturesque and venerable southern German university towns like Freiburg or Heidelberg. Likewise, his writings on the Solidarity movement inspired me to attempt to learn Polish in 2001. Although I later switched to Russian, it was those long-gone snowy afternoons drinking tea by candlelight with my Polish teacher in an unrenovated, crumbling Prenzlauer Berg tenement block that cemented my passion for the strange new (or renewed) geographical and cultural entity known as Central Europe.

It is fitting, therefore, to celebrate this new decade's resolution with a video of a recent talk given by Garton Ash on his latest book, Facts are Subversive. Highly recommended if you have 27 minutes to spare. Hearing him refer to a pedantic colleague as the 'Ayatollah of fact-checking' seems to make it be worth the virtual journey alone.

Night Train

Russian jazz has come a long way since the days of Valentin Parnakh's First Eccentric Orchestra (pictured) and Stalinist repression. This second abandoned poem is about a night in late December when we attended a jam session at a basement jazz club in central St. Petersburg. It also includes a couple of scenes from the journey home, through the centre of the city and under the river with the last metro back to Vassily Island. Somehow these frozen nights out on the town and the dash (or should I say ice-skate?) through the streets to make the last metro have become so tangled in my memories that it's difficult to imagine one without the other.

In a sense, it could have been anywhere. The quality of the musicianship and the standard bop repertoire would have been equally at home in Amsterdam or Berlin. But there were tell-tale signs. The peculiarly Russian faces and careless dress sense, and the rich ethnic mix of Slavs and musicians from other parts of the former USSR. The couple of bored, pretty girls at the side, ignoring the music and just hoping to meet a rich foreign businessman. Right down, of course, to the drinks that never arrived.

Russki Dzhazz

Fleamarket nudes spoil beige walls
Above ill-lit front tables
Glowing faces flowering from
Woolen polo neck sweaters
Nicotine nails
Scratching greasy once-blonde hair

Girls
Inspecting the blue shadows for wealth
Deaf to our cacophony
Alert to the cut of the silk
The stuffed leather
Here hiding out
Amidst the dusk of Armenian eyes
And lightbulb foreheads
- A thankless task
They'll go home sighing

And
On bandstand
Portly pianist
Some rogue bank clerk, shirttails ousted
Grimaces into ivory
Punctuates
Nods, shows teeth at
Drummer – what to say – he drums
Swipes, slaps, smacks, alliteration
Of a kind

Waiting on drinks, still
American jazz, yes, but Russian service
Banker just quoted Gillespie
Salt-peanuts salt-peanuts
Where’s champagnska to wash them down with?

Baritone bell raised gleaming street level
Bassman hunched like yesterday’s washerwomen
Over his mournful charge
Wringing those old guts dry
Misses cue, nods at polished bar

-All change over
I’d sit in I don’t know how-

Midnight run for metro
Man at grim coatcheck’s
Polar moustache moved by laughter
Really it’s just getting started
But paka
Patchwork chords locked in cellar
Paka

Home over the Nevsky Prospekt
Snow piles swim
In the restless grand Christmas lights
Million dreamless colours evade
Nikolai Gogol's ragged ghost, hunched in the shadows
Madly

Under the Neva in the tunnel's death rattle
Out past frozen sodium-bright kiosks
And the Soviet grocery
Up darkened, complaining stairs

Into the flat where warmed icicles
Whisper unseen, electric
Joining courtyard drains
Echoing now, I hear them clearly.

All You Need Is Love

The whole meeting had the air of an illegal gathering. There were about 25 of us sitting in a small attic room in St. Petersburg, Russia, watching black and white Beatles movies and surrounded by massive Beatles flags, posters and memorabilia. Occasionally a giant John Lennon or Paul McCartney board would drop from its hinges onto the head of some unsuspecting guest.

In fact, until around 20 years ago, this kind of thing was illegal here. The organiser, Kolya Vasin, is a Soviet underground legend who converted his St. Petersburg apartment into a Beatles museum in 1966 and has never looked back. He was the only Russian to exchange correspondence with John Lennon, and a founding member of the first Soviet Association of Rock Musicians in 1971 (which collapsed when one of its members was arrested and imprisoned). Now he’s spent the last couple of decades trying to get the world’s first Beatles Temple built on Vasilievsky Island at the mouth of the River Smolenka. In the meantime, his office/apartment is the temporary home of the temple.

With grey hair, wild eyes and a big Woodstock-style beard, Vasin takes the microphone and rambles on cheerfully about John Lennon for a bit. He uses Russian diminutives, affectionate nicknames for friends and family, when referring to the Beatles. Johnik, Paulchik, Georgeik and Ringochik. In Vasin’s worldview, John Lennon was sent by God and now lives in a monastery in northern Italy. (This theory, if it were ever proven, would have interesting legal repercussions for Mark David Chapman, his killer). Then he suddenly emits an ear-splitting yelp into the microphone; the audience’s collective heads practically explode. Everyone ducks and winces. Vasin grins. If you’re the type of person who dedicates their life to building a Beatles Temple, I guess you’re allowed to do things like scream annoyingly into microphones without people getting too upset.

Then the musical entertainment appears, an American named Jan Britten Owen who plays Beatles tunes on a 12-string guitar. He’s all decked out in a Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band suit, and would seem rather eccentric himself were he not sharing a stage with Kolya Vasin. After an hour or so of belting out the hits, the show is over and the guest star is besieged with requests for autographs and photos. I’m introduced to Mr Vasin, who tells us that they’re going to the temple in a minute and we’re welcome to drop by. “Sounds fun,” Olya tells me. “Expect indoctrination, though.”

I wasn’t quite sure what form Beatles indoctrination would take. Enforced ingestion of LSD? Sticking pins into Yoko Ono voodoo dolls? As we trudged down the 5 flights of stairs and back into the snow, we resolved to find out. At any rate, it wasn’t far to walk. The gig, like the makeshift temple, was on John Lennon Street. Vasin successfully convinced the local government to rename the city’s smallest street in his hero’s honour. The sign on the little door announced:

In the name of peace, love, music, and John Lennon

We knocked and it swung open from the inside. It was a bit like the scene from Being John Malkovich where he steps inside his own head. Every single spare inch of the small office was covered with Beatles pictures, life-size cut-outs of every member of the band, a papier-mâché model of the proposed temple on Vassilievsky Island, badges, stickers, tapes, books, coffee cups and homemade memorabilia. Jan Britten Owen, tonight’s guest of honour, sat in the VIP armchair at Vasin’s insistence. Another member of the church gathered up some mugs and filled them with dry red wine. It’s difficult to find good red wine in Russia- if they drink the stuff at all here they usually go for the sickly sweet variety- but then I suppose you’d expect good taste at a Beatles Temple. They handed drinks to everyone and we drank the health of the Italian monk John Lennon and his associates.

The American guest jammed some more classics on an old acoustic guitar and then our hosts turned the stereo on. Even Beatles fans need a bit of variety sometimes, so this time it was a John Lennon solo record. If you had told me when I was 17 years old that at some time in the future I would be dancing around in a temple with a bunch of hippies banging tambourines and singing Give Peace a Chance, I would have probably thrown myself under a bus. But back then I was younger, so much younger than today. Tonight I was drinking the blood of Christ, or Harrison, or one of the other Lads from Liverpool, and happily singing away.

I glanced around. There was a badge on the wall that said, “We have the temple, now we just need to build it.” Paul McCartney stood behind me, frozen in 1963, observing everything through his black fringe. He looked on with his cardboard gaze as the VIP guest stood up to say his goodbyes. Kolya Vasin hugged him vigorously.

The architect refilled our mugs and chatted a bit about the design of the future temple. Vasin announced that anyone who wanted to catch the last metro had to leave now. We hung around a bit longer. After all, there are last metros every night, but how often there are Beatles religious ceremonies?

And then, finally, it was time to quit. We thanked our hosts and put on our coats, scarves, hats, gloves, thermal shirts and all the rest of our arsenal for keeping the Russian winter at bay.

I shook Vasin’s hand and felt like I should say something profound. I am English, after all, a son of the Mother country that spawned the Fab Four. I decided to stick to the rules and repeat something I’d heard earlier.

“All you need is love,” I said, as soulfully as I could.

“Love is all you need!” Vasin exclaimed.

Not a bad mantra, I must admit. Then the door closed and we were left outside in the snow. Cold has a very sobering effect, both physically and emotionally. Had it all been a dream? We walked out towards the main road, past the giant, three-dimensional yellow submarine and the Revolver-era Beatles images engraved into the walls of John Lennon Street, past the proclamations of peace, love and music. It was definitely real, and it’s still there if you want to find it. I guess, to paraphrase the English World War 1 poet Rupert Brooke:

There’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever Beatles.

Weirdly, that’s quite a reassuring thought.

(First printed as a column in the Queensday Festival 2010 fanzine)

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

"A poem can be finished," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti many years ago, "a translation can only be abandoned."

But can an original poem ever truly be finished either? Even great poets are notorious for returning to old poems throughout their careers and tinkering with them, re-working them constantly until it is difficult for anthologists to work out exactly what the definitive version is. All a poet really does is drag thoughts or scenes or ideas from the subconscious and translate them into words in one of our flawed, limited human languages, and perhaps this is the same thing all along.

My plan now is to publicly abandon several of the poems I wrote in Russia last winter on my blog over the course of the next few weeks. I'm used to surfacing in this medium only at the occasional poetry reading at a bar or café in Berlin, where the words fly by at a merciful rate and the audience only has a chance to reflect on the poem once the flurry of sentences has vanished into the ether. Nothing needs to be fixed, and you can ad lib or change bits that didn't work for next time. It's a different, rather more daunting prospect to hang the words out to dry, but here we go.

Poem number one was written on Christmas Eve in St. Petersburg and is addressed to the Siberian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I'd been reading an old Penguin edition of his early poems, and knew absolutely nothing about him apart from that. I typed it out in Olya's mother's warm little kitchen as we hid ourselves away from the brutal Russian winter, using the few pages of verse ('Zima Junction', about his hometown, being the apparent masterpiece, but my favourite was 'In Georgia'), a translator's introduction written in 1962, and an old photograph of an angry young man smoking a cigarette as my research material.

Here it is, then. Unfinished, perhaps, but I hope that these poems collectively will serve to explain what I'm trying to say in the awkward silence that I fall into whenever people ask me, "Well, how was Russia?".

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

The ash-cat tangles
with emptiness on the linoleum
Crumples the autumnal pages on
discarded Yevtushenko

The tight bay window
Holds a wheeling barrage of snow
Stifling the year-heavy cobblestones beneath
Sighs disrupt the dust
in the used light

Cream cupboards scrubbed cleaner
and the gas flame
chewing patiently, blue gold
at the charred rear of the squat silver saucepan

Yevtushenko!
You’re young!
and wearing a cigarette
and a tie clip
Pale and Irate, writing the blonde truth
Lacking Mayakovsky’s sinister
handsome shotgun darkness

And the
Introduction
tells me you were attacked 21st June 1957 in Komsomolskaya Pravda
A publication which I actually saw yesterday
behind the smeared glass of
the counter as I waited in line at the shabby
Vassilyostrov post office with its bored ponytails
Who don’t chew bubblegum but should
Writing raucous rhythms in saliva as they spit
Davai, davai
Give me your documents
A tragic old Siberian song
Heard once upon a time in bearded mouths
At Zima Junction

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich, your name is a tug of war of the consonants
I, too, would like to be “a fearless spokesman of his generation”
(Any generation would do)
And I’m jealous of your adjectives

- Yevtushenko 52 years and 6 months and 3 days after they slandered You
Are you still muttering new words
above the anemic linoleum
of some lucky girlful Moscow kitchen?

Or are you a literary footnote deep
Beneath the subdued, lamp-bitten courtyards
In this one evening’s surrendering light
And unbroken snow?

It would be easy enough to find out.

Death of a Patriot

In the first verse of the song 'Radio Maryja', recorded in 2007, the Zatopeks criticised the homophobic, anti-Semitic Catholic radio station in Poland of the same name. More specifically, we were attacking the ruling Law & Justice party for its connections to Radio Maryja and the degree to which the station's values were shared by members of the Polish government. It won't have escaped many peoples' attention that the head of this government, Lech Kaczyński, was one of the 96 people who died in a plane crash at Smolensk on Saturday.

The reaction in Poland, even among Kaczyński's political enemies, was and still is one of shock and devastation. This is natural given that the crash took so many lives, regardless of who they happened to be. As it turned out, it was a presidential delegation comprised of many major figures from various walks of life, from politics to the military, finance and academia.

In the tributes to Kaczyński that trickled out after the tragedy, it is difficult not to detect the contradictory nature of his life and career amidst the cautious words of praise. "It was one of the great ironies of Polish history," notes the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "that a nationalistic, ultra-conservative Catholic who may have counted some anti-Semites as his supporters was a pivotal figure in the post-Communist healing of grudges that have so long divided Poles and Jews."

Further food for thought is provided by Adam Michnik, a leading dissident during the 1980s and later editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, who wrote:

"We often differed in political views. However, I've always remembered what a great patriot Lech Kaczyński has been all his life. This was the first thought that came to my mind when I heard about this terrible accident."

It's worth examining this comment in a little more detail. The tainted word 'patriot' is, in itself, a rather dubious compliment. However, regardless of how it appears today, for the duration of the Soviet occupation this same Polish patriotism was a tool of resistance and unity against the authorities. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash recalled striking shipworkers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk watching a meeting of the communist party Central Committee on television. As the party leaders rose to sing the Internationale, the workers responded by singing the Polish national anthem.

Perhaps Michnik is trying to gently remind us of this as we remember the uglier sides of Kaczyński's patriotism. It is easy to forget that his earliest political involvement, from 1977 onwards, was with the unique cooperation between workers and intellectuals that began with the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and culminated in the massively influential Solidarity (Solidarność) trade union. Kaczyński was a member of KOR, lectured workers on labour law, wrote for dissident publications and served as an adviser to Solidarity's leaders in their negotiations with the authorities.

This patriotism served, then, as a kind of binding force for what the Czechoslovak dissident Václav Havel referred to as parallel culture in a 1984 essay:

"All those hundreds, perhaps thousands of people of all sorts and conditions - young, old, gifted, untalented, believers, unbelievers - gathered under the umbrella of 'parallel culture' were led to it by the incredible narrow-mindedness of a regime which tolerates practically nothing."

It is a shame that Kaczyński himself would come to represent that same narrow-mindedness and intolerance, this time in the name of ultra-conservatism and reactionary Catholicism. Several years ago I asked a girl in Kraków what she thought of the political situation in Poland; she just groaned and put her head in her hands. Not a particularly wordy critique, but somehow a rather eloquent summary of the situation (at that time Lech and his twin brother Jarosław were still a political 'double act', President and Prime Minister respectively).

The political career of this walking contradiction serves as a lesson in the complexity of Central Europe's recent history, and a warning to those of us outside of Poland who would pass judgement too quickly. The man I criticised (and will continue to criticise) in 'Radio Maryja' for his regressive socio-political attitudes was also fêted for his reconciliatory work with Poland's Jews and played a part in one of the great resistance movements of the 20th century. A resistance movement in a country where, once upon a time, 'patriot' was not yet a four letter word.