Class by Name, Class by nature

One of the problems when trying to achieve something is that people see you and your ability in terms of what you and the society you inhabit have demonstrated. This can be a really annoying process, such as starting to write a blog and then someone tells you 'it was very interesting, but I think I found some grammar errors." Yes, well, thank you, does anyone remember how many keyboarding mistakes Beethoven made when writing his music? Is it of any importance? Why do people see things in terms of society's belief? Is it because they fear to express their own feelings or do they simply lack the practice or even the facility to do so? These and many other questions clamour for some kind of response.

After a long phase of metaphorically headbutting the walls of my understanding, I began to notice that the pattern of cracks on that wall had some regularity. Understanding began to flow through me, I had been like a child brought up in a prison cell with no experience of the outside world that grows to realise that the regular pattern on the wall were made by individual blocks built by men to limit the child's experience. In my case, these cracks outlined the blocks built by humanity, but was it to limit what could be understood, or was it to protect us from an unnamed danger out there? Had anyone been to check recently? Was the danger still there, had it receded or had our ability to understand increased enough to create newer walls further out? If the latter was true, maybe it was time to build those walls further out and give ourselves new thinking space. Perhaps the time is ready for humanity to make a mental change as significant as cave painting, making tools or telling stories to create history.

Now that I could see the cracks, I could see the blocks, but I could also see the holes punched through the walls by other thinkers. I examined the blocks more closely, they were not made of an ordinary material but of the raw elements of the infinite possible human experience, rough hewn and individually named. When I indicated the structure to the people around me they often responded with fear or confusion in their eyes - this is how it has always been, they said. But these blocks were hewn by man, were still being hewn, this is not always how it has been, it is merely how it is now, the result of the best techniques known by previous generations.

The infinite totality of possible human experience is larger than our minds can encompass, and because it is larger we cannot deal with it, not even to make basic communication possible beyond pointing. To expand the mind to try and encompass it all would burst the mind. What we do instead is to chip out a chunk of the totality that expresses what we mean. That chunk can be positioned on the wall so that others can refer to it as well. Um, wait, we are putting new things on the wall? That means the world we have built has no roof. Understanding crystallises further, the ones with fear and confusion in their eyes are the ones afraid to look at the new parts of the wall, their understanding of their world was created early in there lives by memorising their surroundings, their prison - by making changes you either force changes in their minds or leave them feeling confused when the model of their world and the actual world no longer correspond.

There are people busy adding to the wall, and each time a child is born it begins to memorise the environment that exists during its early years, but this is not the same environment memorised by earlier generations. This makes sense, we are constantly bombarded by older generations telling us how things were better or harder-therefore-better in the past, but what they probably mean is that they felt more comfortable in understanding the world that existed then. Only the other week someone of my generation told me that 'life is going down in Britain these days', but perhaps what he meant is that the Britain in his mind and the Britain that exists in the present are moving further apart and that this made him feel increasingly uncomfortable?

The easiest blocks to examine are those of words, which seem to exist separately from the blocks that are concepts that we name using words. Take this block here: "cup". We think of a cup as a drinking vessel, of pottery, metal or plastic, and we can recognise one when we see one in our friend's kitchen. Do you have a favourite cup? Do you remember when you first got it, do you get pleasure from using it, and does it say something about you? If a thief broke into our house then they would see just a cup, all those feelings we invest in 'our cup' would mean nothing to the thief, it will be just a cup unless it is wrought from a precious metal or is an obvious work of art to the thief. We value more our own things, the things we understand, than we do those of others, partly because we invest individuality in them, they move from being to mere 'cup' to 'my number one coffee cup which my wife gave to me on our second date'.

If we replace 'cup' with 'concept' we find that we can invest the same feelings in our favourite concept and have no little or feeling in our neighbour's. Our political beliefs are right and those of other people are wrong is a typical example of caring more for our own 'cup', as is the belief that our nation is better than other nations. In the latter case we can see that the defense of our own nation frequently gets in the way of attempting to solve or seeing problems within our own nation, especially when the comment comes from another nation.

Going one stage further, now let's replace 'cup' with 'person'. We can see how we invest individuality into the the people close to use, and less into people distant. However, now we are not talking about mindless objects or concepts, but about people, individuals who have self-determination beyond what we may or may not give them. Cups can be put away in cupboards, but we cannot do this with people as they may open the cupboard themselves, and are quite likely to do this at a time not consistent with our desires.

Our prison walls are therefore not just constructed of blocks made of stuff, but also blocks that are individual people. We are imprisoned by the people who surround us, both in the present and in the past, alive and dead. We both construct our walls and become part of the walls for others. If we move yourselves from one wall to another the people who thought they knew us often cannot deal with this change, because we have a set position in their internal world image.

As people we have complete bodies, fully visible. Our minds are not fully visible, and not even fully explored by ourselves, and what people see is based largely on early contact with us where they attempt to compare us with other people they have known, seen, read about etc. They attempt to fit that model they have in their heads onto us. Even when we have known someone closely for a long time they continue to surprise us, which we can call their 'out of character' behaviour. Perhaps, though, they are not being out of character, maybe it is our lack of understanding of their full character? Problems arise when we expect people to meet our expectations without us first trying to understand their character in terms of them as an individual instead of them as our perception using an incomplete generic model.

In Poland I struggle every day to show people that I am me and not 'generic English-person, generic foreigner'. I try to have conversations with people, they try to have conversations with Johhny Foreigner and they then fail to understand what I say because I am forever a cup from someone else's cupboard, my words are distorted or ignored. The idea that I could now be a cup from their own draining board is a concept too alien to consider.

Dressing to Age You

Theatre, film or television, we can quickly estimate the period a film or play is set in by the costumes. What an astoundingly astute remark is likely not what you are thinking at this moment, but it does have relevance: if we can date a period by the dress, what are we telling the people around us by the way we dress? When I look out of my window at work, I can see people standing at bus stops or crossing a very busy junction, and mostly I can tell their age to within five to ten years by observing their clothes and their hairstyles. The older someone is, the more likely it is they will be wearing fashions from yesteryear, and not because they have to keep their clothes longer than youths but rather because they bought 'fashion' and not 'style'.

Their is a strange dualism as people become older, they defend their older styles by saying that they like wearing what other people of their generation are wearing, and yet when the magazines say that 'orange is in', you can be sure they will be at the head of the queue buying garments in orange. What the magazine pundits say is 'in' is fashion, what suits your figure, colour and wrinklyness is style, and the trick is to find where style and fashion overlap. Yes. Definitely. However, when you read magazines, whether about cars, fashion or gardening, the images if not the words will seduce you through simple repetition. Many people who do not have figures like a stick come to believe that there is something wrong with them only because they are watching a never ending stream of well-dressed sticks, and that is what they get because they continue to buy the magazines that show this. There are enough readers who do not need to see the stick army to change the ways that magazines present their material, but not enough of them have the courage or the know-how to band together and do something. You too can look good, but you might have first to change the world around you before this appreciated.

I am a stick, my wife is a viola, and her mother told her never to trust a thin man. I love the shape of my viola, and I want to find things that I can adorn my viola with so that the stick army and everyone else can see that she is just as beautiful as any stick. Lublin is a terrible place to be a beautiful viola, because you are supposed to be a stick and remain that way or evolve into a roundy shape dressed up with curtains. The largest bra size is a C, and we are told again and again that no one asks for larger sizes, and they are almost right. Almost, because what do they think we were doing if not asking? Big is bad, and if you have D cup breasts or larger you are supposed to strap a C cup bra over them and either squash them onto your stomach or balance them on top so you look like some kind of battle cruiser - and heaven help anyone standing next to you if you turn around to quickly.

But back to the street, and some of the typical people to be found there. Men first, and topping the list is the smiley belt, which most men seem to achieve by the age of 32 and presumably is the result of those beloved pork cutlets in bread crumbs, where the stomach protrudes and the belt curves down and around it. Men are also the most boring dressers once over the age of 28, at which point dress sense becomes disengaged, overwhelmed by the image of the suit. Suits and non-suits can be easily observed at the weekend and when on vaction by their belief that a shirt is cool, especially one designed to be worn with a suit. The ultimate suit, at ages of 40 and above, stands on the beach in long shorts, short sleeved shirt tucked in, short haircut and short socks, the latter in their summer shoes. There is no turning back at this point, the long-term wearing of a suit removes any confidence or ability to wear something cool. One the positive side, the incidence of wearing socks and sandles in Lublin is slowly falling from the high of 90% down to around 50% as young people begin to understand that it is possible for the male biped to bear his feet naked in public.

Another millstone around the neck of the man is the macho image, where macho actually means becoming an unremarkable servant of a small hierachy. Let us take Spanish culture for a moment, possibly the home of the elegant macho image: Spanish men do not wander around the street in a toredo's outfit, and yet the toredo is at a pinnacle of the macho image. Or, that footballer does not wander around the street in a footballer's shirt. Men are suckers for the the fear of being excluded, this fear drowning out common sense, abandoning them to the belief that the real man looks like every other real man. The trouble for me is that I can see their is life beyond the macho, and it is not all about dead looking people in the same uniforms. if we compare our choices with that which women have in comparison - colours and styles in bags and belts and jewelery and underwear as well as the tops, jackets and the rest. The men's section is like a monastery.

Seeing as how the woman's choice is so much greater, let's take a look at what goes wrong on that side of the fashion fence. When you are young and and stick-like, everything is designed for you and as a consequence everything coordinates easily. As you get a older, and your skin loses some of that suppleness you begin to move into that area your less beautiful and less stick-like friends knew all the time, the feeling that you have to hide stuff. What you need is to read a few magazines and listen to your friends and they will soon give you the rules for concealment. You will be saved!

Rule 1: Black conceals - if you have nothing to conceal but your charm or if you stand in a dark place, else all it does is outline your figure perfectly without giving you any definition to soften it. If you feel big, black will make sure you look big. If you have lines or wrinkles, the inability of the eye to focus on that blackness will mean it slides to your face, meaning that your lines will be super visible for want of anything else to look at. Other solid colours fare little better, and should be used more as an accent.

Rule 2: Black goes with anything - as long as what you want it to go with is also black. Black can be highlited by other colours, but rarely the other way round. Black trousers will not make you look younger because younger people generally wear other colours and so anyone in black is more likely to be non-stick or old. This is the trouble with rules, if everyone follows them then people will believe you belong to the group that typically wears whatever it is. Skirt = woman, black trousers = old or large woman.

Rule 3: Jackets should conceal the bum - but a jacket that long will either be fitted and make your legs look short, or will be too large and make you look bigger and shapeless. We call this the 'concealer jacket', because that is what it does not do.

Rule 4: The older you are, the shorter your hair should be - the logic is that short hair makes you look younger, except that younger people generally have longer hair unless they are trying to appear older. Frizzy styles make you look like a poodle, continual dying makes your hair look dead, and that curly style women choose over the age of 50 says just that. The best length is around shoulder length, and the best way to treat your hair is to keep dying products well away from it.

Rule 5: There are shops for the young and shops for the old - this breaks the fashion versus style rule, the shop that has something that suits you could be any shop. Do not let modern music or moody looking shop staff put you off, go in with a smile on your face and prepare yourself to enjoy the experience.

When we see fashion in shops, we often describe it in terms of the people we know who would wear that style, it creates a fun shorthand when out shooping, making it less of an onerous tromp around the shops. And fun is important, although learning to 'come out' and strut your stuff in the changing rooms takes some effort. The more we practice then the more that clothes shops become playgrounds for our imaginations, and hence the greater we can relax and enjoy the expereince. If you can make the shop assistants laugh with you, then your life is being lived.

The Write Fit

Some time ago I wrote about writing and the problems of not planning and how planning is, well, a boring task. I am not sure why so many of us have so little respect for the planning process, unless it reflects the alienation created by education, which too often is perceived to be an irrelevant process for the person made to undergo it. Perhaps we find it more fun to run into a battle, swinging our club around and hoping that we will hit our target, and therefore education and planning are both irrelevant and not fun, consuming time better used in watching television.

I once saw a video that showed one should always use colours for the plan, a different colour for each major branch, but I do not have any coloured pens or pencils and surely the colours indicate that I have already finalised the links between the elements of the plan, which is often not true until the plan is being utilised. Still, while the colours might be fun for some people, it does not grab me. Another video described using images on a plan, which is a good idea except their little cute images on their perfect plan were off putting because they were beyond my skill. I like idea or images, and it reminds me of one the planning packs I use on my students consisting of about 25 photographs of combine harvesters which they have to use to produce a plan from.

The main block seems not to be the methods of planning, of which there are many choices, but in the fact that it is so darn hard to get anyone else interested in your plans. 'Pooh' you can read on their faces 'what's the point in playing with that, I have better things to do'. We believe plans are boring, low value tasks, and therefore that is what they become.

Intuitive planning is where we know what we want to say, and have an idea how much page space we will need to achieve it. Sadly, getting our ideas to the right size takes practice, and many exam candidates fail to get their texts to fit and overrun the word count limit. Other related skills include the ability to drop ideas, no matter how fond we are of them, if they will take too long to describe or detract in some way from the rest of the text. If, for example, I had a great idea concerning planning that involved my cat and spent half this text describing that then the thrust of the text would change, becoming 'the cat technique of planning' rather than 'concepts relating to getting a text to fit on-the-fly'. Of course, if we are writing for our own amusement or for our own book, then we can change what the text is about because who is going to be even slightly interested in our original plan?

My planning involves having constant access to a small pad of paper and a pen, or an email account, or even the notes section of my mobile phone if I get really desperate. When that stray thought comes through, or the text feels like it is drifting off too far from my intention, I make a note of the thought and add it to the growing pile I have of them. Planning for one text, therefore, begins while I am doing something else, and begins to take shape in my subconscious as I compare it with other notes until a trigger situation happens when I remember the note - or I dig through my memory box of notes looking for something interesting.

Once the hot flush of inspiration has drained away and we are left alone with our text, now comes the time to read through it again. I used to hate this proofing check, and once when I was still at college I 'forgot' to do it and so failed to notice I had not added the figure numbers anywhere in the report. My lecturer was not impressed. I guess I did not want to go through the club waving exercise a second time, could they not see the dead body lying on the ground, was that not enough? The breakthrough happened when I started to write for my pleasure, I actually began to enjoy reading what I had written because it was sometimes funny and often more profound than I remember when I wrote it. Now other people seemed to like it, heh, so maybe it was worth crafting the text so that there were no embarrassing typos. it is worth remembering that it takes less time to read than it does to write, the effort of trying to wrestle that idea into a sentence can mean that you miss some poor grammar or fail to get the current sentence to match the previous one you wrote a few minutes ago.

Computers also help as they can help fix many problems with grammar and spelling, and you can always ignore their advice. Even my web browser, on which I am typing this, delicately underlines all the words it believes to be miss-spelled. I meet many people, from man-on-the-street to translator who pooh-pooh the grammar and spelling checkers, listing the the one time when it offered the wrong choice or suggested something that was wrong (in their opinion), like they never made a mistake. As a professional proofreader, he said, straightening up in his chair, I can generally tell who manually checks their texts and who uses at least the spelling checker - because those who rely totally on their eyes miss so many things. I recommend always using the checker for anything you will publish or want people to be impressed by, not as a replacement for manual checking but to check if you missed anything. It cannot find everything, but if it finds a pile of errors, then perhaps you are too tired to finish the job now and should continue tomorrow.

Some day someone might manage to combine a cheap touch sensitive screen with some software that evaluates the plan you draw out on it, and recreate it as the final linear one you need to write the text, maybe opening convenient text boxes next to each part of the plan where you can type in the idea in its final form. It might even be me, at which point do not be surprised if someone breaks into your local supermarket and steals the touch sensitive screen from the checkout till.

Travel Lite

A trip starts the moment you have the idea for it, and finishes the moment it disappears forever from your memory. Traveling is exciting because you are pitting yourself against new experience, and long after you return the positive benefits should remain with you even if one day you forget how you achieved that benefit. One of the worst parts of traveling is the preparation, not always what you have to do but what you have to suffer in terms of what the other people you travel with want in terms of organisation, not forgetting the extra pressure you put on them with your own desires.

Ania gets to go on many trips throughout the year, as do many people from her department, as they attend exams and give courses in Poland and abroad. Often, while she has little more than a small roll-along backpack, her friends have small wardrobes designed to deal with the 'clothes for travelling' plus 'clothes for wearing around the hotel' and 'clothes for the exam', or possibly even 'clothes for dinner'. Yes, it's nice to have all those clothes, except that they have to be transported on and off trains, planes, cars and elevators, dragged up and down stairs, and eventually unpacked. This not only effects oneself, it is also effects everyone around, who have to suffer by helping to lift the bags, to have less room on the train and then finally have to wait in the lobby while a certain person unpacks, changes clothes and messes around with their make up. No, let's instead think of our friends and take less of the stuff that does nothing but prop up our own egos.
To respond quickly to the experiences that travel offers, one has to be able to move quickly. The more we take, the longer it will take us to meet those changing circumstances. "Sorry, I cannot join you, I have to wash my hair," is an at-home thought, one we need to abandon. My wife gets to see more, do more and meet more people because her hair is not cut in a way that needs continual maintenance, and with the bare minimum she takes in her bag she spends longer exploring her new room than she does in unpacking. She is down having a coffee at the bar or in that cafe across the road while her friends are still placing endless bottles on the shelf above their sink in an effort to recreate home in a hotel.

When you pack your bag, question everything:

• Why am I taking it?
• Can something else do the same job?
• Is it light enough?

The chances are that if it is liquid or cream the container is too large, something else will do, and your body can survive a day or two without it, and unless you are going to be staying in a field there will be some equivalent product on sale when you get there if it becomes vital to your continuing existence. Taking too much also means that everything gets squashed, so now we have to do something about all those creased clothes when we arrive. The less you take has another advantage, we now have less to lose if we drop something, leave it behind or have it stolen.

Do you need that fancy bag for your showering things, another for your make up, one more for first aid things and so on? Who will see what you bring? Are you afraid of the maid's opinion? Your friend who already knows you? If it fails to all fit in one wash bag, then there we have too much stuff. While choosing that one, effective washbag, find one with a nice hook on so you can hang it somewhere that doesn't have a shelf.

For the clothes, flexibility in choice is best done with the small things rather than the large. A single jacket and trousers can be mixed with a number of tops, and they take less room, and even if no one else notices, at least we will feel good for a change. Of course, it goes without saying that everything we take should be mix and match. If we think that we might like to buy things on our trip, and we do not want to have to stagger back with a bursting bag, then taking clothes bought from a secondhand and abandoning them before returning could make a lot of sense. Ania was once unexpectedly given many books on one trip to Slovenia, which since she had to bring them back it made sense to abandon other things to compensate. It was on this trip that she saw her first ever luggage on wheels.

And when we get back home, we unpack only what we need to wash or the bits and pieces that we bought while travelling. For the rest, since we will need most for the next trip it makes sense to store it in the luggage. This saves significant amounts of time during that stressful preparation process, and makes it easier to decide early on what you are short of and need to replace. And when we are doing our normal shopping, we try and remember to look out for those things we need, because trips are fun and worth good preparation.

New Flat, New Life?

You know the feeling, you are taking a huge risk raising the largest amount of money you ever handle to buy that new flat or house, and if you are able to keep up the payments it is going to change your life. And, for a few weeks or months, it does. However, like that new outfit you bought last season and felt brilliant in for the few times that you wore it, now it it just feels normal and you are back to where you started. Of course, if your new place is larger you now have more to clean, and how long before all that beautiful storage space is as cramped as it was in your last place?

Does is always have to be this way? And what happened to that dream, does it need to fade away?

My life has been a series of moves, either for work or family reasons, and each time it has forced me to make some decisions about what I should keep and what I should abandon. And every time it feels like I am letting go of some past idea, either something that I was involved in or saw as an image of what I could become. "I will buy and keep this coat because I want to spend more time walking, and, oh, this tablecloth will be good for those impressive dinners I will give, and..." The biggest step came when I started to get rid of books, and I don't mean those from my childhood but those I bought or were given that involved some subject I was interested in as an adult. However, it had to happen, the total number of books and the storage units they needed began to require more effort to move than the rest of my stuff put together. I remember sitting down and looking at piles of books and other paraphenalia as I prepared to pack away my life once more into a finite stream of cardboard boxes, and wondering why I was getting rid of things I actually used instead of books that I never read.

For this move, though, things had to be different. This time I was packing to move abroad, possibly never to return to my native country, to be with my new wife who was waiting for me in distant Lublin. By this time of my life I was already suffering from arthritus and circumstances meant that it would be just me and the driver who would be loading the lorry - and now those books seemed more heavy slabs of reconstituted tree than fount of knowledge. Eventually I decided to use the books as an inner layer for the boxes to help protect my more delicate possessions against the effects of knocks and to protect the boxes from being crushed when they were stacked in the container. I divided my books between the most essential and the inessential, and started using the former as packers. Eventually, all the boxes were full, and whatever books had not been the right size for use as packing, well, they were going to have to stay.

A decade later and my wife and I were getting ready for our first joint move, the first real one she had been involved in since the last time for her was when she was four years old and her familiy moved to a larger flat in the same block. Now our shelves were full of our dusty books, and some of hers had not been opened for decades. Along with this was the detritus of her family's possessions and a number of remarkable collections such as the the kitchen pan store, dating back largely to the 1980s. That was the decade that everyone seems to remember best, when there was hardly anything in the shops, and if you saw something then you bnought it whether you needed it or not - you could be sure that someone would want it eventually, and then you could barter it for something they had that you wanted. Those pans were not coming, that I was sure of, and neither were half those books.

How to help my wife learn how to let go of things? Luckily, she is more practical than overly romantic about objects, and I knew that the big problems were going to be her books, kitchen pans and wardrobe. We began almost a year before the move, even before we chose the flat where we were going to live, back when it was still a concrete shell overlooking a pleasant gully. For a week or so we went around once a day and each selected something from each room that we thought that we could do without. Perhaps a picture, an ornament, a book or even a piece of furniture. We then had to justify why we thought that we no longer needed each item. This was a period of exploration, questioning why we felt attachment to the the things we surround ourselves with, trying to define whether it was best left in our memories and whether we were keeping it as part of a 'collection', an excuse to worship quantity instead of quality.

This sorting process was the leaving side of the equation, what about the arrival side? Not what did we want to take, but what did we want in our new flat? We had plenty of furniture dating from the 1850s to the 1990s, a small museum of contrasting styles that either worked together in a strange, eclectic way or we had just become resigned to. As we started to design the interior for our new flat it became clear that what we wanted was modern, and no matter how good or how well loved, the old furniture had to go. Actually, one piece did make it, the grand old English neo-gothic sideboard, but eventually we gave it away to charity because we had no time to sell it for profit. Every time over the year leading up to the move that we had time to ponder, we would chose some item and ask ourselves if it were really part of the life we wanted to lead or just something from a potential alternative path.

The final element was the flat design itself: by limiting the amount of potential storage space we forced ourselves to make the final paring down, like removing the last layers of the fancy dress that we had adorned ourselves with, to ultimately leave the real, naked self. Scary? Very much so, and there were times when we thought that we had gone too far, that we were cutting through flesh instead of the dead layers. In spite of all the efforts, no matter how well you design a system, there will always be something that does not fit it, but in this case we were lucky as there was a basement room in our new building where we could store things to see if we really needed them. This worked well, and often in the early days we would pop down there to see if this or that was down there, and now after a year and one trip to the charity shop, there is still our old plastic laundry basket full of paperback books that we have not yet been tempted to read, plus a few other boxes of items that with each visit down there inch nearer to their final farewell.

In the weeks following our move we had to return to our old flat occasionally to sell some of the furniture we left there. One lady brought her grown up sons and their broken down Mercedes to pick up the sofa, the standard lamp and the carpet, the three elements which marked our involvement in the dworek dream, a dworek being a small manor house and the ideal of the backward-looking middle classes here in Poland. We had enjoyed them, and Ania will never forget bringing the rug home in that period between her mother dying and then meeting me, while the sofa was paid for by my father and stepmother when I had only been here a year and we needed to have something to replace the equisitely uncomfortable and tired horsehair beast I had slept on when I first spent a night in Ania's flat.

The memories still remain, and we continue to find ways back there. But our life has moved off in a new direction, although we have yet to explore its full potential. By editing down the physical elements of the decaying parts of our lives, we have made room for the living us and the many things that we need to do today. We can still experiment with our possessions by banishing them to the basement and then waiting to see if we still feel the urge to use them when they are no longer in sight, an urge which we often discover to be weaker then we could have imagined.

Dress Code

What do you like to wear - and what would you like to wear? Ever been tempted to wear something that you are not supposed to? Well, I would never have thought that of you, I am quite shocked! What we wear is not especially dictated by fashion as by what our culture dictates; but who, behind the culture, is doing the dictating and why do they feel the need to do so?

When you are born you were given an armful of 'your' culture and indicated, by peer pressure, that you have to maintain it. Why? why should we care for one particular brand of culture when there are so many others to choose from. Let's face it, the culture we are responsible for is only an accident of birth - if circumstances had left our parents stranded elsewhere and they either chose or were pressured to change to suit their new local culture, that is the one we may now feel most comfortable with. Or, what if our real parents had sold us, we were adopted, or our parents' culture ceased to exist for some reason? No one culture can be argued as being intrinsically better than another, crime and beauty still occur in both and the people we engage in argument with are likely to be partisan, including ourselves.

One of the problems is that it is difficult to see what elements of a culture are human necessities today, and those which are remnants of former necessities or even something imposed by a devious group of people intent on protecting their position in society. Which parts are useful as part of a ragbag of essential reserve skills that might be needed if the society came under some pressure, such as a war breaking out? A lot of the difficulty is that even the concept 'culture' is ill-defined, too often it is abused by the 'high culture' people, or the 'look at the pretty dancing' people or even the 'no, you are not going to have the advantages I never had access to' people. Culture is not about being pretty, being quality, it's about a functioning society ensuring some level of safety for the group and it includes the icky bits performed by the undesirables scrabbling a living at the lowest levels. It is the best that previous generations could do with what they were given combined with their best efforts to adapt the conditions they lived under.

Changes to culture can be scary, because we might make the wrong decision and hence become excluded from society, left to a lonely existence outside the group. Older people also find changes difficult because they fear that if they are no longer valued then who will protect them? What will our elders do if they do not understand our new culture, how can they advise us in a new environment when they are no longer strong enough to maintain their position in any other way? As humans we can be very lazy, riding the wagon of culture and letting ourselves become distanced from the changing reality, allowing a generation gap to appear and then grow yawningly wide. It is easy to blame bad influences from foriegn cultures instead of remaining current and responsive to the new problems of the young.

Another way of viewing the issue is to imagine yourself living two hundred years in the past, no, not as a member of the ruling classes, not even as a learned person, but as an average person. How similar would our lives be, and how much would our current knowledge of our culture allow us to slip in successfully, unnoticed? One might pull off an 'evening at the bar', or 'talking to the family', but how long before we begin to see the great gaps in our understanding of daily life and chores, with no time off and people from the 'big house' who see us as a lower form of life?

The chances are that the intervening centuries have seen a paring away of what each generation considered undesirable in their culture, and we are descended from those people who were flexible enough to withstand these changes, even if they were unaware of the extent of the changes they were involved in and what the previous generations had already discarded. If you are a man and there is no skirt or dress wearing in your current culture, then the chances are that somewhere in the history of your culture the skirts or dresses simply faded away or developed into something else.

In summary, the limitations on what one can choose to dress in are imposed on us as we grow up by the previous generations who confuse 'what life was like in the culture when I grew up' with the total sum of the culture of all past generations.

Life Rules

Do you think that this blog is all about writing? Well, whatever, it isn't, it's about design. Writing is such a great subject that I want to return to it again - and again. I live in Poland, and living in a foriegn land is never easy because cultures are different. The main problem is not with the many varying aspects of the culture itself, though, but with respect for foriegners. I am lucky because back in the UK I was able to live and work with people originating from many different cultures and I assumed that they were not that much different to me or anyone else, they were just people. OK, they often had different habits, like the Chinese born guy I shared office space with who always noisily slurped his tea. It was a cultural slurp where he was brought up, just as the family next door where I grew up watched football. I do not slurp my tea and I do not watch football, they are merely other people's culture, wherever they were born or with whatever racial history they might have. I knew several Polish people in the UK and we just talked about life, politics and the rest in the UK about the UK, whether or not all or any of us were born in the UK. We all lived in the UK, and we all accorded each other the same level of respect.

Poland, though, has proven to be a different case. Here in my city it is really hard to find anyone who will see me and think "Yo, another human!" What I say is mostly not seen in terms of human-living-here speaking but as he-English-speaking-about-Poland speaking, often without the person being concious of this. Keep the conversation light and on neutral subjects and there is no real problem, but in trying to talk about the social issues here is a nightmare, despite the fact that I have lived here for about eleven years, have been married to a Polish woman all that time, worked for Polish companies and not spent my free time down the bar drinking with my English-speaking-ghetto buddies. And I do care, as I think that anyone with any feeling for others would. No, I am not supposed to say anything that reflects even slightly badly about Poland, and by doing so once it means that I always do so. Mind you, even the press in Poland has been subject to the same requirement, not that this makes me feel any better, quite the opposite.

However, this is not a rant blog but a design blog, so we need to examine some of the dynamics. But first, what kicked this subject off in my head this morning was the inability of many people in politics and the media to deal with Poland being defeated by everyone they played in the UEFA football cup. You cannot escape newspaper's publishing the official email and phone number of the referee who 'did Poland down', or the fact that the same referee has got death threats from Poles unable to deal with the defeats. What is their problem? Where is all this hate coming from?

Poland has had rather an unfortunate history over the past couple of centuries, and this is what usually gets the blame, but the reality is different. Much different. Poland is a country where people are brought up largely as peasants, not in terms of the volume of knowledge taught in schools, but in a defeatist attitude that is designed to keep people where they should be - in their set social position. Hard words, true, but one measure of a cultures freedom is its ability to accept change. In a peasant society you certainly do not want your peasants understanding the reality of the control they are under, only that they respect the hierarchy enough that they become in awe of its highest members. As a result, the answer I get to suggestions is "Oh, that can't be done (here in Poland)". Mu!

A good example, and we need an example, is that of education. This where you are not taught to respect your elders, say, but only to respect the people in power, especially those with a big badge or an important job. Doctors, professors, priests, politicians, lawyers - you cannot say a bad word about them and succeed because the doctors will not treat you, the professors will not let you pass, etc. In this way is created the godhead that must not be questioned. Of course, people do rebel, with the oppression of the godhead to live under you either comply or rebel - and the best thing is that the godhead is so built in that you do not rebel against the godhead itself but break their rules only in ways which effects their fellow sufferers.

At this point I will just mention that I know some fine doctors etc. who are as frustrated as I am by the system and the people who take advantage of the it.

I have no desire to destroy the people around me because the godhead is oppressive, instead I question the godhead and in doing so I become something alien to the people here. I ask of these people why do they do certain things and not others, and again this is against the principle of the godhead. Only if the godhead says yes does it become possible to accept change. Whether the person is passive or rebel, they are taught that change is the enemy, and by association the bringer of change who is not the godhead is the enemy as well.

The teaching involves a lot of focus on 'tradition' and the usual 'this country' biased history most education systems to specialise in, but here always with the twist that sometime in the past was a better time - the 'golden age of Poland'. The assumption that everything went wrong some centuries ago is incorrect, the people in power, Polish or foriegn, have simply never let slip the reins of power, but instead continued to ensure they, as the godhead, remain in power, the movement from nation to dominiom to state to communism simply being the replacement of the people at the top, not their attitudes.

Poland, as I see it, is in pain, but a pain that remains untreated as the symptoms have been mistaken for another disease. Until enough people who care realize that the problem is the retention of an essentially feudal peasant society wrapped in technological gift wrap, then the situation will continue much as it is at present.

All hail the godhead!