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.

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!