Movin' Out?

I'm a country boy.  Born in what was then a small village on the border between Kent and Sussex but is now a sizeable town.  Lived there for the first 25 years of my life before, on marrying, moving to a somewhat bigger border town 20 odd miles away, where I stayed for maybe four years.  Then back to another north Kentish village, about the same size as my home town (and it hasn't grown much since).  So green fields, narrow roads and woodland have always been if not within sight at least within a short walk or, at worst, drive away.  Likewise the smells of horseshit and crop spray and newly mown hay are as well known to me as roast beef and Yorkshire pud or a decent curry.

So living, as I have done for close to 20 years now, in one of Europe's more polluted cities, is not really "me".  Don't get me wrong: I love the place, despite the maniac drivers on the over-crowded city roads, or the frequent blues-and-twos waking me up at six most mornings (I'm sure it's some numpty copper having fun driving around the neighbourhood waking everyone up for a laugh) or the jet noise from nearby Warsaw airport (thankfully we're not directly under the flight path but we can hear the traffic when the wind is in the right direction).  Warsaw has everything I need to be happy - first and foremost my wife and kids and a comfortable home; then decent shopping within walking distance; close to entertainment (a cinema complex half a kilometre away, and two more in malls within ten minutes' drive, plus a massive network of cycle and footpaths and parkland for exercise); and within a 15 minute Metro ride - free on my OAP pass - of the city centre for more shops, museums and art galleries than you can shake a stick at.  Plus I have my books and my music and good friends around.  It's all good.

But it simply isn't the countryside.  I need to do something about that.



Moving out is the only way I can get back to what I'm used to (for despite my extended Warsaw residence it still doesn't feel completely right).  And of course this presents problems to be solved.  Two in particular - my kids and money.

My kids are still well in school age - my son is 13 going on 14 (and teenage angst is setting in) and my daughter 11 going on 21.  I love 'em deeply, and they are my Number One concern.  Because of their age, they are well settled into education and have networks of close friends, built up in the local (very good) middle school a kilometre up the road.  The lad has also just moved up to senior school and started on his equivalent to English GCSE studies with college or university on the horizon.  Milady has a couple of years to go before she follows him......and the time is passing way too quickly. The last thing we can do is disrupt their education.

So the alternative to leaving Warsaw completely is to buy a smaller place out of town where we can weekend or holiday - and that of course leads us into the second issue - dosh (or the comparative lack of the stuff).   Retirement and Brexit between them have, naturally enough, blown a sizeable hole in the Good Ship Spending Power.  Like most blokes, I suppose, growing old(er) was never on my radar, and the needs of my first family (all grown men thankfully, and doing well in life with their own family responsibilities), to mention nothing of Doing the Decent Thing when I divorced some years ago mean that I have a quite small savings pot.  Then of course a devaluing pound has reduced the value of what pension income I have, since I'm paid in sterling and have to convert to Polish zloty.  At Referendum time I could buy over 5 to the pound, now it's closer to 4.5 and sliding.  Thank you, Parliament!

There's not much I can do about either.  I can't slow down time so that my kids grow older more slowly, nor can I turn back the clock to before they started school, when leaving Warsaw would have been no upheaval for them.   I can do nothing either about the folly of the Brexit decision that has affected the currency markets and economies of both Britain and Europe, Poland's included, and will continue to do so for many years.  My pensions are fixed for the duration (State excluded - you never know, a future Government of some kind may see their way to being more generous, but I'm not holding my breath) and the chances of winning the Euromillions lottery are not worth thinking about so I don't bother playing it.  So all I can do is  manage the best I can, and that will be the story of my life, I think.

But looking on the bright side, I'm still healthy so I can at least enjoy my kids and bike rides and hiking for many years to come.  And there is actually one possibility that could help me realise my move out.



When I claimed my pensions I had a couple of lump sum payments (as you do), and even with a sliding exchange rate they come to a reasonable sum.  I'm not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but there's enough there to give me some options.  I also have a savings policy maturing this time next year that will swell the coffers a bit as well.  In theory at least, I could invest in a small out of town place now.  This would complicate things a little because it would probably mean my splitting my time between Warsaw and wherever, at least until the kids finish school (perhaps 10 years?) enabling my wife and I to relocate properly.  But it's a consideration that we're taking seriously.

A big question is location.  It will be in Poland somewhere I think, if for no other reason than property prices are very cheap here in comparison with other European countries, especially Britain.  That may change, of course.....  So then the choice is where do we go?

We could probably find something a couple of hours or so's drive out of town that would be pretty rural and fit the bill.  A little plot of land with a small cottage on it in a village somewhere is appealing, but I'm not convinced - I don't know the locality well enough.  The price, while reasonable, would be higher due to the proximity to Warsaw, so less value for money - a bit like buying a place in the Home Counties within commuting range of London.  I'm not sure.....

Then there is the south of Poland, beyond the major cities like Krakow and Wroclaw and Katowice.  Here you are coming into ski country, with the Biesczady and Tatra mountain ranges, offshoots of the Carpathian range, that form Poland's only real natural barrier.  I've been to the Biesczadies several times as we usually take a winter break in a small ski resort called Szczyrk that I've praised on here a couple of times.  It's lovely countryside and I've often thought I'd like to visit in high summer and explore a bit without tramping through a metre of snow wrapped in thermals and gloves.  The cold frankly doesn't agree with me these days, especially with the dodgy hips and knees and increasingly rheumy hands that all ache constantly.  But it is nice there, and is not impossible.

To the north, of course, is the Baltic coast, and this is my favoured destination at the moment.  I've visited several resorts there - I wrote about the pleasures on offer a few weeks ago in a piece called Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside and there are a number of other essays scattered about (check the Archives most years for July or August and you're likely to find something)  - and I can safely say it's my favourite part of the country.  There is no question I would move there tomorrow if someone offered me a place.  A small villa, an apartment somewhere (especially with a sea view) or a place a few kilometres inland - I'd settle for any one of them. And there is still excellent value to be had, and a lot of new developments springing up to offer a wide choice.  Hmmmm.......

The drive to the coast this year took us on a different route since our resort was new to us - well, to me anyway: it was a return to childhood for my beloved.  Two thirds of it followed the familiar and excellent A2 and A1 highways towards Gdansk that we have driven many times, but around the historic battleground of Grudziadz we swung onto the cross country route north westerly through the beautiful Pomeranian countryside, past Chojnice and the coastal resort of Koszalin.  It's a lovely road, winding through rolling, forested hills and small villages with their distinctive Kaszubian wooden cottages that gave way the further west we traveled to the more Germanic buildings representative of the area's Prussian past.  Regularly we would swing around a bend and through the trees see lakes large and small glimmering in the hot summer sunshine.  On our return, reversing the route, we stopped off a couple of hundred metres off the main road along a deserted forest track where there was a small picnic area and rested for an hour.  It was deserted, and despite the hum of traffic from a busy (for the area: a car or truck every four or five minutes) main road, very quiet and peaceful.  We loved it.

A lot of the small lakeside villages had property for sale, and many seemed to be small wooden bungalows set back from the road, often with the lake lapping quietly at the boundaries of the small and neat gardens.  It was idyllic......and immediately gave us another option.  The area is beautiful and quiet, with few large towns and not a shopping mall or McDonald's in sight.  It's probably a couple of hours from the coast and about four to five from Warsaw, and at summer's end the traffic was, as I've suggested above, quite light.  I'm sure it's heavier in the peak period from the end of June to the end of August and I'm sure winters bring difficult conditions (as is common throughout the country) but for all that I think it would be a delightful place to live.  More research is needed, maybe a trip or two more at different times of the year to get a clearer picture, but it's a region I'm now thinking seriously about.



So there we go.  Much as we would like a place in the sun, on some sandy coast in the south of Spain, the Algarve in Portugal or a Greek island, it ain't likely to happen.  I should have started saving many years earlier to get anywhere close to that.  In the same way, a return to my homeland to settle in a Cornish or Norfolk coastal cottage is unlikely - liquidating all our property here will only raise a decent deposit for such a place, and no-one is likely to provide me with a mortgage (my pension would nowhere near cover it, not even close!).  Besides, sad as it is to write this, I'm not sure I could live in England now - it's not the place I grew up in and the changes that inevitably come anywhere to anyone have not been kind.  And I've changed too.  I'm simply not the man who jumped on an A320 at Heathrow back in 2000 to start a long-term project in this strange and dreary country called Poland (and how wrong that impression turned out to be!)

So movin' out - yes, sooner rather than later, but where to?   And a small apartment rather than a house would be better too - less work to maintain (gardening and DIY have never been my strengths, although I do enjoy a potter at my plot).   Time to stop thinking and start doing something about it, perhaps.





 

Well done the weather walkers!

It's good to see so many people on the streets today, protesting climate change.  I have to say had I known about the event I would have joined in the march here in Warsaw - assuming there is one (I've seen nothing ov tv about one yet).  But from what I've seen so far on my main news source, the BBC World News channel and website, the marches across the world have attracted not just school and college kids but tens of thousands of concerned individuals of all ages.  And not a hint of trouble (as I write, early afternoon in a cool cloudy Polish capital).  This is all good.

Forget Brexit.  Discount Trump's and Democratic candidates' posturing. Ignore the US - China trade war that threatens the entire global economy.  It seems to me the Number One threat to this planet, and all of us who live on it is Climate Change.  Global Warming if you prefer.  If it isn't addressed by all of us, and soon, the place will be changed so much international trade, global economics, capitalism, Islamic terrorism, the whole lot, will be unsupportable in any case.  A good proportion of the planet will be places where, conservatively, it will be difficult to live and prosper, never mind indulge in petty squabbles about my God's better than your God, or whose food is best, or whether US cars are better than German (hint: it's not the American).  Whole countries will have disappeared under rising seas (the Maldives and Polynesia, for instance) and others changed forever and reduced in size by the same catastrophe (the Netherlands, parts of the eastern United Kingdom and eastern coast of the USA, many others).  It's happening already.

The threat, no matter what nay sayers may claim, is real.  The science shows time after time, that both polar ice caps are melting, and faster than anticipated even five years ago.  This alone is enough to concern us all, since it will directly cause the sea level rises.  Study after study shows increasing levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that are clearly affecting our weather patterns.  There are more tornadoes every year in the US.  Hurricanes and typhoons are more frequent and more powerful.  The frequency of severe weather - whether extraordinarily high rainfall and exceptional flooding, more sustained periods of drought, a greater incidence of uncontrolled forest fires (as far apart as California and Siberia and Australia) or greater snowfall in areas where such events were previously rare - increases year on year.

A friend of mine (well, an old colleague at any rate) insists that there is no such thing as climate change or global warming.  This is all a cyclical variation in normal weather patterns, he says.  But then what does he know?  He's also a rampant Brexit zealot and thus incapable of reasoned discussion.  The Orange Occupant of the White House, President of the biggest polluter of them all, is an even bigger, and hence more dangerous due his position, sceptic.  To him, climate change is all a hoax dreamed up and organised by the Chinese to damage American industry, trade and its economy.  To combat which he increases coal production, grants more fracking licences in the first year in office than in the entire Obama presidency (according to some reports), rolls back environmental protection laws that have been in place for many years, and overrules states like California that take the problem seriously and introduce their own measures to mitigate damage.  Oh, and unilaterally withdraws from the Paris Climate Accords because "they're a bad deal that damages America".  Fuck the planet - America First!

When there are people like this in positions of power, whether politically or in business, then it will remain difficult to change the bleak future that has been predicted.  A period of a mere 11 years (that is the same as my daughter's age - a very short time!) before irreversible climate change tips us over the edge into a difficult and uncertain future is the current estimate.  But some reports suggest that things are happening even quicker and that 11 years projection may in fact be generous.  To be clear: Climate Change cannot now be stopped, the most we can hope to do is slow it and mitigate its effects. 

There are business leaders who have made commitments that will help to do this - in particular the major tech companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, all with commitments to become carbon neutral within a relatively short time span (up to ten years), and all of whom are investing billions of dollars in measures to do so.  There are also a lot of governments who have made grand sounding pledges for their entire countries to become carbon neutral (clearly a much harder thing to achieve) but their time frames are typically in the range of 30 years - so by 2050 - which will of course be far too late.

The problem is the world is still too reliant on carbon fuels - gas guzzling cars and buses and trucks and (worst of all) airplanes, coal and oil burning power plants to provide our electricity to homes and industry.  There are many movements and activists trying to make us all more aware of our carbon footprint and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, take fewer flights and make less car and bus journeys, but in many rural areas and Third World countries these measures are often impractical or at worst impossible to attain.  But the efforts must continue - indeed increase.  There are many sloar farms abd wind turbine farms scattered around the world, and more are needed.  Governments world wide must do their part to move us all away from fossil fuels, the big polluters, towards more sustainable and renewable energy sources.  Whether wind power, solar power, the still untrusted but vital atomic power, and others still theoretical like nuclear fusion, is immaterial.  A mix of all them is needed. 

The issue of course is cost.  All of these changes will cost trillions of dollars to deliver in the time frame available (or close to it) and governments world wide are reluctant to commit these vast sums of money when there are more immediate local problems for them to confront - policing, health care, aging populations, unemployment, border security and terrorism.....to name just a few.  This is quite understandable, but at some point - and some point VERY soon - governments are going to have to bite the bullet and address the climate change catastrophe properly.  The Paris Accords - no mater what Trump may insist - were a decent starting point and one that needs to be built upon, whether or not the US are involved.

And if that means that we, as individuals, have to pay more taxes to fund the investments that will be required then so be it.  If services like power and heating (from whatever source) increase in price then fine.  If we have to drive less and take fewer holiday or business flights (and pay premium prices when we do so) then bring it on.  It seems to me that is a price worth paying to allow life to continue - and hopefully flourish - on this planet of ours.

I hope today's demonstrators, whether in Australia, across Asia, in wealthy Europe and poor Africa and India, and especially in gas guzzling wealthy America, make their local politicians sit up and take notice.  And if they don't I hope they do it again.  And again.  As many times as necessary.

And next time - for there WILL be a next time! - I fully intend to walk with them.