The Slaughter of the Innocents: illegal migration

Anyone who says we are all born equal is in a dream world.  We are not.  Poverty, grinding and soul-destroying, is all around us.  Walk through any city, anywhere on the planet, with your eyes open and you will see it in all its grubby obscenity.  This is not new – it has always been thus.  Since time immemorial there have been The Haves and The Have Nots.  I see nothing to suggest it will ever change.  It is human nature to aspire to more, to a better life, but unfortunately it is also human nature to put oneself first, above others.  What is happening in the central Mediterranean now, every day, is merely the latest manifestation of this.

 

I see poverty everywhere I go.

In Cairo, every morning and evening in the taxi travelling between my hotel (a luxurious complex a mile or so from the Pyramids) and the office downtown we would be ensnared in the city’s appalling traffic, four or five lines of cars and buses, motor cycles and donkey carts, squeezed onto a road built for no more than three lanes.  Invariably, between the lines of almost stationary traffic, there would be dozens of penniless and destitute people, suffocating on the heavy fumes in the air from the traffic, their hands held out imploringly for a few coins.  Some would be selling individual cigarettes or matches.  Others, always younger women, would be carrying a crying baby on one hip as a further encouragement.  They were all risking life and limb for a few crumbs of comfort, a few pence, to keep themselves and their families going for another 24 hours.

In Sofia, there was a young guy, probably in his middle twenties, no more, with crushed and twisted legs, pushing himself along on a plywood cart on the sort of castors you see on office chairs.  We saw him pretty much every day in the area around our office, close to the bus and train stations.  Whatever the weather – hot and sunny, bitterly cold and snowy, or pouring with rain – he would be dressed in the same filthy jacket and flannel trousers with no shoes or socks, his hand held out for small change and scraps of food.

In Bucharest, across from my hotel, was a bridge across a river that I crossed on my walk to work.  It was always crowded with old and penniless people, selling whatever they could lay their hands on.  One old guy had a set of bathroom scales and was charging a few cents to weigh yourself.  I never saw anyone take him up on the offer, but he never gave up – he would be there when I left for work about 8 and still there on my return in the evening, every day.

I have seen cardboard cities in London and Edinburgh, kids scavenging trash cans in Manhattan and Almaty, and drunken derelicts slumped in doorways everywhere.

The common factor is that none of them have any hope, no prospect of improvement in their life.  Every day is simply a battle to survive.

 

I see wealth, too, everywhere I go.

In Cairo, the people in the bank all led comfortable family lives in middle class suburbs – one guy actually lived in a penthouse flat overlooking Tahrir Square and rushed home from work every evening to join the throng there protesting for democracy.  I sometimes wonder what happened to him.   In Sofia and Bucharest there were Range Rovers with darkened windows cruising the streets day and night, probably carrying the local Mafiosi and corrupt government officials between their luxury apartments and night clubs and offices.  Almaty was awash with Toyota Land Cruisers and Hummers, guzzling the country’s cheap petrol (a pint of milk cost several times as much as a gallon of unleaded).  The streets were closed and cordoned off by armed troops whenever the corrupt President sped through in his armour plated Mercedes – I was threatened once by them as I returned to my apartment laden with a Saturday grocery shop and happened to cross one of those roads (it was the first time I became aware that this happened on a regular basis).  London and Manhattan are among the wealthiest places on earth, where property prices are unaffordable to the average Joe Public, and whole swathes of the cities owned by Russian and Arab billionaires (or in the case of Manhattan Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan executives).

Do they take any notice of the poverty around them? Do they care?

 

Aspiring to get ahead, to move up the social scale, is a natural ambition for anybody.  I come, proudly, from working class stock – my mother was in service, a chambermaid at Chiddingstone Castle in Kent, between the First and Second parts of the World War in the 1930s.  There she met my father, who was a gardener.  After the war and service in North Africa and Burma, he worked as a coal delivery man, a removal man, a stoker in the local gasworks and a mill operator in a plastics factory.  My mother didn’t work at all until I was 14, and then spent 20-odd years working in various cleaning and shop assistant jobs.  We lived all my life in a low-rent council house (in the 50s and 60s they did not have the reputation they do now).  Money was always tight, although I never realised it – I don’t think dad ever made more than 20 or 30 pounds a week, mum even less – but I had a great childhood and never wanted for anything.  About the only thing I can remember missing out on was the odd school trip, skiing in Switzerland or exchange visits with French students, because the cost (even though heavily subsidized) was simply beyond our means.  It never bothered me.

When I got my first job, in the City working as a filing clerk in a major stockbroker’s office, my parents were overjoyed – it just was not the kind of thing they ever imagined could happen to a council house kid.  For the first couple of years I thought nothing of it, it was just a job that kept me in beer and cigarettes.  Then, when I was 19, still a kid really, dad died from cancer (all that dust inhaled during a lifetime of toil) at the young age of 56, and left me the breadwinner.  It made me, once I had sobered up some months later, realise there was more to life and I began to work hard and want to better myself.  It’s been a struggle, with as many downs as ups, but all in all I’ve done ok.  And I got roaring drunk the day I outlived my dad – it was a kind of belated mourning.

So I understand the desire of the poor victims in the Mediterranean, who mostly just want a better life and head to Europe to find it.  What I cannot understand, and will never come close to understanding, is why they take the risks they do to achieve it.  Why they spend months struggling to get to the southern Med coast, and then all their money to board a leaky death-trap of a boat to make a sea crossing that even in the best weather is dangerous.  Their desperation and determination is breathtaking, and that makes the tragic deaths of so many of them the more terrible.  Worse still are the women and children, innocent victims, who perish with them for love and loyalty to their spouses and fathers.  There is no doubt that people trafficking is an evil line of work……..

 

It’s also a line of work that has existed for thousands of years.    Entire civilizations have been built by it.  The Romans and Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Persian Empire, Incas and Vikings and Mongols all used slave labour, typically the survivors of their defeated enemies, to build and farm and serve them.  More recently, in their colonial heyday, European nations like the French and German, Spanish and Portuguese, Dutch and British carved out global trade empires through the judicious use of slavery (even after its official abolition in the mid-19^th century).   When those trading Empires waned, as they inevitably do, and the fading European powers left their African and Eastern colonies, their former servants were left to fend for themselves, usually with little support from their former “masters”, with no real experience of self-governance, and always facing a power vacuum that was often filled by a brutal and corrupt ex-military tyrant (think Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein) who continued to hold the “lower” classes in servitude, while retaining a corrupt and fawning retinue of old friends and supporters.  The result has been a succession of post-colonial struggles to modernise that has engulfed the African continent, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the Far East that continues to this day. 

It is these circumstances that have prompted the illegal migrations that are continuing all over the world, often with such tragic consequences, and provide the people traffickers, wherever they are, with such rich pickings.  That in the Mediterranean is only one example, and the one most in the public eye right now, as it takes place in the full glare of tv news networks and an insidious spread of anti-immigrant rhetoric across the entire EU.

 

It’s all very well calling for action against the traffickers.  Blockading Libyan ports and trying to stop the migrant vessels as soon as they leave territorial waters can only go so far.  If Libyan waters become no-go areas the traffickers will simply up-sticks and move a few hundred miles along the coast.  There are plenty of small, poor and unobtrusive fishing villages along the entire southern Mediterranean coastline that will serve equally well.  The number of vessels that EU navies will need to station in the area to form an effective blockade, even with the most sophisticated satellite technology, will be unsustainable, and the traffickers need only be patient. 

Other routes will be opened as well, overland through the Levant, or by a longer road through an Iraq that is struggling with Western democracy, through Afghanistan and the Caucasus region and the bandit country that is eastern Ukraine and southern Russia, regions where there remain sufficient numbers of organised criminals who will be quite happy to help out, if the price is right.  The trade is simply too profitable to just close down because of a few EU patrol ships in the Med.  Besides, the traffickers are not the root of the problem, they are merely the facilitators and profiteers.

The cause of all this tragedy remains the desperate poverty that far too many millions of people across the world are trapped in.  It remains the continuing catalogue of conflict raging across Africa and the Middle East.  Think of the slaughter that continues disgracefully in Syria, where the butcher Assad uses the destruction of his own subjects to cling to power while the major nations like the EU and the US and the discredited UN allow it to happen.  Consider the anarchy in Libya, an oil rich state that has never recovered from the turmoil of the Arab Spring and the fall of Gaddafi, now torn to shreds by lawless competing militia and without a credible government.  Look at an Iraq still struggling with post-Saddam democracy, or Afghanistan trying to move forward against an allegedly defeated but still strong Taliban – both countries abandoned by UK and US forces that helped them to a kind of freedom but without a credible Plan B in place to sustain and create law and order afterwards.  In sub-Saharan Africa, Boko Haram and IS jihadists continue to do much as they like in Northern Nigeria, in South Sudan and the Horn of Africa with little to stop them. 

In Central America poverty forces thousands to try dangerous overland routes to the riches of America, riding on top of freight trains for days on end, or in the Far East migrants choose the dangerous sea-routes to Australia in a fashion remarkably similar to the Mediterranean crossings – and with as much tragedy (if less publicity, at least in my part of the world).

 

I don’t have the answers.  In fact, I’m not sure there are any answers.  It seems to me that poverty and oppression and the slaughter of the innocents are as much a part of this life on Earth as are the seasons and the sun rising in the east.  The situation is merely (and that is probably the wrong word….) more visible now because of the long reach of satellite tv news carriers and the internet, bringing their awful pictures to your SmartTV or phone or mobile device within hours – sometimes even minutes – of the tragedy actually happening.

Human nature needs to change, dramatically, for the situation to improve.  There needs to be a concerted effort to tackle those conflicts and that grinding poverty that induce desperate people to take desperate measures to escape from their desperate lives.  I see nothing to suggest that is likely to happen in the foreseeable future. 

Which means that, no matter what actions the EU or the UN or any other organisation or country is likely to take now or in the coming months, it will be no more than a sticking plaster to solve a global problem that needs drastic and probably impossible surgery to heal.

A book review: "Too Big to Fail" by Andrew Ross Sorkin

I’ve spent most of my working life in the banking industry, in one way or another.  In the late 70s, pleading poverty as a newly married man earning (even by those times) a pittance, I moved from a highly respected and now defunct London stockbroker to the investment banking arm of the world’s (then) biggest bank, based in its London office.  Over the ensuing thirty odd years, I worked in the dizzy and incredibly profitable world of “casino banking”, as it’s now dubbed, and without setting the world alight I did ok financially and mostly enjoyed my life’s work.  It had its ups and downs – two more Wall Street behemoths decided at different times that they no longer wanted me to darken their doors and disposed of me like a used tissue: it meant nothing to them as they raked in their billions but crippled me financially as my mere five figure salary disappeared overnight to be replaced with UK unemployment benefit.  Never particularly generous under any government in my lifetime, it was barely enough to pay the bills, and it’s fair to say that now, nearly twenty years further along life’s bumpy road, I’m still paying off the final bills from those heady days.  But I can truly say I have had the last laugh – neither of those two Wall Street behemoths exist now.  Both fell in disgrace, after getting their fingers caught in the till (figuratively speaking) in major financial scandals in the late nineties and early noughties.

Which brings me neatly along to “Too Big to Fail”, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s superb book about the financial crisis of 2007/8, the fall of Lehman Brothers and related events that still send shock waves through the system and dominate our financial lives to this day (and no, I never worked for Lehman – but know people who did).

It’s an excellent book.  The subject itself could be very dry and difficult to understand for anyone who has not worked in the business, but Sorkin brings it all to life with a writing style that takes it from the financial pages of the FT or WSJ and into the realm of John Grisham.  It reads like a thriller, and a good one at that, and the intricacies of the deal making that brought about the crisis and that Wall Street bankers and the US government then used to desperately try to salvage something from the impending disaster are laid bare and clear to understand.  The story rattles along at a cracking pace, with all the foul and abusive language you would expect from people under immense (and often self-inflicted) pressure laid bare.  The petty jealousies and dislike bordering upon hatred between multi-million dollar CEOs are vividly portrayed.  There are some nice little vignettes too – like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, close to breaking point, throwing up into a waste bin in House Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office – that portray a humanity that is often ignored in accounts of those days.

Few people come out with much credit.  For instance, Dick Fuld, Lehman’s combative CEO, comes across as greedy and barely competent – managing a trading desk might have been fine for him, but running the massive house of Lehman was clearly beyond his powers, and his indecision and stubborn insistence that someone would come to the rescue, and his anger when that failed to materialise and the axe fell, is impossible to feel any sympathy for.  Tim Geithner comes across as overbearing and unsympathetic, with a blinkered insistence that he is right and everyone else wrong that is at best misplaced.  Ben Bernanke is presented as a highly intelligent and scholarly man, but one who is perhaps a little too divorced from the rough-and-tumble of the trading floor to grasp fully what is going on on his watch, seeking a solution in statistics and history when perhaps something more tough, even brutal, was called for.

Ever since those days, “banker bashing” has been something of a global sport, and every politician with aspirations for high office has jumped on the bandwagon……usually with little or no knowledge of either the industry or what actually happened.  It has always seemed to me misplaced, and I’ve blogged about it a number of times over the past few years, taking a consistent line.  Without question, at the top of the pile, where the salaries are huge and the corporate jets two-a-penny, there have been (and still are) bad apples, greedy and incompetent men and women, whose sole interest is the total sum of their bank balances (whether they be on- or off-shore).  “Risk” is not a consideration, unless it is to their own assets and well-being.  The man in the street is of no concern – even when said man in the street is slaving away on a perhaps meagre salary on the bottom rung of their own corporate ladder – the man in the mailroom or lowly filing clerk contributes in his own way to the firm’s profitability, but too often this goes unnoticed and unremarked by those at the top.  The small man is also ignored by most commentators and critics of the industry, both then and now, and shamefully in my view tarred with the same brush.

If there is a fault with the book it lies in its failure to weave the small fry into the narrative.  Its focus, correctly, is with the dealmakers who caused the mess and then repeated past mistakes trying to unwind a parlous situation.  The weekend long number crunching sessions trying to identify the bits of failing companies that might just be worth salvaging and buying for a buck are well documented (and at times amusingly so), but the efforts that were undoubtedly going on way down the food chain to try and track and accurately value increasingly complex businesses, by ordinary men and women on “normal” wages rather than the obscene rewards of their alleged “betters” are hardly mentioned.  In fact the nearest instance to this is a section where the antiquated systems and procedures being used by the ailing AIG to run its affairs are roundly condemned – and given the state that company was in, quite rightly.   This is understandable, since there is no glamour to be had in the back office, but to this reader (who has spent a lifetime labouring away in that world) it is a sad omission.  Remember, when the companies fell, into bankruptcy or takeover, thousands of perfectly respectable and ordinary nine-to-fivers (if such an animal existed in Wall Street circa 2008 actually existed) found themselves unemployed, their pension funds worthless and with little or no pay-off to keep them going through their next job search – and I know from recent experience how difficult that process is.  During the global financial crisis that followed these events, finding another position must have proved incredibly difficult – especially with the last entry on the CV reading “Lehman Bros”.  Meanwhile, the senior managers and directors who had caused this mess drove away in their Lincoln Continentals or Porsches or Mercedes, with millions stashed away in their bank accounts, to their estates in the Hamptons, to lick their wounds and re-surface a few months later, aided and abetted by their friends back in the industry.

And this is sad.  According to some columnists and commentators, ignorant unwashed Occupy activists and “revolutionaries” like Russell Brand, and shamefully most politicians, “bankers” are the scum of the earth.  We’re not.  The overwhelming majority of bankers are genuine hard-working individuals who take pride in their work, put their customers first and are generally ill-rewarded for their efforts.  And yet we are all lumped into the same pile as the Fulds and Milkens and Leesons of this world, the greedy and incompetent deal-makers and shysters. 

Like it or lump it, the world cannot run without bankers, global finances are much too closely interwoven for that, at every level from government finances to my sister’s old age pension.  As the events of 2008 clearly demonstrated, if one link in the chain breaks more are sure to follow, and the resultant difficulties take years to recover from.  People who should know better should really move on from the cheap political point scoring that banker bashing still provides, and work at changing these misleading perceptions.  It hurts that an industry I’ve spent my entire working life in is now rated so badly when it used to be a career to aspire to, and all because of the misadventures and stupidity of a small number of individuals.  

Regulation is not the complete answer.  Banks have never been so closely regulated as they are now, risk management never so complex, and yet still the lessons do not seem to have sunk in.  GM has seen its car sales boom in the last twelve months according to reports yesterday, but a lot of this is down to their finance arm providing sub-prime auto finance (cheap loans and credit agreements to the non-US reader) that are proving unaffordable to some customers and defaults are on the rise.  This is exactly one of the contributing factors that led to the crisis in 2008, except for sub-prime auto loans read sub-prime mortgages.

No, the whole mindset of people in the finance industry needs to change.  That will take a generation, probably.  But the mindset of the banker bashers needs to change too – an acceptance that not everyone working in banking is a criminal would be a start.  A refusal to take on unaffordable finance terms when buying a car or a house or a holiday would help too.  Soundbite politicians could perhaps stop taking pops at an “easy” target and focus on real policies to get elected, then once elected adopt measures that rebuild a still ailing global economy rather than pile more misery on people already crippled by an arguably failed austerity policy.  But that would be to admit defeat, and no politician will ever admit to being wrong.

And people really should read this book.  Knowledge is a good thing, and “Too Big to Fail” brings a clarity to a complex subject that even Russell Brand might understand.  Who knows, it may even prompt him and his ilk to moderate their views.  It may even help to bring about that change in mindset I referred to.  And this would be a very good thing.

Sea, snow and fireworks - New Year's in Sopot

In the north-east of Poland, on the Baltic coast, lies Gdansk Bay.  At its northernmost point is the Hel peninsula, a huge populated sandbank stretching 30-odd kilometres into the sea to form a barrier from the worst of the stormy waters, and at its southerly extremity lies the estuary of the Vistula river that flows just over a thousand kilometres from the Beskidy mountains (close to the Czech border).  On the shores of the bay lie the Trojmiasto (the Three Cities) of Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia. 

The southernmost (and the largest of these) is Gdansk, formerly the Prussian Hanseatic port of Danzig, and home of the Solidarity Revolution in the 1980s that ultimately spread throughout the country and brought about the downfall of Communism.  In its heyday it was a major shipbuilding centre but funding problems and antiquated machinery and practices have led to a collapse of the industry in recent years as capitalism has replaced communism and its huge state subsidies (and captive Soviet market).  The northernmost is the port city of Gdynia, still providing ferry services across the cold sea to Sweden and other Baltic states, and an increasingly prosperous tourist destination.  I worked there for a year or so back in 2001-2, staying in the Nadmorski Hotel right on the beach, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  In fact, Gdynia was the first major town outside Warsaw that I ever visited, in the summer of 2001 for a weekend, staying in a very cheap but comfortable hostel close to the central railway station.  I remember spending a pleasant couple of hours drinking cold draught Tyskie beer at a beachside bar watching scantily clad beauties playing beach volleyball in 30C sunshine and thinking Poland was not such a bad place at all….

Between the two rapidly modernizing port cities lies the third of the Trojmiasto, Sopot.  In contrast to its larger neighbours, Sopot retains a run-down and scruffy elegance from its early 20^th century heyday as the health resort frequented by the rich and famous from across Poland and Germany.  After the Second War, it remained a leisure resort for the Communist leadership and with their downfall its popularity as a seaside resort has remained.  It may lack the busy ports and shopping malls of Gdansk and Gdynia (although that is changing, with a new shopping complex close to the pier), but its beaches are perhaps cleaner and its hotels and bars generally more atmospheric – less modern, certainly, but pleasant for all that.  At its centre lies the Molo, stretching some 515 metres out into the sea (and in total some 650 metres long), and the longest wooden pier in Europe.  Unlike a typical Victorian English pier, it lacks the tacky amusement arcades and seafront theatres, and instead is little more than a place to stretch the legs and take the sea-air, but at the beach end there is a selection of souvenir and jewellery stores specialising in Baltic amber creations, and some good seafood restaurants.  Right next door sprawls the Sheraton Hotel complex, and next to that the older and perhaps more luxurious Grand Hotel, both with their own private beach areas and expensive dining.

 Sopot in the snow

It’s a nice little town, and this year, just for a change, we made the 400 kilometre drive to stay there and welcome 2015.

The drive was good, on quiet highways, although the weather could have been better.  It was a cold day, so there was patchy fog throughout the journey.  Then about 40 kilometres south of our exit we ran into snow, and by the time we came into Sopot it was near blizzard conditions.  The road down from the highway winds through a pleasant forest parkland, so it was very pretty even if the road itself was treacherous.

We stayed at the Pensjonat Eden – more of a guest house than a hotel – situated in the town centre just a couple of hundred metres from the beach and pier.  If you look at Tripadvisor there are some very negative reviews, complaining about unfriendly staff, poor repair and decoration in the rooms, and a lack of amenities.  Look at the hotel’s website and some of this is justified – the hotel, especially the outside, could do with a lick of paint, and by modern standards the rooms are perhaps not the best: we had a family room that was not much more than a modern double room but squeezed in a double bed and a convertible sofa bed as well as a table and two armchairs and a toilet/bathroom.  But it had a balcony and sea view, and was warm enough.  And everything worked ok.

 The Pensjonat Eden

 Nice staircase....

To expect more of a hotel that is a hundred years old and run for most of that time as a family business is to me a little unreasonable.  The Eden is not a Sheraton or a Grand or a Sofitel or any of the other global brands, and does not pretend to be.  It is what it is – a guest house close to the sea, and should be judged by those standards, not those of the hotel chain.  Taken that way, then it has a quiet and homely ambience, and an old fashioned comfort and charm missing completely from bigger and newer places, and for me that is part of the attraction.  I’ve stayed in hotels all over the world, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart, to distinguish the Sheraton from the Sofitel.  Every Sheraton has its Someplace Else restaurant and piano bar, serving the same menu.  Stay in one boxy Holiday Inn double room and you’ve stayed in them all.  Nothing wrong with that – they serve the market very well and I’m happy to use them.  But they can be soul-less places.  

The Eden is none of that.  The Reception area is small and not at all hi-tech, but the receptionist was friendly and welcoming and spoke excellent English (always an advantage wherever you go).  Step into the hotel and you are confronted with a massive open staircase winding its way up like something out of Hogwarts.  At the top of the stairs is a massive skylight, covered in snow during our visit but in summer it must illuminate the whole place beautifully.  To the right is a big dining room, and beyond that a bar and lounge area full of old furniture and paintings and leading onto a pleasant enough terrace (again, one for warm summer evenings).  I found the place a delight, and without question would stay there again.

 The dining room and lounge area

We settled in and dressing up warmly went for a stroll across the beach and along the pier.  To this Englishman there is something inherently unreal about ankle deep snow on a sandy beach.  It’s jusr…..wrong.  Beaches should be somewhere to strip off and swim, and relax with a good book and a cold beer, and get comfortably sunburned.  They should not be a place where you need to swaddle yourself with scarves and woolly hats and gloves and thick winter coats and waterproof boots and thermal socks, unless they lie north of the Arctic Circle or south of its Antarctic brother.  The snow is bad enough, the film of ice rapidly forming along the surf line (the sea itself was millpond flat, and lapped gently against the freezing shore) surreal.  But that is the reality of the Baltic coast.  I still haven’t got used to it.  

 Ally and her snow rabbit

 Just a few of the Sopot swans

Paddling maybe 50 feet or so offshore were flocks of seagulls and ducks and improbably the better part of 20 swans, looking ghostly in the faint moonlight and illuminations from the pier.  The beach itself was pretty much deserted, and we only stayed a few minutes before climbing the steps to the pier.  We walked its length to the deserted marina complex at the end, full in summer months with small sailing boats and motor cruisers.  Along the coast we could see the bright lights of Gdansk and Gdynia, and a kilometre or two offshore some larger Baltic shipping anchored in the bay.  They were still there the following night, New Years’ Eve, and must have had a wonderful view of the firework displays all along the coast.  We took some pictures then headed back onshore and found a fish restaurant next to the Grand Hotel complex and right on the beach.  I remember going there one hot summers night several years ago with my wife and a group of friends and it was a disco then, and I gave my creaking joints a bit of a jig about between beers.  It’s now been converted, unless the disco has moved upstairs, and is a modern and light and airy beachside restaurant that served a delicious seafood menu.  I had a very pleasant salmon tartare with cottage bread and salad, and a main of cod with fried potatoes and mixed vegetables, all washed down with a couple of pints of mulled beer (that is to say heated and infused with a selection of herbs and raspberry juice – very pleasant and it warms you up beautifully when you are cold, as we were).  

The next day, armed with a bag of bread leftovers from our late breakfast, we headed to the beach again to feed the birds.  There were far more swans than we had thought, getting on for 50 I should think, a similar number of ducks and hundreds of gulls, and the bread didn’t last long.  In seconds we found ourselves surrounded by them, squabbling amongst themselves for the scraps we were feeding them, like a scene from Hitchcock’s classic movie The Birds, but they were friendly enough and delighted the kids by taking the bread right out of their hands.  

 Food all gone, sorry....

After that, we had a walk round the town, looking for sparklers to light to see the New Year in but by the time we found a shop that sold them it had closed for the night.  On our wanderings we stopped for a while at what looked, from the outside, like a cheap and cheerful café serving zapiekanka (a long French bread stick, cut in half, topped with tomato sauce, grated cheese and a selection of meats – ham, salami, bacon -, chopped onions and mushrooms, and then grilled), various soups and pierogi, but it was expensive and disappointing.  My zapiekanka may have been half a metre long and filling but it was also overcooked throughout and charcoaled at both ends.  We found a better place perhaps a hundred metres further up the street that served up better food at half the price.  Ah well – you win some, you lose some.  Later we found another place that sold gofry, which is a delicious toasted waffle with a big selection of toppings like powdered sugar and jam, through about twenty different fresh fruits and whipped cream, to the inevitable kid’s favourite of thickly applied Nutella chocolate spread.  My two would live on the things if we let them.

In the evening, after a warm up bottle of wine in the room, we dressed up again and headed for the pier for the celebrations.  By 11:30 the pier was full of revellers along pretty much its entire length, and more crowds thronged the circle of shops at the landward end.  We parked ourselves there, nudging our way through to the seating so that the kids could see what was going on.  The fireworks were set up on the beach to the south, the usual batteries of rockets and huge roman candles and so on.  There was no countdown, but at midnight the first battery shot skywards and everyone broke open the cans of beer, bottles of wine and champagne, amid hugs and kisses and cheering.  We could see similar displays all along the coast into Gdansk to the south and northward to Gdynia.  I had hoped we would also see the displays out along the Hel peninsula too, out across the bay, but we were a little too far south to make them out.  But it was a spectacular display, and went on for a good twenty minutes. 

 Happy New Year.......

 ....to you all!

We headed back to the hotel through the park, swigging cheap champagne from the bottle (except the kids, who had Lipton’s Iced Tea instead).  In the park we paused for a while to set off a small bunch of cheap fireworks one of our crew had brought along, and built a small snowman before all the snow had melted (it had got warmer during the day and a thaw had set in).  Back at the hotel, we had another drink and some snacks, and crashed out about 1:30 or 2:00 a.m.  It had been a good day and an entertaining evening.

 The last drop.....Robs had it all.....

The next day we slept very late, but the dining room was still open when we went down for breakfast.  We picked up another bag of cast-off bread and cakes, then packed and loaded the cars for the drive home.  The snow had all gone by now, but it was a damp and miserable day, hungover like the rest of us, but the birds were pleased to see us when we went back to the beach to give them a final meal.  After that, we had another stroll around the little half circle of souvenir and jewellery stalls that were set up at the foot of the pier, and picked up a few gifts and bits to take back with us.

The drive home was fine but for much of the trip we were battling high crosswinds that made it a battle to keep a straight line, especially overtaking the convoys of TIR trucks heading south from the docks in Gdansk and Gdynia.  But again, just over four hours, including a comfort break and a burger break at McDonalds on the highway about half way home and close to Torun, was pretty good time and we were indoors by tea time.

It was a good trip, and good value for money, but I’m sorry, snow on the beach is just WRONG.