Angol in the country
Look on any map and you will see lots of places separated by empty space. These empty spaces are known as ‘the countryside.’ People keep telling me to go these empty bits, but I find the experience of being repeatedly bitten by insects many miles from a decent bar displeasing. I avoid going to the countryside as much as I can but sometimes I find I’ve accidentally strayed beyond the limits of civilisation into the big green. One of the major problems with Polish villages is that you have to use Polish roads to get to them, which is only slightly less deadly than playing Russian roulette with five loaded chambers. Your odds of survival are slightly better in the summer because much of the population is at the seaside or the lakes drowning themselves.
The Polish countryside is much like the countryside elsewhere: there are lots of trees, lots of those smaller green things that look a bit like trees and some of those even smaller green things that bees like—I think they’re called pansies or something. The people in the countryside are just like people in cities, but without any useful recommendations for good pubs or restaurants. Despite having much more space to wander around in, people in the Polish countryside never go out. On the very rare occasions when they do leave their houses, they go and sit in their neighbours’ houses. This is not particularly surprising since there is nowhere else to go. Unless you have a particular fascination for watching grass grow or dumping things in the forest, there is absolutely nothing to do in the Polish countryside. If God had meant us to live in the countryside, he would have given us much higher boredom thresholds.
Polish villages are very unlike English villages. Every English village has a pub and a church. The pub is always full and the church is always empty, apart from a few hardcore prayer-fans. Every Polish village also has a bar and a church. The church is always full and the bar is always empty, apart from a few hardcore vodka-fans. I badly miss English village pubs. Whole families visit them to sit in their gardens, chat with friends and eat nice food. Polish village bars are frequented by the kind of people who think bimber constitutes a healthy and balanced breakfast. These bars are often dingy, undecorated rooms or just a couple of plastic tables and chairs outside the village shop. I tried sitting at one of these tables to drink a beer and soak up the village atmosphere once. A man with one eye who seemed to have trouble standing up immediately wanted to be my friend and a goat tried to eat my trousers: I think they were working together.
The two main activities in a Polish village are going to church and building houses. Everybody is building a house, planning to build a house or has just finished building a house. I don't understand why these villages aren’t already bigger than Manhattan. Do they knock the houses down and start again every 20 years? The amount of new building going on in Polish villages is staggering. In England it’s almost impossible to build a new house because the land is protected. In Poland you can build pretty much anywhere that isn’t currently on fire or under water:
Mr Nowak: Hello, I’d like to build a house.
Mrs. Planning Officer: Do you have planning permission?
Mr Nowak: What’s that?
Mrs. Planning Officer: I’m not sure, I was hoping you would know. I must ask you a few questions.
Mr Nowak: Shoot.
Mrs. Planning Officer:Are you planning to build half a house and then abandon it for many years surrounded by piles of bricks and bright blue tarpaulins?
Mr Nowak: No. Well, maybe a bit.
Mrs. Planning Officer: Are you planning to build a bright red-and-blue four-storey monstrosity visible from 20 kilomteres away?
Mr Nowak: I wasn’t, but that's not a bad idea.
Mrs. Planning Officer: Congratulations!
The enthusiasm with which Polish village dwellers flock to the church when they aren't building houses is also something I will never get used to. At midday every Sunday the entire population get in their cars and drive the 200 metres to the local church. The first time I saw this sudden mass migration I assumed a meteorite was about to hit the earth. Weirdly, a large proportion of these people take the trouble to go to the church and then just stand around outside. I was very impressed when I saw these little crowds outside churches. "Blimey," I thought, "church is so popular they can't fit everyone inside!" Not true: there is plenty of room inside, some people just prefer standing outside in the snow or the blazing sun. Perhaps they are dreaming about how many houses they could build if they knocked the church down.
Jamie Stokes