Angol on the beach
For millions of years the annual migratory pattern of the Pole remained unchanged. Every winter majestic herds of badly driven Fiat 125s made their way south to the mountains and every summer they made the long, perilous journey north to the seaside.
Poles are drawn to the Polish seaside and the Polish mountains once every year by ancient instinct, but increasing numbers are being tempted from the true and righteous path by the strange lure of foreign places. There are now a multitude of options: get on a bus to Bulgaria; get on a bus to Croatia; or get on a cheap airline to England. Cheap airlines are a great idea, but if you want to go anywhere from Poland you have to fly to Luton first and change planes there. Poles, as a result, have ninja-like airline-travel skills. My wife has the ability to pass through check-in queues as if they were not there. We dutifully join the queue at the back, I turn my head to check my watch, and suddenly she’s five places ahead of me. By the time we get on the plane, she’s sitting on the pilot’s lap and I’m strapped to a suitcase in the hold.
Polish street markets are excellent places to find holiday kit. This year I had the coolest beach towel on any stretch of golden sand anywhere in Europe, probably the world, thanks to a 10-minute search at my local market. Buried at the bottom of a stack of tedious examples with pictures of palm trees or dolphins on them I found the Mona Lisa of beach towels: 1.9 metres of cheap nylon-cotton mix imprinted with a poorly executed image of Pamela Anderson topless. It was mine for 10 zloty. I assume it had lain there undisturbed since about 1992. It caused a sensation on the beach. There were expressions of what I can only assume were admiration and stunned respect all around - it's hard to tell with foreigners. I only gave in to the temptation to mould the sand underneath Pamela to better represent her three-dimensional physiognomy once, but I think it went a long way toward enhancing the reputation of English tourists everywhere.
The other thing you can find at Polish markets is factor-50 sunscreen. The existence of factor-50 sunscreen is the ultimate proof that human beings are about as far from being rational creatures as Komorowski is from being James Bond. I fly hundred of miles across the globe to lie on beaches in the fierce sun covered in factor 50 sunscreen that prevents any of that sunlight from reaching my skin, an effect that could be more easily and less messily achieved by simply wearing all those clothes I lugged with me in a suitcase with wheels that don't go round properly.
Effectively isolated from the tanning UV radiation that I pretend I’m not interested in anyway, I lie there like pallid jetsam getting hot - again, something that could be more easily and cheaply achieved by staying at home and closing the windows. Lying in the sun for hour after hour pretending you aren't trying to get tanned while slathered in a substance that is ensuring you won't is, to be honest, quite boring - especially if you've forgotten to go to one of those parts of Europe where young women refuse to wear more than 50 percent of a bikini. This is where the topless Pamela Anderson towel reveals itself for the work of genius that it is. Not only can you build compacted sand breasts and congratulate yourself on the ironic subtly that they are principally composed of silicon-dioxide and, therefore, closer to the real thing that actual flesh-and-blood breasts, you can also pass a fair amount of time arguing good-naturedly with the local police who have been dispatched to escort you from the area.
Once sunscreen manufacturers realised they could sell me sunscreen that did the same thing as wearing a shirt without the benefits of hiding my beer belly, they knew they essentially had a licence to print money. This is the origin of the sunscreen expiry date. All sunscreen bottles have an expiry date on them, and the date is always in the middle of February. Go and look at that half-empty bottle in your bathroom, I bet the expiry date is in the middle of winter. It always is a half-empty bottle of course - when have you even actually finished a bottle of sunscreen? When next summer comes round you will go out and buy a new bottle, even though there's a perfectly good half-empty one sitting in your cupboard.
The expiry date is there to protect sunscreen manufacturers against krakowians and Scots, the only people tight enough to consider using last year's sunscreen. In the middle of winter, as you are concentrating on preventing your fingers turning blue and dropping off, your sunscreen is sitting in the cupboard quietly expiring and chuckling in an evil manner.
Jamie Stokes