Steemfest lingers on in my imagination: November 14 2018

I was loitering at Edgeware Road, getting my bearings, when a man came by and picked up a thick gold ring from the ground at my feet.

He insisted I have it, "for luck, it will bring us both luck if you have it." He was from Poland, he said, Krakow (I know, fancy that), looking for work.

He sauntered off, then came back. He needed money, forty pounds, he said, he was undocumented, he said. I gave him a fiver I had loose in my coat and wondered if he had a pocketful of gold rings to drop at the feet of likely looking marks (daft English women).

Later, I wandered into Hatchard's at Kings Cross St Pancras, a proper bookshop with quotes by Jane Austen and James Joyce, displays of books other than travel trash and a whole secluded niche of non-fiction.

Poland has caught my attention, already I understand it has had a checkered history. Before that I had only heard of Lech Walesa and the Gdansk shipyards, Polish builders frightening in their efficiency. Now it lingers, proud, desolated, rich and ravaged in my imagination.

How ignorant we are in our British isles.

I found a history by Adam Zamoyski, a chapter called the Polish Question, much the same as Red Famine (Anne Applebaum) had one called the Ukraine Question (so troublesome these eastern border countries).

I love the maps, the tables of monarchic dynasties littered with Hapsburgs and Boleslaw the Curly, grainy black and white photographs and the index stuffed with fat, indented sections like plums in a plum pudding.

On the way to the cash desk with my treasure, I stumbled over London Belongs To Me, a Penguin Modern Classic. I'm transported to 1938, words printed on thinner paper with a silky sheen. Just as well, it's 738 pages long.

Daily Activity, Walking