Amongst Russians

Today Poland and the US signed the missile defense deal; Russia have stated that they will drop a nuclear bomb on it when it is built; Russia have invaded Georgia blocking off access to Central Asian resources and will not leave. Today the entire world has changed dramatically.

This is not the fault of Russia this is the fault of your average British family shored up in their living room conserving their wealth, with the credit crunch which was inevitable from the decades of consuming many more times that which we contribute.

Compare sitting in a bar in Christchurch-upon-Avon and standing at a bar in Tarnóv. In the former the children are smugly sat in exclusive groups milking their parents cash awaiting the return to a hothouse university with the only ambition to fuck anything that moves; in the later there is a real sense of meaning as people strive to break from decades of horizontal constraints expressed through a keen desire to share in our language our culture our visions of a Europe of universal tolerance.

There is a line you cross somewhere between Thungria and the Danzig corridor where there is a back wash of ideas separated by a generation. Take the revolution of the sixties where culture became vertical and entire nations were rebuilt to avoid repeated atrocities. That is happening again now in Poland and we must learn from them. We must not forget out past and how we came to be in the situation we are now in. We must not forget what happened when empires drew lines all over the world and grew fat in our extravagant towns in Köln in Newcastle in Marseilles before tearing everything apart. Listen to the voice of the nightingale in the bar in Tarnóv singing of the paradise of America, stroll the Carpathians to look over unbelievably lush country, enthusiastically hit back vodkas with the man with "soldier" tattooed on to his forehead then go and sit on your couch.