Chris James's Blog, page 12

Apple blossom!

So, it’s come to this: a blog post solely featuring pictures of the blossom on the apple tree in my back garden.  Apart from the one photo of a plane that, when I checked on Flight Radar, transpired to be an Ethiopian cargo jet flying over Warsaw west-to-east to God-knows-where.

I  took all of these shots over the last few days, especially trying to capture the evening light when the sun strikes the blooms with softer light as it gets lower.  I only wish I could’ve photographed the incessant buzzing of bees and wasps and the chattering of the birds all around.  Still, take a look and see how many blue tits and bees’ arses you can spot in these pictures.  Have a great week!

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Making the most of a long weekend on lockdown (before and after pics)

This weekend included a bank holiday day off on Friday, so I enlisted the help of the rest of the James family to fix a problem that had been bothering me for the last 18 months or so.  This:

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This was our front fence.  As you can see, 18 years of rain hitting those engineering bricks and splashing back up into the wooden panels had made them rot to the point where dogs, martens, foxes and others could and did push through at night and have a hunt for anything tasty.  As the panels broke, I bodged the gaps with other bits of wood, but they were never going to be a long-term solution.  The options for replacement were not especially appealing.  To replace the wooden panels was a non-starter.  I built that fence 18 years ago and re-stained it nine years ago, so I was not going to replace those panels with more wood and give myself the same ultimately futile maintenance work.  Metal seemed the preferred maintenance-free option, but it also came with a snag: price.  Modern metal panels look snazzy enough but are not cheap; they would have to be made to order, and I would not be able to fit them myself because I don’t know how to weld or have my own welding gear.   This is what we did instead:

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This solution has a few advantages: it cost about one-fifth of what the headline metal panels would have set me back.  I enlisted the whole family to help remove the rotted wood panels, paint the supporting metalwork, and then fix the new wire panels.  I was able to trim the wire panels to fit with my old bolt-cutters.  Each wire panel needed just 18 screws to hold it to the metal supports, while for the same area, 24 wood panels needed a whopping 72 bolts.  But the best part is what comes next: we’ll plant ivy and other climbers so that in a couple of years, the wire should be mostly covered in greenery.  As my dad would say: that’s another job jobbed!

Here are a few more before-and-after shots, and then a few shots of the apple blossom that finally put in an appearance this weekend (and look out for the out-of-focus moon).

Have a great week!

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The Battle for Europe pre-order links

The Repulse Chronicles, Book Three: The Battle for Europe is available for pre-order at the (usual) special introductory price of $2.99 or equivalent in your territory.

The Kindle release date for this title is 18 July 2020.  Here is the synopsis:

“Danger: sixty-one Spiders have targeted this landing zone.  ETA ten seconds.  Take defensive action immediately…”

In the early hours of Friday 2 June 2062, the New Persian Caliphate resumed its merciless invasion to crush Europe and its peoples.  Over the next six weeks, soldiers, scientists and civilians would do everything in their power to confront and delay the enemy.  In this battle for Europe, many of them would be obliged to pay the ultimate price merely to slow the enemy’s relentless advance.

I love writing these books; editing them, not so much.  But I have a small army of kind, patient, and sympathetic people behind me who help ensure that the best quality product is released.  And while those blessed people are giving the book that vital help, I can get on with writing Book Four.  In the meantime, here are the pre-order links: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, France, Spain.

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Bonnie, birds, blossom, and a bit about the next book

It’s been a hectic ten days here in the James household.  The headline news is that the new “kitten”, Bonnie (see previous post), is in fact already pregnant, so we’ll have kittens in a few weeks.

And that isn’t the only headline news.  The other headline news is that yesterday, I wrote “THE END” on, er, the end of my next full-length novel, the eighth.  This doesn’t happen too often, but for those of you who’d like to know, The Repulse Chronicles, Book Three: The Battle for Europe exists somewhere other than inside my head.  Finally.  I can’t tell you how ridiculously happy I am that I’ve finished another novel.  Phew!

I will post more on that later, but for now here are a selection of photos all taken in my garden in the last couple of days.  There’s an update on the maple blossom, and plum blossom, pear blossom, as well as numerous winged visitors who were kind enough to wait while I took their mugshots.

To begin, here are two of our three cats.  On the right is the pregnant Bonnie, and about to leap on her on the left is Wafer, the cat my daughters rescued from the base of a mountain in Slovakia last July:

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Below, Wafer is on the right, Bonnie on the left:

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Then we have Bonnie lounging on the couch saying: “Can you guess how many babies I’m carrying?” To which I reply: “No, but you can bloody well bet they’re going to help me sell some books when I publish the next one in a few months’ time.”

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Then we have all the birds and blossom in the garden, and some artsy-fartsy tulip shots.  Gotta love spring!

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Everyone needs a cuddle

[image error]I do not know what it is about the plot of land I live on that attracts the local stray and abandoned animals, but they always seem to show up here and adopt us.  I’ll give the history of these animals below, but first, here is the new arrival.  The Daughters have named her Bonnie, which they adapted from ‘bony’, because under that dusty pelt is an underfed, scraggy spine and rib-cage, and not much else apart from a purr like a power drill.

Bonnie turned up late last week from god knows where, miaowing and mewling in the old house at the back of our land, fearful of any advance.  The Daughters went to work, leaving out food in a bowl and some water.  It took Bonnie a few days, but finally today she deigned to be picked up and cuddled because, you know, sooner or later we all need a cuddle.

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Bonnie is a tabby like Wafer, which the Daughters decided to rescue last summer while we were on vacation in Slovakia.  We estimate Bonnie to be about six months old, older than Wafer when brought him back to Warsaw:

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But the first animal to adopt us by turning up in our garden without an invitation was a grey cat we called Susie, who arrived in 2007 in exactly the same manner as Bonnie has just done.

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Susie had a litter of four kittens the following year, only one of which survived to cat-hood, before she died of old age in 2015.  Her surviving kitten grew into the notorious Biter, and he really was a murderer: nothing that came into the garden was safe.  Here are some photos of Biter when he caught and ate a red squirrel in 2013.  And he ate all of it except the tail while I hovered around him taking these photos:

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Biter disappeared suddenly and without a trace in the early spring of 2014, likely caught by a fox from the local forest.  Given the number of animals he killed, it was perhaps fitting that he should also have been preyed on.  But what a cat he was:

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One day in September 2011, Crazy the dog turned up in our garden, again totally out of the blue.  Like Susie, she also managed to get stuffed and have a litter of pups about which I wrote a comedy book in 2012.  She is still with us, a little slower but still the same total bat-shit crazy nutcase.

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If there is one thing we have to do with Bonnie, it is get her spayed before all the boy cats in the area realise there’s a new girl in town…

To end, here are Susie and Biter in 2013, and one more of Biter’s numerous victims.

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Spring in my garden

Every winter I tell myself that this year, I shan’t photograph the buds on the maple tree in the front garden because I have more than enough shots of them.  And every spring, I am amazed at these incredible things which emerge from those bland branches.  I’ve also included a couple of shots of Wafer the kitten who has now become a cat.  Sending you all good wishes this Easter.

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After 22 years, we’ve got a road

When we moved here in 1998, Mrs James and I never really expected our local authority to build the road.  And given the current chaos going on, we certainly didn’t expect it to happen anytime soon.  But this morning, a crew turned up and now we’ve got a road.  Wow.

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Living next to a managed forest

One of the many advantages of living next to a managed forest is of course having thousands of hectares of pine, oak, silver birch, and acacia woodland to roam.  If you’re lucky, you can see deer, wild boar, and innumerable species of bird.

One of the very few disadvantages of living next to a managed forest is when Mr Forest Manager and his trusty band of vandals come along and cut down a part of the forest you really enjoyed.  Yes, it is a business.  Yes, they have done this before elsewhere and immediately after clearing, they replant saplings.  Yes, I have bought some of those logs over the years and they have kept my family warm back when Poland used to have proper winters.  And yes, as the saplings grow they become home to the same diverse creatures.

Still, I do sometimes wish they’d take their chainsaws somewhere else.

These photos show the most recent culling of some very old trees, along with an area that was cleared and replanted five years ago, and another that received the same treatment ten years ago.

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Documenting the new motorway, #9: The bridge on Izbicka street

To say things have been a little hectic in the James household since the year began would be the understatement of, well, the year.  However, today we finally had some nice sunshine after what feels like months of dull, overcast skies and a ridiculous non-winter, so here are some more photos of how the new motorway in my neck of the woods is coming along (at least those of the woods they didn’t cut down to drive the bloody road through).

Izbicka street connects Radosc to Falenica the ‘back way’; that is, not following the railway track further west that cuts through Wawer in a straight line all the way to Otwock, but going through the forest to the east.  The first four photos below are of the bridge that will lift Izbicka street over the motorway; the last three photos are from the bridge.  Two years ago, there was only Izbicka street here, all else was forest of pine, birch, oak and elm.  Now look at it.

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That was the decade that was

Spoiler alert: This is a very wordy post.  A decade ends tonight and I would like to voice some opinions on it and forecast what the 2020s will bring.  There are not many pictures, but what pictures there are, are I think quite nice.

[image error]Somewhere in the endless expanse of the continuum there is an alternate reality where the UK referendum on EU membership in June 2016 resulted in a 52/48 vote to remain.  Today, a newly elected centrist government is about to enact a “hard” remain, where the UK will join the Schengen free-movement area and adopt the Euro.  The losing leave voters bleat that the vote to remain only meant keeping the status quo; they complain that the remain campaign broke electoral law and nothing’s been done.  Perhaps there is also a polarising, high-profile court case where a Polish or possibly Romanian shopkeeper is being prosecuted for murder when he killed a young English nationalist who had smashed his shop window and set the premises afire.  But in our reality, it is the reverse: campaign criminality by Vote Leave has been disregarded; their lies and half-truths wither from public discourse like a boy-band that’s abruptly dropped out of fashion.

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The trouble with identifying recent historical turning points is temporal proximity.  A glance at the 2010s suggests two pivotal events, both of which took place in 2016.  However, future historians will lump the UK’s vote to leave its closest trading partners together with the humiliation at Suez 53 years earlier: proof that the British are the only people on Earth who can’t accept that their empire is dead.

Regarding the US, it is tempting to conclude that the country has reached its Caligula moment.  But this does not take account of the underlying forces driving this self-destructive change.  From the end of WWII until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, the capitalist system had to be seen to work, to be broadly fair.  This was because there was another, competing system in the world, a choice, and Western governments could ill afford a majority of their poorer citizens to feel the Soviet system might be fairer and thus preferable.  However, the last 30 years have seen a vast sea change among the ultra-wealthy.  Since 1989, there has been no choice except unfettered capitalism.  In the West, the richest 0.01% have watched Russians steal and rape their motherland with impunity, and not unreasonably, they concluded that it would be rather nice if they could behave like that in their own countries.  Of course, a semblance of democracy has had to remain, but that semblance is beginning to fade.

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So, here goes: next month will see Trump “beat the rap” as my American friends probably don’t say anymore.  In another delicious irony, so-called “Republicans” will vote to acquit Trump, thus handing him unfettered power to abuse his office.  With copious assistance from Moscow, Trump will be re-elected next November and use that to claim he should be appointed president for life, and the presidency should become, finally, hereditary.  Don’t laugh: look at the Kennedys, the Bushes and even the Clintons—Trump and his supporters will merely argue that a hereditary presidency has been a long-time coming and the subsequent “stability” will be fantastic for the economy.  The script for this scenario is easily written by any hack.

Brexit will happen and will cause a great deal of damage to the poorer regions of the UK.  But the Conservative Party will have five long, fruitful years to gerrymander existing Parliamentary seat boundaries; the working-class people who helped land Johnson with such a healthy Commons majority on 12 December can now look forward to at least ten years of regret.  (As an aside, it is ironic that those qualities the UK’s middle classes abhor in the working class—fecklessness, idleness, drunkenness and dishonesty—are no barrier to giving a member of the aristocracy who displays exactly the same qualities the highest office in the land.)

Again, and as with the US, it debatable whether the UK will still be a functioning democracy by then.  Given its hopelessly outdated first-past-the-post system, the UK has a far shorter distance to fall before what weak and malleable checks and balances there are on the incumbent government can be side-lined or neutered altogether.  As with Trump, by 2024 Johnson and the Conservative Party will be overwhelming favourites to win again, aided by all of the assistance Russia can offer.

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The most powerful person in the world today in Vladimir Putin, and he will remain so for the foreseeable future.  Over the last 20 years, he has built up a wholly unassailable position as leader of one of the most powerful yet corrupt countries on Earth.  Any Russian who crosses him usually loses their life without much fuss.  Indeed, Putin can even send his assassins to commit murder in the UK without any material comeback whatsoever (not so tough on crime when Putin’s doing the murdering in your own backyard, are you, Tories?).

To me, the most shocking fact as the 2020s begin is that no one in any position of political power in the UK or the US appears to know anything about the history of Russia in general or Putin in particular.  Perhaps, as I’ve noted above, it is a question of the ultra-wealthy banding together irrespective of country loyalty to stymie and smother even the remotest possibility that they should be obliged to forego even a tiny fraction of their enormous wealth.  The ultra-wealthy have become a pseudo-nationality who help each other to protect their fortunes.

On the other hand, perhaps the young KGB agent who watched in dismay as his beloved Soviet Union fell apart because of those ungrateful Poles, in whom bitterness welled as Western conglomerates tried to move in on Russia like victorious carpetbaggers, perhaps he still festers inside that pig-eyed, ageing murderer in the Kremlin?  He has known since 1989 he could never hope to defeat NATO militarily and make the West pay for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there have been other avenues, different bets, some of which have paid off handsomely.  Next month, Putin’s asset in the White House will be exonerated of the most outrageous high crimes and misdemeanours of any president in US history.  Trump will then be unassailable.  Putin will have orchestrated this.  And he will have done it without his military firing a single shot.

In the UK, 2020 will see Brexit happen and the EU’s and Britain’s economies suffer grievously.  Again, Putin’s bots in Moscow and his vast array of useful idiots inside the UK will smother and obfuscate, additionally supported by UK press owners who see eye-to-eye with Putin when it comes to paying higher taxes (and if you follow that second link, scroll down to figures 2.1 and 2.2).

Ultimately, as the 2020s begin Putin’s two aims remain unfulfilled: political destabilisation of the EU and subsequent disbanding of NATO.  Putin very much wants these organisations finished because they represent a viable countenance to Russia’s growing economic and military power.  Will he achieve them?  What unforeseeable advances and setbacks will happen over the next decade?  It is worth noting that just a few days ago, Putin unveiled the newest Russian missile capable of delivering a two-megaton nuclear warhead anywhere in the world at an impressive Mach 27.  That’s right: at 27 times the speed of sound.  NATO has nothing to match it.  For the first time in history, Russia has the most advanced military capability in the world.  What do the Republicans have to say about that?  Trump?  The Tory Party?  Johnson?  The silence is deafening because the US president and the UK prime minister are muffled by being in Putin’s pocket.

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Worst of all is that the one vital issue facing the world today gets repeatedly pushed down the agenda in the face of such political posturing: climate change.  Recently I had a difficult conversation with my eldest daughter.  She wanted to know how anyone could refute the fact of climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.  I found myself obliged to tell her what happened decades ago, when I was her age, and when doctors first discovered a link between cigarettes and increased occurrences of various cancers and heart disease, how the tobacco companies found their own “doctors” who claimed smoking was perfectly healthy, how the tobacco companies produced allegedly impartial studies saying that smoking caused no ill effects.  Even as late as the 1980s, people still insisted it was stress that killed people young, only it was “easier” to blame it on cigarettes.  And now exactly the same thing is happening not with people’s health, but with the planet’s.  Some things never change.

Thanks for reading.  Happy New Decade.