Well that was nice. I came up to write and I was greeted by a picture of a young Brigitte Bardot. I was searching earlier for pictures of wildlife in Poland, and somehow found pictures of that most beautiful actress of my emerging life. She’s looking out from the screen on my right and is quite distracting.

I’m trying to remember what today has been about. More planning of the train journey, and an email from my friend in Poland asking what I was interested in seeing and realising I know nothing whatsoever about the country. Hence Brigitte Bardot; she is quite incredibly beautiful. In the picture I have on the screen she is wearing a broad black scarf like an alice band, and her blonde locks are lit by the sun and falling onto her shoulders. She’s looking past me at something, her eyes are huge, her lips pink and full, her nose is perfect, the whole face the shape the bowl of a chalice and she seems to say drink, I am nectar, but not to me, to somebody else who is somewhere behind me. She hasn’t noticed me.

I had to turn her off. Nothing was happening. I’m not sure anything will happen now, but it might. I had quite a long conversation with Agata, my new lodger, today. She is also from Poland, and we looked at the map and she showed me where her house is and we talked about her country. I am trying to get an understanding of nationhood and nationality, and I am beginning to realise how different other nationalities experience it. Poland was not a country at all for over a hundred years because the last king was sleeping with Katherine the Great and gave away the country ( I haven’t researched this yet, it’s straight from Agata) and then after the First World War it had twenty years of independence before Stalin and Hitler carved it up, and was not independent again until 1989.

Sorry, this is a bit muddly, but I want to scribble it down so I have it. The other thing that stands out from our conversation is that Eastern European women are like tigers and Western European women are like domestic cats.

I think that may be enough for tonight. I didn’t write today as it is Sunday, but I did walk out to the fields with Boo and my binoculars where I saw plovers, a few gulls and a buzzard. I also had some more language learning fantasies. And I’m reading this lovely novel by Kelley Swain called the Naked Muse, a memoir really, about her life as a model. There is something rather appealing about reading a book by someone who is naked most of the time.

So until tomorrow!