Some people don’t belong to any particular place, and I’m one of them. So here in Poland, I’m counting down the hours to my departure back to Dublin – to a new job and accommodation.
Yet it’s in my nature to hope that this stable situation will not last for longer than a year. A character in a novel by German writer Erich Maria Remarque noticed that people who longed to settle down were often dissuaded by adventure. That sentence spoke to me.
But I’m still enjoying my holidays in the Polish countryside. I came down here with a firm decision to restrict both television and the internet (the latter is easier as I’ve to cycle six kilometres to the nearest town to check my e-mail).
There is no escape from politics, though. Walking down to the local shop I noticed a poster from the last elections – which happened weeks ago. Although it was on a minor road, it’s an important communication route locally, and I cannot imagine how high the fine would be if some controller discovered it.
I could understand that one could simply forget to take the thing down, but exactly the same poster was traceable in a few places throughout the village. So it seems that the whole project was poorly co-ordinated. That’s hard to accept. After all, it would be enough for the committee to get one person in every powiat (local authority area) responsible for the erection and taking down of posters. The cost of such ‘seasonal’ work might be lower than the fines for hundreds of ‘forgotten’ items and at least money would go straight to people instead of state institutions.
I wonder if any posters are still up in Dublin.
– Anna Paluch
