August 2026

Europe is trying to become a geopolitical power without yet deciding who is going to pay for it. The old EU political economy was built around the single market, relatively cheap (including Russian) energy, US security, Chinese demand and supply chains, German export surpluses, fiscal…

I am sitting outside a laundrette in Warsaw drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while my clothes are being washed. The washing turns behind the glass. Shirts, trousers, socks, underwear, all performing the same small revolution. Forty degrees. Fifty minutes. Another Sunday administrative task. Later I…

Not the absence of sound. Warsaw is almost never silent. There is somebody cutting something in a garden, an aeroplane descending towards Chopin Airport, a tram somewhere beyond the houses, dogs, birds, a lawnmower, someone reversing a car very badly. Even on Sunday morning the…

Seen from Warsaw, something about Germany now feels ominous. Not because Germany is becoming Nazi Germany again. That comparison is too easy, historically lazy and perhaps even reassuring, because it allows the present to be dismissed as repetition. History is rarely so obliging. What is…

Jarosław Kaczyński understood something about Polish politics that much of the left never quite did. People do not experience class simply as income. They experience it as dignity too. That word has run through the political language of PiS for years. Andrzej Duda’s victorious 2015…

I owe Jacques Lacan a thank you. Not because he made me happy. He would probably have found the proposition suspicious. And not because I have finally understood Lacan. Nobody who says that should be trusted. That’s what my spidery senses tell me anyway. He…

A budget is supposedly a technical document. Revenues. Expenditures. Deficits. Debt servicing. Growth assumptions. But a budget is also a map of desire. It tells us what a society considers urgent, what it is prepared to postpone, and – perhaps most revealingly – what it…

I once knocked on Robert Więckiewicz’s door in Warsaw, accidentally. I had entered the wrong building for an English lesson and instead of Justyna, the Polish actor appeared. I had just watched him play Jerzy Pilch in Wojciech Smarzowski’s Pod Mocnym Aniołem and half expected…

I spent the morning pulling weeds. Back garden first. Then the front. The smell changes when you pull them out. Dry leaves on top, then damp earth, roots, something green and slightly bitter released when stems break in your hands. Two small children from the…