step up to the mike...

Most of the time the Cancer, drugs and chemotherapy have no visible effect on me whatsoever and I function perfectly normally both as a Councillor and Consul for weeks at a time.

Today was the exception. I woke up late. Fran had long since disappeared off to work. It took me a moment or two to realise that I could NOT stand up.

Worse still my initial struggle had awoken a pain area above my right hip which in turn had awaken all the pain areas across my chest. For nearly an hour I lay there screaming in Agony! It was painful, miserable and almost unbearable!

The phone was too far away to reach across a very large bed lodged in its cradle on the far bed side cabinet. There was absolutely no way of reaching it!

Our two female cats, who I could see sitting on the floor, were flustered and miserable. Our huge “boss” male tabby looked disturbed and sad.

Or three and a half year old large, fluffy black cat, Janusz Czarny (Janusz the Black) – who is very deeply attached to me clung to my arm throughout whimpering desperately in obvious pained sympathy.

All of a sudden I felt a truly stunning pain as something was thrust with what seemed like enormous force into the side of my right hand ribs!

I turned to see what was happening and there was Janusz pushing the telephone receiver into my ribs with all his might. He had clearly not only worked out what was needed, devised a plan and executed it brilliantly!

Fran and I use the phones – both mobile and household - all the time particularly when Fran is at work in Birmingham and I am working from home!

Janusz also knows that I am endlessly saying “Fran…” when I am on the phone and that Fran is the great “provider” of all household goodies and support. Mike talking to Fran could solve everything!

Having thought all that out Janusz worked out how to get the phone out of its cradle, across the double bed and, above all how to “deliver” the phone in such a way as to ensure that the arrival and availability of the phone is duly noted.

Ironically, I don’t want or need the phone. I don’t want to call out the major public services for what is really a very small issue. Furthermore, most of my personal friends and Fran will be out of reach! However, I do NOT want to upset Janusz. So I dial an imaginary number and make a ‘pretend’ call to Fran.

As soon as Janusz ‘hears’ me talking to Fran his Feline roar turns to an unholy Leonine roar of monstrous proportions. I am talking to Fran! Everything will now be “O.K.”!

As luck would have it, in the process of this amazing Feline performance by Janusz I must have somehow moved a centimetre or two. Suddenly I can get up.

Janusz Czarny is totally triumphant! Never before – in the whole of my life have I heard of or experienced a cat behaving with such incredible intelligence. The problem was assessed, a solution and plan of action was devised and carried through precisely, and with total accuracy and success. Not only that but the likely reaction of the known recipient was clearly evaluated and built into the plan!

posted by: Oborski at 00:53 | link | comments |

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Don't get me wrong! I'm sure she is a lovely person and she has certainly been a really superb Senator for New York.

No, what first worried me was reading her book "Living History". It said nothing! It gave nothing away!. It was as if not only any reference to any of the controversial episodes in her life had been neatly filtered away but along with it disappeared any vision or passion leaving only a bland feeling of goodwill for good causes.

Now we have the apparent launch of her Presidential Campaign and what is her opening shot? We get meaningless blandness about wanting to "talk" to the American people and to discuss all their "opinions". Blair would love it! Total blandness! Where is the passion? Where is the conviction? Where is the vision?

The lady looks the part and has the big dollars. She'll probably win the nomination and with luck beat the hapless Bush. Americans will be happy with a bland, artticulate, look the part, woman. Whether or not she will achieve, or even attempt to achieve, anything much will be a different story.

John Edwards is simply a good looking Democrat Party hack who should not pose much of a problem to the Clinton steamroller.

Barack Obama will not win because he is far too intelligent for the job and bright intelligent new ideas may frighten the average American voter yearning for peace, security, troops home and a quiet life. Neither will he have the vast Clinton "war-chest" which will be used ruthlesly to smear or smarm it's beneficiiary out of any trouble!

Yet just read Obama's book "The Audacity Of Hope" which for once is a book that really reads up to its title. Every single page sparkles with insight, viision, hope and new ideas. If you read just one book on politics this year then make it "The Audacity Of Hope"!

In a sane World Barack Obama should be the next President of The United States of America. Alas sanity in politics is a rare thing indeed. I live in hope!

posted by: Oborski at 17:06 | link | comments |

posted by: Oborski at 08:02 | link | comments |

THE CASE OF AGENT GREY

From Warsaw Voice

By Sławomir Majman
17 January 2007

It is getting tougher and tougher to be a Catholic in Poland.
The shock felt by Polish Catholics today can only be compared to what faithful communists must have felt after the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th congress, when Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s crimes.

Note: People have discovered that under communism, Warsaw Archbishop Stanisław Wielgus not only met with secret service officers over two decades, but also completed special intelligence training. “Put the latest issue of Stern in your right-hand pocket, folded so that the star on the title page is visible,” intelligence officers instructed Fr. Wielgus, or Agent Grey for them.

Note: Half an hour before the archbishop’s installation at Warsaw cathedral, the pope accepts his resignation, likely forced upon him by the joint forces of the Vatican and the Polish president.

Note: A violent dispute breaks out between the archbishop’s supporters and opponents, but the dividing lines in no way translate into political views. The postcommunist daily Trybuna demands in unison with Catholic hardline traditionalists from Radio Maryja that people should not be assessed according to the content of secret police files.

Note: Then something unheard-of in Poland—Catholic journalists yell at a senior Catholic churchman and proclaim: “This guy is lying.”

Note: The Polish primate openly sneers in his sermon at the pope’s decision on Wielgus’s dismissal: “What kind of court is this, based on a few scraps of paper, copies of copies.”

Note: Belligerent supporters of ultra-right-wing Radio Maryja smack a reporter from ultra-right-wing Gazeta Polska and attack this paper as well as the liberal media, as the initiators of a Jewish conspiracy against the bishop, who is a true Pole.

Note: Monks mercilessly criticize their bishops on TV.
For the immune and powerful Church in Poland, which until now has always been beyond criticism, these are revolutionary experiences. Before, there were no centers of opposition among Poland’s Catholics, a unique fact globally. There were no grassroots lay movements akin to Western Europe’s “We Are Church.” Polish progressives and traditionalists fitted easily into a single doctrinal circle, and the episcopate’s authority was unshaken.

The Agent Grey affair has brutally revealed the weaknesses of this lack of reflection in the Polish Church.

■ The matter of Agent Grey caused a widespread war among Poland’s Catholics.
The first front is the war between part of the laity and senior Church officials.

The truth, known since the Second Vatican Council, that the faithful—all those who have been baptized—are as responsible for the Church as the bishops are, had not reached the awareness of Polish Catholics. The laity in the Polish Church was of no consequence. The Church in Poland has always reflected the ideals of a feudal structure, overlooking the culture of modern democracy with a lordly grandezza.

To the Polish clergy, the Church is the bishops, and the role of the faithful is to listen meekly to the voices from the pulpit. This hierarchical and patriarchal structure gave the Church strength during communism, but has been completely outdated for many years now.

In Archbishop Wielgus’s case, the Church behaved like a professional fraternity, a lawyers’ guild defending its long-time member. The bishops treated the unpleasant facts from the life of their colleague, as revealed by the press, as an attack on their professional group, something that should only be dealt with from inside their close-knit community. Primate Glemp defended this stance to the extreme, but the complete silence of the Cracow cardinal and the papal nuncio was also significant.

This was the first time that rightist, conservative and pro-government Catholic journalists had risen against the Church hierarchy, mainly because they recognized that the Church’s resistance to vetting was hindering the great plan to cleanse Poland—a plan that is an idée fixe of the Kaczyński brothers.

■ Well, the second front was the battle between those who carry out vetting and those opposed to it.

“The past is the domain of God,” said Primate Glemp firmly, and this is compatible with the words of Benedict XVI to Poles: “Let us not turn into arrogant judges of the past.”

What goes around comes around. The trouble is that, not long ago, when the public was leaked genuine and alleged lists of secret service agents of the ancien regime, the primate and bishops displayed the zeal of Savonarola in condemning all those who had sinned in the past. Doubts only appeared when it turned out the cleansing flame could seriously burn people of the Church as well. Then, the anti-vetting trend unexpectedly won in the Church, with visible procrastination in investigating the numerous accusations against clergymen and their past. Using delaying tactics, the bishops left the vetting field to radicals from the government camp.

The Kaczyńskis’ team recognizes vetting as a priority for Polish politics. One could go on for hours about how outdated this priority is 17 years after the fall of communism, when collaborators of the old special services are no longer any threat to Polish democracy, but it is a fact that the final disclosure and condemnation of former agents is important to the president and the prime minister as a tool for replacing the elite. The vetting process can in no way exclude the Church, something that senior clergymen wish, going against the will of rightist politicians.

Successful vetting has so far been conducted in the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but collaboration of priests with the secret services was so widespread there that it was no real reason to get excited. It was different in Poland. Here, the Church came out of its scuffle with communism with the halo of a moral victor. How can this image of purity be saved today?

The point is not to torment people with their past sins. The everyday image of contacts between the clergy and the political police had nothing in it of Gorky Park, nothing of a John Le Carré novel. Every priest had a file and every priest spoke to special service officers. A rural parish priest would go to his local security services captain to wangle a few sacks of cement for church renovations in a country of constant shortages. A helpful young man in a cheap, creased suit would offer an inaccessible medication for a parishioner’s sick child in exchange for a few platitudes about the mood among local people. Another guy would drop in to the presbytery to copy some names from business cards the local priest had brought from a trip abroad. A bishop would share a bottle of brandy with a general while discussing the efficient organization of a papal pilgrimage. The Church existed in those days and had to have contacts with the authorities of the time. Today records of those contacts can be used as proof of collaboration.

So, the issue is not tormenting people, but the bishops’ inability to deal with the problem. Their haughty inertia, their conviction that the Church was beyond the reach of the vetting started by the government, placed related initiatives in the hands of vetting fanatics.

The case of intentional collaboration by Agent Grey was an extreme one. But it is certain that from now on, Poles will be told about the sins of more and more prominent clergymen, and the bishops’ failure in the Grey case will be the perfect argument in favor of an all-encompassing vetting that is sure to cause suffering to innocent people.

■ The case of Agent Grey is the tip of the iceberg, a prelude to an avalanche of accusations that will engulf Poles any day now.
The Polish Church should therefore answer two questions for itself and its faithful.
First, does a dishonorable past completely erase subsequent merit?

In Archbishop Wielgus’s case, the Church has said, “No, it does not.” You could be an agent of the secret services and then the brilliant rector of a Catholic university and a good shepherd of your diocese.

Will the Polish Church give the same answer in relation to thousands of ordinary citizens who are about to become the object of vetting: people who showed too little strength of will at some point, who said a word too many, who were unable to say no—out of fear, for the sake of their career, to be left alone, and who led good, hard-working lives afterwards?

Second, how does the Church in Poland intend to manage without its historical credit of past achievements and without using the Polish pope as a crutch when any difficult matters come up? Will it remain as it is today: grey, without interesting new personalities, with negligible involvement of the laity, with modest intellectual strength, doctrinally traditionalistic, politically rightist and nationalist, and culturally conservative?

Above all, despite its efficiency in holding mass-scale rallies, will it be painfully inert, lacking initiative, frozen in its semi-feudal cocoon?

If Poland’s institutional Church fails to find the strength, then lay people will decide the spiritual lives of Poland’s Catholics, as they did in the Agent Grey case. It will either be lay people like those few Catholic journalist militants who destroyed the archbishop of Warsaw in a matter of weeks, or lay people like the Radio Maryja troopers who revile the pope, newspapers, Jews and Freemasons.

posted by: Oborski at 08:00 | link | comments |

Despite being doubled up with cancer and chemo I made the 20 mile trip to Worcester tonight with Fran to see the BYRDZ. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much.

What we found was 5 young men who to be honest didn’t look too much like the Byrds – except “McGuinn”! They didn’t make any attempt to present themselves as anything other than they are – a ‘tribute’ band – indeed they were rather dryly self mocking on stage. Everything was performed as if with the original line up without silly costume and hair changes.

The big surprise was that these guys had really done their homework. They must have spent ages researching nd practising the music. They were excellent. Not only had they ‘nailed’ the instrumentals and really ‘nailed’ the vocals (close your eyes and you could hear a young Gene, David – and above all a young Jim / Roger) - they had completely ‘nailed’ the essential spirit of the music.

The result was a really great evening of fantastic music with, yes, loads of “jingle jangle”! The play list was also imaginative, varied and, at times, challenging:-

1. All I Really Want To Do / 2. Wasn’t Born To Follow / 3. Bells Of Rhymney / 4. Feel A Whole Lot Better / 5. It Won’t Be Wong / 6. Change Is Now / 7. What’s Happening?! / 8. Here Without You / 9. 5D / 10. Turn, Turn, Turn.

11. Draft Morning / 12. Renaissance Fayre / 13. Everybody Has Been Burnt Before / 14. Going Back / 15. Mr. Spaceman / 16. Wild Mountain Thyme / 17. John Riley / 18. He Was A Friend Of Mine / 19. My Back Pages / 20. Why? / 21. I See You! / 22. So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n Roll Star.

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posted by: Oborski at 18:03 | link | comments |

National Holocaust Memorial Day in Wyre Forest will be marked by a Memorial Service at the Wyre Forest Holocaust Memorial outside Kidderminster's Parish Church of St Mary & All Saints at mid-day on Sunday 28th January.

Wyre Forest Holocaust Memorial Committee Chairman and Polish Consul for the West Midlands, Cllr Mike Oborski said today "It is absolutely essential that we remember those events of just over 60 years ago. We have to remember because it is only by remembering that we can stop this, or something like it, from happening again".

"It is also equally important that we pass the message onto younger generations so that they too understand the overhelmimg need to prevent any recurrance of that sort of activity anywhere in the modern world."

All members of the public are welcome to attend and are invited to bring a single flower to lay at the Memorial.

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Recently I presented English language certificates to Polish bus drivers in Coventry. The courses at the local college had been organised and paid for by the bus company and designed to meet the specific needs of the drivers. The atmosphere was great. The strong rapport between company and drivers and the enthusiam of the drivers were clearly visible.

The lesson is simple. Good employers invest in their staff and get good results. Others do not.

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My Cousin's oldest son - Marcin Konarski - would like to invite you to Poland!

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The picture ("Christmas Eve Underground) shows Polish Soldiers of Jozef Pilsudski's Legions celebrating the traditional Polish Christmas Eve 'Wigilia' in the trenches of the First World War.

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It was late on Christmas Eve morning when Father Christmas staggered out of bed with a blinding hangover from the party of the night before. It was only when he entered the kitchen and pleaded for coffee only to narrowly miss being hit on the head by the large and very heavy coffee pot thrown by Mother Christmas that he started to remember the events of the previous night - particularly having been caught by his wife while in a passionate embrace with a naked and voluptuous young elven girl - his hand having been precisely where it shouldn't have been.

The row that now followed in the kitchen that Christmas Eve morn with vicious, humiliating, protracted and - worst of all from Father Christmas's point of view - extremely noisy. He was saved only when a terrified Goblin rushed in in unannounced screaming "Father Christmas, Father Christmas, come quickly, come quickly, the presents, the presents!"

Father Christmas rushed over to the workshops. Unsupervised by the elves - who were mostly still collapsed in an alcoholic stupor in the staff canteen - the toy making machines had churned on uncontrolled making increasingly faulty and unlikely, not to mentioned unwanted, toys. Father Christmas staggered around a huge mountain of square footballs only to be confronted by a vast array - stretching as as far as the eye could see - of neatly packaged and stacked huge-breasted Action Men. He could not even bring himself to look at the equally vast output of apoparently trans-sexual Barbie Dolls about which the horror struck Goblin was now moaning. Luckily for his sanity it was only on Boxing Day that Father Christmas eventually discovered the hidden warehouse full of George W Bush dolls created due to the endeavours of a singularly malevolent computer attached to an automatic production facility!

Furiously Father Christmas (still unaware of the George W Bush Dolls) stormed off to the canteen to confront the elves. An hour later and the elves were happily esconsed around hastily assembed bonfires outside the gates of the complex exchanging bottles of near toxic alcohol left over from the events of the night before and singing filthy songs about the alleged sexual inadequacy of Father Christmas. They had declared a dispute and were happily awaiting the arrival of their national Union organisers.

With all the hectic events of the morning it was not until lunchtime that Father Christmas discovered the rude and ill spelt letter which had been left on his desk and which was signed by every single one of the middle management Goblins.

They were, they said, all resigning and had got better paid jobs at a Call Centre somewhere in Southern India. As the Goblins were by nature rude, insolent and barely able to understand let alone speak a word of English they would obviously be absolutely perfect for their new roles Father Christmas reflected grimly. It was only when he started phoning around trying to find temporary last minute labour that he discovered for himself exactly how rude, insolent, uncomprehending and incomprehensible a Call Centre Goblin can be!

It was only following this that Father Christmas realised that nobody had fed the reindeer! Father Christmas rushed off to their stable to feed them. It was too late. They had gone. After a protracted search Father Christmas found them. They had strayed into the Great Hall - the uncleared scene of the previous nights "Company Party". Clearly the reindeer had found the left over food and drink some long hours earlier. Rudolph was lying drunk on the floor snoring loudly - his head resting comfortably in a still warm pile of his own vomit. Indeed, only two of the reindeer were still standing. Donner and Blitzen had become fighting drunk and were were still staggering around, swearing loudly and exchanging badly aimed punches. The air were filled with reindeer curses and the floor was covered in pools of reindeer blood, vomit and droppings. Rudolph gurgled happily in his drunken stupor, rolled over and elegantly pissed down Father Christmas's left trouser leg.

It was by now late afternoon and for Father Christmas it had all been far too much. He staggered back to his house his head and heart both thumping, his senses numb and his eyes filled with tears.

Entering the hallway he ignored the envelope from his wife who had by now gone off to stay with her mother. He sank into his favourite and well worn arm chair in the freezing and uncleaned living room.

At that moment the front door bell rang. Mindlessly Father Christmas staggered to the door and opened it. He looked down. There, on the doorstep, stood the the most truly beautiful little fairy anyone has ever seen. Her face was radiant with the joys and warmth of Christmas. Beside her on the ground lay the most magnificent Christmas Tree you can possibly imagine.

The little fairy peered up at Father Christmas her whole face wreathed in smiles as she opened her beautiful little fairy mouth and said in her beautiful little tinkling fairy voice "Father Christmas dearest, I have brought you this wonderful and beautiful Christmas Tree. Where do you want me to put it?"

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