Best films, bad backs and Mister Boot...

First of all huge congratulations to the Polish film ‘w Ciemnośći’ (in Darkness) for getting past the ‘nominate your own fim’ category for foreign countries. Richly deserved, I say. The film is not without its faults, but the central characters are intense and rich. The acting of the main character Ryszard Więkiewicz, which involves a traditional (and on paper a rather hackneyed) change from ruthless and exploitative petty thief to boy ‘dun good, is extraordinary. In fact he carries the film.

It’s better than Katyn in almost every way. Less jumping around; more context; fewer random characters and sub-plots; visually far more engrossing and rich. (I enjoyed watching it without subtitles in the cinema. The film is in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, German and Yiddish and it was good to get a mix of old fashioned Polish and napisy.)

Switched on the monitor today and flicked through the Daily Mail. I’m a proud Britisher, I love my country and I don’t care if patriotism is an increasingly outdated concept, destined to die like slavery and religion along with other shackles of our human behaviours.

But I’m not so proud that I can’t see that there are many things that need fixing in my country, and many countries where life is better than ours, especially on all the metrics that count – happiness, quality of life, health and health care, crime and education. And these are all areas in which Poland outperforms the UK, according to a recent article in... the Daily Mail.

Not so according to our typical British chap Alexander Boot, a Daily Mail blogger who is so disillusioned with the impact of immigration on the UK that he, an immigrant Russian himself, now lives in France, not the UK. And yet he sees fit to cast his dubious pearls of wisdom at all and sundry on the perils of immigration on a regular basis on poor old Blighty.

Let’s fisk the chap and see where it leads us. Subject matter? According to Mr Kickski the BootInski, Eastern Europeans lie like they breath. Nothing like a bit of enormous generalisation over millions of people to start a blog off, eh Alexander?

(More tomorrow, ‘cos I have a bad back and had to cancel my Polish classes and go home to lie in bed and listen to Brahms. But not back’s not so bad enough that I won’t be back for Mr Boot.)

Jutro, moj stary głupek, jutro...