Potted background
The first names on my birth certificate are in Polish: "Paweł Jacek Aleksander". I was never called by these names and my passport has the English names: "Paul James Alexander". For some reason the name Jacek was translated by my parents to James and many Poles translate it to Jack. Both are incorrect as I discovered by reading a Polish book about Saints. There was no Saint Jack since Jack is a nickname for John, but Saint Jacek was there and he wasn't Saint James at all. Jacek is translated to Jacinta in Spanish and Hyacinth in English. Saint Hyacinth was a 13th century Polish Dominican Priest, who is the patron saint of those in danger of drowning. My sister, who was one of those people who could laugh with her belly, thought this revelation was simply hilarious. Of course Hyacinth is associated by many in England with the sitcom character Hyacinth Bucket.
The Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) is one of my favourite flowers.
My arrival on earth was in August 1945 as the embers from the bombing of Nagasaki were going cold. I thus avoided having the label of a war baby. AlthoughI was born in London and then largely schooled there, I have lived the majority of my life in Ireland with brief excursions to New Zealand and, more recently, to Poland. Most of my childhood holidays and early life were spent or based at my Grandfather's home at Killegar, County Leitrim in what was then a strikingly beautiful and well maintained house and estate. In my early twenties I got to know and then worked for Paddy Hand, a vet in Killeshandra. It was his encouragement that made me go back to school and study for the "A' levels that I had avoided taking by leaving school early. I moved back to London and worked as a lab technician at the Samaritan Hospital for Women and went to evening classes at the nearby Paddington Technical College. I got good enough grades in 1970, at the age of 25, to be accepted to study medicine at Leeds University. After my internship and a spell doing some neurosurgery in Leeds I spent two years in Auckland, where I began a career as an anaesthetist. This career was thereafter pursued in Dublin then London and back to West Yorkshire and latterly as a Consultant in Cavan, where I worked, very often single-handed, until I took early retirement in 2000. I then became relatively poor as a small farmer in Ireland, but very rich in terms of health and happiness. An Irish farmer, who won the lottery was asked what he was going to do with all the money. "Ah, sure I'll just carry on farming until its all gone", he replied.
I had really loved my medical career until I worked in Cavan, where it was onerous not only because of the hours worked and the lack of vacations, but also because of two other main things: (1) There was an administrative culture that was primarily interested in how services were perceived rather than provided and (2) There was a coterie of surgical colleagues, who often fitted the syndrome best described as "big fish in a small pond" and to whom private practice was too attractive. That is not to say there were no good colleagues and I would not have lasted so long if it had not been for fabulous Nursing Staff and patients, mostly from the local areas that I was so familiar with. I could have tried to return to work in a big Teaching Hospital, but it would have meant leaving behind my pastoral life with my dogs and cattle, which gave me so much sanity. So I stayed local and immersed myself in a new direction by writing some software and by building and repairing computers.
My father died in Warsaw in the same week that I was to return to Ireland from Leeds to take up the Consultant post. That was 1990 and just at the time that communist Poland was imploding. He bequeathed me a property in Kraków, where some cousins were living, and I used to joke about owning this place abroad. The joke turned into reality 19 years later, when it was finally registered in my name in the equivalent of the land registry in Poland. This enabled me to begin restoring the property, in which relatives were no longer living. It also encouraged me to try to learn Polish and to spend time getting to know much more about that side of my background. The property in Kraków is now mowing towards being an apartment hotel with 7 self-contained apartments and a restaurant - that is once things are able to reopen.
As I write this in March 2021 in the splendid isolation caused by the bloody virus, I have time to reflect on many things. It seems likely that the world will have been altered in many unpredictable ways by this pandemic and so both I and others may have to try and reinvent themselves. For now, I sit quietly in this lacuna and like so many I am mostly connected to humanity via the ether of cyberspace.