At this particular point in time, I am not very interested in the present. I spend half of my mental life projecting myself into the imaginary future, envisioning myself as a happy and assimilated Polish migrant. I don't think very hard about how this will happen or what it entails; instead I think about the feeling of effortlessness that marks life here, a sort of daily absence of friction, and project it onto the half- known landscape of Warsaw. It is partly a feeling of being half asleep, of being entitled to ignore my surroundings because I have absorbed and internalised them. I currently spend my trips to Poland with eyes like saucers, staring around me and straining with the effort of trying to understand how it looks to its inhabitants.

The other half of the time is spent in the archives of the past. My current self operates as a sort of didactic historian in these circumstances, unearthing strata of old bitterness and old joy, adjusting her pince nez and poking with her tweezers, muttering that's why....... ahh, it's because...... don't you see? This world is like the land of dreams, where I am both myself but not myself. It is a world which- like the dreamworld-makes sense both currently and retrospectively, in two entirely different ways.

The present (at present) is nothing but a zone of synthesis for these forces of history and possibility, a cocoon of routine from which I can safely observe what has been and ponder what might become.