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I should have checked my dear Polish wife’s answer :blush:

You/she weren’t actually incorrect - but you might wish to refrain from telling her that Lithuania was at least intially much larger. Sadly both nations proved to be insufficiently strong to protect the borders of their vast territory and I’d argue that it’s only in recent decades that both and the Ukraine have re-emerged as independent nation states . Though I now worry about Poland’s current direction, but hopefully they’ll be a bit pragmatic abou their current Hungarian alliance.

Incidentally in my Catholic primary school in post-War England about half the kids were Polish or Ukrainian and most of the rest were of Irish descent (meanwhile, I thought I was Polish-American, but later learnt that I’m Franco/Hungarian American).

So do shifting frontiers affect perceptions of national identity? I’m not sure, people in the Scottish Borders tend to sa y they’re from the Borders rather than from England or Scotland (‘liminal’ is the fashionable academic term) but is it the same in Alsace? I only really know the latter through their excellent wines.

Wow! that’s where it all began, I remember, forty years ago listening to reports of Lech Walesa’s defiant strikes in the Gdańsk shipyards that led to the founding of Solidarity and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union. Heady times!

Also the city’s second most famous son, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and The Flounder

The following site looks useful

I’m fascinated by our (us Europeans) old city states such as Danzig, Fiume (Rijeka) Trieste, Smyrna (Izmir - it used to sort of be in Europe!) but Idoubt that the UK, sorry, I meant Plague Island’s govenment’s proposed freeports will have quite the same cosmopolitan appeal

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@DrMarkH

I think you are talking to the wrong person here :grin:

There’s been a mix-up, but appreciate your response to my previous post

and Scotland obviously

Well that’s the point, Scotland voted to stay part of the EU so not part of the easily confused 52%. Will they become an independant state, their leader Jimmy Krankie wants them to…

I see, but that 52% also included Scotland, so if you took away Scotland the 52% would be much higher !

Quite probably, I have no information regarding numbers so just rounded things up, the comment was only for entertainment.

A purely manufactured notion, standing on the shoulders of the old racist London trope, “wogs start north of Watford”.

But coming from the North on the M1, they have signs for “The SOUTH”

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Merely for basic motorway orientation, nothing definitive to suggest boundaries etc. NB This puerile debate is doing my poor head in… :confounded::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::face_with_head_bandage:

In normal times I visit Gdansk annually with my wife Ewa. The old town is beautiful, especially in the summer when the sun streams down the Dluga - the main pedestrian walkway. Everything was more or less levelled in WW2 but rebuilt so that you would hardly notice. I haven’t visited the new museum of WW2 but I have seen the wonderful Solidarity museum. Every year sees more visitors with a great number from Scandinavia. For me it’s the best place to visit in Poland.
Véronique, I assume your daughter will be living in Gdansk. Let me know if we can help with information on Gdansk, Gdynia, Sopot etc. Ewa moved to Gdansk in her teens to attend the medical university. She recounts the days when she and her friends used to taunt the feared Communist security agents. Being fit was essential to outrun them. It’s such a shame that freedom from autocratic rule was so short lived.

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Have lived in Scotland for 20 years. It’s not just oil, Scotland will have an advantage in wind and hydro power. And water… an undervalued resource in England. A friend with umpteen degrees in geology and hydrology swears that Scotland will be selling clean water in the future and make more money than from the north sea oil reserves.

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Thank you, that’s very kind. I expect I shall have questions to ask! She has found herself a flatshare in/on Biskupia Gorka with two Polish women and can hop on the train to work, it’s only a few stops as her office is by the university.

Believe it or, there are already feckin idiots paying more for water than petrol, it called bottled water.

Not just bottled water, too much water taken out of aquifiers near the shoreline
brings saline underground water into the resources.
Scotland will be selling water as they have no need to use too much water from the aquifiers.
Might be mighty wet in Scotland most of the time, but as a renewable resource water cannot be underestimated.
Look at all the restrictions we have in France already

Yes the threat of water shortage is of grave importance and has been known about for some time.

Fresh water shortages some places, saline water shortages in others. It’s just dreadful.