Hi,

This week, I'm very pleased to say that I know the official date of the new Marek Zulawski exhibition in Toruń CSW in Toruń, Poland: the opening will take place on Friday 8th September 2023.

While the final layout is still being devised, and I even have no poster to share yet, the aim is for the exhibition to be the largest solo career retrospective of Marek's work to date. It will be open for two months. I am obviously very much looking forward to it!

Here is a Google Pin location for the exhibition venue - save it in your phone!

Abstract gas

In the London studio, we have the only two abstract pieces Marek ever made hanging up.

Looking at them initially, you might not sense what they are of, just random daubings.

Much abstract. So random lines.

But they are in fact paintings of London and Paris as seen from a plane at night. (The first above is Paris, the second London).

I have always loved looking out at cities during night flights, so these two pieces resonate with me strongly. They also remind me of this scene from an old episode of Family Guy.

Looking at the difference between the two representations, my mum has explained to me that the London one looks a lot dimmer because many London street lamps still used to be gas lamps back in the 1960s when the paintings were created.

(I think it's because, in Marek's mind, one plane was flying over the Champs Elysee, and the other over Chiswick Roundabout and Acton...)

If you're wondering about London's gas lamp history, it turns out there are still a couple hundred left which you can find just off central spots like Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square.

Their numbers are dwindling all the time, and there's a campaign to save the gas lamps that are left. You can see lots of great photos of them in this Daily Mail article which is predictably angry about the galling idea of them being replaced with LEDs.

Apparently, there's also a lone gas lamp near the Savoy Hotel partly powered by methane gas from the sewers...

I managed to find the photo above of Marek standing next to a lamp post in the late 1930s, so it was likely a gas lamp too. And thus this story comes full circle. Amen.

Language article of the week

I find London accents fascinating. And it seems so do linguists. They are predicting some huge changes for the ways Londoners speak as the decades progress:

"Linguistics experts at the University of York predict Multicultural London English (MLE) — which carries huge Caribbean, West African and Southeast Asian influences — will become dominant in the South East of England by 2066. It’ll take over from Already Estuary English (AEE), which blends cockney and received pronunciation (RP)."

Read the full Huffington Post article about these changes.

I'm personally quite used to the MLE accent, I'm sure most Londoners are. And I'm quite happy for it to become more dominant.

But I've always wondered about the Polish element in London voices.

Second-generation Polish Brits, especially those in West London, often have a very particular twang to the way they speak. Much like second-generation Asian Brits in North West London, they drop random foreign words into the context of their everyday speech with fellow members of their group. It's essentially "Ponglish".

I don't think the Polish contingent of London is as dominant as the other minorities, but it does make me wonder if it makes up a small percentage of that MLE mix that we will soon be welcoming as our language overlord.

(Obviously though, my favourite British accent is Scouse. If only I were born in Liverpool! 😫)

Many thanks for reading. Look after yourselves.

Adam

p.s. In case you didn't know, the term "gaslighting" (with no spaces) has over the last decade garnered an entirely new meaning in popular culture...

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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