On the way to the airport just now to pick up a friend arriving from Australia I found myself listening to a fascinating programme on the BBC World Service covering the turbulent history of the Polish trade union - though that description fails to do justice to the organisation - Solidarity. It featured quite a number of those directly associated with the movement, several of whom had spent periods in prison on account of their brave attempts to foster democracy in Poland in the early eighties.
In retrospect the fall of the totalitarian regimes behind the Iron Curtain seems inevitable. At the time it seemed anything but, at least to the younger version of myself who assumed that little would change, despite the obvious courage of Lech Walesa and the like. How wonderfully wrong I was. And how wonderful it's been to witness so many unexpected developments in the world in my lifetime.
You may think things are standing still. They never are. Which is both exciting and deeply disturbing at one and same time. I'd be tempted to say that the story of Solidarity had a sort of happy outcome, except it didn't as we never get to see a final outcome for anything.
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