Strange man on a train (Dziwak w pociągu)

Two years ago there was a man on a train getting hot and bothered just because some people were speaking a foreign language. He wanted to be 'put out' - seems he had nothing better to do. He could have read a book or a paper, looked out of the window, listened to some music, done some real work or some knitting, done the crossword, played eye spy, played Patience. There's a whole heap he could have done. No he didn't want to. He could have seen how many words he could have made from the word 'Ignorant'. I know the route he took very well - Charing Cross, London Bridge, New Cross etc. I had travelled that way for decades, to work and for other reasons. There are people travelling on the trains - conversing with one another as they do - end of story. 

As the EU referendum campaigns stretched ever more frenzied and painful, I started to have recurring nightmares about the strange man on a train. Then around 3am or similar, 24 June, the ex-Business Secretary, Sir Vince Cable was on Radio 4 saying that Leave had won the vote. Surely not. How could a sensible country make what seemed to be an insular and backward decision. I went through the stages that I've heard many go through too - shock, dismay, horror, and an overwhelming feeling of being diminished. It wasn't a case of sour grapes, I had already thought before the vote that the decision to hold a referendum was both foolish and callous. A set of complex issues to be reduced to a simple in/out referendum. 

Then in the days following the Brexit vote, I was still trying to assimilate, and I wondered again about the strange man. He clearly felt isolated when he heard a foreign language - so why didn't he go and learn a foreign language himself?

Then I thought 'what have I done about the referendum?' Well I did speak to people before, and posted and shared on facebook - all in my small way. What should I do now? I'll learn a European foreign language! So I booked a course at the Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge. I'm not a Sixth former! My route is via Adult Education - Polish Beginners Level 1. The course notes say you need not have any prior knowledge of Polish - so I qualify perfectly! It runs from September to November. 

I thought that was it, but there was an interesting twist. It turns out that the Sixth Form College was once the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where Roger Waters and Syd Barrett (of the band Pink Floyd) went to school. From an article in The Wall Street Journal (updated 21 September 2015) about writing 'Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2' Roger Waters said:

"The words and music were written as I strummed on a six-string acoustic guitar. The song flowed straight out of me in a minute and a half. It only had a single verse and a chorus. On the demo, I accompanied myself. (Mr. Waters sings the rhythmic acoustic guitar introduction and then the lyrics, “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control.”)

The lyrics were a reaction to my time at the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys in 1955, when I was 12. Some of the teachers there were locked into the idea that young boys needed to be controlled with sarcasm and the exercising of brute force to subjugate us to their will. That was their idea of education."

Well, I hope it's not like that for me at the Sixth Form College! I'll be singing 'Nie potrzebujemy edukacji' as I go in and out of class - well maybe a bit later in the course.

Always good to have a cue for a song, and I didn't know I was going to get one out of this story.

Thanks to Kaja for the Polish!