THE PO-PO HAS LANDED

Hello, hello. We are home. Now we need to go through a ton of footage that is scattered across a bunch of different devices, hard drives, and SD cards. God knows how many hours of footage we have… it’s going to be a massive effort to get it all into order.

Despite a bit of fun at the beginning with the flat tire, the trip exceeded our expectations. By not just visiting the obvious tourist places, and going deeper into the history and relevance of the country, I think we got something much more real.

In fact, if we hadn’t had the flat tire, we wouldn’t have changed the itinerary – which led to some of the most fascinating stuff of the entire trip. Our (over) friendly mechanic told us not to bother going to Suwalki (our original plan), because it’s boring, so instead we moved things around and drove up to the Gdansk areas – which is far more ripe in history, and has its own flashpoint border with Russia/Kaliningrad.

We’ve got a bunch of Patreon-exclusive stuff for you in addition to the main videos we’ll be putting out. There’ll also be outtakes etc. And I filmed in the Wolf’s Lair gift shop, which was eyebrow-raising in itself. We bought a few bits and pieces of inappropriate merch, which we’re going to give away to Patrons.

We ended up filming every day, and though I ache like heck… it was worth it. I’ve still got one big interview to do over Zoom, which is going to be fascinating, and we need to record some voice-over to tie the narratives together.

I’m toying with breaking the videos down into smaller chunks, rather than putting out a couple of big ones. Every location we went to kind of justifies its own focus, but I’ll make the call once I start editing properly.  

One thing I will say is that as much as we try to keep it light and fun – and we do dick around as usual – many of these places are steeped in some pretty dark history, so at points it’s going to get serious. We didn’t go to any concentration camps – because we didn’t quite want it to get that heavy - but man… they’re everywhere. We kept driving past them. Just horrible. Every single town has its own story.

I’m not going to include all of it in the video, because it makes me feel far too vulnerable, but I got pretty overwhelmed by the Wolf’s Lair. Going into Hermann Göring’s basement was the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever experienced (not a sentence I thought I’d ever say). Such a palpable feeling of dread and heaviness – probably because there’s a particularly grim story associated with it. I came out and had to ask Sanja to stop filming, because I pretty much burst into tears. And I’m not usually that guy.

We’ll do a Writer’s Club/Biffo’s Brain Zoom next week where we’ll discuss our experience in a bit more detail, but every tier will get something exclusive.

Suffice to say, thank you SO MUCH for your support. This trip was possible because of Patreon, and it has made us hungry to do more. I really, really hope you enjoy the videos.

Paul