Daisy from Szczecin to Berlin, expecting usual evening miracle.

With thanks to Szymon, our wonderful host (with partner Kamila) in Szczecin, Poland, for the above shot of Daisy’s 80-kg (or so) road train in focused forward mode, we start our sixth week on the road with 310 km pedalled over the last three days (50 of those without battery!), well over 2000km in total and now approaching Berlin from the East.

Which brings me to miracles, as in the daily-to-be-expected.

After many years of practising this art, as the day draws towards a close and we haven’t a clue yet where we’re going to stop or sleep, Expectemus miraculum as I’ve learned to say (let us expect a miracle).

Last Saturday evening, my mobile data ran out, so we couldn’t check online for either campsite or Booking.com, and had to look out instead for old-style Zimmer Frei signs offering accommodation.

Unlike many other long-distance cycling colleagues, we don’t plan our daily destinations, but trust things (Things with a capita T? Universe? Deity? Life Itself?) to work out. As they always miraculously do, though rarely quite as expected.

Result being, on this latest occasion, that we found ourselves, after a spectacular 135-km day’s ride through the woodlands of West Poland, just across the border with Germany in the closest thing we’ve yet found to an old-style GDR Gaststätte/guest house.

Set in the fields of the rich agricultural Oderbruch (scene also of some of the most intense Soviet-German fighting of the final weeks of World War Two), the Oderschänke in Letschin is still looked after pretty much unchanged by the now elderly couple who ran it in old communist times.

So of course we had our favourite GDR dish, Bauernfrühstück, or farmer’s breakfast, basically a folded omlette with fried potatoes within.

Asked about their experience of the Wende in 1989 (the “Turning ” as the transition from communist GDR to German unity is generally now referred to), our hosts were amusingly nonchalant.

“We were able to buy this place instead of running it for the local council,” they said, “and we do have to organise more for ourselves now. But otherwise, for us, things haven’t really changed much at all.”

They still have a stork as regular spring neighbour, who uses one of their doorsteps as its morning toilet. Hence the plastic sheeting to protect.

Last night, another regular miracle – a free camping spot deep in the Spreewald alongside the eponymous river, where canoeists regularly stop over.

Before adding a selection of further images, a further thought on Russia and Putin, having been challenged gently regarding my last post by our good and pacifist friend Renate.

I make no apology for now wanting Russia’s clear defeat in this war in Ukraine, and for this, tragically, to need to be military and conclusive.

Yes, it’s easy for an elderly, armchair observer to say this from a comfortable, safe distance, knowing I’m too old and creaky to be conscripted.

But like my great uncle Mark after whom I am named and who died very young indeed in the British commando raid on St Nazaire in 1942, if I were now a younger Ukrainian, I would fight – against a revanchist, expansionist power clearly and explicitly set on destroying my country and my very identity.

As with individual clients in psychotherapy, and using more traditional cultural language, one can understand a dysfunctional pattern of behaviour and exerience of self and world as a kind of spell that has to be broken.

Russia, and so many Russians, still labour under a hubristic spell of special self-importance reinforced castastrophically by their victory in World War Two, in the launching of which Stalin directly colluded with his secret pact Hitler to carve up Poland, invaded and absorbed in September 1939 from East as well as West.

Yes, if only that spell could be broken through dialogue and patience.

But by invading Ukraine and starting the the world’s biggest and most destructive war since WW2 (yes, more so than Vietnam, more so than Iraq, terrible misjudgements though those were), Putin has changed the rules of the game, and the fight, until the spell is broken, must be armed.

But enough heavyweight musing for today.

It seems a bit glib to switch to photos of a cycle trip, but that’s our complex world. Bright lights and deep darkness co-existing.