Not a dry eye for the house

Some of you may recall that I tend to write about personal matters in my Endpiece columns. And things are not going to be any different this time around. Not long ago, I moved from an apartment block in Warsaw’s Bemowo district (which, in spite of everything, I remember fondly and still miss) to somewhere with a bit more space. Since then, it has transpired that my brother and his family are soon going to swap their Warsaw apartment for a semi-detached house a few miles further out. Other friends have just moved out to terraced housing in the suburbs of Warsaw, Lublin and Poznań, while others are looking for something similar or even for plots on which to build their own homes. The parents of a friend of mine, when they retired, exchanged their cramped flat in a block for a house by a lake so that they could – as they told us – spend their old age closer to nature and have somewhere for “the grandchildren to run around in.” The dad of another friend also