It’s the first of May, and so I can’t help but remember the May Day marches of my Polish childhood; all that sea of red, big portraits of the current and the past communist greats, flags and banners with stilted commo-speak slogans (a Communist Bingo would have been an entertaining game to play, though in a good Eastern European tradition you would be blind drunk pretty quickly), local dignitaries watching and waving from the specially erected stands as rows after rows of cheerful workers and farmers representing their factories and enterprises pass by to the sound of marching bands.