I spent nearly a month in Poland this summer because my widowed, childless aunt died unexpectedly and left me and my mother with a mountain of “death-min” which we have still nowhere near dealt with. 

The media and political classes present us with a confused portrait of what Poland is  really like. On the one hand, we hear reports that the country is thriving economically, on course to overtake Britain’s GDP by 2034.

On the other hand, we hear that it is effectively a dictatorship, run by an “extreme right”, “populist” government because, for example, it has banned abortion, supports the Catholic Church and controls its people by giving them handouts (every family with children gets 800 złotys a month which is the equivalent of about £200). 

But having spent much of my time on this particular visit out and about, dealing with doctors, lawyers and public institutions, I would take this so-called right wing dictatorship over our liberal United Kingdom any day.

Sitting on a bus in Krakow, it is striking for someone coming from the UK how much pride the average Pole has in their appearance. Unlike in South Wales, where I live, where going to the supermarket in your underwear seems to be verging on the norm these days – the fatter you are the better – in Krakow the people, and women in particular, are modestly and attractively dressed.

What is also striking is how polite people are. The moment an old person or pregnant woman, or a woman handling multiple small children, steps onto a bus, all the young jump up to give up their seats, a routine which is then followed by thank-yous and smiles and courteous nods of the head.

During this extended stay in Poland I started to think that if my husband weren’t such an uncompromising “somewhere” and was able to be anywhere other than Wales for longer than a week, I would seriously consider moving to Poland. The perks seemed to be endless. 

While we were there, my daughters attend-ed a nursery three minutes walk from our house which cost me £15 per day per child, a sum which included three meals a day, including a three-course home-cooked lunch. Compare this to the £120 a day that most parents in London will be paying for a similar service and you start to understand why the Poles seem keener to have babies than the Brits. 

Cheap, high-quality childcare, combined with other perks like a brilliant state education system which doesn’t indoctrinate children with strange secular ideas but instead teaches them proper academic subjects, a healthcare system and transport infrastructure that actually work, all delivered with courtesy and a smile, make moving to Poland a no-brainer if you can. As far as I’m concerned this so-called “far right” dictatorship seems to have its priorities right.