Postcard from Bishkek

Regular readers of my postcards will know of m,y interest in Statistics … and the travel and leisure industry provides a wealth of useful examples that I wish I had been aware of when I was teaching the subject. Whenever two or three hoteliers are gathered together, for example, there is one topic of conversation […]

A few years ago, my Cable TV used to show a wide variety of programmes in different languages: Russian and Kyrgyz, of course, but also English, French, German, Turkish and Japanese … even Italian and Spanish from time to time.  The obviously did some market research and decided to  cut most of these from their […]

December is here … so I suppose it is time to deck with boughs of Holly … and so on.  Actually December is quite a busy month will all sorts of special days to commemorate this or that … today, for example, happens to be World AIDS day and also the anniversary of last year’s inauguration of […]

When I was a lad one of my favourite schoolboy jokes was: “Who the Dickens wrote Oliver Twist?” “Who the Dickens … ?”, is, (or was), an exclamation which served as a rhetorical question … an expression of surprise.  Sometimes, it would be abbreviated to WTD. The way that WTD just rolls off the tongue, […]

The Silk Road Lodge 1s 12 years old today. That is, we opened our doors to the public on 7th August, 2000. We’ll have a cake in the office, as usual, to commemorate the occasion … but as it is not exactly a kroogliy data - a round figure – I don’t think we’ll be doing […]

One of my favourite sayings,  as a former Maths teacher, is that “I am not afraid of numbers …”. Apparently there are people who are afraid of numbers and there is even a name for this condition: Arithmophpobia or Numerophobia.  Personally, I am not sure whether there are people who tremble with an irrational fear […]

Over the weekend, I undertook one of the tasks which make up my regular routine: checking newsletter of the legal database to which I subscribe for any amendments to the legislation which may affect out operations here in Kyrgyzstan. As well as keeping me up to date in the various zakon, postanavleniye, ukaz and prikazes, […]

There are several songs about the “Perfect Day“, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one by Lou Reed from his 1972 album Transformer, (and which was the flip side of his, Walk on the Wild Side, released the same year and regraded by many people as his signature piece). I was […]

My home town of Malvern, in Worcestershire, was famous in Victorian times as a spa town.  In the middle of the nineteenth century the  ”water cure” attracted a wide variety of celebrities to the town including the likes of  Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson, Samuel Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale.  Despite that, not everyone was convinced in the efficacy […]

When I first moved to London, back in 1978, having moved into my flat, I took two weeks off and went to explore the city.  I bought a “go anywhere” ticket for the tube and set off to see the sights: Buckingham Palace and The Tower of London; I sat in the public gallery of […]