Archive sections: ‘Living in Interesting Times’
At the end of 1941, a new American “romantic comedy”, Sullivan’s Travels, was released – starring Joel McRae and Veronica Lake. It wasn’t a great success at the box office and enjoyed mixed reviews. With the passage of time, however, it’s reputation has improved and is now considered to be a classic. I remember watching [...]
Those of you that know me will know that one of my favourite pastimes used to be playing “Trivial Pursuits”. I have that sort of mind that “collects” trivia … I loved the Geography questions but I also enjoyed History ones as well. Although I am interested in History, my knowledge of the subject is [...]
One of the emails that I received this week thanked me for the weekly postcard that I send out giving a review of the weeks events here in Kyrgyzstan, but the writer admitted that they were rather confused as to to who was who and the positions taken by the various parties in our recent [...]
One morning in October 1987, I woke up at six o’clock as usual, had a bite of breakfast and got into my car to drive to school. As I emerged from the garage, I got a bit of a shock – there was absolute chaos everywhere I looked, high winds, branches of trees all over [...]
I am not particularly good at sports, although I am willing to try my hand at most. Apart from needing a certain level of skill, most, if not all, sports also require a certain amount of dedication and a level of fitness. It won’t come as a surprise, therefore, if I say that I am [...]
Apart from being the tenth day of the tenth month in the tenth year of the century, an auspicious date in Chinese astrology, Sunday was a day of special significance here in Kyrgyzstan. It was Election Day.
The days before the election proved to be quite busy for me. Each day I came to the office intending to tidy my desk and catch up on some of the backlog of work that has been steadily building up as I have had my attention distracted onto other matters – but it seems that [...]
Dickens’s classic novel of the French Revolution, “The Tale of Two Cities”, has probably the best opening line and closing lines in all of British literature. It is an extremely well crafted list of eight opposites that compliment each other almost like poetry: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, [...]
During the Second World War, the battles raged in several different “theaters” around the world. Despite the fact that the United States entered the conflict after being caught “off-guard” by a surprise Japanese attack in the Pacific, for various reasons the war in the European Theater was given priority. That’s not to say that the [...]
I have just got back from my monthly trip to Naryn. These trips are so much a part of my routine that I don’t normally write a postcard about them, but this one was slightly different, so I thought I would this time.
