Postcard from Bishkek

Andrei often asks me questions about English … and they often takes the form of: “Is that in English-English … or American?”  Although there are differences – quite real and significant differences – at times.  I remember, for example, as a child reading Superman and Batman comics, or watching American TV sitcoms, feeling a little […]

Ever since 1993, May 3rd has been earmarked by the United Nations as World Press Freedom Day. The General Assembly of the United Assembly declared World Press Freedom Day to raise awareness of the importance of the freedom of the press and to remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to […]

Perfect Day is a song written by Lou Reed in 1972,and featured on his iconic album Transformer … and was the B-side of what was probably his most famous (or infamous) record, Walk on the Wild Side. I have commented before how some dates seem to attract more than their fair share of particular types […]

Back in the UK, I rarely ever had to worry about paying the household bills for the utilities … they were all taken care of by Standing Orders or Direct Debits with the cash disappearing out of my bank account on a regular basis each month.  Here I get utility bills, (for electricity, water, gas, […]

Back in the autumn of 1962 a film was released which was to have a significant effect on the genre of espionage movies in the West: Dr. No, based on the James Bond novel by Ian Fleming.  Indeed, Bond is not just a Western icon, even here everyone knows about James Bond. Although it was […]

In the United States, 15th April is known as Tax Day. This is the day when tax returns have to be submitted to the Federal government … there are also local “Tax Days” for those states which have a different deadline for the submission of the forms. For the record: The deadline was originally March […]

On 14th April, 1894, … the first ever motion picture house opened in New York … however, it wasn’t exactly what we would recognize as a cinema. It operated ten Kinetoscopes, a device for “peep-show” viewing of films … inside the carcass was a long strip of perforated film which passed between a light source and […]

They say that there are some books that pretend to have read … but which, in fact, very few people have actually done so. In the various lists of such books that we “lie” about are works like: The Bible; 1984 by George Orwell; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; A Passage to India by EM Forster; Atlas Shrugged and […]

Back in 1995, when I had landed at Almaty airport – in those days there weren’t really any flights to Bishkek from Western Europe … that was to come later … and Almaty in Kazakhstan was the gateway that most Westerners used when coming to Kyrgyzstan.  After passing through Immigration and Customs I was met […]

There’s an interesting trend on social media to post photographs – some are beautiful, fascinating, evocative … but, unfortunately an awful lot of them are, (not to mince words), dross … snapshots that may be of interest to those who post them, their immediate family and friends – but because they have been posted on-line […]