Archive: November, 2013
I am a great believer in what is called “lifelong education”. As a teacher, back in Britain, there were always lots of opportunities to avail ourselves in order to – from single one-off lectures to extended courses leading to further qualifications. One of the most interesting courses I ever took was called Looking at Paintings. […]
Tomorrow is St. Andrew’s Day … Saint Andrew happens to be the Patron Saint of Scotland, so I wish all my Scottish readers a Happy St. Andrew’s Day. As it happens, Andrew is quite a popular Saint around the world … as well as being Scotland’s Patron Saint, he also fulfills that role for […]
On 28th November, 1820, a young boy was born in the town of Barmen in the Kingdom of Prussia, (today it is known as Wuppertal in Germany), Frederick Engels. Although he was the son of an influential and relatively affluent businessman, (a cotton manufacturer), he developed an interest in revolutionary politics and dropped out of […]
I was surprised the other day to receive an email from a firm based in the UK offering professional translation services … it said: We had a message from Google about unnatural links pointing to our site, and we are currently in the process of cleaning our link profile. We believe the link from your […]
There’s a “legend” that the Kingdom and the Tower of London will fall if the Raven that live in the tower ever leave … although it called a “legend”, even on the Tower’s own website, it may date back only as far as Victorian times. The Tower of London is a fortress based on a […]
Opposite the Kyrgyz Agrarian Academy, on Mederova Street, (in the Southern part of town, near the junction with Sovietskaya – nowadays renamed after Baaytik Baatyr,) there is a Statue which has a striking feature – a long flowing handlebar moustache which surmounts a full beard. It’s a statue of the Biologist Konstantin Scriabin. It faces […]
Back in 1972, on 24th November, the Osh oblast was created. Osh is in the Southern part of Kyrgyzstan, bordering China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as well as the Kyrgyz oblasts of Batken, Djalal Abad and Naryn. Possibly because we are based in Bishkek, in the North of the country, most of the requests we receive […]
Fifty years ago, on 23rd November, 1963, a phenomena was born. It was a Saturday evening and Grandstand, the BBCs flagship sports programme had come to en end … and onto our screens burst the psychodelic graphics and electronic music of the Dr. Who theme tune that is now recognizable almost anywhere in the world … even here […]
I’ve mentioned before the work of Hugh Coulter in support of the private orphanage in Karakol - several times as it happens. He was working in Karakol on a project financed by the European Union and came across the orphanage almost by accident. Impressed by the work of the orphanage, Hugh and his family found themselves getting involved in […]
I am sometimes asked about where I get the inspiration for different postcards … and there are different, many different, answers. Sometimes postcards are prompted by an anniversary or event, others are because I have seen an interesting news article, on occasion people write and make suggestions and, in fact, I have quite a long list […]
