Archive: January, 2014
Last year was supposed to be my year – the Year of the Snake. I was born in 1953 and in the Chinese Calendar, that was the Year of snake … and according to the Chinese Zodiac, every year has an animal associated with it – there are twelve of them in a cycle, (Rat, […]
In recent weeks, the region known as the Ferghana Valley has been much in the news. For the record: The fertile Feghana Valley is about 300 kilmeters long and 170 kilometers wide and is divided between three neighbouring Central Asian states, (Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan and Kyrgyzstan), and comprises the flood plain of the Syr Darya River, […]
I have to admit that, although I understand why they were developed and people use them, I hate spam filters. Please, don’t misunderstand me – I hate Spam!, but I probably hate spam filters even more! They are like computers and technology in general … they offer so much and when they work they appear […]
Yesterday I came across one of the saddest posts that I have seen for a long time … It was a short post – just a single paragraph comprising three sentences and a youtube videoclip. It was about Jenishbek Rayimbaev … and told how he had been “forced” to be photographed for money in Osh bazaar […]
Seventy years ago, 27th January, 1944, saw the end of the great battles of the Second World War … the Siege of Leningrad. It was one of the the longest and most destructive and costly sieges in all human history, (according to some estimates there were as many as one and a half million casualties), […]
I recently saw a report of a survey undertaken for the London City Airport which claimed to have found that the average person in the UK has visited seven countries in their life. The survey of some 2000 people came up with a number of other interesting facts, such as that almost a third had visited […]
Although Ian is a Scottish name, as far as I am aware I have no Scottish blood flowing through my veins, (however there is some Celtic blood there, because some of my mother’s forebears came from South Wales). I mention my ancestry, (or, at least, my lack of Scottish ancestry), because today happens to be […]
Earlier this week I came across an interesting post on the kloop internet portal … although the site has a blog in English, this particular post was in Russian – which makes sense because it was really aimed at a local audience. Even so, I thought it was particularly interesting and well worth sharing with a wider […]
My father was a trade union official and, even if I say it myself, somewhat of a “barrack room lawyer”. Years later, when I was to follow in his footsteps and also became a trade union official, one of the lessons he taught me proved to be invaluable: “Get it in writing.” “If all you’ve […]
As a former schoolteacher, I always take an interest in news reports about education … so, I was intrigued last December to see a report of a meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on Social Policy addressed by the Deputy Minister of Education and Science who quoted a number of very interesting statistics – another of […]
