A year after signing the ground-breaking Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, the President of the Palestine National Authority, Yasser Arafat, visited Beijing in a bid to further cement Chinese support for the Palestinian cause.
Following his meeting with then President Jiang Zemin, Arafat held a press conference at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. As the Beijing correspondent for the South China Morning Post, I was invited to attend.
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When we visited Japan’s famous snow monkeys high up in the Nagano hills in the summer of 2012, I was immediately drawn to one solitary character. While the other macaques frolicked around the waterfall or soaked in their hot tub, this grumpy monkey just sat by himself looking at the world around him with disdain.
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For a small, isolated village on the fringes of Romney Marsh, the parish of Aldington has been home to a ridiculous number of famous residents, dating all the way back to the Roman occupation.
As I discussed earlier, in the 16th century it was the birthplace of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, who prophesized against King Henry VIII and was beheaded for her troubles. More recently, it has been home to influential writers and raconteurs such as Noël Coward, Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. Until a few years ago, Noël Coward former residence, Goldenhurst Farm, was home to the comedian Julian Clary, who moved there at the suggestion of another fabulous villager Paul O’Grady – aka Lilly Savage – who lived in Aldington for 20 years before his sudden death last year.
However, it is another group of colourful characters, collectively known as The Blues, who are the subject of this article.
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About five years ago Iceland’s Directorate of Health conducted a survey to find the happiest place in Iceland. The town that came out on top was an outwardly unremarkable fishing village on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula called Grindavik.
Since then, Grindavik has rocked by continual earthquakes and the threat of lava from fissures erupting in the nearby mountains. In December last year, the eruptions came even closer and on the morning of Sunday January 14, the lava finally arrived, engulfing houses on the periphery of town.
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England’s greatest playwright had made a comfortable living during the last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign by producing crowd pleasing blockbusters, and a series of historical plays that were basically propaganda for the Tudor regime.
When the old queen finally died and the Tudor dynasty came to an end in 1603, William Shakespeare, like everyone else dependent on royal patronage, faced an uncertain future. In a succession meticulously managed by Elizabeth’s closest advisor, Robert Cecil, the new monarch was to be a foreigner, James VI of Scotland.
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In 1996, I bought a small house in the village of Bridge, not far from Canterbury. It was what real estate agents call a “character property,” a former chapel built in the 1830s as part of a workhouse complex to house the rural poor. The complex now consists of 26 dwellings whose residents share responsibly for its management and upkeep. Things were very different 190 years ago.
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There is evidence of human habitation around Aylesham dating back to the Bronze Age, but the current village is less than one hundred years old and owes its existence to just one thing – the discovery of coal under the Kent Downs.
The village was purpose-built to house miners working at the newly opened Snowdown Colliery in the 1920s. The new settlement attracted miners from across the north of England and south Wales who were struggling to find work at home. Many landlords in nearby Kent towns refused to accommodate these “dirty” migrants so Aylesham provided a welcome sanctuary.
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Living in Hong Kong, I never needed a car, in fact, I hardly ever needed to take a taxi, just about everywhere was accessible by public transport.
My apartment was a ten-minute walk from the nearest MTR station in Tsing Yi, from where it was just a 15-minute ride to both downtown Hong Kong and the airport. My office relocated twice during my 15-year tenure but the commute was never more than 40-minutes door-to-door.
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In late July 1985, I arrived in Moscow after a week on the Trans-Siberian Express from Beijing. I was hoping to be met at the station by my friend Valery, who had been studying at the same university as me in Beijing and had invited me to stay. Instead, I was immediately surrounded and interrogated by half a dozen KGB agents demanding to know what I was doing in the Russian capital.
I was eventually rescued by Valery who arrived with a sheaf of documents from his boss at Radio Moscow authorizing him to host this suspicious looking foreigner at his apartment for the next week.
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One of my first tasks on returning to England after 15 years in Hong Kong was to reregister with my village health clinic. In order to do this, I had to fill out an exhaustive questionnaire to determine my basic state of health. Since then, I have been bombarded by requests/demands for blood tests, various cancer screenings, heart rate and blood pressure monitoring.
This is partly due to my advanced age (over 60), as well as the lack of any National Health Service (NHS) records for me over the last two decades. In order to fill in the gaps, I offered to provide my medical records from doctors in Hong Kong but this proved to be a remarkably complicated and time consuming process. In order to get my Covid-19 vaccinations recognised by the NHS app, for example, I had to travel to London (one hour on the train) and locate one of the few hospitals in the capital authorized to scrutinize non-UK vaccination certificates.
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