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.
Continue reading →

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.
Continue reading →

If you glance at a map of the East Kent Downs you will notice several settlements with the suffix Minnis. The name probably stems from the Saxon word (Ge)maennes, and refers to areas of open heathland that once played a key role in the medieval rural economy, providing spaces for landless peasants to graze their animals, forage and collect firewood.

Over the centuries, the minnises were gradually “enclosed” by the lords of manor who owned them and vital access to the commons was cut off. This process was accelerated as the rural population grew and demand for land increased, and the privatization drive was eventually legalized by a series of parliamentary acts of enclosure. By the mid-19^th century, nearly all common land in Kent had been parcelled up for private property owners.
Continue reading →

Frankly, the left has to start caring a lot more about growth, about creating wealth, attracting inward investment and kick-starting a spirit of enterprise… It is the only show in town for those who dream of a brighter future.

This, believe it or not, is the leader of British Labour Party, Keir Starmer, writing in The Observer in July this year.

I expect this kind of nonsense from the Conservative Party but for the leader of the Labour Party to parrot it so enthusiastically is utterly depressing. I guess that after 13 years in opposition, the party has decided it must rebrand itself as Tory Light if it is to have any chance of winning at the next election.
Continue reading →

It was widely assumed when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer were released on the same day, July 21 this year, that the two films would attract polar opposite audiences.

Clearly, such assumptions were wrong. And while the “double-feature” may have started off as a joke, as many have now pointed out, there are some interesting connections.

Continue reading →

When I was about ten-years-old, I had a secret hideout on the chalk escarpment above my primary school in Folkestone. My gang and I would sneak out the back gate of the school, across the fields and up the steep slope to the World War Two pillbox that was the base of our operations.

I did not really appreciate it at the time, we were too busy playing war games, but from up here you can get a distinct sense of just how connected this corner of Britain is with mainland Europe. On a sunny day, you can see the white cliffs of Cap Blanc-Nez gleaming in the distance, cliffs that are composed of exactly the same Upper Cretaceous rocks that you are standing on. If you follow the contours of the chalk ridge from my hideout to the east, and out across the water, it does not take much imagination to see how intimately the two sides of what is now the English Channel were once linked.

Continue reading →

In Season Three of Breaking Bad, Hector Salamanca brutally demonstrates to his young nephews that “family is everything.” The sentiment is reciprocated later by his nephew Lalo in Season Five of Better Call Saul when he vows revenge against Gus Fring.

Better Call Saul is not a traditional family show, but at its core it is a show about family, specifically the disintegration of the toxic McGill/Wexler family that leads to emergence of Saul Goodman. But there is also the corporate family represented by Howard Hamlin, the Cartel, and tying everyone together is ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut, a man so fiercely protective of his family that he will go to any lengths to keep them safe.

Continue reading →

I have found it surprisingly disorientating moving from Hong Kong (22.3°N), where there is little more than two hours’ variation in daylight hours over the course of the year, to southern England (51.2° N), where the longest day exceeds the shortest by nearly nine hours.

Living in a small village with little artificial light makes the change in daylight hours even more palpable, especially on the days when there is a sudden one hour jump to British Summer Time and back again to Greenwich Mean Time.

Continue reading →

In the mid-seventh century, Æthelburh, daughter of Æthelberht, the first Christian king of Kent, established one of England’s earliest Christian communities by the source of a pure chalk stream on the North Downs.

Æthelburh, or Ethelburga as she is now known locally, had been married off to King Edwin of Northumbria but after he was killed in battle (a common fate for Anglo-Saxon kings), she returned home for a life of quiet aristocratic contemplation with God. She commissioned a convent and a small stone church on the hillside directly above the spring feeding the stream in the valley below.

Continue reading →

The tiny Oxfordshire village of Ewelme* is very much off the beaten track nowadays, hidden down narrow country lanes in the Chiltern Hills, away from any major thoroughfare. But 500 years ago, it was the stage for an epic drama, the rise and fall of one of England’s most prominent families, tragically embroiled in a dynastic struggle we know today as the War of the Roses.

The clue to Ewelme’s former status is the imposing church of St Mary the Virgin on the hillside above the high street, and its adjacent almshouses and school house, a grand stone and brick complex more suited to a small town than a few scattered households.
Continue reading →