Archive for the ‘My life & thoughts’ Category
Holiday in Central Asia (3): welcome to Kazakhstan
September 4th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Kazakhstan is about the size of Western Europe and, as a single entity with defined borders, it was an invention of the Soviet regime in the 1920s. During the Cold War, the USSR decided that the republic was so empty and remote that they used it as the chief nuclear bomb testing ground. When the […]
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Holiday in Central Asia (2): getting there
September 4th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
I knew that this trip would be challenging but I didn’t expect the challenges to begin before we even reached the region. However, the evening before departure, we were notified that our UK Tour Manager had just gone down with covid so that we would be dependent solely on local guides. On Day 1 of […]
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Holiday in Central Asia (1): introduction
September 2nd, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have had many opportunities to travel and I have visited a total of 80 countries all around the world. But this trip – organised by the travel company Voyages Jules Verne (VJV) – is different. It is not my furthest or my longest trip: that would be […]
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Would you fly with Ethiopian Airlines?
August 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
There is an amazing story that two pilots with Ethiopian Airlines fell asleep at 37,000ft (11,000m), missing an airport runway before waking to land the aircraft safely. The news raises the question would you fly with this airline? Well, I did – six times in two weeks as you will see from this account of […]
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How would you like to die?
August 11th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
It was just over 50 years ago but I still remember it. I was in my early 20s and very active politically in the Labour Party. I had represented my Constituency Labour Party at the Labour Party Annual Conference and I went round all the wards giving my report of the event. This particular meeting […]
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The tragedy of Sri Lanka
July 9th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
For months now, Sri Lanka has been in the grip of an economic crisis that has devastated the country and utterly impoverished most of its citizens. The latest news is that the Presidential Palace has been stormed and the Prime Minister’s home has been burned down. It is something of a joke among my family […]
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The blog is back. Roger that.
July 7th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
About six weeks ago, I found that I could no longer post new items on this blog. It proved to be a really difficult issue that my IT mate Gary worked on a lot. But now he’s cracked it – and I’m back. Many, many thanks Gary. This is is the longest that I’ve not […]
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A holiday in the Balkans: Kosovo, Albania & North Macedonia
May 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
I’ve just returned from a most enjoyable week’s holiday in the Balkans visiting three small states in the region. You might have been reading my daily blog postings of the trip. However, I’ve now drawn all the blog postings together into a single narrative for my web site which you can read here.
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Day seven in the Balkans
May 17th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The last day of our trip (day seven) was the least challenging since it was the shortest and all around or in Pristina. Setting off at the (to us) late hour of 10 am, it was only a 20 minute drive to the site of the Battle of Kosovo which has been called “the cradle […]
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Day six in the Balkans
May 16th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Day six – the penultimate one – and how did it go? We left our hotel in Skopje at 9 am and arrived at our hotel in Pristina at 6.20 pm and, in the intervening nine or so hours, we visited four locations in two countries in excellent weather (26C). Starting the day with […]
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