Reviews of two Julie Delpy films

October 11th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

I’m a big fan of the French actress Julie Delpy who is also both a film director and scriptwriter.

I recently saw “2 Days In Paris” [my review here] in which she performs all three roles and I have now seen the sequel “2 Days In New York” [my review here].

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How fairly is global wealth distributed among the world’s citizens?

October 10th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

“Our estimates for mid-2013 indicate that once debts have been subtracted, an adult requires just USD 4,000 in assets to be in the wealthiest half of world citizens. However, a person needs at least USD 75,000 to be a member of the top 10% of global wealth holders, and USD 753,000 to belong to the top 1%. Taken together, the bottom half of the global population own less than 1% of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest 10% hold 86% of the world’s wealth, and the top 1% alone account for 46% of global assets.”

This is an extract from this year’s “Global Wealth Report” produced by the Credit Suisse Research Institute.

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Congratulations to Alice Munro on her Nobel Prize

October 10th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

I am delighted by the news that the Canadian author Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, partly because i have enjoyed her writing [see my review of her collection of short stories in “Runaway” here] and partly because it is a celebration of the art of the short story [see my own 30 efforts here].

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A review of the film “Thanks For Sharing”

October 9th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

While I was away in Bucharest, I saw the new film “Thanks For Sharing”. I thought it was a rom-com but I was not quite right. Read my review here.

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Ruminations on Romania (1): recent history

October 8th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

  • In 1861, the United Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia was created.
  •  At the National History Museum, we saw a special exhibition to mark the centenary of the peace of Bucharest in 1913. Apparently this treaty ended the Second Balkan War. The First Balkan War of 1912-13 involved the Balkan League of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria expelling the Ottoman Empire from its European territories, while the Second Balkan War of 1913 saw Bulgaria attacking its neighbours Serbia and Greece because it was dissatisfied with the territorial allocation from the previous war.
  •  In the First World War, Romania fought with the Entente against the Hungarians and Germans. The resultant Romanian state was almost twice the size of what is currently Romania. In the 1930 census of Greater Romania, 757,000 (4.2%) were classified as Jews.
  •  In the Second World War, most of Transylvania was awarded to Hungary under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact while the rest of the country became a quasi-German protectorate.
  •  During the war, in the territories administered by the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, over 280,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were exterminated
  •  Towards the end of the war, the Soviet Union occupied Romania and it became a communist state.
  •  The revolution that overthrew communism in Romania came later and was bloodier than the other revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. The rising occurred in December, some 1100 died, and on Christmas Day the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were both executed by firing squad.
  •  In the first six years after the revolution, the political system in Romania was dominated by former communist turned nationalist Ion Iliescu.
  •  In 2007, Romania joined the European Union (at the same time as Bulgaria).

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Ruminations on Romania (2): people and politics

October 8th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

  • The population of Romania is around 20 million. There are two significant ethnic minorities: Hungarians and Roma. Less than 8,000 Jews remain in the country.
  •  The population of the capital Bucharest is almost 2 million.  There are now only 2,500 Jews and a mere two functioning synagogues in the capital.
  •  Romanian is a Romance language like Italian, French and Spanish, so my sister Silvia – who speaks these three languages – was fascinated by the similarities and differences and surprised at how useful her Spanish was in Bucharest.
  •  More people smoke in Romania than in the UK. Smoking is still allowed in cafés and restaurants.
  •  Our taxi drivers never seemed to know where the museums we wanted to visit were located and clearly had never heard of the Jewish Museum.  It seems that they are used to dealing with business visitors only.
  •  When we went to the cinema, we found the audience quite irritating because there was rustling of food, lots of talking, speaking on mobiles, and laughter at inappropriate times.
  •  The current President of Romania is Traian Basescu who will complete his second term next year when he will have to step down. He is a controversial figure and has twice been the subject of a referendum seeking (unsuccessfully) to force him to resign.
  •  The current prime Minister of Romania is Victor Ponta who is in permanent conflict with President Basescu. He is leader of the Social Democratic Party and young (in his 30s).
  •  We were told that the vast majority of Romanian politicians do not go into politics for ideological reasons but for the power and the money. Certainly, independent observers rank Romania as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe.
  •  The economic growth rate is expected to be 2.2% for 2013.
  •  The official unemployment rate is 7.5% but it was suggested to us that the real rate was more like 20%.
  •  We had a two hour conversation with the president of one of the five national trade union centres in Romania.  Dumitru Costin heads the Blocul National Sindical (BNS) which has around 350,000 members out of the approximately 2.25 million trade union members in the country (a unionisation rate of around half of the working population of about 4.5 million).
  •  We had a one hour conversation with Mircea, the brother of a Romanian friend of mine in London. Fascinatingly, his father was “a honest communist”, one who joined the party in the early 1920s and was imprisoned for his beliefs. Prior to the advent of Ceausescu, he was an ambassador in Argentina, Turkey and China/North Vietnam.

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Ruminations on Romania (3): our time in Bucharest

October 8th, 2013 by Roger Darlington

  • Our guide book – the Thomas Cook pocket guide – admitted: “even its fiercest advocate would readily admit that when taken at face value Bucharest is not Europe’s most appealing capital”. Between the world wars, Bucharest was known as “the Paris of the East” but most of the features that earned the city this appellation were destroyed during the communist era.
  • Much of the inner city today is pretty grim – if that is not a contradiction in terms – with many buildings in a dilapidated state and graffiti is ubiquitous.  However, when the Romanian relative of a British friend drove us to the north of the city (to visit the Village Museum), we were impressed by the attractive villas and embassies in that part of the capital (which also has its version of the Arc de Triomphe).
  • We stayed in the Athenee Hilton Hotel which the guide book describes as “unquestionably the best hotel in the city”. It was good – but not that good. It was built in 1912 in the secessionist style and overlooks Revolution Square.
  • Although it was the beginning of October, the weather was clear and sunny if crisp (around 10C).
  • However, we did experience an earthquake. My sister Silvia told me on Sunday morning that she had woken in the early morning when her bed jolted. I joked that either she had had a dream or there was a poltergeist but, in fact, the news in the morning confirmed that at 4.37 am there had been an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale.  In 1977, some 1,500 people were killed in Bucharest as a result of a severe earthquake.
  • Bucharest has no real centre and virtually no old town. Lipscani is the one street in what was old Bucharest that is striving to create an atmosphere with cafés, restaurants and clubs, but even the local events guide describes it as “a work in progress”.
  • We visited several museums: the National History Museum, the Village Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust Museum and the National Art Gallery.
  • We managed to take a movie, since in Romania all foreign languages films are shown in the original with sub titles. We saw “Thanks For Sharing”.
  • The most ‘interesting’ monument in Bucharest is that commemorating the victims of the revolution which appropriately enough is located in Revolution Square. The official title of the monument is the Memorial of Rebirth. It is supposed to represent freedom breaking through barbed wire but locals say it looks more like an olive on a cocktail stick.



    • Freedom and barbed wire
    or olive and cocktail stick?

  • In our guide book, there was a struggle to list the top 10 features of Bucharest, so one item in the list was not a place but a food: a type of bagel calked covrigi (there are shops that sell nothing else). We bought one and found it to be delicious.
  • Like many parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the spread of incomes and living standards is now enormous and the cheap and the expensive co-exist side by side. For 10 lei (about £2), one can take a taxi half way across Bucharest or buy a hand-made chocolate from France – both of which we did. We went to the cinema at a multiplex in the Bucharest Mall which is full of shops selling the most expensive designer goods side by side with such fast food outlets as McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.

Footnote: Since there was fog at Heathrow, we were not able to board our return flight at Bucharest until two hours after the scheduled departure time. Then, a dent in the fuselage was discovered and it took another two and quarter hours before we were given permission to take off. So a flight of three hours began over four hours later than planned.

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A weekend in Bucharest

October 3rd, 2013 by Roger Darlington

I’m about to go on my annual break with my sister. We like to go somewhere that neither of us has visited before, so this year – our seventh such break – we are off to Bucharest for a weekend.

This means that I won’t be blogging for a few days. So please look around my site – you’ll find lots to read while I’m away.

And I’ll be back soon with some ruminations on Romania.

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Does everything happen for a reason or is it all just one big set of coincidences?

October 3rd, 2013 by Roger Darlington

This is the philosophical conundrum at the heart of a new novel called “The Coincidence Authority”. I’ve just finished reading it and you can check out my review here.

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Which railway station has a platform zero and a platform nine and three-quarters?

October 2nd, 2013 by Roger Darlington

It’s Kings Cross station in central London which I used today to catch a train to Cambridge. I was visiting the Internet Watch Foundation which I chaired from 2000-2005 for a catch-up on their work.

I guess the Platform 0 has resulted from the addition of a platform before Platform 1. Platform 9 3/4 is not a real platform but a photo opportunity for fans of Harry Potter.



A Harry Potter fan prepares to board the train
to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

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