Archive for February, 2015
Our Ethiopian odyssey (4): Addis Ababa
February 8th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Day 1 (Saturday) of our trip was in fact essentially just a nighttime flight from London Heathrow airport to Addis Ababa Bole airport. All our flights – both external and internal – are with Ethiopian Airlines. This is the largest and most profitable airline in Africa and has recently been declared “African airline of the […]
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Our Ethiopian Odyssey (3): a few introductory facts and figures
February 7th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
So much for the ancient history of Ethiopia. What about modern times? The recent history of Ethiopia has involved the Derg socialist revolution and ‘the red terror’ (in 1974-75, between 100,000-500,000 were murdered), invasions (by Somalia in 1977 and of Somalia in 2006), famines (most infamously in 1984-85 when between 400,000-million died), and full scale […]
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Our Ethiopian Odyssey (2): why we are going there
February 6th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
So why are we going to Ethiopia? Well, besides the fact that we love to visit different countries and experience different cultures and we have already been to so many of the more popular destinations, Ethiopia has a long history, so mysterious as to be almost mystical: The earliest known hominine fossils come from the […]
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Our Ethiopian Odyssey (1): why on earth go there?
February 5th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Our latest trip – an organised tour with Cox & Kings – is to the African nation of Ethiopia and some of our family and friends have wondered why we would chose such an obscure country for a holiday. We must say that, after we had booked the trip and consulted our local surgery on […]
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How much of China was occupied by Japan in World War Two?
February 4th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
I’ve now attended four lectures on my City Lit course on Chinese history. The fourth lecture – which will be my last of the six because I’m off to Ethiopia – covered events during the Second World War. I knew that Japan occupied Manchuria before the war but I did not realise how large that […]
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Why the world needs water that is clean and affordable
February 3rd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
For the last three years, I have chaired the Customer Challenge Group for a regional water company in the UK (South East Water) so, more than ever, I have been aware that clean and affordable water is vital to all communities both in the UK and around the world. But, according to the latest IFC […]
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All four copies of Magna Carta brought together for just three days
February 2nd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Today the only remaining original copies of Magna Carta, one of the world’s most enduringly influential documents, are to be brought together for the first and probably only time. Two copies in the British Library’s collection will be joined by one from Lincoln Cathedral and one from Salisbury Cathedral to mark the 800th anniversary of […]
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What is the only place name in Britain with an an exclamation mark?
February 1st, 2015 by Roger Darlington
It is Westward Ho! and it is named after a novel by Charles Kingsley. You can learn more here.
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