Archive for December, 2020
A new year means a new diary
December 31st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I have now kept a diary for 59 years and the total number of daily entries currently stands at 21,548. I have never missed a day. I have always enjoyed the routine of writing a journal, but this last year has been so challenging that it has been a part of my survival mechanism to record what is […]
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A review of the 2013 film “The Invisible Woman”
December 31st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
You could call this the invisible film since it has made little impact since its release and I only caught up with it during the latest lockdown of the 2020 pandemic. Unlike “The Invisible Man”, this is not a science fiction movie, but allegedly a true story of how the famous English writer Charles Dickens […]
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Bernardine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge: first black British women to top bestseller charts
December 30th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
This year, in twin firsts, black British women topped both the fiction and nonfiction charts. Both successes were a long time coming, but sparked a ray of hope that the Black Lives Matter movement may be creating space for new voices and stories. The novelist, playwright and poet Bernadine Evaristo, who made history with “Girl, […]
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A review of the novel “Identity” by Milan Kundera
December 30th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The only other work that I’ve read by this Czech novelist – who now writes in French – was “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being”. But that was over 30 years ago and I confess that I did not understand much of the imagery in that work. Three lockdowns into the covid crisis of 2020, I […]
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Do you miss real life meetings, seminars and conferences?
December 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Nine months before the pandemic hit the UK, at the age of 71 I finally retired. The last 17 years of my working life had been as a portfolio worker sitting on, and usually chairing, a variety of consumer bodies. So, every couple of days, I would attend a meeting or seminar or conference. I […]
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A review of the new Netflix movie “The Midnight Sky”
December 26th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Set largely in 2049, when a cataclysmic event has wiped out most of the Earth’s population, this sci-fi movie is located partly in the Arctic, where Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney who also directs) is working as a scientist, and partly in space, where the craft Aether is returning from the discovery of a habitable moon […]
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Word of the day: alas
December 26th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
According to the team behind the BBC TV show QI, the word alas has become a staple during recent parliamentary debate, having been used more than 80 times in the House of Commons in November 2020, more than any other month since 1800. According to this piece in the “Guardian” newspaper, we can thank Prime Minister Boris […]
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A review of the film “Phantom Thread”
December 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
It is 1954 in London and distinguished fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis, the only man to win three Academy Awards for Best Actor) meets a foreign waitress Alma Elson (Luxembourger Vicky Krieps) who becomes his muse, lover and wife in a tale written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (“There Will Be Blood” also […]
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What do we know about the two new Covid variants in the UK?
December 24th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The global pandemic is the stuff of nightmares. No sooner has most of the UK population moved into the toughest set of restrictions since formal lockdown than we have a mutant virus and now a second variant – apparently each more virulent than the previous strain. At such times, we need careful assessment based on […]
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Here’s what we know about the new variant of coronavirus
December 23rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I live in London, the epicentre of the new strain of the coronavirus – what is technically known as the Sars-CoV-2 lineage 1.1.7. In the “Guardian” newspaper today, there is an informative article by Sharon Peacock who is director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium and professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Cambridge. […]
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