"DEAR EXPEDITION members! Good morning!" The loud velvety voice of David Berg, the expedition leader, coming from a carefully concealed and un-switch-off-able intercom (like a KGB bugging device) is filling my spacious cabin.
FOR SOMEONE like me, who has spent most of his peripatetic life away from the country of his birth, there exists two distinct types of nostalgia: positive and negative. The former is a bittersweet longing for the happy moments of your past; the latter a somewhat darker attraction to (or even a near-obsession with) an environment similar to the one you grew up in - no matter how restrictive, or even sinister, it could have been.
I'M NOT SURE about you, but this writer is desperate for a bit of cheer.
In a recent BBC Radio 4 programme, the audience was asked what had saved them during the first year of the lockdowns, and it was nice to hear that several listeners - rather than crediting Netflix serials and wild Zoom parties - said "books". It justified my decision to open a 'beat-the-lockdown' virtual book club for E&T readers several months ago.
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, of all 555 medically described phobias – from ailurophobia (fear of cats) through soceraphobia (fear of parents-in-law) to pantophobia (fear of everything) and phobophobia (fear of phobias themselves) – I used to suffer from just two: acrophobia (fear of heights) and aviaphobia (fear of flying). On board a plane in the pre-Covid-19 epoch, when people were still flying happily and in large numbers, those would often merge into one 'acroaviaphobia' (my own neologism).
LET'S FACE IT: Covid-19 is not going away any time soon, and the only thing we can do under the circumstances is to keep living our lives as close to normal as possible.
IN A TRUE WHODUNIT style, we begin with a corpse in a hotel room. Or rather with the coffin containing the dead body of a hotel guest, who — after a thorough investigation by detectives — turns out to be alive, albeit fast asleep, and even snoring loudly!
WALKING TO THE IET'S London offices from Embankment Tube Station, it is easy to overlook an old-timey-looking street lantern at the bottom of Carting Lane, directly opposite the stage door of the Savoy Theatre.
Sometimes it takes extreme or unusual circumstances to make ordinary things seems wonderful. Never a truer word has been spoken, or alluded so perfectly to the fact that the ordinary is, in fact, quite wonderful. Last month, just as the weather was starting to turn, I was cycling into work across a fairly average field when I witnessed something truly wonderful — that is, something which filled me...
LET ME BEGIN in a purely Soviet manner - by contradicting myself. Yes, contrary to what I promised in my last 'After All', I won't reveal the answer to the real-life Soviet riddle of why broken light bulbs sold like hot Russian pirozhki in the late-1980s USSR. The reason is that your answers keep pouring in as I write. The number of emails with your guesses (including several correct ones!) has re...
We announce the results of our Crossed Wires challenge and name the winners, who had supplied the best/worst photos of careless electrics.
In his traditional Yuletide tale, our columnist travels through space and time: from Moscow to the beautiful Caribbean island of Nevis, where he meets the 'engineer of spices'.
IT WAS LIKE a short circuit, when a large amount of energy (readers' photos) gets released in a very a short time, with the resulting build-up of heat (readers' outrage towards careless electricians) and potential explosion (of my email box). Within days of publishing your first selection of slipshod electrics (in issue 7/8), we got nearly submerged by the flow of similar snapshots.
We announce the winners of last year's Golden Bookshelf reader competition.
Our columnist travels to Iceland in search of the Aurora Borealis and concludes that technology is not always helpful in observing natural phenomena.
Fictional versions of the Bletchley Park story have sparked interest in an aspect of wartime codebreaking that's often overlooked.
