Posted in Cinema, History, Patriotism, Pregnancy, Russia, War, tagged 9 Rota, 9th Company, Afghanistan, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Iraq, Vietnam on April 21, 2008 | No Comments »
A couple of weeks ago they showed a Russian film about the Russian Afghan war on TV called 9 Rota, or 9th Company.
You actually saw this when it first came out back in 2005 or thereabouts, but settled in to watch it anyway as you remembered it as being quite good, and in any case [...]
Posted in Britain, Culture, Drink, Family, Food, Holidays, Patriotism, Poetry, tagged Burns' Night, Robert Burns, William Topaz McGonagall on January 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
You are not in the least Scottish.
This has always been a source of faint irritation because you are able to conjure up in almost equal amounts a Welsh background, an Irish one, a Northern English past, a Southern English birthplace and a strong connection to the Channel Islands out of France. So to miss out on being [...]
Posted in Alonso, Britain, F1, Fernando Alonso, Formula 1, Formula One, Hamilton, James Allen, Language, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, Patriotism, Russia, Russian, The Rest of the World, War on August 5, 2007 | 6 Comments »
As a fan of formula one, your years in Russia were a bit frustrating.
It’s true that the races were generally available on one of the terrestrial channels, although it always seemed to take a few races for a deal for the TV rights to be struck. Missing the opening of the season every year and [...]
Posted in Britain, Communication, Culture, Culture Shock, ESC, Eurovision, Eurovision 2007, Eurovision Song Contest, Flags, Language, Lasha Tumbai, Morality, Music, Patriotism, Russia, TV, The Rest of the World, Ukraine on May 13, 2007 | 12 Comments »
You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.
In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with [...]
Posted in Britain, Education, Health, Patriotism, War on March 12, 2007 | 2 Comments »
So you decided you’d better do something towards researching current conditions for armed forces veterans as a result of the ’support the troops’ project described here.
And there you are doing the absolute minimum by rootling around the Ministry of Defence website, when you discover that there is, in fact, a Veterans’ Day. And there has been [...]
Posted in Blogging, Britain, Culture Shock, Morality, Patriotism, Russia, The Rest of the World, The USA, War on March 6, 2007 | 2 Comments »
A chap called Hobgoblin, who you came to via Charlotte and Aphra Behn’s postings on the topic, has requested movingly and persuasively that people blog about what it means to support the troops. This seems like an admirable project, even if it didn’t run headlong into your latest train of thought, so here goes.
It’s not something you feel you [...]
Posted in Books, Britain, Morality, Patriotism, Religion, Russia, The Rest of the World, The USA, War on March 3, 2007 | 8 Comments »
So there you are about to recommend a book in a thread as a result of Midnight Jester’s very thoughtful and sensible post on the nature of responsibility in war. Suddenly you realise that you have done this so frequently over the last few years that rather than wear out the keyboard and encourage people to read it one at [...]
Posted in Britain, Culture Shock, Education, Feminism, Footwear, Morality, Patriotism, Religion, TV, The Rest of the World, Work on February 1, 2007 | 3 Comments »
You are no longer convinced about the value of the concept of equality.
This is mainly because there’s a common misconception that in order to be equal, things have to be the same.
You can claim until you are blue in the face and ready to stick a fork in someone’s eye that, say, feminism - to take a concept entirely at [...]
Posted in Architecture, Britain, Education, Language, Monarchy, Patriotism, Sightseeing, Teenagers, Work on December 31, 2006 | 8 Comments »
The first time you went to Windsor Castle was with a bunch of foreign teenagers you were shepherding about as part of your job on an EFL summer school.
Your most abiding memory was of reeling out of the ticket office in shock at the amount of money you had just forked over for your group [...]
Posted in Architecture, Culture Shock, Music, Patriotism, Russia, Sightseeing on November 29, 2006 | No Comments »
Your thing for Russian composers predates and actually has nothing to do with the fact that you ended up spending seven years in Russia, so every now and again you fail miserably to connect Russian composers with their country of origin. Which is why, when you were back in the USSR at a time when the world - well, [...]
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