FEAST OR FAMINE

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

In the treasury, the basement of the National Museum of Georgia, there is an ancient incense burner, found at the Zghuderi archaelogical site. It is dated between the 1st-4th centuries AD – the Late Classical Period.  MARTINA NICOLLS   is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author   of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom   (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

A week ago I wrote about my father’s slide rule – the one he gave me: the one he used as a civil engineer. Today my uncle sent me a 1963 photograph of my father, at work, using his slide rule – the one he gave me. I did not know this photograph existed. My uncle added a photograph of his own collection of slide rules (below). The way we were: the slide rule (blog, October 5, 2015) My father gave me my first, and only, slide rule. It was a big deal back then. I was in the last year of high school, and my father – a civil engineer – proudly gave me, his daughter, his work slide rule because I was the only one in the family going onto university to study mathematics. It was like getting a car! Calculators weren’t around then, but I did have an abacus. With an abacus and a slide rule I could do anything! I am reminded of my first slide rule because I saw one on display in a museum recently. It was a Russian slide rule. Mine was a ...

When I saw an iconic royal red British telephone booth in Paris – in someone’s backyard – I wondered whether telephone booths still exist. The telephone booth – or phone box – was a public pay booth for making telephone calls. They were positioned in strategic places around cities in accessible locations. The most iconic telephone booths were the prolific red boxes of England, the one in which mild-mannered Clark Kent changed clothes to become Superman, and the one in the 2002 American movie Phone Booth where actor Colin Farrell is held hostage. The first British telephone booth, developed by George A. Long, was installed in London in 1903 near the Grand Central Railway. Germany claims to have had the first telephone booth in Berlin in 1881. The decline started in the 1970s and was most rapid in the 1990s with the advent of mobile phones. The original telephone booths required coins, but many of the remaining ones take coins and cards – credit, debit, pre-paid cards, or...

Spotted in the Old City, Tbilisi, Georgia, in an office supply store on February 17, 2011. The women  were adding up the price list on the abacus (which pre-dates the computer, the calculator, and the slide rule).

  Spotted in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in November 2013, the man was replacing the inked (carbon) ribbon that winds on a spool. MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).