Author: Leigh Banks

…Well, I’m stuck here gents, in the last Starbucks at the World’s End. I’m drinking hallucinogenic brandy in my cappuccino. This is a very strange posting indeed. God, I’m bored. Just me, Starbucks, hallucinogenic brandy and these snow-capped mountains. I’m thousands of miles away from anywhere anybody’s ever heard of. Borjomi! Yep, I’ve never heard… Continue reading Wish I was there… with Harry, Jim and Batman

A good friend of ours, Roman Vitkovsky, is quite famous … he made a break into Hollywood sometime ago and his music has appeared in big movies. He also gigs with a top Slovak band … But he is in fact a real, good old fashioned travelling troubadour who is known to make journeys across… Continue reading Heart-felt coronavirus song from travelling troubadour who recorded it on his phone

Journalist, writer and broadcaster Leigh G Banks is stranded in Slovakia by the coronavirus crisis … fellow broadcaster Rodney Hearth can’t get home either and is ‘trapped’ in an apartment in Portugal. Here they talk about how it feels to be isolated from your homeland and families, ponder the future and the catastrophes which loom… Continue reading Trapped! What it is like to be in lock-down in a foreign land

The coronavirus crisis is bringing opportunities for positive change that the whole world can’t afford to squander, say the smiley people involved in the eighth annual World Happiness Report. The report ranks countries according to their happiness quota and looks at crucial clues to well-being. “These will help in the weeks and months of the… Continue reading Happiness is a virus too – read this for a smile

What can the NHS do to help victims of coronavirus as the UK goes in to so-called lockdown? Indeed what can the rest of the world do to help people while scientists try to come up with a vaccine? Is it all really, isolation, face masks, panic buying, collapsing currencies and ravaged businesses … or… Continue reading Are old cures key to the future as we go into lockdown?

As war planes flew overhead and loved ones faced the legalised murder of war, Geraldo and his world famous dance band took to the crackling airwaves with We All Must Stick Together. The sheet music sold in millions across the world and the song went across the dance halls of war-torn Britain, almost like a… Continue reading Coronavirus – let’s face the music and dance

Suddenly it became real in Poprad … the clarion cry from the powers that be came down demanding we wear face masks in public places. And to make it happen, security guards at supermarkets began intimidating like pretend secret police officers if somebody wasn’t wearing one. Within minutes coronavirus changed the face of this beautiful… Continue reading Virus… step back in time to a dystopian world of masks, ‘secret police’ and empty shelves

Well, it looks like baked beans, beer and box-sets for the foreseeable as the climes of this foreign land we now call home put life on hold. The Slovak government has ordered a 14-day ban on all cultural, sporting – and many other – events to avoid the spread of coronavirus. Twelve cases of the… Continue reading How Covid-19 is shutting down central Europe in the new ‘cold’ war

It is being predicted that the slide affect (sorry, side affect) of corona-virus – the wholesale going-down-the-pan of world sanity – will come to an end next Tuesday. It’s all just been a splash in the pan as far as some marketing gurus are concerned – particularly that lavatorial madness of stockpiling toilet rolls! Yes,… Continue reading Is the world actually sh*tting itself or is panic buying toilet rolls just for *rs*holes?