Tales from the Coffeeshop

I MAKE a point of not following the Twitter accounts of our self-important scientists, who have become A-list celebrities of the Covid era, but a few days ago I was ...

PRESIDENTIAL elections might still be 16-plus months away, but some candidates have expressed an interest in standing, without being too definite about it. These are human rights lawyer Achilleas Demetriades, ...

SADLY, it does not look like we will be returning to the constitution of 1960 any time soon, Prez Nik’s zealous and earnest initiative failing to convince anyone, not even ...

THE REVOKING of the passports of 14 ‘officials’ of the pseudo state by the council of ministers was a gloriously meaningless decision that was enthusiastically cheered by our patriotic parties, but ...

WARNING: if you are turned off by the Cyprob I suggest you stop reading now, because today’s shop is exclusively Cyproblematic. I apologise for this, but it has been ...

BEFORE our establishment had a chance to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Akel, the comrades came up with another party anniversary. August 15, a party announcement informed, us marked the 95th ...

THE POLICE state has been showing its muscle. In the 24 hours up until Saturday morning, the cops had carried out 5,935 checks reporting 30 individuals and five businesses for violating the Covid ...

AT LEAST the streets are still SafePass-free zones, but for how much longer is anyone’s guess. For now, we will not need a safe pass to venture out on ...

DÉJÀ VU. We appeared to have engaged in some time travel in the last week and returned to the eighties when high anxiety gripped the country over the wording ...

OUR ESTABLISHMENT has put up the price of all our items in order to pay for the muscle we have hired to check that customers have a SafePass. I know ...

The prophets of doom and the Project Fear salesmen, who had mercifully disappeared from view for about a month, made a comeback in the last week, doing their best to ...

YOU ALMOST felt sorry for Prez Nik after the week he has just had. The number of public rejections he suffered would have forced lesser men to go into hiding ...

CONGRATULATIONS to Annita Demetriou for becoming not only the first woman to become president of the House but also the first Disy deputy. I do not know if she is ...

BY FAR the most irritatingly tedious part of a parliamentary election is the subsequent horse-trading of the political parties over who to elect House president. It’s a ceremonial position ...

THE ELECTION campaign may have legally ended at midnight on Friday, but some party leaders continued with some light campaigning on Saturday. It was a ‘light’ violation of the law ...

IT WAS INEVITABLE that a small part of Kyproulla would be affected by the fighting between our strategic ally Israel and our former buddies in the Palestinian territories. Rarely could ...

A RECORD 658 candidates from 15 parties/groupings will be contesting the 56 parliamentary seats up for grabs in the elections in a fortnight. Of these, I would guess that some 500, maybe more, ...

THERE is an expression that officials use to highlight the lunacy of executive decisions that are provisional, as a way of reassuring affected parties that asserts “nothing is more permanent ...

EVERYONE has been wondering how and why the government decided to impose a lockdown for two weeks starting last Monday, despite giving assurances before the announcement that there would not ...

IN KEEPING with the traditions of authoritarianism, supreme leader Prez Nik overruled his government’s decree prohibiting people from attending church services during Holy Week just a few hours after ...

IF HE DID not have the golden passports to bang on about every day or his public hero-worship of Odysseas to signal his virtue, Ethnarch Junior would have nothing to ...

A WEEK rarely goes by without the auditor-general Odysseas, Kyproulla’s self-proclaimed Elliot Ness, featuring in the news. He is second only to Prez Nik in the publicity race, in ...

LACK of perspective and a sense of proportion have always marked the way the drama queen politicians of Kyproulla view the world but they surpassed themselves last week in the ...

WE SHOULD have expected that the champions of school closures would suddenly become the biggest critics of the school closures. It turned out that the wise men and women of ...