Apparently between 8th of June and 21st of June 1985 my brother and I discussed boring stuff on the phone. I know this from a section of my parents Securitate file, which was handed to us in 2003. Our home phone was bugged, and some chap listened in on our…

When I was a private in the Romanian army my family name was not Sonea but my maiden name which was very long, rare and unpronounceable even for Romanians. I use Sonea here for brevity. I was a private in the Romanian Army for a brief period in ’89 and…

If there was a time when the banking APIs for branches and ATMs would have been needed it was now, during lockdown. Before going into the details of why it is so, you have to know a few things: Open Banking, the much envied UK initiative to establish industry wide…

Mentality is a crow in a cage Minds are fragile birds Minds needs to grow but war is the cage Voices are tuned out by silent screams Does war mean dead age? Streets are ruins of fear We need not tell the children it is an honour to die in…

As usual, what I write here is a personal story. Take it as such. I tried not to write anymore about the incredible similarities between Romania’s ’89 and UK’s ’16. I wrote before about the coup, the New Man, Newspeak, or being again an “enemy of the people”. It is…

This is the third story in the “So what?” series of stories which have either inspired my research this year or which I discovered through my research. For the full report on measuring access to banking in the UK, go here. #SoWhat 1. “For 70 years old, wheelchair bound Tim…

This is the second story in the “So what?” series of stories which have either inspired my research this year or which I discovered through my research. For the full report on measuring access to banking in the UK, go here. Story 1. “For 70 years old, wheelchair bound Tim…

This is the first in a series of “So what?” stories which have either inspired my research this year or which I discovered through my research. For the full report go here. Consider Tim. He is in his 70s and lives in retirement accommodation with his wife. He is wheelchair…

The past two years and a half since the UK referendum in June 2016 have been a never-ending source of “triggering” events. More precisely, I refer to how the UK government’s actions and their relentless drive to concentrate all the power in their hands took me back again and again…