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Finally, there is a decent film showing, An Education. I have already seen it of course but beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, so I will just have to see it again. Thank god for the Zena Palace. When anything worth watching comes to Nicosia, it often shows there. But it is never on for long, so you need to rearrange your plans and see it tonight or tomorrow at 8pm only. The other great thing about the Zena Palace (like the Cine Club at the University of Nicosia) is that it hardly ever attracts teenagers who eat loudly and talk all the way through the film – the kind of experience that puts me off going to the cinema all together whenever there is anything worth watching.

Nick Hornby’s screenplay of Lynn Barber’s memoir is great. If you love the idea of an hour and a half of London in the sixties, romance, education, posh totty, crime and a fabulously nostalgic soundtrack, then this is the film for you. Why is it called An Education? Because it is about a teenage girl whose plan to get into Oxford is side-tracked by a totally inappropriate relationship with an older man. He opens up her world and gives her a completely different, and possibly more interesting, kind of education. Carey Mulligan, doing a mild Audrey Hepburn impersonation is fab, in fact the whole thing is just pure entertainment, stylishly done.

On the subject of education, I keep seeing adverts in the papers for entrance exams for private schools here. Presumably, this is partly about advertising their exclusivity; they are hard to get into, so only for the brightest or the best? It is difficult to keep anything a secret on such a small island. Is there anyone who doesn’t know which schools have entrance exams and when they are? Most people who are interested have probably been sending their kids to private lessons for years, at vast expense, just to pass these exams. It would be great to see some adverts for their brilliant exam results, too!

A friend of mine took her five-year-old daughter to sit such an exam at a school recently. She waited nervously for two weeks to find out whether she had passed or not. What a great relief and an excuse to get the champagne out and celebrate her child’s genius when we found out that she had got in. I dread to think what would have happened if it had turned out that her child was a complete failure at the age of five! Then again that could have been an equally good excuse to have a drink. But in this case, we are all very happy for her. I notice that the school is still advertising that it has more places if anyone else wants to put their kid through this rigorous ordeal. Don’t tell me this is all just an exercise in getting bums on seats. That would be so disappointing after all that effort made to feel good about ourselves!