Whirl Like a Dervish

To celebrate our deliverance from delirium, we fancied a night on the tiles and chanced upon a small nightclub, very Turkish and surprisingly chic. Turkish pop filled the room and young trendy things revolved around the dance floor like whirling dervishes. There was one tiny sensory drawback though, prompting Liam drunkenly to declare ‘my gift to Turkey is deodorant.’ Foreigners were definitely in the minority, though we caught the eye of a couple of likely western ladies, one of whom was topped off with a curly ginger perm and who writhed around the dance-floor like orphan Annie’s grandmother. We sang The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow knowing full well that it always does in Asia Minor at this time of year. Happy and contented we made our way home in the wee small hours picking up a kebab on the way; a very distant relation to the slop that’s dished up in Walthamstow.

Jack Scott Imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, married, middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. I chronicled our exploits with the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad in a blog for the whole world to ignore. Then came the book which became a critically acclaimed best seller. Its success opened out a whole new career for me, firstly as an author, and now as a publisher. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not me. In June 2012, we ended our Anatolian affair and paddled back to Britain on the evening tide, washing up in Norwich, a surprising city in eastern England, then to the wilds of Norfolk as the only gays in the village. I’m sometimes nostalgic for our encounters with the hopeless, the hapless and, yes, the happy go lucky. They gave me an unexpected tale to tell and for this I thank them.

7 thoughts on “Whirl Like a Dervish”

On The Ege says:

22 July, 2011 at 10:37

That put a smile on my face this morning 🙂

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Joan Briant says:

22 July, 2011 at 12:15

What is it about body odour in this part of the world? And it’s not just the men!

Maybe they just like the natural scent of the human body? Maybe we’re the weird ones, blocking up our pores with unnatural and over-perfumed chemicals?

Mind you, after our last dolmus trip (my daughter almost passed out with the the stench), I’d vote for unnatural every time.

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Lynne says:

23 July, 2011 at 10:19

I was born in Walthamstow!! Mind you, I had escaped to the wilds of Essex before I had sampled a kebab there. Having said that, there was a Kebab van in our town in Essex and while vaguely edible, it too bore no resemblance to the kebabs here.

Before a friend came to stay last year, I told her how good the kebabs were here. We took her to Sultan Pastanesi to get her her ‘fix’ of Baklava and as we left with our precious box of heaven, we spotted a small kebab place. We sat by the side of a busy road sitting on plastic chairs, in the dark, jammed between two oleanders. I thought she would not be happy with this. Not so, -she loved the doner wrap So much that she actually requested we take her there again on her last night!!!

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1. Jack Scott says:
  
  23 July, 2011 at 13:29
  
  Ah, the sights, sounds and smells of Walthamstow. I actually liked living there. A bit run-down but friendly and real.
  
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Lynne says:

23 July, 2011 at 13:34

It’s changed a lot since I left there in 1974, LOL!!

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Ayak says:

25 July, 2011 at 13:59

Much worse than the smell of body odour here is the cheap perfume that some Turkish girls spray liberally on themselves.

Sounds like a great night out Jack x

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1. Jack Scott says:
  
  25 July, 2011 at 15:15
  
  Plenty of cheap scent in Bodrum. Some of it’s in my bathroom given our minimum wage!
  
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