When we first moved into the micro-loft we tarted up the bathroom and fitted a fancy new shower screen. But East Anglian water is so hard it almost hurts – calcifying kettles quicker than Medusa’s stare –  and I soon tired of the elbow grease needed to keep the fancy shower screen fancy. So we replaced it with an easy-wash shower curtain in electric blue. Sorted.

But what to do with the fancy shower screen? There’s not a lot of storage in the micro-loft (the clue’s in the micro) so we decided to ask the Council to take it away. In the meantime, we just slid it under our bed and forgot all about it.

Twelve months on and we returned to the micro-loft one afternoon to find the entire bedroom floor covered in glass fragments. It didn’t compute at first. You know, those times when you just can’t believe your eyes? Then the penny dropped – the fancy shower screen. It had exploded – everywhere. The biggest bang our bed had experienced in years. And the effect was almost artistic – the kind of thing that wins the Turner Prize.

It took hours to sweep up and I put my back out in the process.

The moral of this explosive story? Simple. Don’t store a fancy shower screen under your bed.

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 an indie 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.

14 thoughts on “What a Bang!”

    1. We think temperature changes over time weakened the structure somehow so the glass just spontaneously shattered. I’m sure someone with a scientific mind could explain it better. 😀

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  5. C’mon, fess up–the fancy shower screen got over stimulated living under the pit of love and imploded. 🙂

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      1. Lovely, Jack, as I hope yours was.
        Wordpress no longer notifies me when people I follow post a blog. So I then forget about searching for them. I love getting the regular notifications.
        Hope things are less crazy on your side of the pond than they have been here for the last year. I don’t see how any county could measure up to our circus of madness, hate and mayhem.
        Best to you in 2018. I can barely believe that a year with that number is here!

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      2. Yes, we had wonderfully quiet and slightly boozy day. Shame about WordPress notifications. Really pleased you remembered to search, though. Ah, the state of the World – what can I say? You’ve got Trump, we’ve got Brexit. Trying to keep calm and carry on, as the old saying goes. All the best for 2018 😀

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