To celebrate the launch of Summertime Publishing’s little sister, Springtime Books, we’ve got a few paperbacks to give away on Goodreads, the web’s most influential book site. It’s our way to get the party started. I ask for nothing in return but, if you win, a fair and honest review is always welcome. The authors would be chuffed. Click on the image to find out more and the chance to enter. Best of luck.
In my last post, I took a meander down memory lane and hinted that change was afoot. Well, my news is that I’m now a publisher, a bone fide purveyor of the written word. No, I haven’t bought out HarperCollins or picked up a Penguin. I’ve gone into partnership with Jo Parfitt, she who is the force of nature behind Summertime Publishing and Jane Dean, a super-talented eagle-eyed editor with a big red pen. The new publishing venture is called Springtime Books, and you’ll see that we have a few books on the books already.
Summertime Publishing has been the expert in expat books for years. From now on, Summertime will specialise in expatriate families and third culture kids, while Springtime will focus on travel and the expat experience in general. We’ve even got a snazzy little video to promote our new enterprise.
Are you a current or former expat with something fresh to say about expatriate life? If so, it could be your time to shine.
And that’s not all. Today’s also the day Springtime publishes its newest title, Passage of the Stork, Delivering the Soul from the rather wonderful Madeleine Lenagh. Click on the book image to find out more.
Now, I’d wager you thought that this post was going to be about the weather. You did, didn’t you?
I’ve always worked, even in the loosest sense of the word. When my dear old dad popped his clogs way too early, my mother lost her husband, her livelihood and her home in one fatal blow. I resolved not be a burden and dropped out of sixth form college to get a job. I was seventeen.
My first brush with gainful employment was at a meat importing company near Smithfield Market in the City of London. It was a tedious gig and some days it sent me to sleep – literally. In those days, I was far too fond of sowing my wild oats. My employers were very forgiving but we both knew it wasn’t a marriage made in bovine heaven.
Next up, flogging light bulbs to the rich and famous in Habitat, a trendy home store on London’s infamous King’s Road (well, it was infamous back in the day). Felicity Kendall was always sweet and Lionel Blair was always vile. My partner in crime was an eccentric old Chelsea girl who had the look of Margaret Lockwood and drove a battered Citroen 2CV. As a pretty boy with a wandering eye, I collected phone numbers on credit card slips and tripped the light fantastic. They were the heady days of a deliciously misspent youth: ‘Days on the tills and nights on the tiles…’ as I wrote in Perking the Pansies (that’s my first book by the way. Not a bad read so they say). Eventually, I abandoned the Lighting Department for the counting house and rose to the rank of Chief Cashier. Cooking the books took all of half a day and I soon tired of flicking the abacus and twiddling my thumbs.
A life in the New World beckoned. I threw caution to the wind and boarded a Freddie Laker flight to the good old U.S of A – a one-way ticket to the land of the free and the promiscuous. I planned to stay and wallow but after a few months spreading the love in Washington DC, I became homesick. Before long I was flying back across the Pond to a land being ravaged by rampant Thatcherism. Imagine if I had I stayed the course. I could be a Yankee citizen with an irritating mid-Atlantic accent and a completely different tale to bore you with.
The Iron Lady would have approved of my next position – credit controller at Citibank, trying to extract cash from the cashless. It was a soulless task. As a bleeding-heart liberal, my face was never going to fit and I jumped ship before I went under. Besides, it was time for me to grow up and get a mortgage. I got a proper job with a pension attached at the council. This wasn’t any old council, mind. Oh no, we’re talking the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a beneficent parish with the richest real estate on the planet and enough reserves to bail out Greece. More through luck than judgement, I crawled up the career ladder and become quite important with a fat budget and a hundred people to boss about. But then I met Liam and he turned my head with dreams of hazy, lazy days in the sun. I was seduced. We liquidated our assets, upped sticks and lived the dream for a time. It was the best thing I ever did, and we did it for as long as we could.
And now we’re back on home turf. Why? Well, you’ll have to read the sequel to find out. We soon looked for ways to pass the long samey days, anything to avoid the empty calories of daytime TV. Quite by chance, Turkey turned me into a writer and new skills bring new opportunities. What are they? Find out more in a day or so…
With the remorseless horror in the Middle East being played out on our screens every day at 6pm, it’s hard to make sense of the senseless. The baffling case of the school girls who have allegedly travelled to Syria to become brides of ISIS only adds to my bewilderment. Sometimes, it takes humour to wade through the treacle – the British funny bone is a cultural characteristic forged by wartime adversity and a healthy disrespect for the respectable. Cue a recent Facebook exchange with a Bodrum Belle of my acquaintance.
“Hello, Jack, now where’s this new book of yours? Got myself a little girlie spa holiday booked to get away from frozen Bodrum. I need something to read so get printing. Bodrum is seriously cold this winter. Roll on spring. Me and a few gals are off to Egypt, and very cheap it is too, all 5 star inclusive tackiness. Why so cheap? Because the British Government says it’s unsafe and advises not to go. Well that doesn’t hold these gals down. If we do get taken as Jihadi brides, at least we can say we’re used to the heat.”
“Hello, love. The book’s with the designer. It’s not just thrown together, you know. Make sure you pack some sheets – just in case you need to wrap yourself in polycotton for the wedding. You’ll forgive me if I turn down the invitation to your nuptials…”
When I first started this blogging lark way back in 2010, I began to attract cyber-friends from across the blogosphere. Yankee repat, Charles Ayres, was one of them. Right from the off, Charles was a great supporter of my literary pretensions (blog and book) and was one of the first to review Perking the Pansies. He’s one of those virtual pals I know I would enjoy getting drunk with in the real world.
Charles published his own expat story, Impossibly Glamorous in 2013 and has now followed this up with a sequel, ‘San Francisco Daddy’ under the name Charles St Anthony (he thinks it sounds like a posh Yves Saint Laurent scent; it reminds me of a cheap hairdresser I once dallied with). Here’s what I made of it…
Charles St Anthony used to be big in Japan. That was until that earthquake in 2011 which proved that Mother Nature was the bigger bitch. So what did Charles do? Kicked off his heels and chucked himself down the evacuation slide. Inexplicably drawn to tectonic faults, he parachuted into San Francisco. While waiting for the Next Big One, he wrote his brilliant autobiography, Impossibly Glamorous, keeping the wolves from the door with a series of less than glamorous dead end jobs. Gay men never grow old they just grow body hair and Charles joined the party by ditching the waxing and growing the whiskers. Transformed into a ‘bear’, he embarked on a series of romantic liaisons as dead end as the dead end jobs. San Francisco Daddy: One Gay Man’s Chronicle of His Adventures in Life and Love, is Charles’ brutally honest account of his tales of the city. Charles has lost none of his well-honed observational skills or self-deprecating caustic wit. The book is a delight to read. Did Charles land the dream job and the dream man in the end? You’ll have to download San Francisco Daddy to find out.
Check out San Francisco Daddy on…
2014 has been quite a year for us and our brethren…
Okay, okay, I tried to make it scan to the tune of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ but failed miserably. Liam’s the musical one, not me. With such a helter-skelter year, I guess it’s it’s no wonder I didn’t get the second book out in time for the festive rush. The good news (or bad news, depending on your point of view) is that it’s with my publisher and will be out in the new year. Liam is hyperventilating at the prospect – my fiercest critic seems to like it. The blog’s done brisk business too with over ninety posts. Here are the top ten hits for 2014 – the usual diet of Turkish delights, smut, divine retribution, emigrey nonsense, men in women’s clothes, internet curios, fine guides and the love that dare not speak its name. I’m nothing if not predictable.
There is Bodrum and Then There is Turkey | The Biggest Cock in Town | The Great Flood | | Gumusluk Travel Guide | Pantigate | The Love Letter | Istanbul Pride 2014 | Desperately Seeking Doreen | Bearded Men in Dresses | Norwich-Over-the-Water
This was the most popular image for 2014. I can’t think why.
Here’s looking ahead to more pansy adventures in 2015. And the Man Booker Prize. And oh, a few less real life medical dramas would be nice. Happy New Year to one and all.
After several lean years, it seems that we Brits may be falling in love with Turkey all over again. You know things are on the up when the London Evening Standard Property Supplement runs a feature on the Bodrum Peninsula with our old cruising ground, Yalıkavak, and its fancy new marina, getting a special mention. This how I described our first glimpse of the whitewashed town in my first book, Perking the Pansies, Jack and Liam move to Turkey
As we breached the brow of the hill, we caught our first picture postcard glimpse of Yalıkavak shimmering at the end of a lush valley below like randomly scattered sugar cubes on an overgrown lawn.
Chapter 3, Back to the Future
These days the sugar cubes are tumbling over every hill and, at the top end of the market, this is what you can get:
It’s the kind of dream home that costs a whole lot more than the misleading £75,000 quoted in the ad. Also, what the agents don’t tell you (and why would they?) is that if you keep all your doors and windows open after sunset, you’ll get eaten alive by mozzies. Just so you know.
Hot of the press from the splendid people at InterNations is Expat Insider 2014, one of the largest global surveys of everyday life and personal happiness in the expat forest. As Turkey features in the top twenty destinations, it gets its own country profile. As well as the usual reasons for settling in Turkey (climate, low crime rate, family friendly environment, blah, blah), 13% of survey respondents moved there for love. Here we go again, all those Shirley Valentines being laid at low tide. It’s a bit of pet subject here at Pansy HQ and, unsurprisingly, is a recurrent theme in my new book, Turkey Street. Just in case you think it’s just me being smug as usual, fear not, I get my comeuppance and there’s a glimmer of redemption at the end.
Plucked, banged then blown out when the cash dried up, the orchestra of ladies kept on coming anyway, scouting Turkey’s resorts for love and orgasms.
Chapter 3 – Home Alone
‘Look, when your boat’s holed beneath the waterline, head for dry land. It’s no use bobbing about in the water like flotsam just because the sea is warm…’
Chapter 8 – The Sisterhood
As we supped our cocktails and nibbled the cheesy balls, the tragedy of Deborah’s tale was concluded in all its tawdry detail. With her husband scattered over the playing fields of Eton, Deborah sold the bistro, moved to Turkey and drowned her sorrows by jumping on top of any would-be gigolo who sailed past her patio. The boys got younger as she got older and she clung to the VOMIT lifeboat until her nails bled.
Chapter 15 – Happy Birthday Uncle Sam
‘Anyway, I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Jack Scott. About the VOMIT thing on your blog. You’ve got us wrong. We’re not all victims or washed up old slappers. And we don’t all chase pretty boys and drop our drawers at the first smile.’
And finally…
‘The Sisterhood, Jack?’ asked Doc.
‘Ex-VOMITs. Ladies who learn.’
‘That works for me.’
Chapter 31 – The Ringing of the Belles
I’m relieved to write that Turkey Street has finally gone off to my publisher for knocking into shape. Expect an early 2015 release. Life just gets in the way.
My tuppence-worth contribution to Roving Jay’s latest travel book, The Gümüslük Travel Guide, the first of an in-depth series about the Bodrum Peninsula from a lady in the know:
One sultry autumn afternoon, Liam and I rode the dolly to Gümüslük, a pretty picture-postcard village set among the ruins of the ancient Carian city of Myndos. This was a well-trodden excursion for us, a frequent and welcome distraction from bustling Bodrum Town. As a protected archaeological site, Gümüslük had mercifully been saved from the rampant over-development that afflicted much of Bodrum Peninsula.
As we bussed along the meandering heat-cracked road, I imagined how different the scenery must have been before the mad march of little white boxes up hill and down dale. Stunning, I was sure. Nevertheless, the hinterland surrounding Gümüslük still managed to impress; snapshot glimpses of pine-smothered hills and Tiffany blue waters cast a beguiling spell. We arrived at the small otogar perched above the village and meandered down the hill to the rows of craft stalls peddling multi-coloured knick-knacks, eclectic artwork and small pieces of fine silverware. Liam liked to potter, umming and ahhing at each stall and chatting to the hawkers. Sometimes he even bought a trinket or two. Just ahead of us, the glassy harbour gleamed beyond the quay and drew us to the water’s edge. The sheltered anchorage has been a sailors’ safe haven for millennia. This is where Julius Caesar’s chief assassins, Brutus and Cassius, moored their galleys during the ensuing punch-up with Mark Antony, something that even gets a mention in the famous Shakespearian tragedy.
A late lunch was on the menu. We’d long since learned to avoid the overpriced identikit fish restaurants with their press-ganging waiters reeling in the catch of the day. As emigreys on a fixed income, we left the fishy eateries that lined the bay to unsuspecting tourists and well-heeled Istanbulers who equated price with quality. Our destination was our favourite low-cost lokanta, a ramshackle kind of place with mismatched furniture and wipe-down table cloths. Dalgiç Restaurant was set off the main drag and served our favourite fast food – freshly prepared gözleme – delicious savoury rolled pastries laced with a tasty selection of meat, cheese or vegetable fillings. Our effervescent patron attended to our needs out front while his pantaloon’d missus rolled, chopped and griddled out back. The flat-bread feast was washed down with a ripe bottle of red, a cut above the ancient Myndoan plonk that was reputably mixed with sea water and caused unending flatulence. Sated, replenished and wine-mellowed, we wandered down to the headland and waded across the partially sunken causeway (submerged by a long forgotten earthquake) to Rabbit Island. Here, as was our tradition, we tumbled over antique stones*, bunny spotted and settled down on a grassy ledge to witness one of the most sublime sunsets the Aegean has on offer.
*Sadly for visitors, Rabbit Island is off limits to waders due to renewed archaeological interest. Don’t let this put you off. The sunsets are gorgeous from every angle in Gümüslük.
After I survived the surgeon’s knife, I was told to put my feet up and let nature do the healing so I’ve been doing the bare minimum to keep the wheels on the bus of Jack Scott enterprises. I must admit, my lolling about on the sofa has involved a fair amount of daytime TV – a thin diet of magazine programmes, flashy quiz shows, racy gossip, silly soaps, mindless vox pop, meagre news and convoluted whodunnits. It’s all been quite soporific and great for helping me catch up on my sleep. This healing lark is so exhausting.
Occasionally though, a classic grabs my attention and holds it for the duration. Such is the 1974 film version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with a stellar ensemble headed by Albert Finney in the role of Hercule Poirot, Ms Christie’s fey and fussy Belgian detective. I’ve seen the movie loads of times. It’s hugely OTT and I can only assume that the cast laid down bets during the first read-through on who could ham it up the most. My vote goes to Wendy Hiller as the ageing Russian princess, all lacy widow’s weaves and truly dreadful Romanov accent. She would have given the Bolshies a run for their money. Sadly, along with Dame Wendy, most of the players are now dearly departed – Anthony Perkins, Ingrid Bergman, Rachel Roberts, Denis Quilley, Colin Blakely, John Gielgud and, of course, the fabulous Lauren Bacall who popped her clogs just last month.
It’s rumoured that Agatha Christie wrote at least some of her famous book when she stayed at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul back in its glory days, the digs of choice for princes and presidents visiting the Ottoman capital. I’ve lodged there myself a couple of times during its more recent rundown years. Or as I put it in the new book (cue the plug):
“The Pera Palace was once the opulent end of the line for the Orient Express but had fallen on hard times, a piece of Istanbul’s neglected family silver in dire need of a good buffing.”
Chapter Eight, The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
It was Liam’s first visit to old Constantinople and we endured four seasons in three days – driving snow, bitter winds, low grey clouds and sparkling sunshine under blue skies. Our room at the Pera Palace was so cold, we were forced to share the huge antique bathtub to keep warm. It wasn’t too much of an imposition. Since then the hotel has been buffed to buggery with a multi-million lira facelift. Even the prolific and profitable Ms Christie might now baulk at the rack rate (if she were still alive, that is).
Perking the Pansies 