I’ve invested in smart phone from Virgin. Well I say invested, it came free with a 24 month contract. My trusty old Nokia just doesn’t cut the Colman’s mustard anymore. Nor is it the right image for an infamous author and fading community radio star. Besides, my pay-as-you-go tariff was crippling me and this one comes with free this, free that. You see, it’s a smart-arse Samsung smarty pants touch screen Star Trek contraption and it’s so much smarter than me. My stumpy little fingers can’t quite manage the micro-keyboard and the bloody thing insists on wolf-whistling at me. I have no idea why. It’s been twenty years since that last happened. I tell you, it’s enough to turn an ex-pretty boy’s head. And if I don’t feed it daily, it just conks out. My old low IQ phone may be dim-witted but at least it goes on for weeks without draining the national grid. Beam me up Scotty and show me how it works. Where’s my 10 year old nephew when I need him?
Category: Internet
Expat Quotes
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the latest glossy offering from the Easyexpat stable of top of the range emigrey websites. It’s called Expat Quotes and aims to take some of the stress out of settling in a foreign field. The site…
…connects expatriates and future expats to services in the categories of:
Visa & Permits, Moving Jobs, Housing, Finance, Education, Health, Shop &
Telecom, & Tourism. The listings provide an ever-growing directory with
the ability to get free quotes. Whether you are looking for an
international removal company, medical insurance, or expat banking service
– you will find it there. In addition, a series of country guides provide
information directly from expats and experts in immigrating to a new
country.
I’ve been asked to write a word or two so expect to read my irreverent ramblings very soon. Don’t let that put you off.
Mommie Dearest
The day after we moved into our ancient gaff, a nice man called Richard from Virgin Media (not the Richard, obviously) installed our all singing, all dancing multimedia techno-wizardry – 30 megabyte fibre-optic broadband, telephone line and high definition TV. The whole compendium was half price for six months and came with free installation, free equipment and free weekend calls. We now have more channels of crap than you can shake a stick at. Currently, I’m being forced to watch wall-to-wall Olympics (Liam’s current obsession). We’ve never had HD TV before. I can see every wrinkle, every blemish, every spot and every blackhead on the faces of the famous – except for Gary Lineker (who surely must have had a nick and lift). No wonder an old bundle of ageing TV presenters decided to hang up their auto-cues and throw in the flannel: there are some things even the thickest slap can’t hide. Now we have free weekend calls, they’ll be no more Sunday Skype calls to mother. Just as well. I could never get the bloody thing to work properly from Turkey anyway and the compulsory weekly check-in was always a painful exercise, invariably ending in complete frustration.
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Do You Have a Tale to Tell?
QuestTurkey is a top notch property and lifestyle website about Turkey. I’ve been lucky enough to feature on the site a few times in the past. Quest is always looking for contributors with a tale to tell with an interesting angle about living in a foreign land. If you’d like to share your expat story, why not drop Lauren a line on lauren@questturkey.com?
Sweet Charity
The world famous Foyles Bookshop along London’s Charing Cross Road is offering 15% off Perking the Pansies if you reserve online and pick up in-store. So, while you’re in the West End looking for summer bargains and something skimpy for your holiday, why not pick up a copy for only £8.49? If you can’t make it into town, you can order online for the full price of £9.99 with free delivery to any address in the UK.
Alternatively, you can buy the book and anything else that takes your fancy on Amazon through Jack’s Shop and I make a few extra pennies. Think of it as charity.
Locked Up and Knocked Up
Are you an expat who started a company to do the business in Turkey? Do you have a website? If not, you’d better get one sharpish and register it with the authorities. If you don’t, you might find yourself dumped in the clink for 6 months. Even if you do have a website, you’d better make sure it’s stuffed to the brim with company information. Don’t forget to include the name of the office cat, your granny’s maiden name and the parlous state of your bank balance. If your site content isn’t up to scratch, expect to be banged up alongside a hairy daddy with a twinkle in his eye and a little lovin’ on his mind. Why is this? Well, the Turkish Government has just adopted a new Trade Law which is due to come into effect on the 1st July this year.
Sounds like some daft idea from a witless job’s-worth paid to dream up the unworkable. I expect it will go the way of the much heralded internet regulations introduced with a fanfare then unceremoniously dropped when it became blindingly obvious they were just a little bit crap.
200,000 Hits Plus
A few days ago, an obscure English language blog written by an ex-pretty boy reporting from a minor peninsula on the Aegean coast of Turkey, exceeded 200,000* page hits. My sincerest thanks go out to all those people who have popped by to show their support for Perking the Pansies. Are you all mad?
Other notable stats for cyber geeks include:
600 posts – 2,000 shares – 14,000 spam comments – 4,500 legit comments (not including Faceache and that tweety thingy).
Surprisingly, I’ve been little troubled by the angry little trolls who stalk cyberspace with impunity. I’ve only ever had to delete two vile comments from the faceless.
My parochial dispatches from the emigrey trenches (in the winter, I mean this literally) have been liberally sprinkled with liberal mutterings on selected events of the day. Sometimes, Perking the Pansies goes beyond these short-sighted shores and tackles issues that interest, amaze, amuse or concern me. Indeed, many of the posts with an international twist have been big hits. This gives me hope. Maybe Perking the Pansies can evolve from reflections on emigrey life to broader horizons – from fosterland to motherland. So, climb aboard the slow boat to Blighty. I hope you’ll stay on for the ride but feel free to jump ship at any sunny port en route. That’s what journeys are all about.
Next milestone? A quarter of a million. Imagine that?
*Combining page views on this site with my old Google blog blocked by the Turkish Authorities in December 2010).
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From Local to Yokel
It’s Sod’s Law. As soon we decide to paddle back to Blighty on the evening tide to become country yokels, two things happen to make life in battered Bodrum just that little bit easier and that little bit cheaper.
First off, the Town’s highways and byways are being laid with fibre optic cables. A battalion of dusky, sweaty vested navvies is carving out mini-trenches along every street. The deep furrows are being backfilled badly and dribbled with lumpy tarmac. In some of the crazy paving alleys, zigzagging troughs look like hastily repaired earthquake cracks.
The project is a joint venture between Super Online (internet) and Turkcell (mobile phone). Fibre optic cables provide a much faster and more reliable internet experience and the new service will give the current whore’s drawers service from TTNET (Turk Telekom) a run for its money. Who knows, it may even drive down prices. I hear there are also plans for cable TV in the pipeline. Oh, what joy: the chance to tell Digiturk (Satellite broadcaster) where to shove their overpriced packages.
And so to the second piece of good news. Dolly drivers on the flat fare blue-liveried bus routes now charge us the tariff usually reserved for locals (2 lira instead of 2.75 as advertised in English). It’s only taken two years. Sadly, we’ve yet to get the local rate at cute Ali’s barbers for our one-round-the-side-two-on-the-top crops. He’s worth it though. Even without the ‘extras’.
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Telegraph Jack
I flung open the closet door in the same year that ‘Going Straight’ first aired on the BBC. It was a time when the age of consent for gay men was 21* and the number of gay bars in London could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Fourth Estate – redtops and broadsheets alike – was routinely beastly to the down-trodden embryonic gay community and the police raided at will. It’s no surprise then, that my politics were a little leftish and I thought of myself as standing on the outside looking in. Now in my fifth decade, I find myself published in the Telegraph, that most ‘establishment’ of newspapers – only online, mind you. Read my Bumpy Rite of Passage. I’ve sold out for a sell-out.
*In fact it was only legal for two men to get down and dirty if they were alone in a private dwelling. Also, lesbianism was never a crime, presumably because most of the (male) public school lawmaking hypocrites not knocking off the boys on the side were rather turned on by the thought of their nannies at it.
Retail Therapy
I’ve started a little shop to add a few coppers to our coffers. It takes me back to the distant days of my misspent youth when I was a store boy on Chelsea’s trendy King’s Road. Days on the tills and nights on the tiles were the best probation for a young gay boy about town. My shop is stocked with a few hand-picked items that you never knew you couldn’t do without. Naturally, my book takes centre stage in the window display. So, if you’re looking for great deals on hotels, flights, books or anything on Amazon then visit Jack’s shop. It costs you nothing and I need the money. No pressure.
Perking the Pansies 