Category: Parties

Beggar Thy Neighbour

Susan and Chuck invited us to their pre-Christmas shindig. They live in Gökcebel, a sprawling village in the foothills above Yalıkavak, in a charming detached house surrounded by a pretty well-manicured walled garden.  As we arrived Susan presented us with a Manhattan. She mixes a mean cocktail and it nearly blew my head off. The usual suspects were in attendance with a few out of town extras to add to the vetpat mix. After a short while of mingling and polite conversation, we became trapped in the kitchen with merry widow Maureen from Windsor. She thought us very entertaining because she so loves the ‘gays’. She didn’t exactly endear herself by comparing us to Colin and Justin, the two queeny Scottish daytime TV interior ‘designers’ who devastate the homes of the unsuspecting with cheap and nasty kitsch. Realising she is incurably stupid rather than malicious, I let it pass.

Susan laid on a sumptuous festive spread. As we tucked into the sausage rolls, Liam chatted to naked capitalist Francis from Weybridge, who lives near Gümüslük with his wife Dotty, who apparently is. He retired from property speculation a few years ago and is a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher. He made his first fortune by buying and selling discounted, state subsidised council houses. Christ, even the Iron Lady hadn’t intended that to happen.

Having escaped the clutches of merry Maureen and fat cat Francis, we retreated to a bitter but discreet and sheltered corner of the garden for a furtive fag where we soon attracted the attention of Patricia from Bitez. She told us that she also owns a house in Wandsworth, south London, so she’s worth a bob or two. I engaged in a little small talk about the area, since I grew up there. The main advantage of living in Wandsworth, she said, is the low council tax. Mind you, she doesn’t think she should pay anything as she lives permanently in Turkey. “Do you know why your council tax is low?” I enquired. She didn’t. “Well, never be old, never be young, never be disabled or the parents of a disabled child” I explained. Patricia pondered a while, playfully twisting her hair and caressing the vulgar bauble welded to her finger. “Oh, I don’t care about people like that” she sniffed. I hope she never ends up in a wheelchair.

The Barmaid Who Won the Lotto

Chrissy and Bernard invited us for dinner. They live in Torba, just outside Bodrum. They consider it a more upmarket kind of place. It isn’t. Their house is generously and expensively appointed but dressed in English country cottage naff with heavy drapes that wouldn’t look out of place in a jaded Thistle hotel. Fussy and provincial, Chrissy’s tastes are closer than she realises to her Turkish char, like a barmaid who has won the Lotto. As a couple, they are rather obsessed with social protocols and the emigrey pecking order, and they reckon themselves to be top of the heap. We have started to appreciate that they are all (little) style over (no) substance.

Delia, Daisies and Dick

Following our sojourn to Sodom, curvaceous Charlotte and dapper Alan invited us to their gaff for a late light bite. They have a luxuriant but unpretentious home overlooking Yalıkavak. Domestic goddess Charlotte served up a splendid spread of full fat tastiness. My arteries hardened with every morsel. There we met the congenial Greg and Sam, a couple of muscle marys from Turgutreis who retreated from east London three years ago, forsaking unfulfilling careers and studded thongs for peace and tranquillity. Impressively, they have been together for over twenty years contradicting the widely held belief that gay men are genetically incapable of sustaining a relationship beyond the first date. They used to be anatomically huge but have since somewhat deflated by exchanging pumping iron for jam making. However, they still have the biggest pecs on the peninsula. We share the same vocabulary of Delia, daisies and dick. They are to be our new best gay friends.

La Crème de la Crème

The evening of Clement’s supper soiree had arrived, and we waited in our still empty house until quite a few of his guests had turned up before venturing next door. We approached his house with some trepidation. Neither Liam nor I are that good in crowds of strangers and as new kids on the block, there was an added frisson to the occasion. With a cordial welcome, Clement led us like condemned lambs into the body of the kirk. There assembled were the congregation, ‘the gang’ Chrissy whispered, la crème de la crème of the ex-pat community.

We grabbed a drink and bravely resolved to mingle. I occupied an empty seat on the patio next to butch, Brigit from Brisbane, who I rashly assumed to be a lesbian, and threw myself into conversation. Our tête-à-tête tripped along nicely until I innocently but unwisely enquired “Do you have a girlfriend?” With a glacial glare she rebuked me with “I don’t know what you mean” and ignored me for the rest of the evening. Oops. This was to be the first of many social gaffes, though in my defence it was an easy mistake to make given the lack of make-up, masculine attire and boyish hair do. Well, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a bloody duck.

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My next social intervention met with much greater success. I sidled next to Charlotte; a vivacious, energetic kind of girl with a bouncing cleavage that heaved in rhythm to her filthy laugh. We hit it off immediately. Charlotte and tall, debonair, silver haired husband, Alan, are ex-pat veterans having lived in Turkey for eight years. They sold up in England and built their dream house in Yalıkavak. It was obvious we shared similar values and I sense a friendship developing.

Next up was lovely social worker Nancy, Charlotte’s best friend visiting from London. Nancy is a shapely, sassy lass of Turkish extraction who speaks Turkish with a Cockney accent. Nancy has abandoned a barren and loveless marriage in search of romance and orgasms. She is having a passionate but stormy affair with a local skipper.

Liam hovered nervously in the background and spoke mostly to Chrissy. She dished the dirt on everyone in the room. Last to arrive were Susan, who marched in with a confident gait, and husband Chuck. Susan is a pretty Fulham girl in her 50s who had been clearly gorgeous in her youth. Chuck is a well built, striking older man with tattoos and warm blue eyes. Feisty and independent, Susan told me she ran away to Istanbul in her teens where she met and married a philandering academic many, many years her senior. The marriage ended in divorce. She then tried on a second older Turk for size. They too divorced. Following her dalliance with the Turkish branch of Help the Aged, Susan left for the New World, settling in LA where she owned a coffee shop and developed a curious mid-Atlantic accent.

Yankee Chuck’s chequered youth perfectly matches his seventies porn star looks. Susan and Chuck’s eyes met across the Gaggia coffee maker; they fell in love and married. Despite (or perhaps because of) his colourful past, Chuck has become a reformed character, virtually tee-total and a bit of a born again puritan. Susan, on the other hand, likes a drink. We were left with the distinct impression that, despite many pretenders to the throne, Susan is truly the queen bee in these parts.

After a few hours of polite inquisition, we decided to withdraw. We walked back to our holiday let for a final shandy on the balcony to debrief. All things considered, we survived the ordeal relatively unscathed. But, are we the ‘right sort?’ we wondered. “Well, we’re not talking Monte Carlo” Liam sighed leading to a more fundamental question to ponder. Was this disparate group of people thrown together purely by chance really our sort? And so, we surmised, the stage is set, the cast assembled, and we made it through the first act without fluffing too many lines.