Category: Turkey & Turkish

Educating Rashida

Tariq has acquired a brand new set of dashing, shiny dentures so Tariq is toothless no longer. He proudly grins all over the site flashing his novel knashers at random passers by. Tariq and the missus are archetypal village types; she in a head scarf and clashing floral baggy pantaloons and he in a tatty vest with a fag permanently jammed in his gob – honest people with simple needs. It is to their credit that they are raising their two daughters as thoroughly modern types.

Educating Rashida

Tariq’s eldest daughter came by the house waving a piece of paper which she handed to me with much excitement. I thought it was yet another bill but it was her last school report. I called Liam out to the patio and we examined it together. She had received tip top marks in virtually every subject (except English, unfortunately) and beamed with pride. Quite right too. We were chuffed that she thought to show us, and the next day bought her a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. My eternal hope is that her parents resist the pressure to marry her off at 16 to some country cousin.

We mentioned her glowing report to Clement, but he simply doesn’t approve of educating Turkish girls “lest they get above their station.” Honestly!

Let the Children Play

I’m touched and heart-warmed to see that children are still children in Turkey, retaining innocence and a simple wonder long since lost in Blighty. I rarely witness a temper tantrum or any kind of brattish behaviour in public.  They have less but enjoy more. Turks of both sexes adore their young, lavishing affection and gentle correction in equal measure. Turkish society has yet to become tormented by rampant paranoia about child snatching paedophiles or obsessed with risk, both of which have turned some western children into selfish, cotton-wool covered social misfits, old, but not wise before their time.

Just Shout Loudly in English

“Avustralyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına” is a Turkish term pronounced as a single word and an extreme example of agglutination, the process of adding affixes to the base of a word. This word is translated into English as “as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Australian people”. Crikey. Turkish is stuffed with tortuously lengthy agglutinations and therein lies my knotty problem.

Turkic Language Distribution

Though rhythmic and poetic on the ear, Turkish is not an easy language for Europeans to assimilate as it is thought to belong to the Altaic language family and is distantly related to Mongolian, Korean and other inscrutable Asiatic tongues. Despite Atatürk’s valiant 1928 adoption of the Latin alphabet and the fact that the language is phonetic and mostly regular, the word order, agglutinations and the absence of familiar sounds all conspire to make learning Turkish a very daunting prospect. At least that’s my excuse. Liam is trying. I am just hopeless.

Although our hosts are remarkably tolerant of the average Brit’s lazy attempts to nail a foreign tongue, I’m a zealous believer that a little learning goes a long way. Taking the trouble to remember a few choice words and phrases can make a world of difference. One rainy afternoon, we were buying DIY essentials in Koçtaş. A yellow-haired, haughty emigrey ignorati strutted into the store and bellowed imperiously at a random selection of bewildered staff “Excuse me, I am English! I need help! Do you speak English? Yes, you there. Do you speak English?” It made me cringe with acute embarrassment and I peered apologetically at the pretty till girl. Despite my lacklustre language skills, I will never become one those all too common high-handed, po-faced little Englanders.

So what’s the Turkish for “as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble a drag queen”? Answers on a postcard.

Pansies Across the Seas

I’ve recently found a nifty little device that I’ve added to Perking the Pansies. It’s called ‘Revolver Maps’ which pin points the location of my visitors across the globe. I now stare at the screen for hours to watch the cities of the World light up and pulsate to the perking beat of the pansies. Unsurprisingly most of my punters come from Blighty, the Emerald Isle or the Turkish Riviera though the map of Europe is beginning to twinkle like a Eurovision Song Contest score board with nil point currently awarded to France. Perhaps they don’t like pansies in La Belle France though there was little evidence of it when I was last in Gay Paree.

Most unexpectedly are the pansy punters from more far-flung corners of the globe. I seem to have enthusiasts on both American seaboards but have attracted few fans in the vast lands in between where the bible-belters lurk. The Canadians like to perk (well the Mounties will do anything to keep warm in minus 20 degrees) and I have one or two camp followers in Latin America. The fragrant Far East is where the pansies never fade and I’m particularly delighted by our man in Borneo. Oz is a disappointing late starter though the ever cheerful Aussies do have  a biblical flood to contend with. I have high hopes for Africa and track the map from Cairo to Cape Town looking for signs of pansy flashers.

The South Pole is excluded from my pansy blog domination. Nothing grows down there anyway and I don’t want the egg-heads of Antarctica to be diverted from their vital work on global warming lest the pansies drown from rising sea levels.

Clapped in Irons

The screens have gone blank in Turkey and I hear there is much speculation about whether I should expect a knock at the door. I must confess, I have been slightly worried; have I unintentionally transgressed some Turkish Law or other? The explanation is both more prosaic and more ominous. It seems my blog has been caught in a blanket ban on hundreds of thousands of websites hosted by Google. When I first set up my site, Google assigned what’s called an ‘IP Address’ which I share with tens of thousands of others. At least one of these other sites has fallen foul of the authorities so the IP address itself has been blocked. So it’s one out, all out. I’ve looked at some of the other sites affected; they include many Turkish businesses and a lady in Istanbul promoting her pretty sketches. How sad.

As Churchill famously said “We’ll fight them on the beaches”. That’s the wartime prime minister by the way, not the nodding dog in the car insurance adverts.

In the Beginning

In the beginning there was work and work was God. After 35 years in the business, the endless predictability made me question the Faith. Liam, on the other hand, was neither bored nor unchallenged but was routinely subjected to the ephemeral demands of a capricious boss, a soft and warm Christmas tree fairy with a soul of granite – Lucifer in lace. He feared for his tenure. I feared for his mental health. It was the 30th May 2009, Liam’s 48th birthday, and we were enjoying a romantic meal in Soho. As the booze flowed the conversation turned to ‘What if?’ Thus began our Great Adventure.

We began to hatch our audacious plot to step off the treadmill and migrate to the sun. Turkey sprang instantly to mind since we had just returned from Bodrum – a chic and cosmopolitan kind of place attracting serious Turkish cash, social nonconformists and relatively few discount tourists. Liam loved it and, after many years visiting the western shores of Anatolia, I needed no convincing. All I had to do was sell my house just as property prices were in free fall. All Liam had to do was agree a financial settlement with his ex on their jointly-owned property, something that hitherto had proven more difficult to resolve than the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Against all odds, I sold my house and its contents to a God-send of a neighbour and, after some emotional horse-trading, Liam finally achieved a reasonable settlement on his own property. Implausibly, we both secured voluntary redundancy from work. In my case, it happened with such an indecent haste that I sensed they were glad to be rid of me. Well, the axeman was stalking the Town Hall corridors looking for prey. It mattered little since it all added to the purse. Our remarkable run of luck convinced us that someone was looking down kindly upon us. Liam attributed it to the Virgin Mary.

We turned our attention to where in Turkey we might settle. The obvious choice was the narrow western coastal strip tucked beneath the vast Anatolian Plateau as it is the most attuned to European sensibilities. Turkey beyond this is the genuine article, a magical land of sweeping landscapes, drenched in drama and culture but far too foreign and exotic for a couple of mature, bourgeois, gay boys from the Smoke.

Bodrum was the bookie’s favourite, an urbane, liberal oasis where we could live safely and unmolested. We briefly entertained the notion of living in Kaş on the Turkuaz Coast where we had honeymooned. Kaş is a sparkling Bohemian jewel, surrounded by a pristine hinterland that has been mercifully spared the worst excesses of mass tourism. But, its glorious isolation, protected by a wilting two hour drive from the nearest international airport, means that the town is effectively closed out of season and lacks those dull but essential full time services we all need to live in the material world: banks, supermarkets, hospitals and the like. We cast our eyes along the map. The coast running south-east of Kaş towards Alanya has been colonised by the Germans and Russians and the string of major resorts running north – Fethiye, Marmaris, Altinkum and Kuşadası – attracts legions of bargain basement Brits. It was no surprise that the odds on favourite won by a mile.