We observed the blanket blizzard from the safety and comfort of our loft musing how we might manage the social merry-go-round that is to come. Still, we were content in the knowledge that the house was warm, snug, leakless and the power uninterrupted. Perchance, I may experience my very first white Christmas.
The pitiless Turkish winter is suddenly upon us and we are woefully unprepared. We are being mugged by a posse of violent electric storms processing across the horizon, a savage spectacle that crashes ashore trapping us inside. Generally, Turkish houses leak, have no insulation and precious little heating; and ours is no exception. Our double height living room is like a drafty village hall with a blazing open grate that only warms a few square yards. Towels are strategically placed against every crack and crevice to keep the water at bay. The power is up and down like whore’s drawers. I fail to see Turkey emerging as an economic powerhouse if the electricity company can’t keep the lights on. Fearing frostbite, we recline in double coated socks, mummified in a duvet and vie for possession of the hot water bottle.
It’s a striking reminder of my pre-central heating childhood days, when the bed was too cold to get into at night but too warm to get out of in the morning. We sprint to the loo for a morning pee, wear sexless layers and have reverted to copulating under cover.
Sipping my morning cuppa lounging about the patio in sun specs and a T shirt in early December is a novel experience. The stark contrast with the frigid Siberian winds that have plunged Albion into a mini ice age is not lost on me. My mother, a spritely, feisty 81 year old Ulsterwoman still young enough to run for buses, complains bitterly through chattering dentures that she is unable to leave the house for fear of a breaking a hip. She is not the kind of woman to be imprisoned for long. As a beautiful young girl she was swept off her feet by a penniless, pretty soldier boy with a twinkle in his eye. She was plucked from a small Irish town made famous by an IRA bomb and found herself on a slow boat to Malaya. I was a home birth in an army barracks which may explain my enduring fetish for uniforms.
Our glorious Indian summer has been violently deposed by an unannounced contest for meteorological supremacy between apocalyptic tempests and dazzling sunshine, a battle which sired a family of stunning, perfectly cut rainbows (which my picture cannot do justice to). The electric rage lashed the house with horizontal rain and peppered the walls with hailstones. I feared the End of Days. I now better appreciate how people in less scientific times attributed this natural replay to the eternal struggle between good and evil with humanity caught in between. The electricity company wisely cut the power during the heavenly discord. We shrugged our shoulders, lit some candles and chucked another log on the fire.
Perking the Pansies 