A tantalising glimpse at the April edition of Time Out, Istanbul. Right at the bottom there’s a tiny headline for Pat Yale’s article, the Best of Expat Literature. I’m in it. I don’t know what Pat has written as I haven’t yet got my grubby hands on a copy. I’m spending so much time hanging around my garden gate for the postie, passers-by think I’m soliciting. Well, if the book doesn’t sell…
The next door apartment block has just received an unusual spring makeover. Over a period of two weeks, we watched in bemused amusement as the entire building (excluding the roof) was clad in grey polystyrene tiles. These were eventually rendered then whitewashed to suit Bodrum’s standard livery. The re-modelling was watched from the opposite side of the street by one of the residents, a little old man wearing an embroidered pillbox* hat and an inscrutable perma-grin.
Buildings hereabouts are little more than simple concrete boxes and are notoriously difficult to keep warm in the winter or cool in the summer. They would also collapse like a pack of cards if an earthquake struck. So, is this some new and ingenious insulation technique – like a tea cosy or a padded jacket for a hot water tank? If so, let’s hope it breaks the time honoured annual cycle of frostbite and heatstroke. The unconventional wrap was completed just in the nick of time. The following day the mother of all storms lashed the coast. The rickety scaffolding would surely not have survived the tempest. Neither would the little old man.
*This type of hat is called a kufi kofi hat in parts of Africa but I don’t know what it’s called in Turkey – any ideas?
Blessed (and gloriously noisy) are the children…
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After a couple of false starts, the race towards summer is on. We feared the sun-kissed season had been cancelled this year. The starting pistol was an earthquake beneath our feet at 4am yesterday morning. Just a tiddler of a tremor at 3.1. Liam woke with a jolt and went in search of fault lines. I slept like a baby through the whole thing.
March winds are fashionably late this year. A few nights ago, Hurricane Hatice blew furiously over Bodrum. We were trapped in our bed by a creepy speedy wind that whistled through the narrow streets. Unfettered flying objects and the constant banging of a nearby metal gate kept us alert. Dogs were silenced and cocks kept their own counsel. Unhappy memories came flooding back of the infamous hurricane that hit southern England and northern France on the morning of my 27th birthday on the 16th October 1987. More about this here.
Talking of wacky birthday weather, Yankee Sarah from Was Constantinople recently celebrated her birthday with a friend from across the pond. She wrote:
“While we were catching up on Baltimore Ravens gossip over fried anchovies and mussels, 300 houses were losing their roofs, 5 people were dying, some building was falling over in Nisantisi, and a yacht was on fire. By the time we paid the bill, the seas were calm again. We opted for more chilling than sight seeing.”
You can read the full post here.
Happy birthday Sarah. One to remember.
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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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Naturally I tweet. Doesn’t everyone these days? Facebook and Twitter are the gruesome twosome of social media – the top of the pops. Got nothing interesting to say? Say it loudly and often on the tweety thing and faceache. For reasons unknown, I’m popular with tweeting Turks. I usually follow back even though I haven’t a clue what they’re tweeting about. It’s the polite thing to do. Distressingly, my popularity can be short lived and some of my new admirers quickly unfollow me, presumably after realising I am what I am. That’s not the polite thing to do. I unfollow in revenge, punishing them with my mouse. ‘Take that!’ I click. Disturbingly, I also seem to attract young Turkish men – really young. Obviously, I don’t follow them back. Youngsters really aren’t my thing and I don’t want to stand accused of grooming. It’s a funny old world.
When it comes to social issues, readers may think I’m a bit of a one trick pony – gay this, gay that, blah, blah, blah. In fact, as a bleeding heart pinko liberal, I come equipped with a range of predictable views on a range of predictable issues. People who feed and water me will attest to this. Apart from the fairy thing, I rarely use my blog as a platform to spread the liberal word. This isn’t why I started it. But (yes, here comes the ‘but’) there’s one thing that caught my eye recently that I just can’t resist commenting on. It’s been reported in the New Civil Rights Movement, an American online magazine, that Arizonan women are now legally pregnant two weeks before conception. Even though I agree with a woman’s right to choose, I’m not going to wade into the whole American abortion debate. It’s a divisive issue that stirs up an enormous amount of emotion on both sides of the argument. However, isn’t this all getting a bit daft? In effect, this means that a virgin can be pregnant (Hallelujah, it’s a miracle). Why stop there? What about those wet dreams of our teenage years? Or don’t we boys count?
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It seems that the man on the Clapham omnibus often gets his Calvins in a coil when trying to work out the difference between sex, sexuality and transexuality. Put simply (simplistically, even), sex is what you do, sexuality is who you fancy and transexuality is when you are born the wrong gender. A sex change does not alter an individual’s sexuality. Therefore, a woman born as a man who fancies men will still fancy men after the op. Likewise, a woman born as a man who fancies women will still fancy women. Got it?
The reason I’m labouring this point is because my good friend and new kid on the blogging block over at Back to Bodrum sent me an article about two gay men, Aras Güngör and Barış Sulu. They intend to marry in Turkey. Impossible, I hear you collectively cry. Under ordinary circumstances you would be correct but these are not ordinary circumstances. You see, Aras is a transexual born female and now living as a man. Therefore, he carries a ‘pink’ identity. Barış carries a ‘blue’ identity so, under Turkish law, they are permitted to marry with all the rights and duties that entails. They intend to use their matrimony to campaign for marriage equality. I wish them the best of luck and I hope they can stay safe from those who will seek to bring them down.
You can read their courageous story here.
Despite a long tradition of transexuality in Turkey, transexuals have a rough time. With the exception of a few at the top of the entertainment heap, most are marginalised and reviled. Some end up leading brutal lives and resort to prostitution to bring home the daily bread. I saw this first hand during my inaugural trip to Istanbul in 2003 when street ladies in Laura Ashley frocks would leap out from behind parked cars in the dingy side roads along Tarlabaşi Bulvari. It scared the life out of me.
Just for the record, transvestites are people who cross dress, often, but not always, for sexual gratification. Most transvestites, like most people, are straight. Drag queens are not transvestites. They are female impersonators and entertainers (though not always convincing or entertaining). It’s all part of the rich tapestry of humanity, I’m pleased to say.
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Now we’ve unplugged Digiturk, we’re gradually re-acquainting ourselves with our DVD library. This is more troublesome than it sounds. Our LG home entertainment system is rejecting discs at random. Again. This tiresome business first started last November. At the time, the system was still under guarantee and Liam called in the service man. The burly, surly boy who turned up at our door had a brilliant suggestion. We were trying to play the ‘wrong kind’ of DVD. I quickly disabused him of that and he grudgingly took the machine away for repairs. It was returned a week later and worked fine. For a few months. Naturally, it’s now out of warranty. When we move back to Blighty, our top of the range system will be at the bottom of the bin.
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Perking the Pansies 