Book promos are like buses (and men). Not a sniff for ages then several come at once. Check out Blog to Book – Start to Finish on Redheaded Writer and my interviews with the Turkey Expat Forum and Working Traveller.
I’m constantly surprised by the continuing interest and remarkable book sales. Thank you.
My brother is in Majorca sitting on a sunny hotel balcony sipping cool white wine wearing shorts and a tee shirt. We’re huddled in front of an electric fire in slippers and zippy tops. Last month’s electric bill was 480 lira (£180). Yes that’s right. Four hundred and eighty. We don’t expect this month’s bill to be much lower. We thought grumpy Mother Nature had flicked on the spring switch a couple of weeks ago. It seems the perfidious old bag has switched it off again. Still, the flowers are nice.
You might also like:
We caught the opening episode of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent on catch-up TV. A genuine attempt to discover the best (and worst) amateur talent that Blighty has to offer, or a cynical commercial exercise in crass oversentimentality? Probably both and so what? It was brilliant. From the weird to the truly wonderful, the eccentric to the frankly insane, we lapped up every last drop.
First to have us on the edge of our IKEA sofa was a duo of male, married (to each other) ballroom dancers called the Sugar Dandies. Their sweet dance of love had the audience swaying in the stalls and cheering from the aisles. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Then came the Welsh all-teenage boys choir from the Valleys called Only Boys Aloud (get it?). Their sublime rendition of a traditional Welsh folk song brought the stunned crowd to its feet and sent shivers down my spine. Who says the only thing the so-called illiterate teenagers of Blighty do these days is shag, take drugs and riot?
The soaring triumph was Jonathan, a shy, overweight 17 year man with big hair, clumsy demeanour and self-esteem in the sewer. Charlotte, his pretty singing companion had to virtually drag him on stage. After a slightly shaky start, jaws dropped as hesitant tenor met pretty pop opera voice. The hairs at the back of neck stood up in tribute. Fabulous.
Cue the videos (if you get an error, just click into You Tube)
I’ve been scribbling like a lunatic getting the message out about the book. The days when an author just sits back and lets someone else do all the PR and promotion are long gone. Sometimes, though, things just happen without any intervention from me. Pat Yale is an extremely respected British vetpat travel writer living in Cappadocia. You could say she put the pat in expat. Pat wrote A Handbook for Living in Turkey which is the definitive guide for moving to and living in our fosterland. Pat also writes a Turkey travel blog called Turkey from the Inside. Liam stumbled across the page about Yalıkavak. This is the introduction:
On the northwest side of the Bodrum Peninsula, pretty Yalıkavak centres on a harbourful of gülets but also boasts several inviting getaway-from-it-all boutique hotels up on the hillside. It served as the setting for Jack Scott’s 2012 travel memoir Perking the Pansies which dished the dirt on goings-on in the expat community.
Thank you, Pat. I’m chuffed.
Auntie Beeb recently ran an article about gays in the military – not in America this time – but in our foster home. It makes comical reading. For young gay Turks to receive their pink exemption slip (I prefer lilac myself) they have to prove their perversion with photographic evidence. Got a few holiday snaps of you being bummed on the beach in Bodrum? Now, young man, it only counts if you’re Martha not Arthur. The next best thing is to see you in a frock and slingbacks*. Anything floral by Laura Ashley will do. You couldn’t make it up.
For all those wasted years of navel gazing by the horrified higher echelons of the British armed forces, gay and lesbian Britons are now allowed to serve their country. People who know a great deal more than I do about these things say this has had absolutely no detrimental effect on the operational efficiency of Her Maj’s army, air force or navy (well, it’s always been rum and bum in the navy anyway). Military failure is reserved for our hapless politicians who send our brave boys (and girls) out to fight wars they can’t win.
Let’s face it, when it came to periods of genuine national emergency (like a world war), no one cared less where you put it. We were all cannon fodder back then (unless you were Quentin Crisp, of course).
Thank you to Pansyfan Paul who sent me the article.
*A cock in a shock frock reminds me of my encounter with transsexual prostitutes on my very first trip to Istanbul in 2003, but that’s another story.
Sadly, my prediction about the little market a short sashay along the street from our house has come to pass. The ever-so smiley pony-tailed proprietor has removed his dusty stock and abandoned his customer-less business. A padlocked glazed door protects the dusty ghost shop, the shelves are empty, worthless rubbish is piled up in the middle of the cracked floor and a tatty ‘for rent’ sign is swinging in the wind outside. What next for this ill-fated space? A croissant-erie would be nice.
You might also like
I’m ecstatic to announce to the room that London’s Gay’s the Word, Blighty’s premiere LGBT bookshop (and voted 3rd in the top 50 bookshops in Britain by the Independent newspaper), have added Perking the Pansies to their illustrious shelves. This is better than sex. Gay’s the Word really is the place to be seen. If you’re in the area, pop in, browse the aisles and thumb through the many titles on offer (and buy my book, of course). To celebrate this latest achievement and whet your appetite, I’ve released the first five chapters for everyone to read.
It doesn’t end there. Are you sitting down? On the very same day I found out about Gay’s the Word, my publisher told me that the Bookshop – Darlinghurst, Australia’s pre-eminent LGBT bookstore is also offering the book for sale, just in time for Mardi Gras. The discerning readers of Sydney will have the opportunity to meet:
“…the oddballs, VOMITs, vetpats, emigreys, semigreys, debauched waiters and middle England miseries.”
I can now declare that, just like the British Empire of yesteryear, the sun never sets on these pansies.
The benign spring weather allowed us to take tea and tittle tattle on our balcony with a few Bodrum Belles. It’s a sunny spot, though we often have to yell above the din of the harried street. This is more than compensated by the chance to observe busy Bodrum life passing by below. I was being mother and, as I poured the coffee, I gazed momentary across at the flat roof of our single storey kitchen at the other end of the courtyard. It glistened in the bright sunlight. Tiny waves rippled in the gentle breeze. Had we installed a roof-top plunge pool? No such luck. A few weeks earlier, a beefy covered lady with Popeye biceps and sprouting underarms had collected the olive crop from the over-hanging tree. She had beat the bush with Amazonian gusto and left a shag-pile of twiggy debris in her wake. Come the next deluge, the leaf litter plugged the drainage hole and created the shallow lake.
After the Belles departed, I climbed onto the roof, waded through the water and unblocked the hole with the handle of a wooden spatula. The undammed waters spewed like a mini Niagara onto the turned dirt of our neighbour’s bald vegetable patch. Their chained up dog, so used to barking at the slightest flutter of the tiniest sparrow, was taken totally by surprise. Rover didn’t know how to react so decided not to react at all. Now there’s a first.
You might also like:
WordPress (the organisation that hosts my blog) has got its knickers in a twist over comments. They’ve introduced some unheralded changes to the comments function and now there are more bugs in it than an old cow pat. Some people who try to comment on Perking the Pansies either can’t at all, or have to sign in to some long forgotten WordPress account of yesteryear. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s all very irritating, causing much fury on the user forum and tut-tutting in the Scott-Brennan household.
I’m sure they’ll unscramble the mess soon but in the meantime, please do persevere with your thoughts, either by choosing your Facebook or Twitter ID (if you have one) in the comments box or commenting on posts as they appear on Facebook. As a last resort, you can create a WordPress Account which will allow you to comment on my blog and others hosted by WordPress. It’ll only take a few minutes off the rest of your life.
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.
Perking the Pansies 