Happy First Birthday, Perking the Pansies

When Liam and I came to Turkey, we intended to retire early, put our feet up and watch the pansies grow. With a ridiculous amount of spare time on my hands, I decided to amuse myself by starting a blog. Maybe it would delay my inevitable descent into alcoholism? At the time, I assumed I would end up talking to myself.  Twelve months, 400 posts, 2000 comments, 6,000 spams and 120,000 hits later, Pansies has just reached its first birthday. To celebrate this minor miracle I’d like to share what I think are some of the major milestones (Pansysteps).

08/10/10 – In the Beginning

Perking the Pansies was launched onto an unsuspecting public. God help them. I knew nothing about this blogging business, how it worked or what would happen. This was my debut post.

24/11/10 – Are You Mad?

I knew something was up when the blog exceeded 12,000 hits. Shit, someone was actual reading my inconsequential, irreverent ramblings. I started to understand blog promotion and search-engine optimisation, joined Faceache and that tweet, tweety thingy to build a virtual social network. Well, it beats actually talking to people.

04/12/10 – Clapped in Irons

My blog was banned by the Turkish Internet police just as it was taking off. I was expecting a knock at the door by a scandalised conscript in latex gloves, demanding to conduct an internal investigation. I nearly gave the whole thing up in despair.

10/12/10 – Pooing on a Paddle

After a frantic, fretful week, Perking the Pansies shut up shop at Google and moved lock, stock and barrel to begin life anew at brand new WordPress premises. Fear of imminent arrest subsided. This naughty little number was my first post on the revamped, re-launched site.

14/03/2011 – Hold the Front Page

Perking the Pansies was featured in the Turkish national press along with a select group of illustrious fellow jobbing bloggers.

01/04/2011 – Bubba’s Gobbler

Perking the Pansies reached 50,000 hits. This was my April Fools’ piece. It was partly inspired by thumbing through the gaypers in a Soho watering hole.

06/04/2011 – Perking the Pansies – Bound and Ungagged

The blog has spawned a little book which is about to go off to the publisher. The book covers some of same terrain as the blog but with much more spice, bite, depth, pace and pathos (Well, I hope so).

10/05/2011 – So You Think You Can Write a Pop Song?

This was the first mega post attracting big numbers. Pansies were bursting out all over the place. My pansymap ended up resembling a nuclear attack on Western Europe and North America. All very Cold War.

24/07/2011 – Amy Winehouse, RIP

This is by far my most popular post, 4,600 and still growing. I think it just caught the mood. It also caught the attention of some wanker who left a vile comment. I don’t generally censor comments. Free speech and all that. However, I didn’t publish his nasty little words.

17/08/2011 – I’m Coming Out

Perking the Pansies reached 100,000 hits and I exposed myself to the world. No, I didn’t get arrested or receive a congratulatory brick through my window.

Many happy returns, Perking the Pansies. Make a wish and hope you make it to the terrible twos.

Wash, Reset and Blowdry

Hanife, our formidable landlady, swung into rapid action to fix our unholy holey roof; she arranged for the leaks to be sealed by the contractor who originally built the house. He was incensed to find that the electricity company had illegally nailed power cables to our roof and punctured the bloody thing in the process. To add insult to injury, the cables were nothing to do with us; they were supplying an adjacent property. Our fuse box was brought back to life by a pixie-sized spark who dried out the box with a hairdryer plugged into our neighbour’s socket. We watched in horror as he perched precariously on a folding patio chair: one wrong move and his ankles would have been snapped off. Liam made tea while I went for a lie down in a darkened room. This is Turkey.

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A Tight Wide-open Space

Once in a while a chance encounter with a stranger can change things forever. My happy happenstance was crashing into Liam one wintry afternoon after work in a pub called ‘Half Way to Heaven’.

Matt Krause, a mighty Yankee vetpat from California has recently released a book. A Tight Wide-open Space tells the touching tale of his own chance meeting that led to love and a journey across an ocean to follow his heart. The story is much more than a boy-meets-girl penny romance, as sweet as that is. It’s also about his struggle to adapt to the strange ways of a strange faraway land. We can all identify with that one.

If you’d like to know more, take a look at Matt’s website. The book is available in paperback or kindle at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

To celebrate the release of the book, I asked Matt to write a guest post about his love, hate, love relationship with that great and ancient metropolis that straddles two continents.

I am not a city boy.  In my more militant moments I will rail against urban life, calling cities “cesspools of human filth” and swearing up and down the truest beauty in all the world can only be found when no man is present.  In fact, put a glass of scotch in me (I am a lightweight, it only takes one), and I am likely to say things that make the Unabomber look like a humanity-loving urban hipster.

So why did I write a book that starts out as “boy meets girl,” but ends up being “boy loves city”?

Believe me, it wasn’t easy (learning to love a city I mean, although writing a book is no cake walk either).

There are people who go to Istanbul and fall in love with it in 20 seconds.  They barely even pull away from the airport before they start raving about how amazing the place is.  Immediately they begin posting photos to Facebook and drooling all over everything and generally acting like giddy teenagers who just found the most perfect guy or girl in like, EVER!

I am not one of those people. When I first got to Istanbul I saw little but smog and chaos and stress.  Even six years after I arrived I was comparing living there to living like a lab rat in a cage stuffed with so many other lab rats they go insane from the overcrowding, and end up attacking each other and gnawing off their own feet.

But Istanbul has a way of getting under one’s skin, even mine.  Few things bring me peace like strolling through the square just north of the Ortakoy mosque on a cool summer night, where young lovers cuddle on the benches and little kids laugh as they chase each other around the plaza.  Few things strike me with awe like standing atop the stone walls of the Rumeli Hisari while watching a massive Ukrainian tanker sail south down the Bosphorus on its way to the Mediterranean.

Don’t let my mixed feelings about Istanbul scare you away from it. For every person like me who doesn’t know whether to call that place a shining city on the bay or a shameful scar on the face of the earth, there are ten who say without reservation that it is the greatest city they’ve ever seen in their entire lives.  Istanbul is the kind of place that every person, country boy or city slicker, should see at least once before they die.

And certainly don’t let my mixed feelings about Istanbul scare you away from Turkey in general.  If I were to list the five most beautiful places in the world, three of them would be in Turkey.  The first would be a particular balcony in Gumusluk, a small town on the Bodrum peninsula Jack mentions occasionally on this blog, from which all you can see is sea and all you can hear is wind and waves.  The second would be the side of a hill in Kapadokya, 600 kilometers inland, where in the mornings you can step out your front door and marvel at a sky so big and so blue it reminds you it is the sky that brings life to this earth, not the ground you are standing on.  And the third, well, that third image is just for me.

Maybe I wrote a book about adjusting to life in Istanbul because I was trying to sort through contradictory feelings that will never reconcile.  Maybe I did it because after the thousandth person asked me what it was like in Turkey, and for the thousandth time I didn’t know where to start, I thought maybe writing it down would help me clear my head and move on.

A fat lot of good that seems to have done me though.  I miss Istanbul and will be moving back in a few months.

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Strobe Lightning

Last night, the heavens opened and we were entertained by a real snap, crackle and pop of a storm. What is it about Turkish raindrops? They seem so much heavier than the Blighty variety as they fall to the ground like cluster bombs. As we watched the spectacle from our balcony, our courtyard became littered with adolescent olives and the road outside was overcome by a river of brown sludge that sloshed against our garden wall. We unplugged our fancy electricals as a precaution against the strobe lightning, positioned towels at vulnerable points around the house and hoped for the best.

At least the town’s first autumnal wash did douse the semi-parched garden. At the beginning of the summer, our neighbour took sole charge of our joint plot and made a valiant effort to keep it well watered. His initial enthusiasm eventually waned to half-hearted resentment; he seemed very pleased with the biblical downpour. We were less enthusiastic. Midway through the tempest, our roof sprang a leak and our fuse box, which is illogically located on an external wall, tripped. Compared to some, we got off lightly. We’re planning a joint birthday shindig this month; our birthdays are two weeks apart. At this rate it will be illuminated by candles and guests will be entertained by transistor radio while they sup warm white wine and dance around strategically placed buckets.
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Jamey Roddemeyer, RIP

I came across this sweet video of Jamey Rodemeyer, a young American boy struggling with his sexuality. Despite vicious and relentless bullying at school, he had the strength of character to send a message of hope to all young people everywhere who are grappling to understand who they are and to make sense of their feelings. He called his message ‘It Gets Better, I promise’.

Jamey Roddemeyer

Unfortunately it didn’t get better for Jamey. On Sunday 18th of September, he committed suicide. He was just 14. No one will ever really know why he took his own life. The internet is full of conspiracy theories (as usual). What we do know is that he was gay and brutalised by his class mates. Nobody stopped them.

I know how lucky I am. I have a charmed life. I have always had the support of my family and have always felt loved. I am one of the lucky few. I know Blighty isn’t perfect. I know some people harbour dark views. I know some children are bullied. But I’m glad I grew up in a country that is genuinely free, a civilised little island where political correctness has gone mad, according to the more reactionary among us.  Well, tough. I’m glad it’s not okay to say paki, nigger, queer or spastic. I’m glad people have to watch what they say and what they do. I’m glad bigotry has consequences. That’s why people died fighting Hitler. Lest we forget.

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X Factor Ads

It’s Sod’s Law. Just as I posted about gorgeous autumn weather in Bodrum it started to rain. And, Christ, did it rain. We’ve spent a couple of drizzly evenings watching the first two live episodes of the X Factor (that’s the British version of American Idol to those across the pond) through the internet using a VPN (virtual private network). I know, I know, it’s shallow, exploitative nonsense but it is entertaining. We plugged the laptop into the TV. It’s not the greatest picture but beggars as they say. We hear unconfirmed rumours that VPNs/proxy servers will be illegal when the Turkish Government eventually introduces its new internet controls and we’re beaten down by the heavy hand of the censorious State. If this is the case they’ll be no more British TV for us. And they’ll be no more British adverts either.

I’ve often thought that commercials are more entertaining than the programmes they rudely interrupt. Yeo Valley, purveyors of all things dairy have commissioned a costly class act for the X Factor. It’s bubble gum fun. The men aren’t bad either.

It’s not a new idea, of course. I remember the 70s Coca Cola ad that spawned the worldwide hit single I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing for the squeaky clean New Seekers (not a patch on the old Seekers).

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Bodrum, Nice and Slow

The tyranny of summer is behind us and a blesséd autumn waits impatiently out to sea. The mugging muggy days have given way to bright warmth and cooler, cuddly nights. Having outlived the big heat, we reoccupied the upper floor of the house for the first time in two months. I was glad to become re-acquainted with our superior sprung marital mattress.

Bodrum’s hysterical nightlife has slowed to a thin trickle. The hordes are back in Istanbul and the whores are back in Kiev, replaced by Teutonic types in fishing hats and sandals with socks. The hassle boys along bar street are out in force to squeeze one last pushy sale and itinerant workers are heading home to their winter pastures to marry their cousins. Fink, the exemplar rich bitch bar has gone into hibernation and its huge swaying red chandelier, the most photographed light fitting this side of Versailles, will soon be dismantled and packed away. This is Bodrum at its best. Snap it up while you can.

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Jack the Hack

Now that Rupert Murdoch and his progeny have hit the skids (and not before time), I’ve decided to become the next big thing in the newspaper business. I now publish my very own daily online newspaper called Jack the Hack. Now, before you start thinking that I’m turning in to a megalomaniac media mogul, spending all day at the keyboard and denying Liam his conjugal rights, I don’t actually do a thing. I found a snappy little app called paper.li that automatically garners articles from Twitter by combining my tweets with lists I follow and keywords I’ve specified. Ok, I know it’s all a bit random but it’s fun and it’s so easy. I don’t intend to go the way of Maxwell, Black, Murdoch and co, but I do see a gap in the market now the News of the Screws has kicked the bucket.

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Steve Jobs, RIP

Apple technology is not the best or always the most innovative but it is undeniably iconic with real feel appeal. Steve Jones was a genius but also a philosopher. ‘Nobody wants to die,’ he said. ‘Even those who want to go to Heaven, don’t want to die to get there.’ He knew better than most that death is the final destination for all of us. ‘Never settle,’ he said. That’s why Liam and I are in Turkey.

The Dorothy Dollar and Pink Pound

When I was in negotiation with my publisher, Jo Parfitt, she asked me if Perking the Pansies, the book, would attract a wider audience beyond a gay niche. It’s a question I had asked of myself. It’s not a bad niche to be stuck in. By some accounts, the pink pound is worth about £6 billion in the UK and the US equivalent (the dorothy dollar) is reckoned to be worth a staggering $640 billion. Even if this is an exaggeration in these recessionary times it’s still big bucks.

The more I thought about it the more I realised that neither the book nor the blog are actually about gay life in Turkey, rather they are about a gay couple living in Turkey. This is an important distinction. I did a little digging about my blog readership. It turned out that my pansy fans are overwhelmingly British, female (about 70%) and over 45 (around 80%). Even though the blog is occasionally a little naughty and  gay boy about town, this hasn’t put off the straight reader. This may be because gay culture is much more mainstream in Britain than elsewhere. The gay scene has emerged from the dark ghetto on the wrong side of the tracks and gone very high street (or Main Street as they say on the other side of the pond), the Daily Mail has stopped being routinely beastly and the tea-time TV choices for British women of a certain age are Graham Norton and Paul O’Grady (neither of whom hide their flashing pink light under a bushel).

What do you think?

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