My Dribbling Years

Being closer to the finish line than the start, I’m regularly pricked and poked, and not in a good way – blood tests for diabetes and high cholesterol, liver and kidney function, and checks on my far-from-showroom-new prostate. And let’s not go there about stabbing a turd for bowel cancer, a procedure that leaves no one’s dignity intact.

And I’ve now reached a new milestone. I’ve just turned 65. So, it’s official. I’m an old fart who’s ‘past it’ but can’t remember what it was. In years gone by, this would have meant that I’d get my state pension, but no more. I’ve got another 18 months to wait for that pauper’s ransom.

On the plus side, some youngsters now call me ‘sir’ and I get to sit in the special seats on public transport. Whoopy do. My delight knows no bounds.

And I get an extra layer of healthcare aimed at the grey herd – jabs for flu, shingles and pneumococcal (whatever that is) and screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm (any idea? Me neither).

These checks, supplemented by a daily diet of pills and potions, are meant to keep me alive and kicking beyond my biblical three score years and ten. No wonder us old bones are a drain. It wouldn’t surprise me if those same youngsters who offer me a seat on the bus would rather throw me under it.

But despite the aches and the pains, the turkey neck, the well-ploughed wrinkles, the expanding bald patch and waistline, the greying short and curlies, the slowly fading faculties, the struggle to tie a shoe lace and the all-too-tedious 4am sleepy stagger to the loo, I’m embracing my dribbling years. Because living here and now, I know how lucky I am.

Sparks, Candles and Cardamom

Suddenly one late evening our lights started to flicker and our electric hob began to beep randomly. Our neighbours, too, were experiencing spooky goings on. With Halloween approaching, we thought it might be a message from the other side. Well, our small cottage is over 170 years old and some poor soul is bound to have kicked the proverbial at some point in the past. Instead of chasing ghosts by rolling out the Ouija board, a saner mind prevailed: Liam contacted the UK Power Networks – the fancy new name for the National Grid.

Engineers were on the case in less than an hour – climbing poles and checking cables. It turned out to be a fault in an underground line running beneath a neighbouring front garden. Nothing more could be done that evening and so, as a safety precaution, our electricity was cut off. Out came the candles, on went the transistor radio. Early the following morning, a lorry-load of strapping lads in hi-vis vests descended upon us, their power tools cocked and loaded.

While they got down to business on the fault, we were wired up to a bloody great generator on wheels parked outside. “Is that cardamom I can smell?” asked the sexy sparky as he poked cables through our cat flap and up through our coffin hatch to the fuse box. Now there’s a man with a keen nose, I thought.

The faulty power line was repaired by nightfall. Job done. Here’s one of the sparks and his dancing feet disconnecting us from the generator before plugging us back into the mains. A fella happy in his work.

We can’t fault the fault fixers. A tip-top service from the big boys with their big toys, can-do attitude and ever-friendly smiles. Thank you.

Happy Birthday, Perking the Pansies

“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.”

These were the fateful opening lines of my very first blog post on the 8th of October 2010 – fifteen years ago – when Perking the Pansies was born on a wet Friday afternoon in Bodrum. Over 1,500 blog posts later, these pansies are still as perky as ever.

They were also the first few lines of my first memoir of the same name, with its enticing, Amazon-friendly book blurb (or so I hoped at the time)…

Jack and Liam, fed up with kiss-my-arse bosses and nose-to-nipple commutes, chuck in the towel and move to a small town in Turkey. Join the culture-curious gay couple on their bumpy rite of passage. Meet the oddballs, VOMITs, vetpats, emigreys, semigreys, randy waiters and middle England miseries. When prejudice and ignorance emerge from the crude underbelly of Turkey’s expat life, Jack and Liam waver. Determined to stay the course, the happy hedonistas hitch up their skirts, flee to laissez-faire Bodrum and fall under the spell of their intoxicating foster land. Enter Jack’s irreverent world for a right royal dose of misery and joy, bigotry and enlightenment, betrayal and loyalty, friendship, love, earthquakes, birth, adoption and murder. Suburban life was never this eventful. You couldn’t make it up.

Fifteen years is several lifetimes in blog-land. In this attention-span-of-a-goldfish era of TackyTok, Instapout, Faceache and the debased twit thing with its daft new porn-site-sounding name, who blogs these days anyway? I may be old hat but I’ve not run out of steam quite yet. And so, as they said just before the outbreak of World War 2, I’ll just…

Roys of Wroxham

Way back in 2013, I wrote a brief throwaway piece about a day trip to Wroxham – ‘Gateway to the Norfolk Broads’ – a town entirely given over to those who like to mess about in boats and those who service them. I called it Roy’s Town because we were baffled by the dominance of what seemed to be some bloke called Roy – Roys Supermarket, Roys Pharmacy, Roys Toys, Roys Garden Centre, Roys Car Park. Note the missing apostrophes. Tut, tut.

Last week, the long dead and buried post attracted fresh attention. This happens now and again, usually without rhyme or reason. But not this time. BBC East – Auntie Beeb’s local news hereabouts – featured one of those newfangled ‘influencers’ who was also baffled by Roy’s riches. He posted about it on TikTok.

Riding on his coat-tails, my post got a few hundred extra hits. He got millions. Such is life.

Room With a View

When we first waded ashore to the fabled isle of Ithaca, we stumbled upon a tumbledown wreck of a house, perched by the waterside and overlooking a pine-dressed Frikes Bay. Sad, unloved and barely standing, a wonky For Sale sign hung precariously from the front wall. It was the ultimate doer-upper (or puller-downer and start again-er). But with such a glorious aspect and a view to sell your soul for, we expected it to be snapped up in no time and transformed into something truly magical. Over dinner, we fantasised about snapping it up ourselves. Romantic notions of the perfect place to live out our dotage were encouraged by the robust local plonk. The more we drank, the more possible it seemed.

Of course, the next day, reality dawned and all romantic notions of our place in the sun evaporated. Like many Greek islands out of season, not-so-idyllic Ithaca is cold, wet and closed, wild winter tempests could sweep us out to sea without a paddle and what about healthcare for our aging bones? Also, the prospect of trying to learn a new language with an unfamiliar alphabet made our old brains hurt. The booze from the night before didn’t exactly help. Besides, the curse of Brexit meant it was nigh on impossible anyway. That was two years ago.

Imagine our surprise when, this year, back in Ithaca, we stumbled upon the same tumbledown wreck with the same wonky For Sale sign hanging precariously from the front wall. We started to romanticise all over again. Well, an old boy can dream, can’t he? I wonder…

My Garden Follies

After a long hot summer of sweaty nights, autumn waits impatiently out to sea and nights are cooling. The changing season has brought with it a welcome respite from the semi-drought. Apart from the occasional monsoon-like downpour that evaporated almost as quickly as it landed, we’ve had very little rain this year. And as East Anglia is the breadbasket of England, the thirsty fields are desperate for a good drink. Our little plot has managed to get through the dry patch relatively unscorched – with the help of a couple of water butts replenished by the odd thunderstorm.

And with shorter days, cosy evenings and frosty nights on the horizon, it won’t be long before the garden goes into hibernation and I’ll have to put away some of our garden toys – my follies, I call ’em – which can’t take the cold. The evil eye hanging from a branch is looking particularly worse for wear. I should’ve bought a new one when we were on Ithaca. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Idyllic Ithaca – the Return

It’s taken quite a while but we’ve finally recovered from our frolic-filled sojourn on Ithaca. For our second expedition, we were accompanied by a couple of fellow village people who added an extra helping of spice to the mix. We had a ball. We haven’t laughed so much in years. It was well worth the hour-and-a-half delay at Stansted Airport, the three-and-a-half-hour flight to gorgeous Kefalonia, the hour-long taxi trek across the island to the pretty port of Sami, the two-hour wait for the thirty-minute ferry to Ithaca – enough time for a liquid lunch – and, finally, the half-hour cab ride to Frikes.

Even the ferocious squadron of wasps sharing our breakfast buffet each morning didn’t manage to spoil our picnic. Neither did the nasty mozzie bite on my once pert posterior.

Our ouzo-fuelled romp was liberally sprinkled with hot-off-the-press gossip, laced with the lewd and the rude. Here’s a few choice phrases chucked into the drunken conversations. A bit of camp old nonsense, I think, but if bawdy double entendre ain’t your thing, then best change channels now.  

“Need to get some water on my aubergines.”

“Our neighbour’s always going up my back passage.”

“Well, there was that time when my friend shat in a Pringles tube.”

“Apparently, Keira Knightley buys her onions from a veg shop in Bungay.”

“So, the doctor just shone his torch up my backside and said, nice and clean.”

“Oooo, you’ve got a lovely little foible!”

“You gotta keep your own hair on your own seat, right?”

“It’s true! She came home with a pickled foetus in a jam jar.”

“So there I was, just standing there holding my swimming teacher’s long pole.”

“It’s like butter off a water’s back.”

And the evergreen classic…

“So, is your cervico intacto?”

 “Oo-er. Didn’t know you spoke Latin.”

Massive hugs to our splendid travelling buddies. Thank you for the good times to be treasured. You know who you are.

Idyllic Ithaca, we shall return again.

Turkey Street with Bettany Hughes

People who know me know that I love an old ruin. Nothing gets me going more than a pile of ancient tumbledown stones. When I can’t visit ’em, I watch programmes about ’em on the box. And few TV pundits get the sap rising better than classical scholar Bettany Hughes. Buxom Bettany flits and flirts around the Med telling tales of the ancients in a fun and fascinating way. In fact, it was she who first introduced us to Ithaca in her series A Greek Odyssey. We’ve been to Odysseus’ legendary isle twice now, so she really does deserve a medal from the Greek Tourist Board.

Bettany’s latest expedition is Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a three-part series on Channel 5. In a deliciously vivid and insightful narrative enhanced with the very latest archaeological finds, she walks the viewer through the meagre remains of those once wondrous wonders of yore. We’ve visited three of the sites – The Statue of Zeus at Olympia (carted off centuries ago), The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (just one forlorn column remains standing) and, of course, the scattered pile of stones that is The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in present-day Bodrum, our former home town.

Cue the first shameless plug for my second memoir, Turkey Street…

… as Bodrum had always provided refuge to the exiled and the unorthodox, we gambled on getting the going rate for ‘theatrical’ types. Supplemented by Liam’s feeble but endearing attempts at Turkish, the gamble paid off and Hanife the Magnificent, the undisputed matriarch of an old Bodrum family, accepted us and our pink pounds with open hands. We paid our rent and two weeks later moved into Stone Cottage No. 2 on the corner of Sentry Lane and Turkey Street. And so it came to pass that by happy coincidence we found ourselves living on the same road as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. ‘I think,’ Liam had said at the time, ‘you would call that a result.’

Chapter 1 – The Garden of Sin

The final episode of Bettany’s epic journey starts with her riding pillion on a scooter driving the wrong way down Turkey Street trying to find the entrance to the ancient site. Imagine our complete surprise and delight as she passed Stone Cottage No. 2 along the way.

Blink and you’ll miss it, so here’s a still with a big yellow arrow indicating our garden wall.

Cue my second shameless plug…

Tired and dripping, I waded past rows of sleeping dolmuş minibuses – ‘dollies’, as Liam called them – and splashed home along Turkey Street. Twenty-three centuries earlier, Alexander the Great had marched along the very same road to wrest old Halicarnassus from the doughty Persians, just before he went on to conquer half the known world. My ambitions were rather more modest: to survive the short stroll in one piece and jump back under the duck down duvet. Like many old Anatolian thoroughfares, Turkey Street was just wide enough for two emaciated camels to pass each other unhindered. This constraint never seemed to trouble the locals, but for us, motorcades of Nissan tanks flanked by Vespas on amphetamines made for a testing pedestrian experience. Aided by the now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t pavements, death or permanent disability lurked at every twist and turn of the perilous road.

Chapter 2 – Turkey Street

Eventually Bettany found the Mausoleum, bringing the scanty ruins to life more than I did when I wrote about them back in the day. Thank you, Bettany, you brought back such monumental memories.

Take a Walk in My Shoes Again

While we’re perking our pansies on Ithaca, I’m reposting something from the time we first tasted the wine on Odysseus’ fabled isle. So ladies, gents and everyone in between, take a walk in my shoes all over again…

I gloriously misspent my youth trawling the sleazy dives of many of the world’s great metropolitan sin bins – London, Amsterdam, Paris, New York and Los Angeles among them – and cruising the hedonistic no-holes-barred gay fleshpots of Europe – Ibiza, Sitges, Gran Canaria, Mykonos. My dance card was rarely empty and I had a ball. But, there comes a time when the spirit is no longer willing and the flesh is in bed by midnight.

These days, a gentle week around a cool pool with a good book, a glass of something local and Liam by my side is what gets the pulse racing. Let me take you on a walk through laid-back Frikes, our latest tranquil bolthole, a cute village on the northeast coast of the pine-dressed Greek isle of Ithaca.

Courtesy of JustGreece.com and Jorgos Nikolidakis

Heaven’s Gates

A few years back, we spent a truly heavenly time on Crete celebrating our 10th anniversary. It was so peaceful, so life-affirming, that we’re thinking of doing it all over again for our 20th next year. As I wrote at the time…

“Our Cretan idyll delivers unexpected familiarity. If I close my eyes, I’m transported back in time to another land of randy insects, loose goats, old men in tea houses and pine-smothered hills.

Ok, no headscarves or hassle, and the call to prayer has been replaced by the chimes of the local blue-domed monastery, but looking at the following snaps – the first of our Cretan digs, the second of our old stone house in Bodrum – you get my drift.”

That was then…

Aphrodite Guest House
Bodrum House

This is now…

Then, guess what we stumbled upon at the end of our recent modern-day Greek odyssey in a hidden corner of our Aegina hotel? We took it as a sign from the gods.

So we’ve decided to return to the place where the original odyssey of Homeric legend ended. Yes, we’re going back to Ithaca and, unlike Odysseus, it won’t take us ten years to get there.