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…

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.

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…

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.

Even the Ducks Are Pissed Off

These constant rainy days are really starting to get on my tits. I’m not unfamiliar with big weather. As an army brat in faraway Malaysia, there was the annual inundation during monsoon season, with overflowing sewers and flooded classrooms. And then there was the ‘Great Storm’ of 1987, which barrelled across the land and ripped off half the roof of my house. In more recent times, as semi-retired Aegean gentlemen of leisure, Turkish winters taught us a lesson or two. Spare towels were requisitioned to stem the relentless tide of water flowing under windows and doors as angry tempests crashed ashore, overwhelming storm drains and trapping us inside for days on end. Our Bodrum gaff was only saved from flash floods and floating cars by stout stone garden walls. They don’t tell you that in the guidebooks.

Norwich may well share the same latitude as Calgary in Canada, but the Gulf Stream flowing up from Mexico keeps our islands relatively warm, winter-wise. It also keeps them damp. But enough is enough. We’ve just endured the wettest winter since 1836, and so far this spring, hardly a single dry day has gone by. It’s not big weather, it’s boring weather. Even the ducks are pissed off.

But to provide some cheer, I finally got to see seven swans a-swimming. Two proud parents and five cygnets were spotted mucking about in Loddon Staithe*.

The photo is courtesy of Loddon Town Council

*A staithe is a riverside dock traditionally used for loading and unloading cargo. These days, they’re used for mooring leisure boats.

Ten Lucky Years

A decade has now passed since we closed the door on the stone house in Bodrum for the last time and brought our four-year Turkish adventure to a sudden end. And ever since, while the world has continued its grim descent into oblivion, we’ve just carried on regardless. Our Anatolian days taught us to think differently and live differently – making do with less and being all the happier for it.

After Turkey, we pitched our tent in Norfolk, a flat and bountiful corner of old England – first in Norwich, then Chedgrave, a village few people have heard of. To begin with, we rented, trying the city on for size. Our first lodgings were a 400-year-old former weaver’s gaff in flint and brick near Norwich’s University of the Arts. We loved it, giving us a taste for city life and its student vibe. But our antique digs were cold and draughty and, even back in 2012, cost a king’s ransom to heat. Gawd knows what the bills are like now.

After a couple of years, we decided to put down roots and buy our own slice of historic Norwich – a micro-loft in a handsome converted Victorian warehouse, a writer’s garret to polish off Turkey Street, my second memoir.

At the time, our savings were still in Turkish lira earning pretty good interest. Little did we know that the lira was about to take a dive – and lucky for us, we converted to sterling just in the nick of time. Only days later Turkey’s currency dropped off a cliff, and it’s been more or less in freefall ever since. Had we hesitated it might have been the workhouse for us, not some trendy city-centre apartment.

Five years later, we fancied a quieter life, with room to breathe and a log burner to keep our tootsies toasty. We put the micro-loft on the market and it was bought by the first person to view. Quite by chance, Liam noticed a tiny 1850s worker’s cottage for sale. We came, we saw, we bought. Five months into our village life, the world was in lockdown, and our cottage was the perfect place to ride out the storm. Our luck was still in.

Truth is, we only chose Norfolk because we needed somewhere we could actually afford and that was a relatively easy commute to London: there was family stuff to deal with. But as time moved on there was no longer a need for us to stick around the sticks. For a while, we toyed with God’s Own County – Yorkshire – with its big-limbed, hunky Heathcliffs. It certainly does have its moody blue attractions among the moors and mills.

But we’re rather taken with our East Anglian hamlet, with its broad Naarfuk brogue, big skies and chirpy birds with their squawky dawn call – loud enough to wake the dead in the churchyard next door. And we may be newbie Norfolk broads but we’re definitely not the only gays in the village.

The cottage is my nineteenth address. Will I make it to twenty? And will our luck hold? Who knows? But we do have a coffin hatch just in case the Grim Reaper comes a-knocking.

Top of the Pansy Pops 2020

What a year. Who would have predicted that 2020 would have brought a pandemic to strike us down and trash the global economy? Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus dominated the pansy charts this year. And there was death too but not because of the virus. Professionally, I lost a fellow author in a horrific murder and, personally, I lost my oldest friend to a sudden and totally unexpected cardiac arrest. But then came the COVID-19 survivor close to my heart and a birthday milestone, both of which brought some hope and happiness to a tragic year best left behind.

Despite the hurricane that swirled around us, Liam and I have been incredibly fortunate and life remains calm and peaceful. We know how lucky we are. The pansies remain forever perked.

Ladies and gents, both, neither and all those in between, I give you top of the pansy pops for 2020.

The most popular image of 2020 was this fuzzy black and white photo of my old primary school in Malaysia during my army brat years. Usually it’s something smutty or a hunk in the buff.

2020 was a write-off but do I see more hopeful times for the New Year? I think so but then I’m an eternal optimist. Clearly, the vaccine will be centre-stage. With a bit of luck and a fair wind, life should start returning to normal. Wishing us all a safe and sane 2021.

Missing You Already!

I first met Clive Smith a few weeks into our first year of secondary school. My very first memory was him doing a skit of ‘The Fenn Street Gang’ – some of you oldies may remember the seventies sitcom. He was doing all the voices, mostly female I have to say. It was hysterical. I liked him instantly. A theatrical life beckoned.

We travelled together through our teenage years – birds of a feather, you could say. And what adventures we had.

There were the incredible school trips – all the way to Russia by train then back by sea on an old Soviet rust bucket. We shared the boat with a girl’s school from Scarborough and attempted to chat up the lasses – really, who were we trying to kid?

Then, a couple of years later, there was Transylvania – not many people go there. Sadly we never got to see Dracula’s Castle but we did see an awful lot of snow-capped mountains and tedious communist-era architecture. Yes, amazing trips. Not many schools put on that kind of show. How lucky were we? And I’m sure this is where Clive acquired his wanderlust. Who could forget the tale of a young Clive sailing up the Irrawaddy to smoke dubious substances with the locals. Not me; I never let him forget it.

But it was the afternoons in the front room of Clive’s home in South London I remember and treasure the most – gossiping and talking schoolboy sex to a soundtrack of Elton, 10cc, Alice Cooper and Bowie – lots of Bowie – oh, and way too much Roxy Music for my liking.

In the late seventies, Clive came to see me at work in Habitat on Chelsea’s King’s Road. He had something to tell me. ‘I’m gay,’ he announced. He’d come out to me next to a stack of trendy crockery in the middle of the shop floor. ‘No, you’re not,’ I replied. ‘I’d know if you were.’ Shows how little I did know.

For years after, Clive was always my Christmas Day guest of choice. Best thing was, veggie Clive always brought his own nut roast. How we laughed over the Coronation Street board game he brought one year. No we didn’t. It was rubbish.

Clive’s greatest attribute was his loyalty, to me certainly, even when I didn’t always deserve it. Typically, he was the first to visit me and Liam in Turkey – no mean feat out of season – and the first to drop by when we moved to the middle of nowhere in Norfolk, house-warmer in hand. It was a bottle of port. He knew us so well. He always kept in touch through time and distance. That was his talent.

I’d known Clive for nearly half a century and, for nearly half a century, we debated and argued, bitched and joked, fell out and fell in, laughed and cried, shared secrets and naughty thoughts.

We may have bickered for nearly fifty years but for nearly fifty years we also loved, more like brothers than friends. And that’s what counts in the end. So all I can now say is, ‘Missing you already.’

Clive died suddenly and without warning from a cardiac arrest on 16th January 2020. He was 58.

Old Money, No Money

This is the second article originally published at On the Ege Magazine back in the day. I’ve rescued it from the bin to re-post for posterity. Why? Because I can.

Old Money, No Money

We were summoned by a Turkish neighbour for moonlit drinks. Her name is Sophia, a slightly batty older lady who speaks fluent English with a cut glass accent. Sophia has been threatening us with an invitation for weeks by rapping on our window, poking her hand through the grille and startling our visitors. Our immediate neighbours, Vadim and Beril, were also invited so we all scurried along Sentry Lane together. We approached an ornate set of heavy double-doors and rang the bell. Sophia flung open the doors to reveal a gorgeous candlelit courtyard bursting with a copse of mature fruit trees – avocado, pomegranate and lemon – laid out before a pretty, whitewashed old Bodrum house. Liam was immediately drawn to a candlelit niche in the stone wall, partially hidden by the thicket. The recess contained a small statuette of Our Lady, a replica of the original from Meryemana (the house of the Virgin Mary, near Ephesus). Liam resisted the knee-jerk urge to genuflect.

As a foreign student in the sixties, pedigree’d Sophia had acquired her regal inflection at the Royal Society of Dramatic Art. Her career in the arts was cut short by marriage to a Turkish diplomat whom she loved intensely; she travelled the world as the ambassador’s wife until his premature death a decade ago. She still grieves him, but that doesn’t stop her flirting outrageously with Vadim. His protests that he’s a one-woman man get a sceptical response from Sophia. In her experience, it’s perfectly normal for Turkish men to have a harem of women on the go at any one time, a modern twist on the old Muslim custom of taking more than one wife.

Drinks were plentiful and complemented by bountiful mezes freshly prepared by Sophia’s faithful old head-scarfed retainer she calls ‘my Kurdish woman.’ We were serenaded by Vivaldi and classic crooners – while the hired help fell to her knees and prayed with gusto next to the stereo, disregarding completely the irreverent chatter emanating from the terrace. This bizarre spectacle illustrated, as nothing else could, the polar extremes of Turkish society.

As Dean Martin’s honey tones dribbled from the speakers, Sophia pulled me from my seat for a slow smooch around the terrace.

Although she tended to dominate the conversation (in both English and Turkish), Sophia was a gracious host and the evening was a civilised, bi-lingual diversion. Sophia is old money through and through. She seems taken by us though; we’re completely baffled what ‘old money’ sees in ‘no money’.

Postcards from Corfu

The A Gays

We chose simple and we got sublime. Our billet is a modest studio (A1 for the A Gays) overlooking a sparkling pool.

All we have to do is drag our tired old carcasses the few yards from bed to lounger – perfect for the R&R we crave. Most days we laze about dipping and sipping, reading and dozing. We deliberately booked the week after schools went back – to avoid over-wrought brats who scream and splash. We hadn’t wagered on the toddlers, though. We’re being diverted by the neurotic antics of four nervous grown-ups dancing round Lola, a tiny tot wearing a kamikaze-style sun hat and what looks like a suicide belt. Lola’s only word is ‘NO!’ and she repeats it a lot.

Elleana the Great

Our landlady is a magnificent Corfiot matriarch called Elleana – not one to cross, we think. Liam has charmed her with warm talk and a few well-practised words in Greek. It’s done the trick. She keeps a well-stocked bar which we’re eager to drain. Corfiot wine is surprisingly quaffable given it’s stored out the back in three-litre plastic bottles.

Elleana’s gaff is protected by a shaggy guard dog. He likes to call round for a sniff, frisk and lick. We’re not sure of the make or sex but we call it ‘Hector’.

Wasps around the honey pot

The vine harvest has brought the last hurrah of the season for squadrons of wasps. Puny by comparison to their angrier British cousins, they’re more annoying than menacing and are only really interested in sipping from the glass Liam keeps topped up by my side. I’m happy to share. Several have drowned during the mid-afternoon Bacchanalia. A leathered Brummie reclining at the far end of the pool keeps insect spray to hand. Every so often we hear ‘pssssst’, ‘pssssst’, pssssst’ then she returns to her chick lit. We call her ‘Ms Raid’. The wasps may be irritating but the mozzies are less voracious than expected. Either that or our four years in Turkey have turned our blood to poison.

The Youngest Gays in the Village

The resort is serene and spartan – just a few tavernas and pizza parlours – and most of our fellow visitors look like they’ve been pickled. It’s a novel experience being (almost) the youngest gays in the village. The locals are friendly and obliging, if a little frayed after a long hot summer. Liam was nearly laid low by an upturned beer crate. Fixed to the pavement with duck tape, it was there to cover a big hole.

Overheard

As many know, I’m a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) eavesdropper. Here’s a few random throwaway lines picked up on the radar as we gadded about:

What’s the wever tomorrer?

‘ow do I know? Do I look like a weather cock?

She’s very end of season, that one.

No, Joan, I don’t ‘ave a pair a woolly knickers.

For maximum effect, such quotes are best recited with a northern accent.

It’s all Greek to me

Sunsets are spent playing cards and Scrabble accompanied by the hard stuff. As the light gradually dims, we resort to mini-torches to read the letters. Liam tries to cheat with Greek and thinks I won’t catch on in the dark.

Déjà vu

Our soporific Ionian idyll delivers unexpected familiarity. Closing my eyes, I’m transported back in time to another land of barking dogs, crowing cocks, randy crickets, loose cattle, manic drivers, ripe drains, pine-clad hills, goats, potholes, bugs and a nightly spectacle of glorious sunsets.

In the end, who could tell the difference between a grandma riding a donkey in Greece, Bulgaria or trotting through a Turkish village?

Turkey Street, Chapter 13, Blesséd are the Meek

As I observed in a book I once wrote. Ok, headscarves, hassle and the call to prayer are missing and they don’t play cricket in Bodrum but you get my general drift.

Coming soon… Postcards from Albania.

Answers on a Postcard

Would you Adam and Eve it? Our washing machine and dishwasher conked out within a few weeks of each other. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. They were both installed when the building was converted into flats about eight years ago and had been worked to death ever since. Still, to lose two appliances at once looks like carelessness, to misquote the marvellous Oscar Wilde. The equally marvellous Co-op came to our rescue with instant, no drama service. Quite fitting as we live in an old Co-op warehouse.

The replacement washing machine is from Beko, a Turkish brand. We’re doing our bit to keep the Turkish economy afloat. We chose cheap to keep our own economy afloat. The dishwasher is British made but you’d hardly know it from the manual. I’m not bad at English. I’ve got an O Level in it. But even I can’t fathom the meaning of:

The rapid light flicker fleetly.

Answers on a postcard.

Ten years ago, come Saturday night, you’d find me shaking my booty to the Freemasons surrounded by topless hairy marys. Ten years on, I’m on the sofa thumbing through a dishwasher manual watching sequinned men shake their booties on Strictly Come Dancing. Sad but true. And strangely satisfying.

Perking the Pansies

Jack Scott's random ramblings