PKK Party conference season

The annual new year's eve amateur drinking competition in Taksim Square has been canceled to show support for the Turkish soldiers bombing PKK rebel camps in northern Iraq. Why should Istanbulus have a good time when the boys are blowing villages up to keep them safe.

The increased security alert may have resulted from the arrest of a suspected suicide bomber who was apprehended as he got on the Istanbul metro and may have contributed to the cancellation too. He was tailed for three weeks after coming over the border from Iraq and nabbed in the nick of time with a back pack full of explosives.

Having helped police with their inquiries he mentioned in passing that there were 800 PKK rebels who had received suicide-bomber training with 100 or so of them primed and ready to go.

A conservative estimate has PKK membership at roughly 3500. So that's about 25% of the party ready to blow themselves up, leaving the organization seriously depleted. I would have liked to have been at he party's annual conference when that motion was tabled.

"Brothers and sisters, we now come to motion 34 on the agenda; suicide bombing. We appreciate that this policy will expedite the Turkish army's goal for them, render our armed struggle impotent, and alienate our grass roots support, but we really think this is the only way forward."

"All those in favour say 'Banzai!'"

When You Want Quality Acting, Only Simon Johns Delivers on Time and on Budget

The winter is drawing in, and it's as crappy and grey as the Old Country, even more so since the apartments are so tall they block out the sunlight. I didn't move here for weather like this. I moved here for cheap liquor and fatty food. But the saving grace is the daily doses of odd things to see and do.

Tuesday's grip-and-grin on board the HMS Exeter ended in a cold terrace bar, severely drunk after many cans of Her Majesty's John Smiths. The Consulate invited us to help a shipful of seamen weigh anchor after their manoeuvres with Turkish tars in the Mediterranean. The last landlubbers standing, Mrs Johns and I were cordially invited to go ashore with three servicemen. Drunk and wrapped in my peacoat, I bade farewell to our matelots in their shirt sleeves and left them to go to the karaoke bar to sing shanties and pitch woo.

Keeping with the theme, on Wednesday I spent a few hours dressed as World War One sergeant in the new Turkish historical soap opera Karayilan, roughly translated as Blackadder. (Mondays at 8pm on ATV, for local fans.) A friend of a friend working on the set called to say the show needed a honky, and, as we all know, there is none more honky than I.

I thought they needed me to stand around in a muddy field shooting withering glances at the natives. I got the distinct impression something else was intended when the production staff referred to me as "Simon Bey", the very formal and polite address in Turkish. I was ushered away from the rest of the extras, given my own dressing room, sent to hair and costume in a warm Portakabin. Stripped of my sideburns and dressed in an obviously inauthentic uniform with a plastic helmet and puttees made of old curtains, a piece of paper was thrust into my hands with pidgin English on it. "Your dialog, Simon Bey", the extra wrangler said. "You can fuck off if you think I'm saying anything", I thought.

But I did. I acted, I mugged, I considered correcting the grammar. And my suggestion that an Edwardian soldier wouldn't have said "meat head" fell on deaf ears. A troupe of local farm folk was shipped in to play the oppressed masses (oppressed by me, by the way). When these extras weren't cooing over the star of the show, they went to great lengths to tell me how pleased they were to meet me. They knew a star when they saw one, even if I did look like Martin Cloons with a healing herpes scab. My star quality was slightly diminished, however, when they saw me shoveling my payment of rice and peas into my gaping maw.

Watch it here.

The producer called me a few days later to ask if I would do a voice-over for the show. "Para var mi?", I asked. "Para yok." "Simon yok!" (You get the idea: No money, no acty). My career as a thesp came to an abrupt end, cut short by greed. Yet I now have a new and in-depth understanding of The Craft: It's fucking easy! I am a ham, but with minimal instruction I know I could play a monocle-popping toff, a sneering Brit baddie or a shivering junkie in any low-budget soap throughout the length and breadth of Europe. (You can run Simon Callow, but you can't hide.) As long as the carbs are forthcoming, I can act all day long. Problem var mi? Problem yok!

What do we want? Hair gel! When do we want it? Now!

Mrs Johns is off to the Southeast for a few days to report on the escalation of Turkish/Kurdish (Turdish?) violence. Hopefully she won't be killed in an ambush. Or contract the shits, as we did last time we were there. Either would suck. I am looking at three days of sitting around the flat in my underpants drinking beer and watching war films in sympathy.

Turkey is gripped by a nationalist fervour after the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group, killed a dozen soldiers and kidnapped a few more. Today, like many days, there was a demonstration on Istiklal, this time by a metalworkers' union. They all had their union truckers' caps on and were milling about in front of Galatasaray high school up, confident that by waving very, very large Turkish flags the P.K.K. will lay down its arms and descend the hills into captivity.

A permit is required before a demonstration can be mounted on Istiklal. This gives the police ample time to take men away from real police work, like hurtling up and down Istiklal on mopeds blipping their sirens and telling taxis to get out of the way, to mass their riot ranks in preparation.

The other day the Communists held a modest rally of about 50 people outside their HQ on Istiklal. There were four coaches of fully armed riot police at both ends of the street, a water cannon, and, of course, an assortment of vintage small arms, at a ratio of four police to one demonstrator. Protesting mothers groups, farmers, and students get the same overwhelming police presence. Despite the British police's armour, if you pick up a dustbin lid and a stick the playing field is a bit more level. Not that I'd fancy my chances, especially if I was Brazilian.

The (nationalist) metalworkers' demo had no such police presence and presumably no permit. But this didn't seem to bother the law. They weren't demonstrating for equal pay or better conditions. They were showing the terrorists, 1500km away up on a mountain, precisely who has the moral high ground.

The riot brigades consist of twenty-year-olds who look and behave like other Turkish twenty-year-old men - smoking, walking arm-in-arm, and pawing at each other in a way that would raise eyebrows anywhere else - except they are dripping in Kevlar instead of sultan's slippers and polyester suits. Their gel-caked hair and slouching make them they look like a gang of, well, heavily armed gay men, by Brighton standards anyway. Until, of course, they mace you or beat the soles of your feet.

A few years ago, Istanbul's finest was ordered to refrain from using excessive force to meet European Union human-rights criteria. They are said to have implemented a work-to-rule to protest the ban on traditional methods for extracting information, and Istanbul was promptly hit by a petty-crime wave. That's political incorrectness gone mad!

Ramazan

Ramazan is over and the rich aroma of over-cooked lamb is evaporating from the streets, especially from the Konak restaurant on Istiklal. The demand for the sweating elephant's leg is less during Ramazan so they stay on the spit longer, emitting a gamy smell called "tail-butter". It resembles the smell of a rotting ewe's carcass found by a rambler laying in a ditch in the Peaks, bloated and maggot-ridden after a mauling by a feral dog that escaped from a local encampment.

Bulgistan-a-go-go

As is customary, every three months us yabancilar (foreigners) must exit Turkey then return at least the next calender day to get a new tourist visa if we intend to remain without going through the virtually impossible, lengthy, and hand-typed (Good Lord) residency permit procedure.

So Mrs Johns and I decided to hire a car and drive to the Bulgarian border, some three hours away, and simply hop over and back, spending the night in the nearest town Edirne - the Ottoman capital before they swept to Istanbul in the mid 15th Century - and perhaps do some sightseeing. (A kebab shop here, a pile of foetid rubbish there, a man with no legs somewhere else. Local charm in spades.)

We hadn't worked out how we were going to get over the border (one can't walk it), but reckoned we could get a cab or a dolmus (half bus, half taxi, all grotty) from Edirne. We couldn't take the hire car, too much red tape. Instead of parking there, we overshot the town and ended up a mile or so away from the border in a transport cafe-cum-hotel-cum-coach-park, like a Little Chef without more harrowing lighting. After sitting down to work out what to do (it was about 9 pm) over a glass of very bitter tea, Ayla asked a random, semi-official looking bloke if he knew how we could work the scam.

"I'll sort you out", he said and beckoned over a young woman seemingly, but not, in her mid-30s. She indicated that our plight was old hat and for 20 lira invited us on the coach she was "hosting". She also mumbled something about buying her cigarettes. An ethnic Turk from Bulgaria, she was a sort of handler for Bulgarians and Turks who want to travel over the border to take advantage of the amazingly cheap duty-free in the no man's land.

We boarded the coach at 10 p.m. and set off the mile or so to the Turkish-Bulgarian border. On the way we passed hundreds, if not thousands, of juggernauts waiting to go through. Most of Afghanistan's heroine and thousands of trafficked people come through this border so it takes a long time to search every lorry and receive a bribe from each driver.

I was feeling cagey: This trip was already on the odd side and I was about to come up against Turkish passport control who would instantly know why I'm here and what I'm trying to do. We disembarked from the bus (about 15 of us in total) so each passenger's passport could be scrutinized. I had a pee, we all smoked, and we waited. When the passports reappeared we got back on the bus and the first leg, though long, was over. Inexplicably we had a different bus driver for the few hundred yards to our next destination: duty-free. In fact, before every leg of the journey, however short, the drivers alternated. Everyone on the bus lit a cigarette.

We arrived at duty free, disembarked, lit a cigarette, and headed to a duty-free hut with our fixer, the young Bulgarian Turkish woman. Ayla and I bought a carton of fags (€13), a bottle of Campari (€6), and eight bottles of French wine - clearly stolen as they were in-flight-meal sized - for €2 each. You take what you can get. Our companion bought at least 10 cartons of cigs then asked if she could borrow our passports so she could buy more.

We got back on the bus, they all lit up, switched drivers, and drove another few hundred yards to Bulgarian customs. The bus moved slowly to give our hostess, her mate, the two drivers, and just about every other passenger enough time to stuff packets of cigarettes into just about everything. Socks, tights, luggage, waistbands, shoes, wash bags, blankets, the driver's seat. The two women were taping them to their backs and legs and throwing the empty cartons left, right, and centre. Our fixer foisted one carton onto Ayla.

Great, we had cadged a ride with smugglers. If my nerves weren't jangling enough already, we had to get a seat on the Midnight Express. Everyone was smoking like chimneys, casting doubt for a moment on our suspicion they were smugglers - perhaps they made this run everyday strictly for personal consumption. But it turned out to be fear.

Mrs Johns pointed out that the Communist regime in Bulgaria had expelled the Muslim Turkish population in the late 1980s, which went some way to explaining why the fixer and the rest of the passengers were so palpably nervous around authority figures. Customs boarded the bus and turned it inside out searching the entire vehicle by torchlight. Despite their best efforts, the stash went undiscovered. Bag searches were cursory and reserved for the male passengers (except me) who were also searched for handguns. Once searched they all lit cigarettes.

Proceeding to Bulgarian passport control, we got out again and all wandered over to a small neon-lit kiosk staffed by a young, hyper-blonde female Bulgarian border guard with a crisp green uniform.

"Where are you going?" she asked me.
"Er ..." I said.
"We're going to ... " Ayla said
"I asked him!", she said, cutting Ayla off and pointing at me.
"Er ..." again.

My brain froze under the pressure of either deportation or a stretch at the president's pleasure. There was no destination, there was just the task at hand. I wracked my brains trying to come up with a name, any name. Sofia? No, an obvious lie. There was a town over the border I saw in the Lonely Planet section on this very venture.

"Stal- Slav- Stanislav- rmdnergrad?" I spluttered, massacring the Slavic.
An immobile face produced the words, "When are you coming back?"
"Er...." my heart pounding.
"Soon?" Steely blue eyes penetrated my soul, searching for the untruths, waiting to pounce, call the guards and kick my backside all the way back to Blighty.
"Yes, very soon."
"You may go."

So it was. What did she care as long as I was leaving again? She just fancied watching another stupid foreigner shit bricks to relieve her boredom. Make them sweat for their pork products.

And off we went again to another, even grottier transport cafe a mile away from the border on the Bulgarian side. The fixer and her mate offloaded their contraband onto their cig pimp, we ate pork (for the first time in a good while), bought biscuits, and waited to be taken back again. I was driving so resisted the overwhelming urge to down a couple of bottles of Bulgarian beer during the wait. The first chance to drink something that wasn't bloody Efes was just out of reach.

The rest of the passengers disappeared, the glow from their freshly lit cigs fading into the darkness. That left the two smugglers, the two drivers, an old bloke, and us. Back through the Bulgarian border, back into no-man's-land, back to duty-free. The two women did the whole thing all over again - carrier bags of cigs removed from their cartons, stuffed in every orifice! They had a cig pimp on the other side as well.

Next was passport control where it could all go very wrong. What I was attempting to do had been done by many before me, daily. But there was nothing to stop them fining me, deporting me, or worse. Especially as there ad been a shake-down of corrupt officials at this border only last year. But the new guards seemed to have slumped back into the old routines nicely. With only a query about Ayla's passport's validity, I got a new visa. By this time I was too tired to be nervous and reckoned if I got into a scrape I'd grass on the smugglers to divert attention from my own crime.

The last hurdle, Turkish customs, also came off hitch-free as the fixer was clearly bribing the martinet with bananas and booze. He was king of his little hill (which resembled Auschwitz) and didn't hesitate telling me he played the saz after querying me about my occupation.

The fixer, only 28, does this at the same time every single day. Her official job is stewardess for the bus line. The journey, about two miles cafe-to-cafe, takes five and a half hours punctuated by two sessions of frenetic stuffing and by two long waits that could result in a heavy penalty on either side. All that for a 25% profit margin on a commodity that is already dirt cheap. They love to smoke up there.

We parted ways with our partners in crime when they dropped us off on the side of the highway and hightailed it into the darkness. It was 2 a.m. and the truck stop was still hopping. Ayla and I looked at each other, silently agreed we had had enough of this neck of the woods, got back into the hired car and drove uninterrupted to Istanbul in two and a half hours flat listening to volume three of the British Nuggets boxed set.

Spectre vs Rector

The trial of pop impresario Phillip Spector has taken another turn as lawyers and expert witnesses tussle over a fragment of finger nail found at the murder scene. Proof positive, say his defense attorneys, of the suicide of Lana Clarkson and, ergo, the innocence of Spector. Proof positive Spector's cleaner needs to get a new vacuum cleaner.

Phil Spector has already threatened the Ramones, the Beatles and former girlfriend Dorothy Melvin (Joan Rivers' ex-manager). He allegedly once chased Melvin before hitting her over the head with a shotgun after he suspected her of snooping in his house, looking for memorabilia to pinch. Perhaps she was trying to locate his life-sized effigy, which he made Ronnie put in the passenger seat of her car during solo trips to the shops while Phil was creating music history.

This time, Phil claims he was an innocent witness to the tragic suicide of Lana Clarkson (no relation to Jeremy). In June, he told Esquire magazine that Ms Clarkson had died in a bizarre act of suicide after "kissing" the gun. (He'd already confessed to his driver and police who attended the scene that he'd killed Ms Clarkson.) Was Mark Chapman merely letting Lennon sniff the barrel of the new revolver he had just got? And perhaps Jack Ruby just wanted Lee Harvey to feel the heft of his gun, to appreciate the balance and check out the nifty pearl inlay on the grip before … BANG, daw, shit.

He remains free on a $1 million bail and protected by his wall of sound, bizarre hairpiece collection, and Robert Shapiro, the man who got O.J. off. So his chances look good.

Phil's real crime is appearing bewigged in court as national treasure Dame Judy Dench. The Anita Dobson/Brian May fright wig he sported during his arraignment was a one-way ticket to life in gaol, but Grand Thesp Auto deserves the chair.

Someone must be talking about me

Rites of passage are a golden thread woven into the fabric of life here: Circumcision, your first sexual experience (with a goat if you're a man, according to Ayla), national service, buying your first pair of Sultan's slippers, deciding never to match your suit trousers with the jacket again, being charmingly mugged, realizing that you can enjoy Efes, and when to decide that it's time to have all your extraneous facial hair removed. Or rather having your barber, who tries to persuade you he's Mexican when clearly not, decide for you.

I had spent a considerable amount of time building a relationship with my barber in Brighton. I had tried many, including the late Alice Cooper Psycho Barber on Bond Street (haircut 100p, thick hair 120p). When I first moved to Brighton, I went there to have my very long hair shaved off (in a perverse attempt to "fit in" at art school) with Andy Blake. Half way through cutting Andy's hair Cooper turned to me and said "If you think I'm going to cut that (my hair), you can fuck off." He died shortly after. In his shop there was a hand-drawn picture of a man with his throat cut, which said underneath in a very shaky script "We do not shave." Years later I noted that the man in the illustration looked exactly like Lee, right down to the teeth. It was uncanny

I settled upon Headmen on Powis Square. It was clear from the first visit I wasn't going anywhere nice for my holidays, I didn't have a job, and I didn't care how the Albion were doing. (That's a stupid question at the best of times. Shit is always the answer). The dialog entire was gradually reduced to "Scissor-cut back and sides, longer on the top, parting to the left, leave the sideburns, please." "£7 please", "Thanks. Here's a quid for you. See you in a few months. Goodbye." Easy.

Northern Englanders often lament the stoicism of southern small businesses proprietors; I celebrate it. I refer to a letter sent to me by James Smith who found himself behind former Eastenders actress Patsy Palmer in the queue at Tesco. He was enraged by her driveling with the checkout woman. It is bad form to engage in conversation when there are other queuers eager to go about their daily businessespecially when they are patiently waiting to buy sixteen cans of Stella Artois and eighty Lucky Strike at 10 am on a Sunday.

And I don't want to know who my neighbours are either. Getting to know them is bad luck. When, for instance, they come to the door at 1am in their pants, drunk, complaining about the noise. Well, he could have been drunk or may have had a stroke, it was hard to tell, but nevertheless it was rude.

I entered uncharted territory once more when I went to a new barber for the first time the other day. The shop was unchanged since the 60s, like the Red Crescent clinic where I had my blood extracted. And it smelled like Old Spice, like the Red Crescent clinic where I had my blood extracted.

Mid way through the cut he produced a cigarette lighter from his pocket and set my outer ear hair on fire. It bloody hurt. Then he set about my inner ear hair, my eyebrows and my nostrils. That bloody hurt too. By the time the cutthroat razor came out I thought I was sausages.

Except for the Philip Schofield circa 1992 flick he quiffed up (which smoothed down into my regular Reich parting when I got out the door) it turned out to be a pretty good cut. He claimed he cut the late British Consul's hair before he was blown up by a al Qaida. Maybe I'll let it grow long again.

Carry on Kafka

Chaos, grime, and a man outside smoking with a fresh tracheotomy (and he's not the only one I've seen): Welcome to Taksim Square hospital.

Taksim hospital is state run but appears not to be state funded. There were hundreds of people in hundreds of queues, waiting for clinics and doctors with too many patients, whcih they couldn't find. Nobody knew where to send you or what was going on. You went to one window to get a form to take to another window to get a ticket to take to another office, then another office, another window, another office in the basement then back to the same window at which you started. I expected at one point to open a door to see a human brain in a pyramid or a half man/half pig moaning in bed. It was all reassuringly familiar.

Ayla and I were approaching the last stages of getting our documents for the Turkish part of our wedding. We had already been to three separate places, one of which was to get an x-ray to prove we didn't have TB. I already knew I hadn't contracted TB because I wasn't consumptive nor wrote romantic poems. The radiographer and the receptionist at the clinic were one in the same, and x-rayed the four-man batch at once without leaving the room or changing the film. For the modest sum of 20YTL I got to stand on a pneumatic plinth, hear a doorbell ring and get photographed by what looked like a large reflecting telescope. Bingo, no TB.

Having popped my pants down, hopped up on the bed and had many a quack have a little look at the old chap I am accustomed to exposing myself to the medical profession. The young Muslim couple in the same group as us were not so comfortable. The bride was terrified and humiliated at having to strip to her underwear in public her groom was angry that he couldn't assuage her discomfort. The only function I could see in all this was to generate money and keep someone in work.

After we had been irradiated and then discharged ourselves we were off to get blood tests. Turkish law dictates that before Ayla and I marry we must be in peak physical condition, like everyone else. This meant blood tests for HIV, hepatitis A and B and syphilis. Rather than allowing us to be tested in our private hospital (who said I was a socialist?), we had to be tested in a state clinic.

The undeniably friendly technician teetered around on cork wedged heels in the on-street laboratory unchanged since, well, ever. No gloves, no swab, no disinfection. If we didn't have HIV, hepatitis and syphilis before we walked in, chances are we'd have it by the time we walked out.

However frustrating, frightening, and life-threatening it all was thank god this wasn't the NHS.
Ooh Matron!

The hand that giveth

The woman beside me was snoring, all the blood in my skull had pooled to the back of my head, my lumbar region hurt, I was sweating profusely lying on a mat someone else had sweat on profusely, and I was listening to the indisputably worst music I have ever heard. I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, relaxed.

I was at my first Yoga class. It was a birthday present of fourteen classes from Ayla. (The pay-off is that she plays squash with me once a week. Let's see how she likes them apples.) Considering my woeful posture it's a very thoughtful gift, but considering my immense snobbery it's on thin ice.

It wasn't that it was intrinsically humiliating (the clothes, the sweating etc), it was the music and the Tantric bowl ringing, or clonking, that rankled the most. Actually, it was the music. We were just about spared whale and dolphin noises but not the positive affirmations of peace and relaxation. And a cavalcade of all the world's most aggravating ethnic instruments playing tourist melodies all synchronised to the movements I couldn't perform. If it had featured steel drums and roto-toms I would have done some damage.

It's not easy to perform dog-with-down-turned-head position and cover your ears at the same time.

It's all Greek to me

After an abortive trip to Ayla's ceramics guy (she has an eye guy, a gold guy, bag guy, a silver guy, a carpet guy, and a late shoe guy), we wandered back along the Golden Horn stopping briefly at the Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchate. Along the way we bumped into a hot and bothered young student called Rob from Oxford who tagged along for the ride.

Our friend Colin was reluctant to come in for fear of being struck down by the Lord's lightning but as we entered the jaw-dropping church there was a service in action. Sadly, the (disputed) centre of world Christian Orthodoxy had a congregation of just one middle-aged woman.

Just as we were about to leave this gilt eastern Vatican an older priest entered to take over the proceedings from the three younger priests who had been chanting and singing a plaintiff three part harmony. I smiled and nodded to the old vicar in due respect and he warmly smiled and nodded back.

"Do you know who that is?" Ayla asked me.
"Not a clue, my love."

It was, she pointed out, His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, 270th successor of the 2000 year old Orthodox patriarchy.

I just gave the Brighton eyebrow to the (sort of) Pope. Sweet.

Fumus Interruptus

I was delighted and deeply saddened by a note from dear Alan Hay, for which I express my gratitude, that said that there were only twelve customers at the Heart last Saturday night. Delighted that I'm not subject to the appalling fascism meted out to our fellow subjects, and saddened that, England has been disgorged.

I am, of course, still harping on about the smoking ban in English pubs but also it's ramifications. Rich you might say coming from me, living in the land where it is positively encouraged throughout. But I feel my comrades' anguish even here.

It is trite, but born from the experience of professionally touring international licensed premises, that the culture, the phenomenon of the English public house is unique in this world despite this ludicrous ban.

Nowhere else was there a place of such simultaneous discourse and revelry and a bastion of bawdiness and louche behaviour dressed in the stained velvet and crinoline of a genteel Victorian parlour. Where the formulation of all kinds of relationships -- romantic and social, of great import or frivolous -- was so potential. It's where some of my most cherished friendships were fomented. It was a monument to solitude and community. The most immediate point of sale for government policy and the place to immediately discuss it. It's a place of learning, not least providing a valuable lesson on how to expediently and expertly detect bullshit. A meeting place, a rallying point, and a safe haven. Where else can you derive hilarity and moments of tenderness? To console and be consoled? And, frankly, to get utterly pissed.

To drink anywhere else in the world is to merely enter into a dishonest financial transaction with the barman, not a landlord. A landlord, my God. A common peer of his own realm.

In America a bar is where you get drunk, alone; in France a bar is where only discourse seems to occur; Spanish bars may have food but the ankle-deep Ducados butts and discarded lotto tickets don't whet my appetite; I wouldn't give a XXXX to burn the Midnight Oil in an Australian pub; From the outside Scottish bars seem derelict or closed; Irish pubs look like Irish pubs the world over; great beer is found in German kellers but martial drinking jangles my nerves; Italy has no idea what constitutes a serious drinking establishment; and in Istanbul a bar is where one spends most of one's time trying to remain sober enough to calculate how much formaldehyde you drank at the end of the night without seeming tight.

And what glorious variety grows from what was once just a private house brewing their own gut-rot. From the sparkling gin palace to the thatched inn. From the city spit-and-sawdust to the Utopian 1930s wayside hostelry (automobiles welcome), the coach house, the new pub in the tower block estate, the wine bar (surely what made Gordon's beside Charring Cross so great was the ploughman's, suffocating smoke, and not enough headroom to stand up), and the common-or-garden boozer with a good Jukebox and migraine beer. I love the pub; I miss it bitterly.

And now all it's gone, forever. I wish my diarrhea would go the same way.

Suits me

Had a rather odd day today; the vestiges of my food poisoning are still lingering taking all my powers not to dive off at random points from my companion's company at awkward moments.

My companion today is a family friend of Ayla's who accompanied me to his favourite tailor to be fitted for my wedding suit. It's a chance to get a reasonably priced bespoke suit and with any luck, paunch permitting, I'll get to wear it at my next wedding too. I have chosen a navy chalk stripe, three button, double vent with flat fronted trousers (no turn-ups).

At the tailor they pulled out all the stops: An espresso when we arrived, two tailors and an assistant in attendance and, the piece de resistance, a bar serving booze. And the icing on the piece de resistance; you can smoke, in the shop. Disque Bleu!

My Anarcho-Dandyist credentials are restored. This is a place where a chap can thrive; drunk, calabash in hand, having young Mahmoud measure ones inside leg. A-hem.

"Are you free Mr. Lucas?"
"I'm free."

Kurdistan

We never learn, we never exercise self control. We were getting drunk way past our bed time and still got more beer from the shop before passing out at 2.30 for a 5am start. There was no argument due with the cabby this time on the way to the airport the next morning. Today, we were heading east.

Arriving at the military airport in Diyabakir, the main city in the Kurdish part of Turkey, was a shock. At 9am it was already 32C and rising. I slept most of the day in the hotel room, drugged by heat and hangover, while Ayla went about her work interviewing local politicians ahead of the elections next Sunday. I only got up to eat take away and watch an episode of Extras and a very dry documentary about Gallipoli. Same old story: Bad planning, arrogance, failure, pointlessness, but the British ultimately prevailing. And the Gallipoli film wasn't much better.

Ayla supposed I was the only male in the region with a foreskin and the last blond-haired, blued-eyed man they'd have seen was on Starsky and Hutch. That must be why they all look at me strangely.

Then a coach load of Japanese tourists turned up. Were they aware of the political hot potato they were visiting? Were they the same coach party that has been touring the middle east since the second gulf war? Did they think I was David Soul too? The answer to these questions must surely be: No.

We drove to the old ruins of a Byzantine fortress, at a place called Hasankeyf, where people lived in caves for two millennia. We had lunch on the banks of the Tigris. I had delicious open-grilled fish caught fresh from the river. Then we paddled in the river where our lunch was just caught. Hold on... I'm glad I only just thought of that. And finally, after months of nagging, I bought Ayla a bloody raffia cowboy hat from an urchin. Happy now?

We visited a monastery of monks who spoke Aramaic, the language of Mel Gibson. This region is the homeland of a few Syriac Christians who, it is claimed, can trace their faith back to 33AD, the year of our Lord's crucifixion. This makes them the very first new age Christians. I wonder if they had fish symbols on the hinds of their asses.

Back on the campaign trail, after a night in a hotel popular with dead flies and cockroaches, we started to feel very, very unwell. I drove Ayla to the next engagement reasoning that she had to be fresh for work. She met with a local candidate from the Kurdish DTP party which, bizarrely I was invited to attend. I was ushered upstairs by a party officials into a private apartment full of relatives, extended family, and minders, through dark corridors (which perturbed me somewhat) until I was sat in the corner and fed scalding hot tea while Ayla asked the questions. The interviewee, the head of the DTP, didn't have socks on.

They thought I was Ayla's hired goon. Fat lot of use I would have been in a hostage situation, wearing flip-flops and jeans and looking all Brighton, complaining about how the North Laine isn't the same any more since they built the new library. Maybe ending up locked in a Syrian broom cupboard moaning there are no clean towels or enough Stella on the rider. "Erm, yeah mate, I'm in a popular Post-Rock-Krautrock-Nihlist-Assault-Groop with a dash of French Ye-Ye called Stereolab. We're internationalist and marxist and everything." "Silence you western pig!"*

By the time we got back to Diyabakir we were almost incapable of walking. Both of us had sore joints, aching backs and headaches. And not induced by booze this time since there isn't any.
This place is Hell; hot and no beer.

We returned to Istanbul extremely unwell spending long spells of Monday groaning on the sofa punctuated by dashes to the necessarium.

My backside is like the Japanese flag. And as Ayla is sparked out in a worse state than me I can't even go to the shops to get some Imodium because I don't know what the Turkish is for "My arse is on fire. Can you give me something for my Sultan's revenge?"

The Diyabakir tourist board has a lot to answer for.

* Thanks Jim.

Arrival

So, I'm here at last in Kebabistan.

That might have been the longest goodbye I've endured. With my birthday on Thursday, the farewell gig on Saturday, the barby on Sunday, and the last pint in the Heart on Tuesday, I was harder to get rid of than syphilis. But thanks to all of you who made it to one or all of those evenings. I regret not giving everyone as much attention as I hoped, so if you were neglected I'm sorry. You'll just have to come and visit, and bring some pork products.

The trip back to Istanbul was pretty sweet: we got free upgrades to business class, stiffed The Man for an unprecedented extra 25kg of baggage for free (Ayla played the wedding card with the dope behind the counter), and smuggled my guitar amp into the country without paying duty.

We stepped out of the plane and into the heat of a Nike shoe factory in August. And then, of course, we had to endure the blazing row over a few pence with the ignorant, smelly cabby straight from ignorant, smelly cabby Central Casting.

Tomorrow Ayla and I are off to the Kurdish part of Turkey so she can cover the run-up to the elections. In a town called Batman (in the same region) the temperature is already 47C. Holy armpits! Not the weather for capes and tights, Robin. Let me get the Bat-roll-on deodorant from my utility belt.

Spent today unpacking an array of crap that I simply can't live without, including a broken Stereolab mug, a squash racket needing new strings, lots of wires, and dirty laundry. My most essential items are languishing in the loft at my old place.

The Union flag I bought at the Sunday boot after a night out has been hung in the hallway so we can stand to attention in front of it every morning and sing my national anthem. I couldn't bring any Crown soil through customs because of regulations but I'm in conversation with the Consul General to see whether I can acquire some Crown soil from the Istanbul Consulate on a lend-lease basis.

My anarcho-dandyist principles are already out the window, sat here as I am in shorts, my mosquito-bite-ridden soft white underbelly exposed. In a while, I'll put on some flip-flops and a George cross T-shirt and go to a restaurant, where I will be encouraged to smoke. In your face.