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!