Jackson C Frank
“Blues Run The Game”
JACKSON C FRANK , Columbia/Castle,1965
Jackson C Frank first came to England from America in 1965. This song was produced by Paul Simon.
Vashti Bunyan
“Some things Just Stick In Your Mind”
SINGLE, Decca, 1965
Written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. It took Vashti another 35 years to achieve commercial success after decades in seclusion when her best known seminal folk record JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY, was rediscovered. Although this song not exactly a folk tune, it’s still a great and one of my favouritesby her.
John Renbourn
“The Earl Of Salisbury”
SIR JOHN A LOT OF MERRIE ENGLAND, Warner Bothers, 1968
A beautiful, medieval song,
Bert Jansch
“Pretty Polly”
JACK ORION, Transatlantic, 1966
Most traditional folk songs are about two things – sex and death. There are many great versions of this tune but this is my favourite.
Shirley Collins and Davey Graham
“Reynardine”
FOLK ROOTS, NEW ROUTES, Decca,1964
A Victorian ballad about a werewolf who kidnaps young maidens then, presumably, has his wicked way with them and kills them. It’s sung by Shirley Collins who, along with Anne Briggs and Martin Carthy, is pivotal to the early English folk revival in the 1950s and 60s. And together with Alan Lomax she recorded an amazing collection of Southern American folk music.
Pentangle
“Light Flight”
BASKET OF LIGHT, Transatlantic 1969
The BBC used this next song as the theme to the first drama it broadcast in colour.
Fairport Convention
“Fotheringay”
WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAYS, Island, 1969
Here’s another song about death, this time that of Mary Queen of Scots who was beheaded by her sister, Queen Elizabeth the first.
Nick Drake
“River man”
FIVE LEAVES LEFT, Island, 1969
This song was produced by Joe Boyd, who also worked with VASHTI BUNYAN and the INCREDIBLE STRING BAND.
Round Table
“Scarborough Fair”
SPINNING WHEEL, Jay Boy,1969
Studio session bands are put together for no particular reason other than to make weird records that disappear without a trace. This song features band leader, the late David Munrow from the EARLY MUSIC CONSORT playing the lead crumhorn.
The Incredible String Band
“The Hedgehog Song”
THE 5000 SPIRITS OR THE LAYERS OF THE ONION, Elektra, 1967
This next song was chosen by the Arch Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as one of his favourite records of all time.
Jan Dukes De Grey
“Texas”
SORCERERS, Nova, 1969
Acid folk from JAN DUKES DE GREY from their first record in 1969.
Mellow Candle
“Heaven Heath”
SWADDLING SONGS, Deram, 1972
Moving further into experimental folk from very young Irish group,
Richard Thompson
“Vincent Black Lightening 1952”
RUMOUR AND SIGH, Capitol, 2001
A peerless performer and songwriter who I had the pleasure of seeing a few years ago combines my two favourite things in this song – guitars and motorcycles, and being a folk tune, love and death.
Guaranteed to make me weep every time I hear it.
Steeleye Span
“All Around My Hat”
ALL AROUND MY HAT, Crysalis, 1975
Produced by Mike Batt of The Wombles and Katie Melua fame, here’s is a good fun mix of glam rock and traditional folk, which reached No. 5 on the UK charts in 1975.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Sunday, 20 January 2008
Life's not fair
The first few weeks of 2008 have been testing. This week particularly. Wranglings with our idiotic and greedy landlord Korhan Gumus and his enforcer, the managing agent Sefa Aykac, reached a head when our water was turned of in a deliberate attempt to get us out. This comes after a series of threats and abuse.
Korhan has failed to increase rent in accordance with regulations since Ayla moved in. It's now laughably small and even if it had been raised with inflation it would still be modest. On the couple of occasions he has attempted to increase the rent it has been by a huge amount. The last time was via a lawyer and he wanted it quadrupled or we had a month to vacate. We also pay a large service charge to the managing agent for the maintenance of common areas and water.
It turns out the water bill has never been paid by either Sefa or Korhan accruing a debt of 2000YTL. When the water company arrived to cut off the water, Sefa deliberately pointed them to our stopcock and meter. They clamped the taps, cutting off water to only our flat meaning we had to pay the whole debt to have it put back on. It was only after Ayla turned on the water-works at the waterworks office after two hours arguing that they advised we smash the clamps off. But they're still coming round to cut off the whole building if all the tenants can't find the whole 2000.
What is not fair is that they landlord and his agent can act in such a gross and shabby way, that we should suffer because of their greed - where has all the service money gone from 4 flats?- and that they have got away and we have had to pay the bill twice.
But all this is nothing compared to the truly terrible and upsetting news I received from home concerning a dear friend. Recently he was diagnosed with terminal cancer after a few months of what doctors thought was a trapped nerve.
Korhan has failed to increase rent in accordance with regulations since Ayla moved in. It's now laughably small and even if it had been raised with inflation it would still be modest. On the couple of occasions he has attempted to increase the rent it has been by a huge amount. The last time was via a lawyer and he wanted it quadrupled or we had a month to vacate. We also pay a large service charge to the managing agent for the maintenance of common areas and water.
It turns out the water bill has never been paid by either Sefa or Korhan accruing a debt of 2000YTL. When the water company arrived to cut off the water, Sefa deliberately pointed them to our stopcock and meter. They clamped the taps, cutting off water to only our flat meaning we had to pay the whole debt to have it put back on. It was only after Ayla turned on the water-works at the waterworks office after two hours arguing that they advised we smash the clamps off. But they're still coming round to cut off the whole building if all the tenants can't find the whole 2000.
What is not fair is that they landlord and his agent can act in such a gross and shabby way, that we should suffer because of their greed - where has all the service money gone from 4 flats?- and that they have got away and we have had to pay the bill twice.
But all this is nothing compared to the truly terrible and upsetting news I received from home concerning a dear friend. Recently he was diagnosed with terminal cancer after a few months of what doctors thought was a trapped nerve.
Thursday, 27 December 2007
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!'"
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!'"
Thursday, 15 November 2007
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!
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!
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
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!
Sunday, 14 October 2007
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.
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
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.
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.
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