Ain’t going to Jo’burg no more.

Phuck.

Ah, well. Life had been getting a wee bit too pleasant, after all.

India, India, India, India.

The place where finally some long-wished for hand reached out of my bowels and pulled my heart out of my throat and pulled it back to where it belongs.

Where I finally danced the way you’re so-phucking-posed to.

Where everyone’s so busy hating the abstract idea of those around them that when it comes to actually interfacing with “them” all they can be bothered to do is cooperate in the most efficient manner imaginable.

Where criticism of a Bollywood star’s choice of charity is enough to cause riots, but a deadly explosion in a factory prompts little more than resigned shrugs of the shoulders and wry grins.

Where my friend Chris is having a mini-temple built in his honour in the shirt shop across the road from his house and where Catholics drape the inside of their taxis like Hindu shrines.

So hear ye: Bombay is now Mumbai. This change was wrought by a low-rent, localised version of the Nazi party that occasionally grabs control of the city and regional government.

Not sure of the spelling but they’re called ‘Shriv Senna’ and are – hilariously – run by a family – I schit you not – called the Thackerays.

In essence, Mumbai is in a province/state called Maharathstra. Maharathstrans are predominantly Hindu, working class and ignorant. They are also (max) 50% of the population of Mumbai.

And – thanks to the range of talents and abilities that they are able to call upon when faced with the challenge of the modern job market – they tend to be amongst the poorest, dirtiest and most desperate of the city’s people.

This is not their fault. Local politicians in India tend act to as local fiefs, with a massive say over the how social services to address long-term problems amongst their electorate are delivered and designed.

It is not in the interest of people such as the Messer’s Thackeray to prioritise long-term educational goals, so they instead focus on picking fights with whatever threat – real or imagined – happens to be on the horizon at any given time.

Happily, the threat in question never really changes: it’s always them foreigners coming over here taking our jobs and getting all the best housing. So they foment the odd riot, encourage the odd beating and change the odd name.

So, yes: “Mumbai”.

When the Britishers got to Mumbai sometime around the 18th century, the locals called it something like ‘Bumbai’. But now the Britishers are gone and the city is a vibrant mix of Sikhs, Muslims, the once–dominant-but-now-almo

Hello.

Finally out of a haze of end of year funk and new year geographical dyspraxia. The Christmas break was made up of “Vienna”, “Berlin”, Istanbul, old people, tedium and two phucking long coach journeys.

There is very little else to say beyond:
• I attended the WORST new years party ever I’ve ever been to
• Vienna in December is too cold for romantic solitary walks
• Shit clubs are no more nor less awful whether you’re 17 or 27, but when you’re 27 you can leave
• People change as they shift past 60/65, they get slower and can’t take their drink
• You CAN convert to Judaism, but you need to hang out with a rabbi for two years first
• An old friend Richard has become a maths genius, batting away job offers from MIT, Cambridge and that one with all the letters in France. He’s also wealthy, charming and not a little good-looking, yet still immensely likeable.
• My mum made friends with this Welsh woman who’s married to a ‘gyptian and whose son went to the same school as me in Canada and apparently I hit him. So, thirteen years after having mildly teased this short, swarthy, be-speckled chap with a funny accent, I meet up with Ashraf for a coffee. Dude looks EXACTLY like me and is nice, funny and doing a PhD into the maths of face recognition. I plan to apologise as soon as it’s appropriate but instead we talk over each other for the best part of an hour, not once mentioning the past. As we’re parting. Ashraf says ‘You know that fight we had? Let’s tell people it was about a girl or something, yeah?’

Tangentially, coffee with Ashraf was not my first such encounter. There was an AWFUL boy in my house at school that I made a point of letting know quite how highly I thought of him whenever the opportunity arose.

Last year, he contacted me out of the blue and suggested we meet up for a drink. I put him off a few times until his leaving do, when I decided to risk it for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was its coinciding with having phuck-all else to do.

I arrived to be treated like the guest of honour at an Indian wedding: introduced to family and friends with accolades I don’t even secretly ascribe to myself. I kept expecting some kind of attack, but none came, just hand shakes, accommodating people and glass after glass of some clear Greek liqueur. When it was time to go, he walked me out and I attempted to say something conciliatory about the past, only for it to be brushed aside and be told that he “was AWFUL at school “and that my actions towards him had played “a big part in making me who I am”, a state with which he had evidently made peace.

He then hugged me and blundered off back to his party. Nice, but quite weird.

Anyway.

Arrived in Istanbul in early January knackered, depressed, sick and confused.

None of this was assisted by various liaisons that served to make my desire to get the hell out of Istanbul junior partner to my outright need. Managed to squeeze in a bit of Stamboulian delights I`d previously missed including Dolmenbahce (the last home of the Ottoman sultans – crap), Top Kapi (the historical residence of the sultans – excellent) and finally got to use the boats that define the city to many.

It was a brilliantly sunny day and the view of Istanbul from the boat was like that on a resting giant. It almost looked cuddly. That said, I simply do not like the place.

It’s bloody expensive for sod all return, the food’s generally schit (whatever Turks loudly and wrongly insist to the contrary) and Turks are not, as a rule, scrupulously honest or helpful in their dealings with foreigners.

Still, Top Kai’s reasonably flash. Brilliant view of Bosphorous, beautifully laid out and ornate structure and packed to the gills with all kinds of trinkets from bejewelled medals such as the order of the garter and the cross of St. Nicholas to scraps of the prophet’s (pbuh) hair, teeth, etc.

All genuine, mind. They’ve also got Abraham’s rod, Moses’ footprint and Jesus’ Sega Master System 2.

But it’s been India for the last 3 and a half weeks and the place utterly, utterly, utterly pisses all over any other place I’ve been in terms of the pure pleasure one gets from simply being there.

The sensation of total well-being has been strongest in Mumbai, and stronger still in the northern suburb of Bandra, where we’ve been for the most part staying for the most part.

The most succinct way to describe Mumbai would be to point to the satisfied smile of someone who has had fantastic sex with someone they love and has just remembered that there is a left over osso bucco in the fridge and an unwatched Alan Partridge dvd in the player.

You exert yourself, but it feels like a mutual effort on the part of all those around you, and when you’ve finished there are endless brilliant things to do next that seem to have been designed around your own particular tastes.

I lived in India as a child, albeit a young one, and so was especially interested to do some ‘compare and contrast’ between present and past and, at least superficially, nothing seems that different. But as the days pass, one realises that in fact EVERYTHING has changed only relatively subtly and, crucially, rather holistically.

By ‘holistically’, I mean that things seem to have altered in a way that has maintained the balance between the extremely diverse elements that constitute India’s incredibly sophisticated and hugely disparate society.

Examples:
- the beggars are still here, but they’ve got flip flops now;
- mobile phones are everywhere, but you buy your credit from a rickety shack that also sells samosas;
- there are big successful companies with nice shiny offices, but the MDs speak to their staff like they’re errant domestics; and so on.

My happiest place in the world is now the back of a Mumbai taxi.

M

Hello.

My cupboard elf has been stolen.

Or rather sacked.

And she was only small.

Quite literally: absolutely tiny, like 4’ nothing type tiny. And quite sweet in a brainless blonde kind of way, of which she was neither naturally, but both artificially.

And therein, I believe, lies the seed of her ultimate doom, jobby-wise.

Little ’I’ (la turque) was actually a low-rent version of a Paris Hilton-type spoilt little rich girl. Only we couldn’t tell because our perception of her Turkishness crowded out the indicators that – had she been, say English, or, to a lesser extent, German or something, would have made clear what her type was, and consequently affected our treatment of, and behaviour and feelings towards, her.

Instead of seeing her as a proud, self-involved and potentially vicious girl to be treated with kid gloves and kept at least a metre away from real affection, we fooled ourselves into thinking she was something akin to a pet Turk.

And it appears that Turks, like huskies, eventually turn on their owners.

So my cupboard has been vacated and I now have access to a real-live bed, albeit one in a cupboard. But plus ca change…

Exciting times job-wise though. Having the cupboard elf out of the way, real efficiency has kicked in.

The job hinges on interviewing everybody and their mother active in Turkey’s burgeoning financial sector and a couple of chief-execs from big companies in a position to comment in a general way on the broader economy.

Slowish start to the interviews given that my knowledge of the financial sector was previously largely restricted to Islamic finance, “private sector instruments complementary to asset-based welfare” and listening to my ex-girlfriend get my bank charges reversed.

But there is no better education than having someone speak to you as if you are an expert and so doing a lot better now. For any of you considering buying ‘rich dad, poor dad’ – don’t. Simply take a week off work, pretend you’re a financial services journalist for a semi-creditable publication no one has heard of and go about interviewing financial analysts. All I need now is the bloody cash to do something with my new-found knowledge.

But then again, given that I have never, ever, ever won ANYTHING ever in my sporadic trips to casinos, I would more likely lose everything phucking stupid investments in the Turkish service sector.

But I could just put it in the bank and do well: because the Turkish central bank is desperate to get foreign capital into the country, short-tem bank interest rates can be as high as 17%. Now inflation is about 8%, so it’s not as good as it at first seems, but it still sure as schit beats the crap out of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

I’m just not sure as to how I go about getting the requisite ‘right’ to put my money here. There’s the further concern that there was a massive banking crisis in 2001 in which everybody and their uncle lost all their cash due to a liquidity shortfall, so having the money in the bank is still no guarantee you won’t lose everything. Hence the high interest rates as a kind of risk premium.

A propos of the above, in answer to a question about why foreign capital makes up over 70% of the Istanbul Stock Exchange, one of my interviewee’s answers produced the following diamond: “after the financial crises of 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, the earthquake in 2000, and the big crisis of 2001, Turkish investors are somewhat shy of investing in the stock market.”

Which makes you think.

Went to Bulgaria via a 12ish hour bus trip.

Our journey out began with a minibus ride to a small bus station where everyone was going mental, banging drums, blowing bag pipes, singing and chucking people in the air.

We kind of assumed it was football, but whatever it was served to make the whole situation thoroughly confusing.

We eventually managed to get someone to help us to a second minibus that drove us to the big bus station where we were greeted by yet more mentalist football supporters, this time lighting flares and setting off fire crackers.

Turns out, however, they were not football supporters but the friends and family of Turks being sent off to their military service.

They seemed remarkably upbeat for people about to spend three years getting schit pay, screamed at and living in areas of the country where around 90% of the population arguably have some justification for wanting them dead on sight.

One of these areas will include the border with Bulgaria at 3 o’clock the morning, where Turkey’s marvelously efficient crossing system takes a measly three hours to complete.

But ho-hum.

Given my love of all things Slav – bar the word “slav” which is, sadly, unconscionably ugly in English – I was over the moon to be in Bulgaria and grinned like a drunken fool at everything we saw and most people we passed.

The architecture of Sofia is a wonderful mix of the old and the dreadful, with a picture postcard scene at every turn.

But the place is about the size of a postcard.

Literally.

Sofia has to be the most absurdly small city I’ve been to. It claims a million people – which is Edinburghish or Glasgowish – but appears to be the size of Burgh’s New Town.

It MUST be bigger than it seemed, but, my god, did it seem utterly, utterly tiny.

Bulgarians v pleasant, though, and nothing cost anything. They were also much better looking than Serbs and have this rather fetching habit of plastering sexually explicit adverts all over the city. Also sex shoppes everywhere.

Also much pig.

Amusing, this pig thing. Everything in Serbia – which like Bulgaria was also Ottoman land for about 400 years – was also pig.

I remember a mixed grill we ordered at a restaurant in Serbia which consisted solely of the different shapes you could grill minced pig into.

Did the culinary fashion for pigs and nothing else takeoff before, during or after the Ottomans? If before and during, was the Ottoman reaction one of disgust, disinterest or discipline?

I have Bulgarians cousins. More specifically I have two Bulgarian half-cousins I’ve never met through my uncle’s Bulgarian ex-Stasi faith healer second wife.

Took the opportunity of meeting them while in Sofia: one’s an architect-cum-entrepreneur

we’re always touching by underground wires”

Apparently.

Silly little dramas and tribulations, like little earthquakes on the face of an empty planet, have characterised much of the last few days.

Happily, they have ceased.

Always good to be sworn at by your boss in your first fortnight: builds character and all that.

Happily, cussing out was followed by good chat and vast quantities of liquor. This all takes on a rather surreal quality when your boss bears an uncomfortable likeness to a young Prince Phillip.

Banqueted ‘a la turque’ on Friday – many, many wee dishes and many, many wee drinkies. Sadly, all of which led to yet another morning waking up genuinely surprised to be where I was.

Occasion for feasting was a ‘now bugger off’ dinner for those who, like me not so long ago, had been flown out to Istanbul for interview. Rather a nice bunch, bar one bloke who both looked and acted like a creepy paedophile.

Or a school librarian.

But the difference is academic when it comes to the aesthetics.

Not, obviously, when it comes to practice. The noise level, for one thing, one imagines, differs somewhat. Or does it? I guess it depends on context.

So yes, the people were okay. One staggeringly beautiful Turk/French girl was notable for her alertness and presence of mind.

Staggered from banqueting to drinking proper and at some point must have staggered from there to the office at Besiktas with the other only other attractive interviewee, but for no purpose more nefarious than sleep.

We awoke reasonably early and went to tour the major sites of the city, which I had not yet done since arriving. Managed in the time allotted to see many of the principle sites of the Golden Horn section of the city.

The Golden Horn is the European-side peninsula that was the location of the Byzantium and Constantinople of old and is where Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Suleymaniye (amazingly, spelt correctly first time), Topkapi palace, the ‘main’ market, the ‘main’ university, the ‘main’ library, and a few other ‘mains’ are.

It is also, I believe, the location of all seven of the Seven Hills.

We toddled through the aforementioned at a brisk pace, my walking companion for the day not being one to tarry and I in no fit state to argue one way or the other. Besides, I still can’t rid my system of a pointless frustration at the fact that most of the buildings that I would want to see are long-destroyed, some of them more than half a century ago.

I don’t think I’d be that frustrated if only the remaining collection of monuments did not consist primarily of seemingly identical, albeit impressive, mosques. Although I can claim no expertise at all, it does seem from what little I’ve read that the vast majority of the various sultans, their mums and wives labored under the delusion that the greatest thing they could do to beautify the city and immortalise their names was to build yet another bloody mosque.

But I quibble stupidly. They are astonishingly beautiful and immense from the outside and there must be all sorts of intricate little differences between them that I have yet to discover.

I am less willing to back down on the insides, though. All the bloody same and all too minimalist for my inherently gaudy sensibilities.

But I have yet to see Topkapi palace, which will no doubt completely alter my current perspective on Ottoman architecture.

Back on the Horn: even until the early 1960s, the population of Istanbul (currently around 16 million) sat at one million, exactly its level at the height of Byzantine and then Ottoman levels.

This denotes that the frequently stomped areas of Ortakoy, Bebek and my own Etiler were only subsumed into the vast monster that is present day Istanbul after that time and before were pleasant little towns with their own wee economies.

Hmm.

My favourite neighbourhood, however, is Galata, which did count as part of the city at least under Ottoman times. The name is shared by one of the two bridges that one usually hears referred to in relation to Istanbul.

Neither of these bridges cross the Bospherous to Asia, but rather connect the Golden Horn peninsula to another section of European land. The other bridge is rather radically entitled Ataturk. Both are liberally decorated with fishing Istanbulus.

Galata is my favourite neighbourhood for aesthetic reasons as well as those of sensibility. Taking the latter first, in Ottoman times it was where the vast majority of Istanbul’s “foreign” community was based – the Greeks, the Armenians, the Venetians, the Jews, etc. This made it the most cosmopolitan part of the city and also most liberal and dangerous. Each community was policed according to its own laws and was seen as a guest of the Sultan even if the family had been there since Byzantine times. Due to its being the trading hub of the city, it was also the city’s banking centre and in early republican times it was here that the major banks located themselves.

Galata centres on a steep hill at the top of which sits Galata Tower. The tower – unmistakably European in appearance – broodingly surveys the city with the bored resignation of someone at the wrong party. As with the metaphorical ‘loser guest’, so with Galata: now the various expulsions and genocides of – and just plain abandonment by – most of the city’s “foreigners” has been accomplished, precious few Istanbulus will live in the area and its beautiful, steep, windey streets are largely abandoned to prostitutes, pick-pockets and the odd posh hotel.

The aforementioned Mr. Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderb

Hello.

Getting kind of heavy. Working past midnight. Grunt.

Happily, was able to intersperse work with a pleasant meal in an unpleasant cafe, a spate of writing off-key messages on the back of an unwitting colleague’s business cards (ex: “I dream in colour”; “Touch me”) and watching a creditable double-whammy of Meg Ryan getting hit by a car and Nicholas Cage giving up eternal life for one poor shag with the aforementioned mop-head.

Who says remakes are entirely rubbish?

Most actual drama recently has been inter familia and can only be referred to obliquely

Not good at being oblique.

Attempt at obliquitude number one:

Years and years ago, I had this girlfriend who had a dad who was more than a little bit psycho.

He:
a) tried to make my girlfriend feel guilty about all the terrible things she would do only to hurt him like, oh, having friends, occasionally laughing, not wanting to travel the 6 hours home from uni every weekend, menstruating, etc.;
b) tried to get me kicked out of university;
c) tried to get my dad fired;
d) would ring up my parents at 4 in the morning and hang up;
e) follow me and his daughter to and from classes in a car with blacked out windows;
f) illicitly obtain my friends’ phone numbers;
g) phone my friends and threaten break their legs unless they disclosed her whereabouts;
h) get his wife to phone my friends pretending to be a friend of his daughter’s and asking them to disclose her whereabouts;
i) etc.

Essentially, it was utterly crap, drove us both a bit loopy and upset an awful lot of people who had phuck all to do with the situation anyway.

The point of mentioning the above is a situation developing in Stamboul that bears some striking similarities to it. It centres upon not I, for once, but rather my sweet and lovely cupboard elf whose ex-nutter is stalking about the place and making a general nuisance of himself.

He rings her constantly (I mean like a dozen times a day at least and not just from his phone, but other people’s too and as well as manipulating others into calling on his behalf) to – among other things – guilt-trip her over her abandoning him while he is grieving for his long-dead dad.

His latest innovation is to try and get her new/my address by asking people he doesn’t know to give it to him so he can send flowers.

Worst of all, I made the STUPID mistake of attempting to engage with him – I was a bit pissed – a few days back and have been rewarded with a threat of violence upon my person and with the honour of having entered his perverted social nomenclature [pronounce it like an American and it sounds less poncey] as “that aggressive guy my ex lives with who is keeping us apart”.

That kind of flip-round, ‘I’m the victim here’ crap sprinkled with manipulating others into doing his dirty work from a base of sheer, pathological persistence is EXACTLY what the ex-girlf’s-nutter-dad would do.

For – I schit you not – years.

Creepiest of all was that when we spoke he had this uber calm way of repeating “what you don’t understand is that [thingy's name] is mine”. Like in TOO sane a voice, you know? The adoption of which does not suggest so much as screams that in his world view there can be only one eventual result and that anything in between is just time-wasting and other people being needlessly and pointlessly obstreperous.

Anyway. Not very oblique.

On a tangential note, one of my current bosses told me in the summer that persistence is the signal characteristic of the male Turk’s approach to wooing.

He went into some detail explaining that the standard modus operandi was to get your number and ring and ring and ring and ring until your only option is to give in or to stop using your phone.

Not that it ends there.

He said their persistence was such that he knew someone who had been living in Istanbul, foolishly gave her number to one of these chaps, reaped the resultant telephonic whirlwind, stopped using the phone, left the country, returned to visit two years later, figured she’d use her old Turkish mobile to save money, switched it on and received a phone call from her old stalker within hours.

They eventually ended up going out.

And therein lies the explanation of this weird-ass stalkerish behaviour: it gets results.

This was heartily and laughingly endorsed by the two females who were present, one Turked-up at the time, the other in remission.

The two then related anecdotes about how they had eventually been swayed by the pure persistence of Turkish guys they had given their numbers to, despite ignoring the calls for in one case weeks and the other months.

I LIKE it when the horn go.

Hello again.

Flags everywhere, including massive ones draped over huge office buildings in the financial district. Every other shop, every other apartment balcony, every other car is draped in the red and white crescent and star of the Turkish flag.

Not too sure how you correctly, succinctly describe the flag actually: should I write “red background with white crescent and star” instead?.

Anyway, here’s something I didn’t know: the Turkish flag’s crescent is not that of Islam, but rather comes from the Battle of Kosova of 1389: after the fighting stopped the moon rose over the field of battle with a bright star directly underneath it and because of the vast amount of blood spilled, the effect of the comibined celestial light was to turn the whole field red.

Or something.

On the flags again, M finds them threatening and cackled when the large one they’ve draped acrss our apartment complex was tied in a large knot by the wind. I on the other hand, must adimit to finding them oddly comforting: as if the buildings are draped in big warm blankets. I also find nationslism quite sweet, for reasons I haven’t bothered to fathom yet.

I can’t be sure if it’s always like this – there were quite a few when I was last here in June/July but the country was approaching elections then – or whether it’s been encouraged to become especially prevalent due to Kurdish PKK “rebels” in the South killing the odd (dozen) commando(s) at irregular intervals.

As to the more general obsession with the flag and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, two ideas have immediately present themselves as explanations:

Option 1: It’s to do with the fact that the Turkish people essentially have sod all history as “Turkey” and so the importance of symbolism and the one big figure they have managed to produce have taken on huge importance. This is similar to my ‘China syndrome’ theory, which is, briefly, that modern day Chinese have utterly no cultural connection whatsoever with the great Chinese of the past (only a tiny minority was actually involved in the cultural achievements, everyone else was a peasant, the early twentieth century did for pretty much everyone who did have any claims to the cultured minority); and that this leads an absurdly uncritical view of themselves.

Option 2: It’s all to do with the secular elite that run things keeping the people in line by pouring on a nationalism that is meant to drown out the desire for an equitable and just redistribution of resources as well as any moves toward Islam, the presumptive default option for those unenamoured with nationalism.

S’funny, though. Lots of Turkish people have also switched their facebook profile pictures to one of the Turkish flag.

Flags aside, Istanbul is like Manila or Mexico City more than it is like any European city. It’s huge in scale, the rich cut themselves off in areas that owe more to the gods of consumerism than those of taste or history.

Lots of brands, lots of vast and vastly wealthy family-owned holding companies that do everything from bathroom tiles to banking

I may be wrong, and it has only been a week, but the economy seems to be skewed by the fact that the ’secular elite’ is both rich and big enough to sustain a consumer goods market priced way above what the average man in the street can sustainably afford.

Irritatingly, one of those men in the street happens to be me. You’re paying London prices for practically everything, the food in the supermarkets and the taxis that you pretty much have to take if you’re going to get anywhere interesting inside 45 minutes, etc.

I asked a new Turkish friend of mine what the deal is for normals, and it apparently works out as a diet of bread and yoghurt. This explains her dinners of pasta with no sauce.

Another eating option is the relatively cheap fried food that you can buy from street kiosks, the popularity of which I guess explains the horrendous skin of a number of the people one sees.

Fun is accessible, but has thus far been irritatingly drink-based. I trust this is more the result of laziness on my part rather than lack of options. Must develop a route to “kul-tcha” that is affordable, sustainable, and doable in midweek. I think I live close enough to the shores of the Bospherous to make this an attainable task.

Discovered proximity during a wander that took me down to the shores for dusk. The walk there took me down a precipitous incline lined with cute little houses on each side followed by a pleasant high street area garlanded with Istanbulus of varying religiousity, age and happiness.

Also many dogs and many fishermen.

I was accompanied by a camera, which would be an a non-event except for it being the first time. Experimented with the camera and tried to sum up the courage to take pictures of picturesque and interesting people, but failed miserably.

Note to self: get backbone.

Allo.

Found a pub. A nice one. It’s got a roof terrace and each floor on the way up is populated by funky-looking Stamboulians. Imagine a bar in Barcelona.

The area called Taksim is a beauty. Windey European streets packed with bars and restaurants and fish mongers and vegetable stores and people. It would be the ideal place to live.

But I don’t live there.

Maybe some of you have seen that Whit Stillman film ‘The Last Days of Disco’ remember how in the first flat the Chloe Sevigny character lives in, she has to go through somebody else’s bedroom to get to hers? Well that would be my room in this flat.

But that’s okay so far. The girl that lives in my walk-in closet (how the tables have turned, oh Destiny!) is more than sweet and thus far complementary body clocks and mutual consideration seem to be carrying us through.

V pleasant atmosphere in the flat. Bit like being at camp. I arrived, rang the bell and was greeted by the two girls and it was all very business-like, shook hands, unpacked, hung up the suit and then we sat down, had a fag, I made them laugh and it’s been plane-sailing ever since.

Am simply not thinking about London, friends, etc. It feels a bit like when you’re wilfully ignoring a partner. Which, I guess in a way is pretty much what phucking off to Istanbul is.

Need to go again.

M

Took a bus today. It was brilliant.

It was brilliant because I am not trapped in the Turkish equivalent of Chelsea it has been my misfortune to be accomodated.

Flat has been vandalised by an old lady with a perverted love for ‘baisse bourgeois’ taste. But that’s okay; my flatmates are both female and lovely.

Have spent a bit of the last few days encouraging the only four Turkish people in the world who speak English to eliminate the Kurds as mercilessly as possible. I tell them that the experience of the West teaches us that long-term ethnic/sectarian problems can only be solved with bombs and oppressive military occupation. They nod.

Have spent another bit of the last few days interviewing investment bankers and telecom magnates about the Turkish economy. I now know what derivatives are. This makes me better than I was.

It is not hot, nor is it cold.
It is expensive, but there are ways around this.
The men are good looking, the women are not.

I need to go.

I miss you.

M

Francois’ Guide to Flat Hunting

Option A: Live with Friends or Friends of Friends

Step 1 – Tell everybody you know and everybody you meet you’re looking for a flat.

Step 2 – Ask everybody you know to tell everybody they know that you’re looking for a flat.

Step 3 – Update you Facebook status to “Francois is desperately looking for a flat to move into in London.

Step 4 – Ask deeper – might someone you like who’s got a flat consider moving in with you in a onth/few moths time? If so, GO TO Option B.

Step 5 – Persist.

Option B: Get a flat and find people to move in with you that you get to choose

Step 1 – Decide where you want to live

Step 2 – Think very carefully about how many people you want to live with and what kind of house you want it to be – definitely a garden, definitely a roof terrace? Two floors? One? Nicer living room or nicer kitchen? And so on…

Step 3 – Have very clear in your mind exactly what type of people you want to live. Make a list of their characteristics, social background, sex, relationship status, etc. Remember this is London – all life is here, and they’re usually looking for a place to live.

Step 4 – Get the flat

Step 5 – Advertise immediately on gum tree, craig’s lets, your alumni website, Oxbridge forums, etc. REMEMBER create an e-mail address just for receiving enquiries – there will be shitloads of people. DO NOT give out your number.

Option C: Living with randoms

Step 1 – Decide where you want to live – ideally by post-code. Decide on a quadrant of the city, walk around the streets and make a note on a map the area you are going to consider.

Step 2 – DO NOT EVER be swayed away from this area by anything. EVER.

Step 3 – DO NOT LIVE WITH AUSTRALIANS

Step 4 – DO NOT LIVE WITH COUPLES

Step 5 – DO NOT LOOK AT ANY FLATS WHERE THE RECIPIENT USES TXT SPK IN THE AD

Step 6 – Prepare yourself mentally for an exhausting awful series of ‘social interviews’. DO NOT LIE IN ANY OF THEM.

Step 7 – Draft a polite, charming and honest e-mail that can be sent to anyone. All you should have to change is the “Dear [Blank]”.

Step 8 – Similarly draft a call script – have a greeting, first line, why you’re moving and who you are prepared. See ‘Francois’ Guide to Interviews’ as a template.

Well, not quite Himmel. More like Soho.

Should anybody read this, I would be curious to  hear why it is that the New York SoHo has a big ‘h’ while London has not. I suspect that London lost its H. I’ll just check:

1. London:

“Most authorities believe that the name derives from the old ‘soho!’ hunting call (Soho! There goes the fox!, etc.). Some have suggested a link with the Duke of Monmouth, who used ‘soho’ as a rallying call for his men at the Battle of Sedgemoor , but the use of the name predates that battle by at least half a century. An alternative proposal is that the name is derived from a shortening of Somerset House, a grand palace to be found to the south of the strand, built in 1547.”

2. New York:

“SoHo is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan named after Soho, London, United Kingdom. It is bounded roughly by Houston Street on the north, Lafayette Street on the east, Canal Street on the south, and Varick Street on the west.

The name is a play on that of the famous London shopping district, justifying its name as being the area South of Houston (pronounced HOUSE-tin) Street. It was the first such mildly amusing naming acronym that has been followed by other new neighborhood descriptions such as TriBeCa and DUMBO. Before its incarnation as a trendy locale, it was known as the Cast Iron District.”

Well, that’s that, then.