Rants and Roundabouts

It’s been only a week since I’ve last written but it feels longer…I’ve been travelling through life at high speed and slightly drunken and I don’t even have a car…

The weekend was particularly peculiar. The Guardian Travel section featured Istanbul on the ‘been there’ pages. Readers are encouraged to send tips about a city each week. Usually the feature takes up the two middle pages. This time though there was an ad on almost the entirety of one of the pages…not even an ad about Turkey but BA flights to Bahamas. Pah!

I’d got up early (on a Saturday I let you know) to get the paper to see if they published any of my tips. They did – three of them in fact. But there was no mention of any of the ‘must sees’, nothing on any of the palaces, Aya Sofya, none of the mosques…nothing, nada, zilch. It’s an insult to such a city.

I don’t usually subscribe to the school that thinks everyone is against the Turks. But if there was ever a last drop, this is it…I’ve given up. I put the paper down and thought to myself ‘I am leaving’…I used to feel part of London, used to sit in the tube and feel at home (you know what I mean, the feeling of belonging to a place not because the tube is comfortable). But now, I sit in the tube, the bus, bars, anywhere and feel a stranger. ‘Twice a Stranger’ in fact to quote the title of an interesting book by The Economist journalist Bruce Clark: a stranger here and (probably) a stranger in Turkey. I always knew there was an element of truth in this but looked at it positively – when you are a stranger to places, in a strange way, every place can be yours…anyway, difficult to explain. But now, I just feel twice a stranger.

I’ve also learnt that while I may not have mastered the art of getting people to help me to make life easier, I am capable of using them. Someone said to me at the weekend that I only talk to him when I am lonely and in need of company. He was right. I am not saying he deserves more but at least he had the guts to tell it to me as it is. I had to agree.

Anyway, I went to a stand up gig tonight to cheer myself up. The MsC sung a few songs. One them goes: you are just another roundabout on the ring road of my life. Roundabout indeed….ring road: even more apt. And I don’t even have a car.