Summer

Apparently there wasn’t much of a summer here this year…July wasn’t bad I was here I know. August they say was grey. I was in Turkey for most of it.

Someone said to me back in July that I must have spent most of my energies for a long time on integrating here. That’s what most immigrants bent on integration do apparently. But now that I feel integrated, I have all this surplus energy which I am diverting to creative activities.

This blog has suffered a little as a result. But it has already served its purpose (and will for a while longer but not as frequently). Purpose? To make me write regularly. I now do. After the play in May – June, in August, I wrote a short story. Not the best one you can read but I am happy to have started and finished something. I know how hard some things in life can be and am under no illusion that they will happen easily and quickly. So one step at a time, one entry, one short play, one short story, one evening / morning entry in a little black notebook…

Back in April I had booked my trip to Turkey. First a couple of weeks, then three, then by the time I clicked on the ‘next’ button on Easy Jet website it was 4.5 weeks. I am glad I clicked when I did.

I am also glad I went when I did. Not because I avoided the grey. Grey here is not something you can avoid. You come and you go, and it’s usually here. But you learn not to mind it. You tell yourself that it’s all about atmospheric conditions and latitude and not because the gods above have anything against you personally.

I am glad I went when I did because I was beginning to burn out. A couple of weeks before I went, I found myself at the bottom of the escalators in Oxford Circus tube station one evening not remember where I was going and once I remembered how I was going to get there. Oh boy, it was scary. People walked past in fast motion, signs flew circles around my head. And after what seemed like an age, I turned right towards Central Line. I was going home after all and I couldn’t remember which line…the line I took for 12 years…

I also wanted to go to Turkey for a long time to meet the beautiful people of my motherland. Since I left in 1991, I’d not been there more than three weeks and not met anyone I hadn’t known before I left. Those I’d known before were mostly miserable now…if not miserable; ever so adult, what with kids, bad marriages, large credit card debts, boring jobs...We had fun together but it was only a respite from their lives. I wanted to meet genuinely happy people.

I don’t know if there are such things anywhere in the world, let alone Turkey, where people have some genuine problems. But I wanted to believe there was. I wanted to believe that those atmospheric conditions I don’t take personally here will work for me there and get out of the way of the sun. Again not for me but they did get out of the way.

I sweated just the way I’d missed doing (I really had missed sweating).

I rested: I would go to bed at night feeling genuinely excited about getting up the next morning and having absolutely nothing to do all day.

I swam – sometimes sideways like old ladies used to do, sometimes pretending to be in the Olympics (which I couldn’t watch due to lack of TV).

I walked up a mountain at midnight to watch natural gas seeping from the ground and burning like it did for thousands of years.

I walked and swam amongst the ruins of an ancient town – where there had been a settlement since before the time of Christ.

I got on a cable car and climbed to 2365 meters above sea level…which I would not have done had I realized they cut through the forest to build a 7 km road to the base of the cable car.

I got into the sea at full moon at the early hours of the morning…clear as the day.

I partied like there was no tomorrow….sometimes there was hardly any tomorrow as I didn’t wake up or at least get up till late afternoon.

I drunk raki and ate fish while listening to Zeki Muren and crying.

I did much more…but let the literary critics find out about those as a great Turkish poet, Orhan Veli, says at the end of one of his poems.