She was about my age, stooped and wearing billowing, floral pantaloons, several layers of mismatched woollies and a daintily embroidered cream head scarf. She was carrying a bouquet of empty plastic paint buckets, an enormous bundle of thick polythene sheeting and a sleepy grandchild. She was following her husband who was also about my age, also stooped, and wearing an old suit and a well-darned cardigan. He was carrying three long thin bamboo canes.
He greeted me as they plodded purposefully up my track. This could mean only one thing – it is olive gathering time. Hours later, in the failing light, I saw him in the next door field, still up in the branches of a gnarled olive tree, thwacking and flailing around with his poles. His wife, bent double and assisted by the family, was scrabbling around below, dodging the cascading twigs, leaves and insects dead and alive, as she gathered up the precious black shiny olives. Next time, when you reach for your bottles of olive oil in Waitrose just remember, if it has “virgin” in the title, this is how it must have started life.
Here in Yali, olive gathering is just one reminder of the onset of autumn. The season has felt much longer this year. The start of Ramadan, (advancing about 10 days every year) this time fell in an extremely hot August; 70 days after Ramadan, Kurban Bayram, the Feast of the Sacrifice took place. Thus the season was extended by a week or two.
After Kurban Bayram, the tourists left, the wind dutifully turned round to the north, summer elided gently into autumn and thermals were taken out and inspected for moth. Village streets, crowded with tourists until merely a few days ago, are now deserted; little shops, cafes and bars are boarded up for the winter, the Turkish version of Virginia creeper sinks into deepest red, and yellowing figs leaves carpet the ground. The villagers breathe a collective exhausted sigh as they drift into seasonal hibernation.
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Regarding the wild boar, you might expect from my frequent moans that we are on first name terms but until this year I had never actually set eyes on them. In July, though, I came across a whole sounder (or is it a singular?) of them - Mr Porker, Mrs Porker and about a dozen little Porkers - mincing down my lane as I drove up behind them late one night. The whole family had scaled an 8 foot, vertical embankment, before I could even say “bacon sandwich”.
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if I have not got enough to keep me out of trouble, early in January, in a burst of keep fit enthusiasm, I bought a second hand Nintendo console with all the Wii Fit games. For a month or so I persevered with tennis and bowling, step aerobics and hoola hoop - as a child of the 50s, I excelled at this - and of course the balance exercises, including yoga.
Yoga was, I have to say, a challenge. Take the “Tree” pose for example. Now, if you are feeling strong, try to imagine me attempting this, in my study, in my local (off-white, woolly, itchy, smelling of moth balls) thermals. “You are doing fine”, the svelte , self righteous on-screen trainer purrs, “But you seem to be swaying a bit”. Swaying? I am careening round my study, bouncing off the bookshelves, the walls and the piano, in my vain attempt to remain vertical. Clearly the trainer and I are not in the same room. As a friend said, Wii Fits are the Breville Toasted Sandwich makers of their day except they gather dust next to the DVD player rather in the loft. Well, that’s where mine is anyway!
My new Kindle, on the other hand gathers no dust. I’ve said before, access to books here has always been a problem. No Smiths or Waterstones, no charity shop or library. So it’s down to Mr Amazon. He tries his best but the local postal service is a major stumbling block. He also feels compelled to charge about £8 p&p which soon mounts up. And besides, my books are rapidly taking over the house. The Kindle solves these problems at a stroke – and Mr Amazon even sells Kindle gift vouchers, thus solving birthday present problems too.| I m |
entioned H3A last year, I think. Herodotus Third Age Academy – so called after a local lad who made a bit of a name for himself as the Father of History - is based on the idea of the University of the Third Age and is the only one of its kind in Turkey. See http://www.hero3a.com/ to learn what we get up to.
One important activity is our reading group but again we had the problem of obtaining books. Not any more – Kindle really comes into its own, and I can make notes on it too.
One important activity is our reading group but again we had the problem of obtaining books. Not any more – Kindle really comes into its own, and I can make notes on it too.
After our meetings, I record the views of our reading group on one of my blogs so if you want to know what we think of, say, Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernières or Portrait of a Turkish Family by Irfan Orga, or Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, or From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, or Arundhati Roy’s splendid God of Small Things, or Catch 22 (that was a trip too far down nostalgia lane for some of us), you had better click onto http://terryinturkey1.wordpress.com. If you are not interested, just pass swiftly on.
We’ve moved on a bit in our ebru group. We now call ourselves The Ebru Ensemble and last
summer we organised a one day exhibition in the garden of one of our members. It was a great success. “Short and sweet” is probably the best way to describe it – at just a few hours long, it was the shortest exhibition of the summer but attended by over 80 people. You can see more images of the day at the abovementioned blog. Short though it was, some attending managed to drink us all but dry whilst “admiring the art”; a number of visitors kindly bought some of our work. A couple of us, having become a bit bored with producing yet more classic ebru tulips, decided to use our vast collections of bits of ebru to make collages. I came up with collages featuring a few batty animals, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and a couple of janissaries – not in the same collage.Another one was based on a view across our bay and I was especially pleased when this one sold. Next year we are planning to have a couple more exhibitions in Yalikavak, one in a disused water cistern.
Ebru was very popular in Northern Europe from the 17th century for lining and covering handmade books. In a pleasurable revival of that tradition, my good friend Hugh in Suffolk takes some of my ebrus and uses them in his bespoke book making, book binding and book repair business. If you are looking for a very special diary, journal or a beautifully bound version of your biography, Hugh is your man.
I would like to say that my piano playing is coming along in leaps and bounds..... but then sometimes we cannot say what we like and simultaneously tell the truth. The truth is that making progress on the piano project is at the top of my New Year’s resolution list.
On to real music now and this year we had the usual splendid summer of festivals, in Turgutreis, Gumusluk, and of course the Bodrum Ballet Festival.
Turgutreis festival began with a wonderful concert by the Tchaikovsky Moscow Radio Symphony orchestra with the magical cellist Mischa Maisky playing the Rococco Variations. Vladimir Fedoseyev breathed new life into the Polovtsian Dances, ably assisted by several Turkish matrons behind me who got carried away, thought they’d joined the cast of “Kismet”, and began to sing along - “takka myand ama sitiranja n paradayz” – at the appropriate moment.
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umusluk festival had its moments and one of them was the final concert after the series of piano master classes. The youngsters taking part were terrifyingly good, not just with the standard repertoire but also with some Turkish contemporary pieces, full of violent, piano-leg-buckling, percussive passages interspersed with rests so long an elderly soloist could die in one of them.
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As extra entertainment, during the interval of the American evening, a local loony got up on stage to entertain the guest of honour, the American ambassador to Turkey, with a “Yankee Go Home” style diatribe. We were mildly amused until we noticed how long it took the police, gendarme and the private security to react. Had the man been armed he had time to pick off half the audience. Now you don’t get that at Covent Garden.
It is always good to catch up with old friends and this year it was a special pleasure to welcome my friend and former colleague from the early days at Fairfield, Chris Taylor. She spent four very wet days in April exploring Istanbul before coming across the Sea of Marmara to Bursa where we met up. After a day touring the city, we drove back down to Bodrum, breaking the journey so we could visit the amazing ruins at Ephesus.The weather people pulled out the stops in Bodrum so we were able to relax and enjoy the Spring sunshine, touring around the area, eating outdoors and catching up on more years than either of us cares to admit to. Splendid!| F |
nally, a couple of things that made me giggle this year.
Firstly, reflecting my love of Wales:
- On a beautiful summer's day, two American tourists were driving through Wales. They stopped for lunch at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogoch,and one of the tourists asked the waitress, 'Before we order, I wonder if you could settle an argument for us. Can you pronounce where we are, very,very, very slowly?'
The girl leaned over and said:'Burrr … gurrr … king'
Second: - Yali abounds with lovely examples of “Tinglish” (Turkish English). The owner of this little boat got his words right – but he just needs to brush up on his euphemisms!
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Merry Christmas and a healthy, happy and peaceful 2012
