it is Day 1 of Turkey’s Ramazan lockdown. While the streets feel fairly deserted, it’s by no means the ghost town we heard of last year, with dolphins swimming in the Golden Horn etc. Was it like this then, and am I just used to this business of shutting down a city of millions for weeks on end? Last year’s closures seemed unbelievable and they still feel unbelievable now, but this year’s closures feel banal, quite ordinary. I am looking forward to when I shall look back on this time as an aberration rather than the ordinary, though undoubtedly it will be in the midst of the climate change wars so with nostalgia rather than relief at leaving the plague years behind.
The GF and I went out though, on the permitted grocery shopping excursion. We went perhaps slightly farther afield than desirable, but not too far, and it was all on foot and in the open – just across the road to Cihangir to get our weekly fresh milk, my breakfast tarama and a bag of onions. There were plenty of people also grocery shopping, with a similarly expansive interpretation of the guidelines, but being outside and masked in a breezy city doesn’t feel too risky.
I have now had two successive days of basically not doing any work, despite some looming deadlines. Of course I have not spent the days particularly well. I did, rather surprisingly, get an invitation to submit to an academic anthology (seemingly legit) on urban pedagogies on the basis of a story I published recently, but since I am not even sure what urban pedagogies might be, I shall have to decline.