blog

Lights

Our day’s excursion was to the lighting shops. We went to a place which makes bronze and copper lights, including to any design you specify, and seemed to have good quality and workmanship. Later, we found a few sites with stylish lights, and have a much better sense of what we might eventually use in […]

What I noticed

1. Vaccine passports 2. Attack in Mozambique 3. Jordanian thises and thats 4. A man, his plan: a very long canal 5. The reason for rape according to Imran Khan (skimpy attire) 6. Myanmar deaths 7. More talk of vaccine nationalism 8. Train crash in Taiwan 9. Deaths among the tribesmen 10. Coronavirus horrors in […]

Easter quest

This morning, Easter Sunday, the GF woke with a quest in mind. So off we went to Kurtulus, in search of a legendary baker of Greek Easter bread, described as brioche-like, flavoured with mastic and mahlep, and baked by a Turkish family whose patriarch had been apprenticed to an old Rum baker. We went on […]

A walk in the sun

We took the new tram to Eyup, what a lovely journey. I was a little distracted, but could enjoy the slow glide on the edge of the water, and sometimes over the water itself. Until the tram line opened all of this had been behind scaffolding and construction barriers, so though we’d walked past many […]

Sad news

The GF and I stepped out for an early spring stroll, on a pleasantly warm day, and stopped at the flat where they were busy plastering over the electrical wiring and the plumbing. It is really coming together beautifully and now, for the first time, I can imagine living in it. While I was there […]

Day off

A partial day off today, the first in long time. I finished up in the morning, and then the GF and I went for breakfast, after a very long time indeed. The plan was to go to Nisantasi and stock up on bulgur etc from our favourite shop there, but instead we wandered through Cihangir, […]

Heartbreaking

A heartbreaking article, and full of controlled fury, in the New York Times. It is about the 2019 outbreak of HIV in a rural part of Sindh, where hundreds of children were (and continue to be) diagnosed. One of the better piece I’ve read in a while of this sort, as it links together societal […]

Close to home

The coronavirus is running rampant in Pakistan, thank heavens my father and grandmother should have their second vaccinations next week, assuming they don’t run out of doses. A pair of relatives by marriage are quite unwell and have only just been diagnosed, so it is many days before they will be safely on the road […]