A few lost days as work has kicked up a couple of gears and I’m forever behind. I read The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin – technically re-read it, but didn’t remember a word of it. Very enjoyable, and starts with a very good metaphor about coming from sleep to wakefulness. After some quality […]
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Happy birthday
It was Jinnah’s birthday on 25 December, much to the relief of Pakistani Christians as this means that they can have Christmas off without the mullahs screeching blue murder. This was doing the rounds on social media – a celebration of his birthday somewhere or the other. One understands the ‘get me out of here’ […]
Everything is open
Everything is open, I don’t understand how lockdown works. Well, I suppose it means there are fewer people out, which is certainly a good thing in a pandemic. But even the famous fish sandwich on the Golden Horn was open, and the famous fish sandwich man was there. We popped into the flat and saw […]
Surrounded by history
During our stroll we spotted this in a han where they manufacture metal springs: a broken Byzantine column repurposed as a water pump.
Peran Christmas
We had our first Christmas in Galata, Pera as was. In the morning I dashed to finish some work, and managed just as the GF arose. We went off to bring a Turkish breakfast from a nearby cafe, along with a couple of glasses of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. Since our dining room is dark […]
Deal done
I had a bad night last night, very anxious, and slept poorly. At some point during the night I became convinced that a piece of paint was going to fall off from ceiling onto the GF’s head, so when he came to bed I warned him anxiously. Then, I worried about why our visas are […]
Pardon power
One of the most intractable problems in Pakistani law is that the heirs the murdered can forgive murderers, and there is little the state can do about it. I know someone whose brother killed her father, but the son went unpunished not because the father was a terrible man (which he was) but because the […]
Plague island
That’s the European headline papers in the UK have picked up on, understandably. There is quite the fog of uncertainty about this new variant. My own current understanding is that: Viruses mutate all the time of course, and there is a new variant. It is appearing often enough in testing that it appears to be […]
This cursed year
I had rolled my eyes at all the tedious platitudes about 2020, ugh, don’tcha know, but this is bringing me around to that view. I was just saying to the GF last night, sunnily, that the silver lining in this year’s turmoil has been that at least we hadn’t heard a peep from Ed Sheeran […]
Galataport
A brief lockdown excursion today, just to investigate the Galataport, which we’ve never really walked around. Most of it is shut off of course, but the mosque, which was under scaffolding for restoration and the installation of a public convenience, was now visible (though shut) and some of the other buildings, like the art gallery […]