Metaphorically speaking, of course. The weekend lockdown starts tonight so the GF and I decided to take Friday as our weekend (well, I did anyway; the GF just moved his working day to the evening). It was a lovely sunny afternoon and we went to get supplies for the next couple of days, having decided […]
Goodbye sunshine
After a warm, sunny long weekend, today the clouds have returned. It is grey and heavy outside, befitting Turkey’s coronavirus figures, speeding towards the top of the global charts. It would be quite something if the GF and I were to have stayed in both the best and the worst places to be during this […]
Kitchen connections
I was very grumpy indeed this morning as there was no water in the taps when I woke up, so that I had to use mineral water even to wash hands and brush teeth and perform the most basic ablutions. The water didn’t return till the stroke of 11, so I assume it was a […]
Up the Bosphorus
The GF got a fuller quota of sleep today, so after lunch we took the Metro towards the Bosphorus coast to find out how easy it is to get to Bebek by public transport instead of braving the ugly weekend traffic on the coastal road. It turns out easy and very pleasant indeed, and it […]
Prince’s Islands
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Some progress
For the last little while the GF and I have been banging our heads against various forms of bureaucracy, most recently the bank – our ATM cards are blocked, can only be unblocked by telephone, to use the telephone service we need a telephone pin, the pin is sent to our registered phone number, we’ve […]
Pandemic lunching
We were out of groceries and it was a sunny, if chilly, afternoon, so we decided to go out for lunch. It turned out to be very pleasant: we went to Cihangir, to a little hipster street food place. Under the new regulations there is no dining in, so we took our food to the […]
Assassins we have known
A curious dinner party last night, replete with tales of assassins we have known told by one of the other guests, advice on where to buy ‘illegal meat’ (i.e. not slaughtered in an abattoir), and the best duck in Turkey which, it appears, is available at Ikea. All this over a rather spectacular dinner of […]
A beginning
Today – or, correctly, tomorrow – a magazine that I’d been working on with some others goes live. Admittedly, with only one story as the plan is to publish a story every few weeks and for 4 or 5 to comprise an issue. I think it’s a really interesting idea if we can keep it […]
Man with a pickaxe
Today was the day work was to begin. We arrived at 8.30 to hand over the keys, waited for about 20 minutes sipping tea, and at last a van arrived full of men with a distressing number of pickaxes. They took the pickaxes to the flat, taking up the rotting floors and removing the kitchen […]