Good news story

This delightful, though probably hopelessly misrepresentative item: Taiwan official urges people to stop changing their name to ‘salmon’. The motivation is a promotion at a sushi restaurant. “I just changed my name this morning to add the characters ‘Bao Cheng Gui Yu’ and we already ate more than Tw$7,000 (£176),” a college student surnamed Ma […]

Wistful thoughts of poison

There is a cat in our neighbourhood which has the most godawful yowl. Every late morning, from around 10 to 1. It is absolutely nervewracking, and has been going on for weeks. Today I even heard a neighbour shout at it, which is rare in Istanbul.

Locked out

I have been locked out of my Facebook account. It’s actually been several days now but I only just tried to log back in, to no avail. Well, I’m not going to send them a copy of my passport, so I suppose that is that, at least for now. My only concern is if someone […]

Novax

It has turned out to be very fortunate that my siblings took our family’s elders to be vaccinated on Saturday. Apparently it was the first day and there was almost no one there. On Sunday thousands showed up and there was chaos. Today, I hear that the health minister has said that it is all […]

Angry women

Both the countries for whom I have passports and some sense of allegiance continue to show where a woman’s place is. Pakistan, of course, remains the most hurtful and the most deadly. The Aurat March with its frankly anodyne slogan of ‘mera jism meri marzi’ – my body, my choice – in Pakistan ‘please don’t […]