In the morning we went off to the northern Bosphorus to visit a friend who has a house there at a rather pretty spot which opens up towards the Black Sea. We arrived in time for brunch and a TV show the friend had been awaiting, featuring an important person they knew. So they propped a laptop on a chair and we all watched the panel discussion. This was in Turkish, of course, so all the GF and I could really comment on was the body language, expressions and intonations of the important person. There was a very large dog there, limping and (we were informed) suffering from diarrhoea. He was clearly in the mood for affection, and spent the next hour or two going to each person at the table, one after the other, to lay his massive head in our laps and insist on an ear scratch. It was sweet, but rather disruptive as I had to go and wash my hands every time. Also at breakfast was a person we had not met before, a gentleman-farmer, with strong views on vibrations etc. It struck me how many men I know of that sort of age who go back to the land to build themselves a castle and/or farm, in one way or another – my father, his uncle, the agave farmer in New Zealand, the mad Pole in Costa Rica, etc.
Breakfast over, we all got into a car to drive off to the gentleman-farmer’s farm on the Black Sea. Along the way we were stopped at checkposts, because of the lockdown, but all of us carried various documents permitting us to travel, so nothing too tricksome. We took the inland route, through forest and what had once been forest but was now houses though the landscape was still beautiful. It was a less sunny day than yesterday, but still unseasonably warm, though it certainly became cooler as we went north.
The farm itself was definitely a working farm, albeit one that cultivated its vibrations, with greenhouses to grow and bathtubs to wash vegetables, and any amount of the usual anonymous metal detritus. The farmhouse was constructed entirely out of recycled materials and rather looked it, withm for example, red shutters serving as part of a wall. Commendable, but not to my taste really.
We strolled around the fields and admired the broccoli and a new dog, this one a pit bull. The pit bull, though not the farmer, accompanied us down to the beach where the water and the sky were practically the grey-blue, so the ships steaming across the Black Sea seemed suspended between heaven and earth. The water of course was very cold, but this did not deter the dog, who ran in quick plunges and ran out again multiple times. The GF found a pebble to skim, which thoroughly confused the dog, who scrabbled around for a good while in the shallow water, looking for something he clearly assumed was meant for fetching.
On the way back I am told we nearly got savaged by a pack of three wild dogs, but I was totally oblivious. We made it out.
As a thanks to our host we bought rather a lot of produce and some of the vibrational materials, such as a magical oil which we were told had many magical properties including preventing corona if applied inside the nose, and treating warts if applied inside the vagina. Anyway, we will do neither, but it was clearly something of a flagship product and smelled nice, so we bought a small vial, for one of its more mundane applications as a skin or hair oil.
On our return to the Bosphorus house we found the important person from the TV sitting in the very chair the laptop had been in this morning. So we had a pleasant high tea/ dinner, and then got a cab back to our place with only a minor setback during the conversation when the important person got miffed, stewed for a short while and then pulled up some videos of himself to prove that we were all quite, quite wrong.