Pebbles From Paradise

Britain’s Most Popular ‘Fake’ Handgun  Begum Kartal a 23 year old university undergraduate was eagerly anticipating her marriage on the 1st September when she was killed by a bullet fired by revelers at her pre-wedding party. As a result a nationwide campaign has been launched to stop the practice of firing guns into the air [...]

This Fine Pide Shop Was Closed To Make Way For Another Ambulance Station, But Do We Need More Ambulances, Or More Wood Cooked Pide? A couple of years ago Irem and I were having dinner with friends in Istanbul when we heard the loud crash of breaking glass outside followed by the sound of a [...]

Ortaköy ~ Istanbul, in October Maybe? Damla will arrive in Amos late tonight ~ tee hee, plenty of fine Martinis for the winter months. Hurray! But she will not, after all, be sharing them with Phillip this October when he is due to return to Turkey with his family. In an exclusive e-mail to PebblesFromParadise.COM [...]

Umut Özlüer And Guest Here is a photograph of Umut Özlüer the publisher of Holiday Magazine Turkiye praising a local artist and inviting her to say a few words at the magazine’s first birthday party. The image is a bit of a ‘cock-up’. I had intended to use the E900‘s small flash unit to fill [...]

In The Glade Something Stirs! In the past two weeks I’ve remembered a past life, and no I’m not referring to my experiments with hypnotic past life regression, but rather I have been remembering a life that excited me throughout my late teens and early twenties. I’m referring to attending music festivals. The catalyst for [...]

If you troubled to read yesterday’s entry, which was about Summer Festivals rather than Past Life Regression, you may have formed the impression that the last Summer Festival that I ever attended was in England during the late 1980s. But this is not so. For a number of years there used to be a regular [...]

Dunnit! Exactly ten years ago today my father in his 94th year drove his car for the very last time. The occasion was my wedding to Irem. Father was awaiting two hip, and two knee replacements and for the previous five months could only walk with the aid of a Zimmer frame – but he [...]

Amélie Poulain It must have been around midnight. I was sound asleep when I heard the sound of the telephone Irem answered it from my study. The mysterious caller was none other than Gent Bey, who owns one of the houses over the Aquarium Bay at Amos but who is currently in Istanbul. It transpires [...]

The Moon Last Night From Damla’s House It’s my birthday today, but I celebrated it last night at a small party organized by Damla. She also gave me a rather lovely, and unexpected birthday present. It was laying unwrapped on her work surface and being a gadget man I fell in love with it at [...]

Some of you may remember how Amazon, Irem and I ran away from the prospect of creating a new brochure for Amos Restaurant. The reason is that the owners of large enterprise know just how much work needs to go into projecting the right image, whereas small business owners tend to think that taking pictures [...]

As an escape from thinking more about the production of Mehmet’s brochure I spent some time surfing this morning and came upon an intriguing, if not very serious personality test on the web. By submitting answers to eighteen questions the test revealed what classic move my personality resembles. Below you can see what the program [...]

What Famous Leader Are You? personality tests by similarminds.com Yesterday I discovered that I was an ‘Easy Rider’, according to an impressive personality test at the SimilarMinds web site, which analyses your answers to a bank of questions and reveals the movie to match your personality. I also completed a second test to determine what [...]

It all started last week when I was getting up-to-date with Hannah via e-mail. Her descriptions about festivals, and the like, reconnected me to a whole world that I once knew but somehow seemed to have faded away. I hit the Internet searching for names from my past and BINGO I turned up a profile [...]

Leica have just announced a whole raft of ‘new’ products. I have put the new in inverted comas because a number of these cameras have already been released by Panasonic, so they’re not so much new as re badged. All the cameras, even when sold as Panasonic products, carry superb Leica optics. The cameras in [...]

Some weeks ago I wrote an article called ‘14 Ways The FinePix® E900 Rivals The Legendary Leica‘ for e900photography.com. These included compactness, silent operation, and a number of the advantages of using digital media. The piece was a comparison between the FujiFilm FinePix E900 and the Leica M system. Today I might have to revise [...]

Fishing Boats Snapped With The Fuji Finepix E900 On This Beautiful Day In Marmaris We went to Marmaris today when something happened that made me realise just how fortunate we are. Amazon peed on me! It’s unusual for her to have such accidents and today it only happened because she was exhausted after a days’s [...]

Time And Eternity, by Coşkun Çankaya Last night we were delighted to have a rare visit from our friend Coşkun, who is a local artist. It was he who corrected the painting I commissioned of a Bentley Motor Car, which had some distortion to its perspective. I’m still delighted with Coşkun’s restoration but last night [...]

“Tell me another story Mummy!” As you may know, from reading previous entries here at pebblesfromparadise.com, I do not favour the use of flash in photography and when I am forced to use it I prefer to use my Metz CL-45. I’ve had it for nearly twenty years and it works fine with the Canon [...]

Ready For The Oven, And Now As Floyd Would Say: “Time For A Slurp!” At last it’s happened! Mehmet phoned yesterday to say that he had caught an enormous fish and he invited me to photograph it for his new brochure. Amazon, Irem and I hot-footed ourselves, actually we took the jeep because I was [...]

Words fail me. Some people have very small brains, and even smaller minds. If you think that this is going to be a rant then you’re right. I am going to rant. My rant will achieve nothing. The small minded people will continue to attempt to make an impression upon me and they will fail. [...]

Fishing Boats On The Way To Netsel Marina Today was spent in Marmaris. We had to go because our tyre repair hadn’t been done properly, indeed we discovered it hadn’t been done at all! In the event it wasn’t the tyre but the valve sleeve that required replacement. But the trip was valuable for other [...]

There are certain things that I find quite irritating about the current trends in attitudes and service in the UK. Years ago I had the misfortune to be stranded for a day in London because National Coaches had sold me a ticket on a nonexistent bus. They got me back to Manchester that evening but [...]

Please Act Now Before You, Or Your Children Become Infertile, Or Worse! I’ve just received a most disturbing e-mail from Liz Wilcock of Sulis and Stone Stable~ it’s self explantory. Dear All, If you want to keep this country, [England, separate consultations are taking place for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland], GM free it is [...]

“A Man Comes” “He travels swiftly“ “He bears passion and love” Kindly note: The images on the entry are the copyright of US Games Inc. They were originally painted in 1974 by the Scottish Artist Fergus Hall and used in the Eon Productions Film ‘Live And Let Die‘ which was based upon of Ian Flemming’s [...]

Exmouth Market London WC1 There are two ways to travel the world: by foot, plane, train, ship or bus, or by boat or car! If you travel by foot, plane, train, ship, or bus you will meet real people living in an apparently real world. You can ‘experiment’ with being sociable, hear new stories, imagine [...]

One of the problems that all aspiring writes share is the question of where to insert the comma in a sentence. I tend to insert lots of commas when I write my articles, and then spend the following two days removing them whilst the lentil soup simmers on the Aga. Teachers still no doubt have [...]

O.K. I admit it. It’s nice to be in London. My dear ol’ Papa, Gawd rest his Soul was a Londoner he lived as a boy in Camberwell, and it was in Camberwell that I first met Irem and started my rehabilitation from therapist to regular guy. I’m still not cured but I’m lots better [...]

I’ve been three days in London already yet I’ve seen very little of it ~ that’s due to change tomorrow. The reason I haven’t seen much of the City is that I decided that I would purchase a laptop computer on this trip and for the past two days I’ve both been setting it up, [...]

This unicyclist performing at Covent Garden Market ate an apple whilst juggling it, plus an indian club and a lethal machette My trip to London to meet Hannah has coincided with a second piece of family news. My eldest son the intrepid Ollie Bray has officially launched his domain www.olliebray.com. It’s extremely well made and [...]

The Budgieman, Great Family Entertainment Here I am on day two of my adventure in London rediscovering Hannah. I’ve felt a lot more relaxed today, we both now know each other. She is no longer discomforted by moustache and I have adjusted to the slight Derbyshire drawl to her accent. Indeed I think it’s true [...]