Pebbles From Paradise

A Cornucopia Of Common Sense!

There are times when I think I may be becoming an old fart, what with pontificating about the preservation of railway stations, and the like. But just when I’m feeling at my fartiest a reprieve arrives from unexpected sources. Yesterday I was particularly fortunate, since I had two reprieves.

The first came in the unlikely shape of Heinz, from the white houses. Like me he resolutely refuses to learn Turkish, and since he’s German and I’m English we always ask Irem to translate for us. Irem is great at translating from English to Turkish, or vice versa but like me speaks no German. The result is that she communicates with Cuma, who speaks neither English nor German but somehow can communicate with Heinz. The conversation is usually about an ancient laptop that Heinz brought with him from Germany, and which is now held together with home made brackets. It hasn’t worked properly for some time. Yesterday he asked if I could put Windows 95 on three 2¼” floppy disks. Seventeen floppy disks later I thought there could be a more efficient way to load Windows on his machine!

But Heinz speaks the universal language of social drinkers. Shots of Gordon’s gin, are interspersed with those of grappa and washed down with the essential Efes. Who cares about whether the computer works, or not? After such sessions I usually leave after dark and pee on the rubbish tip on the way home to our house. Heinz may be ancient, but he’s certainly not an ‘old fart’ and when I see this then neither am I!

Then today through the post came ‘Cornucopia ~ The Magazine For Connoisseurs Of Turkey‘. It’s always beautifully written and produced. I always make straight for the photographs and articles by Berrin Torolsan as the pictures are painstakingly arranged and lit and the articles well researched and written. Berrin could be either a photographer, or a journalist, and would be at the top of her profession. Instead she has mastered both and is the publisher of Cornucopia. But it wasn’t Berrin’s illustrated article about asparagus that came to this would be fart’s aid but a report by Azize Ethem on her return to the town in Australia where she grew up:

Progress who needs it?

In the last quarter of 2005 I took off to New Zealand and Australia to visit friends and family. Fourteen hours in Changi Airport was enough to put me off travel forever. Sitting in Harry’s bar overdosing on caffeine, I was homesick before I had reached my destination.

People had warned me that one should never go back, but oh no, I just had to rip down memory lane. As a child the large local park was the site of most of our games and activities. My friend Les used to spend days fishing for tadpoles in the pond. The area under the bandstand was dark and cobwebby, a perfect place for our Famous Six Club meetings. On Sundays the local brass band played patriotic music and the ice cream man came round on his bike. The long grass of the park was home to purple and silver snakes which were so venomous you only had to look at them to be struck dead. [None of us actually saw these snakes but Joan's big brother swore they were there.] The park was scruffy, with rickety swings and a rusting jungle gym.

First I had located the house I was brought up in. It looked so neglected and weary I’d headed off to the park to cheer myself up. The lawns were wonderful, smooth and green right to the edges ~ no long grass for the snakes. The bandstand was gone and where the pond had been was a large plot of marigolds.

I spied a man painting out graffiti on the walls of the toilet block, so I went over to ask him why all the changes, and why, although it was after school hours there was not a child in the part, not even a group of old ladies sitting on the benches. It seems there are no swings as the council cannot afford a full time attendant? The pond had been deemed dangerous and the bandstand had become a haven for undesirables, so that had to go. The children and old ladies? Ah, well parks are not the places for children or people to linger ~ too many perverts and druggies.

I sat on one of the very few benches and thought of the past and progress. I thought of our children’s parks in Iznik, untidy with straggly weeds and probably wonky swings. There is enough long grass at the edges for death zapping snakes and we are not yet civilised enough to have perverts and druggies.We don’t even have graffiti.

My whole trip seemed to be full of examples of progress which jarred. I met someone in Queensland who was off to apply for a compost license. A modest household compost as to be licensed, I was told. People thought it quite quaint that I can build composts wherever I like on our land, without the sanctions of the local council.

I am sorry, but I think the so-called world has gone stark staring mad and I don’t intend to venture beyond our town boundaries for quite a while.

It seems I’m not alone in thinking our so called sophisticated world with its electronic doodahs, and instant communication really is failing totally to keep our priorities on a healthy predilections and lifestyles. Indeed it gets increasingly difficult to avoid the tawdriness of modern life, but here in Amos we do our very best to provide Amazon with the kind of start I would appreciate even in this day and age.

Kindly note: The cover illustration of the current issue of Cornucopia and quotation from Progress: Who Needs It? by Azize Ethem are both published here as ‘Fair Use’ insofar as they comply with the generally agreed principle that works may be quoted where: quotation of excerpts is in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages is in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 2:16 pm and is filed under This Wonderful World, Turkey Travel, Turkish Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.