The main thing I look for in any society/culture/country is how power is restrained, controlled, managed. Otherwise, the elephant smashes the ant. Let’s face it 98% of us fall in the ant category. Years of schooling, TV, newspapers and magazines instill in us the goodness, generosity and kindness of elephants in their care of ants but that mainly creates delusional thinking. Accepting our ant-like status ought to make us far more sensitive to the rules of the road for the elephant, where they can walk, and where they can run and what happens when they decide to have a little fun and get the herd to stamp on an anthill. Just to bring the fear needed to keep the ants marching in a straight line. For the ant, his hill isn’t a molehill but a mountain to be protected. For an elephant, mountains are, well, mountains with ridges and gullies, forest and snow. This difference in perception leads to odd results.

Social stability usually means the elephants are left to graze when and where they please and to erect rules that prevent foreign elephants from coming into their pastures. Elephants also have all the powerful weapons to keep the ants walking single file from work to home. At least this is how a well-ordered jungle ought to work. As a sideline, elephants sometimes sell a bunch of ants to foreign elephants and this can be profitable for both herds, though not so good for the ants. That’s life in the jungle. Should an elephant be banished from the herd, the rule is such a creature is to be forgotten. A banished elephant is a non-elephant. Any ant bold enough to talk nice about such a disgraced elephant would do well to look up as that shadow above his head shaped like large hoof and ask why it’s falling so fast? Although elephants seem to be born with an immense hide, as they are actually quite thin-skinned creatures whose feeling are easily hurt.

Recently there was a flutter on the Twitter channel about someone who had been asked by a small school administrator to fill in an evaluation form. A young Thai graduate asked her foreign friend to complete the form so she could include it with her application for a teaching job. The form included a frank opinion on her hair, teeth, and beauty—remember this is for a teaching job. Those in power can run an informal beauty contest for teachers. You might have brilliant marks, the kind of personality that makes students want to learn, but if your teeth are crooked, your hair cut short, you might not make the cut. This is an example of the elephant pretty much deciding on factors that are important to elephants and of little importance to the small ants that sit in classrooms and want to learn about the jungle. Also when a foreign ant tries to help a local ant, it is bound to lead to trouble. As foreign ants just don’t understand how elephants think.

The assessor (see Thai 101) was asked to comment on these factors:

Outer personality
1. Hairstyle
2. Face
3. Teeth
4. Weight
5. Attire
6. Jewelry/accessories
7. Shoes and socks

It seems quite important to the elephants that the ants wear the right socks and shoes. You can’t just be any pocked faced, short, crooked tooth, sock less hag, dressed in a plain smock no matter how brilliant and stimulating you may be in teaching a class. Weed out those who wouldn’t look at home on the catwalk. It’s not necessarily that elephants don’t like smart ants. It’s more likely that they are distrustful of any ant that is too clever. Elephants prefer a good-looking turn of the calf to the turn of a clever phrase.

In the West, laws prohibit job discrimination based on appearance. Western governments decided a long time ago the only way to keep harmony in the jungle was to hire a mahout and put him on the elephant’s back to stop the beast from rampaging, eating all of the best bits, and shitting on anthills. It hasn’t always worked out all that well in the West. But they at least made an effort. In Asia, elephants roam around pretty much free. No one tells an elephant that making a list of outer personality is wrong; mahouts try to pretend they are in control of the elephants but mostly every ant agrees they are no more than pretty decorations. Even the most dimwitted ant knows that the mahouts are by and large elephants in disguise.

It is one of those hard lessons of life: Elephants are obsessed at finding and hiring pretty young ants. The catwalk look doesn’t apply only to teachers, but includes doctors and nurses – especially nurses – who must pass beauty contest requirement before admitted into the profession. Elephants, when they get sick, want to look up from their hospital bed and see an angel-like attendant hovering nearby.

Another case involves a student who applied to medical school with a 3.8 grade average and otherwise with sterling qualities, but her application was rejected. Why, because (and this is after the deadline) she is informed that she failed to include all 5 copies of her photograph. Let me repeat that number: 5. The elephant side said they’d only received 4 copies of the photograph. The ant side, i.e., the student, who has subsequently brought a lawsuit, says she indeed included all 5 photos. The committee representing the elephants obviously had five people and no photocopy machine. As in the first case, the photograph allows for an assessment of the beauty element of the applicant. We don’t know what this student looks like. Is it possible that if she wasn’t beautiful enough, her application was kept in the pile of brilliant but not quite catwalk quality applicants, one of the five photos was conveniently ‘misplaced’ and her application therefore was tossed into the incomplete pile. We may never know.

Nurses and doctors also must meet height and beauty requirements along with the usual academic qualifications. You won’t find many short, ugly Thai nurses. Beauty and ugliness are obviously in the eye of the beholder. Those ants wishing to become doctors and nurses must undertake a physical examination. The checklist for admission includes: no mental illness, no sexually transmitted diseases, no crooked or missing teeth, at least 150cm in height, no ugly marks on the face, and in a fairly narrow weight range. It may be easier to pass the physical requirements become an astronaut for NASA that getting into medical or nursing school in Thailand. Sometimes you wish that you were making up this stuff. But inside the anthill, this is how things work.

An elephant’s view of beauty to be sure, but they are the ones running things and what they want, they usually find a way of getting. Democracy is quite dangerous for the elephants as one ant gets to vote just like one elephant only there are a lot more ants and that can be a problem. The next thing is that ants what to make elephants accountable and get them to stop shitting on anthills or at least give a little advance warning before those enormous bowels open. We live in a world where the faint hint of such a possibility is enough to get the whole herd of elephants trumpeting and bellowing. That makes quite a noise. Democracy works because many ants have been taught that elephants act to help ants have a better life. In other words, ants are easily tricked by elephants into believing their well-being depends on the happiness of the elephants. Always has been, always will be as long as there is a jungle home.

Another way of keeping the ants working the jungle floor is to convince a large number of ants that they too are the same as elephants. Now that seems flat out crazy, right? Wrong. Luxury watches, cars, clothes, perfume and glasses an elephant does make, and before you know the whole colony of ants are working furiously to buy the stuff that normally only elephants possess. Come election time, the elephants strike fear into the ant colony that anything smacking of anti-elephant policies would smack down the dreams and aspirations of ants. And of course, any ant who would dissent from the point of view or, God forbid, criticize elephants directly, should be ‘stepped on.’

From an early age children are taught that it is a dog-eat-dog world. That is elephant propaganda. The kind of thing that ants are taught by very beautiful teachers to worry about when in fact what children should really be worried about isn’t about dogs eating each other, but about the right of elephants to condemn all the non-beautiful ants to a life on the edge of the colony. One crooked tooth or a cross-eye can be all that separates you from medical school and a life sweeping streets. Ants really ought to think about that.

I wonder if ex-prime minister Tony Blair will ever just go away? I like to think of him cowering in a tower block somewhere, eaten up with remorse and the hideous embarrassment of having once been George W Bush’s best buddy. But I know that in reality he is actually feted by statesmen across the world and has enough money to be able to buy me, St Paul’s Cathedral and Mexico.

Superlatives about this man who took my country into an illegal war, still abound. Even his book A Journey is a bestseller and now, apparently, he is in line for a literary award. Happily it is of an ironic nature. It is the Bad Sex Award (BSA) and, as far as I can see, Mr Blair really deserves this one. Anyone who describes himself as an ‘animal’ in the sack with his wife (or anyone else) is on the road, if not at the terminus, of the bad sex journey. I’m impressed that he’s risen so high (if you’ll excuse the expression) in such a short literary career but then if you use the word ‘animal’ in relation to human sexual contact then you’re almost guaranteed a BSA.

It’s all down to words really or rather certain words. There’s a fair bit of sex in my Çetin İkmen books, but I’m always very careful about the words I use to describe it. I don’t actually fear winning a BSA, one can argue that the publicity would only do my career good. I think that what I fear is being bad at something in a very public arena. Literature, even if one is not a best-seller, is out there for anyone and everyone to read should they so choose. I’d like to keep my failures to myself thank you very much!

So what are the words I think that those not wishing to end up with a BSA should avoid? A very thin line, I believe, has to be walked between the risible and the anatomical and so, right from the off, I think it best to avoid terms that your doctor might use. I may be wrong but I don’t think that a sex scene really benefits from a minute anatomical investigation of a woman’s vagina. There are, or should be, emotions and even perhaps romance involved. We really don’t need a literary tour of the organs of reproduction. This just leaves the risible.

Everybody’s idea about which words, when used to describe sex are funny, may differ. ‘Animal’ as I have said before, is one of them for me. Others include: throbbing, member, shuddering climax, tumescence, huge, feasting, proud. When applied to the sex act or to ‘tumescent’ sexual organs these words can reduce me to a heap of mad giggling. I guess I just find it all too over-blown and too serious by half. Even in a crime novel, sex need not necessarily be desperate and joyless. Some of the characters may have sex because they love the person they’re having sex with or for fun or on a whim or for any reason that may not necessarily be connected to any sort of crime. Criminal sex, as in rape or abuse, is something else entirely and is beyond the remit of this current discussion.

Of course I have to accept that not everybody laughs at the word ‘throbbing’ in the way that I do. I have a particularly childish sense of humour at times which, during the late 1980s was honed to perfection by a mad comic for adults called ‘Viz’. This publication had comic strips about all sorts of vaguely and not so vaguely lavatorial subjects and characters including ‘Johnny Fartpants’, ‘Nobby’s Piles’ and ‘The Fat Slags’. Now a rather venerable magazine here in the UK, it still makes me laugh until I cry and I still feel about fifteen years old whenever I do.

So use words like ‘animal’ and ‘proud’ at your peril. Not just because they will make me laugh but because they also, it would seem, make the Bad Sex Award judges laugh quite a bit too. Sadly for those who still find words like that useful in a sexual context, I fear that the judges may very well, like me, have read far too many copies of ‘Viz’ comic back in the 1980s. I suspect Mr Tony Blair did not read that publication, hence his new and this time very funny, run in with notoriety. The rule of thumb therefore for Mr Tony Blair in the future is read more smut, laugh a bit more and for God’s sake stop taking yourself so bloody seriously! Oh and of course, learn what the word ‘humility’ means – if that’s ever really possible.

If you were dictator of the world, or a village, or inside your house, the main perk is that you hold everyone else hostage, strapped to a post. They listen to you. You offer comfort in an uncertain, dangerous world. Still, the larger reality is people listen not because they want to; but because they have no real choice. Corporations are built on the dictator’s model of giving comfort. If you fly United Airlines in the United States, remember they’ve got you where they want you. They have your undivided attention.

I’ve been spoiled flying in Asia. The number and length of announcements are relatively limited and short. Even repeated in a couple of languages they are brief. In America, when you board your flight, you find that you’ve entered George Orwell’s Room 101. I speak from recent experience on a United Airlines flight. There were very long announcements about what you can and cannot do, the penalties involved, the commands of what you must do if you occupy an exit seat. It was like being in school. Reform school. With a little editing, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine their test audience had been passengers on rendition flights that American Intel agencies operate.

But the best form of torture was a slick corporate video starring Mr. Smisek, the President of United Airlines, who looked like the understudy host on a Reality TV show, giving comfort—yes, I choose that word carefully—to all of the passengers about the recent merger with Continental Airlines. He was worried about us. Thought we were confused and scared about the merger. He must have truly believed that every United Airline flight contained a planeload of passengers frightened about the meaning of clause 18 in the Confidentiality Agreement. His mission, in the video, was to list all of the benefits, hopes, and plans for such a transaction for shareholders, bankers, the board of directors and the President’s best friends. The funny thing, after the video, I didn’t feel any better knowing about how this merger was going to improve my life.

This is a plea from the heart, Mr. Smisek, most of us don’t really need your reassurance about the merger plans. We understand it was likely a highly frightening experience for you like waking up with your hair on fire. That video made us passengers a little sad. But, then as a Harvard law graduate, and highly paid executive who has worked his way up the ranks, we do understand only a fool would forgo the chance to go directly to his customers about the merger. Populism shouldn’t be restricted to politicians. You are clearly a visionary to see beyond the narrow confines of the boardroom. We salute you for thinking of us. And respect how important the merger has been in your life. We are happy for you. But we are just fine, in so far as we have no legroom or elbowroom, to stay inside our cone of total ignorance about the defining moment of your life.

Let us watch the video, listen to music, and wish that even a meager meal of prison food might have been served rather than robbing the food budget to make the video. But that’s probably just me whining. We are hungry strapped in small chairs like infants. And you, like big daddy, come to comfort us about a corporate video. Excuse me, sir, but in coach class no one around me looked like they were being kept awake at night worrying about the long-term implications of the merger. As I said, earlier, it could have just been me who wasn’t worried.

Believe me, we don’t have a dog in your corporate rat race. Most of the people on the flight were worried about keeping a job, paying their mortgage, the weather in Denver or given the chronic delays, making our connecting flight. In a perfect world, our priorities would be your priorities. But we don’t live in a perfect world.

I am glad that you had a chance for closure for the hellish months in merger hell. It took guts for you to stand in front of that camera and not to spill the beans over how you fought for days against overwhelming odds to secure the best the corporate perks clauses, gold parachute provisions, and stock options for senior executive sub-clauses. We can understand how these battles must have haunted you during your waking and sleeping hours for months. Shell shock isn’t limited to soldiers. Corporate executives also bleed. Sir, you have our sympathy. Everyone on my flight seemed to appreciate the real suffering you must have endured. There is no other explanation as to why you would have forced a captive audience to watch such a heart felt video about such an interesting, compelling and dramatic subject as a corporate merger.

No doubt there is a film to be made based on the anguish you experienced during the merger. With a film, you see, we have a choice whether to see it or not. But on your airline, sir, we have no choice, our seats are in the upright and locked position, we have our seat belts on, we can’t walk out of the cinema and scream: I don’t fucking care about your merger. Sir, please read George Orwell’s 1984 and ask yourself whether part of the merger was to recreate Room 101 on every bleeding United Airline flight in America. Try this: put your video on YouTube and let those who need comfort find it on their own. Of course, that would give passengers a choice. So I ask what is it that makes you wish to rob us of choice?

I have found an answer: acting.

You may have caught the acting bug in your Princeton or Harvard days. That’s okay, too. Some of my friends are actors. But, by and large, they have to earn their audience’s attention. They have no real ability to leap out at them around 35,000 feet and force them to watch their performance. Should you decide to make future in house videos, here are a few suggestions:

(1) Music. You really need to set the mood with an original score. I don’t have Lady Ga Ga’s phone number but I am certain one of your bankers must have it. Ask him.

(2) Set designer. Hollywood understands that people do look at the background of shot. Throw in a vase of flowers, a Van Gough reproduction (Sunflowers are nice and comforting), and a grand piano (Bach is nice, too). Anything but the interior of a fucking corporate office.

(3) Costume and makeup. You looked like a zombie from one of those vampire movies that are all the rage in your country. Maybe you wanted us to feel sorry for you. But makeup is needed. Ask your wife. Hire her as a consultant, if you haven’t already done so. Get a suit that doesn’t make you look like an undertaker.

(4) Script. Sir, was your script written by one of your lawyers who finished in the bottom half of his/her class? There was no dialogue. No plot. No character development. No hint of a story line. Just a lot of description, and that is no way to treat a captive audience. We deserved more.

(5) Director. I don’t mean board of directors. I mean someone who directs people in front of a camera. Not the cameraman, the guy on the boom, or the guy with the sound equipment. The director might have saved your performance. But then again probably not.

(6) Acting coach. Acting looks easy. But it is hard. And sir, I hope that this merger really works out for you because you should you lose your day job and that gold parachute fails to open, don’t make plans to go into acting. I know that is a tough thing to say, and you are still a little fragile at having been beaten up by a room full of lawyers for days on end, but someone needs to speak the truth.

If it isn’t possible to pay frequent flier points not to watch your in house video, I’d suggest as your post-merger plan, that you include this option (or slap it on YouTube). Many of your passengers would be grateful and off loading that liability would look good on your balance sheet. And when your balance sheet looks good, you look good. As a former captive, I harbor no grudge, no permanent mental pain, loss of vision or hearing that I can’t handle, and really hope that someone in your office will give you a big hug and tell you that everything will be okay.

‘Lordy, Lordy!’ as those two gorgeous gals, the Fat Slags, from the very rude adult comic ‘Viz’ would say, ‘it’s the bleedin’ eighties again, man!’ ‘Viz’ was a product of those troubled times here in the UK and so they, and their characters, should know. So do I.

It isn’t superficial, this eighties-isation. Big hair and red braces have not, I don’t think, started to make a come back. Leg-warmers have been seen but I don’t think we’re in dangerous territory (i.e. Rubik’s Cube) just yet. No, the nineteen eighties are rocketing back into British life in the shape of the cuts to public services our new government wants to make. Basically if it is funded by the state and isn’t a nuclear weapon, they are going to cut it. Our free healthcare service, the NHS (National Health Service) is, admittedly, to be an exception to this rule. But then that would be very stupid in both practical and political terms. The concept and the reality of free healthcare is one of the few things that brings a smile to your face when you’re poor. You might be jobless, miserable and hungry but at least if you get ill, someone will look after you. In fact I think that attacking the NHS is one of the few things that might bring the masses (both ‘washed’ and ‘unwashed’) out onto the streets. So they won’t do that. Not directly.

However, the NHS is, we are told, going to be ‘reformed’ – again. ‘Reform’ is a word I hate so much if it were a person I would knee it in the balls and then punch its teeth out. Margaret Thatcher started ‘reforming’ everything in the eighties. It meant thousands of lost jobs, massive social inequality and a mindset turned towards excessive greed that was later exploited by the lovely and fragrant Mr Tony Blair. Apparently these ‘reforms’ are going to be aimed at giving local General Practitioners (GPs) and the communities that they serve more control over their budgets. In other words spending will no longer be controlled centrally but devolved to individuals. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. I get the whole tailoring services to specific local problems and needs. But we have been here before – cue big hair and Patrick Swayze. And yes I am biased because my husband and I were poor students with a kid in the 1980s. Scum that we were, we got grants (for the young, this was a system where the state paid for your studies), went on marches against things like joblessness and homophobia and ate a lot of mouldy vegetables. We also, until the late eighties when things improved for us, struggled to find anyone or anything that would just give us a chance. I had an accident during that time and had to go to hospital for a few days. I can still remember laying in my own blood on crackling, paper sheets trying to sleep while the elderly patient in the next bed waited in vain for her incontinence pads to be changed. Someone, somewhere hadn’t ‘prioritised’ her.

You shouldn’t, in my opinion, give individuals exclusive control over vast amounts of state money. We are all human and if we are given money we will all want to spend it on what interests or concerns us. For instance I am sure that if I were in charge of a health budget, services for people with mental health problems would improve enormously. But I am not a GP (luckily some would say) and so I will never be in that position.

GPs are fallible like everyone else and, although I am sure that many of them will do very well for their patients in their new ‘reformed’ world, others will not. As it is now, but more so, the services provided by the NHS will become a postcode lottery. ‘Cancer? Oh, you’ll have to move to Blackpool if you want that dealt with. Dr Tumour is a wonderful surgeon you know. You’ll have to swap your cancer for Mrs Jones’s Parkinson’s disease. Where you live now, in Milton Keynes, is a world leader in Parkinson’s.’ And so on.

I fear getting back to the eighties. I’m older now and I don’t want this, again, for my child. Maybe what I need, what we all need, is some reformation of the concept of ‘reform’. What we need to do is to get back to people and what is best for them as opposed to trying all the time to please and cosy up to the forces of high finance. Simple minded in its, well simplicity I know, but then maybe these things aren’t that hard after all. Maybe it’s just in the interests of our governments, whoever they may be, to make us think that they are more complicated than they are. After all, back in the eighties, as I recall it, even getting dressed for a party was complicated – all that make-up, all those ruffles, all that hairspray!

The crime novel tradition seems to have little connection to love. Maybe sometimes love in a perverse sense is the spur to the murder at the heart of most crime novels – the spurned husband killing his wife, for example. But usually the detective is a loveless loner, pining without much hope like the great Marlowe for his true love to come along.

As I write more novels, I’ve noticed that love is at the heart of crime fiction. At least, mine, anyway.

Leonard Cohen sings that “love’s the only engine of survival.” It’s a good way to look at the crime novel. Rather than being a race to unravel the murder puzzle and nab the killer, I view the crime novel as the detective’s journey toward understanding about himself. And understanding, in my experience, comes only with the unfolding of love. You can finger the killer and take away the danger he poses, but unless your detective learns about love, emotionally he won’t survive the trauma of his closeness to death.

It may seem that I ought to have figured this out before now – I’m close to completion of the manuscript of my sixth novel, after all. But society hides the centrality of love behind strictures of finance and duty and work, and the format of the crime novel often plays the same role. So it’s only now, 400,000 words down the line, that it’s clear to me.

I started out thinking of crime novels as marked by plot – a murder, an investigation, a discovery of the bad guy – alongside a deeper emotional characterization of the hero and as many of the other characters as I could manage.

Then as my novels went on, I noticed the importance of relationships between the characters. I realized that it was these relationship which gave the novel structure and meaning, rather than the Three Act concept (dilemma, discovery, resolution) of most writing texts. The Three Acts were the superstructure, if you like, but no more.

More recently I’ve looked back and seen that each of my novels was founded around at least one relationship of love. Even in my first, “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” Omar Yussef investigates because of the love he feels for his ex-pupil, George Saba. By the time of my most recently published novel “The Fourth Assassin” the love was even more baldly stated, because Omar had to clear his son of an accusation of murder in Brooklyn, New York.

Now that I’m writing historical crime fiction, the love stories have become even more central. Not because of anything inherent in historical writing. Rather because I’ve accepted the unavoidable: if your aim isn’t to find the love in yourself, then it’s because you don’t know yourself; and if you don’t know yourself, then you won’t be a good detective. Love is so basic that it strips away all the posturing about ourselves which can obscure our thinking.

I suppose I knew this all along, subconsciously. That’s why I made Omar Yussef a family man, rather than a loner; a man of compassion rather than a self-hating cop driven by old resentments.

Most of all, without acknowledging the love you feel for the world around you, as a writer, you’ll produce emotionally empty novels. What better way to understand the centrality of love, than to place your characters in juxtaposition with the kind of action that erases love – murder. So, put more romance among the noir nastiness.

There are breakfasts that can tempt you – full ‘English’ complete with egg, bacon, sausage, black pudding, fried tomatoes and fried bread for some people, maybe mountains of exotic fruit and fresh bread for others. There are also breakfasts that are, quite frankly, a chore. Muesli can be a bit of a mission and I defy anyone to see porridge as anything other than an instrument of masochism. However, not many breakfasts, good or bad, intrigue.

My travel writer friend, Pat, who lives in Turkey full-time has a good eye for the out of the way and the outré. I think we get along as well as we do because we’re both fascinated by the weird, the wonderful and the almost disappeared. And modern İstanbul, vibrant and thrusting as it is, rarely fails to disappoint in this respect. So when Pat invited my husband and me out for what she called a Bulgarian Breakfast one sunny morning, what could we possibly do but accept?

The nameless little eatery that we were headed for was located in the district of Beşiktaş on the European side of the Bosphorus. Famous for its ornate ferry stage, it’s football club and it’s proximity to the great rococo confection that is the Dolmabahçe Palace, Beşiktaş is also a district characterised by the ghostly remains of old Greek public buildings as well as by some very eclectic domestic accommodation. My next İkmen book, (A Noble Killing) due for publication in January 2011 is set in this extremely varied and vibrant quarter of the city.

As our bus took us nearer and nearer to our goal, I asked Pat what was so special about a Bulgarian Breakfast as opposed to, say, a Romanian or a Slovak early morning meal? As usual with all things İstanbul, her answer was what I had and had not expected.

‘Well, the breakfast itself isn’t actually from Bulgaria,’ she said. ‘It’s basically a plate of clotted cream with honey piled on top that you dip bread into. The man who sells it is Bulgarian, or rather he’s a Turk from Bulgaria. It’s one of their traditional dishes. You know!’

Luckily, I do and did. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Bulgaria in the 14th century a lot of Turks went to live in that country, mainly to provide support to the troops who occupied it. Their descendants are known as Bulgarian Turks to this day and many of them only left to return to Turkey as recently as 1989.

‘I don’t know when the owner of the breakfast place first came to İstanbul,’ Pat continued, ‘but he’s old now and the rumour is that he wants to retire. It’s said that his son isn’t interested in carrying on the business and so this place could close soon.’

I’d never heard of cream and honey for breakfast before and so I was keen to try it. Pat led us through some very lively and colourful streets until we came to a tiny little cubbyhole of a place painted a pale shade of blue. The owner, whose hands shook with age or possibly some palsy or illness came and ushered us inside. We told him we’d rather sit outside in the sunshine but he insisted that we first come in and look at his photographs which hung at the back of the little place on the wall. They were of several stout and rather handsome cows. These animals, he explained, where the source of the milk from which the kaymak, clotted cream, was made. They lived, he said, a most idyllic life in one of the more distant Bosphorus villages. He then showed us the kaymak, and the honey, and we ordered and then went to sit outside.

Clotted cream, honey and bread did not prove to be the most spectacular breakfast I have ever had. But it was intriguing. Who had thought of that first and why? It’s something that Bulgarian Turks eat and have probably always eaten and, don’t get me wrong, it works. But it isn’t an obvious combination of ingredients and we all thought that it had probably evolved in line with what just happened to be available to the people who originated it. That said, it was delicious. Telephone number calorie count and off the scale fat content aside, I could have shoved more than one portion into my mouth and indeed I did consider doing that. The only thing that stopped me was a memory of a clotted cream over-indulgent ‘incident’ I had once had as a child and which not even I would ever want to repeat.

I’m glad that I had the Bulgarian Breakfast and that, because I didn’t go mad with quantities, I will always have a good memory of it. Sadly this one outlet for kaymak, honey and bread will soon be gone and the lovely, stout cows out in the village will be redundant.

Really. What’s the point? Let’s face it, apart from a few superstar authors who are drawn here whenever I use their names in vain and the Google name check rats me out (and Brent and Kevin) nobody reads this blob. Most of those hundred-and-eighty thousand people on the stat counter, if they really exist, were actually looking for Realty Check. Nobody can afford houses but they can dream. And then there’s the Moore bloke’s Auntie Maude who he hires eight hours a day to click ‘enter’ over and over again to bring the numbers up. And, of course, other crime writers who surf all the other sites to see who has the most readers. So once you’ve excluded all of them (and Brent and Kevin) you’re left with about 150 fifty people who are fascinated with the site. And 148 of those are here for the Moore and the Rees and the Nadel. For a bit of class. Insights on writing. Stories about old dead scribes I’ve never heard of. My blob’s the DVD trailer you fast forward through to get to the feature.

You know? I bet you I could write, ‘All work and no play makes Colin a dull boy’ 200 times and nobody would notice. I could blaspheme. I could say ‘Jesus bloody Christ’ in a non-ecclesiastical setting and I wouldn’t get one abusive letter from the middle American bible belt. I could certainly do a Rushdie without fear of getting my house blown up. You know why? Cause nobody reads my blobs. I could write anything I like. Knickers.

I used to do a weekly comic strip for a national newspaper. It was cool to see my pictures in the paper every week but it would have been a lot cooler to get paid for them once in a while. So, after a long dry period, I submitted a cartoon entitled, ‘Do editors read the cartoons they put in their newspapers?’ The editor put it in without reading it. It was very rude. And, just my luck, that particular copy was given to a European royal who was visiting the paper that day. I didn’t have to worry about not getting paid ever again. They coughed up my dues and fired me.

And here I am trying to write a book. It’s intense. It involves putting words in a certain order so that readers understand them and are prepared to fork out thirty bucks to buy them. What do I need to do to unwind from this stressful profession?
a. Go for a walk on the beach.
b. Read comics and play Sudoku
c. Write a blob which will almost immediately dissipate into the blobosphere like a drip of blood in the English Channel
(answer……)

My mum’s second husband, Bob, was a truck driver. He spent his entire life driving petrol tankers around England’s frustrating motorways. Then he married mum. You’ll never guess what my mum’s favourite holiday was: coach tours. On his brief, two-weeks of annual vacation, she’d have Bob in a bus traveling around the motorways of England. To his credit he suffered in silence and it wasn’t like they made him drive the coach. But I know how he felt. I write for a living. Why would I want to write for a non-living in my free time?

So, I quit. I’m out of here. I don’t want to play any more. You can mail me my gold watch. Nothing can make me reconsider. But here’s the deal. I’m prepared to test my theory that there are no more than 150 actual people stopping for service at this site (not including Brent and Kevin). If there is a huge public outcry begging me to reconsider, and I mean an international campaign on the level of Band Aid with common people uniting in a show of solidarity, I’m on me bike. It’s a concept I’ve just invented called Reality Blogging. (Big Blobber). You get the chance to vote me off the island and you don’t even have to do anything. If I haven’t got 148 people on their knees by Wednesday, (I’ve excluded Brent and Kevin) you’ll never see me again. You know what? I’m going to enjoy those weekends off.

We were on the Hessian plain somewhere outside Frankfurt when I felt as though the drugs had taken hold.

Why am I paraphrasing the great Hunter S. Thompson? Because I endured an experience that Professor Gonzo could only have imagined in his wildest LSD frenzies. Something that made me feel I must be hallucinating, as if the Las Vegas of HST’s fear and loathing had come to me, cleaned up and waterless but every bit as insidious. What I saw was proof that we have no limits in our power to suck every last cent out of every possible human moment.

I was urinating. Into a urinal. At a rest stop outside Germany’s business capital. When I looked down, I didn’t see the accustomed maker’s logo. No, there was a video screen. About six inches across and four inches high. Bright, bright high-definition. Built into the top of the urinal. Advertising itself as the product of Urimat.com.

They’re insidious, these Urimat people, I tell you, brother. They must’ve done years of research to assess exactly where males let their eyes drop when peeing. It’s not on your unit. No, because that necessitates looking at the disgusting mess of the urinal itself, the chewing gum and receipt papers and hairs, oh God the curly hairs. We look higher than that. But not so high that we must confront the wall in front of us, with its vicious graffiti and its smears of nose-booger.

We look right at the top of the urinal. And the bastards at Urimat thought: Why waste all that time, when men are looking at nothing? Let’s make them look at a housewife, scrubbing her kitchen and bathroom. Let’s make them watch as “The dirt goes, the aroma stays.”

Can’t you picture Baron Urimat now, in his boardroom overlooking Feldbachstrasse in Feldbach, Switzerland – for this is where they have their evil mountain lair – saying to his henchmen: “When they have their dirty little units in their hands, the path to men’s minds lies open. Let us feed this psychological emptiness. Before they put themselves back in their pants and walk out without washing their hands. Let us take control of their minds.”

I can hear the evil laughter now.

I had thought the final invasion of our most trivial moments had been the video screens in the back of New York taxi cabs. They’re noisy, but at least you can turn them off – most of them, anyway. And in New York you fully expect to be assaulted and irritated at every turn. (It has its benefits, too. When the driver turns on his meter, the cab used to broadcast Judd Hirsch of “Taxi” fame saying, “Buckle up for safety.” Or did he? I always thought the devilish Hirsch was actually slurring “Fuck a lot for safety.” The rogue.)

But no, it can get worse than the NYC taxis. Imagine, even if there was a button to turn off the urinal-top video screen, how depraved and disgusting would be the man who would actually press his finger down to activate it. I remind you, it’s on top of the urinal where you and thousands of truckers pee.

That’s the cruel logic at the heart of capitalism. Oh, yes, it’s true that the irresistibility of the urinal-top video screen is the furthest reach, as yet, of the dread control of Adam Smith’s hidden hand. It can’t be avoided. It can’t be switched off. Yet you must pee. It’s as though Wharton MBAs were being told to read “1984,” with admiration for Big Brother.

Next time I go on a book tour to Germany, I shall be riding the railways. They’re state-run. Surely they’ll be a couple of years behind on the urinal-top technology. I can void my bladder with nothing but the clack of the rails in my ears, as generations of men did before.

But, ah, brothers, the future is a deformed bastard son of the world it could’ve been.

As anyone who works in any capacity in publishing will tell you, times are hard right now. Nobody quite knows whether we’re in a recession, coming out of a recession or kissed the recession goodbye some time ago. But whatever is going on, money is in short supply unless of course you are a banker, a footballer, Tony Blair or Saudi Arabia. Books are not selling as fast or in such quantities as they once did. However, this is not so across the board.

I’ve just got back from İstanbul where, amongst other things, I had a chance to talk to publishers, publicity people and booksellers about the Turkish market. What I learned was amazing and very encouraging. Turkish books are booming. The book shipping department at my Turkish publishing house looked like a military operation – it was buzzing. It wasn’t just one type of publication on show either. World classics were shifting as quickly as popular fiction and a comprehensive new biography of the murdered ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink is projected sales in the hundreds of thousands.

Everybody smiled. My publisher recalled a time, not too many years ago (I remember it myself) when reading was almost an eccentricity in Turkey. Wandering around with a book or reading on the train or the tram was considered really odd. People would stare and sometimes even try to distract you from your wild and crazy strangeness. Not now. Now everybody has a book and the bookshops and book-fairs are jumping.

Of course none of this has happened over-night. The old book bazaar (Sahaflar Carcisi) dates back to Byzantine times and the booksellers in it have always been caring and learned. In modern times, quality bookshops like Pandora in the Beyoğlu district of the city have been spreading the word since 1991. Other book heroes include Homer Bookshop, Robinson Crusoe and the venerable institution that is the bookseller Simurg. This latter place has served as a second home to İstanbul intellectuals for decades offering as it has always attempted to do, a vast selection of books in many languages, endless glasses of tea and a sleeping cat on every shelf. Now, recession (or whatever) notwithstanding, these places are coming into their own. For my own sales – I am human after all – I am delighted. But I am also thrilled for other authors, for publishers, booksellers and for readers.

On my last day in the city, I found myself in the central city square, Taksim. This is basically a large interchange for buses as well as a park based around a war memorial. There is a lot of open space in and around Taksim Square. On this occasion however, that open space was taken up with something that made me really smile. It was a great big, open-air book-fair – and it was heaving with people whose faces shone with a hunger for books.

Gilda O’Neill

Last Friday we were sad to learn of the death of the British author, Gilda O’Neill. A writer of many gifts, Gilda wrote crime and family saga fiction as well as non-fiction historical works about her beloved east end of London. An academic, a novelist, a broadcaster, Gilda was a true believer in people and their potential. When Barbara was a nervous first-time author, Gilda encouraged her to believe in herself. There is an old saying about good people ‘not having a bad bone in his/her body’. That was Gilda. She was a true diamond and the world will be the poorer for her passing.

I think the main reason people take the lift up to the thirtieth floor of a condominium they don’t live in, climb out of a window, select a spot on the car park and jump, is that they know too much. I don’t know who coined the phrase ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ and I don’t want to know. I’d probably be disappointed if I did. But he certainly hit the Honda on the hood with that one.

When we moved south to our little fishing village I had blissful ignorance in mind. Any fish scandals or squid intrigues would simply fly over my head. I didn’t care. Like the US military, I wouldn’t be asking and the mackerel wouldn’t be telling. And for the first six months here life was an idyll of unawareness. Everybody in the village was loveable. There were no issues. Peace and harmony were all around us. (cue The Seekers) I had reached Nirvana right here on earth.

Then I blew it. I decided to write a book, nay, an entire series set in our little town and Nirvana crumbled like Jericho. For background colour I started interviewing the locals. And it seemed that with every question I asked, I chipped another tooth in the great Thai smile.

That loveable old couple at the corner store? She’s not his wife, you know? She’d hired him once to bump off her real husband and they fled south together. That jolly village policeman? Ha! Drinks on duty and takes bribes to turn a blind eye to the illegal gambling. It appears all the wives of the fishermen, starved of nighttime entertainment, have become addicted to cards. And talk about addicts, those friendly waving teenagers who like to practice their English? Stoned every one of them. The merry coconut farmer? Shoots dogs. The cute high school student? Pregnant at fourteen. The friendly local councilman? Had the incumbent beaten up and bought his way in.

Jesus. It was like finding out everyone in Sesame Street had been wiped out in a street gang massacre. ‘Tellytubbies Filmed in Crack Induced Sex Orgy’. Postman Pat downloading child porn. But then we let the Burma issue out of Pandora’s box. Five-thousand Burmese living around here working at basic wage, abused, hassled, reviled. None of their kids educated, so we really had no choice but to start a school for them. Kidnapping and slavery on the high seas, so we had no choice but to contact the press and the Bangkok cops to come and rescue them. And now, from humble beginnings, we’ve become the Mr. and Mrs. Bob Woodward of Pak Nam. We know everything about everyone; far more than we ever wanted to know. We’re the UN. The crime busters. The problem solvers. Much against our better judgment we’ve become influential figures…and we all know what happens to influential figures in Thailand. And all because I crossed over the line and opened my big mouth and my big ears. The more you know, the worse life becomes. I dread reading the newspapers because I know that day by day they’ll munch off the edges of my perfect world and I’ll be dissatisfied with everything. Information is turning me into a grumpy old bastard. I think the only reason we still love our dogs is that they never, I mean never answer questions.