I am a self evident, self confessed Eurovision addict even though it almost sends me mad with frustration and sometimes just plain boredom. Won by what I felt was a rather limp offering from Denmark on Saturday, this year’s contest was characterised by the continuing demise of western Europe. It was all about former Soviet republics and Scandinavia who absolutely dominated with only minor breakthroughs for a couple of pleasant songs from Malta and the Netherlands. Former Eurovision giants, Ireland, came last!

The principal funders of Eurovision are what are called the ‘Big Five’ countries; the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. All but Italy were at the bottom of the heap this year and that was probably because the Italian singer was a very handsome young man in an excellent Italian suit. You can’t really argue with a handsome Italian in my experience. But he didn’t win, in fact he got nowhere near the top of the leader board. Oddly he was overtaken very early on by a man singing on top of a perspex box which contained another man who was clearly trapped in the box and needed to be let out – urgently. But he wasn’t. The whole experience was worrying and, for a western European like me, dire.

So what are western European countries like the UK, Spain and Ireland to do about this apparent international rejection of their Eurowares? We’ve thrown both known and unknown artists at them and Ireland have even treated the world to a rubber turkey, but to no avail. Where on earth do we go next? Well if we want to win (and I cringe to speak his name) I think that maybe the UK should call in ‘X Factor’ mogul and pop Svengali, Simon Cowell. Unlike Dan Brown I don’t think that the symbol for the Antichrist is hidden in some painting in Venice but resides at the back of Cowell’s oddly shaped head. Not only creepily cruel he also brought us ‘One Direction’ which proves he is the Great Beast. At the moment the spot cream scented miasma that is ‘One Direction’ would win.

But I don’t think that we should aim to win any more. What we do is not appreciated and so why put ourselves through the stress of going for gold only to get shit? Therefore I think that the Big Five, plus Ireland, should mount a race to the bottom. We’re all very pragmatic countries, most of whom (with the exception of Ireland) have had empires in the past which means we have been derided for decades. So why not go for it and if we cause some offence both at home and abroad along the way, then all the better.

Ireland had the right idea some years ago, as I said before, when they entered ‘Dustin the Turkey’. A childrens favourite, rubber turkey Dustin sat in a shopping trolley and sang ‘Irlande Douze Points’ a blatant and chaotic plea to the rest of Europe to give Ireland twelve points in exchange for a bit of Irish stew. It was genius on so many levels. It was tacky, obvious, loud and some Eurovision enthusiasts even said that it was offensive because it was so bad. Excellent. Next year I think they should go even further and have the fine actor Frank Kelly reprise his role as Father Jack Hackett from that brilliant comedy classic ‘Father Ted’. For the one person who doesn’t know, Father Jack is  what is known in Ireland as a ‘Whiskey Priest’ in other words a drunken cleric. In the case of Father Jack, not only is he drunk, he is also wildly offensive as he leers at young women, imbibes toilet cleaner and shouts out ‘Feck!’ ‘Arse!’ and ‘Drink!’ to anyone in his vicinity. I really think that Ireland should enter Father Jack maybe with a ditty outlining the pleasures of a damn good stomach pump called ‘Fecking hell me duodenal ulcer’s bastard bleeding again!’

Here in the UK the pattern should also be one aimed at the bottom of the table and peppered with open offence. And seeing as there is such a massive hoo hah across Europe about  gay and transgender marriage at the moment, I’d like to suggest a row of besequinned transsexual vicars high kicking to a song in praise of Queen Anne Boleyn’s vestigial fingers. She was a bit of a goer, even if Henry VIII did cut her head off, and I think she could make it to, albeit belated, gay icon status if the UK really puts its back into it. Part time Dobby the House Elf and full time President of Russia, Vladimir Putin won’t like it one little bit – he’d like to make all forms of sexual difference illegal in his country – and will probably have to do a bit of light judo with an underling in order to calm himself down. But then I think that’s great. If we can help the oppressed of Europe through our bad Eurovision songs then our myriad humiliations will not have been in vain.

So spread the word blog readers. Send this post to all your friends and colleagues and let’s make sure that next year in Copenhagen, we make people’s pants explode with righteous indignation.

Oh Lord have mercy, I have to have an eye check up or they won’t give me any more daily contact lenses. But what is wrong with that, I hear you cry? Surely that is just a sensible precaution against eye disease. Well yes of course it is. It’s a good thing. Unless you have some sort of medical phobia. Unless you’re me.

Maybe it’s because I worked in hospitals for many years or maybe it’s because my mother is a massive hypochondriac, but whatever the cause whenever I have to have any sort of medical examination I almost lose my mind. Last night I had a dream about being trapped on a hospital ward indefinitely, waiting fruitlessly for tests to take place and then losing my bed to an enormously overweight man because I made a complaint. Sat on the floor and forbidden from using the toilet I was raged at by a nurse who was so vile that I eventually lumped her one. She bloody well deserved it and had I really been in that situation I would have done exactly the same thing.

So how does this phobia manifest, well there are many and various ways. I can get a blinding headache, my heart pounds, I sweat, I have a dry mouth, I cough, I can’t breathe properly and I think that I’m going to have a cardiac arrest. Once I actually passed out, but having a complexion the colour of grass is common. Occasionally I can have all of the above together but that is usually when a test like that for blood gases is required which I can’t even describe without throwing up. So I won’t.

When I’m actually in hospital, my first question is always, ‘When am I getting out?’ But then once I’ve been allocated a bed and the first serving of the food whose taste passeth all human understanding is served, the professional in me usually kicks in. Last time I was incarcerated, and in spite of being on a drip, I made sure that other patients were fed, called doctors to them and went ape crazy in order to make sure that a dementing old lady was given morphine for the fracture in her leg which was almost killing her. Don’t get me wrong our National Health Service is fantastic and it has saved my life on several occasions, but there are not enough staff to do the job effectively and this means, from a patients’ point of view, that it is every man for himself. But of course that isn’t really relevant to my visit to the opticians today.

So why I am so worried about trotting along to a branch of Specsavers in my local town to have a routine eye check up? Well what if they find something wrong with my eyes. What then? What if I’ve got some ghastly parasite based eye lurgy which involves things like cockroaches growing in my head? What if I have glaucoma? Macular degeneration or even a brain tumour? I know you’re saying ‘well what if you don’t?’ and I can understand that. But what if I do? And what if that means that I have to go to hospital where I have to fight not just my own condition but also the forces of lack of staff, mixed wards featuring poor demented people who expose themselves to you at 4am and beds that frequently collapse due to advanced age (yes that happens).

I know this is all frightfully neurotic of me and that I should pull myself together. I know I risk becoming a character in a Mel Brooks film if I’m not careful, although if he paid me enough to cash to be a British version of the hypochondriac, Blum, in The Producers, I’d do it. How would that look? Well I imagine that instead of hanging on to a security blanket whenever things got tough the British Blum would try to go to the toilet as discreetly as possible and only scream when the door was firmly shut behind him. There would also be at least a vague attempt at maintaining a stiff upper lip even though this would break down in a flood of hysterical weeping and possibly even a swoon at the end.

So anyway think of me as I have my perfectly routine eye examination and thank goodness that you’re not like me. If you are like me then let me know and maybe we can go mad together some day – or share Rescue Remedy, booze or in fact any sort of crutch we can get hold of.

With our government here in the UK edging our free public health service closer and closer to the private sector every day and with the rich getting obscenely richer by the second, I feel I have to capture a moment here to just review what I think should be normal, but isn’t. Clever people should be doing clever stuff and pushing our culture forwards.

Time was, not so very long ago, that if you got a PhD in your subject at university you were pretty much set for a career in academia. Not many people can study for a PhD, I know I couldn’t have done so. Thus, in the past, their ultra bright brains were justifiably highly prized as was their dedication which has to be not inconsiderable. So why, I wonder, do so many of them seem to be working for peanuts in the kind of jobs that could be done by trained monkeys?

This is no easy question to answer as the reasons are multiple and complex but I think I’ve managed to boil it down to some few and very basic causes. Firstly a lot of older academics are not retiring. In these uncertain times they can’t be blamed for that and in no way is this crisis down to them. But they are, of course, involved. Secondly, again in these uncertain times, universities are nervous about taking on new staff members they may not be able to fully employ. Now that tuition fees are up to £9,000 per year in England, they’re never sure whether they’re going to get the student numbers they hope for. In addition the government is placing further residency restrictions on non-EU overseas students and so that is and will have an impact too. And then, more speculatively, there is the issue of spite.

Now this is my theory and only mine but I have experienced a precedent for this and so I speak with some authority on the subject. Twice in my career, I have been told that I cannot put my very pedestrian degree on my business card. Twice I have been told this during times of great hardship for the many and great largess for the few in this country, by people who had a lot more money than I will ever have. And in both cases I think that those people enjoyed doing it.

Now there is no law that states that one cannot be clever and rich. There are lots of rich, clever people which is why we have celebrity lawyers and shiny-toothed sexy TV doctors. But some very successful people, many of whom were acolytes of the now late Margaret Thatcher, do not have formal qualifications and they resent those of us who do. They will of course trumpet the ‘school of life’ that they came from as the best and only way to get on in the world, they will say that you only need drive to be an entrepreneur. But they’d quite like a BA too and they know, deep down, that they could get one easily if they tried. They want it all.

The trouble is that, in most cases, they don’t try and they resent those ‘clever dicks’ who do and who succeed. In fact if you have ‘drive’ and especially if you went to the right school, have the right daddy and mix with the movers and shakers then you don’t need any qualifications. But then there’s schools of life and there are schools of life. However great wealth is made, one should always be grateful for it and not spend one’s time being resentful for all the things one still doesn’t have. Like a degree.

I believe that with a few notable ‘celebrity’ exceptions, clever people are being down-graded in this country. I know that some people laugh at those who have taken higher qualifications and dub them fools for having done so instead of going out and making money. And I think that some people take pleasure in seeing clever folk scrub out toilets and sell shitty financial services. What they don’t realise is that the ‘joke’ is actually on them. Because I know a lot of really clever folk and do you know what? They’re grateful just to have a job these days and they do what they have to in order to survive because they are clever. Every day they can look at their arrogant sneering bosses and think, ‘You may have money but can you read Proust? You can’t even read The Sun, can you.’ And although their bosses can go home to their TV screens the size of Birmingham and their wives with tits that can be seen from space, the clever folk have their books and their scientific papers and the amazing stuff that they create in their heads that one day someone with half a brain will want again.

In the meantime, it’s tough out there and so be extra nice to the soft spoken bloke who sells you a sandwich in the bakers next time you go in there. He’s probably a Classics Professor and I may well know him and so be good. Remember that while he’s doing what he has to in order to survive, he is thinking thoughts that you can’t even dream about. We forget these lives our government seems so keen to waste at our peril.

Last week I attended the London Book Fair at Earls Court. This is an annual event more usually attended by publishers, agents and ‘media types’ than it is by authors, but I was hosting a panel discussion and so I went along mainly for that. I was also there because 2013 had been designated ‘Turkey Focus Year’ at the London Book Fair and so my fellow panelists were Turkish authors of crime fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction. These were, respectively Ahmet Umit, Baris Mustecaplioglu and Hakan Gunday and they were as keen as I was to discuss the current state of genre fiction in Turkey.

When I first became aware of book shops in Turkey back in the 1970s, they were places that tended to trumpet the work of foreign authors over the home grown talent. Unless the literature in question was ‘literary’ and old, Turkish writing was not given anything like the exposure it should have had.

However by the 1980s things had started to change. For a start, Orhan Pamuk was beginning to make a name for himself and so writing was starting to be seen as something one could do as a career without necessarily being a journalist. One of the first genre’s to ‘come through’ as a local literary force was crime. One of Turkey’s foremost crime writers, Ahmet Umit said that although he was inspired by mainly UK classic crime writers like Agatha Christie he found his own voice mainly through the history and presence of the city of Istanbul. For him, as for so many crime writers the world over, his location has become a very powerful and pervasive character in his books and this, as well as his excellent stories, was what attracted readers to his books.

For Baris and Hakan the fantasy/SF and speculative fiction writers however the road has not been so easy. The Turkish perception of SF and fantasy up until very recently has been that the ‘best’ comes from the west and so leave it to western authors. Up against, as they saw it, people like Tolkien, Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov and Terry Pratchett, Turkish publishers would, until very recently, routinely reject the work of local authors. However things are changing and both Baris and Hakan have had some considerable success of late. Having their work published outside Turkey made local publishers think and eventually start to take what they had produced seriously. It’s a good sign and it was really heartening to see so many people, Turkish and international, finally taking notice of Turkish genre fiction.

Whether a lot of business took place at the Fair is difficult to know. Meetings are organised and business discussed but the results of such contacts are not usually known for some time. One thing that I did see that was very prominent this year was the proliferation of self publishing services, authors and advisers. A lot of doom and gloom has been talked about the book trade ever since the advent of e books and the coming of the recession, but it is clear that people in droves still want to write and read good fiction. And although I am sure that mainstream publishing will continue on as it has for decades, this new self publishing phenomenon is obviously something that is growing and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. That said, most of the self published authors I spoke to did ultimately want to be published by mainstream companies at some time in the future.

With one notable exception, I found the book fair a very inspiring and hopeful event. The only down side to the whole thing was the possible fate of the venue itself. Earls Court Exhibition Centre is slated for demolition as is the council housing estate next door to it. Apparently now we have Excel in the east end of London we no longer need an exhibition space to the west of the capital. In addition the people who live in the council flats clearly need to be moved on (??!!). The plan is to build some ‘affordable housing’ on the site as well as a shit load of houses Russian oligarchs would be hard pressed to buy. To say that it bloody stinks in an understatement. It’s just another example of the greed that now rules this country and the minds of the people who are apparently, leading us out of this latest recession. Last week, concurrent with the Book Fair, this group of hopeless people wept at the funeral of the woman who really popularised this kind of greed in Britain which was why I completely ignored the whole thing. The worst thing you can do to monomaniacs is forget and ignore them. I’ll spend my time worrying about the people who will be chucked out of their council flats and about the vandalism that will be done to the beautiful art deco building that is Earls Court Exhibition Centre. Dead prime ministers are just that. Irrelevant.

The Ottoman Turkish Empire was the largest and most powerful Islamic civilisation in the world. It was also one of, if the longest running empire of any religion. Beginning in 1299 it did not finally leave the world stage until 1923. Ottoman Turks ruled nations as diverse as Bosnia and Iraq and their power encompassed Egypt, what is now Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and much of Eastern Europe. They were a force to be reckoned with and when in 1529 Sultan Suleyman I, whom westerners called ‘Magnificent’ (Turks call ‘The Lawgiver’), laid siege to Vienna the whole of Europe trembled. This was the apogee of Ottoman power and if Vienna had not held out against Suleyman who knows what the map of Europe would look like today.

Post 1529 the Ottomans still struck fear into the hearts of many Europeans and they retained much of their vast empire up to the beginning of the 20^th century. But after Suleyman they were on the path to decline. Of course enlightened sultans arose from time to time across the centuries, particularly Sultan Mahmud II (1789 – 1839) who broke the power of the hated Corps of Janissaries and his son Abdul Mejid I ((1823 – 186) who actually paved the way for power sharing with a nascent Turkish parliament. However as so often happens when an Empire is on its knees, a ruler arises who will not accept reality. That ruler was Abdul Mejid I second son, Abdul Hamid II (1842 – 1918).

Quickly undoing what his father and, briefly his older brother Murad V had done in terms of power sharing, Abdul Hamid chose to rule as an absolute monarch and as such he lived in fear of assassination for the entire duration of his life. In order to keep his people under his thumb he employed the largest network of spies the world has ever known with the exception only of the Stasi in what was East Germany. A clever but paranoid man he could have done so much good for his country but as so often happens in cases where a person seeks to rule others rather than ruling with them (I have to allude just briefly to the recent death of ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher here, but that is all I will say!) he only succeeded in ranging millions against him. He was finally deposed in 1909 by his own military officers and was then sent into internal exile to Salonika. He died in the Beylerbey palace in Istanbul in 1918 at the end of the disaster that was the Great War.

Post the 1918 defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the allied powers of Britain, France, America and Italy, it staggered on under puppet monarchs until 1922 when the last Sultan of Turkey left the country to go into exile in Malta. In the end, Turkey as we know it today was saved from foreign occupation by the one great Ottoman hero of the First World War, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881 – 1938). He changed what had been a theocratic empire into a secular republic, he changed the alphabet from Arabic script into Roman script, he emancipated women and for fifty years and more  significant historical acts in Turkey started only really with him.

But in recent years there has been a lot more interest in the old Ottoman Empire. I can remember a time when antique shops in Istanbul could hardly give late Ottoman artefacts away. But now they are quite chic as is an interest in the whole subject of the empire. There is even a very popular TV series called ‘Muhtesem Yuzyil’ (Magnificent Century) which tells the story of the young Suleyman the Lawgiver. People love it. People also love living, when they can afford it, in Ottoman houses too and some people even like to dub themselves ‘New Ottomans’.

Why has this happened? I don’t see any real nostalgia these days for a resurgence of the British Empire here in the UK. But then we here in Britain still have our monarchy and so we retain a foothold in the past that the Turks haven’t had. Another thing to take into account when considering this new Ottomania is the fact that Ataturk and his new republic did not harm the ex-Imperial Osmanoglu family when he deposed them. They were sent into exile, some of them with their servants still at their sides. So the Turks, unlike the Russians who have made the Tsar they killed in 1918 into a saint, don’t have any guilt about their royal family either.

But it was still strange to a lot of people when the then head of the Osmanoglu family, Osman Ertugrul Osmanoglu Effendi, died in 2009. The 97 year old grandson of Abdul Hamid II was given a funeral at the imperial Sultanahmet Mosque in Istanbul that was attended by government ministers and was watched by thousands of people from nearby Sultanahment Square. Were the onlookers just gawping at an anachronism? At something a bit old, curious and odd? Some were and some were not. As a foreigner from a monarchy myself I found it all quite run of the mill because things like that are run of the mill in the UK. But I was in Turkey and when I remembered that it all became a little surreal.

Do I think that the Osmanoglu family will ever rule Turkey again? No. But I do think that the Turks are appreciating their history more now than they did and that is a good thing. Apart from anything else, if we don’t learn the lessons from our history, whatever they are, we doom ourselves to repeat them and that is rarely, if ever, a pretty sight.

I seem to be furious most of the time these days. Not just ordinarily pissed off but absolutely raving like a thing possessed. I know I’m under a lot of pressure with a deadline looming up at me as well as some potentially good things which may or may not happen re my books going on in the background. But I am CRAZY. This afternoon I threw a piece of post I didn’t want at the window and then proceeded to have a screaming fit about it. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it might just as well have been.

So what’s turning me into this other person who may well have to be tied down in the near future? I have a theory. It’s everyday life – and I include politics in this definition – the grinding inevitability of the unfair, the unjust and the stupid.

So what are the ten things that really get my goat and make me want to scream until my head falls off. Here are, in no particular order, my own personal Top Ten.

1) The way our politicians bang on endlessly about how we must get on top of a debt we can never get on top of and shouldn’t even try to do so. So we owe? So kill us. So our credit rating will go down? Well woop di bloody doop! If we don’t start growing our economy soon then that will be immaterial anyway. But then all of this austerity they’re pushing at us all the time isn’t about that anyway. This is about the rich getting richer and grabbing everything from the rest of us while we’re all too worried to care. Dear Rich, if you try to take anything that is mine, I will put a brick through you. But then I would, wouldn’t I?

2) The way our politicians like to portray all working class people as feckless scum. They seek out the worst possible examples of people who either won’t work or who deliberately try to cheat the system in some way and tar us all with the same brush. WE’RE NOT ALL THEM!!! I’d actually call myself one of David Cameron’s ‘hardworking families’ if I could be arsed and if I had a pony in the back yard, but I don’t.

3) People who abuse others because of their private lifestyles. You know what, you arse holes, if you don’t like your neighbour because she’s transgendered, move. I once had to help a transgendered woman move because she was being threatened by her neighbours and you still hear stories like this now. It makes me sick.

4) Shit parking. I know it’s only a small thing but when someone parks across two spaces it makes me see purple. It’s selfish and it’s stupid and it means that everyone else has to range about looking for spaces on the fucking moon.

5) The perfect life brigade. You know them, those people who have charmed lives and who make you feel as if you’ve just screwed up all the way along. They’ll put it to you that they’re just leading by example and hope that you will benefit from their wisdom. They love you and want to help you. But what they’re actually doing is making you feel like a dick and bringing you one step closer to throwing yourself out of the bathroom window. Braggarts and bores all of them. Get rid.

6) Ingredients on tins and packets that can only be seen by ants. Why are these things printed so small? Even with my glasses on all I can see is just a series of dots. What are these food manufacturers trying to do to us, make us go cross eyed?

7) Talent shows. ‘The Voice’, ‘X Factor’ ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. Sadly versions of these horrors exist all over the world now. Why do they all sound the same? I don’t know but I suspect that sound they make is one that uber impresario Simon Cowell likes. Well I don’t like it, get off my screen.

8 ) Computer malfunctions. I don’t have the words. I just don’t have the words.

9) Losing my mobile phone. I know that this is my problem and that only I can sort it out but when I lose my mobile I do go garrity. I do it so often, with such boring regularity that I can hardly stand it. But why won’t the wretched thing stay where it is for more than five minutes? How can they migrate in the way that they obviously so enjoy doing?

10) People who are famous for naff all. If you’re distantly allied to the Royal family, can cook the odd tapas and have a bum then you will be showered with praise and cash. If you show your bum on a TV reality show and then mispronounce all your words someone will give you £200,000 to do it again on ice. Why? It’s bollocks and it cheapens the culture and it makes people cringe for these poor (if not in cash terms) saps who are being exploited in this way.

I nipped over to Istanbul at the end of last week. It was just for a meeting and so I was only in town for a day. But my hosts very kindly put me up at the Hilton Hotel which is a bit of an Istanbul icon.

I arrived in the middle of the night in the pouring rain (which continued, relentlessly, for the entire trip) so my first impression of the Hilton was of a sort of 1960s style modernist pile that involved a lot of wet marble. I unpacked as quickly as I could and then went to sleep in my bedroom sized bed which is probably designated as a ‘Kingsize’ or ‘Roman Emperor-style orgy ready’ bed.

In the morning I went down to breakfast which took place in a glass conservatory that overlooked a very grey Bosphorus. Once fed and watered I then idled my time away before my meeting by having a look around. Because it is such an Istanbul icon the Hilton has many, many information plates up on its walls which taught me that its glory days had indeed been very glorious.

The Hilton is situated in a district called Harbiye, which is just north of the central square, Taksim. It is on the way, north through the city, to a district called Nisantasi which is a very chic shopping and restaurant district that is patronised by the type of Istanbullu for whom money is no object. It used to be a district full of old wooden, Ottoman mansions which Orhan Pamuk and myself remember burning down back in the 1970s. There’s nothing like name dropping a famous author you don’t know. But anyway…

The Hilton Hotel was built in 1955 and was designed to be Turkey’s first five star hotel, which it was. Built for the rich and famous it was going to help Istanbul become a desirable destination for Hollywood movie stars, European royalty and the great and the glamorous from all across the world.  One day even people like ‘us’ might be able to go there! That was how it was sold.

The modernist architectural style was almost unknown in the city in those days, although that economy of embellishment as well as the cleanness of the lines had appealed to the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And in common with a lot of 1950s architecture, the design of the Hilton was unashamedly modern, optimistic and forward thinking. This place had proper functioning en suite bathrooms, car parking, central heating and even views of the ‘old world’! What fun it must have been for those first guests to discover such lightness, such comfort and such an apparently bright future.

Everyone stayed at the Hilton. Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Grace of Monaco, Danny Kaye, Sophia Loren, Shirley McLean, Turkish President Celal Bayar – the list goes on and on. In 1964 some scenes in the movie ‘Topkapi’ were filmed there with Peter Ustinov and the wonderful husky voiced Melina Mercouri. At that time Istanbul was not the bright, skyscraper adorned city that it is today but a place of dark coffee shops, of crumbling wooden buildings and rutted streets that became quagmires in winter and ankle hazards in summer. With the exception of the Hilton and a few other modernist buildings, Istanbul was an old world city that nevertheless looked forward to the new horizons offered by the 1960s and 1970s with optimism. And I loved it. I still do even if I can’t really get behind all the neon lights everywhere, the tunnels underneath the city squares and the gentrification of so many districts of the city.

Bringing a city, or a town, up to speed for the current age and for the type of people who need to use it is always a problem. There is a quarter of the city called Tarlabasi, which I like very much, which is a case in point. Very close to the centre of the city, Tarlabasi has been the haunt of Istanbul’s poor for many years. Originally a Greek and Armenian district, Tarlabasi’s many ornate 19th century apartments have served as havens for new migrants from the countryside or abroad, for sex workers, gypsies and much of the city’s transgendered community for decades. There’s a Suriani church in Tarlabasi as well as a wonderful market and I have always found it to exude a very accepting and inclusive atmosphere. But it does have a drug problem and many of the buildings have been on the verge of collapse for years. So redeveloping and making some of the existing buildings earthquake proof does make sense, as does attempting to clean up the drug dealing. What I take issue with is the relocation of the residents to places outside the city where they don’t work and where they know no-one. It’s all very fine to gentrify an area and bring in new, shiny people with money but when you move the original residents out you cannot say that they and their problems have disappeared. You can’t also point at your city and say ‘hey, look all sorts live here!’ because they don’t. My home city of London is the same, the poor are moving out and the city is less than it was and could be because of that.

In the brave new world of the 1950s and 60s exemplified by places like the Istanbul Hilton, wealth was supposed to trickle down to the masses. One day we’d all be able to stay at the Hilton and we’d all have somewhere nice to live and possibly even a flying car. As it is the rich get richer and the rest of us get pushed around and used. I just heard that once again British banks do not have enough reserves to cover any potential losses that might occur. At present there is no threat to British savers along the lines of the poor Cypriots. There’d better not be. My brave new world of modernism and soft Socialism may be a thing of the past, but if these bastards try to take anything from me I will get very, very Mediaeval on their asses and no mistake. But then if our masters want to act like barons of old…

There’s a wonderful BBC Radio programme in the UK called ‘Desert Island Discs’. It’s been going since the beginning of time as far as I know and is loved by all those who enjoy radio – like me. The format is simple. A prominent or worthy person is invited to choose eight records, one book and one luxury item they would like to have with them should they ever be shipwrecked on a desert island. They are given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and The Bible gratis, but the rest they have to work out for themselves. The records are then played and the person’s life discussed.

Now I know I have gone on about the snow this winter but it has been relentless and it is back AGAIN. People in many parts of the country are without power and even here it’s difficult getting around. In fact it’s a bit like being on a desert island but without the lagoons, pineapples or anything that may cheer the soul in any way whatsoever. Consequently I feel stranded even if I am not.

Last night while musing on this miserable state of affairs I decided that in order to cheer myself up I’d create my own ‘Desert Island Books’ list to sustain myself through protracted snow falls. Gratis, I would get a CD of Gregorian Chants and the Complete Works of the Rolling Stones. My books, in no particular order are:

1) ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by Lawrence Durrell. I first read Durrell’s sprawling, flawed work of genius when I was in my teens and it has been part of my life ever since. His setting, a long gone Egypt, is bewitching and his troubled characters, some of whom have the most outre interests and habits remain in the mind forever.

2) ‘Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem’ by Peter Ackroyd. Set around London’s 19th century music hall community, this book reflects an East End I never knew but which I just caught whispers of as a very young child. So as well as being a tale of ‘horrid murder’ and prejudice it is also very evocative of my own past and the pasts of my forebears. Also has a very terrifying description of a hanging – something I am totally opposed to.

3) ‘The Light of Day’ by Eric Ambler. Jewel thieves in 1950s Istanbul, what’s not to like? One of my favourite films ‘Topkapi’ directed by Jules Dassin was based upon this book.

4) ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte. I was grabbed by this tale of moorland passion, cruelty and necrophilia when I was at school and have loved it ever since. I’ve lived not far from Haworth and so I now know the locations too which just add to the obsession.

5) ‘Affinity’ by Sarah Waters. Clever and creepy London set thriller of the mind. Victorian repressed sexuality and confused identity. About fakes, charlatans and even love!

6) ‘Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens. I love Dickens and although this novel is my favourite I would have his complete works on my Snow Bound Island if I could. Miss Havisham is one of Dickens’ most stunning creations and for a while when  I was a child I wanted nothing more than to be jilted at the altar so that I could become a recluse.

7) ‘Them’ by Jon Ronson. Ronson’s fantastic, light and affectionate treatment of conspiracy theorists is fun and also makes me feel sane.

8 ) ‘The Underground Man’ by Mick Jackson. This fictionalised diary of an English aristocrat who, while losing is health, is retreating ever more deeply into the tunnels underneath his house is touching and beautifully written. It was introduced to me by my son too, which also makes it very special.

‘Castaways’ are always asked which ‘disc’ (book) they would take if they could only take one and I suppose for me it would have to be ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ because it is very big and because I always find something new in it every time I read it.

As for my CD, well I’d probably take Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. This is because to me, this is the sound of the city and I am a city person who, if doomed to endless snow bound silence, would need Gershwin to help me get through.

Finally my luxury. Now there’s a thing. What would and could that be? I considered all sorts of items: chocolate, a cat, moisturiser, fags, fleece lined underwear. But then I decided that what would be of most use to me would be an electric blanket and some electricity to plug it in to. Of course I may never leave the electric blanket to go and hunt for moose or track down the odd winter berry but I think I’d probably lose the will to eat in all that cold eventually anyway.

So there are my Snow Bound Books etc. And who knows maybe one day very soon I will need them. Now I have to go and dig the car out.

Of late I have taken to writing my weekly blog rather at the last minute. This is because not only am I in the process of finishing a book at the moment but I’m also all over the place travelling hither, thither and yon. However today I had to seize the moment and wrestle it to the ground in an attempt to put you in the picture about the problems that surround serial killers.

I’ve never actually worked with serial killers before, in fact or in fiction. When I worked in a unit for Mentally Disordered Offenders, most of our patients were either arsonists or one person killers. We did have a woman who had killed twice, two members of her family, but she had been in another reality when she did that. This wasn’t the cold, planned world of the psychopathic killer of Moors Murders fame or of fiction.

Why I decided to tackle the serial killer thing in my latest Ikmen book, I don’t now remember. Either I had a moment of over-ambitious madness or absinthe was involved. It doesn’t matter. What’s important now is that I (or rather Cetin Ikmen) catches this very clever and deeply unpleasant person, who I nevertheless identify with – a bit.

So what’s the big problem about multiple deaths in good old Istanbul I hear you cry? Well in a nutshell it’s keeping all that evidence in your (Ikmen’s) head. With one murder you have a certain number of leads, some of which will be dead ends, plus a certain number of witnesses, suspects and also rans. When you’ve got five horrific deaths there’s stuff happening everywhere with all sorts of crazy buggers with axes to grind and just generally odd takes on life running around. And don’t get me started on the pathology because the poor old ‘path’ just doesn’t have time for so much as a chicken shish kebab.

Don’t get me wrong, on a good day, this is the most massive fun a girl can have on her own without a rich relative’s credit card. But it is a logistical nightmare and whereas my desk would usually only be littered with many scrappy bits of paper with things like ‘She recognises the wife’ written on them, many, many are in evidence now and they have been joined by my favourite note taking device of all time; the empty fag packet. Ah, lovely fag box, adored by authors from Orwell to Bainbridge, what would I do without you?

Well life with the serial killer, minus the fag packets, would be more confusing and duller but would it be any easier, from the point of view of pure plot construction? No. Serial killers and their worlds are hell, in every sense imaginable and you’d be surprised how easily your cunningly crafted conclusion to their reign(s) of terror can be undermined by a nosey neighbour who appeared once on page 41 and who you have totally forgotten about. Yesterday I forgot how victim number two had died and even what her name was and so I had to trawl through my M/S to remind myself about her. Of course having neat and organised notes on everyone and every incident in my book close to hand would have saved me from that fate but sadly, tidy is not the way I roll and if I start now, God knows where I might end up.

On the plus side however, I am getting there. In spite of (or perhaps because of) my chaotic lifestyle I will get there in the end and I will probably tackle a serial killer again some time in the future. As an intellectual exercise it’s amazing and at the end of every days’ writing I feel as if my brain has had some sort of uber workout designed by Professor Brian Cox. That said however, when May comes and my killer is safely behind bars I will have to lay down for a while with various things that are very bad for me and toxify my brain again. Serial killers are one thing, serial mental workouts are quite another.

A friend of mine has recently got into the business of hobby and craft publishing. He makes and produces DVDs that illustrate how to do things like baking cakes, jewellery making and scrap booking. It’s all very good and worthy stuff for those with time and dextrous fingers, but I have neither of those things even though exposure to this world did get me thinking. Why don’t I have a hobby? A lot of people I know get tremendous pleasure from playing an instrument, knitting or bird watching and I do frequently wonder why I seem to be immune to such pastimes.

However as with most things in my life, there’s no use forcing anything and so I just casually regarded my friends’ material and waited for the craft for me to come to me in a blinding flash of metal sequins and sticky back plastic. My breakthrough came last Thursday when I least expected it.

I was early for my meeting with my publisher and so I found myself wandering about on Baker Street, home of Sherlock Holmes and all that, with not much to do. Baker Street is one of those many parts of London that is redolent, for me, with the memory of my late father who used to work on Baker Street. When he was there, back in the late 1960s it was rather a rundown place where junkies used to regularly die on the floor of the tube station toilets and people like Sammy Davis Jnr and Frank Sinatra would climb out of taxis to go into dubious, grease and soot stained buildings to go about whatever their deed for that day might be. Dad loved it because, then, it was kind of glamorous but kind of squalid and down at heel too. So you could feel a bit glitzy but within the comfort of a familiar level of grime. Not that it’s like that these days.

Baker Street 2013 is all glitz and the only grime on show is the accent of the film director, Guy Ritchie who apparently lives in the area and who affects the most awful ‘mockney’ accent for some bizarre reason. Maybe someone out there can tell me, but why do rich, often quite posh people (like Ritchie) want to ape aspects of my life, like my accent? I’d love not to be as common as muck but sadly I’m stuck with it and I can’t understand why that is in any way desirable. Maybe Ritchie thinks he’s relating in some way to the ‘plebs’? From my point of view he isn’t doing much more than just making himself look like a prat. Now if he took my overdraft as opposed to my accent maybe I could get behind his attempt to be like me. But I don’t think that’s his intention somehow. However I digress.

Behind Baker Street are numerous small mews which I hadn’t been into for what felt like a million years. Back in the dark ages these places were full of small shops selling old books, shoe mending services and naff frothy coffee. Occasionally one or two mews cottages would be owned by rising British movie stars like Peter O’Toole or Honor Blackman but you’d hardly ever see such people except as they raced past in Jaguar sports cars. Now however these mews properties are home to very select shops and boutiques selling very high class, very expensive stuff. Who knew that a whiskey I’d never heard of could cost over a thousand pounds? Who on earth was aware of the fact that shoes could also double as works of art?

This was all new to me and so I had a good old look and it was then, quite inadvertently, that I discovered my new hobby. While looking, in a somewhat bemused fashion at a wedding dress so elaborate it defied the laws of physics, I slowly became aware of the fact that I was being watched. For some reason, not immediately apparent to me, I had managed to attract the attention of what seemed like every assistant in the wedding dress shop. Had I been ten years younger and had they not looked so worried I would have thought that maybe they were looking on me as a much welcome potential customer. But there was fear in their eyes too and so they clearly weren’t pleased. Confused I looked behind myself to see if some mad or homeless type was leering over my shoulder.  But non-one was there. Only me, as I was, being watched by the very smart, clean and stylish shop assistants. And then of course it hit me. They were frightened I was going to come in.

Now I could have gone in because the Devil had already entered my mind as soon as I realised I was, with my scuffed up boots and broken umbrella, far too ‘homeless’ for their shop, but I didn’t. But that was for my convenience. I mean what do I want with a wedding dress unless it’s to go down the off-license in? Instead I found a very beautiful clothes shop with stuff in the window that I actually liked. Just like before, as soon as I lingered, smart shop assistants came to view me, like Hugo Chavez in his lovely new glass coffin. And this time I looked back.

Have any of you seen the cartoon film ‘Shrek’? There is a character in ‘Shrek’ called Puss in Boots who is voiced by the Spanish actor Antonia Banderas. Basically he’s a romantic, swashbuckling cat who also, and significantly, does a very good line in limpid, pleading looks that make you want to cry. I am not a pretty little cat with beautiful big brown eyes but, for some reason, I can do that look. I did it when the dress shop assistants looked at me and I think I almost reduced one of them to tears. But whatever I did when I opened the door to go in, they neither threw disinfectant over me or called the police. Clearly rather nervous at what a ‘homeless’ might do to their clothes they did talk to me all the time I was in there and became rather alarmed every time I touched their clothes (I expect they wiped them all down with wet wipes afterwards). But at least they were civil and didn’t even attempt to search my bag when I left. But then I suppose they feared what might be in there (Crack? A child? The nicked contents of Harrods food hall?). I said goodbye and thanked them and then I left. But I didn’t leave alone, as it were, because I left with what has become a new, chap, time efficient and exciting hobby.

It’s called ‘standing-outside-posh-shops-looking-homeless-and-pulling-on-heart-strings’ and, if you ask me, it’s better than either knitting or scrap booking. Baking cakes may well give it a run for its money but I’m crap at that and good at this and so, for me, it’s no contest. Just not sure whether the time is yet right to make a DVD about it…