We are parked at Gatwick on the runway waiting for take off. How can they get so many people on a plane? The leg room is minimal, just must be within the legal limits. They must comply with those legal requirements, mustn't they?
"What is that pummeling?"
"I don't know, maybe they think they are kangaroos, boxing."
"Keep you voice down" says the mother of my children.
So we are going to have 4 hours of this because I have booked a package holday to Turkey.
More people boarding and they are so fat! The plane will never be able to lift off.
If you believe Satre's dictum that 'Hell is Other People' then a package tour will confirm it.
My children who are seated in front are just loving it all. The 'fatties' keep boarding. In 13 years, what a contribution Blair and Brown made to the nation's health. I hope this plane has a lot of thrust power.
I take a deep breath, Turkey, the nearest I have ever been to the East is a jaunt in Athens, where I sensed a cultural difference watching people argue and gesticulate in coffee bars and I deemed I was witnessing Socratic dialogues at there most earnest.
Bloody hell, I recall it now. I nearly died in Athens. It was in my neo-hippy stage, me sailing round the Greek island, till I end up in a flea pit hotel in down town Athens. It is baking that night and I leave my window open on the fifth floor.
Then I stir, what is that? What!
There is a man at the end of my bed, standing there. What!
My God! I think of keeping my eyes closed and pratyng he will go. He is heading towards
the window. Go, go go,. Please go.
Then suddenly a wave of anger overcomes me. i am consumed by fury. Hold on, I am fucking broke. Has he taken my last Euros. No, fuck this. I leap out of the bed. And he is just outside the window about to descend the fire escape.
"You wait there, get back in to this fucking room," I scream at him..
He is bearded and sweating profusely.
"Have you taken my money, have your taken my fucking money? Have you, have you.
You fucking stand there and wait."
I rush across and check my wallet, its all there, my few pitiful Euros.
"Drugs,=" he says, "...drugs...look for drugs." The sweat is pouring out of him.
For a moment I am insulted that he has climbed up all the fire escape, five flights and has probably had a dekko through all the windown and then he looks through my window and thinks, Ah, he look like druggy.
"Go on, fuck off, go on. Get out."
I watch him climb out of the window. He stands on fire escape and looks pitifully at me.
"Go on, fuck off."
I watch him descend, and then I close the window. I get back into bed. I do not alert the Hotel staff or call the Police. There are not many things I like about myself but I do like that aspect.
Back in London they exclaim, 'Jesus, you were lucky there. He could have had a knife.'
So that was my experience of the 'Orient' and now I am going en famille . How to prepare?.
I read Edwards Said on Orientalism, that's what I do. The gist of it, in a filleted version, is this.
In a polemic against ‘Orientallsm’ Edward Said identified persistent tropes in which the West have visualised Eastern and Arab cultures. The Orient functions as a theatre, he argues, a stage on which the performance is repeated, to be seen from a privileged standpoint of Western eyes. For Said, the Orient is thentextualised, its existential predicaments are coherently woven as a body of signs susceptible of virtuoso reading.
The Orient has been occulted by these authors, and supposedly brought lovingly to light, the Orient issalvaged in the work of the saintly scholar.
It is in such deployments, that they (authors) confer on the ‘other’ (the Oriental) discreet identity, while also providing the knowing observer (Westerners0 with a stand point which to be seen
and yet no be seen, a panoptic view of the Oriental which we can read in our leisure without interruption
The author’s voice is seen as a tone or an embellishment of the facts. Hope I haven't done that with the Greek tale. Beucase that really did happen.
So how will I talk about Turkey.
There is a scream in front of us, as a fat child bellows out as the parent barks, 'Baily, shut it"
The child screeam louder, "Baily will you shut it!" This is going to be a looonng flight.
More later
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