Turkey and tobacco seem made for each other.  The drink of choice is tea, drinking tea is always accompanied by smoking. Talking and smoking go well together, standing outside your shop and smoking are made for each other. It’s OK to smoke whilst sitting or standing, particularly  whilst preparing the take-away food in your stall. Of course nothing fills the spaces of your quiet contemplative moments like good, strong Turkish tobacco.

There are health warnings on the packets, however even for someone trained in the languages by Rosewood’s teachers they are hard to translate:

‘Don’t criticise Erdogen whilst smoking, 

Don’t eat pork and smoke, 

Don’t drink alcohol and smoke, 

Don’t drive around Syria whilst smoking, 

It’s OK to smoke sitting or standing’ 

(This of course is a rough translation only)  

              

I have been fortunate in my travels on the fringes of Empire to have been able to see some wonderful museums – The Pergamon in Berlin is outstanding, a number of institutions in Italy figure in my top ten, as do some of those in London. None of course compare favourably to the collection of ancient farm machinery that is found in the Kraatz’s back paddock at Rosewood – this goes without saying. The Archeological Museum here in Istanbul though is particularly interesting.

It has a featured exhibition with rooms displaying relics from the ten layers of the ancient city of Troy. At the very bottom of the excavation were found pieces of hand-shaped pottery and stone implements. Another layer of settlement that produced turned, glazed ,and baked pottery follows this. Then you can trace the development of metallurgy – copper, followed by bonze, then iron. Around 500BC the site was so hastily evacuated that the inhabitants left behind beautiful gold and silver trinkets. Then came the Greeks and Romans. At some stage the whole place was abandoned as it no longer had access to the sea, and remained undiscovered until Heinrich Schliemann did his Indiana Jones thing in 1870. 

This has led me to regularly ponder my fascination with Man’s ability to tell the complete story based on mere fragments of the whole. Then I realized it is something that my Band of F Block Brothers and I do every day! I must explain.

We have my dear friend Remington in our staffroom (I call him Remi, however for some reason others call him ‘Chris’ or even ‘Thommo’). He provides us with constant opportunities to hone this particular intellectual skill. Either through the fog of a failing memory or because of an overactive mind he will often walk into our workplace and make statements like; 

“Hey BCF have got a really good……..” This is followed by, 

“I’m really….looking forward to eating…..” This statement is immediately followed by, 

“ I MUST go to see this girl about ……….” He will then walk out without uttering another word. 

Sentences are left infuriatingly unfinished. However from this scattering of mere shards of conversation, by deduction we are able to determine that BCF apparently have a wonderful range of hard-bodied lures currently on sale (along with some fine fishing rods), and that his daughter Selena cooked a magnificent roast pork dinner the previous evening – the meat of which is filling the very sandwiches he intends to eat for lunch today. 

Despite our best efforts, sadly, none of us have ever been able to present a plausible theory around who the mystery girl might be, or why he would willingly forego such a lunch in order to meet her. This remains a puzzle for future lingual archeologists to solve. 

Perhaps my visits to some other treasures in this fascinating  city will provide the trigger of a clue?   

Enough for now – I’d best let you go. I have mysteries to solve. 

F C-S

Murray Freeman played front row in our Under 14b team.  He had a most unusual body shape- even for a Rosewood lad. But I don’t remember even Murray as having a perfectly rectangular bottom……….???

This is the Land of Mysteries indeed!

  

To be truthful – I’ve never been overly fond of the kebab. But as a Man of Empire I must respect the tastes of others – even in the birthplace of the eunach.