A Change of Tone

It seems a long time since I returned from The UK Grandy Tour ’22 but it is actually less than a fortnight. It was a lovely trip, taking in five grandchildren at different stages of development. Two are still guileless babies but three are at different moments in the acquisition of language and its concomitant ability to manipulate and control.

Seth, at 22 months, is showing promise but his ploys and strokes are still transparent. An example

Mother (lifts and smell-checks) “Seth! I think you need a nappy change.”

Seth (who does not welcome the interruption to his play) “No! I did a fart.”

Well, I thought it was funny.

Seb, par contre, at 30 months shows little sign of such subtlety and has learnt that the best way to control is by tantrum power. Untrammelled energy and willpower are his weapons of choice. His parents are trying with indifferent results to school him in “appropriateness”. An example

Whilst playing in the sandpit in the park, Seb was pushing his little dumper truck along its dwarf wall. When he came to an obstacle, in the shape of a little girl sitting on the wall, he continued to push his truck straight into the girl’s leg and stare at her. Grabbing him, I retreated hastily muttering to the little girl’s parent that he was “having boundary issues”.

Daisy, the oldest at nine years, has always shown a remarkable control over adults combining both force and the subtler arts of language. At the age of five I caught her whispering to her uncle Adam “You’re my favourite Adam!”, just fifteen minutes after she had whispered the same to me.

On this recent trip I delivered a pretty speech to her on the importance of obedience and consideration for others. Ambient jazz was playing on the radio and two minutes after my words, to which she had given no sign of attending, she responded sweetly

“Grandy, this music goes very well with that little speech you just gave.”

My flabber, as Frankie Howard used to say, was absolutely ghasted.

Anyway, all such is now water under the bridge and I am reunited with Special K in our mountain redoubt, Leto House.

Whilst it is lovely to be home, events have overwhelmed me in the shape of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. So, I have decided to tilt my blog away from my usual mildly satirical take on life as an expat in Turkey, towards the momentous events that are taking place in our region. A change of tone is required.

In so doing I want to educate myself more about geo-political realities in this incredibly complex area. But I also want to share analysis, thinking and perspectives on this appalling conflict.

For a couple of years I have been picking at a project to write about the first hundred years of the Turkish Republic. On 29^th October of this year the secular (NB) Republic of Turkey will celebrate its 99^th anniversary since its founding in 1923 under its father (ata in Turkish) out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. On the same date in 2023 it will celebrate its historic 100^th Some time before that (and by April ’23 at the latest) a new president will be elected. So we were already in very interesting times in Turkey.

I have been reading around the subject and it is torture. I have, at the very best of times, absolutely no sense of Geography at all. Turn me around three times and I cannot find the bathroom in my own house. To get my head around the emerged and newly emerged countries that fell out from the Ottoman, Soviet and Hapsburg empires, those countries clustering around and including the Balkan States, is pure pain for me.

I visited the Ukrainian city of Lviv last year. It was once the fourth city of the Hapsburg Empire, then Polish (Lwów ), Then briefly Soviet, then German under the Nazis, then Soviet again post war, until its emergence from under the USSR in 1991. Kim and I, by coincidence, visited at the same time as John and Amanda Federwycz. We shared some good times with them and that visit has certainly helped to anchor Lviv and its history for me. One of my visits was to the erstwhile Soviet era political prison, now a museum, on Laçki Street where you can see and feel some of the tragedy and turbulence of Ukrainian history.

The whole region is a crucible of nationalist turbulence. The First World War stopped for France and the UK in 1918 but not for the many vanquished countries of Central Europe, who like Turkey, rolled straight into national wars of independence.

But Daniel Finkelman was on the nail when he warned, in a recent Sunday Times article, against overcomplicating things “It is easy to get tangled in the thickets of this history, which is why Putin speaks about it at such length.”

The invasion of Ukraine by Putin is an appalling act of aggression, comparable with Hitler’s Invasion of Poland. The world cannot allow it to succeed. We must all do what we can to support both the brave Ukrainian resistance and the brave Russian street protests. They carry the aspirations of all democratic, freedom loving people and the burden of being in the front line.

We “armchair warriors” as one erstwhile Kalkan resident said, must do all we can from our positions of comfort. In that respect John Federerwycz is leading with great energy and creativity. Follow his posts on his own shareable page https://www.facebook.com/john.fedorowycz

I am working, meanwhile, on an idea to create a viral campaign calling on world leaders to co-ordinate a global, simultaneous 2 minute silence. I will post details tomorrow. I will also call upon the valiant, unflinching Armchair Warriors of Kalkan to help me get the message in front of them.