It was one of those unforgettably painful moments - staring, horrified, at a deserted departure gate instead of calmly boarding the Air France flight from Paris to Mexico. Your heart sinks and fury joins an already high dose of adrenalin pumped up by tearing through the airport. Together with three other hapless passengers I had somehow gone off-track at Roissy (CDG), or rather Roissy had lost us between airport buses, fire-engines blocking the way, corridors leading nowhere, a woeful infrastructure and generally unhelpful terminal staff. Roll on the new terminals, still under construction, because in the meantime I don´t recommend the airport to anyone.
As I queued at Stansted airport to check-in last Friday, I realised life is not always a picnic. It was mayhem and the Tower of Babel ruled. Thinking back a few weeks, the Eos flight from Stansted to New York had been unreal. Easyjet was more like it - back to reality with a bump, although I have to say the flight itself was faultless. In fact I’ve always tried to mix the high-life with the low-life (well not too low) and really enjoy simple hotels, beach-huts, boats and hammocks. Sleeping in vans, cars and buses comes a lot lower on my list but has cropped up quite often over the years - generally a result of minor natural disasters: landslides, floods, low budget, that kind of thing.
Last week I nearly found myself in the middle of a military coup. It was touch and go but thankfully democracy won the day. Yet oddly it was a confrontation between the army (normally perceived as reactionary) and a democratic opponent labelled as a potential Islamic extremist. Somehow this paradox is typical of Turkey.
What is extraordinary about Istanbul is how much it lives up to the cliché of a dual existence, of being the bridge between East and West, of Asia and Europe. That schizoid character appears again and again, as much in the political arena as in women’s appearance which veers between dowdy headscarf and body-enshrouding full-length dress to the tightest jeans and full-on make-up.