…. or alternatively, A is for ‘attachment’, B is for ‘blog’ and C is for ‘chatroom’.
Somehow, back in January, I missed the fuss that surrounded the publication of the updated edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. I caught up with it today, when reading an absorbing article in today’s Guardian by landscape and natural world enthusiast Robert Macfarlane. This is what he said.
‘The same summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark,mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. ………I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry.’
I too was dismayed. Everywhere there is evidence that children are playing out far less than they used to, seeing green space less often than their parents did. Perhaps more than ever they need a dictionary to help them know about chestnuts and clover. Since the Second World War, there have been regular complaints from teachers and others, that there are city children who don’t know that milk comes from cows, or potatoes from the earth, or that blackberries are for gathering and devouring. Best not cut them out of works of reference too.
But then, I’m not sure how many children use dictionaries either. I’ve seen lots of young people, including our own daughter, who will turn to an online source rather than the dictionary when needing to check a spelling or a meaning. But really, what can be more fun than turning to a dictionary to look something up, and then becoming distracted, for more than 20 minutes at a time, by reading about words you never knew, or knew you needed to know, like ‘pursier’, or ‘grager’, or ‘chip breaker’ or ‘squaloid’?
All the same, I’m glad and relieved that my grandchildren know the meanings of all the words Macfarlane singles out, both the new edition inclusions, and the ousted ones from, apparently, a bygone age.
I lived in Wakefield for a few years, in the 1970s. Back then, it was a gritty industrial town, surrounded by pit villages such as Crofton, Sharlston and Lofthouse. It was the home of Double Two shirts, and the administrative capital of the now-defunct West Riding. You’ll still find Wakefield Prison here, the largest high-security prison in Western Europe. And Wakefield is still part of the unique ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, an area between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell where, in the cold early months of every year, delicate pink forced rhubarb is grown in darkened sheds for a public still eager to buy.
Wakefield had its elegant quarters too, largely built round the Georgian St. John’s Church, and there was a decent market as well, and a good Art Gallery and Museum.
What it didn’t have in those days was the Hepworth Gallery. So we paid it a visit on Sunday. It’s on an unpromising site by a fairly unlovely stretch of the River Calder, alongside a busy dual carriageway and various semi-industrial sites. But with its austere pigmented concrete facade, the building itself rises energetically and imaginatively from the midst of the industrial landscape in which it’s situated. We went inside, to a cool, clean and calm space. With an excellent café. This did seem promising.
The Hepworth Gallery.
Houseboats on the river.
A worker’s cottage? Or trompe-l’œil?
Rain on the outside walls.
Neither of us liked the current exhibition showcasing Lynda Benglis. But we’d really come to see Barbara Hepworth’s work. She was a Wakefield lass, a contemporary, friend and colleague of Henry Moore. I’ve known and admired her work for much of my life, but most enjoyed it when visiting St. Ives some years ago. Hepworth lived there from the 1950s till her death, and much of her work is exhibited at the Tate Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. It was the sculpture garden that did it for us then: plants and sculpture co-exist in intimate harmony, each enhancing the other in ways that have stayed with us in the years since we were able to spend time there.
The time we spent with her work in the Gallery was enhanced by glimpses of her working life: the tough and workmanlike bench with its tools laid ready for use; the videos showing her working, or her pieces being prepared for casting in bronze in busy foundries.
Hepworth’s workbench.
What makes this exhibition interesting is that most of these works are full-size prototypes, in plaster or aluminium of works that would later be realised in bronze. It’s clear that she needed to work even at an early stage on the same scale as she would on the finished article. What could she gain by trying her ideas out in miniature?
These pieces are reminiscent of the rolling character of the Yorkshire landscape round Wakefield. To achieve them, Hepworth chipped, carved, smoothed and worked away at her pieces: it was solid manual labour, not so very far removed from the labour of the miners and workers who also lived in the community where she grew up. It’s a man’s world, and Hepworth was extraordinary not only for being a woman studying sculpture, but for reviving the art of carving her own work. In the Edwardian age, sculptors had merely moulded their maquettes and left masons to do the hard graft.
I love this juxtaposition of the Hepworth sculpture with the Euan Uglow portrait behind.
Yet her work is sensual and invites contemplation. I relished the chance to do so in this light and airy gallery, with its backdrop of the city of Wakefield seen through the vast windows, allowing the daylight to illuminate her work.
Wakefield from the windows of the Hepworth Gallery.
I know I’ve mentioned them already, but this year’s crop of snowdrops has been quite astonishing. Maybe they weren’t quite such a feature of our local landscape in France. Maybe when we last lived in England, because we were in town, we saw them only tucked into quiet corners of suburban gardens, or on occasional weekend sorties. Perhaps snowdrops round here are always this special. But for us, this year has been a real treat.
Snowdrops have been almost the first thing we see as we set foot outside the house. They’ve been in dense groves in nearby woodland. They’ve been on sheltered verges. At first slender, pointing their sheathed leaves upwards in search of light, now they’ve opened their petals into blowsy bells and flattened their leaves gently towards the ground beneath. This is the sure signal that they’re on the way out. Gardens are displaying the first of the early crocus, and even daffodils are opening in more sheltered spots. I think snowdrops prefer to be the centre of attention, prepared to share the woodland only with occasional patches of aconites. Now that spring is really on its way, and the birds are honing their voices in preparation for their courtship rituals, the snowdrops are preparing to allow their flowers and leaves to wither and die, as the bulbs enjoy their long and nourishing hibernation below ground.
Until the early years of the twentieth century, there had been thousands of Greeks living in Turkey, and Turks living in Greece, preserving their own culture and ways of life over many centuries. But by the 1920s, both Turks and Greeks had been through a period of real upheaval, with a series of wars including the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. Senior politicians in both countries could see problems ahead if largely Muslim Turks remained in Greece, and largely Orthodox Greeks remained in Turkey.
Their solution though, was a shocking one. Following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, thousands and thousands of Turks and Greeks were in effect deported from the lands where they and their ancestors had been living for centuries, back to their country of ethnic origin. They were given almost no time to prepare or to pack belongings: they were displaced refugees. Large Greek communities such as Smyrna were quite simply emptied of their citizens, to be stocked with Muslim Turks and re-named Izmir . The regional ethic mix which had prevailed for centuries ceased.
Greek refugees from Smyrna arriving at Thessaloniki 1923 (unknown source)
Though it’s hard to regard what happened then as anything better than ethnic cleansing, many Turks nowadays will say that now the dust has settled, and with the passage of time, both Greece and Turkey are the better for it. Greco-Turkish relations have often been poor, and with the two populations now separated, there’s one less thing to fight over.
It’s a hugely complex issue about which I know next to nothing. What I do know is that we spent the last morning of our Turkish holiday in Şirince, one of those villages that was forcibly de-populated, then re-populated, in this case by Turks moved out of Thessaloniki in Greece. It’s a charming place, set on a hillside amongst olive groves and orchards; a tourist trap for Turks and foreign tourists alike. But on a quiet warm morning in February, it was no hardship. We used the time to sample the fruit wines for which the village is noted: mulberry, peach, morello, quince (no, we didn’t try them ALL). We bought last-minute souvenirs: local olive oil, honey, pomegranate vinegar. It was easy to feel, strolling through the narrow streets, that we might be in Greece rather than Turkey, even though we didn’t hear, as promised, any of the older inhabitants speaking Greek.
A mosque has now replaced the church.
Fruit wines waiting to be sampled.
Bazaar in Şirince. Easy to see it’s part of Turkey now.
The church has seen better days.
A quiet bar: a good place to sample some of those fruit wines, or an apple tea.
Village life.
A quiet street in Şirince.
Local textiles on sale.
Retail opportunity outside the now disused church.
It was a peaceful way to end our holiday. We’ll be back, as independent travellers next time. And from now, it’ll be posts from misty moisty England. For a while at least.
The Republic of Turkey has only existed since 1923, and rapidly transformed itself under Kemal Atatürk from a failing Ottoman Empire with a glorious past, into a modern nation, looking towards Europe as it pushed through a programme of reforms. Then and now predominantly Muslim, it became an uncompromisingly secular state, in which religious symbols in schools and public buildings were forbidden, and women achieved universal suffrage by 1934. These days, you’ll see fewer veiled Turkish women than in the average British city centre.
Look below the surface, however, and Turkish life is centred round the extended family, as it has been for centuries.
When they’re 19, Turkish young men go off to do their National Service for two years. Those from the west serve in the east of the country, and those in the east go west. What they’re hoping for is a nice post as a jandarm (army police) in a quiet country town, though they’ll lie through their teeth and tell anyone who asks that they were posted to the borders with Syria, Iran or Iraq. No internet, no mobile phones, no wild social life: it’s not fun, and they count the days till their discharge, aged 22.
Back home, mother has no time to indulge in ’empty nest syndrome’. She has her son’s marriage to arrange. She trawls through likely candidates, looking for a young woman from the same caste, of good family, aged about 17 – 19. She’ll check out whether the girl can make a decent Turkish coffee and a good pilau rice, and even get the chance to appraise her naked body when they go to the Turkish baths together. Her son will almost certainly fall in with her choice, and the girl’s family too usually agrees.
Father’s role in all this is to foot the bill for the wedding, which is cripplingly expensive, so he’ll have been saving all his married life. Average wages in Turkey are low, and after regular bills have been met, don’t allow much slack for buying or building a home complete with fixtures, fittings and furniture, much less a new car. This is where the wedding comes in.
Wedding gold. (altinka.net)
The guest list for the ceremony will include about 2000 of the couple’s closest friends, of whom about 1,500 will actually come on the day. And they will bring gold, which they’ll pin to the couple’s clothes. Nobody will dare to offer a smaller amount than the person in front: social death. This gold will be transformed into a new home, a car and all the other things the young couple might need. Now their modest income will be enough for day-to-day life.
After the marriage, the young woman leaves her family behind. Her new life is with the extended family of her husband. They will all live together. We saw whole blocks of flats, maybe 4 storeys high, which our guide assured us were likely to belong to a single family. People buy from developers or build for themselves: renting is almost unknown. As are planning regulations. You can build what you like, where you like, on land that you already own or have acquired. Surveys of the land are unnecessary, so in this earthquake prone land, many buildings are destroyed by ‘quakes or landslip, or subsidence.
Earning a living is paramount for the men. While communities will be proud of those who make it into the professions, there’s no shame in, for instance, washing cars at a petrol station: it may in fact be more lucrative than say, teaching. Many families find ways to earn their living together, by running a shop or garage, or by working the land together. Almost every block of flats in Turkey has shops on the ground floor. You can be sure the business is being run by the family who lives above.
Traditional Turkish tea house: men only. (Reuters/Umit Bektas)
When not actually working, men retire for the day to a tea shop. The woman’s domain is the home, all day, and woe betide the man who reports home sick at 2.00 in the afternoon. The average family has about 5 children, and life expectancy is 61 for men, 67 for women. This is because health services are rudimentary and expensive. Most families are dependent on traditional remedies, or failing that, the pharmacy. A stay in hospital is an unthinkable expense for much of the population.
The family groupings apply to to the very many nomad familiies who still exist in Turkey. Some families are still entirely nomadic, whilst others have a nomad existence in summer, and return to a more low-lying village in the colder months. Most rear stock, especially sheep and goats.
A nomad tends his flock outside Bergama.
I’m sure Turkish life is changing. We certainly saw many Turkish women working outside the home. But walking about the streets in the evening, it was clear that home and family is still central to everyday life here.
Solar heating captors are everywhere.
Old Ayvalik.
As in France, old village centres are neglected in favour of edge-of-town modern development.
Much town development seems very high density, with little outside space.
A block of flats with solar heating captors and satellite dishes.
Orange trees often line the streets, or offer shade in gardens.
Modern housing.
Street furniture in Ayvalik.
A village scene in Didyma. Outside appearances aren’t important in Turkey.
Efe took time out from his job as guardian of a group of nomads and their sheep wintering in the area, to accompany us on our visit to Miletus. He’s a kangal, and we all immediately took to this handsome, gentle and affectionate dog, one of a breed popular in Turkey for its qualities as a fine guardian of stock.
Like many Turkish dogs and cats, Efe has a home. But many others do not. There are hundreds and thousands of animals whose home is the street, and who are on the whole tolerated and even regarded as part of the community. Don’t imagine that these animals are mangy and sickly, with protruding ribs and rotting yellow teeth. They’re well fed and healthy.
Turks apparently, when planning a move to a new neighbourhood, will look and see how street dogs are treated. If they’re friendly and companionable, then that means the neighbourhood too is friendly. If the dogs are aggressive or fearful than it’s not a good area. Best not to buy.
Street dogs by the sea at Ayvelik.
These days though, street dogs are a problem, simply by virtue of their huge numbers. So they are tagged, vaccinated and spayed or neutered to prevent the spread of rabies and other diseases, and to limit their population.
An Ephesus resident attempts to steal the show from our guide.
We saw cats too wherever we went. But never so many as at Ephesus, which is rather famous as an unofficial cat sanctuary. Looking round the site, we once saw 14 at a single glance, and they were quite at home as they lolled on marble pillars and lounged round the library.
Ephesus cats.
These photos of street dogs and cats are among the less expected souvenirs of our trip.
We’ve just come back from a short holiday in Turkey. We’ve just come back from our first organised tour. We’ll happily go back to Turkey. But we won’t be on a tour. There’s only one plus in this form of holiday, as far as I can see, though it’s quite a big one: a Turkish guide, born and bred, brings many insights into Turkey, its people, and their way of life. There’s a post or two coming about some of the things we learnt.
We were herded on long coach journeys from place to place, where after our official visit, we often had little time to linger, absorb, and just simply ‘be’ in ancient sites that have seen thousands and thousands of years of history. Large tourist hotels are comfortable but impersonal. The food they offer is perfectly tasty, but offers only a tiny glimpse of the country’s rich culinary tradition. And then the herding continues, as we’re compulsorily escorted into stores selling carpets, jewellery, leather. We longed for more free time. I snatched the chance late one afternoon to work out how to catch a bus into the nearest town, Ayvalik, and follow my nose for a few precious minutes. But I only had three-quarters of an hour before I needed to come back and re-enter the system.
However. In visiting Anatolia, we’ve seen glimpses of the most extraordinarily rich culture of the area, from pre-historic to post-Classical times. We’ve seen those places I’ve known about since childhood, when I first heard all those stories about Odysseus, Helen of Troy et al.
Here are some of the photos I took as souvenirs. Most of the places we visited have survived so well because they lost their reason for being busy, successful places. Originally on the sea, they are now several miles inland, since Anatolia’s western coastline has been silting up for millenia. One day it’ll link up with Greece, and who knows what ructions that will cause.
We visited Priene, already important by 300 BC. It made quite an impression on us to walk its ancient marble streets, built on a grid system, still intact, complete with gouged marks and notches to prevent slipping. Its drainage system is still visible, its bouleuterion (council chamber), its temple to Athena, and its theatre, designed to accommodate 6,500 people.
Steps up to the city of Priene.
A view of the theatre complete with marble throne.
Temple ruins
Miletus was next, a city that was a centre of Greek thought from as early as 1000 BC. It was fought over by Greeks, and Persians. Later Romans took over. Alexander the Great, St. Paul….. they’ve all been to Miletus. And the theatre here seats 15,000…….
First view of Miletus
The baths.
Spreading the weight through a series of arches.
The theatre: the space between audience and arena indicates that animal fights were held here.
Didyma wasn’t a city, but what a temple! The Temple to Apollo here has 124 columns and used to have its very own oracle too. What impressed us was the height of those columns. How did those ancient builders do it?
Some of Didyma’s columns.
Medusa
A forest of columns.
Helpful tourist information.
And this was all on our first day……
Fast forward to Thursday and a visit to Troy. I ‘did’ Troy at school. I learned all about how it was occupied from the Bronze age until well into the 9th century , and how layer upon fantastic layer of history was preserved as each succeeding era built upon the remains of the last. The site there was ‘sliced’ through by archeologists, first of all by the archeologists’ Bad Boy Heinrich Schliemann, who destroyed by over-enthusiastic excavation almost as much as he preserved, and disposed of his finds to a variety of museums.
Walls of Troy.
The path to a palace.
The oldest known fired bricks, some 3000 years BC…..
…… now being attacked by solitary bees.
Sloping walls more successfully deflect enemy ammunition.
The remains of domestic housing.
Pergamum was perhaps my favourite. It’s the city that invented parchment – made from animal skin- when the Egyptians declined to let its citizens have papyrus. We reached the Acropolis, high above the modern city of Bergama by first a lift, and then a cable car: not an option in the city’s hey-day. It has a dizzyingly steep-raked theatre cut into the hillside with spectacular views which reminded me of parts of the Pyrenees. It has temples to a variety of Roman, Greek and Egyptian gods and emperors, and its library used to contain 20,000 volumes. We could have spent hours there exploring: but we got little more than one (we had longer at a carpet showroom).
Modern Bergama below, Pergamum above….
A glimpse of the aqueduct, far below…
The remains of domestic housing.
Then Ephesus at last. This is an extraordinary town which deserves several hours at least of anyone’s time. We got two hours. It was founded by immigrants from Athens in about 1000 BC, and because of its harbour, thrived under the Lydians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. It was already silting up by the 5th century AD, and that was that for Ephesus. Saint Paul wrote letters to the Ephesians, and more recently tourists have been sending postcards of the astonishing quantity and quality of its remains.
All human life is there, from latrines where statesmen would use the time to sit and discuss issues of the day, to brothels, to the 2nd century Library of Celcus, to a 24,000 seat theatre…. There are temples and terraced houses. These houses are fascinating for providing an almost unique chance to see the inside of such dwellings: the mosaic floors, the wall decorations, the ground plans, the bathrooms and plumbing.
Curetes Way: Ephesus’ main street
The Odeon: the debating chamber
The astonishing Library of Celsus.
A discreet entrance to the brothel.
Terraced housing: wallpaintings.
Terraced housing: walls with original downpipes.
Terraced housing: mosaic floor.
Our guide demonstrates the latrines.
Cats are quite at home at Ephesus.
We’ll have to go back. We haven’t seen the half of it.
I like my diary a lot. It’s big and bright and yellow and demands I remember to stuff it in my bag as I’m out and about and adding in appointments I shouldn’t forget. I like to leaf through its pages in idle moments, because on nearly every page, there’s a poem: an old one; a recent one; a classic; or one that’s, to me at least, unknown.
Here’s my diary
Here’s ‘After Africa’
And on another page, here’s the cover of a book I used to love in childhood
Here’s the poem I found this week. It speaks to me, though I’ve never been to Africa, and it’s very many years since I worked in Surbiton Library in Surrey. It touches me with its imagery of rich and different landscapes lost, at the same time as rediscovering the softly-washed colours of once more familiar territory. No-one would compare France with Africa. But they might recognise the bittersweet feelings of regret yet acceptance that accompany those of us who come home after some years in a very different culture.
After Africa
After Africa, Surbiton: An unheated house, and flagstone pavements; No colobus monkeys, no cheetahs scouring the plains. Verrucas and weeping blisters ravaged our feet.
An unheated house, and flagstone pavements, And snow falling through the halos of street lamps; Verrucas and weeping blisters ravaged our feet; But the shavings made by our carpenter, Chippy, were as soft as bougainvillea flowers
Or snow falling through the halos of street lamps. Everyone was pale, pale or gray, as pale or gray But the shavings made by our carpenter, Chippy, were as soft as bougainvillea flowers … Red, African dust spilled from the wheels of our toy trucks and cars.
Everyone was pale, pale or gray, as pale or gray As the faded carpet on which Red, African dust spilled from the wheels of our toy trucks and cars. Real traffic roared outside.
A faded carpet on which Everything seemed after Africa, Surbiton’s Real traffic roared outside – No colobus monkeys, no cheetahs scouring the plains.
Mark Ford.
You can listen to Mark Ford reading his poem by clicking here.
Mark Ford: Selected Poems was published by Coffee House Books in 2014: ISBN 978-1-56689-349-7
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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