One Thousand Shades of Grey

I recently made the effort to revisit the 1978 film Midnight Express. The film depicts the apparently true story of Billy Hayes incarceration in a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country in 1970, his experiences in prison and his subsequent escape. The film is reviled by the Turks and as I sat there watching it with my Turkish wife I could understand why, the film wheels out grotesque caricature after grotesque caricature of hideously distorted Turkish stereotypes and insulting attacks on Turkish identity. One of the reasons the film is so hated by Turks is that they feel that the movie has done lasting damage to their image abroad, with its extremely negative portrayals of Turkish personalities and not one single portrayal of even a positive character trait let alone a good Turk. Truth & Fiction In Turkey the film is often written off as being a film designed to make the Turks look bad and based on lies. This is largely due to the sensationalist depi...

1986 was a strange year for me I was eleven; my best friend was a ten year old haemophiliac. 1986 was the year my great grandmother died at the age of 89, my cat that I’d known all my life got run over and my best friend got injected with HIV contaminated blood by the National Health Service at the local children’s hospital. Haemophilia is a condition that restricts your blood from clotting; put simply a small cut would without medication continue to bleed indefinitely, where as in an average human the blood would coagulate and a scab would form. That year we had been riding our skateboards together and my friend had accidently hit a parked car, if it had been me there would have just been some minor bruising but for him this meant a visit to the hospital to stop any internal bleeding. The treatment he received (factor8) was to be ultimately fatal to him. I remember being told by the adults that my friend had AIDS, this turned out to be not entirely correct, but HIV/AIDS was at the ti...

So like many people I opened my paper yesterday to be confronted by pictures of the three dead children of the Samouni family in Gaza, like most people it sickened me to my stomach so I was both surprised and disgruntled that the first person I heard mention it when I went into town was sticking to the same old line of “its justifiable, Israel are just defending themselves”. I have tried to understand this ideology but it just doesn’t really hold any water, in a purely statistical sense it is recorded that only 13 Israelis have been killed by rocket attacks from Gaza since the attacks started in 2001, so how can that justify the continuous years of massacres and brutality perpetrated on a people forcefully evicted from their homes in what is now part of the state of Israel and pushed into the Gaza strip by a foreign aggressor? The Gaza strip is only 25 miles long and at its widest about seven miles wide, so not dissimilar to the Isle of Wight except it has a population of approximate...

I find myself wondering what is the point to make new year resolutions, after all they only ever last until the second of January then you find yourself stuffing yourself full of McDonalds,’ getting shitfaced and chain smoking in one all out binge! But that I realise is the problem, the onset of age has slowly ground all the idealism I suffered from in my twenties into so much emotional dust and been replace with a form of cynicism so aggressive that it borders on out and out nihilism. Therein lies the problem with cynicism it actually has me at a point where I just can’t be bothered. I used to like the George Bernard Shaw quote “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” But now I think I prefer Peggy Noonans’ “Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.” That’s my new year’s resolution to resurrect that little bit of my youth known as idealism, if there ha...

Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi throws his shoes at bush whilst shouting “this is a farewell kiss, you dog!” with the first shoe and “this is from the widows, the orphans and all who died in Iraq!” with the second shoe. Sadly the hero shoe thrower is allegedly so badly beaten by security that he has been unable to appear before court, but once recovered may face a possible two years in prison for the crime of "insulting a foreign head of state".

Picture this: It’s a normal day about half past nine you leave your flat to make your way to work, you get the bus to the tube station at Brixton. Upon arrival you find the tube station is closed because of an attempted bombing the day before. You call a work colleague to warn them you will be late for work and then re-board the bus to get to the next closest tube station. You get off at Stockwell and make your way down to the platform, the tube pulls up, and you get on the train. As you sit down you hear a commotion from the door looking up you see some men armed with guns rushing onto the train, scared you stand up, at this point one of the men forces you to the chair whilst two others shoot you seven times point blank in the head! It should be unlikely that this would happen in the UK one of the bastions of the free west, but this is what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes on the 22nd of July 2005 at Stockwell tube station. So what was the result of this event, who has been held a...

Did you ever wonder why the barman appears to hate you? I mean what have you ever done to him? Is it really necessary for the bar staff to continually treat you with such disdain? Time to wake up bozo! This is why, this is what you did when you came to the bar..... Firstly (and really the very first thing you did irritated us) you walk in the bar, with its traditional roaring fire, with your generic office clone friends and left the door open! Because that’s the reason we light the fire so you can leave the door open, I know its Christmas but you aren’t Jesus and this isn’t a barn You then continue to barge to the bar and start shoving notes in the face of the bar staff who obviously have to serve you because the forty people in front of you aren’t really all that thirsty after all, you bitch and moan for the entire two and a half minutes that you have to wait for me to come and serve you and then have the audacity to ask me what lagers we sell! HELLO! You’ve been standing in front of ...

It might come to some as a strange turnaround for me to decide to support a football team for the first time in 33 years having spent the rest of my life sitting on the fence as to which football team I support. When it comes to supporting national teams then no problem I always follow England and Turkey as family ties dictate, but when it comes to supporting local clubs I have never found one relevant enough to me to take an interest and to support any of the teams my friends support i.e. Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester united just makes no sense after all I’m not from north London or Manchester so these clubs hold little relevance to me on a personal level. That all changed on the 26th October in Eskisehir when the decision was taken out of my hands. I went with my brother in law, sister in law and wife to watch Galatasaray play Eskisehir in the Turkish super league at a bar in Eskisehir city centre just outside the stadium. In an historic game Eskişehirspor hammered Galatasaray 4-2 ...

Boss getting on your nerves? Find yourself constantly fighting the urge to stab your team leader in the jugular with a biro? Fantasise about beating your work colleagues into a bloody pulp with the waste paper bin? You’re not alone whackyouboss.com offers you the opportunity to live out your dreams without the inconvenience of a hefty jail sentence or the embarrassment of having to explain to your family why you brutalised your boss with the office stapler.... Kill the bastard here.... WHACKyourBOSS

So we wake up today to the first black president of the USA, I the noticed odds on Obama winning the presidency at the William Hill website were: BARACK OBAMA is now 1/ 2 favourite to win the US Presidential Election with William Hill who make John McCain the 6/4 outsider. I wonder if William Hill will be offering odds on the amount of assassination attempts during his presidency (two assassination plots already during his campaign) and the possible outcomes. After all isn’t that the historical precedent set by previous visionary groundbreaking American presidents.

So I have arrived back in England after a two week visit to Turkey a country which I absolutely love, I am one hundred percent self confessed Turkophile. However whilst I was there I tried to update this blog with some random ramblings about what I was up to out there and was met with the following message: Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir. T.C. Diyarbakır 1. Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi 20.10.2008 tarih ve 2008/2761 sayılı kararı gereği bu siteye erişim engellenmiştir. Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/2761 of T.R. Diyarbakır 1st Criminal Court of Peace. My first reaction was confusion, surely there must be some mistake but no, I tried clicking the link again and was met with the same message. My second reaction was akin to some kind of violent suppressed rage as it dawned on me just how wide and indiscriminate the website ban in Turkey was, I mean I had heard talk about You tube being inaccessible due to a slanging match between G...

The UK is allegedly the most recorded populous on the face of the planet with the average Londoner being caught on CCTV three hundred times a day, and apparently one CCTV camera for every 12 people in Britain. The Guardian recently reported that thousands of CCTV cameras across Britain have now been converted to read number plates using auto number plate recognition technology and that nationally roadside cameras are now reading fifty million number plates a day, and that the details of these “recorded” journeys will be kept on record for five years. The scary thing about surveillance techniques applied, apparently put in place to protect us from crime is that they are frequently and systematically being used to control minute aspects of communal living, with councils using CCTV and other surveillance apparatus to record and fine litterbugs , parking offences, bin men, shopkeepers and in Derby even noisy children this is all perfectly legal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers...

Last week the Sun ran an article on the recent tragic killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Al Majed, a Qatari foreign language student in Hastings. I don’t usually bother to read the Sun as I prefer to source a cheaper and softer quality of toilet paper, however they made the effort to write a full page article slagging off my town so it was inevitably bought to my attention. I just wanted to congratulate Anila Baig on some truly top quality journalism! I mean why bother to get on a train from London just to hang around outside a games arcade an interview a couple of local chav’s who predictably spout the kind of xenophobic rubbish you would expect from people whose main occupation of their time is loitering around the arcades. In fact I guess you used that location because you knew that was exactly the kind of response that you would get, it is clear from your article that you have made every effort to paint Hastings in the worst light possible, as a decaying seaside resort with no pros...

I read an article in the Sunday papers referring to a small town in the Yorkshire dales called ‘Booze’ apparently this small ex mining village (with a fantastic name but sadly no pub) has been deemed to dangerous for the local postman, who presumably suffers from some kind of chronic fear of lanes or other equally disturbing mental disorder. Booze has had uninterrupted postal service since the postal service began, and now finds itself in the dubious position of being even more isolated by cost cutting bureaucrats with risk assessment forms instead of logic. This is a damning state of affairs, Is England really that sad a place that we can’t find a postal service manly enough (sorry ladies) to tackle a winding country lane.

The land of the free has led the charge again in an astounding attack on the individual privacy of pretty much anyone entering the country. US border agents are now empowered to seize then search electronic devices of any traveller, without any grounds for suspicion or probable cause. Be it your laptop, mobile phone, MP3 player or your child’s hand held game console it’s all perfectly justifiable. A data trawl that can snoop anyone unfortunate enough to step of a plane onto federal soil. Once searched, they can decimate the information between the empires other government agencies as they see fit. There is no guarantee your device will even be returned, as some travellers to the states have already reported. However do not be alarmed this is all part of the department of homeland security’s drive to protect you (American citizens) from terrorists, junk peddlers and nonces. It’s only a matter of time before they put you in cage where you will be nice and safe, presumably with curtains a...

Humanity: 1. All human beings collectively; the human race; humankind. 2. The quality or condition of being human; human nature. 3. The quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence. Humane: 1. Characterized by tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for people and animals, esp. for the suffering or distressed A friend commented recently that the word “Humane” was possibly the most absurdly ironic word in the English language and is in desperate need of review. Who defined the quality of being humane as pertaining to kindness and benevolence or compassion for the suffering and distressed? Was it a particularly good year? I had a quick scan through the Times concise history of the world and have failed completely to find the year that we (humanity) collectively spent some time being kind and benevolent to each other. However I did find countless years of senseless brutality, intolerance, xenophobia and general all round unpleasantness. It comes to me suddenly that we hum...