You're Turking the Piss - An Anatolian Spa Odyssey

Given that I'm in Turkey, I had thought about writing an article about the devastating effect that terrorism has had on the tourist industry here. But after the latest horrific attack in Barcelona, I felt like writing something more light hearted. Like myself, you're probably weary of the endless stream of articles on our feeds that remind us just how awful human beings can be to one another. So I'm holding off for the time being and writing something altogether less weighty.

My father, in one of his fits of eccentric generosity, decided to treat the family to Turkish massages and spa treatments. After receiving one himself, he bounded home in a state of frenzied ecstasy and declared that we should all be subjected to them too. The well being of our souls depended on it, apparently.

I'm no stranger to an occasional holiday massage. But I view them in the same way I see religion. Some nice ideas, but of debatable net benefit to humanity and one's general well being. Unless they are done by a professional sports masseuse, they're more of an entertaining diversion than something that's going to help you find inner peace or make your skin feel like a cherub's bottom.

The spa industry is something of a curiosity to me. It seems that as soon as humans had the gumption to develop a civilisation, they also decided that furiously rubbing one another with oils, lotions and tinctures was the dog's bollocks. According to Wikipedia, the earliest evidence for the practice was in BC 2330 on the tomb of Akmanthor in Egypt. But I have no doubt that it was going on well before that. Almost every single proceeding civilisation engaged in some form of pampering or another. It just seems that we humans love not only to be fondled (with consent) but are also inexorably drawn to the purported benefits of a good pampering.

Earliest known pampering at Akmanthor

On this occasion my beloved and kindly father had booked a mysterious smorges board of treatments. Although he intentionally omitted the details of it, for fear of ruining the surprise. I was told that it would take two and a half hours. This had me intrigued, if not a tad nervous.

My masseuse introduced himself with a name that I dare not attempt to write down for fear of insulting the many Turkish readers of this blog. He seemed an amiable and smiley sort of fellow, which didn't put me at a great deal of ease.

I was given a towel and mistakenly went into the massagarium without swimming trunks under it. I was told in broken English that the towel needed to be laid out underneath me and he would prefer, if possible, not to massage me naked. Once I had reaquainted myself with my trunks we were good to go.

The massagarium (I think that's right?) was a low ceilinged, dark room containing two giant black marble slabs. I lay down on my back in the manner of a corpse in a morgue, resting my head on a recycled pool float.

Turkish pop music was blaring energetically out from the speakers. Bill Bryson once described Turkish pop music in the early 90s as sounding like a man receiving a vasectomy, without anaesthetic, to tune of a wailing sitar. Little has changed it seems, save for the increased number of men involved and the useful guidance of a well syncopated beat.

He began by scrubbing my skin off me with something that felt not unlike steel wool. Despite the material, it was rather satisfactory experience. I'm quite sure I shed a few pounds in the process. Once I was scrubbed, he made me look at the vast field of dead skin that he had successfully removed from my body. I gave him a gentle nod of approval and he duly drenched me in lukewarm water for the compliment. Then he wordlessly and quite suddenly left me alone in the room to muse on just how badly I had neglected my poor skin.

The door opening had a slightly jarring habit of sounding very much like a gun shot. I nearly fell off the slab in shock the first time it happened. My new found friend re-entered, proudly displaying a large, clear plastic sheet. 'What fresh Hell is this?' I pondered. He slowly began to unravel the plastic sheet and lay it down the marble slab in a manner that reminded me of just about every episode of Dexter.

Soon it became abundantly clear that I was meant to lie on it and be covered in something unappetising. Once horizontal, I waited with dread as to what my beloved father had selected for me to be marinaded in. Given that he had chosen it, there was little surprise that the treatment in question looked a great deal like raw sewage. The smell, thankfully (I say thankfully in the lightest of terms,) was akin to untinned pilchards that had been left in the sun for just a little too long.

Soon I was coated from head to toe and my friend began the process of diligently wrapping me. I felt like a suitcase on one of those rather pointless cellophane machines you get in Asian and African airports. Eventually I was encased in this mysterious and apparently improving concoction. A big, plastic, grumpy Tutankhamun. Unable to move a single muscle, save for a wide eyed scowl. Once again, he silently left the room and I was alone, eyes fixed to the ceiling.

At this point I expected the door to blast (and I mean blast) open and for all of my exes to come in, encircle me, douse me in cat piss and laugh like hyenas whilst pointing their fingers at me. Such was the trajectory of this experience. Instead I was left alone, motionless, staring blankly upwards and wondering why on earth people willingly engage in such foolishness.

If some idiot had said that bathing in lotion made from baby foreskins, drinking bull semen, or smearing bird shit on your face was healthy, then another idiot would probably do it. In fact, all of the above are real things that people actually do to themselves in the name of health, virility and beauty. I'm quite convinced that people will do just about anything as long as it has some vague pretentions to healthiness. People are, by and large, quite stupid.

Hard to avoid bull semen these days

All this gently percolated in my mind as I lay for what felt like an eternity, gently marinading in my fish effluent wrap. For some reason he had put a wet towel on me before leaving which made breathing, the one thing I could still do, just a little bit less comfortable. His sole concession to mercy was to change the pop music to Peruvian pan flute fare, backed by the sound of gently crashing waves. A nice little reminder of the ocean home that once bore the slurry that I was now so intimately acquainted with.

Eventually the door thumped open and I would have flinched a great deal, had I the capacity to. I was diligently unwrapped and washed down with ice cold water. Quite why it was cold was a question that I didn't have the strength or aptitude to proffer. Especially to someone who spoke as much English as I did Turkish.

But it wasn't over yet. Soon I was back on the slab and having something that felt like a sheep's stomach filled with soap suds frotting all over me. This, I confess, was quite pleasurable and I found myself cracking a faint smile and the occasional giggle. It was accompanied by another hearty scrub, thankfully not with a steel wool brush.

Once complete I was led out of the room. I had wrongly assumed that this was it, but I still had another hour and a half on the clock. 'Is it over?' I enquired, a tad wearily. 'Deep tissue massage' was grunted in a thick Turkish accent from the person sitting at reception. 'Oh, good.' I pondered, unable to muster much in the way of resistance, even in thought.

Actually, I quite like painful and unnecessarily cruel massages. I would go as far as to say that I find them quite pleasurable. I recall one so vigorous and unrelenting on a beach in Burma that I was streaked with equal measure of sweat and tears by the end. It's these moments that lead me to conclude that I may be unconsciously suppressing a tendancy towards Sadomasochism. Perhaps I'll end up like Max Mosely in later life. Caught in a private dungeon, on all fours, being gleefuly whipped by a female Gestapo officer. Who knows really.

Accompanied by these slightly troubling thoughts, I was led sheepishly into a smaller massage chamber (massagerimus?) and an altogether more comfortable looking bed. The massage itself was glorious. Unfortunately I had eaten enormous quantities of beef the night before and was as windy as a Victorian steamer.

I can tell you, with great assurance, that trying not to break wind with a man pressing hard on the small of your back is a feat all into its own. I thought about trying to let it out gently, like bleeding a radiator. But I didn't trust myself enough. A mistimed release would be fatal for the fragile relationship I had built up with my new friend and tormentor. He was, after all, only about a foot from ground zero and I expect would instantly start crying blood after exposure. Such is their notoriety.

Mercifully and miraculously he seemed to massage the large volume of gas trapped inside of me upwards and into places all but unknown. Soon he had reached my shoulder which I'd buggered up spectacularly after a scooter accident two months ago. He seemed confused that one side of me felt like he was massaging a well beaten piece of mutton while the other was vaguely normal. I wanted to explain what had happened but I already knew it would lead to further confusion, or worse, another sea swamp wrap.

The final flourish was the application of an unctious, ice cold liquid to my face. It later transpired to be mud. Thoughtfully gathered from a site near their septic tank, no doubt. I was again left alone with no revealing details about what I should do with myself next. Another wilderness of waiting while my face slowly shrunk and cracked. Once again staring wide eyed at the cieling, awaiting my fate. After some time I concluded they had probably forgotten about me.

I got up and my friend hurried in and motioned to the dividing curtain. 'Is it over?' I enquired. He nodded, beaming. 'What about the mud on my face? Do I get to keep it?'. 'You wash' he said, still beaming. I thanked him for his exemplary service and quietly prayed that this was the first and last time I would be a sea excrement burrito.

A happy camper 

In truth, I was incredibly grateful for my father's generosity and did quite enjoy the overall experience. I don't believe that all life experiences should be purely thrilling and joyful. The most uncomfortable and unusual ones I often find to be the most memorable and genuinely diverting. And my skin did certainly tingle and glisten like that of a moist otter afterwards. It's all part of the rich tapestry of life and the weirdest part is I'd probably do it again. Why not toss in a shot of bull semen for good measure? Maybe even a bird shit facial. Why the fuck not, eh?
 

We're All Mad Here - Mental Health: The Elephant in the Room

As I'm more or a travel writer but I'm not doing much travelling right now, so I thought I'd try to write about a topic that is close to my heart. I was prompted to write this article after reading a widely publicised story about an office worker in Michigan who wrote the following email to her team.

'Hey Team,

I'm taking today and tomorrow to focus on my mental health. Hopefully, I'll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%.'

Thankfully her boss was not only receptive to this but held her up as an example for other employees. And as he should. There seems to be a widely held stigma that talking about your illnesses to colleagues, mental or otherwise, is somehow a weakness and likely career suicide. And I should know, I've been guilty of this kind of behaviour for over a decade. 

I've been very fortunate to have never suffered any serous or non-serious disease. All I've ever get are silly ones that inflate my face to the size of a watermelon. See exhibits No 1. and 2. below.

I was in an ambulance about thirty minutes after the bottom one was taken. 

The lone semi-chronic illness I've had to put up with is a rare nerve disease, cheerily titled Dysautonomia. It's a malfunction of your sympathetic nervous system. The part of the nervous system likely protected many of yours and my ancestors from being eaten by saber toothed tigers or falling off cliffs, so we should be eternally grateful for it. unfortunately it can decide to go haywire in spectacular fashion with symptoms varying wildly by individual. 

In my case it can gift me a kind of weird superpower of perspiring more than any human should do in situations that don't necessarily warrant it. When it's bad it throws in some severe anxiety for good measure- although it's really more just sweating/flushing/overheating that tends to be its party trick. I have absolutely zero control over when the symptoms will be more severe. It can vary from day to day or week to week. All I can do is manage them.

If this is news to you then it's because I've always been managing the symptoms in various ways. In twelve years I've seen numerous specialists, tried botox, three medications with unbearable side effects, industrial strength antiperspirants, acupuncture and other more weird and wonderful treatments. None of which have had any real measure of success. It has, and still does occasionally cause me a fair amount of emotional distress. I rarely talk about it though, probably as a result of going to an all boys boarding school where revealing any glimmer of weakness was akin to running through the streets naked, wailing and flagellating yourself with a bull whip. 

The truth is I'm extremely lucky to have this as my only long-term disorder. And I always remind myself that there are 1001 things that would be more debilitating than living with this curio of a disease, both physical mental illnesses. Over many years I've spoken with friends and family about their struggles with various bouts of depression and anxiety and have been astonished at the proportion of people I knew who were suffering from them.

Worldwide, roughly 1 in 5 people will experience some kind of mental illness during their lifetime. the vast bulk of which are anxiety and depression. Although this instance is likely to be higher as many go unreported. A third of people who self-identified as having mental illness have never been officially diagnosed. This also varies widely through combinations of economic background, race and other external circumstances. As is sadly always the case, the poorer you are the less likely you are to be diagnosed or ever treated. 

Levels of depression, anxiety, bipolar and schitzophrenic disorders are higher than they have ever been and it's getting worse. Much of this rise seems to be from a combination of demographic changes and more accurate diagnosis. Many more people live in cities, away from the comfort of a familial construct. Expectations of working hours are higher as is the level of competition for good, well paid work. The cost of living has also risen much faster in relation to average salaries. Chuck all that together and cities more than ever feel more like a hulking vampire squid that sucks the life force out of every human soul, spitting out an empty husk. 

Cities like London and New York seem especially preoccupied by how much money you're making as opposed to how happy you are and how satisfied you are with the life you have built around yourself. That and the constant sense that you are somehow missing out on fun by staying at home and you've got a perfect recipe for misery.

'Is everyone else here suffering from depression?'

'Kind of, yea'

Social media and the internet only seem to exacerbate the issue. Despite bringing us closer together as a species, we now have access to a much greater resource of supposedly happy and wealthy people whom we can constantly measure ourselves against. We too easily forget that all forms of social media are really just a veneer of real life. A sort of 'best of' reel that very rarely delves into a person's internal struggles, anxieties and traumas. It's something no one should ever take very seriously but unfortunately a lot of people do and it often makes them feel like shit. Especially after a crap day at work, a depressing date or whatever other lump of excrement life enjoys throwing at you. 

Fuck, that girl Becky I went to primary school with has some lit holiday photos from Ibiza. 

I hope that the stigma around depression and mental illness in general is finally beginning to fall away and we can actually talk about it a little more. Corporations at least appear to be tuning their human resources departments towards its recognition and providing resources towards managing it in the very workplace that has probably contributed to it. But very few people would still admit to suffering from it for fear of losing their jobs.

On the other end of the scale, there also seems to be very little recognition that mental illness reinforces poverty in developed nations. In fact the US tends to cut mental health funding first when its feeling frugal. Despite it being one of the most prevalent diseases on earth and one that leads to a costlier raft of socio-economic issues down the line. There's nothing it seems that governments like more than storing up trouble for future generations. In fact many insurance plans have absolutely no provision for mental health treatments so the average time between the onset of symptoms in America and seeking treatment is 8-10 years. That's a long time to suffer through depression. We're a bit spoilt in the UK as you can even get Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as well as a raft of other treatments free on the NHS for anyone who needs them. 

As a society if we can make some small improvements then the positive impacts down the line could be huge. Removing the stigma around it means that people are more likely to be open to friends and family, seek the right treatment and recover much faster than they normally would. Right now it feels like the elephant in the room but one, I hope, that we can all take steps to manage and understand better. I can only hope that I can do my best to communicate my feelings best when I'm going through hard times and help others as best as I can when they are. 

Recompression Sickness - Returning to London

After being away from London for six months one always expects, completely unrealistically,  that enormous amounts of things will have changed. In many ways, there have been some pretty seismic alterations to London and the country as a whole. However much of it is still hidden out of sight, while some of its changes are now painfully and plainly visible. According to Facebook there also seems to be some sort of engagement epidemic happening that must be down to some form of collective hysteria. I hope it isn't contagious as I have absolutely no imminent plans to enter into such a foolish arrangement. Life is actually bloody long so please for God's sake make sure you know what you're getting yourself into chaps. 

Aside from all the engagement nonsense not that much has really changed. London is still, and always has been a city that ceaselessly bristles with the unflinching energy of commerce. I was swiftly reminded of this as I went for a walk on Friday morning in the Democratic People's Republic of Kensington and Chelsea. For you US readers, the most conservative constituency (district) in the UK just voted in a socialist representative in our parliament. It was about as likely to happen as Mississippi electing Bernie Sanders as their Senator. But it happened and it's pretty hilarious. 

In spite of the new regime, very little had changed. The London air was pleasingly cool and the morning light was as gloriously golden as a day can be here. Yet even in this relatively tranquil parts, the city is still doused with an an aura of stress. Everywhere I wandered, office workers strafed and paced with a kind of frenzied gusto that would get you stopped by the police in NOLA. Out of habit, I made eye contact with a passing stranger and said 'Good Morning'. I was met with a pinched facial expression that was a curious mixture of 'get the fuck away from me' and 'are you handicapped?'.

Despite the beauty of the morning light, cool breezes and verdant streets, London's frenetic energy quickly gifted me a familiar and unwelcome sweat. After just fifteen minutes of exposure to London and I was beginning to perspire like a German trying to tell a joke. I recognised this as a sort of Recompression Sickness and felt that I needed some more time here to really set myself straight.  By the time I'd walked to meet my father for breakfast I had a tension headache. The last time I had one was before I left my job in November. 

Yay. Commuting. 

By the end of my first full day back, my time in New Orleans was beginning to feel like a wonderful, lucid dream. I missed her heat and the small pleasantries of her friendly inhabitants. London felt frosty, and ever so slightly depressed. Although it was Friday which likely meant that most of the people I was passing were either hung over or, more likely, still drunk. Which isn't much of a surprise. I'd barely returned and the city was very actively driving me towards drink. Not that I need a great deal of persuasion at the best of times. 

Other things about Chelsea also remained as eternal as ever. In cafes everywhere there were fleets of oleaginous old men lurking in pastel coloured suits, smoking cigarillos, sipping microscopic coffees and generally looking languorous. Often they would be wearing dark glasses and braying Italian, French or a more exotic tongue down an iPhone or down the throat of a girl so nubile and decorous that I can only assume that that they were a mistress, a prostitute or both. In fact after 9 am, the borough of Kensington and Chelsea seemed principally to consist of grey haired men in loafers boisterously conducting affairs. 

A not uncommon sight in Chelsea

Aside from that there was the occasional housewife in £800 leggings walking something that could be a dog or just a very well appointed rat. Even this activity seems to require more hours put into their appearance than the painters of the Sistine Chapel required for Michelangelo's Frescoes. Incidentally I saw a man walking a goat at a bar in NOLA once. I stared blankly at it for some time until he said 'Yes, it is a goat.' The goat then made a strange gurgling noise and they went merrily on their way together. 

Aside from well cologned leches and lechees, there were enormous numbers of people who were actively involved in either the decoration, construction, cleaning and refurbishment of homes. In fact I'm almost certain that there are more people working on homes in Chelsea during the day then there are actual residents in the borough. Especially as thy're all shuffling about trying to shag each other. 

Rumbled matey

I missed NOLA's 'I don't give a fuck' approach to life considerably and by lunch time I remembered almost all of the reasons why I left this city in the first place. There certainly still were some things I did miss about London that I never thought I'd be glad for. Bank card security for one. How a country that landed men on the moon hasn't even started widely using chip and pin for cards is beyond me. At the current rate of adoption I'll be able to make a contactless payment in 2025.

For all the strikes, delays and drunken arseholes, London's mass transit is also generally quite clean and reliable. NOLA's is so dysfunctional and slow that in six months I haven't used a bus or the streetcar once. I plan to take the streetcar one day but more as a diverting tourist attraction and perhaps some fodder for an article. Once should never use it to get from A to B, especially if you need to get to B on time. 

London also does murder, or lack thereof, pretty well too. To put it in perspective, at current trends, New Orleans has a murder rate of 44 deaths per 100,000. London's is 3 per 100,000. That means I'm about fifteen times less likely to get murdered here than back in NOLA, which is really shit, to say the least. It's the highest murder rate in America and puts it on par with Kingston, Jamaica. Chicago actually beats us in shootings per 100,000 but they are shite at aiming apparently because only one in five shootings there are lethal. NOLA is more like one in three. I'm not sure if that's a thing we should be very proud about or not. 

I have also missed the relentless politeness of the British people. They may not be the friendliest on earth (especially here) but you'll never hear more attempts to say 'sorry' in a shorter amount of time than when a Brit is accidentally nudged by a stranger on The Tube. For US readers, being nudged on The Tube is quite different to what you'd imagine it to be- The Tube is what we call a Subway or Metro here. 

Occasionally the British forget their manners

London is also gifted with an extraordinary amount of free green public spaces. Despite its massive population it's one of the least densely populated cities in the world. Every park, crescent and square is almost certain to consist of the most singular and breathtaking beauty. Except in winter and a good chunk of Autumn, of course. NOLA, conversely, is America's least forested city. Which is a great shame because the species of flora and fauna that do grow there once planted are some of the finest on earth. 

Once I had restored air to my bicycle tyres I was also reminded what it's like to cycle in a city that isn't like driving on the surface of the moon. London's roads are almost entirely free of major blemishes. NOLA's cycling infrastructure is definitely more in the 'wishful thinking' camp. There is only one single separate cycle way on a main road in NOLA and I am not exaggerating when I say that it lasts no more than twenty feet at most. There is one noticeably smooth road called Napoleon Avenue which has recently been given a face lift. It took, and this is not an exaggeration either, eight years to complete. On a stretch of road no more than three miles long. And they somehow managed to destroy the foundations of a number of historic homes in the process, on both sides of the street no less.  

When NOLA gives you lemons, put beer in it

It's this kind of willful incompetence that makes New Orleans so delightfully human though and I wouldn't have it any other way. Rather than being a source of shame it's just accepted as a general source of amusement that any large scale infrastructure project in NOLA will be extremely delayed, hugely over budget or simply won't materialise. It took London less time to build The Shard, the tallest building in Europe, than it took NOLA to re-pave a three mile road and add a slightly better storm drain and no one really batted an eyelid. 

The Shard

Despite my current au fait attitude to London, it will always be a city that belongs to me. Glorying in her luxuriously smooth roads on Celine (my bike) there isn't a single nook or cranny that doesn't seem to hold a treasured memory. Often from when I was a teenager with friends engaging in deviant activities that generally involved making general nuisances of ourselves. I still feel like I could navigate through her streets blindfolded having cycled, staggered, hobbled and jogged through so many of them. And yet there's always more to discover here. After 24 years living here I still somehow stumble into areas the size of The Vatican that are alien to me. It's a place that defies proportion and yet, doesn't have the completely overbearing quality that a city like New York or Hong King bestows upon you. 

I suppose that is the best and worst thing about this place. It's just so bloody big. I could fly to Marrakesh faster than the time it takes me to get to some of my friend's places. It's immensely frustrating but also part of this city's extraordinary appeal. It's also a place that keeps one foot deeply rooted in the past while also continually evolving at break neck speed. There are currently four hundred and fifty five skyscrapers either being built or planned in this city. It's a number that I simply can't quite wrap my head around. Then again, this is a city that I can't quite wrap my head around either. No one person can.

There are also some similarities between the two that I find hard to digest. Like NOLA, London is a city with rampant inequality between rich and poor. An issue that was highlighted by a recent fire in a tower block used for social housing. Some one hundred lives were lost in the Grenfell Tower because a shoddy refurbishment used a cheap, flammable material to coat the building and no sprinklers were installed. The sheer scale of destruction could only really be comprehended once I laid eyed on it myself. A vast, charred monolith standing like a tombstone in one of the richest areas in the world. At night there was something even more profoundly eerie about her lifeless shadow set against the twinkling, animated lights of her immediate neighbours.

NOLA also suffers from a galling level of inequality that's hard wired into its DNA. Although it's an economic disparity that falls mostly along racial lines. But instead of towers burning people alive, poverty leads to an extremely high likelihood of being shot, dying slowly from diseases related to poor diet or not receiving appropriate medical care because you can't afford it. In many ways it is so much more fucked up than London could ever be. But I still love it there and I'm proud to call it home in spite of its deep, rankling flaws. 

In any event, it's a great pleasure to be back here and to see my friends and family again. It's ultimately people that make a place and I have a goodly number of them that I love very dearly here. Life is infinitely richer for their presence in it and I'm so deeply thankful and grateful to have them. Having a very small family, I've always seen friends as an surrogate extension of my own and love many of them as dearly. 

If you're still reading by this point then firstly, well done, I know this is a long article but also thank you for being there for me. Thank you for always supporting my slightly barmy endeavours.  Thank you for being part of so many wonderful memories. Thank you for still accepting that farting loudly in public still has its merits as a form of humour. And thank you for just generally putting up with me. It's apprecaited and hasn't gone unnoticed. I'm looking forward to a fantastic summer together (unless you're in the US, in which case, see you in September).