I'm completely in love with Turkey. Every day is full of strange and lovely things to see and do.
I only wish I knew what everyone was saying.
Even when they are speaking English, I am not entirely sure what's going on. The restaurants all try to lure you in and one excitable chap seemed to be promising "no arse holes". In fact, he was promising "no hassles".
I love the way the old chaps walk around holding hands. I think it would be so nice if my Dad and, say, his old friend Warren Cooper wandered the streets of Queenstown like that.
And while the dear old chaps are strolling around hand-in-hand or enjoying backgammon or dominoes in a cafe, their wives are working hard carrying enormous sacks of vegetables to market.
I must say my mother could learn a thing or two about hard work. I'll tell my Dad to buy a 25kg bag of spuds for her to practise with.
Life aboard was all so simple when we were just tied up on the waterfront in a big town. On Sunday, we decided it was time to hit the high seas, and we hit them big time by going to Rhodes in Greece.
I noticed that the books I had bought my darling for his holiday reading had the ominously prophetic titles Only Time Will Tell and For Those in Peril.
We are still afloat and not divorced and our skipper still seems to like us, but the boat, the marriage and the skipper could all have gone after the thrills of our Greek sojourn. It was thrilling enough wondering if we had enough fuel to get all the way there, but even more adrenaline got added to the mix when we tried berthing.
I'm not the helping sort on boats. I always go below and hide so that no-one shouts at me.
The no-one is usually my darling. I didn't really see anything of Rhodes until all the engines were off, but I did hear some nasty words being said, and mostly by people in other boats.
We don't know anything at all about these sort of boats, or about the rules in Greek marinas, and the other teeny tiny complication is that our skipper doesn't speak much English, and we speak almost no Turkish.
Somehow our skipper managed to get my darling and Johnny Martin, who has made a surprise visit, to do what was required and Miranda was safely tied up.
Or so we thought.
Horrid noises on boats are very horrid and wake you quickly. At 6am, we were all up and worrying. A very cross man in tiny white underpants and a gold cross was leaping around and his even crosser wife was saying how much she hated Turks and gullets. It was lucky for New Zealand that we were flying the American flag on our US-registered boat. It would have done nothing for our reputation as a nation of great sailors to have had anyone think we were New Zealanders!Once everyone's anchor chains had been untangled, it was just a matter of backing back into our berth but our neighbours had suddenly got very unfriendly and one Frenchman kept shouting "Go Haway! Go Haway!"
Our Turkish skipper luckily didn't understand and we backed in with only one fender management issue resulting in a bent stanchion - and even that was solved with nice, tidy cash.
We are getting better at this boating business, though.
Twice since then I have stayed up top throughout the entire process of berthing, and have even learnt to tie on fenders and not talk to the neighbours while I am meant to be working.
All this learning about boats has eaten into my reading time but I have just finished David Vann's Legend of a Suicide.
The author's father shot himself at the age of 40 but this book is not autobiographical.
The blurb on the back is most misleading, and if you read it knowing that each chapter is a separate story exploring the different ways things might have happened, you won't get as lost working out what's happening.
I felt so uneasy reading the story where Roy and his father plan to spend the winter in the Alaskan outback. Everything about the story is chilling and lonely and absolutely nothing made me want to join them there.
I was right to feel chilly reading it - it's bleak and spare and horribly unforgettable.
Even Lionel Shriver, the author of the seriously chilling We Need to Talk about Kevin, said it was so hard to put Vann's book down that she was thinking of suing him for several hours of lost sleep.
I'm sure you'll feel the same.
Huge congratulations for Niamh Peren who featured in the Cannes prize-winning short film Blue - I do love it when our local kids do well!
