Let the kids look out the window

As a young trainee teacher I was fortunate enough to do parts of my apprenticeship with a number of quietly inspirational classroom teachers. I was reminded of one of these figures while on a ferry ride down the Bosphorus Straits recently.

Istanbul is that most singular of cities, impossible to imagine other than exactly where it stands in wedlock between Europe and Asia. Thrice capital of Middle Earth and like all great imperial cities, it sets off echoes of others in its world heritage league. Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, Beirut, Athens all carry an Ottoman stamp first posted out through the Sea of Marmara. Gaze down old Stamboul's steep streets and across its waters to Maiden's Island and there is a glimpse of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Cross the Golden Horn by the Galata Bridge and the Rialto comes to mind. Let the eye wander along the prosperous wooded waterfront beneath the Bosphorus Bridge and Sydney Harbour becomes the comparison. Perched on the wharfside boulevard in the village of Istinye, the fishermen on Havana's Malecon would feel at home.

Taking in all these heady and fanciful comparisons from the ferry deck, we slipped past a string of Ottoman villas each with its wrought iron lace-fronted landing stage lapped by the swirling waters of the Straits. In the last of these grand reminders of a gilded age, the top storey shutters were thrown back and we were passing close enough to see the reflection of light off water dancing on the pressed ceiling of a large schoolroom. Framed in the picture window looking out over the water, was the back of a single figure I took to be the teacher. Just visible above their desk tops were rows of bobbing children's heads, craning to see beyond and behind their teacher's bulk.

I was transported back to my teacher trainee days in that loveliest of cities, Cape Town. I remembered arriving for a week's stint in a secondary school situated high on a hillside above one of the city's Atlantic-facing suburbs. The classroom to which I had been assigned commanded a particularly fine view out over Table Bay, beyond the Docks where the Dutch had landed in 1652 and away towards Robben Island, at that stage still Nelson Mandela's place of long incarceration.

The first thing I noticed as I began to prepare for my history lesson was that the teacher's desk was placed to one side away from the window with all the students' desks facing out over the Bay. Alarm bells began to ring in my eager young instructional mind. Under no circumstances did I want my students to be distracted from the vital content of my lesson. I began to swing the desks around to ensure that they all faced the blank wall on the mountain side of the classroom.

"What on earth are you doing?" The softly challenging voice belonged to the teacher who had been asked to oversee my fledgling efforts that morning. I muttered something about not wanting the kids to be looking out the window when they should be concentrating on their studies.

"But their history is all there - and their future - straight out of that window - your job is to help them make sense of what they can see right in front of them without standing in their way."

I learned more from that short exchange than most of the rest of my year's training put together and it all came flooding back as I waved at the inquisitive, cheerful faces in the school beside the Straits where Jason once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.

Dolphins on the Bosphorus

 "Do you want to sit on the Asian or the European side?"

That was the question my host asked me as we boarded her daily commuter ferry heading towards the centre of old Istanbul. There can't be too many urban transport routes where this is a relevant question. Continent-spanning cities are at a premium. Atyaru, Kazakhstan, located at the point where the Ural River meets the Caspian Sea, has a fair claim with the traffic signposts on its major motorway offering 'Europe/Asia' as alternative off-ramps. Panama City could make an argument based on a notional cut-off point between the North and South American continental masses. Reykjavik has a tentative geological claim in that it all but straddles the Atlantic tectonic plates that bind and divide Europe and North America. Port Said and Suez act as twin stitches holding Africa together with Asia across the man-made incision of the Suez Canal. The Straits of Hercules are too wide and turbulent to have allowed a joint Afro-European settlement to have developed on either side - Atlantis maybe but no Heraclinople or Gibstanbul?

No, the question applies uniquely to Istanbul. The ferry pilot tacks across the swirling currents of the Bosphorus navigating the ancient waterway with deceptive ease. Under our bows at each station, the waters churn and drag fiercely - the tides of history tugging us deeper into the heart of the city. From the Anatolian shores come the sweet, balmy waters of Asia, above the skyline of Thrace rise the competing spires of Europe. Istanbul is both mother and father to a nation.

We pass the narrowest point in the straits where Sultan Mehmet II ordered a chain link blockade to be strung from his hastily constructed M-shaped fortress in order to strangle Constantinople before entering it in 1453. Today the Fatih Sultan Mehmet suspension bridge connects the continents high above us. Migratory seabirds meeuw and swoop down from its steel cradle.

 "If we are very lucky, we may see dolphins," my host peers over the European starboard side of the boat where we have chosen to sit this morning, promising ourselves an Asian side ride on the way home. I stare intently at the roiling waters willing these graceful, intelligent creatures into sight. They are easy shapes to conjure with in the mind's eye. But none appear as we approach the Ataturk Bridge.

I suppose that if you are a dolphin in the Bosphorus, you don't have to choose between continents, between good bank or bad bank, left wing or right wing, between rival religions or even between the secular and the divine. There's just fish for tea and the freedom of the sea that made the world. 

With this juice...

I stand long and watch a juice seller in the cobbled, market streets of Istanbul leading up to the Ayasofia. His waist-height, three wheeled, rectangular wooden cart serves as the perfectly constructed and balanced platform for his art and his trade. As a robust business model it cannot be faulted.

On either side of his central fruit crusher equipment are equal piles of washed oranges and pomegranates. Taking two fruits from each pile, he juggles them briefly in an effortless display of cocktail barman's circus brilliance. The fresh fruit globes fall with a satisfying plop into a hand and are lined up one-two, one-two on his scarred wooden chopping board. A lethal blade flashes four times and the eight halves tremble gently on their backs.

Then each half section is placed juice side down on a circular metal pyramid resembling a small, ringed bee-hive - and summarily executed. I notice that the executing lever is in the form of a metal cross whose inverted cup presses down firmly on its mosque dome shaped counterpart. Into a small tin cup beneath, a fragrant juice trickles.

'One lira Turkish,' he proffers a single cup of his freshly-squeezed, transformed essence of life's goodness. What price a few precious drops of life-taken, lifeblood juice?


 

Dry stone walling

Every organised society throughout history has piled stone on stone to make walls. Walls that are practical statements of protection, possession, wealth and control. Structures that take on a particular beauty in the eye of the builder.

Over time they weather, settle and collapse - open quarries in need of repair. In the UK alone there are reportedly 125 000 miles of dry stone field walls - sufficient to girdle the earth five times.

In one bleak corner of the island, a hardy band of dry stone wallers has gathered to repair one small section of wall forming part of a war memorial park. Grizzled veterans of many years lugging Pennine stone slabs across Cheshire bog and heath are joined by a group of volunteers all strangely drawn to this daftest of outdoor pursuits on the wettest, windiest weekend of a damp, gusting year. It was billed as a 'taster workshop' for amateur, aspiring wallers like myself.

'Welcome,' booms Barry, our works foreman for the day and chairman of the local Dry Stone Walling Association. 'Let's get on with it.' Barry is not one for unnecessary introductions and flowery words of workshop intent. He points to a plie of stone and tugs the largest piece over to where he wants a new lines of stone graded and arranged aslant for easy access.

His assistant, Dora, hands out carefully prepared name badges. The ink is already running in the drizzle. I begin to pin mine onto a lapel, veteran of many a workshop that I am. 'No, not there,' Dora corrects my fumblings, 'we pin our names to the back of our caps - that's the only part of you we will be seeing for most of the weekend.' Straight away I felt initiated into the wry, upside down, practical stonemasonry of the dry waller. It is indeed a different world.

The Land of the Blind

In 667BC Byzas, son of King Nisos of Megara, was contemplating a multi-billion drachma new investment designed to secure his strategic footprint in the Eastern Mediterranean. As part of his due diligence process, and at his anxious father’s insistence, he consulted with the Oracle at Delphi – an early investment market analyst with a track record of vague but somehow portentous economic forecasts. It seemed a reasonable first step for a young venture capitalist king determined to make his mark.

“Build your city opposite the ‘Land of the Blind’,” intoned the Oracle. So, a contrarian view seeking undefended exposure in emerging markets, thought the old man. Once young Byzas actually consulted his charts, he discovered that ‘The Land of the Blind’ was in fact an insider trading nickname for Chalcedon, an early Greek colony founded on the eastern approach out of the Sea of Marmara into the Bosphorus Straits. Inexplicably, the Chalcedonians had failed to spot the real prize directly opposite them.

The real prize lay on the western shore of the Straits where the rocky promontory of Stamboul and its natural harbour of the Golden Horn provided the perfect defensible position - a pinch point commanding the entire system of seaways linking the Mediterranean with the hospitable, sweet waters of Pontos or the ‘Black Sea'. Not so fast, Jason, my friend, never mind the Golden Fleece, we charge highway poll tax here – per Argonaut. Ching-ching.

And thus Byzantium – the rest is history. 

As a young man, King Byzas was able to close his eyes, shut out the noise and listen hard to the cryptic, inner wisdom of the Oracle. As a result he could ‘see’ the invisible strategic landscape beneath the geographical one that had ‘blinded’ his competitors. It is the same experience that thousands of leaders have today when they enter a ‘Dialogue in the Dark’ workshop and spend time with blind coaches in total darkness reflecting on the crowded noisiness of their markets and their lives. 

Some emerge to make clear and far-sighted next moves - others return to their ‘Land of the Blind’. 

You walk like a Turkish

"You walk like a Turkish." The voice that hailed me was that of a young man following me across Istanbul's Hippodrome. I turned to see who my tracker was, intrigued by the quaint nationality adjective-turned-noun switch of his greeting - if it was a greeting.

"Is that a good thing?" I asked my new companion - for he had quite naturally fallen into step alongside me as we crossed the broad boulevard heading towards the Blue Mosque. Over to our left lay the bulk of Ayasofya another in Istanbul's imperial garland of holy jewels. Emre, as he cheerfully introduced himself, was a friendly, engaging fellow, well suited to the profession of tour guide which he revealed was his career ambition. He laughed delightedly at my pointed question and avoided it like any good guide asked for an unnecessary judgement.

"You want to see Sultanahamet Mosque, you better walk quicker, they start to pray there soon." I tried to up my pace, finding it difficult with the after effects of recent bi-lateral meniscal repair surgery still painfully seizing up my knee joints. I began to understand how I might have been mistaken from behind for a Turkish pensioner out for a walk in the autumn sunshine. I was wearing a pair of borrowed trainers, my grey suit trousers more appropriate to the conference I had come to Istanbul to run, a knee length black dust jacket of the kind worn by storemen and kindly donated to me by a neighbour in a recent clear-out and in my hand I carried a plastic bag stuffed with notebooks and newspapers. He had a point.

Indeed as I entered the serene orbit of the Blue Mosque, it occured to me that I had more Turkish in me than perhaps I realised. Earlier that morning I had been in a Turkish bath house rubbing myself down with a coarse towel before sipping steamed tea and nibbling a piece of rosewater infused pistachio sweet from a stall in the Grand Bazaar. Here in the outer courtyard of the mosque I was admiring yards of blue ceramic tiles with their myriad tulip designs. Towels, tiles, tea and tulips were all Turkish inventions claimed my self-appointed tour guide - with different degrees of justification, I felt.

We approached the entrance to the mosque where stewards were on duty turning tourists away from entering the vast hall beneath its worshipful dome at the start of Friday prayers. "Only prayers, no tourists now." Their instructions were clear, firm and entirely reasonable. I bent down with some difficulty to remove my borrowed trainers and placed them on the shelving provided. I drew my dust jacket around my plastic bag, hitched up my baggy trousers and shuffled forwards. "I am told that I walk like a Turkish," I said.

 "You are welcome, amca, enter."

The newspaper vendor of Istanbul

People are kind to cats in Istanbul. I know this because a cat told me. She was sitting selling newspapers just off the Galata Bridge that spans the Golden Horn. It's a strategically located transport node where today ferry, metro, dolmus taxi and pedestrian flows converge much as ancient trade routes converged on Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul itself. It is a prized pitch by any cat's standards. I say selling newspapers - they are actually free editions of a city paper but any donations of crumbled cat food are happily accepted as payment in kind. When I reached down to stroke my newspaper vendor, she cocked one calico ear towards me and accepted her homage with long-suffering good grace. Thousands of commuters, shoppers, tourists, traders, fishermen, students, children pass her station every day and yet her trust in the open, extended human hand is undiminished. That must be one of the finest accolades that any city can earn. Now take your newspaper and bring me some simit on the way home.

Tractor Time

A couple of days ago I pulled out of our drive and set off towards Helsby straight down Primrose Lane. Immediately ahead of me my path was blocked by a lumbering tractor. Now many of you will know this stretch of road intimately, having navigated it successfully countless times. You will know just how inadvisable it is to attempt any sort of overtaking manoeuvre at this point. So I tucked in to chug along in the slipstream of the old workhorse and began my slow descent. I found that I had plenty of time to look around the autumn landscape. Really look around for a change. I hadn’t appreciated just how much of the Liverpool skyline is visible in the view across the Mersey; how much of the Rock you can actually see across the Walnut Tree Farm fields; how you can see details on the frontage of houses in Hapsford; the extent to which the splayed fingers of the dead tree just above the disused railway cutting are covered in ivy mittens; just how vivid a variety of leaf colours is represented in this year’s palette. A normal minute’s flash drive turned into a leisurely scenic tour of our soothing countryside. There are times for the motorist when a wide, slow-moving piece of agricultural kit or a procession of cows up ahead can be stressful – an extra impediment in our obstacle strewn day – the straw that makes the camel late for its appointment with a needle and all the other muddled thinking and decision-making that can take place behind the wheel of a powerful car in a narrow lane. On this particular occasion, I was very glad of the unexpected opportunity to take the slow road and to think clearly and calmly for a moment. Thanks Geoff.