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Springtime Books
Jack Scott Books
Springtime Books
Category:
Biography
Publisher: Springtime Books
ISBN-10: 099323772X
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 344
Copyright: May 18, 2015
ISBN-13: 9780993237720
Price: $7.49 (eBook)
Early retirement was never supposed to be like this.
Six months into their Turkish affair, Jack and Liam, a gay couple from London, took lodgings in the oldest ward of Bodrum Town. If they wanted to shy away from the curtain-twitchers, they couldn’t have chosen a worse position. Their terrace overlooked Turkey Street like the balcony of Buckingham Palace and the middle-aged infidels stuck out like a couple of drunks at a temperance meeting. Against all the odds, the boys from the Smoke were welcomed into the fold by a feisty mix of eccentric locals and a select group of trailblazing expats, irresistible ladies with racy pasts and plucky presents.
Hop aboard Jack’s rainbow gulet as he navigates the choppy waters of a town on the march and a national resurgence not seen since Suleiman the Magnificent was at the gates of Vienna. Grab your deckchair for a whirlwind tour of love and duty, passion and betrayal, broken hearts and broken bones, dirty politics and the dawn of a new Ottoman era.
Excerpt
In the autumn of 2009, Jack and Liam, a work-weary middle-aged gay couple, fled the Smoke and dropped into Bodrum to claim their place in the sun. Turkey had become a destination of choice for thousands of desperados leaving behind the daily grind or snapping up a cheap bolthole for the summer sabbatical. Like Jack and Liam, most clung to the narrow strip running along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, the part of Turkey best suited to Western sensibilities. The country’s burgeoning popularity had transformed large swathes of the chiselled coastline beyond recognition. Just as Spanish-style costas spread like a virus, conurbations of anonymous boxy resorts marched relentlessly up hill and down dale. The Land of the Sunrise gave up her Tiffany Blue waters and pine smothered mountains for the single-minded pursuit of jam today.
While Jack and Liam were pitching their tent, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, was taking his seat at the G20 Summit of the World’s major economies in Pittsburgh. Erdoğan could be forgiven for looking a little smug. The great, the good and the baffled were scratching their heads trying to respond to the biggest financial crisis since the Great Crash of 1929. Yet Turkey was weathering the storm remarkably well and had just entered the top flight, the ultimate validation of Erdoğan’s stewardship of the Turkish economy. A few years earlier, it had been all so different. Following decades of endemic financial instability, chronic inflation, wild runs on the currency and international bailouts, the Turkish banking system had finally snapped, suffering its own meltdown long before the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States set off a train of events that brought global capitalism teetering over the edge. Turkey may have been NATO’s eastern anchor with its second largest army, but it was the IMF calling the shots. The Government of the day acted quickly and decisively, reforming the banking sector and restructuring public debt. Little good it did them. A few months on, Erdoğan’s AK Party swept to power on a high tide of expectation. The new Islamic-leaning Government jump-started the economy with tax reforms and a round of Thatcherite privatisations. In just seven years, Turkey recorded the kind of spectacular growth the West could only fantasise about. With a competitive, robust and well capitalised financial sector and money worth the paper it was printed on, Erdoğan could afford to cock a snook at the flatlining European Union and drag his feet on Turkey’s application to join the club. For the first time since the fall of the Ottomans, Turkey had a seat at the top table rather than standing at the end of it begging for a hand-out. Yes, Prime Minister Erdoğan had good reason to be smug.
He wasn’t the only one. More by luck than judgement, Jack and Liam had stumbled into Yalıkavak, a former sponge diving village neatly tucked away behind a mountain pass twenty kilometres from Bodrum. Quickly ensconced in an oversized villa, three loos for two, gin clear skies and a supercharged view of the Aegean, it was all a perfect antidote to the no-time-to-talk, coffee-on-the-go culture of metropolitan London. But within weeks, a glorious autumn of sunset cocktails and moonstruck nights was sullied by an expat rat pack and drenched by the wettest winter Asia Minor had seen since Noah. Winter thundered violently ashore – all crash, bang and wallop – and as brutal winds battered the dream, al fresco hedonism gave way to herringbone slippers and sheepskin muffs. Warmed by logs, layers and vats of local plonk, they sidestepped the living dead in Primark fleeces and battened down the hatches. When a perfidious landlord tried to sell their home from under them, Jack and Liam knew the game was up. They repacked their saddle bags, abandoned swivel-eyed suburbia and rode to Bodrum Town for Earthly Paradise Number Two.
Welcome to the sequel of Jack Scott’s award winning debut book, ‘Perking the Pansies, Jack and Liam move to Turkey.’ Act Two brings their Anatolian affair, twisting and turning, to its surprising finale.
Editor’s Note
For non-British readers who may be stumped (itself a cricketing term) by some of Jack’s racy idioms and cultural references, you will find A Word or Two in British at the end of the book. Likewise, readers who are unfamiliar with the language of the sultans will find A Word or Two in Turkish bringing up the rear. Jack likes to be educational as well as decorative.
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