What do you think about when not cycling?

1. Domes

“We in Turkey love domes.  We can make any building shape you like out of domes.  We make big ones then smaller ones round the edge, then smaller ones to fill in the bits.
Some people build their religious buildings with sloping roofs with straight edges but they are wrong, and we must kill them.  Other people build their religious buildings with domes and we can still kill them but then we can re-use the buildings afterwards.
Or maybe they kill us and re-use our buildings.
It all depends on which century you are in.”

2. Giving up

One of the nice things about being on a bicycle is that, almost wherever you are, if you fancy a little rest then you can just get off.  Admire the view, consult the map, and if necessary hurl the bicycle into the ditch and call a taxi.

Not that Sid and Doris ever contemplate such a thing, but it’s nice to know the option is there.

We were talking to Mark and Carolyn Kenworth (I might have to re-edit this after some fact/spell checking) who started their Epic Journey last year, taking their Westerly down through the Bay of Biscay, across to the Azores and now into the Med.  On a little boat, however horrible the weather and the experience, you can’t get off.  There is no magic line to the coastguard for you to say “I want to go home now, RIGHT NOW, make it stop”.

So next time I’m whinging about something, remind me about Mark and Carolyn.

3. What a lovely, breezy day

Gosh it is great being out in a nice fresh wind in Istanbul.  Flags fluttering, the warm air becomes pleasantly bearable, the little white puffy clouds scud across the sky, traces of white horses on the water in the Bosphorus.

Only a curmudgeon would ever moan about a nice breeze like this.

I feel a poem coming on.
When it’s breezy
Around your kneesy
Cycling must be easy peasy…
I’ll do some more work on that later.

4.  Putting cakes on paper napkins

Why do people do this?  It’s an international habit, in every country we’ve been in (or ordered cake in, which comes to approximately the same thing), they take a fabulous oozy cake and a clean washed and syrup-proof china plate and gum them together using a nasty cheap paper napkin which then sticks to everything and disintegrates when you try to peel it off.

Anyway I can’t moan too much because I think I am sinking into a small diabetic coma after eating that last piece of baklava mmmm burp pardon me.

5. Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’…

..scuba divin’ with harpoons, and barbequein’.  Here in Turkey they are very clear about what the purpose of all that outdoor activity is, and all the shops that sell camo wetsuits and guns also have barbequeue kits and bags of charcoal prominently on display at the front of the window.  Maybe to reassure The Missus At Home that you really do intend to provide for the family, not just have a nice day out with your mates.

6. Eating for duty

Gosh it is good to be back to eating what we want to, when we want to.  Only problem is that the habit of the seafood diet (old joke: see food, eat food) is now quite entrenched, so we are still looking like two rather gnarled pacmen when we are near food.

But it’s so much nicer than really having to eat food.  Sitting in a layby glumly chomping down an (otherwise delicious, in small quantities) entire caramel sesame bar washed down with lashings of warm water is unfun.

7. Playschool windows

We got thinking about jaunty children’s tv when singing our Strimmer Song, and that took us on to a discussion about the windows in Playschool.  We both liked the arch window best.  We agree that only proper people like the arch window.  Are we guilty of not running a Friends Diversity Campaign?  Should we try harder to like Round Window people or even, OMG what a challenge, Square Window people?

8. Need another challenge for Sid

You may remember a few weeks ago I successfully diverted him with “have you seen every model of Lada now?”  It’s time for another challenge.  I have toyed with “have we stayed in places starting with every letter of the alphabet” [answer: not yet C, J, O, Q, R, T, U, X, Y] but that’s not really very Bonkers.    All suggestions welcome.

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