Met up with a friend in the pub last night. We had a couple of drinks in the centre of town, no-one started shouting “TIME!” or taking our drinks away from us, and we made our way home at about 11.25 because we both had work in the morning.
Do you see what kind of crazed havoc Tony B.(O. O. Z. E.)lair is wreaking on our fair nation? Oh my GOD we’re all going to die! Etc.
Devastating political satire for Daily Mail readersAnyway, my friend was just in Istanbul. She was staying in a youth hostel, along with an English friend she went there to meet. The first night she meets a bunch of people in the hostel, including Aidan the Australian backpacker and Tariq the half-Australian half-Turk. Party mode is set to “turbo” and,
lightweight that she is, she crashes out at about six in the morning. She wakes at two in the afternoon to discover Aidan and Tariq have been arrested.
Tariq had actually been ready to go home at 1am. “I’ve got work tomorrow,” he had said wearily. Then Aidan had offered him a
pill (none of yer tat). “…Okay,” says Tariq. Tariq and Aidan steam on, leaving lesser partyers in their wake.
In the morning, the guy my mate had gone to Istanbul to see is having a coffee in the hostel kitchen and surveying the view of the
Hagia Sofia, Istanbul’s almost-premier tourist attraction (second only to the Blue Mosque).
Istanbul’s almost-premier tourist attractionThen he looks more closely. There appears to be something moving on its roof. Two somethings, in fact. He puts on his glasses and discovers what you might have already guessed: Aidan and Tariq have
scaled the Hagia Sofia, and are now wandering around on the roof taking in the view.
They have already noticed the crowd of police swarming below, but, still full of alcohol and pills, decide that they are not yet ready for the ensuing
shitstorm, so sit and have a quiet, contemplative cigarette before descending.
When they finally make it to the ground, Tariq
panics and tries to leg it. He’s caught within seconds, and he and Aidan are shackled together and bundled into a police car.
Even before the British Embassy bombing, Istanbul could safely be considered a
jumpy town. Ever alert for al-Qaeda “events”, the police would have been forgiven for taking a sterner view of intruders on the roof of the Hagia Sofia, especially intruders who then tried to run away. However, not only are Tariq and Aidan bullet-hole free, but the police proceed to drive them around the sleazy part of town for about an hour playing
loud techno, driving slowly past all the Russian prostitutes: “Boys, you want fuck?” “How much you pay in London?”
Eventually, however, even the Turkish police feel it’s probably time to charge these two, and take them to the police station, where they spend the night before going up in front a judge the next morning. Passports could be confiscated, dodgy work permits revoked, prison ordered. Instead, rather in the manner of a magistrate in a PG Wodehouse novel passing sentence on Bertie Wooster for knocking off a
policeman’s helmet, he fines them and warns them not to do it again. They are free by lunchtime.
Probably my favourite thing about the whole endeavour is the moment when, as they’re part-way up the mosque on the cusp of dawn, the
muezzin in a nearby minaret suddenly strikes up with the
call to prayer. Tariq instantly abandons the climb, kneels on a precarious ledge, faces Mecca and prays. He may be fucked on booze and pills and perched on the edge of what was for a long time one of Islam’s most revered mosques, but he’s still a good Muslim.
So is there a moral to this tale?
None that I can see.
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