THE REALLY TRUE STORY OF OUR LIVES (The Really Wheely True Story)

This is Ruth micrseconds before the sack of coal hit her.











ACTUALITY – OR THE REALLY TRUE STORY OF OUR LIFE

We have been giving you a false impression of our life in Laika, - and as I said to John, we have been boring the pants off you with pictures of beautiful historic ruins –
So this is what Wheely Cabin existence is at grass root level, - no beauty or history – just us two less impressive ruins! Here are some photos of what we mostly do!

Washing up – done in cold water - in the dark very often, but by John. He is very possessive about this chore. I can’t think why. It is the worst job of all and I don’t fight him for it. Plastic camper ware is grotty and stains easily. Large swathes of Europe don’t use teapots. We have broken two teapots but pretentiously we don’t use teabags so we now have half a Turkish teapot. We are wearing out the wine glasses but then the quality of wine we drink does dissolve plastic. Our guts do regenerate enough for us to keep going which is more important.

We used to leave the washing up bucket outside the van for the morning but the attentions of stray dogs are a problem. John has only his right Croc left at present as the left was carried off to some creature’s lair. So far only right shoes have washed up on the beach.
There is now an update on this! John decided to follow the camp puppy over the sand dunes and found his Croc a couple of properties further along – chewed but usable. We have also been woken by cats trying to get into the Wheely cabin – we found one tucked up asleep on the mosquito mesh under the roof vent one morning. I was kind to a cat once and then had to get under the van and fight her for our loaf of bread!
Here we are plagued by biting flies – the kind that cause dogs to lose their ears!

Laundry – occasionally done in the Chinese clockwork machine at great length and with maximum labour, usually by me. Washing machines are never in English and are very slow and sometimes don’t wash at all. Ironing is never done but there appear to be no putzi flies (maggot flies to the uninitiated) and I find careful folding of dry linen into our small spaces works pretty well as a press. I also make the bed. It requires agility and good humour and I make sure the sand is on John’s side as he wears shoes in the Wheely Cabin whereas I claim I don’t. Bedding gets washed less often than in Cranfield but it gets aired if the weather allows. Our silk sheets have been great as they dry fast!

Our current loo and shower is in a half-finished block and is cold water only. So I swim a couple of times a day and rinse off under the beach shower. We rigged the solar shower but it isn’t a perfect answer by any means. John shaves, dips less frequently than me in the sea – maybe the next place will have hot showers?

We have a garden as you see but the mould that grows on veggies in the inconstant cold of the fridge is possibly more exciting and possibly would be good for us too.

We have run out of food here at Osay Camping today. The whole area is a tourist resort and the small shops have almost nothing worth eating let alone buying. We will have to visit the nearest town by dolmus tomorrow. Restaurants are more expensive here too – in quite a bit of Turkey it is as cheap to eat out as in which has given me a pleasant break from cooking. For economic and health reasons we have not eaten processed or ready meals. Managing to cook varied meals from similar ingredients has been quite an achievement. John is rather careful about waste to put it mildly and the sparrows have a hard time getting breadcrumbs off our table! We are both quite pleased with ourselves as we enjoy our food, throw almost nothing away and don’t spend too much either.

Food has not been that simple to acquire. For the first 4 months we had a choice of pork and veal only. John doesn’t eat chicken which is universally available. Fish can be got but in many places it is imported from somewhere far away and is frozen or pickled! In Croatia fish could only be got in restaurants and the Mediterranean is fished out according to a British scuba diving contact.
Romantic notions about living off local produce have proved difficult to fulfil. You don’t just pull Laika over to buy from a roadside stall. There may not be parking and you may not have change. We would use markets but campsites are not accessible except by public transport and no one sane lugs their potatoes and wine round sight-seeing.
Another update - Today we shopped in Manavgat some 10 km away. It was all bazaars of tat for tourists and we walked miles to find fish, meat bread and a small supermarket. When we got back to the bus there was a rioting mob of German tourists (German school half term) trying to get on the dolmus and it took us a while to get home. We had grilled dorada (fish) for supper and then there was the washing up in cold water.

Like all of you we have been smacked hard by the low value of the pound and the crashing banks so our careful financial planning is way off reality. However there is no going back so the trip is just more costly than we hoped. Our biggest problem is the cost of phoning. We thought we had it sorted when we left but 3Skype is a failure. It could work with easy access to internet if we could phone and guarantee speaking to people when we were online. We haven’t made use of local phone cards but again calling from phone boxes would only work if people were home when we called. We are dependent on our mobiles. If darling people would use discount phone lines to call us back occasionally like dear K and B does we should be thrilled. We do know that phones are a big cost for all of us.

Anyhow we are also here to work. John does get stuck into his PhD when we are in one place for a while. He then has a number of agitated discussions with his printer and laptop about their performance that can be heard at a distance. People probably think that he is using that rude word to admonish me. The guitar needs tuning so it has to be kept quiet. I am struggling to put together ideas and concepts for my planned exhibition with K in Cambridge next year. Getting hands-on as I need to is harder in the space with my style of working on 6ft canvases where I throw paint around.

We were foolishly naïve about the impact of the trip on the two of us. Instead of 4 pub nights, Swalocs, work and parties, John just has me. Instead of women friends and family, art and work and book club, I just have John. We are still trucking but it has been close on a number of occasions. We don’t argue over where, why, when or what but John is from Somerset and I’m not, so there is a very loud culture clatter from time to time, and then again. I miss my family very much and John misses his.

We are enjoying this experience a great deal most of the time as you can probably see from our blog. The blog does take up our time though! I spend several hours downloading photos and cropping them etc before putting them on the blog but the biggest problem is the internet. It hasn’t proved expensive like the phones but it sometimes inconvenient and uploading the blog also takes ages. Please if the blog is boring or doesn’t tell you anything you want to know – do tell us. We might change it for you!