The Landlady on an English werewolf in Turkey
I am on a flight back from Turkey, having just spent a few days there furnishing my new house and making sure that things like the toilet, the shower and the fridge work properly. I flew out on the same flight as a pensioner who also has a house in my village. He is perfectly charming and I like him a lot, but he has a reputation – which he thoroughly enjoys – of being a bit of a ladies man, so I was quite relieved when I realised that I wouldn’t be sitting next to him on the plane. At the airport, I noticed that I’d met the girl on the departure gate the previous Saturday in the Lion and Lobster and when she recognised me, she put us in the Speedy Boarding queue, which was rather impressive. Once settled into my seat, some six rows away from the elderly Romeo, one of the cabin crew came and told me they’d arranged for me to sit next to ‘my partner’.
“He’s not my partner,” I screamed, rather a little too loudly, causing the steward to back away in shock… “but I’ll sit next to him anyway,” I added, lowering my voice a little.
“My ‘partner’ was rather disgruntled when the waiter asked if he was my ‘Pappie’”
My ‘partner’ nodded off during most of the flight, but not before, hearing I’m a writer, reading some romantic song lyrics he’d written to me very loudly. On landing in Turkey, the weather was dismal with howling wind and heavy rain, and we took a mini-bus to Marmaris, where my friend’s car was waiting for him to drive us onwards to our village. We had a kebab – what else? – in order to re-fuel and my ‘partner’ was rather disgruntled when the waiter asked if he was my ‘Pappie’, which, given the 24-year age gap was not beyond the realms of possibility. He protested that I most certainly was not, which then gave the impression to the surrounding people that I was probably his much younger, gold-digger of a girlfriend. I was not impressed. I became even less impressed when, as we crawled along the hairpin bends of the mountainous, deserted, treacherous road in the pouring rain, my ‘partner’ in travel proceeded to put on a CD of him singing some of his songs, which I will not describe further than they were in a ‘jazz’ style and not quite as polished as they might have been. Not only were they interminable, but as each new one blasted into my aural stratosphere, he turned the volume up a few notches, so it was eventually on 38… It was so loud, that had I wound the window down, we might have looked like a pair of ancient hip-hoppers cruising back to our ‘crib’. I don’t know why, but with the desolation of the surroundings and ’50s music, I was reminded of a scene from the ’80s film An American Werewolf in London… Suffice it to say, that two hours later, I was very glad to see the sign to our village.
