The Landlady & the gas episode
After I’d recovered from the rather strange car journey to my new home in a tiny Turkish village, I was keen to go out and buy some furniture so I could actually sleep there. I looked in one furniture shop, where the assistant followed me around so closely that I almost offered her a piggy back. It would have been handy that she was there if I had any questions, but it transpired that she couldn’t speak any English and I can’t speak Turkish, so she couldn’t answer my questions anyway. Luckily, my friend B from the village was with me and she speaks good Turkish, so we managed to jointly decide that the shop was too expensive and moved onto the next one up the road.
The next shop was a resounding success and I purchased the first item I saw – a lovely sofa bed and a bed and mattress too, giving me a choice of things to sleep on. Even though it was a public holiday and his delivery man had gone home, the owner promised that he would deliver it to my little house one and a half hours later. We then realised that we didn’t know the address of the little house, so B had to draw a map so the delivery driver could find it. I was fairly dubious whether it would actually arrive, but sure enough on the dot of 5pm, two men came marching through my front gate with my sofa bed. Before they entered the house, they took their shoes off! This was quite alarming as I’m used to the traditional British ways of arriving late then trampling filth all through the house.
“The rooster next door sounds like the feathered equivalent of a bad contestant on The X Factor”
I slept very well, falling asleep to the sound of dogs barking across the valley and waking briefly at 5am to the mystical sound of the mosque. Rather less pleasant was the sound of the rooster next door, who sounded like the feathered equivalent of a bad contestant on The X Factor.
I had connected my gas canister the previous night – a very exciting moment – and boiled myself a couple of eggs for breakfast. As I sat in the yard relaxing over a coffee, a man smoking a fag strolled past leading a horse.
A few minutes later, my friend B and her husband T popped round with their dogs, so I made them a coffee. T is a fabulous character, but he is a ‘doer’ and can’t sit still if DIY needs to be done. He’s helped me endlessly with the house, changing locks here and fixing faulty electrics there. Rather than to sit and drink his coffee, he set about ‘checking’ that I’d connected the gas properly. All of a sudden, there was a loud, fairly ominous hissing sound and he calmly asked B to help him move the canister outside as it was ‘faulty’. Once they’d wrested the canister into the yard, T took his finger away from the valve and litres of gas pumped out at an alarming pressure. Thinking that it might explode, T rolled it out of the gate and let it roll down the hill and into the field at the bottom, where it continued to spew out high pressured gas for 15 long minutes. Lucky that the man smoking had already passed by really.
