Eighty Per Cent

Day one hundred and two, Turkey. Inflation here is running at eighty per cent and climbing. People are not having an easy time of it. At home the energy prices are going up and the euro has started to move in the same direction, and the years of simply having enough are behind us.

What is different here is that the Turks know how to live in a crisis, that the way they treat each other takes the edge off it, and that even when the day is hard they behave as though life were the point.

Come here as a guest and you sit down at a table with too much on it. People are open with you and want to know who you are, and there is nothing behind the question.

The weeks in Istanbul leave me wishing we could find our way back to that at home, under the caution we have buried it in.

If you don't know what I mean, go and eat with them. Listen. Tell them about your life. Then you will feel the thing I can't get into a sentence.

With greetings from Ersan and Sevgi.