| Current music: | Sure on this Shining Night: Morten Lauridsen |
it's a wrap.
Well, that's the Sesame Tree studio segments shot. The series closer was a musical extravaganza. I operated one of the secondary puppets (Jim-Joe, it'll all make sense I assure you.) Of course it's shit all the fun is ended, but it's going to be a terrific show. Now going down with the man-flu that laid low Director Dez and producer Candy. Still somehow finding time to proceed with The Dervish House.
Turkey. Still processing. Wonderful and alien, yet familiar. Istanbul is one of the great end-point destinations and you can even fly direct from Dublin for a stggering small sum. Contemplating a return trip in February. Ballooning over Cappadocia (as seen on Michael Palin). The water really is turquoise and you swim over sunken Lycian tombs. saw the most sfnal thing I've seen in ages, which is the town of Demre. St Nicholas was born here (and saved two poor women from a life of prostituion by placing alms in their hung-up stockiong, and so it goes). It has a statuie of the classic Norman Rockwell Santa in the centre of the town, which look a bit odd in bright autumn sunlight next to the mosque. But what rocked me was that it's Trantor-lite. This is the heart of the tomato and aubergine gowing region and Every. Square. Foot. is covered in greenhouses and polytunnels. Only the very occasional olive grove and house protudes from the unbroken curves of plastic and glass. The only exposed ground are roads. It's got a beach, so Russian fly down over the Blck Sea in their droves, stay in weird hotels looking out over the shining landscape, walk down to the sea between the glass and plastic walls, get drunk on the beach and then walk back up to the hotel again through the roofed-in landscape. That is so going in.
It's only now the pressure is off that the whole thing is decompressing.
Too many cities of antiquity to contemplate, but the one which, for me, had the greatest sense that the old gods were hovering close, their feet just above the ground, was Aphrodisias. It didn't have the magnificence of Ephesus (and certainly not the crowds, there were fifty people in Aphrodisias, plus a lot of the mandatory Turkish cats), nor the vertiginous thrill of the acropolis of Pergamon, but there was a tremendous stadium where the Pythian games were staged, and Aphrodite felt very near.
Totally unrelated, my Hugo arrived, after sitting in Holywood Post Ofice for two weeks after Parcelforce delivered it to the wrong PO (not the one two minuites walks down the road on Abbey Ring) and my paying a 12 quid Saturday delivery charge, never mind the alleged customs duty which came to 57 notes (of course it's not elligible for it, but you have to pay it first then claim it back. Wait until they see the interest I'll charge Customs and Revenue for an unauthorised loan from me to them.) But Ultraman is up on his shelf looking very skiffy.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ianmcdonald) wrote,
