No cause for her pain found

It's been almost fourteen months since my last confession post which is such a humongous timelapse there is no other proper way to explain all my goings-on during this time except through the use of a frenetic, nonsensical mind map, which you can enlarge or ignore according to your level of interest:


But basically, all you really need to know is that the past fourteen months culminated in a gazillion recent medical tests, which can all be neatly summarised in this pleasingly existential diagnosis, below, which also inspired the title of this post, as well as—with eerie, retrospective, ultrasonic insight—the past 31 years of my life in general:


And now that you know the exact size in millimetres of my left ovary, let me tell you even more about myself c. 2011. Five days ago I moved to Istanbul, which is where (as you would know if you have ever imbibed more than half a bottle of anything with me) I lived for one year as a 17-year-old exchange student. I've been wanting to come back for years, and suddenly a situation has come up where I get to live in a magnificent multi-storey, artist-run space that also has trapeze fitness classes twice a week and a terrace that looks out onto the Golden Horn:


It's stunning! I love being back here so much. To celebrate my newfound happiness, here is a quick story. Last night my new friends took me out, and over a feast of pancakes, one of them—an American who has lived in Istanbul for years—told me about the time she and a group of friends were violently attacked down the road by some glue-sniffers who were trying to sell them a coat and who ended up stabbing them. The story was compelling for many reasons, not least because the location of the attack was within a kilometre radius of where we were sitting, and also because she is now married on Facebook to the man she met the night they got attacked, and will marry him in real life just as soon as they can both find their birth certificates. (FACT YOU SOMETIMES FORGET: While you don't need a birth certificate to get married on Facebook, you do in real life.)

Anyway, obviously I wanted to hear to the end of this romantic tale, but after just two cuba libres my jetlag—which I thought had disappeared quite impressively after a nice day of sleep when I first arrived—came back to settle itself upon my eyelids like butterflies made out of elephants. I simply couldn't keep my eyes open, and regretfully announced it was time for this Australian to get on her kangaroo and hop home to bed.*

(*I didn't say this. I would never say anything like this. I don't even know why I'm saying it now.)

I asked my hosts—directing the question with particular pointedness to the friend with the stabbing story—if it was safe to walk home. She described for me a simple calculation I can use whenever required: Before Midnight = Totally Safe, but After Midnight = Get a Cab.

I checked my watch, and seeing that it was 11.30pm I put on my coat and prepared to walk home. However, due to the entertaining bon vivant qualities of my friends, somehow I didn't actually end up leaving the bar until close to 1am, which rendered necessary a revised calculation: After Midnight = Get a Cab.

The cab driver was young and all I could see of him were his eyebrows in the rearview mirror, which made me trust him because they were well-tended eyebrows, which I respect in both men and women alike. The thing about the neighbourhood I'm living in right now is that it's an industrial area and apparently most cab drivers are like, "What? You want to go there? But noone lives there," and they refuse to take you. This guy, as predicted by his eyebrows, was cool though. He was even cooler when, once I admitted in spiked Turko-Inglizce when we got to where I asked him to take me that I recognised absolutely nothing about the place, and that it was all hopeless because there was no way I would be able to find my street in the dark let alone the door to my home, and that he should just leave me on the side of the street to die like a dog because I was a stupid, pathetic, human being, he drove up and down the narrow and hilly cobblestone alleys until we miraculously found my place.

I paid him and spoke two of the truest words I have ever said: "Thank you", and he replied in the grandiloquent Turkish fashion, "And I, also, thank you". He kept the engine running while it took me five minutes to clumsily unlock the three deadlocks on the door, and drove off only when he saw I was safely inside.

I found this to be the height of gallantry, which is not a quality I remember night-shift cab drivers in Istanbul possessed back when I was a 17-year-old exchange student, but when I told my friends about it they said, "Well, he just would have been terrified and certain that you were both going to get murdered out here, because it's so deserted cab drivers think people must frequently get murdered out here."

Repeated use of the word 'murdered' disarmed me so impressively I spontaneously delivered some of the most precise Turkish I had attempted in the past five days. "Öyle mi?"* said I.
*Really?

"Yeah," she said. "But it's crazy really, because if somewhere is completely deserted like it is here then how can you get murdered, because, I mean, there is noone around to murder you, right?! That's what deserted means! Noone! To murder you! I mean, right?!"

IN CONCLUSION! Earlier that day, during a pleasant walk in a new neighbourhood, I insisted getting my photo taken next to a bus advertising the colourful and amusing Greek travel company, Vergina Travel:

The original photo has me doing a happy thumbs-up next to it but I've cut myself out of the picture because I don't feel comfortable exclusively endorsing Vergina Travel anymore when, as you have just heard, I have recently found penis travel—and here, in case you missed it, I am hilariously alluding to the all-male microcosm that is the Istanbul cab driving community—to also be extremely satisfactory.

NEXT WEEK! More bad jokes.