Archers of Okçular @alien1okcular-blog - Tumblr Blog

Extreme Images!

Yesterday, during a break in the rain, I grabbed my hobbling stick, picked up my camera and stuck in what I thought was a clean compact flash card, and wandered off to commune with nature. As I write this my mind is wandering about and also reversing back to less technologically complex days. Days when floppy discs with 1 Megabyte capacity ruled the storage roost! Remember these: 3.5 1 MB…

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Air Of Expectation

J was very kind me today (as she is most days, I hasten to add) and, with the sun shining on the dew and ‘jewels’ of light clinging to the tips of leaves and branches, she agreed to join me on one of my short staggers in the forest. Not far from the house there lies one of Okçular’s hidden valleys. A narrow cut, carved by torrents of water that once-upon-a-time flowed from here, it remains…

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Loveliest Of Trees

Alfred Edward Housman is, without doubt, my most cherished poet. He published only two books of poems, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ and ‘Last Poems’ and yet many of us know his beautiful, balanced, evocative verse without knowing anything about him.Here his words that could apply to Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq or a child in Yemen or anywhere else that the powerful are raining death, destruction or famine…

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Human vs Inhuman Nature

(disclosure) I’m a WASA – a White, Anglo-Saxon, Atheist, as opposed to a WASP – a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant! ‘So what!’ I hear you say (or not). ‘What point are you trying to make?’ My point is this; as I grew up I was imbued with a sense of superiority over everything and everyone else on the planet. After all, hadn’t we spread civilising, Christian values across the globe? Our empire,…

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'Lions Led By Donkeys'

‘Lions Led By Donkeys’

. . is a quote that is often attributed to the period during the First World War and in particular to the slaughter suffered by British infantry at the Battle of the Somme. However, it’s origins are much older with variants back to Greco-Roman times. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels used the phrase on 27 September 1855, in an article published in Neue Oder-Zeitung, No. 457 (1 October 1855), on the…

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They are the stuff of myths and legends. Their god is Anubis – or perhaps they are Anubis’ gods! Who knows . . Creatures of the shadows and dark places. They move like mist sliding, gli…

More things that go 'bump' . .

Night Shadow

They are the stuff of myths and legends. Their god is Anubis – or perhaps they are Anubis’ gods! Who knows . .

Creatures of the shadows and dark places. They move like mist sliding, gliding silently over the ground, they are there – and then they are not . .

Anubis, the old Egyptian god of death, the afterlife, mummification and the patron god of lost souls was ‘created’ in their likeness. They…

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Or words to that effect is a term generally associated with the infamous ‘middle-finger salute’. Coming from England and being an ex-squaddie I’ve never had a problem understandin…

Get Stuffed!

. . or words to that effect is a term generally associated with the infamous ‘middle-finger salute‘.

charming young lady expressing an opinion of authority held by many

Coming from England and being an ex-squaddie I’ve never had a problem understanding this very direct form of communication. Living here in Turkey I find, when watching President Damn Turd Pol (it’s an anagram – you can work it…

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So, yesterday evening J and I were enjoying a home showing of the movie ‘John Wick’, well I was enjoying it – J was cringing and passing frequent disgusted comments on what is, I …

A Golden Opportunity

So, yesterday evening J and I were enjoying a home showing of the movie ‘John Wick‘, well I was enjoying it – J was cringing and passing frequent disgusted comments on what is, I have to admit, one of the most gratuitously violent, story line lacking films I’ve ever seen. That said, bad taste has never been too much of a barrier for me to enjoy a good hoot!

Anyway, in the midst of a particularly…

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‘Blimey!’ I hear some of you exclaim. ‘I thought you’d blogged-off this mortal coil like that William Barker fellow who has ‘gone for the long rest’.’ Not …

Immortalised in Music

‘Blimey!’ I hear some of you exclaim. ‘I thought you’d blogged-off this mortal coil like that William Barker fellow who has ‘gone for the long rest’.’ Not just yet, mate – there’s life in the old blog yet!

A little while back (OK, OK, it was October last year) I wrote about Ali the zurna makerwho intrigued and then delighted us with his enthusiasm for his craft. Well, J and I decided that…

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#John Surman #zurna

A Dying Breed

A few days ago a mysterious car parked at the bottom of our cabin ‘drive’ and a somewhat furtive individual got out. He asked us mysterious questions about ‘a man on the beach’ all the time glancing about and gazing towards the horizon and never quite meeting our eye before he went shuffling off along the track.

J and I glanced at each other, shrugged, and carried on with our hoeing and pruning.…

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#dying breed #Payamli #zourna #zourna maker

Worth

Funny old word – ‘Worth‘! Or ‘wurff’ as in ‘Nah, mate. ‘Snot wurffit!’ as we old Sheppey ‘Swampies’ were wont to say. And ‘were’ because for several decades J has consistently and persistently stepped in with the appropriate, gentle correction à la all those years as a special needs teacher. These days my enunciation has to be impeccable if I expect to manage to string more than two sentences…

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A Sting In The Tale

As I sit here nursing a swollen and throbbing digit I’m trying to remind myself that not everything in nature is a nasty, aggressive little piece of shite! I’m talking about wood wasps of which there are many and varied types. All of them, in my opinion, serve vitally useful functions and have their place in the grand scheme of things which does not happen to include inside any place I happen to…

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I Should Co-Co!

J and I have just enjoyed the pleasure of an episode from the on-going mini-drama series called ‘Dealing With A Turkish Usta and/or Patron In Respect To An Appointed Day and/or Time’ (usta = craftsman). Don’t worry, it wasn’t a painful experience and, in fact, it resurrected many other fond memories from the exponential learning curve that is dealing with these real-time Harry Houdini‘s.

Anyway,…

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