Gulets are just the thing – where to begin? – for restorative lazing, swimming, eating and drinking, and putting ashore to experience another set of glorious ruins.  We’ve also noticed just how good they are for getting through books.  (I’ve chosen this accompanying image because scrutiny suggests it’s Seal 2 Austen 1 in this case, and evidence of guests enjoying my own books, alongside Emma, are so rare as to be cherished.)  Wherever our gulet conversations wend – through what we’ve seen or eaten, where we’ve swum or walked – they also seem to include where we are in our reading.  Try as I might, I can’t recall when we last had a non-reader onboard.

Lately, we’ve noticed that some of our guests are at the point of taking their interest in books to the next stage – writing one.  Indeed, we’ve had a number of published writers, among them novelists and poets, onboard.  No surprise, then, that we’ve often thought about running a gulet-based writing course.  What fun that would be, we’ve thought.  And then we’ve remembered all the onboard and onshore distractions, and the way our minds tend to mush under the broiling Mediterranean sun, and so we’ve thought again.

So we came up with another plan.  In 2022 fellow writer and Turkophile Jason Goodwin and I decided to establish a residential writing course which we instead would run in Dorset, and in the winter.   To this end we are returning to Rushay, a lovely Arts and Crafts house on Dorset’s Jurassic coast, in early December.  We’ll be there for five nights leading a group of would-be writers through a range of informal presentations, discussions and exercises that delve into plot, voice, character, dialogue and other mysteries of writing.  We consider excerpts from published writers – ones we especially admire, some we don’t – to see how they do it.   We generate a wealth of conversations, exchanges, theories, clever solutions and lines of enquiry that invariably spill over into meals (all included), afternoon walks and periods of private reflection, reading or writing time.  There are walks, and log fires, and cakes, and the atmosphere is a joy.

Between us, Jason and I have some 15 published titles – everything from period crime fiction, travel, general non-fiction and cookery – to our names.  In our writing careers we have acquired a rich understanding of how writing works; and as occasional teachers we have also learned how best to communicate our insights and ideas.

If you are a developing writer, or interested in gaining a better understanding of writing, do consider joining us in delightful and comfortable country surroundings for what is invariably a memorable, productive, supportive and highly enjoyable time.  And do please forward this to anybody who might find it of interest.

For more on the course, which runs from 29^th November to 4^th December, and for just how delightful previous guests have found it, please visit https://www.byhillsandthesea.co.uk/courses/

Pix @ Katya Galitzine

This summer I was hospitalised, which was hardly ideal but did prove timely, allowing me as it did to lie in bed for days on end enjoying the performances put on by teenage football star Arder Güler and his Turkish compatriots in reaching the quarter-finals of the Euros.  I was rather less taken, having the time to reflect on such things, by the English-language announcements referring to the national team in question as Türkiye.  That sounds something akin to Tour-ki-ye.  What is it about the way we pronounce their country’s name, Turkey, that the Turks are going to such lengths to fix?

The adoption in English of the Turks’ own form of the name by EUFA, and by the IOC at the subsequent Paris Olympics, marks the latest advances in a transition initiated in 2021 when a presidential circular out of Ankara decreed that Turkish exports should be labelled ‘Made in Türkiye’.  The country’s tourism office soon followed suit with a marketing campaign entitled ‘Hello Türkiye’.  Even the UN agreed to the name change in 2022.  Lately, I have noticed that this creeping adoption of the form has even found its way into English-language travel literature, with two recent travel books favouring Türkiye in their titles or sub-titles.

To be clear; this is not Upper Volta opting for Burkino Faso or Burma for Myanmar.  The Turks do not wish to change their country’s name so much as to impose their own rendering of it upon others.   They would insist upon Türkiye, as the Turks have called their country since its emergence from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, over foreign variants such as Türkei, Turquie, Turchia, however marginal the differences in pronunciation.

They would especially prefer it over Turkey, the anglophone rendering, not only on account of the status of English as international language but because it is in English that the name may be said to have perjorative connections: as American slang for a failure, and as the name of a bird short, we may say, of admirers except when it is served with seasonal stuffing.

On the bird point; while we would not wish any such association to upset the Turks, we would politely remind them of their name for the same bird, hindi – in reference to India, as per the French dinde – which could hardly be any less a cause for offence in Delhi.  Nor need one doubt how any of of us would feel if, say, the Italians insisted that we renounce Italy for Italia or the Spaniards that we speak of Espana; or the Germans that we no longer refer, a propos of that umlaut, to Munich but to München.

It goes without saying that every country has its own name not only for other countries but for prominent international cities and regions too, which is a natural reflection of the diversity among national cultures and of the ways languages work and the sounds they especially favour.  It is precisely because English does not generally feature the vowel sounds represented by umlauts that we pronounce foreign names like München in our own way.

Anyway, it is to be remembered that we Europeans got there first – in calling the land in question Turkey, that is, many centuries before the Turks followed our lead.  It’s even said that the Turkish form of the name was a phonetic borrowing from Turchia, which Italian speakers have used since the 11^th century.

Moreover, we in Britain might justifiably claim that we will not be told what we should call a country which commonly refers to ours – Great Britain, the United Kingdom – as Ingiltere; which is to say England.  It’s a practise established even in official circles where, for example, the British Consulate in Istanbul is known as the Ingiliz Konsolos.  It’s plain that some across our home nations might see this as cause for real offence.

For these reasons this particular Turcophile will be sticking with Turkey.  I will not be following the lead of organisations such as EUFA, the IOC and the UN, and of my fellow writers, in adopting the Turkish form – except when saying it, of course, in my poor attempts at Turkish.    In English I shall continue to refer to that grand and glorious country by the evocative name we have had for it since the 14^th century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of ‘Turkye’ in The Canterbury Tales.  Let us not be told what we would call a country so close to many of our hearts.