Oh, the trouble we could have saved Sally Walker!

When I say Sally Walker, I mean the author of The Salt Path; when I say we, I mean myself and Jason Goodwin, who between us have published some 15 books – histories, novels, travelogues, cookery books – and who every November run a residential writing course in Dorset; and when I say trouble, well, I mean with her story-telling.

If you happen to have been alive this week – to anything other than Wimbledon or the progress of the Lionesses – then you will have surely been conscious of the monster pickle that Walker (nom de plume Raynor Winn) has gotten herself into.  By writing a non-fiction account, that is, of the hike that she and her husband, by her account terminally ill, took along the South West Coast Path – which turns out to be shot through with lies.

It happens that our writing course takes place barely a mile from the path Raynor and Moth, actually Timothy, walked years ago on their ‘remarkable and redemptive journey’.   We cover everything, adding all that we’ve learned in the course of our own writing and teaching to the rich mix of ideas which spill out of our guests; how characters speak, how ideas form, what is that the makes a reader commit to a book and, more than anything else, what is the secret to a good story?

Perhaps the most grievous lie exposed by the Observer’s researches into the Walkers relates to the circumstances which led the couple to lose their home and to embark, for want of anywhere else to go, on their great hike; not because, as Walker claimed in the book, she had been stiffed by the obscure machinations of a supposed friend but as a consequence of her having embezzled some £64,000 from her one-time employer.  Much has been written about the writer’s contract with her reader and the betrayal of the reader’s trust.   And while all that is true, it seems to me to miss the greater point, which is this: that from the writer’s perspective Sally Walker’s greater transgression may have lain in her failure to see that the truth would have made a decidedly greater story than the one she chose to concoct.  The problem was that she put the preservation of her reputation as an upstanding character, as if any reader cared, above the story.  Given that the alleged industrial-level manufacturing of false invoices in her role as company bookkeeper sounds like nothing if not great material, I can’t help but wish that she’d come clean about the thieving.  That would have made a far more compelling justification for a walk that thereby becomes redemptive not merely in a physical and emotional sense but in a moral one too.

It’s instructive to compare this particular literary scandal with the one which engulfed James Frey after the 2003 publication of his A Million Little Pieces.  Here the issue was that Frey in framing his descent into a drug-fuelled hell had massively fabricated his juvenile delinquency and his spells in jail – in short, making a fraudulent claim of criminality.  Otherwise, as nothing more than an averagely errant youth he would have had, as he seems to have understood all too well, barely a story to tell.

Any writer will understand exactly why the author, in the pursuit of a story, did what he did with A Million Little Pieces.  They will find the case at hand harder to make sense of; but what happened with Walker, I’d contend, is that the writer within lost out to the insecure social being within, at the expense not only of the truth but also of the story.

Indeed, if Sally Walker wished to explore the way that stories work, she could do worse than join us at Rushay, the lovely Dorset house where Jason and I will be running this year’s writing course from 21^st– 26^th November 2025.    She could even retrace some sections of her beloved salt path…

For more on the writing course, click here:

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.

Last week I was back in southern Turkey on the trail of St Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop whom I first wrote about decades back in my Santa: A Life (or, more solemnly, Nicholas: The Epic Journey from Saint to Santa Claus in the US edition).

It is a remarkable story – and an almost entirely posthumous one.   The best, and only, evidence for St Nicholas’s life is a sixth-century reference to his original shrine at Myra, now the little Turkish tomato-growing town of Demre; the life of the man is attested only by virtue of one recorded fact in relation to his death.

I write his ‘original shrine’ because his relic remains were famously lifted from Myra in 1087 and removed to Bari in southern Italy.  Since then bits of him have appeared, allegedly, all over the place – in New York, St Petersburg, Venice and Antalya, Turkey to name but a few.  His posthumous existence is all, as much for the journeyings of his relic remains, and for his startling nineteenth-century reinvention as Santa Claus/Father Christmas, as for the fact that the stories about St Nicholas were in most cases first attributed to him after, often many centuries after, his death.

These stories are legion.  Compare with near contemporaries of his such as Saints Valentine and Catherine, revered for their extreme courage exhibited in dying for their faith, but saints with a single story.  What do we know of Catherine other than the firework named for the wheel on which her persecutors attempted to break her?

St Nicholas was among the first of the so-called confessor saints – bearing witness to the faith by the holiness of his life rather than by martyrdom.  It is precisely the wealth of stories that serves as evidence of that holiness.  They tell of St Nicholas rescuing drowning sailors; of saving his people from famine by persuading a sea captain bound for Rome with a cargo of grain to unload at Myra (and discovering to his delight that he is not a peck short when the consignment is finally inspected at Rome); of appearing in visions to the Emperor Constantine and through his offices causing the release of the wrongly imprisoned; of miraculously reconstituting three boys after they were brutally butchered and pickled in brine; and even of exorcising a demon which had taken up residence in a tree.

We may consider these stories as projections of the age in which they flourished – the Pickled Boys, especially popular in the medieval period, may echo colourful and no doubt alarmist famine-period gossip of innkeepers passing off human flesh as ham.    What they all have in common is a measure of the supernatural or miraculous.

Which brings us to Three Daughters.  Writers have a material interest, of course, in what makes one story work and another fail; the question is especially interesting in relation to Three Daughters, the most ‘successful’ and most widely referenced of all the Nicholas stories.  It tells of how the young and affluent Nicholas, hearing of an impoverished neighbour’s intention to prostitute his three daughters, provides each of them with gold sufficient for a dowry which will secure them marriage partners.  Their benefactor comes at night to slip three bags of gold through the nobleman’s window (which you’ll see I’ve circled, for reasons that will become apparent, in Fra Angelico’s 1447 rendering of the story on the Perugia Triptych, now at the Vatican’s Pinacoteca Museum).  It is in Three Daughters – the giving of gifts, clandestinely, to the young at night – that the basics of the Santa Claus/Father Christmas story lie.

Establishing how the story evolved – where the reindeer, and the Far North, and the red suit and the stocking and the rest all came from – was central to the joy of writing this book.  The illustration here shows the earliest instance I was able to find of St Nicholas adopting the chimney rather than the window as his mode of entry (in a late-fourteenth century fresco from a church in Ramaca, Serbia.)

What’s radical about Three Daughters is precisely the absence of the miraculous.  It is simply – I won’t say nothing more than – an act of generosity, and a transforming one.  It has, of course, been cynically exploited, by pawnbrokers who in seeking equivalence between the service they offer and St Nicholas’s kindness have adopted the three gold bags as their motif, and by retailers bent on flogging ever more Christmas merchandise.   But in its pure form it tells of the active charity that defines Christmas – one thing we can all applaud in an often fraught and brutal world. 

A Happy Christmas to you all

The horrific, heartbreaking scenes reaching us from southern Turkey and northern Syria speak of unimaginable tragedy in a corner of the world that has seen more by far than its fair share.  To Russia’s war (its previous one), to displacement, political unrest, minority oppression, brutality and poverty we may now add the earthquake which struck in the early hours of 6th February, the worst time of day at the worst time of year, making it the biggest and deadliest to hit the region for centuries.

I know these places, some of them well; I last stayed in (Gazi)antep and (Sanli)urfa in May 2022 while visiting the region with a tour group, having long considered Antep and Urfa, as most Turks know them, among my favourite cities in Turkey.  Our tour began with breakfast, typically outstanding, on the top floor of Antep’s highrise Kule (Tower) Hotel where we had far-reaching views over this city of two million people.  As far as I can ascertain, the hotel is not numbered among the 5,000-plus buildings that have so far collapsed; but I have no doubt that plenty of them will be all too visibly no longer there in those top-floor views.

We visited because it happens that this corner of southeast Turkey, once synonymous with Kurdish unrest, has emerged as a major tourist draw in recent years, both among Turkish and overseas visitors, and deservedly so.  (Only a few weeks ago I contributed a piece to the Guardian on the region for an item entitled ‘Great travel ideas for 2023.)  Antep is considered Turkey’s premier foodie city, not least for its baklava, and is also noted for its wonderful old market and artisanal quarter, for its fine stone buildings and for its world-class collection of Roman mosaics rescued from the frontier city of Zeugma, now largely submerged beneath the dammed waters of the nearby Euphrates River.  Urfa, supposed birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, has a rich Christian and Islamic history but is best known as the epicentre – if we may still use the term – of the astounding neolithic discoveries that have been made across the region, not least at the World Heritage site of Gobekli Tepe.  It also has a fabulous museum (home to the world’s oldest statue) and the most atmospheric market area in all Turkey.  As if all that were not enough, the remarkable mountain-top tumulus at Nemrut Dagi lies within easy reach.

I do not know what still stands of these cities – of their hotels, mosques and museums, of Gobekli Tepe’s 10,000-year-old megaliths and other wonders.  Nor should I care – at least not until the work to rescue the trapped and injured is completed; or, given the freezing temperatures, redefined as a mission to recover the dead.  For now I find myself thinking of all the wonderful people who have fed, housed, entertained and otherwise served us in the course of numerous visits to the region over the years.  My heart goes out to them, to their families, friends and neighbours, knowing that all I can do is reach into my pocket.

www.donate.redcross.org.uk

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www.kizilay.org.tr

Turkish Dates (29th May 1453 and 15th July 2016, to name but two)

What is it about dates – and I mean the day and the month rather than the year (easy-peasy) – which lends them such prominence in Turkish public life?  They are everywhere.  In my recent A Coup in Turkey (Chatto, 2021; out in paperback with Vintage in 2023) – where I headed each of the book’s fourteen chapters, along with its prologue, epilogue and postscript, with such a date – I had reason to marvel at the degree to which they serve as the names of streets, neighbourhoods, schools, conference centres, sports halls, stadia, bridges, dams, forests and much else besides.  Such dates tend to commemorate great victories, if often gained at grievous cost; victories for the most part military, like the fall of Istanbul to the Ottoman Turks on 29^th May 1453, but also social or political.  It led me to reflect that Turkish dates must be impressed upon the minds of Turks in a way apt to strike Brits – very few of whom could give (beyond the year) the date of Trafalgar, say, or Waterloo, or the death of Churchill – as decidedly curious.

Because I’m interested in Turkey, and because my recent writings have had occasion to reference two such dates, any mention of 27^th May and 15^th July automatically brings the country’s first (successful) coup on 27^th May 1960 and its last (failed) one on 15^th July 2016 to mind; but as these happen to be the dates respectively of my wife’s birthday (in 1966) and our wedding anniversary (1995), it may be said that the dates which so graphically evoke Turkey’s lamentable record of military intervention in civilian life have at least done their bit to maintain domestic harmony in this household – by serving as reminders that it’s that time of the year when am to I buy gifts and reserve tables.

It happens that 15^th July – now the ‘Democracy and National Unity’ holiday – is enjoying peak prominence just now; it’s hard to move in Turkey without encountering the date emblazoned across some such edifice or other.  Given the see-saw nature of Turkish politics, however, it may reasonably be asked how long the holiday will continue to be observed once its great supporter, President Erdoğan, leaves office, as he must eventually do even if he does not recognise the fact.  Consider the fate of 27^th May, the ‘Freedom and Constitution’ holiday which was first celebrated in 1961 before suffering a long decline in observance prior to its abolition in 1982, when the  suppressed constituencies which had resented the 1960 coup, among them the young Erdoğan, achieved sufficient political influence to see it off.  It’s true of most such dates, of course, that they are as much a cause of resentment to some Turks as they are a matter of celebration to others; and as such serve as a truer measure of ideological and political division than of national achievement.  Perhaps, then, they are not such a good thing.

All of which is a preamble to the point of this blog, which is to observe that the centenaries of many of Turkey’s most revered dates are all but upon us.  In fact, if we had but noticed, they have been taking place for some years now, starting in 2015, on 18^th March – as Canakkale University calls itself – in commemoration of the day a century earlier when the Turks mounted their successful naval defence of the Dardanelles prior to the Allied landings at Gallipoli; and in 2019, on 19^th May – the national holiday known as Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day (and the name of Samsun University), the centenary of the day Atatürk raised the flag of Turkish resistance against the proposed dismemberment of Anatolia.

The rest will be upon us in quite a rush: 30^th August – ‘Victory Day’ – when in 1922 the Turks declared victory against the Greeks in the War of Independence; and 9^th September – as Izmir University calls itself – when days later they captured the city then known as Smyrna.  Other centenaries – of the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate on 1^st November 1922, and the departure on a British battleship of the last Sultan on 17^th November of the same year – may be less heralded; but they are reminders of a momentous, eventful and deeply conflicted history.

It is all due to come to a head on 29^th October next year, the centenary of the declaration of the Turkish Republic.  What are we to make of Turkey as it completes its century?  How should we respond to its 100^th birthday?  To wish it well, surely, for despite its problems Turkey is a truly remarkable country, not to say an amazing holiday destination; and to hope, perhaps, that with every passing year it achieves the kind of social harmony and prosperity which will allow it to dispense at last with all those infernal dates.