Goodbye To Wind

One of the many traditions Turkish people have is to spend as long as possible saying goodbye, possibly even longer than the time you have spent with the person saying goodbye to. My sister tries to be clever about this by being ENTIRELY FOCUSED at goodbye time, with steely eyes she will come over for the goodbye kiss which she will plant quickly and effectively on both cheeks whilst affirming "I am leaving now" and will not be dragged into any kind of goodbye conversation, having a few one liners at hand such as "We'll talk about it on the phone" or "Email me the details". Sometimes she fails at this and I can see her kicking herself all the way to her car.

My aunts are masters of the goodbye drag out. They will kiss you on both cheeks, and then will suddenly start to either compliment you on your shade of lipstick, or ask you what colour you've dyed your hair, or remember they have a bag somewhere to exactly match the top you are wearing and they'll just go and fetch it for you and nearly always comment on your weight gain/loss. Then they will stroke your hair and come up with a childhood memory or two. Then just as you are about to leave the door, they will insist on you taking home some of the food left over from dinner as they will always make far too much, so you end up going home trying to balance several bowls of food covered in clingfilm. And then because everyone has spent so long saying goodbye, no-one can remember who they have or haven't kissed, so we all kiss each other again to make sure.

So at my little cousins birthday gathering on Sunday, I gave my other cousin who was also my lift home, the goodbye nudge, we put on our coats, had some conversation about coats, then my aunt had a last minute panic about my five a day consumption, insisting I eat some fruit before I go. Just as I was getting hopeful about making it from the living room to the corridor, one of my aunts began clasping at her chest and grimacing in pain. The pain then subsided and returned several times, as we tried to figure out what it was and what to do. Advice was being thrown about left right and centre of course, "Let her drink some coke" "Open the window" "Drink some coke" "Lie her down" "Stand her up" "Give her some Andrews" "Give her a glass of coke" (no-one gave water a thought). After she downed a glass of coke and a glass of fizzing Andrews, me and my cousin took her out to the garden where she burped ferociously. Then, it was thirty minutes of wind stories. Everyone had a wind story to tell, each one getting more dramatic, and of course, the inevitable story of the man from the village in Turkey who actually died from trapped wind.

When Turkish people have exhausted their own repertoire of stories consisting mainly of some kind of tragedy, there is always someone from the village who tops of the stories in a way that it couldn't get much worse.

This reminds me of something my mother told me about my ex stepmother. Apparently before she had met my father, she was having an office affair and during sexual intercourse, the couple got stuck and were unable to separate. They were forced to dial emergency services who had to carry them both out on a stretcher and take them to hospital where they would be separated. The probability of this happening was confirmed when one day I went to get my lunch from my usual Turkish cafe, where I used to work. I was chatting away to the owner, and I don't know how it came up, but somehow, between asking for a jacket potato and if I could have extra cheese, he told me that he had heard of several couples being stuck together in this way. He added, that although this was fairly common, it only happened in Turkey, and usually to people having affairs.

Anyway, back to wind stories, the running theme throughout everyone's anecdotes, which I will now kindly depart to you, the answer to all your wind problems; Cocoa Cola. Everyone, except the man from the village, was saved by a glass of coke. Although this is not mentioned on the NHS direct website, my family unanimously agreed that Coke is the best solution to excessive wind.

This reminds me of the time I was in India and the residents there having the same sort of feelings about a lemonade type of drink they have called Thumbs Up, which seemed to be the miracle cure for everything. When I suddenly got food poisoning in a jewellery shop and had to lie down on the floor, all I could hear were different voices demanding "Thumbs Up! Thumbs Up! Get her Thumbs Up!" and they had no idea at all what was wrong with me. After being forced to drink three bottles of the stuff, I was put on a rickshaw to take me back to where I was staying. Unfortunately, there was a power cut on the way which did not seem to signal to my driver that he should go any slower. Consequently he crashed head on with another rickshaw and I was thrown out of the seat. Now, as well as food poisoning, my knees and hands were bleeding. I left the two rickshaw drivers to argue about their bent wheels whilst I crawled the short way back to my ashram (kind of like a hotel, but not, in that all you basically get is a room resembling a prison room with a bed and a hole in the ground for a toilet). I switched on the ceiling fan and lay on my bed, only to discover that the fan wasn't working, which not only helped me to build up my fever, but allowed every mosquito in the neighbourhood who thought it was the best day of their little lives to settle on me and bite me to pieces.

I did spend the next few days vomiting so I really can't attest to the medicinal powers of Thumbs Up, although it was a very refreshing drink. And with a name like Thumbs Up, you don't imagine you can go wrong.