Blue Mosque

The Blue Mosque of Istanbul. My first backblip from our holiday. We only had a morning in the city, the blip had to be of the complex series of gently coloured domes and windows, I was so entranced by this astonishing building. The photo is taken looking up through the wiring of the chandeliers that hang not much above head level. Words (or my words) are inadequate to describe the splendour of it, but hopefully the photograph speaks for itself.

The mosque was completed almost 400 years ago, which in human lifetimes perhaps seems a long time. But is it? This day was my Dad's 90th birthday, and that was the reason the family went on this holiday. The age of the mosque is only four and half lifetimes for a long-lived man like him. He was too infirm to be taken ashore to visit the mosque and the much more ancient Hagia Sophia which is cheek by jowl with it.

On the way back to the boat we were held up by a teachers' demonstration against proposed changes to the school curriculum that might begin to challenge the principle of a secular society that was established by Attaturk, the hero of modern Turkey. These are worrying times for the country, as refugees from Syria are flooding in in hundreds of thousands; and the menace of Isis is so close to their border.

There was a lighter atmosphere back on the boat. The old flyer wore a fez at dinner, and the waiters presented him with a very good birthday cake and sang him Happy Birthday. Getting him to and from the boat for the week afloat was a bit of an ordeal, but perhaps the gathering of family and the celebration on the day made it all worthwhile.