No one riles me more than a Turkish man. Self-important, steeped in the idea of himself as a rebel, he constantly feels the need to prove himself. You only have to look at the way he walks, like he’s about to headbutt a wall and bring it crashing down, or grapple with a rutting ram. I get pissed off by people who feel they have to live up to national stereotypes. The Italian who’s permanently cheery and insists on trying to help you when you haven’t asked for anything, the Spaniard who gets belligerently protective when you ask after his sister, the Pole who feels he has to knock back another six vodkas when everyone else has stopped, the Arab who gets his back up and draws his sabre when all you’ve done is congratulate him on his celebrated restraint, not to mention the Englishman who keeps a stiff upper lip when you tell him his clothes are on fire. The Algerians piss me off – and I’m half Algerian – by claiming they’re the most hospitable people in the world when they’ve turned their country into the most inhospitable place on earth and made their government the most repulsive under Satan’s sun. As for the French – don’t even go there. We’re all of these things and more besides. It’s the Universalist in us. In other countries when people badmouth the French, they know what they’re talking about. The Frenchmen who’ve gone before us have given them all the evidence they need to calculate the extent of our arrogance. Someone should write up a guide to national stereotypes and hand it out with travel guides, that way the unwary traveller would know where not to go and what not to say. Of course, they’re simply stereotypes, all these people could shake them off and live happily ever after. No stereotype, no song and dance, everyone just gets on with his life – that’s something it might be worth teaching people.

Anyway, from the minute my plane landed to the minute I got to my hotel on the Bosphorus, in a steep alley in the shadow of the Blue Mosque, every Mamamouchi I’ve met has blanked me. I’ve not heard a single ‘Merhaba, Salam’, still less a ‘Günaydin’ or ‘iyi günler’ or ‘Güle güle’ that they’re always saying to each other. I suppose my cadaverous appearance and my hollow eyes made them feel afraid and disgusted. I was a walking corpse, a dead man who had seen too much. At the airport, the security guard looked at me like I was a drug dealer, one taxi driver refused to take me because he said I was dangerously ill and, at the hotel, the receptionist took so long to answer me I thought he was going to grab me by the throat and send for the baibozuk.