Ölüdeniz Camping is Turkey’s best-kept secret, tucked away behind a lagoon. It’s reached via a winding road from the main beach, which arcs towards mountains spread with shrubs, like blankets of bobble-stitch. The main beach has a family hotel, a couple of bars, some bungalows, a grocery store. Here at camp there are six, one-roomed log cabins, camping ground and a tiny stretch of sand strewn with rocks. On the other side of the lagoon is a sandy peninsula where, hidden behind trees, the ‘dreaded tourists’ descend every day to sunbathe.

Cabin Number 4 has been the centre of Court all summer. One bed on each side with our luggage underneath. It’s positioned in front of a path of hardened earth lined with eucalyptus trees that provide shade. The lagoon swells a few feet away. It should be paradise.

Friedrich, a computer engineer, and Christa, his housewife, are the first to arrive for an audience at Court this Saturday evening. A rather bovine middle-aged couple, they’ve driven their mobile home (size of a coach) all the way from Hanover. There are metal bars on the windows, a monster fridge full of Becks and Holsten and a freezer stuffed with frozen German vegetables, meat and Milch. Their Alsatian, Caligula, sits unleashed outside their door until they return.

They bring eight cans of lager, and laugh at every single joke Jessie cracks.

Gülten and Yelmen, retired schoolteachers from Marmaris, are next. They position themselves as guests of honour on each side of the throne. They’ve been coming to this spot ever since it was a farmer’s field used by hippies that the Magic Bus took from London to India for a dose of spiritual enlightenment, man. Yeah, like, groovy. I can’t imagine these two as the hashish-smoking hippies they claim they were, but I guess most people do get more staid as they get older, everything fixed rigid: their opinions, hearts, their lifestyles. Look at me – Stan the Philosopher, the one who broke free.

Tonight they bring burma kadayif – shredded wheat with pistachios and honey. Gülten smiles at Jessie’s lip-smacking delight, then shakes her head with what can only be described as pity when I decline, as always, her little diabetic bombs of sugars.

Every morning I go to the camp shop and buy some bread and milk. I then watch Jessie eat half a Turkish loaf oozing chocolate spread while I make a fresh fruit salad. She must have put on over a stone. Next, I air my bedding, and hers. I don’t want to share bed bugs.

The two Alexs: young and old, fat and thin, hairy and bereft of, are newcomers. Jessie met them on the beach yesterday. They wear black signet rings and speak of the hardships they escaped in the USSR. Now living in New York, they buy kilims, alabaster carvings and meerschaum pipes shaped into turbaned pashas for their Eastern Eye shop on Fifth Avenue.