The English, I discovered, love to play at being French or Italian, cultures which are reassuringly exotic and have good food. But the Germans use too much salt for a start and are just not exotic enough. They carry the English penchant for order to unreasonable extremes. The thing everyone remembers is that Winston Churchill promised to “fight them on the beaches” -- an injunction which his successors have taken much too literally. In fact they are fighting them on Turkish beaches.According to German sociologists, it is an urban myth created by Teutonophobic Brits that German holidaymakers set the alarm for 6:00 a.m. to go down to the pool to lay out a beach towel on the choicest of the chaises longues. Once their place in the sun is reserved, they go back to bed. The hapless British tourist then emerges from breakfast to discover that the only place left to recline is in the car park across the road. It is a fiction designed to reassure the English psyche that once they cross the Rhine, there is no such thing as fair play.
This is not, needless to say, how the British see things. Last summer someone actually sued their travel agency because there were too many Germans at their hotel -- prompting a volley of retaliatory headlines in the Bild about “lobster-faced, beer-bellied Tommies.” England may have won the battle, but this time they lost the war. It seems that if you book your holiday through a German outlet of Thomas Cook, you have the option of pre-booking a chaise longue for a mere three euros per day. There are resort hotels in Turkey (I am alarmed to learn) which now sign up to this dastardly practice.
The English miscomprehension of their German cousins does not stop there. The British press has been trying to decipher the sudden increase in sales across the Channel of incandescent light bulbs while, all the while, sales in the UK are in steep decline. And this, too, is a story which affects Turkey only too directly. Let me do my best to explain.
Those old-fashioned light bulbs with tungsten filaments are being systematically phased out in the European Union in favor of more energy efficient varieties. There is a real moral imperative to do so. In America the reckoning is that if every household replaced just one incandescent bulb with an energy efficient compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), the carbon emissions saved would illuminate an entire city. Lighting accounts for 20 percent of the world's electricity use. Europe has begun by banning frosted light bulbs on the grounds that there is no point using electricity to produce light that you are then going to obscure.
Now Germany is a place where there is a serious Green Party. It started recycling in earnest much earlier than everywhere else. Yet sales of environmentally hostile bulbs have gone up 34 percent year on year in the first six months of 2009 compared to a drop in the laissez-faire UK by 22 percent, according to the Financial Times. The story quotes a German psychologist who cites a fear that new-fangled lights could “destroy the snug atmosphere of their homes.”
They could also destroy the complacency of Turkish political life. Turks are all too used to having political parties banned by their own Constitutional Court. They are quite unused to seeing the European Union they aspire to join ban the logo of the ruling party. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) proudly displays as its symbol a filament light bulb. To its credit, the bulb appears to be transparent and not pearled. But it is an environmentally reactionary act, all the same. It is true the party has a lot on its plate -- will it proceed with its Kurdish initiative, will it sign up to a deal with the IMF? To this list we must add, can it muster the courage to change a light bulb?
