In the 11 years that I've lived in Turkey, the arrival of the global village has undoubtedly made my life easier. Hard though it is to imagine it now, when I first arrived in Göreme, there was no Digitürk, there were no ADSL lines effortlessly connecting even small villages to the world of knowledge at the fingertips and the version of my favorite English newspaper that arrived here was a shadow of its home-printed version (it was also much cheaper, but that's another story).So on the whole, I'm a great advocate of the benefits of a smaller world and the opportunity it's given the lucky few to lead a more mobile existence. On the other hand, there are undoubted downsides, especially when things go wrong and distance becomes a big problem. When sudden tragedy hit a Göreme family this week, it reminded me sharply of the terrible day when I received news that a friend of more than 25 years standing had committed suicide. One minute I was happily scrolling through my inbox, the next I was faced with having to find a flight seat back to İstanbul, then another to London, then onward transport to Wales, all in the short time it would take for her poor bereaved husband to make the funeral arrangements.
I vividly recall rocking up in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at 6 a.m. in the morning and blundering blindly around the Hapsburg splendors of the city center as I did my best to while away the 12 hours before the onward connection to London. Then there was arriving in Gatwick to find that the airline had lost the bag containing the outfit I was planning to wear for the funeral. “Please be nice to me,” I said to the startled man to whom I had to report the loss, “Or I might start to cry.”
Luckily the bag was found and delivered to my mother's house, and there was a seat on a bus straight to Cardiff the next day. Of course the whole experience of such loss would have been painful no matter where I'd been, but the fact remained that because I'd chosen to remove myself to somewhere so remote, there were whole extra layers of complication to deal with just when I was feeling least able to cope.
There is now a very large Göreme diaspora that has put down roots all over the world. For many, the ability to start a new life elsewhere has been a happy experience involving few regrets. But the fact remains that when disaster strikes, it brings in its wake a whole string of extra problems, not least negotiating visas and enduring lengthy and lonely plane journeys. When I came to live in Göreme, my mother was still relatively young. The time is fast approaching when she will need more support from me, which it's going to be hard to give while living in the middle of Anatolia. To be honest, it's not something I was thinking about when I fell in love with the fairy chimneys all those years ago.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
