It was all perfectly companionable, the way it has been for the last 11 years, and as it was a house I hadn’t visited before, there was the added interest of ticking off its cave-house features -- niches, arches, chimneybreast -- while also noting the latest must-have accessories -- enormous television with satellite cartoon channel for visiting children -- as well as the poignant details -- the color photograph of a family member lost to a car accident some years earlier.In a lull in the conversation I reached into my handbag and pulled out my reusable shopping bag. Inside lay two balls of wool and a circular knitting needle. With a sigh, I handed them to Fatma. “I think I’ll take up knitting,” I said quietly. “Could you cast on the stitches for me?” Thus did I inject a little levity into the gathering: The crazy yabancı, after all these years, was finally getting round to learning a handicraft!
Meanwhile group members were passing around a particularly attractive piece of embroidery. “I found the pattern on the Internet,” said one of them. My ears pricked up immediately. “Where would that have been?” I asked, and she duly wrote the sites down for me -- www.dantel-modelleri.com and www.cevherkutusu.com.
The conversation veered off in a direction that lost me. Then someone stood up to start collecting money, because this was one of the paying tea parties that have proved such an excellent way for women to earn cash for down payments on desirable white goods or, increasingly, computers and mobile phones with built-in cameras. The price had risen to TL 50, a head which meant that this gathering would net the hostess TL 600. Not bad for a morning’s baking, I reckoned.
Then suddenly they were talking about Facebook. When did Facebook first rear its ugly head, I wonder? Some two years ago maybe, at which time I seem to remember quite a few people sending me invitations to become what I thought I already was anyway -- namely their friend. Having no clue about Facebook, I would allow these invitations to languish in my inbox for a few days, before quietly deleting them. Recently, the invitations have dried up as most people cottoned on to a diehard Facebook refusenik.
It’s not that I think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with social networking, just that I begrudge yet another reason to stay anchored to my keyboard. Were Karl Marx to be born today, I can’t help but think he would dub Facebook the new “opium of the masses.” Less time spent networking, more time left over for protesting injustices, methinks. But now to my horror I realized that not only my worldly expat friends but even my tea-drinking village circle had got themselves connected.
This week I caved in and signed up for Facebook. To date all I’ve managed to do is reconstruct my email address list in another medium. The knitting, on the other hand, is going great guns.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
