No joke!

A beautiful warm sunny day, and a warm evening too. First day that people were sunning themselves in the park.

Just back from a talk by Arundhati Roy. She repeated a talk I saw online from last year, but there was a part she mentioned about the Armenian Genocide in Turkey (1915) that was worth remembering. I recall my first exposure to that in a film screened at an Armenian Orthodox Church in Damascus. The anniversary of it will be next year. Roy reminds us what price progress. I see this in the water cannons being used on demonstrators in Ankara. As we are invited to "ask Roy" at #askroy, I am reminded that twitter is banned in Turkey just now.

Travel admin moves ever onward. The journey has truly begun, with me going nowhere but with this mini-K2 moving upwards, and the sign always saying just 10 km more. This new passport (that I never should have needed to get in the first place) is now in hand, the other declared "lost" (because I could not prove the Consulate had it), but it was certainly far from certain. Two visits yesterday by myself, and two visits today by my dad, full conversations with my guarantor and 2 references ("250 lbs, green eyes, and red hair") yielded urgent spring fruit from the Passport office tree of life.

Mentioned to someone that with holidays like this, work is a blissful distraction. I  can't wait to sit upright and do nothing for 15 hours.