I am mostly a diplomat

It all started in Turkey at the 11th World Congress of Historical Cities in June. What I thought would just involve sitting through three days of intellectually stimulating presentations plus me rambling on to the assembled masses at one point, turned out to be something more akin to the general assembly of the United Nations.

The 53 nations involved were ranged around a U-shaped table and each had a little flag and name plate. Not only did it turn out that I was the UK spokesperson, with my little Union Jack, but I was sandwiched between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Macedonia, and later Iraq and Russia when the organisers started playing musical chairs.

I managed to deftly manoeuvre through this without causing any diplomatic incident only to be collared by Turkish telly, as the only UK representative. “Tell them” I said to the translator, “that I have not yet seen the town we’re in, that I’ve only been to Turkey once before and that was Istanbul, and it’s too soon to say what might come out of the conference” (it being only half way through the first morning). He nodded and fired off a stream of invective at the interviewer who replied at length. “She say” he said, “what you think of Turkish historic cities, do they make good job of looking after heritage and what can Turkey learn from conference?” “Thank you” I said to him, and that Turkish cities were, in my experience, beautiful, that Turkey was doing a commendable job with its heritage so far as I could see and that the one lesson was to inspire people, particularly young people, about what was special about where they lived. She nodded enthusiastically and scuttled away probably to ask the delegate from Kazakhstan (yes there was one) what Borat thought about heritage. Never mind I thought, they probably won’t broadcast it anyway (my bit I mean, not the Borat stuff).

Later that day I did my pitch to a remarkably resilient audience who had persevered from kick off at 9 am until about 5.30pm and managed to hang on for a further two hours without visibly slumbering or snoring out loud. I avoided my standard jokes, particularly the ‘pencil up the bottom’ one from a Swedish conference, on the basis that there were substantial numbers of conservative Turkish delegates who might take offence. It all seemed to go very well and prompted lots of enthusiastic ‘button holing’ subsequently from delegates who were very keen to find out how we did things and in particular, how I managed to get my hand into the pockets of the financially well equipped.

A German journalist was so interested that she interrogated me all the way through my dinner later that night, which was probably a good thing since it stopped me overdosing on kebab. “Its all about productability,” I ventured, “the ability to present something that might conventionally be regarded as dull and uncool as an intriguing, must see product.” “Is that a word, a real word?” she quizzed. “It is if you want it to be” I suggested and now “productability” has appeared in Turkish and German newspapers so I want the credit when it finds its way into the OED.

Later that night I was languishing in my room, trying to channel-flick for the latest state of the European Football Championships and was astonished to see me looking back at myself from a news programme. I was cackling away in perfectly dubbed Turkish and no one seemed to take offence so that was good, but no mention of Borat though.