Organising my air ticket back to London, via Turkey. Although I live in the UK, it is much cheaper to buy tickets as returns from the Ghanaian end. But because of the prevalence of fraud, you can’t buy a ticket over the internet starting from West Africa. So my long suffering Ghanaian PA has had a complex task working out from the airlines the best way to fly Accra/Izmir/London/Accra.
The answer turns out to be Lufthansa, and Accra/Frankfurt/Munich/Izmir/Munich/London/Accra, all of which in business class comes to a surprisingly cheap US $3,560. I know this arouses sceptical smiles, but I have to fly business class because of my episode of pulmonary emboli. The doctors say that I should in fact fly business class and with an oxygen mask, but it’s not a good look.
My itinerary in Turkey is being organised by IHH, the Turkish charity that sent the Mavi Marmara. I am donatiing all my royalties from the Turkish language edition of Murder in Samarkand to IHH. I am not receiving any payment at all for this lecture tour to Turkey and am paying my own travel expenses, staying with kind Turkish friends. I give this detail because, if I am going to do this 16.00 posting, I think you need to know how my life works to put it in context.