Our #IceColdinIstanbul was, as John Mills said in ‘Ice Cold in Alex’, worth waiting for.

We were in Turkey for the weekend of Eid, so the city was frantically busy, particularly in the evenings. Our hotel on the banks of the Bosphorus was an oasis of calm after the hustle, bustle, mosques and bazaars. Me and Mr G barely had a breakfast conversation because we were hypnotised by the flowing water and the birds and porpoises cavorting on the strait. Nothing to do with spending 30 days in close confinement. Absolutely nothing!

The only challenge with the hotel was trying to get back there at the end of the day. Public transport was impossible, the right ferry stop was a long way away, and getting an Uber or taxi was a bit like trying to get a cab to go south of the river in London in the eighties. Mr G recalls hailing a black cab in South Ken to be told ‘Battersea- I’m not going to that sh*thole!’ The central Istanbul cabbies definitely didn’t want to go to the Asian side of the city. But we made it, with judicious use of bribery cash incentives.

The Basilica Cistern was one of the sights I was particularly keen to visit, after seeing the stunning location in films like Inferno and Spectre. I was gutted to find it closed for renovations and we retired to a nearby restaurant to lick our wounds. We couldn’t believe it when we were whisked through a curtain into the most extraordinary subterranean space. The Sarnic, which we chose at random, was in a 1500 year old cistern. It wasn’t on the scale of the Basilica Cistern- but it was a fabulous consolation prize.