Turkish Delight

When I was in England and at Sleepy's house, we had some wonderful imported Turkish Delight, the type with pistachios in.
My daughter, Alex, also gave me some to bring back with me, it was in a beautifully decorated box, the balsa wood sort that you get Camembert in.
The actual sweetmeat was the traditional rose and lemon and as you expect, packed in icing sugar. You reach it by peeling back layers of fine paper. There is something very sensual about the Turkish Delight experience, I don't know whether it is from years of Cadbury-Fry's advertising of 'Fry's Turkish Delight - full of Eastern Promise,' cue dark-eyed beauty giving you a sultry look whilst delicately inserting a portion of chocolate covered deep rose-coloured confectionery between her perfectly painted lips or whether it simply is because it has such a delicate flavour and texture.

My goodness, that sentence was so long I felt it should have ended with a German verb. But back to the Turkish Delight. Compare it with some of the cheaper and more popular sweets available, things you have to bite into and masticate a bit. Is there any sensuality in that? No, just sugar rush. Oh no, I think the Turks knew what they were doing. Which is amazing, because there's nothing sensual about the kebab.

And so from the sensual to the violent.

When I was in London with Alex, we went to the London Dungeon and one of the exhibits and little cameos there is about Jack the Ripper. The whole London Dungeon experience makes you think that life in London in days gone by may well have been rather unpleasant. That's not to say that a brutal end would have been welcomed by anyone, but maybe it was just a matter of time. After all, what did a prostitute do when her teeth rotted or fell out? Probably charged less money I should think but who knows.

In Ipswich at the moment, a city which I have visited and is not without merit, someone is out there murdering prostitutes again. Horrible. But it makes me question how we label people. The most recent victim was a 19 year-old girl, her mother didn't know she was selling her body on the streets.
The previous one, a 25 year-old young woman who had somehow gone from being a 'normal' teenage schoolgirl who played the piano (ergo middle-class) to a drug addict and selling herself on the streets without her parents even realising what was happening. Had she not been murdered, chances are that she might have got through this period of her life and it would have just been an unpleasant memory for her, something that had to be revealed when a relationship turned serious, nothing more.
But now she is 'a murdered prostitute'. I don't mean to condemn other women who make a living in this way, far from it, I mean to question why we do label people so readily, especially when there is something so very negative about this particular label.

We are always hearing about young women who become strippers to put themselves through university. I think that's a bit spurious, it's not an avenue that is available to most men, nor is it one that most women take, it seems like a lazy way. But still, it is a job in the sex industry, and how would someone be labelled were she to die whilst in this phase of her life? Not 'law student' but 'stripper'.
The lowest common denominator, as ever.

When is the moment when it all goes wrong? Sometimes it's a chronicle, a story that begins in childhood and runs like a roller coaster towards a predictable end. And then sometimes there must be a pivotal moment, when the first drugs are taken in the wrong company, or the wrong person makes them feel good, a moment when the story could so easily have gone the other way, a sliding door.
And then that final pivotal moment when the young woman gets into a car with the wrong person. And her fate is sealed and written. Set in stone for ever.