“Impossible is nothing” as the folks with three stripes like to say. And this could just as easily be the maxim of Istanbul itself, where, I assure you, the unlikely lurks around the next corner, and the unexpected ambushes you at the next traffic light. Because Istanbul is all things to all men (and women). It’s a brash city-slicker arm in arm with a village idiot. A pious citizen lighting the cigarette of a harlot. History and consumerism with ice and a slice. I won’t say who, but many years ago when I’d just pitched tent here for good, 100m from İstiklal Boulevard, I had cause to put a contract out on a chicken. OK, it was a cockerel, and it belonged to the son of one of Turkey’s leading literary lights. The bird came as part of a job lot of chicks he thought would brighten up the communal garden, even though he only used his apartment as an office. The way 18^th century aristocrats got actors to play jolly peasants in the grounds of their stately homes. And yes, lo and behold, one of the chicks turned out to be a bloke. Now I love nature, having eaten my way through most of it down the years. But this bird, beyond what comes naturally, was an early riser. And a voice, well, let’s just say it was nothing like in the movies. In fact it sounded more like an unmotivated student murdering an oboe at 4am. Polite requests for a decent night’s goddamn sleep fell on deaf ears. Ears, I repeat, that never had to suffer the bird in question. A month later, tired in every sense of this particular sample of Istanbul eccentricity, I decided to take out a contract. My rental contract. The landlord, a lawyer, took pity on my sorry, sleepless self, and to prove that the law here is occasionally there to be used, not ten minutes had passed before a brisk snapping sound sent the cockerel to the great barnyard in the sky. Not many months later, at the feast of sacrifice, I awoke to what resembled Tarantino’s tribute to the early films of Bunuel. Fresh from sleep I staggered to the 5^th floor balcony, stretched, yawned and gazed down at the street. Where on the pavement below, in sight of the Galatasaray Lyceum a cow lay on its side, its blood washing the hill a charming shade of kiss-me crimson for about 20m. Istanbul. It’s an animal.