I was walking quickly and reached the small stream emerging from the end of the lake in half an hour. TRT was still looking huge on the skyline. The only life that I was aware of was of the feathered variety; magpies, skylarks and the occasional buzzard.

The heavy snow of Friday had virtually all gone. The sky was looking settled, so I left TRT at the stroke of 9am turning left at the western end of the complex into the lane which I knew went straight to the lake and then headed for the hills. The track was un-metalled but reasonably smooth as it descended quite steeply toward the valley floor. Apart from the odd car whose occupants gazed at this Englishman in benign curiosity, I saw no one.

The landscape was still desolate and quite bleak. A few small conifers were planted here and there but mostly I was looking at the greyness of land that was still only above freezing for perhaps 8 hours a day. Looking more closely, I could see the evidence of last year’s crops of wheat, which seems to be the life support of the people inhabiting these sparsely populated fringes of Ankara. An electricity pylon, clearly carrying high voltage supplies, leaned at a crazy angle having been struck with force by some truck or other.

As I approached an underpass to Ankara’s 8 lane ring road, the surface improved dramatically for a few hundred metres, but still all was uncannily quiet, just birdsong and a breeze rustling the wind dried long grass at the roadside.

On my right was a large and very elegant house with balconies, barbecues, an orchard, summer house at the end of a huge garden. I saw several places like this, clearly wealthy people who wanted to escape from the city, but this moonscape would not have been my choice of surroundings, I have to say!

Street was too grand a word, the track was getting increasingly muddy. An elderly man was breaking stones with a hammer to mend the track from his house to his animal enclosure. His wife was cleaning a rickety table outside their tiny dwelling. A stream of doubtful purity meandered in the gorge to my right. Low walls of rubble with rickety wooden and rusty iron gates marked the perimeter of small farmsteads. And in an enclosure to my right, noisy geese, chickens and at last, the countries namesake, a turkey!

I approached the centre of the village, knowing that I would stand out like a very sore finger in this most Turkish of villages. Ladies swathed in dark winter clothing, colourful scarves around their heads were doing chores as villagers had done for hundreds of years. Washing clothes in huge tubs by hand, pegging them out on a line, or just hanging them over a fence.

“Merhaba” she replied. I would love to have taken her picture, the lighting and atmosphere of the shot were just right, but courtesy prevailed, and the image is in my mind, not my camera.

These lads were as happy kicking a ball around as some of our couch potato teenagers watching soap after soap, or playing on their Sony Play stations.