When I was 6, in 1955, we lived in Nicosia and went on family picnics in dad's Morris Oxford to the Kyrenia Mountains. From the top, on clear days, you could see all the way from Cyprus to Turkey: the hazy, blue-grey tops of a mountain range. In winter you could see snow. I would gaze, longing - determined - to know these places.

I have just boarded a train in Adana, Turkey, after arriving from Syria. The brilliant seat61.com told us about the overnight sleeper to Istanbul - a 19-hour journey. In the Adana heat I unpack my laptop in our modern train's cheerful buffet and bar to download news from Britain before we move off towards the mountains.

Speaking up

Observing even from Turkey that the British are in lynch-happy mood, and preferring not to return to a torched London flat, I must be very, very careful how I defend Mr not-for-much-longer Speaker Martin.

First, then, my Martin-sceptic credentials. Of course, he was right to resign: in 2000 all of us parliamentary sketchwriters thought that he should never have been elected in the first place. My Times sketch called him a drongo, and I was called an English snob by the Scottish media. Since then, carried by his staff (despite his unfortunate habit of sacking them), Mr Martin has been lacklustre and supine.

But still there is something disgusting in the sight of MPs who happily accepted his cosy connivance in their little tricks now taking kicks at the humbled figure who saw himself more as shop steward than adjudicator. Those who knew all along what the public only know now, but have found their tongues and their courage just lately, do not impress.

So off into the wilderness goes Mr Scapespeaker, with all our sudden indignation on his back. And for what? For being what Labour's fixers chose him to be: pliable. It sticks in the craw to see Gordon Brown's people putting it about that Gordon handed him the black spot. Mr Brown and his predecessor promoted a Speaker who wouldn't make waves. Now Mr Brown sucks up to public opinion by insinuating that he is dumping the Speaker for not making waves. “Oh for a quiet corner,” as Cassandra, of the Daily Mirror, once put it, “an aspidistra, a handkerchief and the old heave-ho.”

West is West

Much is written about Turkey and the European Union viewed from the West. From the West, Turkey is where Asia begins. Westerners reaching Istanbul from Europe are drawn by the Otherness of the lands at whose gates the city stands. Here we feel we leave the West.

That isn't how it feels when you enter Turkey from the Middle East. I loved Syria - magical, different - but the place and its people seemed mysterious. Crossing into Turkey (all of us felt this) seemed somehow like coming home. There were road signs; traffic lights that drivers obeyed; you could read the writing; places and faces seemed open to us; women walked alone, bare-headed; shops and houses looked quietly middle class. From the train (small green fields, neat stations, stationmasters with caps and whistles) it could honestly have been Hungary. The Spain where my family arrived in 1974 felt more Third World.

Before writing off Turkey's chances of joining the EU, people struck by what is alien about the country should take stock of what is familiar. Try arriving from the other side. Coming in from Asia, Istanbul feels like Liverpool with mosques.

Last-ditch defence

It was a word that did it: from “moat” there is no coming back. Poor Douglas Hogg, attacked even by the new Poet Laureate. As Wilfred Owen almost wrote: “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of The Sun.”

Go on, then, torch my flat anyway; I'll patter out my hasty orison. Douglas Hogg is a finer mind, a better man and a braver politician than a whole cartload of them. Mr Hogg endured Tony Blair's shrugs, the jeers of government MPs, the growls of his own side and the raised eyes of Tory whips when for months, years, he soldiered on about the injustice and unwisdom of the Iraq war. Mr Hogg never licked his finger to the political wind. It pains me to see colleagues who do abandon him now; although I know they must.

Better late...

Up a great limestone pass our train labours, along green valleys whose rivers rush with snowmelt from the Taurus Mountains. A pale sun sinks into craggy peaks in an amber sky. Breathtaking. I've got here - 54 years later.

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