Today, I took a meeting with Afif The Thief - you may remember him from chronicles past. Always a great deal of entertainment, that one. We sat in the brasserie at the Marmara Hotel in Taksim Square, one of the original 5-star hotels in the city, whose premises I occasionally use as a sort of conference facility. Afif was telling me a story regarding a third party who tried to slip him some dough in order to influence his business dealings with a client.

The punchline goes as follows:

"I told him I heard his wife hadn't seen a real man in a while. I said, 'you're asking me to fuck the German. Why don't I fuck your wife instead?'"

Afif The Thief is always "talking his book", as traders like to say.