United Nations International Police

We see things we like, things that catch our fancy and sometimes we want to take them home with us. Our guestrooms are littered with them.

For this one, were in Izmir in 2014, we had the kids with us, we were in the Great Market looking for interesting things to buy. This is really a passion of mine; to buy something unusual – preferably unique and valuable for as little as possible. It is exactly the same impulse that drives people to go out at night with metal detectors, or hunt for ancient shipwrecks. But when you are hunting for treasure in markets you have the additional thrill of locking horns with merchants who have plans of their own. Anyway, we had been at it for a few days – the children were willing to go along with it as long as there was a continuous supply of ice cream and apple tea – when we walked into a carpet shop tucked away upstairs and almost inaccessible. Nice carpets are bloody expensive as everyone knows so I wasn’t very hopeful but when the carpet shop owners clapped eyes on this family of European-looking tourists they gave the impression of being extremely hopeful, so they sat us down and poured us Turkish coffee and apple tea for the brats and started showing us carpets we had no intention of buying. I cast my eyes around the room, carpets were hanging on every wall, from the ceiling, in piles on the floor, stacked against wall, these people had serious inventory. Something caught my eye on the wall in front of where I was sat. From its colour and design, it could only be the United Nations emblem, half-hidden behind another more traditional carpet. Pale blue on an off-white background. A UN carpet! I had never seen a UN carpet before. I immediately looked away and drank my coffee. Now we were all getting along swimmingly, the owners of the store told us that our children were angelic and my wife was beautiful – it is quite possible that they had some kind of deal in mind – so I got up, walked directly across the room to the UN carpet and lifted the traditional carpet to get a better look. It was small, about 1×2 meters, a deep and dense weave, good colouring and printed were the words “Unite Nations International Police”; I fell deeply in love with this object instantly. I started laughing and asked the owners what this thing was, affecting a sort of academic curiosity. They looked perplexed. The owner told me that it was a prototype that had been commissioned by a man wanted to manufacture them. Ha! It was a reject! There is no International Police at the UN, it doesn’t exist, it is a mistake, a booboo and he was admitting to me that it was a failure because how else could he explain this strange object’s existence? I put myself in his boots and could come up with no plausible explanation. So I said, “It’s funny but I like it. I’ll give you $100 for it”. He put up a good fight and finally we paid $150 for this little one-off, unique, gorgeous, failed carpet beauty which now graces the floor of the English suite. I know it’s not from England.