By Margaret Sheard ….
The Afternoon Tea Talk at the Black Olive Cafe, Alsancak, organised by the Friends of the TRNC Emergency Services (112) was held a week later in the month than usual and the topic was a bit different as the speaker was the founder of cyprusscene.com, Chris Elliott, talking about his journey into the media. So how do I write about it?
We had a few dummy runs through Chris’s presentation during the morning and I was very impressed with his Power Point presentation and what he intended speak about.
Our friends, Demetra George Mustafaoğlu and Ece Sualp had come along to the Black Olive to give Chris their support and we all settled down to our afternoon tea of sandwiches, cakes, and tea/coffee before Chris started his talk.
The presentation started and on reflection maybe I should have given a helping hand as Chris had to work between his laptop, notes, and keeping an eye on the TV screen to the side of him, as well as holding a microphone. All went well though and he proceeded to talk about how his journey of discovery into the media started from an accident ending up in a hospital bed where he wrote a valentine message in a Cyprus Today competition and won it, which then gave him the taste for writing and led him to carry on with newspapers and an internet website before building his own website, and before again contributing articles to a local newspaper.
The cyprusscene website has been running for some 6 years through all of the various diversions of newspapers and other internet activities. Chris felt there should be more than one English language newspaper in North Cyprus and so in October 2017 there was the launching of a printed newspaper called Cyprus Scene, which sadly didn’t work out due to unresolvable differences between ourselves and the person chosen to handle its 
publication, however, after Chris and I departed, it continued and was re-named North Cyprus Scene with content and editing by others, we believe that this may now have ceased publication.
Chris, always looking forward and not dispirited by the failure to create a newspaper of his choice, then delved into the realms of an online Enewspaper, which reaches around the world rather than just around North Cyprus, where both he and myself have learned new skills to produce, including the area of page-making, which was always a bone of contention with our previous experience of newspapers where the page-makers were dealing with English which was not their mother tongue.
The online free CyprusScene.com Enewspaper is now into its 25th week and looking very professional. It has been a long journey into many different aspects of the media and so, as Chris said, “it has been a journey of discovery and survival and now, what’s next”.
After the talk came the raffle, with some nice prizes and this was followed by Mike’s crazy salt and pepper gifts. I think both Demetra and Ece were a bit bewildered by all of this and Mike was in his element giving them his usual type of banter, all in good humour, which I think they enjoyed.
Mike told us that they have 10,000TL waiting for Girne State Hospital to confirm the equipment they would like from the funds raised. This week the tea talk raised 310TL.
The next tea talk will be on Wednesday 13th June, when the speaker will be Ibrahim Çağlar of the TRNC Civil Defence.
For anyone who would like to access our 24th issue Enewspaper please click below and when it opens use the right hand side arrow to turn the pages.
