The voice is clear and strong with a hint of pain.
“Love,” she sings, “is a losing game”.
I’m not at a concert or watching a movie. I’m at Sentez College, a school in the Turkish city of Sakarya, to present certificates to students who have passed their Trinity College London and Cambridge English exams.
Yeşim Dilmaç, who is singing a classic Amy Winehouse song to an audience of students, parents and teachers, is one of the hard-working pupils to whom I will later present an award.
In my short speech before presenting certificates I praise the merits of language-learning in boosting careers (including, arguably, my own). 115 students come up to collect their certificates. Congratulations to all of them!
But Sentez College is a model of more kinds of communication than languages, important as they are. Here’s why.
I first met representatives of the school in Istanbul when they came to meet the Earl of Wessex as one of the Turkish schools which participate in the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award. They subsequently invited me to the school to present the English exam certificates.
I replied saying I’d love to come, but finding a date might be a problem as Sakarya was unfortunately over three hours’ drive from Istanbul.
In response, the school set up an awesome social media campaign to encourage me to visit. First, noting that my Twitter account @leighturnerFCO had a long-running #reasonstolikeIstanbul hashtag, they set up a #reasonstolikeSakarya hashtag and bombarded me with messages about the delights of the city.
Many of these were cool or funny, eg “islama kofte is our local dish, it’s tasty”; “Mornings Are So Peaceful”; “Despite being a small town, it possesses big-hearted people”; “When it snows, mountains look so adorable”; and my favourite: “When it rains, the smell of the soil is great”.
As if this weren’t enough, they sent me a video, extolling the school and its facilities and featuring classes of children chanting “Please come and see us Mr Turner”.
By this time I was thinking Sentez Koleji was irresistible. So when the chance came up to combine a trip to Ankara with a visit to the school, I seized it with both hands. Result: a tour of an impressive institution – including lunch with the pupils, presentation of certificates and – Amy Winehouse.
But don’t take my word for it. The school is so switched-on that by the time the presentation ceremony took place they were already able to show the crowd a movie about their social media campaign, including footage of my arriving at the school that morning: “How we convinced Mr Turner to visit us“.
It’s a masterpiece: watch, wonder and learn.
Follow Leigh Turner on Twitter @LeighTurnerFCO