This icy day of dagger wind

I scan the squally sea above

Where waves and whales and sailing ships

Collide and slide in tangled whirls

With herring gulls, white horses' manes

‘til the sea I saw is seen no more

Just gnarled contortions of my mind

White and black erupt with grey

Twist and spout and swoop and sprout

And turn about to start again

My thoughtscape ebbs

Wild figments flow

Dreams like driftwood washed ashore

From the pelagic cumulonimbus realm

Where I dipped a single frozen toe 

Greetings pop pickers!

I doubt that any of us will ever forget the dark days of the global pandemonium when we couldn’t go out at all, and then when we could go out we couldn’t go out without a signed note from our mammies. And face masks and Zoom meetings were all the rage, and in many cases those meetings are still very popular because you can pretend to like people even if you hate them because they can’t see the rude gestures you’re making underneath the table while you’re talking, and you don’t have to wear any clothes on your lower half and nobody knows that you’ve got rakia in your water jug.

During those times many schemes were hatched to beat the lockdown boredom. Buying air fryer contraptions, making bread, making babies and performing opera from balconies were high on the list of favourites for much of the population but I sought something a little more original to keep me occupied through the coughing and wheezing.  

Listening to one per day, I joined my youngest daughter Rose in ploughing through a massive internet list of the best rock albums ever made. This was a very interesting project even though not all of the entries on the list of five hundred could be classed as rock music. Country & western, rap, jazz, reggae, national anthems of the Soviet republics, etc. were all there.  

My constructive criticism of the music often amounted to a mere ‘awful’ so I would turn it off after hearing just a couple of tracks. Sometimes, if it was a particularly good one, I would already know the day’s selected album inside out so I might choose not to bother listening to it because it was too familiar to pose a challenge to my temporal lobe. Such predicaments caused me to question the viability of the list and I decided to right a few wrongs by compiling my own.

I set about this task sometime in the summer of 2022 and completed it in January 2025 whilst lying on my snot-encrusted settee with nothing better to do during a short illness (which wasn’t Covid 19). One item per day over such a long period of time would suggest a figure near to a thousand albums, but it contains only a hundred. However, every one of them is an absolute gem, which made it necessary for me to listen to some of them numerous times. And then there were some days when I was busy with other things or I just couldn’t be arsed.

It would have been easy to quickly fill up a list by selecting twenty albums by David Bowie, fifteen by the Beatles, ten by the Rolling Stones and five by Chas ‘n’ Dave but to ensure a wide spread of styles I only allowed myself one album by each artist. Other rules included no soundtracks, no live albums, no ‘best of’ albums and no classical music albums because that really deserved a whole additional list. Only albums that I really loved and that I had listened to numerous times made it on to the list so I excluded many artists that might, under different circumstances, be expected to be included on the strength of their reputation alone, such as B*Witched and Led Zeppelin.

I’m not sure if anyone will ever read this compilation, let alone go through it listening to each album listed, but it’s something I needed to do to sum up my six decades of listening to popular music. And it may not be the final cut as new music comes along and tastes change, so if I were to put it together again next week it could be quite different.

But here are my hot one hundred, listed in no particular order, for your infinite listening pleasure, and mine…

1. Lush - Lovelife
2. Planxty - Planxty
3. Lindisfarne - Nicely Out of Tune
4. Dusty Springfield - A Girl Called Dusty
5. The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette
6. The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
7. Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club
8. The Cardigans - Gran Tourismo
9. Billy Bragg - Brewing Up with Billy Bragg
10. Joni Mitchell - Blue
11. Garbage - Garbage
12. Dr Ross - Call the Doctor
13. Cockney Rebel - The Human Menagerie
14. Bob Dylan - Blood On the Tracks
15. David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
16. Ronnie Drew - The Humour is On Me Now
17. The Velvet Underground - Andy Warhol
18. This Mortal Coil - It'll End in Tears
19. Thin Lizzy - Black Rose
20. Billie Holiday - Lady Sings the Blues
21. Bob Seger - Night Moves
22. The Beatles - Revolver
23. The Undertones - The Undertones
24. Queen - Queen (sometimes known as Queen I)
25. The Stranglers - Raven
26. Elton John - Madman Across the Water
27. The Cure - The Head on the Door
28. The Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
29. Kate Bush - The Kick Inside
30. Frankie Miller - Once in a Blue Moon
31. The Cocteau Twins - Four Calendar Café
32. Kirsty MacColl - Tropical Brainstorm
33. Stevie Wonder - Talking Book
34. Japan - Gentlemen Take Polaroids
35. The Dubliners - A Drop of the Hard Stuff
36. UB40 - Signing Off
37. The Who - Who's Next
38. The Beat - I Just Can’t Stop It
39. Blondie - Plastic Letters
40. Goran Bregović - Champagne for Gypsies
41. The Pogues - If I Should Fall from Grace with God
42. The Human League - Dare
43. Ryuchi Sakamoto - Beauty
44. The Specials - The Specials
45. Bob Marley and the Wailers - Exodus
46. Echobelly - On
47. The Kinks - The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
48. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Juju
49. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Next
50. Sinéad O’Connor - The Lion and the Cobra
51. Rokia Traoré - Beautiful Africa
52. The Faces - Oh La La
53. George Harrison - All Things Must Pass
54. Joe Jackson - I'm the Man
55. Mississippi John Hurt - Today!
56. David Sylvian - Secrets of the Beehive
57. Björk - Debut
58. Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
59. De La Soul - Three Feet High and Rising
60. Fatoumata Diawara - Fatou
61. Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra - Imbarca
62. Everything but the Girl - Walking Wounded
63. The Prodigy - The Fat of the Land
64. The Cranberries - Everyone Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?
65. M.I.A. - Kala
66. Ian Dury and the Blockheads - New Boots and Panties
67. Sleeper - The it Girl
68. Emel Malouthi - Kelmti Horra
69. KT Tunstall - Eye to the Telescope
70. Gogol Bordello - Trans-Continental Hustle
71. Chisu - Polaris
72. Laura Mvula - Sing to the Moon
73. Electric Light Orchestra - A New World Record
74. Propaganda - Duel
75. Ash - 1977
76. T Rex - Electric Warrior
77. Dubioza Kolektiv - Happy Machine
78. Lou Reed - Transformer
79. The Clash - London Calling
80. Lúnasa - Sé
81. Stiff Little Fingers - Nobody's Heroes
82. Tamikrest - Chatwa
83. Slade - Slayed?
84. The Chieftains - The Chieftains
85. The Monochrome Set - Love Zombies
86. Kid Creole and the Coconuts - Tropical Gangsters
87. Yazoo - Upstairs at Eric’s
88. Django Reinhardt - Djangology
89. The The - Soul Mining
90. Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7^th Time
91. Elastica - Elastica
92. La Caravane Passe - Hôtel Karavan
93. Chris Rea - Shamrock Diaries
94. The Small Faces - There Are but Four Small Faces
95. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes
96. Sheila Chandra - The Zen Kiss
97. Ronnie Lane - Anymore for Anymore
98. Fine Young Cannibals - The Raw and the Cooked
99. François Hardy - Tous les Garçons et les Filles
100. The Police - Regatta de Blanc

Gravestones leant against the red brick wall like dockers waiting for work. For a long time now, the dockers have all been redundant or dead, but in the industrial boomtown of Middlesbrough in the early 1960s, only the cemetery was redundant and its dead were all but forgotten.

We’d play tigs-off-ground, jumping up onto those of the stones that leaned the least vertically.  There for a few seconds we were safe from the powers of the person who was ‘it’. Most were old and often decorated with mosaics of lichen. All had names and dates engraved that we never took the trouble to read. The ones I remember most vividly are the ones that looked relatively new and perhaps discarded too soon.

‘You know you’re playing on top of dead bodies!’ adults passing by would shout at us, usually laughing but sometimes having expressions of horror on their ashen faces. But that couldn’t possibly be true. It was only a five-minute walk from the street of Victorian terrace houses in which most of us lived. Deprived of gardens, this patch of green seemed the perfect safe place to congregate. A small slice of peaceful countryside on our doorsteps. Thoughts of embellishing the grownups’ warnings by making up ghost stories to scare our peers, as you might expect from excitable young children, never entered our heads. We didn’t know the truth.  

Almost a lifetime later I wrote a poem about meeting there with friends as seven-year-olds. Our group included a girl who assured us that she was going to marry George Harrison. Beatlemania had just got off the ground then but Patricia’s head had elevated much further up into the clouds. She was the first person I knew at school to feel the sting of a nun’s wooden ruler across the palm of her hand. The reason for this being that she had written I Luv George on the front cover of her sums book. I could remember her very well, I could remember our gang of friends playing on the swings and roundabouts in the park, but I couldn’t remember the name of the park. My writing seemed incomplete without it. So I fired up the internet machine, did a bit of rooting around and found some information that stunned and amazed me.

I read on the website of the Teesside newspaper, the Northern Echo, an article written in 2010 by a journalist called Julia Breen. She had reported that a local historian by the name of Steve Waller had extensively researched the history of Ayresome Cemetery. This was the very place where we would go to talk about Batman, eat Spangles and sometimes tune in to Patricia’s ramblings about her ongoing love affair with one of Britain’s four foremost pop stars. I was pleased to have established the name of the location, albeit a fairly obvious one, but I was fascinated by what followed in the article.

From a collection of archive documents, the researcher had discovered that since it was opened in 1854, more than 11,000 people had been buried in the graveyard. These had included some of the poorest members of the town’s population, some who had been mentally insane and many who had died from epidemics. It also contained the graves of a significant number of wealthy citizens such as politicians, industrialists, merchants and even the children of Middlesbrough’s founding fathers.

The cemetery had been opened to meet the needs of the town’s rapid expansion in the nineteenth century but in 1962, as even greater expansion took off and many old buildings we destroyed to make way for social and economic progress, it too became a victim. Graves and vaults were covered up or sealed, tombstones were uprooted and stacked around the perimeter, and its two neo-classical-style chapels were destroyed. The site became Ayresome Gardens, our idyllic playground.

I don’t remember there being a basketball court. Perhaps that was built later, on the spot where in my day there had been a football pitch. So I was shocked to learn that Mr Waller had unearthed evidence to suggest that dozens of cholera victims were buried beneath it, and that a nearby car park concealed the graves of fourteen children.

As children ourselves, we never paid much attention to those who warned us about the dead who lay beneath our new recreation area. The long rows of unloved headstones leaning in irregular stacks three or four deep were the only remaining feature to suggest that the gardens had once been a burial ground. I touched and saw them often, and even grazed my knees on them, but I never questioned their presence. Although my eyes were open they might just as well have been closed because their being there never seemed to me to be anything other than normal. My father was much more aware of them. They seemed to make him uncomfortable. He told me that they had been removed from their original individual locations because the people they had been put up in memory of had died a long time ago, so nobody came to see them anymore. Apparently the stones were smashed up and taken away in 1978 for safety reasons. Council officials were worried because children had been seen playing on them.

But I read in the Northern Echo article that the last burial to take place there was that of eighty-four-year-old Florence Gjers, the wife of a Swedish iron master. She had died in 1950, just twelve years before the cemetery had been decommissioned. There must have been families and friends who were still visiting their loved ones’ graves right up until the final weeks and days, and possibly even hours. It must have been heart-breaking for them. I suppose there were also living people with the expectation of one day being buried alongside their already deceased family members but who had to make alternative funeral arrangements.

Another remarkable discovery made by Mr Waller from the documents was the incredible symbolic artwork used when designing the graveyard’s layout. He suspected that Middlesbrough had wanted to spend some money to show off its newfound affluence. Apparently the design contained none of the usual uniformity of simple columns and rows, but twists and turns hiding special meanings such as angel wings, the letters AD, ancient gods of the Underworld, and in the centre, the Holy Grail.

Since the closure there has been no marker to say that remains of people equivalent in number to the current population of Ilfracombe lie there. Steve Waller, other historical researchers and Teesside residents have been campaigning for a blue plaque or more prominent permanent memorial to be erected in this place of so many unmarked graves.

I never liked living in Middlesbrough. To me it was a dark and dirty, noisy old place. The town was dominated by the steelworks and petrochemical plant and, even though we couldn’t see these toxic monsters from where we lived, we could see and smell the pollution that they spewed out around the clock. The fog on the Tees is all volatile organic compounds, as the old (imagined) song goes. Just as natives of Liverpool are Scousers and those born in Birmingham are Brummies, we are known as Smoggies. So I was glad that we moved away when I was eight years old. Since then the heavy industry has gone and along with it the pollution, but also the jobs and money that it generated for so long. There are much different problems there now.

Down the years I’ve met many other people from Middlesbrough who have always seemed genuinely warm, friendly, down to earth and funny. They’ve tended to look back on their no-nonsense, no-frills hometown with a lot of affection, reviving memories similar to my own. Comedian Bob Mortimer is an absolute legend in the world that spins round inside my head.

It’s more than thirty years since I was last there but my recent little trip down memory lane, sparked off by my hearing the song All My Loving in a café near where I live in Bulgaria, sent me flying back to those childhood days with my friend Patricia and her Beatle-to-be. This unexpected blast of nostalgia gave me an even more unexpected urge to return for a day or two. I particularly want to go back to Ayresome Gardens and pay my respects to the 11,000 people for whom, in my ignorance, I showed absolutely no respect six decades ago.

Gravestones leant against the red brick wall

Like dockers waiting for work

A redundant cemetery, reborn Ayresome Gardens

Flaunting football pitch and swings

Folks weren’t dying like they used to

‘Close your eyes and I'll kiss you

Tomorrow I'll miss you,

That’s what Paul sings’ you said

‘But I only love George’

Skipping towards the rocking horse

But where would you be tomorrow

In your plastic real leather jacket?

Did George have a bright red jumper

Like mine, knitted by his Nan

Gone bobbly down the front?

‘Our Dad smokes, could be singing

But doesn’t even talk

I wish our Mam had a pop star man

Like I’ll have’ you said

‘When I’ve married George’

‘When John and Paul stop singing

George plays his guitar on his own

We’ll have peach sundaes at Rea's caff

And if we’ve nowt much to say

Then he can play his guitar’

Beckoned by shops on Linthorpe Road

The other kids ran off

Faces pressed to Lucozade glass

Yearned elusive Matchbox cars or

Sindy dolls faded by imagined sun

‘George would never run off like that’

You sighed

‘George would stay and play his guitar’

I didn’t run off like that

I could sigh too

Patricia and me alone in the park

But she saw only George

St Philomena’s bells the only sound

Plenty more fish, I thought

And Dusty Springfield had nicer eyes

Round and broad and black and flat

Each Sunday on her head it sat

Moth-eaten and it smelt of cat

Kathleen Lally’s ecclesial hat

An accessory at every Holy Mass

On seeing herself in the looking glass

She felt refined, a touch of class

Other congregants could never surpass

She’d wear it also to confession

For fashion’s sake she’d try to freshen

It up with a Brillo to make an impression

When recounting her sins to Father Brennan

In Corinthians she had oft-times read

A woman should have a covered head

For receiving wine and communion bread

And praying for the needy, the sick and the dead

Neighbours thought her too devout

Wearing that hat every time she went out

Words of scorn were what they’d shout

But her steadfastness was never in doubt

Miss Foley said a hat’s not needed

She’d said the Pope in Rome decreed it

Advice that Kathleen hadn’t heeded

Afraid they’d see her hair receded

Prepared for when she’d meet her maker

She’d written a note to the undertaker

Give me my hat or some hair that’s fake or

The saints will know I’m a prevaricator

At Glenariffe church where her body lies

Father Brennan smiles with Irish eyes

He’d looked it up and to his surprise

To be bald is just grand, so the Bible implies

The wrinkled old Serb gulped a mouthful of spirit from a battered silver hipflask that he had taken from the pocket of his equally battered jacket. ‘It’s all I can do to stop the coughing’ he said, almost apologetically, before drawing hard on his cigarette. Nicotine stained the fingers of his right hand, a couple of centimetres of the otherwise grey moustache that concealed the whole of his mouth, and the drably painted walls that surrounded the dark wooden desk at which he sat. On his left hand I noticed he had one finger missing and another badly misshapen.

As I examined the dozens of campaign medals tossed into a plastic ice cream tub on the glass-topped counter, he started telling me the story of his own military career. I hadn’t asked but he was eager to share. He admitted that in hindsight he wasn’t proud of some of the things he had done and neither, it seemed, were they who had been decorated with those now discarded pieces of brass and ribbon, each with an asking price of 200 Dinars (approximately £1.40). Considering that people must have died in the lead up to them being pinned on the chests of glorious recipients sent shivers through my body. Thoughts of them later being discarded, for whatever reason, depressed me.   

Standing close to him I sensed that I too was turning brown from the cloud of exhaled smoke as he recounted gruesome details of his time fighting against the Bosnians in the 1990s and explaining why it had been necessary to do so. Although I couldn’t agree with the ideology that had guided him, particularly his attempts to justify the four-year-long Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide, it was interesting to hear of the first hand experiences of someone who had been a combatant in that complex and horrific war. I felt I was listening to the words of an intrinsically good man poisoned by propaganda and in search of personal revenge.    

Suggesting I take a seat, he introduced himself as Boško, and offered me rolling tobacco and a glass of his homemade slivovitz, claiming that both contained only natural ingredients. ‘If I didn’t smoke and drink, how else would I get nature’s goodness into my veins?’ he asked.

Out of politeness I accepted the plum distillate and a little coffee from the small copper djezve that simmered on a cast iron stove in the corner of his dusty antique shop. Laughing as he poured, he boasted ‘All natural ingredients!’ I tried to convince myself that heat from the burning logs might have seen off any deadly bacteria or cigarette ash that had got caught up in the cooking process.

He went on to say that those terrible things he had spoken of had all taken place many years ago, wishing that they had never happened at all and expressing grave concern that the ethnic tension in the Western Balkans had still not gone away. ‘The situation in Kosovo is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off,’ he said before raising his arms in the air and shouting ‘BOOM!’ at the top of his voice. There was an awkward silence then as he drew again on his wispy roll-up and stared hard at the worn bare boards of the wooden floor.

Not really knowing how to react, I hesitated a couple of minutes before asking him what effect the upheaval had had on his family. After a heavy sigh he replied, ‘While I was at the army training camp in Croatia, Bosniaks beat my father to death in our yard. My dear mother and young brother were taken away with some of our neighbours in the back of a truck. No one ever saw them again. No one knows what happened to them. I have no family. Most of our village was burned. I have no photographs. I have only memories and a desire to forget, but not to forgive.’

Looking around I saw shelves laden with simple but interesting artefacts from a Serbia of fifty or even a hundred years before. Coins, porcelain vases, books of poetry printed in Cyrillic script, alabaster busts of long-dead pompous dukes and generals with feathers in their hats, ornate cigarette lighters, socialist groups’ lapel badges, monogrammed and inlaid jewellery boxes, and such like.  Every item was a treasure from a time when Belgrade had been the capital of the whole of Yugoslavia.

A significant proportion of the wares bore pictures or engravings of Marshall Tito, Yugoslavia’s former president. He had been a leader cautiously respected by western and eastern powers alike and worshipped by many in his own country. The old man described him as a ‘snake in the grass’ who, despite his strong allegiance to socialism, had refused to take his people into the Soviet Bloc and who had played a cunning game with powerful statesmen from both sides of the Iron Curtain to secure what he considered best for the Yugoslav Federation. Everything had been fine, it seemed, until Tito died in 1980 without there being a successor capable of continuing to hold together the six individual republics as one nation. From that point onwards all hell really was let loose in a series of wars of independence.

In light of what he had been through, Boško considered himself fortunate to be alive and fortunate too that, due to spending long periods of time away from his home on active service and then having a body and mind both scarred by war, he had never been able to marry and have children. ‘The work of God is such that when the next conflict comes I will have no need to worry myself about my sons and my grandsons. I am very lucky!’ he said with a forced smile on his face.

It didn’t seem right to buy something from him. Taking home a polished trinket would have just sullied this unique experience. I couldn’t have wished for a better souvenir than the conversation we had just shared. ‘Great thanks to you for taking an interest in my country’ he said, firmly shaking my hand. ‘It is rare for a foreign visitor to do this.’ But he understood that as a resident of neighbouring Bulgaria, a country that had experienced great troubles of its own, I would always yearn for a greater understanding of the intricacies of Balkan history.  

An old-fashioned bell jangling on the back of the shop door as it closed behind me was the only sound when I eventually stepped out into the empty streets of the city’s Dorćol district. Boško’s words already repeating themselves in my mind had me thinking to myself that sometimes even the darkest cloud might have a silver lining, albeit one that is virtually impossible to find and which may have been riddled with bullets.

In 1949, while most of Europe was scratting around in search of construction materials to rebuild towns and cities destroyed in an horrific war, a carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen, in his simple and rustic factory in the Danish town of Billund, began manufacturing coloured interlocking plastic bricks for children to play with. His company, which had already been producing wooden toys for decades, was called ‘Lego’, a word derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which translates into English as ‘play well’. The brand name Lego was soon given to dear ole Ole’s innovation, replacing the original but less catchy ‘Automatic Binding Bricks.’ Had this change not taken place, I wonder if a million parents every day would hop on their painful feet and say ‘Oh, bloody hell! I’ve just stood on an Automatic Binding Brick!’  

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been born in 1957 because by then Lego had already been in existence a whole eight years. Even now, not a day goes by without me wondering what people did for entertainment prior to its invention. How did they cope? I suspect that such a void in their culture was a major contributing factor to the post-war baby boom. But the big question is, how would I have coped during my childhood without it?

No matter what we might have learned from the work of psychologist Sigmund Freud, I’d say it’s blatantly obvious that the availability of Lego in the early years of a human life does more to develop a child’s psyche than anything else, including breast milk and Postman Pat pop-up books. To prove my theory, I offer the example that John and Edward Grimes (collectively known as Irish rock legends, Jedward) would have had access to Lego as youngsters, but Adolf Hitler most definitely didn’t.

Although sensible and precautionary, I find it strange and sad that its small pieces are considered unsuitable for children under the age of three. During my infancy I entertained myself by chewing for long hours on a particularly interesting dog-shaped wooden rattle coated in paint of the finest lead content and purchased from a stall in the darkest corner of Middlesbrough market where people these days go to buy the less harmful heroin. By the time I had ingested all of the toy’s toxins I was old enough to join the other kids in the street to kick about an inflated pig’s bladder (kids from poorer families struggled because their pigs’ bladders still had the trotters attached). At that point Lego existed but I was unaware of it. Items on display in the local toy shop window were a ticking time bomb that would one day go off and change my life immeasurably.

It was probably one of those northern industrial Christmases in the early 1960s with black snow, brown ale and adults exchanging gifts of large tins of Willy Woodbine cigarettes when I became the recipient of my first box of Lego. I was instantly hooked. Other popular toys at the time were things that required little more than spinning or throwing or pushing or shooting or whatever it is you do to yo-yos, but with a pile of these little pieces of plastic enchantment I could do almost anything. With my bricks and a bit of thought, ships, rockets, trains and posh houses all became possibilities; as was the pet hamster that I had yearned for, though I would have still preferred a live organic one. In my wildly imaginative mind there was no limit to what I could build, except when I reached a point where I’d used up all the pieces. But subsequent Christmases, birthdays and first Communion day, together with what I bought with the money I earned from my weekend chimney sweeping job, saw my box of Lego grow and my creativity grew with it.

Other plastic construction toys were available but they were all absolute rubbish. There were Stickle Bricks, which resembled the curlers that the grown up female members of the family and odd Uncle Dermot would put in their hair on a Friday evening to make themselves look gorgeous. But you couldn’t build a speedboat with them. There were also Mini Bricks which looked like those very small pieces of Lego but were a thousandth of an inch too big so they were totally incompatible. My mother used to refer to my Lego as my Mini Bricks, which infuriated me. Some hopelessly uneducated aunt once treated me to a box of Mini Bricks for being a good boy. I politely thanked her, put them out of sight under my bed and remained perfectly calm until the day my mother tipped them all into the big box of Lego for tidiness’ sake. That day saw my introduction to the feelings of disbelief, outrage and anger.

Meccano was a bit too scientific and nerdy, and with Bayko it was only possible to build three bedroom pre-war detached houses, so both were disgracefully middle class and totally unacceptable. 

Miraculously, although everything else from my childhood has gone (I blame my mother, so thank you for that Sigmund Freud), I still have that original Lego and it has been played with by many other kids over the course of the sixty years since it came into my possession. I still love it. When my kids were small they loved the fact that I loved Lego and I would play with them using their bricks for up to half an hour after the point at which they had gone off to do something else because I had completely taken over the proceedings.

I could build the Eiffel Tower or Thunderbird Two from memory, so it saddens me these days to see that every box of Lego comes with a set of instructions and the end result is exactly what the children are told to do by a faceless designer in an office in an unknown location, and what is shown in the picture on the box. They’re like three dimensional jigsaw puzzles that are put together once and then left to gather dust until the kids leave home at which point they’re transferred to the loft for a few years before being given away, with intense feelings of reluctance and guilt, to a charity shop.

In my day a pack of these bricks would prepare a child’s mind for an adventure in a world of unfettered inventiveness but now it merely sets him or her up for a lifetime of assembling Ikea flat pack furniture. So I’ve encouraged kids to build their model Harry Potter Fetish Dungeons or Somali Pirate Ships once, dismantle them, hide the instruction booklet and then just build whatever they want with what lies before them, which always turns out to be a lot more fun. No child has ever laughed at not being able to find the red semi-circular piece referred to in step six on page forty-three, but no child has ever burst into tears whilst building their own creation of a flying house on wheels driven by sheep.

I no longer play with my Lego alone (well, not very often) but my interest in it remains strong. Whilst trekking the Inca Trail in Peru not many years ago, I was delighted to learn that all those massive walls, palaces and temples along the way to Machu Picchu were built from stone carved in the same way as the Lego building principle with lumps on the top that interlocked with holes in the bottom. Ancient Incas used neither mortar nor instruction booklets, and I doubt if they had well-meaning aunties who bought them blocks of stone that didn’t quite fit.

Recently my son gave me a kit for building a scale model of Leeds United’s Elland Road stadium but, although being very grateful to him, I haven’t attempted it yet. This is partly because it’s not an official Lego product. It’s a bit like that Mini Bricks abomination. It’s also because there are 2,436 very small pieces which present quite a challenge for someone with deteriorating eyesight, arthritic fingers and the propensity to nod off, such as I. But I need to make a start soon because the football club has announced plans to increase the seating capacity of the ground so, to ensure that the finished item is up to date and realistic, I might find myself having to buy a packet of the inferior rival brand to fill in the gaps.   

Lego is probably now as big a name around the world as Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Apple. Apparently they churn out thirty-six billion bricks every year, so they must employ at least a dozen Irish hod-carriers. I normally detest those vast global corporations but I can always make an exception for Ole Kirk Christiansen’s brainchild. I normally detest the use of plastics in manufacturing and their disposable nature, but who would ever throw away a lovely little bit of Lego?

A few months ago I found a few pieces of Lego on a vacant seat on the bus going into town. My initial reaction was one of great joy at having acquired something that would keep me entertained for the next few hours, but for the remainder of the day my heart ached for the sadness that must have been suffered by the child or sixty-odd-year-old man who had lost them.

I really enjoyed writing this piece. It may seem like a bit of a self-indulgent, nonsensical ramble to you but for me it’s been a wonderful trip down memory lane. I stayed up very late one night to write it and then when I’d finished I decided I needed a photograph to accompany it. The subject of the photograph simply had to be one of my own Lego creations, so I stayed up a further two hours to build a house or hotel or something… you decide! Please don’t tell anybody but I had an absolutely wonderful time and even considered the possibility of going out the next day to buy more plastic bricks. Are you aware of the existence of a sadder sexagenarian than me? Please bear in mind that Ole Kirk Christiansen himself was already fifty-eight years old when he invented the stuff.

Grasping my feet like stony tentacles

Waterworn jewels churn around toes

Daughters of Nereus dance the depths

Inviting and enticing

With each receding wave

To swim

Beneath ancient horizons

Forever in heavenly pools

The Cretan moon sparkles

On silver silken threads

Wild thyme woven with endless time

Their tight mesh wound around my heart

Paralysing body and mind

Thwarts escape

Mœræ whisper, my fate lies here

On Sougia beach

From shoulders

My heavy cloak dropped

Kissed by sun and salt

A captive of land and sea

Both had won me

Flying away

I vow to return

My spirit having stayed

Raising my eyes from my paperback to look at the character approaching me, I heard his voice, ‘Are you reading a book?’ I wanted to say that I was flying a kite but the physical appearance of my interrogator suggested that he might not share my appreciation of sarcasm. Tattoos on the knuckles are generally a good indicator that diplomacy might be required, especially when those tattoos spell LIVE and RPOO. Where the hell’s the L? I wondered but didn’t ask.

So I said nothing at all and he already had his second question primed, ‘What are you reading a book for?’

‘I like reading books’ I responded and he stared at me, mystified.

Without invitation he sat down on the bench beside me. A slight breeze blowing from his direction carried the suggestion that his pastimes were more likely to be alcohol and tobacco than literature and personal grooming. He wore a black donkey jacket with the traditional PVC panels on the shoulders to provide protection from all weathers and, long before the advent of shirt sponsorship in sport, the rear panel bore the words Tarmac Construction in big green letters. I wanted to ask him how many donkeys had died in the manufacture of his jacket but the knuckles reminded me to tread carefully. A woolly scarf tied Rupert Bear fashion fitted snugly round his neck. He also had on a woolly hat which might possibly have been a tea cosy operating in diversification mode, his denim jeans that fitted him only where they touched him were splashed with tar and maybe tea or blood, and holes in his working boots thankfully revealed their metal toecaps rather than socks or whatever else lurked beneath.

‘They say you should never judge a book by its cover’ he went on, ‘but I do because I can’t read. But some books are alright. They smell nice. The best one’s the Yellow Pages because the paper’s dead thin so you can tear a bit out to use when you’ve run out of Rizzlas. Have you got a spare ciggy?’

‘No, I don’t smoke’ I told him.

‘You read books in the park and you don’t smoke ciggies! Are you some sort of weirdo or what?’ The ‘or what?’ (with a silent ‘t’) part of his sentence really emphasising his Scouse accent. I didn’t dare tell him I was waiting for my girlfriend who worked in Leeds General Infirmary just across the road from the public garden in which we were sitting. Incidentally, a few years later that garden was dedicated to Nelson Mandela and, many years after that, the great man made a speech there when he became an Honorary Freeman of the City of Leeds.

As a consequence of government underfunding, Britain’s National Health Service in 1981 was in a right old mess and drastically short staffed, so I never knew how late my true love would be in leaving work. To sit amongst the perfectly manicured shrubbery, the multi-coloured floral displays and the discarded cider cans with a good novel (always precisely the same size as my coat pocket, for convenience sake) was the ideal way to pass the incalculable periods of waiting time. Sometimes I’d go there even when I didn’t have anybody to meet.

I’m not a snob, and neither was she (let’s call her Vanessa, because that was her name), but I strongly suspected that my new acquaintance might not fit perfectly into our plans for the evening; unless it turned out that he could talk at length about the history of the Irish Republican movement, Björn Borg’s muscular thighs, the music of Dire Straits or surgical ventricular restoration. And if it turned out that he could then he was welcome to her. Sometimes she wore a donkey jacket too with a CND badge on the lapel.

‘I just like the fresh air and a bit of peace,’ I shouted as the traffic lights behind me changed to green and a fleet of rush hour cars and buses roared by at five miles per hour until they were halted again at the next set of lights 200 yards further up Great George Street. Leaded petrol and high density engine emissions were all the rage back then so I held my breath briefly, unfortunately letting go just as a cloud of smoke from something burning between the old Liverpudlian’s brownest two fingers came my way. It surged up my nostrils like a mini outbreak of biological warfare. ‘What the fuck is that that you’re smoking?’ I demanded to know as I gasped for oxygen only a matter of yards away from the main door of the accident and emergency unit of a very large hospital where my girlfriend happened to work. At least I could take comfort from the fact that I probably wouldn’t die.

‘I only smoke Benches and Hedges,’ was his answer.

‘You mean Benson and Hedges?’

‘No. I mean Benches and Hedges. Well that’s what I call them. I pick up the dog ends that I find under benches and hedges and roll them up in a bit of Yellow Pages and they’re as good as what you’d buy or lift from the shops. Some posh people throw away more of their cig than they smoke. When I see posh people smoking I follow them to see how much they’ll throw away and then I grab it off the deck. I love posh people. These gardens are a great place for a few dog ends because the doctors and nurses from the hospital always come out here for their fag break when they’re doing operations. Do you want to try one? I rolled up four while I was sitting in the solicitor’s waiting room this morning.’

My curiosity spiralled out of control, ‘What were you doing in the solicitor’s waiting room?’

‘I told you! I was rolling ciggies. I had to go in there because it was raining and nobody in their right mind would ever want a damp roll up. Do you like John Lennon?’

This was a strange twist as an interesting if not surreal conversation seemed to be unfolding. So I answered him, ‘I loved John Lennon, when he was alive, and I loved the Beatles. They were the best band in the world.’

‘Ah, well I’m his brother, Bobby Lennon, you know. I could have been in the Beatles with him but Paul said that one Lennon was enough so I went and worked on building the M62 instead. Motorways are just as important as songs. All You Need is Love is all wrong because you’d never get nowhere without the M62. And when they used to say ‘the weekend starts here’ on Ready Steady Go, well that was bollocks too because for me and a few other fellas the weekend usually started at Hartshead Moor Services… eastbound.’

As he began telling his life story, three building worker sort of people walked by, one of them shouting ‘Hey Bobby, could you spare us a few coppers from your sick pay so I can get something from the shop for my tea?’

Bobby jumped from his seat, climbed up to stand on the bench and waving two clenched fists he bellowed, ‘Leave the lads alone!’ With a look of extreme menace on his weather beaten face he repeated this six or eight times until the men, who I guessed were former workmates, had disappeared round a corner, laughing as they went.

‘Twats!’ he said as he sat down again and muttered a couple more ‘Leave the lads alone!’ commands before continuing with ‘The M62 goes all the way from Liverpool to Leeds, so when we got here I thought I’d stay. It was a good place to escape all the pressure and the fame.’

‘The pressure and the fame that came with being John Lennon’s brother?’ I enquired, trying not to laugh.

‘No. The Beatles were finished by then and I didn’t fancy singing anyway. These ciggies do nothing for your voice you know. Our John knew I was a world class footballer so he had a word on the sly with Bill Shankly who was manager of Liverpool at the time and one of his best mates. Them two and Cilla Black were always out on the piss together. But Shankly said he couldn’t fit me in the team because they already had Tommy Smith playing in my best position. Now I knew Tommy. I was engaged to his sister for a while until she got pregnant and decided to marry the bairn’s dad. Tommy was an ace footballer but they should have signed me up because I was a lot harder than him.’

‘You were harder than Tommy Smith?’ this time I was laughing.

‘Yes, I was. And I still am. Do you want me to show you?’

The driver of a passing van beeped his horn. I’d no idea why but it obviously upset Bobby as he was back up on the bench yelling ‘Leave the lads alone!’ at each of the next half dozen vehicles that went by.

‘You couldn’t spare us half a quid, could you lad?’ he asked, returning to his seat. ‘You see I’m off work on the sick at the moment with my nerves and I’ve got nowt for my tea and Yoko got all the money from our John’s will.’

If I’d said no he would surely have stayed to continue our conversation and then the him, me and lovely Vanessa rendezvous would have cropped up and no doubt been a problem. But by giving him 50p I knew he’d be straight off to the Merrion Centre to get something nice for his tea in Thresher’s.

I didn’t have 50p so I had to give him a pound note, which was probably enough to not just meet his immediate needs but to blast him far away into oblivion. His eyes lit up. I imagined that for the next day or so after his shopping expedition they wouldn’t even be slightly open. ‘God bless you son. You’re one of the lads. I’ll tell our John about you next time I see him, rest his soul. All you need is love!’ he said as he shook my hand for a bit too long and affectionately squeezed my shoulder. I was worried he was going to kiss me, partly because he had a not insignificant hygiene issue going on and partly because Vanessa could arrive at any minute and I didn’t want her to witness the scene and be jealous, even though Bobby could never be considered girlfriend material.

I watched him meander away through the gardens to the exit, stopping every few yards to hoist his trousers up but not stopping when he reached the busy road. In response to long blasts on horns from several irate car drivers he stood on the central traffic island with one clenched fist held aloft and his other hand waving his pound note as he shouted ‘Leave the lads alone!’  

More than four decades later, whilst enjoying a pint of Guinness in the sunny beer garden of the Towers Bar in Westport in County Mayo, an old fella who looked like he was struggling a bit with the modern world sat down opposite me and introduced himself as John Lennon’s brother.

With a broad smile and a raised clenched fist, I said ‘Leave the lads alone!’

With a look of bewilderment, he said ‘What lads?’

So I bought him a pint and we had a good natter about beer garden botany and the history of the Irish Republican movement. It turned out he was also Brendan Behan’s brother. It was then that I decided I might try pulling the same stunt myself sometime if I found I was a bit short of cash. It seemed that there must have been at least three brothers in the Lennon family, so who would dispute a fourth?

 My own photograph of Madiba’s plaque in the Mandela Garden in Leeds.

Denis was going to Birmingham to study economics

Tommy was going to Derry to shoot revolting Cath’lics

Sue was going to push her pram daily to the caff

Jean was going to hospital to train to radiograph

And I was going to work on ships as deck cadet riff raff

Ten pence wakes a silent juke box

Peter Frampton wants me to show him the way

Will there be deadly scorpions crawling in your bed?

Will there be tarry pigtails swinging from your head?

Will there be rum and bum, and the bosun’s lash?

Will there be pirates’ chests of ancient foreign cash?

Will there be pills and balms to sooth your tropical rash?

Another two bob in the record machine

Rod Stewart’s sailing, stormy waters and all

Will you miss the nights in the pub with the gang?

Will you send me a postcard from Ujung Pandang?

Will you be sad to leave us, or maybe distraught?

Will you be having a girl in every port?

Will you be thinking of me, now and then, just a thought?

A shiny coin drops and vinyl crackles

Van Morrison pleads baby please don’t go

Was I bleeding inside with nerves torn and tattered?

Was I turning my back on all that mattered?

Was I wrong to go crossing those great oceans blue?

Was I wrong to be thinking I’d like the ship’s crew?

Was I wrong to be leaving such dear folks that I knew?

Then a rupee jangled in my head

And Candi sang young hearts run free

Photograph: Navigating Officer Cadet, Turlough Ó Maoláin.

On boyhood’s bare calves

Wellies that thwack in summer heat

Bring raw red rings of stings 

While water gushes

Gurgling, it finds a hole

To soggy a sock or two

A causeway of slimy stones

As green as beer bottles

Shattered and scattered

Leads fresh-faced fisher folk

By tyres and rusty prams

To delve the deepest pools

Net heaves on bamboo cane

Wrestled to the bank are

Fins and gills and bragging rights

This spiny inch of beauty

A living trophy from a perfect day

Ichthyic, beloved and mine

The salmon of all knowledge

Leaping through my mind

An aquatic sage, valuates the catch

Above any piscine prize

That might shimmer and splash

Beyond my jam jar’s wall 

Photograph: This is Zimmy the Fish. He isn’t THE fish in the poem but he isn’t just A fish either. He was a much loved family member for almost ten years and we miss him very much.

Eric was a bus conductor and Eric was a soldier

Eric was shot whilst having a ciggy in Iceland in 1940

Iceland the country, not the shop

Iceland declared neutrality during the Second World War

Britain invaded Iceland so that Germany couldn’t

Britain sent Eric to Iceland to scare away Germany

Eric didn’t like Iceland, it was dark and cold

Eric didn’t like Iceland because Iceland shot him

Iceland didn’t like Eric because Eric was British

Iceland didn’t like Britain, they’d brought them the war

Britain didn’t like Iceland because Iceland shot Eric

Britain left Iceland because it was busy elsewhere

America went to Iceland to scare away Germany

America didn’t like Iceland because of dried fish and crispbread

Germany didn’t invade Iceland, it was dark and cold

Germany didn’t invade Iceland because of dried fish and America

Eric worked the rest of his life on a Bath Corporation bus

Eric never rang the bell to stop the bus outside Iceland

Iceland the shop, not the country

Iceland the shop didn’t sell dried fish or crispbread

Peggy always bought fish fingers for Eric’s tea on Thursdays

Peggy never told Eric they were from Iceland, the shop and the country

Photograph: I haven’t got a single photograph of Iceland (neither the country nor the shop) or of Eric but I do have a selection of photographs of volcanoes which I could pretend were Icelandic. This is one I took from Stromboli’s crater rim late one evening whilst on a walking holiday in the Aeolian Islands near Sicily.

It was a grand day but for a wee chill in the wind and a drop of rain. You know that sort of sideways rain that always comes at you straight on so you never get your hair wet which was just as well because I’d an awful habit of taking off my hat in a place and forgetting to put it back on as I was leaving. If ever the country was to run out of spare hats it wouldn’t be my fault. So I thought I’d call in at Clancy’s for just the one to keep the mind, body and soul lined up straight. And there’s no more beautiful sight than a jar of porter, all black in the body with the foam on top in a slight dome shape and five eighths of an inch in depth with not even the suggestion of a bubble in it. The only greater joy in the world than admiring the look of the stuff is in taking the first mouthful. So I would have one. Just the one. Well that was the plan.

But the problem was that I’d such a fierce thirst on me that the first creamy glass had slipped away without me barely even knowing it was there. It’s the weather here that makes the drink go down so fast. If you want to warm the insides of yourself there’s nothing that beats a nice cool jar of stout. Ah, the money I’d save if I moved to Spain. I was telling myself to call it a day because I was saving my wages for Friday night out with the lads but the young fella behind the bar had an empty pint glass in his hand. Only polishing it with his beer-stained apron, he was, and holding it up to the light to check for greasy fingerprints and smudges of lipstick. The temptation before me was as if it was Lucifer himself and not young Aiden O' Raghallaigh that was minding the bar.  He said nothing, but the glass was screaming to be filled and there was no one else in the place without a drink so I felt duty bound to order in another for myself.

Late afternoons, before all the working folks knock off for the day, these places are as lifeless as a Ballymena wedding. Looking around me, I saw a few old ones sitting alone. One clutching his rosary beads tight in his left hand as a finger on the right moved up and down the list of horses and riders in the 3:20 at Leopardstown on a page torn from the Gazette. Another sitting on a tall stool at the bar and staring hard into space through the nicotine stains in his eyes. Half a dozen more scattered about the lounge, muttering away to themselves or an imaginary dog or their long dead mammy, and it was only the fear of spilling their Guinness that stopped them falling asleep.

Rattling around in my trouser pocket I’d almost a punt in five and ten pences so I shoved the whole lot in the slot in the juke box away in the corner beneath faded old pictures of Our Lady of Lourdes, President Kennedy and Samantha Fox. I’d already heard enough of Johnny Logan, Johnny Cash and Johnny Mathis. There were too many Johnnies in the world for me.  So, peering through the glass top of the machine that was intricately coated with a layer of fag ash and circular stains from yesterday’s beer dried and encrusted in the form of the Olympic flag, I found a few tunes to suit my taste and rouse the teatime Rip Van Winkles. The Pogues, Thin Lizzy, U2… class stuff, you know. Eight records I’d put on and my glass with only a mouthful still in it, so I went back to young Aiden the barman to put matters right with another nice pint as Shane MacGowan sang about going to where streams of whiskey were flowing; an altogether more cheerful sounding place than Clancy’s Bar.

‘I've got to give it up. I've got to give it up, that stuff!’ Phil Lynott’s voice floating over from loudspeakers hidden behind some of the twentieth century’s greatest known cobwebs and a few faded links of Christmas paper chains from a time before silver foil was discovered reminded me I should be on my way just as I was coming to the end of my drink.

And then you wouldn’t believe there was a word of truth in this, but in walked Frankie with a handsome black pint of the foaming in each of his hands.

He sat down on a stool across the genuine oak Formica-topped table from me, looked deep into my eyes to make sure it really was me and he said ‘howyeh?’

‘Howyeh?’ I replied, and ‘What are you doing wasting away your time in the pub at this hour of the day?’

‘Ah now! I’m always in for a couple with the brother of a Thursday afternoon.’

‘But the day’s only Wednesday’ I pointed out to him with a fair degree of confidence in the accuracy of my statement.

‘No! Are you pulling my micky? Well what in the name of Jaysis will I do with this other pint?’ he asked, shaking his head in disbelief, pausing to make a start on his own pint and then shaking his head again. Head shaking in disbelief and drinking pints were two human activities that both required great concentration and couldn’t be performed at the same time. He’s a good old soul is Frankie so I offered to help him out with the spare drink and he was grateful for that.

Slattery the one-armed window cleaner had never been a lucky man. Losing a limb in an unfortunate incident involving the widow Mahony could have been avoided if she’d had curtains up in her bathroom but, to make things worse, the missing arm was the very arm on which he had the hand that he used when he played on the one-armed bandit at St Philomena’s Catholic Club of a Sunday dinnertime. The only way he could continue with his favourite pastime (and only vice, so he’d tell you) was by standing with his back to the fruit machine so the handle was in reach of his remaining arm. When I was fifteen, I had a shilling or two in my pocket for the first time in my life that I earned from carrying his bucket and ringing out the shammy for him. It was then that my Da told me it would be terrible bad manners to accept a pint from a fella without buying him one back, especially if you had a shilling or two in your pocket. So that’s why I felt the obligation to get in another couple of jars for Frankie and me. It definitely wasn’t because the drink was giving me the warm feeling or the need to talk about those things that you know little about even though you think you’re a leading voice. Stuff like religion and politics and which one of Charlie’s Angels you wouldn’t mind finding with your hand up her jumper. It was the politeness and etiquette in me that made me take some of the money out of my pocket at the bar. It’s nice when you can still remember a word like etiquette even after having a few pints of plain in you.

As his brother came in through the door, Frankie suddenly remembered that they’d said they’d change the day of their quick session from Thursday to Wednesday that week because Ireland were playing Malta in the Euros at Dalymount Park which was less than a mile up the road so there was sure to be a good reception on the television if they were showing it in the lounge at the front of the pub. Frankie’s brother’s name was Niall and he’d come over to us from the bar with three lovely big pints before he ever got round to speaking to me. I’ll always respect a man who gets it right when he makes an assumption. His movement across the room with great care and caution for the concentration and skill in not spilling a drop had the look of a slow-motion action replay of a great sporting feat. If they ever get round to giving out a gold medal for carrying three pints at once then Niall’s your man.

‘Sláinte!’ he said and we responded as if we were following the words of Father McCreesh at holy mass but we didn’t speak again for a few minutes because it was his first pint and we didn’t want to interrupt the enjoyment he was taking from it.

A few words were exchanged about the weather and the condition of their mammy’s health and then, looking at Niall’s almost empty glass, Frankie remembered that it would be terrible bad manners to accept a pint from a fella without buying him one back.

‘Will I get them in?’ he asked, immediately holding up three fingers and nodding to young Aiden the barman before we had any chance of telling him we didn’t want one. He was only ordering in another round to avoid insulting his brother and at the same time not wanting to insult me by leaving me out so there I had another gorgeous pint in front of me with the match about to start.

‘You’ve to slow down with the drinking when there’s the football on,’ Niall told us. And he was right because while you’re ordering a round or finding the money for it in your pocket you might miss a goal or one of those controversial decisions they have these days, but luckily Mark Lawrenson didn’t score the first until the twenty-fourth minute so we’d no problem getting another one in. I think it was me that paid for that one. If it wasn’t me, it’ll have been Frankie or Niall. Or maybe Niall’s friend Kieran who preferred the hurling to football so he didn’t mind missing a bit of the game to fetch the drinks which was just as well because the goals came thick and fast after that.

We’d been trying to have a pint to celebrate each Irish goal but with the final score at eight-nil to the boys in green (as the song goes) we realised we’d not managed to raise a glass to every scorer. Heaven forbid that Kevin Sheedy should ever find out because he’d got two of the goals late on in the game by which time we weren’t quite as thirsty as we had been during the build up to the kick off and he might have thought us disrespectful. We consoled ourselves in the knowledge that we’d started drinking pints hours before they’d started playing football so we’d done our best for Ireland and we were only human after all.

In a matter of minutes after the referee blew his whistle to end the match (well, seventy minutes give or take a few to be precise), the bell rang for last orders. That’s always something that makes you sit up and pay attention. You need a good clear head to be dealing with the goings on during the last ten minutes that they’re serving in a packed bar. It’s good to be patriotic but when young Aiden the barman can’t hear what drinks you’re asking for because some eejit’s belting out at the top of his voice all the wrong words to A Nation Once Again then it’s time they put a stop to the patriotism. I was sure that even Brendan Behan would have backed us up on that one had he still been with us, rest his soul.

‘Would there be any chance of a bit of extra time?’ Kieran asked young Aiden the barman as he became aware that he was at least half a gallon of Guinness behind the rest of us.

‘While my dinner’s drying up in the oven at home you’ve not a chance in hell’ retorted young Aiden the barman and we all knew that the barman’s decision is final, even when it’s only young Aiden. So we had to settle for a couple of small whiskies just for the road and the hope that there’d be a bus coming along that road soon as we all wanted to get home out of the rain ourselves and watch the highlights of the game on the television. At that stage of the proceedings we were already unable to remember what the score had been or even who Ireland had been playing against.

They can’t have been showing the highlights on the television that night because the next morning I had no memory of seeing anything about it at all. It wasn’t actually seeing the highlights that I was bothered about but I needed to know the score and the name of the other team in case a discussion broke out about it in the bar later. To tell the honest truth, I wasn’t feeling altogether great in either the head or the belly. It must have been something I’d had the night before that had upset the stomach. I couldn’t for the life of me think of what it might have been until I put my coat on to go out to the shop to buy some rashers to put in a sandwich for the comfort food to make me feel less like putting my head in a bucket. It was then that I found the mortal remains of a döner kebab in the pocket along with my spectacles more scratched than the dog’s bollocks and so much loose change I could have put pennies on the eyes of every dead martyr in heaven.

So that was what had made such a glorious mess of my usually indestructible constitution. It’s when the Turkish fella (I think he’s called Mr Sullivan, or maybe Mr Suleiman) knows you might be getting a bit weary after a long day so you won’t notice if they slip a bit of their old brown lettuce in the pita bread beneath the meat-type stuff and you’ve no clue that they’ve done it until it’s inside of you and you’re feeling as rough as a badger’s arse the next morning. There were wee splashes of chilli sauce on my boots too. Suede they were. Ruined! I’d be in for a fierce chiding if my Ma saw them, but sure it’s her that’s telling me to eat more vegetables and there’s always a pile of salad in the kebabs. But I really could have done without having one that night.

Photograph: A little place where I like to eat when I’m in Paphos in south west Cyprus. The elephants’ legs are to die for. 

This Sort of Thing - June 2024

Hundred Word Poem

Six decades flew past but no pen touched my page

Never pausing to note how a world ran rampage

Looking on from my perch in a writer’s gilt cage

People and places, the most precious of times

Once juicy and ripe for telling stories and rhymes

Fade little by little each time the clock chimes

Tides turned while candles burned

Mistakes all made and lessons learned

There’s calmness now, a life’s upturned

My glass half full, maybe more, two thirds

I sit alone amongst trees. As the songs of wild birds

Harmonise with my thoughts, I write today’s hundred words

1 June, Saturday

Summertime and the living is easy, unless you’re trying to park your car in tourist-swamped Arbanasi. Why do they visit our local haunts when there’s so much more to see in Rome or Barcelona or Alton Towers? Gorna Oryahovitsa has never been a holiday hotspot so we had a pleasurable time there instead with vitamina salata and freshly baked garlic parlenka. It was, however, very hot and the waitress did have spots.

The evening’s Gypsy music from up the hill seemed mournful. It was International Children’s Day. Perhaps the parents resented having to make something special for their kids’ tea.

2 June, Sunday

Our Italian trip sadly abandoned, the self-compensatory days out scheme is also foundering. We've been tryin' for Troyan for a week but mountains are best avoided when there's electric rain and herculean hailstones. Thankfully our covered terrace is the new holiday haven. It's like being on a real holiday but without any danger of having to talk to people over breakfast.

Only our shouting 'Fuck off mosquito!' at twenty-second intervals breaks the silence. My flesh, having marinated in garlic and red wine for decades, is understandably irresistible to the vampiric little gitbags whose voracious appetites put Vlad Dracul to shame.

3 June, Monday

Our lifestyle is not completely problem-free. Breakfast conversation centred on a drooping caesalpinia gilliesii, a legacy of our 2020 Mexican backpacking tour. Seeds we found in public gardens in the mountain town of San Cristóbal de las Casas (Spanish for grotty hostel with shit breakfast) when planted in Malki Chiflik flourished into a beautiful Bird of Paradise of the Desert Tree. But lately she’s distressed.

‘Lift it, shift it!’ is the rule for struggling plants. Whilst digging a new hole in the new territory for dear niña, I experienced temperatures greater than in El Desierto de Sonora (even worse breakfasts).

4 June, Tuesday

Our felonious felines partake in organised crime, the subject of each day’s carnage determined by this schedule:

Monday:                blackbird

Tuesday:                lizard

Wednesday:          slow worm

Thursday:               shrike

Friday:                    man-eating grasshopper

Saturday:               snake

Sunday:                  rat

Occasionally, when they’re feeling extra generous / vicious, we’re treated to extra helpings, and we always get a rat on Sundays as if it was some sort of luxury.

Usually carcasses are deposited by the back door but sometimes cross into the kitchen. We have a dedicated dustpan and brush for hurling them over the garden wall into the forest which now resembles a Flanders War Cemetery.

5 June, Wednesday

For our terrace we procured an ultraviolet device with a sticker stating This machine kills insects! Woody Guthrie would have been proud.  

Stingers, biters and flappers don’t stand a chance but tough little ants love it. Perhaps recognising the device is Swiss-made they are in attendance to assist with the suicides of hexapod invertebrates. But they clog up the works. Only the Hoover’s blow setting can unclog the cloggage and restore a state of non-scratchy normality as we sip our Rodopi chai at sunset.   

I can’t dispute its ultraviolet properties. It reminds me of Bailey’s nightclub in Sheffield in 1976.

6 June, Thursday

Continuing our Italian holiday at home adventure, Priyatelkata, brandishing her shiny metal device with polished wood operating handle and singing ‘I’ve got a pasta machine’ in the style of rock band Hawkwind, knocked up a bit of homemade squid ink tagliatelle (мастило от калмари, pronounced ‘ma-stee-loh ot kal-mah-ree’). A delicious accompaniment to our fresh salmon baked with locally grown vegetables, even though during the two hours that it had hung to dry from a pole between two kitchen chairs it had looked a lot like the dogs’ towel. 

She had followed a generations-old family recipe from Apulia… corde dei cani bagnati dal mare.

7 June, Friday

Combining my technical and linguistic skills, I helped a bewildered Bulgarian lady at Kaufland’s self-check-out Big Brother contraption.

Meanwhile my spectacles were in their case sandwiched between two Cornish Mivvies in the car boot; an environment I imagined colder than Suella Braverman’s heart. But penetrative Balkan sunshine heated them such that I suffered third-degree burns to nose and ears.

To maintain our Italian theme, I bought apfelstrudel. Well it’s an Austrian delicacy and Austria’s beside Switzerland where 8.2% of the population speak Italian. It’s lush with a clod of heavy duty yoghurt. Apparently Gina Lollobrigida couldn’t get enough of it.

8 June, Saturday

In a dusty old book of Bulgarian folklore tales, I read this:

One day long ago in a village near Sliven, Hitar Petar met his mean neighbour, Nastradin Hodja by the fountain. Knowing that Petar was a funny man, Nastradin Hodja asked him to tell a joke.

‘Easy! Just wait here while I go home to get my big sack of jokes’ said Hitar Petar.

Nastradin Hodja waited where he stood for many hours before eventually realising that he was part of the joke.

Hitar Petar went on to become a bus driver on the number sixteen route in Leeds.

9 June, Sunday

Election day so there’s no alcohol on sale in shops, bars etc. because we need to be sensible. Administrators always overlook the fact that every Bulgarian house has 100 litres of homemade rakia stored in the ironing board cupboard. Priyatelkata and I aren’t eligible to vote, probably because we don’t drink or own an ironing board.

Turning on the air-conditioning in June is like turning on the heating in October. Too early! Two months hence, as the sun melts the steel plate in my head, we won’t feel the benefit. But our house littered with wilting bodies made it unavoidable.

10 June, Monday

Boyko Borissov, it seems, will become our new Prime Minister… again! Good news in that having been Prime Minister three times before he’s the only Bulgarian politician whose name I can remember.

Long ago, Boyko was bodyguard to Todor Zhivkov, our head of state during the Communist years. Apparently he’s a bit dodgy (I won’t elaborate because goats have ears). However, older members of the electorate love him and he looks the sort of fella you’d enjoy having a pint with. Apparently, Angela Merkel had the hots for him.

Election successes of the far-right in France cause us great concern.

11 June, Tuesday

The grade of shade varies about our premises. The weather forecast lady, who always seems severe, underestimated with a chilly 31°C. Our covered terrace achieved 35°C but behind the garden shed it was only 33°C; so that’s where we sheltered with chilled refreshments and embarrassing damp patches. Under the sun it was 15° hotter.

Sadly, it was the last day of the Italian holiday we should have had but didn’t because of the sick dog. We shopped in Kaufland for make-believe duty-free goods and a packet of tramezzino crisps. Not having to pack to go home was the best bit.

12 June, Wednesday

Hailstones the size of golf balls are so passé. Ours were like mandarin oranges, battering the house on all sides. Weather talk is usually boring but this was spectacular. For ten minutes we stood away from our windows, fearing they might break.

Lighter hail, thunder, lightning and heavy rain followed for an hour before a beautiful warm, sunny evening allowed us to gasp at the destruction. Amongst shattered glass and roof tiles every tree, car and building looked like it had suffered a hammer attack.

Our beautiful garden was decimated, like Vietnam after an American Agent Orange party. Neighbours wept!

13 June, Thursday

We won Compost Heap of the Year with countless wheelbarrows of fallen fruit and garden debris. Why don’t decaying figs bear ‘may contain angry wasps’ warnings? I thought as my two rude gesture fingers throbbed with poison. Cracks in tiles suggested our roof isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

A hundred funerals for little trees and the first ever tears in our garden. No birds sang.

Our cat Osem ate an extremely fresh squirrel and we learned that iconic French singer Françoise Hardy had died in Paris.

Another massive storm sweeping across Bulgaria missed us by 50 kilometres.

hashtagshitday

14 June, Friday

Our dear old cars have a combined age equivalent to that of Ben Hur’s chariot so spare parts aren’t easily found. Mechanic Nikolay confirmed our smithereen-esque mirrors and lights can’t be replaced. Lightning cracked across the sky as both were effectively written off simultaneously. ‘Ullo John gotta getta new motor (and roof)!

We poked at our usually delicious OMV petrol station café banitsas and coffee then honed our moping about skills as rain further soggified our clearing-up task.

The Euro 24 tournament began and by midnight there were 200,000 Scottish football fans in München as pissed off as we were.

15 June, Saturday

In beautiful sunshine and our not quite roadworthy Desislava Daihatsu, we drove up to the food shop in Sheremetya village. All around we saw shattered windows and roofs, walls that appeared to have been machine-gunned and second-hand car dealers’ forecourts containing hundreds of storm-damaged cars.

It seemed strange to accept that our own village had got off relatively lightly. We took time to think about people around the world with homes destroyed by bombs. All things considered, we were amongst the lucky ones.

Feeling slightly less shit, we returned to our personal land clearance scheme, straining emotions more than muscles.

16 June, Sunday

For the first time since Wednesday I saw a golden oriole in the walnut tree. Having feared all feathered friends might have shuffled off their mortal coil, it cheered me like nothing else had done this week. It was a bit of a Noah and the dove with the olive branch situation except there was no flood; June’s sun already has the ground baked hard like a school dinner lady’s pasty.

Am I pruning damaged trees enough? Hoping they’ll bear new leaves this summer, I’m not as brutal as Priyatelkata. Following a heated exchange, I feared she might prune me.

17 June, Monday

At least it was a bright summer morning. Had I got up in the darkness of winter to encounter such widespread skitterings from dogs’ bottoms on the kitchen floor there’d have been a risk of standing in them.

We bought a Lamborghini (or maybe a Fiat… it’s definitely Italian) from the woman who runs the ornamental stonemason’s beside Nikolay’s workshop. If we’ve any problems with the brakes she’ll do us a deal on a nice gravestone.

Celebrating and grieving simultaneously, we had luncheon in the garden restaurant in Arbanasi while waiters brushed up storm damage. Nobody’s hurt but everybody’s stunned.

18 June, Tuesday

We met lovely Maria and Petr at a notary’s office in town to transfer custody of Fyodor the Fiat which we promised to keep clean forever and not just the first month. To earn a living, Petr sculpts three-metre-tall 19^th century Bulgarian revolutionary soldiers from stone blocks for public places. 

Neighbours Ismail and Amelia can’t earn a living because they’ve no cash to repair their storm-damaged work van. Normally they work like slaves selling fruit and veg in markets. We’re mega-morose but they’re absolutely distraught. Our upfront payment for a thirty year supply of rosovi tomatoes will hopefully help them.

19 June, Wednesday

By 6:00 am we realised we’d been overprotective in keeping la voiture neuve in the bedroom to shield it from Balkan weather.

By 3:00 pm we realised the covered veranda at Gorna Oryahovitsa’s Auto Morgue wasn’t protective enough as a thermometer screamed 41°C. Our cars were weighed and we received 55 stotinki (25p) per kilogram for them. Old motors are cheaper than potatoes.

Back home, grinning gypsy neighbours, eager to work, took delivery of fruit and vegetables to sell in tomorrow’s market. Our new car sat in our parking space no longer littered with battered remains. There were happy tears!  

20 June, Thursday

It was already 26°C on our covered terrace when I drank my coffee at 7:00 am. This isn’t uncommon here for August but it’s still only June. Great swathes of a country that almost drowned a week ago are today on fire.

Cat Nouveau is all grown up now. A month ago he decided he was street tough and turned to the outdoor life. But now he suffers the heat in his Tibetan yak hairdo so he’s a house cat once more, snoring long hours under the air-conditioning.

Replacing the cat’s name with mine, you could repeat the previous paragraph.

21 June, Friday

The inaugural day of my 6:00 am kick-off in the garden routine. I beat the heat but not the flies nor the neighbours’ yappy dog. Tidying damaged trees and bushes is becoming less disheartening. New shoots appearing was balm to the brain.

It’s summer solstice time but, although the top hemisphere is now hurtling towards winter and in Homebase in Trowbridge they’ve got Cliff singing Mistletoe and Whine, our weather wasn’t any cooler.

Priyatelkata makes ten mosaic-top tables per day to avoid outdoor catastrophic scenes and temperatures. Not having a flat head is all that saves me from being mosaicked.

22 June, Saturday

It’s Cherry Day in Bulgaria. They call it Chereshova Zadushnitsa (Черешова Задушница, literally ‘cherry stew’). Bulgarians care for the souls of anyone who’s died since Good Friday. Apparently they’re double busy in Heaven from Easter onwards so souls that should get in are hanging around waiting. Wine’s poured on their freshly cleaned graves before they’re decorated with fruit, and we’re knee-deep in cherries this time of year.  

I’m only aware of Frank Ifield and the President of Iran dying in that time, but I’ve no idea where they’re buried, and the Iranian lad probably isn’t up for wine on his grave anyway.

23 June, Sunday

My friend Milena explained why our village, but not every village, was battered by hailstones recently.

Every Bulgarian village has a Zmey (Змей), a multi-headed dragon with golden scales. These ferocious creatures ward off the Hala (Хала) which, with a snake’s body and a dog’s head, is the personification of hail and steals from fields, orchards and vineyards. However, if villagers have angered their Zmey, it sulks in its cave allowing the Hala to wreak havoc.

In March a series of kitsch-looking, two-metre-high, multi-coloured plastic letters spelling out I Heart Malki Chiflik appeared in our village square. The Zmey couldn’t miss them.

24 June, Monday

I love my country because every day is celebrated as the day of something or other.

Today’s Enyovden (Еньовден), the day of St Ivan the Herb Gatherer. Before dawn, sorceresses, healers and enchantresses gather herbs for curing childless women, chasing away evil spirits or casting spells for love and hatred. In more state-of-the-art villages we just cut herbs and chai from our gardens for drying.

I hate to bang on about our recent hailstorm but today we felt quite inadequate as our garden has been blown away. So we had nothing to hang up to dry but our freshly laundered knickers.

25 June, Tuesday

Booking a one-way ticket really confuses Easyjet. I know because eight years ago today I flew to Bulgaria from England with absolutely no intention of returning. They still send me emails expressing concern.

I was over two hours at the KAT, de-registering and registering vehicles from our ever-changing fleet. Dimitar helped me. He gave me two litres of the finest homemade rakia to celebrate everything. Double-distilled and matured in oak barrels in his mate’s basement, it’s the stuff that makes Tsars see stars.

Priyatelkata and I didn’t touch a drop but felt happy for the first time in a while.

26 June, Wednesday

The day began gloomily. Our cats often stay out all night but usually return by 7:00 am for full feline breakfasts. At 10:30 there was still no sign of Crado Cat Nouveau until I visited the downstairs loo where he was asleep in the washbasin. He’d been incarcerated at least twelve hours.

Insurance assessor George came to inspect our jigsaw puzzle former roof. A very serious meeting until he sat on the dogs’ squeaky rubber duck on the settee. It squoke perfectly because it was kept inside during the storm. I hope the quacking and laughing doesn’t affect our claim.

27 June, Thursday

Turkey won and progressed in the Euro football thing last night. So if Russia hadn’t come along in 1878, liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman occupation, we’d be celebrating now too. Bloody do-gooders!

Five nice ladies in five chilled offices dealt, or semi-dealt, with insurance affairs too numerous to mention. Having not experienced three parties, fire or theft, we could expect little more from the ladies than them being nice.

Dining at the Asenovtsi with Scottish friends, French Priyatelkata likened the dialect of Glaswegian Brian to that of the Swedish Chef in the Muppets. Luckily, Brian didn’t understand what Priyatelkata was saying.

28 June, Friday

Little more than a fortnight after our general election, the Bulgarian National Assembly has at last chosen a Speaker. So now they can at least try to negotiate the formation of a coalition government. This was never a problem in those heady days of brutal totalitarianism. She’s Raya Nazaryan from Armenia and she’s young and attractive in a don’t-mess-with-me sort of way, but then she’d need to be. 

Apparently they’ve an election looming in Britain too. There’s no need to read the manifestos or watch the televised debates. Just remember that Hi Risk Anus is an anagram of Rishi Sunak.

29 June, Saturday

These hot afternoons it’s grand to lie on the settee with jugs of glacial tea and a summer soundtrack. Joni Mitchell, Joseph Canteloube, Bob Marley and Mississippi John Hurt on scratchy vinyl all sooth as Pavlovian mosquitos snarl from their sides of insect screens.

Recovering plants yearn for rain. Thunderstorms will arrive in the coming days. Nervously we’ll look out for mammatusi, clouds from which great ice-laden cellular pouches hang like udders. Not to be confused with Gypsy Mama Tusi who tells fortunes in a tent in a layby on Plovdiv ring road. Does she have cellular pouches I wonder?   

30 June, Sunday

In weather so hot my fillings melt when I open my mouth, neighbours Hasan and Slavka have no money, no transport and now no water because of their Communist era plumbing. I bought them twenty litres at the village shop. Embarrassed, they offered me spanners as payment.

I tried to order a book on Amazon. It’s called Rakiya - Stories of Bulgaria, by Ellis Shuman. They said it can’t be dispatched to my delivery location.

We’re Europe’s poorest country, here to provide the so-called ‘developed’ world with cheap labour and jokes. I say ‘we’ and not ‘they’. I love Bulgaria. 

Photograph: Tsarevets (Царевец), our local medieval fortress.

Amidst this midsummer night’s apocalypse

Electric rain musters at fig leaf tips

Bombarding hostas, cool water drips

Snails and frogs come out to play

Cicadas perform their cabaret

And Jasmine’s sultry sweet bouquet

Enchants my dream though I’m awake

Dazzling bolts from heavens snake

Across a sky ablaze, our valley shakes

With just garden life for company

I sink in wild Rodopi tea

As Zeus strikes nature’s timpani

Photograph: Storm clouds gather over our garden wall.

Introduction

Here, in the twenty-first century, people who lived a lot of their lives in the twentieth century choose from a variety of ways to keep their minds active. These might be online word puzzles, Sudoku, eating lots of fish, working way past retirement age or electric shock treatment. My method is to write exactly 100 words each day. It keeps my brain in order most of the time but, on occasions when it’s slightly out of order, I have my daily scribble to look back upon to refresh my memory and anything else that may need refreshing.

My May words…

1 May, Wednesday

Five years ago today Priyatelkata and I met and formed our double act, protecting each other from the madness that blights the planet. We celebrated with a bit of dinner at restaurant Sevastokrator in Arbanasi, not inviting any other members of the planet’s population because they are the insanity that threatens our utopianism.  

International Workers’ Day’s a public holiday so no international workers were working. Also the day of St Jeremiah the Snake King when Bulgarians show respect for vermin-eating snakes by clattering about their gardens making a fierce racket with metal implements and pans. Apparently the snakes love it.

2 May, Thursday

We had a day of relaxation to celebrate the fact that today is one of the few days this month that isn’t a public holiday in Bulgaria. However, everybody else in the country appeared to follow our example.  

Membership of our feline pack seems to have swelled to 8.5. A black Tom, often seen lounging in our garden, invited himself inside for the afternoon to lounge in our lounge and avoid inclement weather. We fed him, dealt with potential parasites (though he could be considered one himself) and named him Jacques… because he’s blacque… perhaps we should do it again.

3 May, Friday

Apparently, guitar legend Duane Eddy (the King of Twang) died yesterday in Tennessee. Although saddened by this, my heart was lifted slightly as I thought he had died years ago. I finished reading The Dead School by Patrick McCabe. Funny and depressing in equal measure, it mirrored my feelings about Mr Eddy’s passing.

In Eastern Orthodoxy land it’s Good Friday which we marked (like every day of the year) with a trip to the vet who said he doesn’t have time for Easter because of attending to all our scabby animals. We’re going back on Monday with a chocolate bunny.

4 May, Saturday

This is the sixty-seventh Easter during which I’ve known the weather to be non-stop piss-pouring rain, though I vaguely remember there being a bit of snow one year. Strange that Bing Crosby didn’t sing about that. Our Muslim neighbours were bragging because the end of Ramadan was sunny.

A man at the bus stop said to me, ‘The proletariat is a mule but it cannot work until the thorn of Capitalism has been removed from its hoof by a handy implement.’ I replied, ‘It doesn’t look like the bus is coming’ and stood up to wander home through the thunderstorm.

5 May, Sunday

There was no noise. No chainsaws, strimmers, motorbikes in the forest, Gypsy music, kids playing in the street. Even the dogs that bark perpetually seemed to be resting. In Bulgaria Easter is a much bigger event than Christmas. There’s virtually no chocolate or consumerism. Eggs painted with vegetable dye are smashed against each other. If your egg doesn’t break you’ll enjoy good health and if it does you can eat it.

Hristos Vas-kray-see (Христос Васкресе, meaning ‘Christ is Risen’) they say as they eat kozunak (козунак) the special Easter bread, and lamb roasted over the garden fire. It really is a joyous day.

6 May, Monday

Ederlezi, originally celebrated by Roma people as the day on which the prophets Al-Khidr and Elijah met on Earth and when spring turns to summer, was adopted and adapted by Christians who rebranded it as St George’s Day in Bulgaria and across much of Eastern Europe. Sadly, it’s now a public holiday for honouring armed forces and those wonderful ancient Gypsy traditions are largely forgotten.

The song Ederlezi has many versions. Bosnian Goran Bregović popularised it beautifully. When I hear it sung by Maria Mazzotta the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and my blood becomes Balkan.

7 May, Tuesday

Yesterday was a public holiday because it was St George’s Day but it was also Easter Monday. It’s not possible to have two public holidays on the same day so in Bulgaria Easter Monday was moved to last Thursday which was the day in between International Workers’ Day and Good Friday but I didn’t know that until today. I was expecting today to be a public holiday (but it wasn’t) so I expected car parking in town to be free (but it wasn’t) so, to cut a long story short (but it isn’t), St George cost me a lev (45p).  

8 May, Wednesday

I was kept awake for much of the night by twelve things; they being two terrified dogs, eight damp cats, a mighty thunderstorm that had festered in Hades since the dawn of time and respiratory discomfort resulting from a whole day of inhaling my petrol strimmer’s exhaust fumes. I had actually been strimming a large area of land and not just snorting up the dodgy emissions.

Wet grass and great tiredness put paid to any further garden work today so I read What Becomes of Us by Henrietta McKervey, an excellent read about the fine women of Cumann na mBan.

9 May, Thursday

We collected Desislava Daihatsu and her shiny new brakes from Nikolay the mechanic and left behind Tatiana Toyota and her strange noise (we think it’s an age thing).

No matter what is thrown at us by the meteorologists (and it rarely includes a meteor), I need fresh air and daylight so, wearing February’s clothes, I sat on the terrace with a book, a fully loaded djezve (coffee pan) and an assortment of domesticated animals (some of which were ours).

Ireland’s Bambi Thug has qualified for a European Final whereas Bayern Munich’s Harry Kane has failed. He could sing Cliff’s Congratulations.

10 May, Friday

We met our favourite vets, Doctors Tatchev and Dimitrova, to discuss Snezhinka the dog’s biopsy results. Cancer cells had been detected and the bottom line said ‘prognosis is guarded - risk of recurrence’. With glum faces we resolved to keep eyes out for further symptoms. Little else can be done.

Beside the veterinary clinic sits the chainsaw shop where the proprietor looks like Ed Miliband and so does his brother. In minutes he changed our strimmer’s filters and hopefully removed the risk of recurrence of my petrol driven phlegm.

Mechanically we’re all up and running again, but oh poor Snezhinka!

11 May, Saturday

Hypoallergenic cat food prevents cats from becoming scabby, but only if they eat it. And if they don’t eat it there’ll be less cat for the scabs to grow on. So it’s a win-win situation. We had such super fun making this discovery.

Sunshine returned as the rain abated and there was enough work to do on the land to provide employment for the population of Middlesbrough but they couldn’t get here and, for once, we couldn’t be arsed so we relaxed on the veranda which is a spot from which we can see only tidy bits of our garden.

12 May, Sunday

We almost watched last night’s Eurovision Rigmarole but dibbed out because the Britain to Bulgaria time difference would render us too tired to function normally today.

It also would have meant lying to the BBC when asked if we have a television licence. They never ask for proof. Do their detector vans visit the Balkans?

A YouTube preview confirmed there were no songs that we liked. Bulgaria doesn’t enter because it costs too much so we couldn’t even wave our own flag.

And it’s too political. For me, allowing Australia to enter but not New Zealand is blatant racial discrimination.

13 May, Monday

We were at the vet with both dogs but only for vaccinations. Dr Tatchev laughed as he remarked that we’d managed to hold out until 3:30 on Monday afternoon before making our first visit of the week. The man who owns the adjacent chainsaw shop asked how Snezhinka was as we passed by his door.

I planted our last two baby trees on the new territory. Also a dozen small ricin plants which will look gorgeous by August, and they’re handy to have should we ever need to lace our umbrella tips with poison to take out a western spy.

14 May, Tuesday

Don’t tell President Radev but we’ve annexed some land that’s the property of the Republic of Bulgaria. This sizeable wedge-shaped plot between our garden and the road was a disgusting mess until three years ago when we cleaned it up and planted trees, which are flourishing fabulously.

People say we’re crazy for doing the work of the local council but, if it’s not kept gorgeous, the land’s prone to returning overnight to its former landfill site status.

We refer to it as the public part of our garden. The original garden and our legal new territory are our private parts.

15 May, Wednesday

Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico was shot today. Surgeons are fighting to save him. Last summer in Bratislava we stood within 100 metres of his predecessor. Politics are scarier than arthropods.

Priyatelkata’s website’s technical problems are on the mend now she’s found Techno Rosen (Росен, a Bulgarian name meaning ‘burning bush’). All she has to do is pay him. She recounted to me every word of their discussions. Very impressive but arthropods are more entertaining.

I bought a kilo of cherries for 3 leva (£1.35). A bargain despite some of them being dead wasps. I love our market in summer.

16 May, Thursday

Ever optimistic, I perused the Bulgarian National Television (БНТ) website for coverage of Leeds United’s crucial playoff match. No joy, so I assumed that Bulgarians dislike football pundits as much as I do.

Television owners have many channels to choose from but televisiophobic misers like me have just four available online.

My options were international wrestling live from Istanbul, international wrestling an hour ago from Istanbul on the catch-up channel, a saucy drama about a remote community of Pirin Mountain goat herders or Ready Steady Cook (the Offal Special). The severe but sexy weather woman’s trendy heels were like Kalashnikov bayonets.

17 May, Friday

I saw the playoff highlights on YouTube. Bulgarian Iliya Gruev (Илия Груев) scored Leeds‘ first goal. The big smile on his face was priceless.

Bulgaria has a general election on 9 June. To emphasise our democratic status, we have at least one every year. Anyone can enter. We’ve had has-been popstars, athletes, actors and glamour models on ballot papers. It’s like Celebrity Big Brother. Iliya Gruev would probably enjoy more glory as a parliamentary candidate than as a Leeds United midfielder. Our current prime minister, dithering over whether to play on the left or right wing, is sure to be sent off.

18 May, Saturday

A day of scribbling and honing in preparation for a grand evening of rubbing shoulders (courtesy of Zoom) with esteemed authors from around the globe, all fellow members of our elite writing group. As I read to them about my traumatic childhood they laughed, reminding me of my traumatic childhood.

A bite from a demonic garden beast caused a finger to swell like a salami in the sun. Luckily I only use this finger for typing the letters I and K and commas, but work on my book ‘Mississippi Kayaking with Kiki Kirkpatrick’ stalled.

I lit a candle for Julia.

19 May, Sunday

Before I’d risen from slumber Priyatelkata had made Balkan chicken and prawn spring rolls and her yoghurt and strawberries concoction perfect for eating straight from the fridge when nobody’s looking. Meanwhile, trout tickled by fresh vegetables and herbs contemplated a sizzle in the oven. I skipped breakfast, holding out for our other four mealtimes.

May’s always our wettest month and today typified this. So I’d nothing to do except loiter, holding out my swollen finger and repeating ‘Oh, my swollen finger!’ Priyatelkata said the Bulgarian word for irritating is drazneshto (дразнещо).

Snezhinka’s wound’s healed but still she limps. What to do?

20 May, Monday

Priyatelkata often overcomes the misery of dull weather by doing a big tidy. Feeling obliged to join in, I chose to organise my books, discarding everything I never read (a whimsical tome examining the Gloucestershire dialect and a user’s manual for the lawn mower I left behind in England when I flitted).

So that every book will always be at my fingertips, I arranged them on shelves in order of ISBN. Priyatelkata, a former librarian, rebuked me for not using the Dewey Decimal Classification system to order them. But at least I have something to look forward to doing tomorrow.     

21 May, Tuesday

Aussie yodeller, Frank Ifield died on Saturday. His music typified those innocent times of the early sixties. Along with Russ Conway, The Seekers, Val Doonican and Dusty Springfield he made up the core of the Two Way Family Favourites, BBC Radio request programme linking Britain with its former colonies as we sat down for Sunday roast beef and Yorkshires.

They might revive it but Stormzy and Dua Lipa could never match dear old Frank.

So when my life is through, and the angels ask me to recall the thrill of it all then I will tell them I remember you.

22 May, Wednesday

Ace vet Dr Gunchev said Snezhinka’s leg lump might be scarring from last week’s vaccination. It could also be cancer, as could her now permanent limp. Monitor the entire dog and return in three weeks, was his suggestion.  

Feeling gloomy, we cancelled our holiday in Puglia. Plan B is a Southern Bulgaria and Northern Greece road trip so we can drive home in a few hours if necessary. Snezhinka isn’t one for holidaymaking.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash. I’m still not over Frank Ifield.

Muddy garden work beneath a spectacular rain-free electric storm cleared my mind.

23 May, Thursday

Shops are only fun if they sell books or records and today’s retail assault course featured neither. To restore sanity, we finished the slog with a cracking bit of nouveau Bulgarski cuisine at the recently refurbished Asenovtsi restaurant.

A plague of rainwater rendered our garden an unworkable mire so I set about washing the windows which were also quite muddy. 

My evening’s relaxation on the terrace with Johnny Răducanu and a book ended after ten traumatic minutes as a multi-coloured frog arrived and our worst cats tried to dissect it. So we all went inside… except the frog… and Johnny.

24 May, Friday

Our first public holiday for almost a fortnight. We get more time off than Santa. It’s the Day of the Cyrillic Alphabet, Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture, celebrated largely in honour of our brotherly scholarly Saints Cyril and Methodius. With wall-to-wall traditional dress, there was swinging and swaying and music playing and dancing in the street and school children giving to passers-by sheets of paper on which they’d handwritten classic works of the great Bulgarian poets.

In the sunshine isn’t this a grand place to be? So we scrapped our holiday Plan B for the sake of Hristo Botev and Snezhinka. 

25 May, Saturday

Partying nightingales sang all night to entertain Turlough the insomniac. They sing until they’ve found a mate. The one by the bedroom window must lack social skills.

I ate handfuls of mulberries from the lower branches of our tree as jays ate from the top. How much more bio could a breakfast be?

But then the little golden orioles flew in and bullied the jays as all ornithological hell was let loose. Swallows swooping about our kitchen in search of a slice of toast appeared aloof and above such squabbling. Local storks don’t like toast… the butter puts them off.

26 May, Sunday

The excruciatingly well-spoken waiter at the old Ottoman Bey House Restaurant was disappointed that we knew he was Australian but didn’t recall having told us this during our previous visit. The owner of the restaurant is the woman who would be our Queen if Bulgaria was still a monarchy, but it’s a republic so she must work for a living. Perhaps the waiter is a marsupial royal.

Stuffed to the gunwales with scrumptious victuals, I switched to energy-saving mode for the afternoon.

Leeds United lost at Wembley… words copied from an old diary. I can’t remember which. Take your pick!    

27 May, Monday

Outside Praktiker we met Fiona, the one of the two house-sitters who we still trust enough to allow into our house and the one who we haven’t found it necessary to buy a voodoo doll of. Cancelling our holiday at very short notice made us feel we should still pay her. She, and her husband, seemed more concerned about ailing Snezhinka. Perhaps we should have kept the money and given them the dog.

To lift our spirits, we had luncheon at Arbanashki Han. Their garden’s almost, but not quite, as lovely as our own. I wished I’d taken my secateurs. 

28 May, Tuesday

Day one of our holiday at home. Determined to not let life’s complications beat us, we imagined a customary poolside sangria reception at which a hefty lass called Chantelle from Bromsgrove, who was a big fan of going to the dogs, offered excursions to a variety of gift shops with adjacent Roman ruins, broken pottery museums or calamari plantations.

We know Snezhinka’s been very ill recently because she hasn’t been a pain in the arse. Today normal service resumed. So we could have gone away and we wished we had gone away. I wonder if Judith Chalmers had a dog.

29 May, Wednesday

I ceased buying books online because Brexit introduced customs complications and the need to pay import duty on British goods. But, running out of English language reading material, I ordered one from dastardly Amazon.

Four weeks later I was summoned to our big post office. A lady sent me to the collections counter in another building. Another lady sent me to the parcels collections counter in another building.

I paid tax of 4.00 leva (£1.80) to lady three who, after a rubber stamp frenzy and personal circumstances interrogation, smiled and gave me the book.

Amazon emails ask if I’m satisfied. 

30 May, Thursday

Day three of our pretend holiday was blessed with real Scarborough seaside weather. I remembered a younger me almost perishing in the North Sea, emerging with nipples and genitalia that had grown and shrunk respectively to exactly the same size as each other.

Not recognising cooking and washing up as holiday activities we went to Pizza Napoli for lunch and a warm. Being rarities in this strictly Bulgarian establishment we were asked if the rain was spoiling our holiday. We hadn’t the heart to tell them we were only 5 kms from home or the truth about our make-believe trip.

31 May, Friday

Day four. Leaving base camp shortly after lunch, we trekked cautiously beneath thunderous skies to the bamboo plantation by the garden shed. Fearing encounters with tigers, Priyatelkata held the blunderbuss as I removed invasive bindweed from young shoots. A spiralling abomination that seems indestructible. Strange it hasn’t strangled our entire planet?

Trump, found guilty of everything, was allowed to go home. He is the bipedal equivalent of bindweed.

Planting out seedlings I was overcome by the heat, the flies and those damned drums. Please send serum for the dengue fever. This may be the last time that I’m able to…

Photograph: A fine specimen from our array of demonic garden beasts which sometimes get a bit lonely out there so they come to visit us in the house. This is Stoycho the baby Scolopendra, my all-time favourite arthropod.

I often wondered if dear old Joan had anybody in the world to talk to other than me and Torty, her tortoise. Before marrying a serviceman and moving to the West Country, she had lived in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Long after she had been widowed I would visit her once a month in her garden flat in the centre of Georgian Bath to remove stubborn corns from her smallest toes and she would entertain me with her thoughts on the strange goings-on in the world, all of which outraged her. She was an avid people-watcher and, barely pausing to take a breath, she would spout great monologues about what had gone through her mind as she’d waited in queues in shops or the post office on pension day, or at the bus stop.

Her great meandering sagas were dotted with ‘I thought this’ and ‘I thought that’, so I’ve put some of her thoughts into written words.

Just look at her! The Jezebel! I don’t know how she has the nerve. Shamelessly putting them there on the conveyor belt for all and sundry to see with her pouches of fancy cat food and her Vogue magazine that’s pure filth and her Findus frozen meal for one, as if to say, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m going to be fornicating tonight!’ Why do they have to sell condoms in Sainsbury’s anyway? It never happened in my day.

I don’t think we even had condoms then. Well the war had just ended and there was still rationing. Even if they’d put up a sign in a shop window saying ‘Get your gentlemen’s latex sheaths here!’ I’d have laid a pound to a penny that you’d never see a rush for them. Well, modesty prevailed, and there just weren’t the condom vouchers in the ration books. In any case, we had too many hungry little mouths to feed for us to be able to afford contraceptives.

To tell you the truth I don’t think we even had a Sainsbury’s just after the war. Not in Thirsk anyway, or even Northallerton which you’d be surprised at. They had them down south of course. I know this because Great Aunt Olive on Father’s side had lived in London during the Blitz. She took shelter in their premises in Kentish Town High Street as soon as she heard the air raid siren wailing but Hitler didn’t stop to think about the poor ordinary housewives running around on a Tuesday afternoon to keep their families fed and watered. It was direct hit by a bomb from a Heinkel that finished her. They found her near the bacon slicer, buried up to her eyes in tins of powdered egg. The cruel busybody of a neighbour thought it a great joke to say she’d been a victim of shelling. I can’t remember his name but there were very few tears shed when his pressure cooker blew up one Waterloo Day. He shouldn’t have been cooking anyway. That was work for Mrs whatever it was that he was called.

We got everything we needed from Mr Cooper’s grocery shop on the corner of Station Road and we were happy. A lovely man he was, despite his ear wax and his wife’s fondness for a bottle of milk stout. I expect it was the ear wax that drove her to the drink. She must have worn her fingers to the bone scrubbing it off his shirt collars. He wouldn’t have sold condoms to anybody. I think he was one of those Roman Catholics.

I wonder if she put them in her shopping trolley by mistake. Mark my words, she’ll have thought they were chewing gum or cough lozenges or something. Mind you, they do come in such a variety of gay colours. Very pretty. I’ve thought about buying some myself, the packets look so nice, but I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Mrs Gooding said they make them in all sorts of flavours too which I find a bit peculiar because they say they’re to stop you getting in the family way. What difference does it make if they taste of banana or raspberry ripple as long they keep the young ones out of trouble? The BBC Light Programme was what kept me out of trouble. Elsie across the street listened to Radio Luxembourg and regretted it for the rest of her life. All that jitterbugging! I blamed her parents.

What flavour has she got there? It looks like juicy fruit to me. Does it say sugar-free? She’s worried about her teeth rotting. The least of her worries, I’d say. Perhaps it is chewing gum. No it can’t be because it says ‘ribbed’ on the box and why would anybody want ribbed chewing gum? Why would anybody want ribbed anything for that matter? Though I bought a nice non-slip bath mat in British Home Stores the other day. That was ribbed. She’s going to be disappointed when she gets home and opens the packet. They’re not going to do much for her curry breath unless she’s bought Signal toothpaste with minty stripes flavour. How on earth do they get the stripes into the tube? Mrs Gooding said they have a machine.

If they are condoms, it’s funny she doesn’t let the husband buy them. He’s probably not her husband anyway and he’s probably too tired after a hard day at work to be bothered with all that sort of shenanigans but she loves him so much she’s gone out to buy them herself. Bless her! I wonder if she’ll use them before or after she has her boil-in-the-bag curry. She obviously doesn’t love him enough to cook him a proper tea, or even share her awful modern food. Don’t Findus do meals for two? At least she’s feeding the cat. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was feeding it to her man friend… feeding the cat food, not the cat, to him I mean. Curry indeed!

We didn’t have those in my day either. Boil-in-the-bag curries. Mr Cooper would never have sold anything like that. Well there was no demand for curry. No, not in Thirsk. All the people who ate curry lived in India until Findus came over here. It’s an Indian word is Findus. Mrs Gooding said it’s the name of a river in India. She used to go on a lot of boating holidays before she lost her husband so I expect she’ll have read about it in the Hoseason’s brochure.

What I can’t understand is why Findus make frozen toad-in-the-hole as well as curry. Mrs Gooding said her granddaughter went to India on holiday. She took everything she owned in a haversack the size of herself but didn’t think to pack an iron. She must have looked a sight but, although I would never say anything to offend Mrs Gooding, I don’t think her granddaughter even bothers to use an iron when she’s at home. She’ll be buying condoms next, just you see. Anyway, she told her grandmother that while she was away on her travels she had toad-in-the-hole in the hotel cafeteria so it must be an Indian dish. I’ve always said I won’t eat foreign food because it pains me, but I do like my toad-in-the-hole. I open a tin of marrowfat peas with it. Mrs Gooding won’t touch foreign food either. She said her father was a prisoner in Burma during the war and the food was terrible.

You’d think they’d go the whole hog and make condoms in curry flavour, wouldn’t you? It would save people like her a lot of time and trouble. Killing two birds with one stone. I suppose she’d turn her nose up if they were toad-in-the-hole flavour. No, everything has to be exotic for today’s generation. I can’t understand why she doesn’t cook herself some normal food. If she’s got time to fiddle about with condoms she must have time to fry a chop. My husband would have insisted on a chop. I’m not the sort to blow my own trumpet but I can proudly say I kept a good pantry, so I knew he would always be content with what went on the table. He never was one for frozen food. Dreadful stuff he said it was, and he wouldn’t have thought twice about telling the likes of this trollop here where to stick her blooming condoms.

Funnily enough I’m having a chop for my tea tonight. They sell them individually now but you’ve to look sharp if you want one with a bit of kidney in it. You can buy the kidneys separately but they don’t taste the same. I bought some in a plastic tray once. They’re only really any use if you’re doing a steak and kidney pie but those things are such a carry-on to make I don’t bother anymore. Well the frozen ones they sell nowadays are so tasty and easy to do. Twenty minutes at gas mark five and Bob’s your uncle.

I think that’s why so many foreigners come over here you know. For the British food. I don’t expect they’ve got a Sainsbury’s in Calcutta and even if they have I bet they don’t sell steak and kidney pies. I wonder if Findus make their food in India and bring it here in lorries. Mrs Gooding’s granddaughter would know. She thumbs lifts from lorry drivers on the M4 when she’s going to see her chap in Nottingham. She certainly gets about a bit for someone so young. He’s at university there. A young man who looks like he’s never seen a hot iron either! And he rides a bicycle everywhere because he’s a vegetarian.

I wish I’d travelled when I was a girl. We went to Butlin’s in North Wales two years running when Father was doing the extra shifts on the railway. He moaned and groaned all the way to Pwllheli, saying that six hours on a train was no holiday for him and he might as well have brought his stoking shovel. Mother said, ‘Bert, there’s no need for language like that!’ Oh how we laughed. The second year we went the dog was sick which spoilt our enjoyment a bit. Well they were such small chalets for six of us and he was a big dog was Rusty. He would get very nervous on bin day (Thursdays, no I tell a lie, Fridays) so I’m not surprised he didn’t settle in Wales. Mother blamed it on the food but Father said, ‘Offal is offal no matter what country you’re in.’

I would have liked to have gone a bit further than Butlin’s. I loved to look at the photographs of the pyramids in Egypt in my history book at school, and Swanage always seemed such a bonny place in the pictures on the travel posters in the railway station. But they were so far away and I never really got the time. Well I had to help Mother look after the house and a stoker’s overalls don’t wash themselves you know. And after I was wed I had so many flipping kids to feed. But there’s not much you can do about that is there?

Photograph: Joan’s reptilian friend, Torty. Almost as old as her but not quite as chatty.

As my Ma took the biggest pan from the kitchen cupboard I knew that we’d be having fillet of a fenny snake for tea. But I won’t complain, I told myself. There’s a delicate situation that needs discussing so I need her to be smiling like a Cheshire cat on its holidays in Grimsby. I’ll eat whatever she puts on our plates. 

Eye of newt and toe of frog

Oxo cube and hairs of dog

Granny’s homemade cholagogue

Your innards to contort and clog

Rations were meagre on Seacroft Estate in Leeds during the early seventies but better than in nearby Gipton. Mealtimes required a combination of imagination, courage and tact. On this particular day, with an announcement to make that I was sure would not be well received, I had to use double tact.

The problem that arose could be blamed entirely on Paul Mallinson, a kid at school who I had semi-befriended because of his knowledge of music. All my other friends seemed to be obsessed with Led Zeppelin, Yes or Cat Stevens, none of which particularly wowed me. But fifteen-year-old Mallo (which seemed such a cool nickname) knew his green onions when it came to unconventional or emerging talent and had midway through an English lesson announced that he was going to a Bob Marley and the Wailers’ gig at York University the following week. New ethnic music from Jamaica, a quid to get in, pay on the door… how cool was that?

I had never heard the word ‘gig’ before. It was what rock stars called a concert. Mallo just got cooler and cooler every time he opened his mouth. He remained unruffled as the English teacher mocked him for wasting his pound on something that wasn’t Pink Floyd related but, although not formerly invited, I decided that I would accompany my teenage mentor on his twenty-mile journey to Trench Town, Yorkshire. Bob Marley’s new style of reggae, that I had only heard late at night on Radio One, was too exotic to miss.

My Ma had a rough idea of where Jamaica was on the map but she had probably never before encountered the terms Rastafarianism, Reggae Music or might not be home that night, so she was somewhat less than enthusiastic when I broke the news of the great adventure I was planning.

‘But haven’t you got school the next day?’ Her words immediately honing in on a stumbling block.

‘I have,’ said I ‘But not until the afternoon because we’ve the exams all week.’

Her lack of enthusiasm diminished to a total absence of understanding underlined by the waving of a gravy-coated wooden spoon. ‘And what exam do you have that day?’

‘Only English Literature.’

‘Only English Literature? And you have all the answers already in your head?’ she asked, already knowing the answer to her own question.

‘All that I need’ I replied, which may have sounded like over confidence or a lie, but was actually neither.

We had been studying Shakespeare’s Macbeth (you may have heard of it), H.G. Wells’ Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul and some poems by some poets that had been admired for some years by some people but not me. All of these I found to be as tedious as a twice told tale, as the Bard of Avon himself might have said. Even our chemistry teacher had expressed sympathy at the joyless task imposed upon us, oblivious to the fact that in many of his own lessons only a few ill-timed explosions and his sense of humour had saved the day. He told us that H.G. Wells was where mercury came from. 

I’ve always loved reading and enjoyed some poetry, but not the set books of Foxwood School’s English Department. I’m tempted to say that their stuff was outside my comfort zone but that couldn’t be completely true because it always seemed to send me to sleep. I wasn’t interested in what they considered essential reading, so I had absolutely no intention of doing any revision work. I would sit the exam because if I didn’t my parents would receive a letter from Leeds Education Committee demanding that they remit £3.75, the administrative cost of inflicting such torture on innocent schoolkids. I didn’t know much about what I’d be asked to write in blue or black ink for a duration of three hours in silence broken only by the occasional cough or dropped lucky gonk in the ghostly school assembly hall where I imagined so many students before me had suffered near-death experiences, but I did know that I’d get by in life without a certificate from the Joint Matriculation Board confirming that I understood exactly why Lady MacDuff had been so pissed off with her husband.

‘You’ll have to tell Bob Marley that you can’t go. Your education comes first.’ My Ma, stirring with heightened vigour what bubbled in her pot, wasn’t smiling anymore. I sensed that toil and trouble was brewing.

‘But….’

‘Don’t you but me. You’re wasting your life. Any more of this and I’ll be telling your Da!’ she threatened.

I wished I’d twisted the truth and said I was going to see Larry Cunningham (who bore the epithet Donegal’s very own Jim Reeves). Years earlier we had been lucky enough to lose his LPs in a house move but his crooned Distant Drums were never too distant from my Da’s eardrums so I know he’d have given me his blessing and possibly even the bus fare to York. Unfortunately, my Da too was distant, doing his bit for the North Sea oil people at the top end of the country, not far from where the Scottish Play was set, so it was my Ma who called the shots in the area of bringing their kids up the proper way.

To argue would have been a waste of time. There would have been shouting, weeping and wailing and an altogether bad atmosphere about the house for days on end and then all stirred up again and repeated with renewed hostility when my Da got home from his work. An older me would have just gone and to hell with the consequences, but the younger me was foolish enough to heed the words of his elders. Thankfully I didn’t have to explain this to Mallo because I hadn’t told him that I’d be going with him in the first place. There’s nothing less cool than telling your peers that you can’t do something because your mother said you’re not allowed. I imagined Mallo’s Ma to have the attitude and demeanour of Janis Joplin.

So, in the interests of family harmony, my education and my future career, I chose to give Bob’s show a miss. Mallo went and he said it was the best gig he had been to in all his fifteen years on Earth. He’d talked to a Rasta roadie and bought a The Wailers - Catch a Fire Tour button badge. Knowing he had no chance of catching the last bus back to Leeds, he had slept under a tree in the lush green grounds of York University. I expect that when he left school he went to live with Bob Marley’s beautiful daughter in a wooden shack on the beach in Montego Bay.  

In the days when grades one to six were pass marks for a GCE ‘O’ Level and grades seven to nine denoted failure, in English Literature I managed an imperfect six. To this day I cannot imagine how I managed to achieve such unexpected success. I think the examiners must have given me a couple of extra marks for wearing my Who Shot King Duncan? tee-shirt during the exam. It can be said that my working life fell into three main areas of expertise; they being merchant shipping, pensions administration and podiatry. Without that certificate of competence, on which the Joint Matriculation Board spelt my name wrong, I just don’t know how I would have got on.

I don’t have many regrets in life but high on the list of those that I do have is my decision not to attend that Bob Marley and the Wailers gig.

A long time after the event (or non-event) two things have cropped up to rub salt into my wounds. The first was my beloved Priyatelkata telling me that in 1977, when she was only thirteen, she went with her friends to see Bob Marley and the Wailers near where she lived in Paris but didn’t tell her parents that she was going.

The other laceration stinger occurred one summer’s day almost fifty years after the forbidden gig. Whilst visiting my, by then, quite elderly Ma, we decided it would nice to go for a car ride over the North Yorkshire Moors, stopping for a bit of lunch in a nice country pub. The sun was shining. The weather was sweet.

‘Buffalo Soldier, Dreadlock Rasta’ she started singing as we motored along the A64 towards Malton.

‘What are you singing that for?’ I asked in utter astonishment.

‘They played it on the radio while I was having my breakfast. It’s a really nice song. It’s by Bob Marley. I like him.’

The hell-broth that had boiled and bubbled on the stove in our kitchen at the beginning of my tale turned out to be something different to what I had expected. I could perhaps describe it as stewed bicycle inner-tubes in a parcel of some sort of leathery-textured, offal-flavoured substance. It wasn’t very nice. In fact, it was almost as bitter as I was. But it was better than what the poor black babies in Africa would have been having for their tea that day, apparently. Little consolation in my mind.  

Photograph: Me taking full advantage of my grade six GCE ‘O’ Level whilst painting the sharp end of a big rusty ship floating about somewhere in the Persian Gulf.

Introduction

For several months, I’ve written precisely 100 words each day to create a record of my life whilst simultaneously exercising a brain that shows signs of impaired functional capacity resulting from excessive wear and tear.

On days when there’s little to write about, I reflect upon more interesting times in my past. This has prompted me to write a prequel entitled The Childhood Stage – My First Ten Years. Don’t worry, I haven’t written about every single day. Just the momentous ones.

This bit’s just an introduction but nevertheless it still comprises of exactly 100 words, the 100th one being this.

Wednesday 6 November 1957 - The Uterus

Similar to Jack Nicholson’s ‘Little Pigs’ scene in Kubrick’s film ‘The Shining’, a steel blade ripped through the wall triggering a tsunami of escaping amniotic fluid. A stranger dragged me out, announcing that I was a boy; something I’d known for several months.

The woman lying semi-naked and semi-conscious in a bloodstained bed, apparently, was my Ma. Years later she’d complain about the state of my room.

To deepen the despair this all happened in Middlesbrough. It was the worst day of my life. Only learning that Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll be the Day’ was the number one record cheered me.

Sunday 16 February 1958 - The Baptism

They crossed the Irish Sea to see me in my long white dress as a man in similar attire half-drowned me in a dark corner of St Philomena’s church.

I was a survivor. Only a month earlier I howled like an infant Banshee, the victim of an acute ear infection. I hadn’t been sleeping and consequently neither had the family. In mid-January 1958 the term ‘Would you shut the fuck up?’ was introduced to the English language.

My Nan put whiskey in my milk to make me sleep, restoring peace. Irritated people have regularly been giving me whiskey ever since.

Friday 1 January 1960 - The Swinging Sixties

In the beginning there was no sign of the Beatles, Twiggy, free love or recreational drugs. With Carnaby Street out of reach, my Ma remained loyal to the nearby Fine Fare shop. Boasting new-fangled supermarket trolleys and a hygiene certificate, it just oozed post-war affluence.

In the town where I was born lived many men who sailed to sea but we didn’t all live in yellow submarines. Instead a red brick terrace house in Kensington Road. Modernity brought the beginning of the end of our heavy industry boom. Decades later free love (or cheap love) and recreational drugs abound there.

Tuesday 31 May 1960 - The Sibling

I vaguely remember family discussions about the possibility of acquiring a car, washing machine, budgerigar, living room carpet or other miscellaneous items to improve our lives but I’ve absolutely no recollection of a sister being mentioned, until it was too late.

Whilst sitting on Mary Erskine’s knee (Ma’s cousin) I was asked if I would prefer the impending baby to be a boy or a girl. I really wanted a puppy more than anything else but we got Beverley and we still have her, long after the point at which a domestic pet might have expired. She’s housetrained too, apparently!

Wednesday 5 September 1962 - The Black Babies

The first time a nun spoke to me she told a lie. She said I’d love school but I never did, neither at St Philomena’s Primary nor any of my four subsequent seats of learning.

Sister Josephine said if we took in pennies (in multiples of six) for the black babies we’d bring happiness to God, black babies and ultimately ourselves. Each contribution earned a gum-backed picture of a hungry child. The prototype of Panini sticker albums but with images of starving Third World kids where excessively overpaid footballers now gloat.

For fourteen years I endured schools, but not nuns.

Wednesday 17 April 1963 - The Strangers in the Night

Staying at my Nan and Grandad’s in York I heard shrieking in the night and the voices of strangers. I was told my Uncle Malcolm was being taken to hospital. Nothing to worry about. Just go back to sleep.

During the day our bus trip to Flamingo Park Zoo was cancelled and my Ma arrived. One afternoon two weeks later there was a family party. Relatives went home with some of Malcolm’s belongings. I was horrified.

Months later I was told he had died. Decades later I was told he had died that night in his bed. An epileptic seizure.

Monday 3 June 1963 - The Pope

Sister Josephine sent us all home from school an hour before the lunch bell because Pope John XXIII had died and we’d need to pray for his soul. It was no time to be doing sums.

My Ma was shocked to see me, exclaiming ‘Your dinner’s not ready!’ Kids were normally met at the school gates by parents, but not today.

Confident that the Pope’s soul was saintly pure, I did Lego instead of prayers.

Years later in lessons about cathode ray oscilloscopes or Lady Macbeth I’d wish for a miracle like Pope John XXIII’s demise and an early finish.

Saturday 1 August 1964 - The Ethnic Roots

They told me I was Irish but what did they mean? Daily doses of Val Doonican, cabbage and potatoes were administered to ensure I never forgot the roots I didn’t know I had. So we went there on a family holiday, via Scotland, in a Ford Anglia and a British Rail ferry.

The Green Glens of Antrim enchanted but, in comparison to our Teesside home, even post-apocalyptic Hiroshima was beautiful.

Near Cushendall, in a farmyard carpeted with chicken shit, as afternoon sun shone through soft rain, my roots anchored me to Ireland and I began to draw in her goodness.   

Saturday 13 March 1965 - The Toy Shop

Maiden great aunts Annie and Maggie owned a cat and a toy shop. The downside to their utopian lifestyle was that they lived in South Shields and they didn’t have an indoor toilet. Sometimes we’d stay there overnight, sleeping in an attic room which entailed weeing into a receptacle that looked like a giant china teacup in front of other family members or making the journey down four flights of stairs to a draughty brick-built facility in the back yard. The fact that they thought that cider was the apple equivalent of lemonade compounded the problem for this unsuspecting seven-year-old.

Monday 18 October 1965 - The Monochrome Set

Nowadays Rediffusion sounds like a word you might associate with that Oppenheimer fella, but back then it was Britain’s first stab at cable television.

Apparently we could only enjoy this pleasure if all households in our street subscribed. Terrified that everyone would know what they were watching, our next door neighbours rarely tuned in.

On day one I was forced to watch the Woodentops. Unimpressed I imposed a boycott ceasing only for the 1972 FA Cup Final, which remains my favourite telly programme.

Decades later I’d watch Channel Five News because I was hopelessly in love with presenter Kirstie Young.  

Friday 25 December 1965 - The Dog

Before dawn, in our posh front room with a proper fireplace, to our delight we discovered a Golden Labrador pup. On its face was a little soot to fit in with the Father Christmas chimney tradition but which resembled the Lenten Cross put on our foreheads by Father Crawley each Ash Wednesday. Were Fathers Christmas and Crawley the same person, I wondered.

We named the dog Bruce, much to the irritation and confusion of Uncle Brooks and Bob the Australian speedway rider lodger.

Previously we’d had two pet white mice housed in a budgie cage and which had mysteriously disappeared.

Tuesday 19 July 1966 - The World Cup

Middlesbrough FC’s Ayresome Park stadium was a mere 200 metres from our house. Walking past one day I noticed great construction work being undertaken. I asked my Da why. Without explaining the concept of a World Cup tournament he told me it was because the best footballers in the world were coming to play. Why on Earth would they come to Middlesbrough, I pondered.

On our doorstep North Korean unknowns beat Italian superstars and sent them home. In hindsight I’d have loved to have gone but I was on a school trip to see a production of Rumpelstiltskin that evening.

Friday 12 August 1966 - The Great Escape

York is a great wondrous city but it was the things it didn’t have that appealed to me when we moved there to live. There were no petro-chemical plants or steel works, purple and green sunsets or schools run by ferocious nuns.

Ma’s family lived there so we’d plenty of people to visit when requiring tea, cake and long conversations about Auntie Maude’s new ironing board. But I knew that if I sat in silence and agreed to kiss an elderly lady I’d get a shiny shilling.

‘You’ve never had it so good’ said Uncle Alec, and he was right.

Sunday 6 November 1966 - The Ageing

My ninth birthday. In accordance with fatalistic family tradition I was informed that I’d entered my tenth year so dotage beckoned. Rattling on towards the big one-oh I should anticipate false teeth, memory loss and weekly steeping of the feet in a washing-up bowl of luxurious Radox.

Next door neighbour Susan Lancaster also hit nine today. I didn’t like her. She played two recorders both of which were even more shrill than her voice. The boys, including Susan’s brother John, came to my party and the girls went to hers. Perfect! A premonition, perhaps, of school discos six years hence.

Saturday 10 December 1966 - The Bay Leaf

As black as a badger’s black bits on the outside and as raw as a badger’s sunburnt bits on the inside. Perhaps my Da cooked our sausages with his blowtorch on the Saturdays my Ma worked in Stead & Simpson’s shoe shop in Coney Street.

My sister and I complained until a replacement shepherd’s pie service was introduced. Prepared by the real chef on Friday evenings whilst chanting shoe polish prices, then reheated and served by her sidekick on Saturday dinnertimes. I always got the bay leaf. ‘If it’s in there it’s to be eaten’ he snapped as I gagged.

Saturday 1 April 1967 - The Arctic Wedding

In Sunderland we saw Mary Erskine (Ma’s cousin) marry Geordie Jim Fleming. A lovely man but six decades later I still struggle with his half-Anglo Saxon half-Pingu accent.

Wearing her silk bridesmaid’s dress my sister shivered in the North Sea wind while polar bears perished. Later I discovered that even posh hotel meals came with cabbage and potatoes. We were given wedding cake in small boxes to take home. Stored that way it keeps forever, apparently. Too tempting, I ate mine in 2012.

At weddings the reward for kissing elderly ladies was two shillings, so it wasn’t a bad day.

Monday 14 August 1967 - The Emigration

My Da had been selling Pyrene fire extinguishers to earn a crust and a bay leaf but he was so successful in his work that within a year everybody in York had bought one, so it was time to move on.

Donegal Quay in Belfast became our Ellis Island and a white Morris 1000 van bearing the legend ‘Glover Site Investigation, Ballymoney’ became our covered wagon.

Settled in our homestead in the Garry Bog, my Da was home (or within twenty miles of it) and I felt I too had arrived home at long last… until the bullets started flying.

Photograph: A family fishing trip to Rowntree’s Park in York, circa 1962. Father Danny with the Mohican haircut, sister Beverley in the perambulator, mother Grace hiding at the back and me at the front doing all the work.

Introduction

This is the seventh month in which I’ve described my personal shenanigans by writing 100 words every day. April is one of my top four favourite months because everything around me seems to be invigorated and green though still a little wet, much the same as I am myself.

If you read beyond this point without nodding off, then I’m very grateful and if there was such a thing as a tee-shirt bearing the words ‘I stuck with this month’s This Sort of Thing right to the end’ I’d send you one but there isn’t, so I won’t.

My words…

1 April, Monday

Priyatelkata once explained that the French April Fool procedure is the same as Britain’s except the punchline is ‘Poisson d'Avril’. Forgetting she’d told me, she falls victim to the prank every year. Until 8:14 am she believed that popular beat combo Olivia, Newt and John had reformed.

Faffing with bathroom fitters and salesmen this warm day sapped all energy reserved for garden duties which we discovered must be complete by Sunday as next week we’ll be five days without bathing facilities. Hassan our neighbour said he hasn’t had a shower since the town’s Milky Sheep Festival and he hasn’t suffered.

2 April, Tuesday

Whilst working horticulturally with my supersonic strimming machine this afternoon, despite wearing all the recommended safety apparel, a small stone flew directly up my nose. A most strange and novel experience!

A business opportunity sprang to mind requiring capital investment of little more than a bag of gravel. At my funfair stall I would offer, for one lev per go, the opportunity to send the gravel airborne by placing the business end of my power tool in it and revving the throttle. Any contestant successfully propelling a single grain into any orifice (of their own) would win a cuddly goldfish.   

3 April, Wednesday

Intelligent but lonely whilst living with grandparents, eight-year-old Mert talks to me in the street. A nice kid despite his big mouth and even bigger head. He speaks English, Bulgarian, Turkish and Dutch but looks uncannily like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. With his towel round his neck in lieu of a cape, he sped down the lane on his kick scooter in the belief that he was the Queen of England. 

I finished reading The Fall of Light by Niall Williams. An excellent tale set in nineteenth century Ireland. It could easily be retitled The Potatoes of Wrath.

4 April, Thursday

Snezhinka, our former street dog, has a bleeding and pustulent lump on the underside of her paw. The vet, who can probably be forgiven because English isn’t her first language, said it’s probably cancer. It seems there are no Bulgarian words for bedside manner. Injections were given to tide the poor bitch over until next Friday (Snezhinka that is) when she returns for a pustulent lumpectomy.

This dear hound, who often displays the amusing facial expressions of Gromit from the movies, doesn’t get taken into the city very often, so I suspect she considered the trip a grand day out.

5 April, Friday

Twice a year Bulgarians swap over car tyres. Winter ones for summer ones and vice versa. Desislava, a nice smiling lady does the work. Despite having the build for it, she was born too late to be a steroidal Olympic shot putter. We saw her in a restaurant one evening wearing her posh frock and not covered in muck and oil. Apart from the pencil behind her ear she looked quite glamourous.

We’ve two cars (essential as one of them is usually away at the menders) so the process takes three hours. The adjacent OMV petrol station café accommodates us.

6 April, Saturday

My favourite Bulgarian regional anthem, by a country kilometre, is A Clear Moon is Already Rising (Ясен Месец Веч Изгрява) especially Sava Popsavov’s 1953 recording. Its bold and passionate words being the hymn of the mystical and superstitious Strandzha Massif in the south east of our country. A song rallying peasants to rise against an occupying empire, it reminds me of The Rising of the Moon to convey a similar message to Theobald Wolfe Tone’s followers during Ireland’s 1798 Rebellion and which has been with me six decades. Both songs were written long after their respective uprisings had ended but both are terrible beauties.

7 April, Sunday

Yesterday I planted seven trees in our new territory. Babies I’d nurtured myself from seeds. In the past I’ve been a collector of coins, stamps, football badges, records and even dirty glasses whilst working as a barman. But from none of these did I gain pleasure like that from my current collection of trees. There are far too many to count.

Last night’s hefty thunderstorm prevented work in the now muddy garden so I cleaned the fridge instead. I also cleaned our extensive and dusty fridge magnet collection but there was no joy in it. I missed those lovely trees.

8 April, Monday

Today was International Romani Day so we decided we’d join a Romani community and live our lives the old way. But on reaching our gate and greeting our neighbours we realised we were already living in a Romani community, so we went home and put the kettle on.

Hristo the plumber started work on our bathroom improvements. A messy job which means we won’t be able to cleanse ourselves for the next five days. Would I be guilty of racial stereotyping if I were to say that made us feel even more like we were part of the Romani community?

9 April, Tuesday

Hristo the plumber arrived at our house smugly smelling of lavender. We no longer cared that our bathroom was out of service because the water supply to the entire village had been cut off… temporarily… hopefully! Our cat Osem stole his lunchtime sandwiches. Na-na-nee-na-naa in Bulgarian is на-на-нее-на-на.

Miro the Bulgarski tutor agreed we’d both benefit from four months without each other so my summer holidays began today.

Desperate for an evening shower but reluctant to admit it to those around us, Priyatelkata and I freshened ourselves on the terrace using dental floss and a secretion collected from osage orange trees.

10 April, Wednesday

Ramadan ended yesterday so our neighbours celebrated today. They observe the fast religiously apart from the bit where you don’t eat or drink. It seems that food from McDonald’s isn’t classed as food, which makes sense to me. They don’t do the bowing and praying business but the big party at the end is taken very seriously. Eid Mubarak!

The middle bit of our new territory is almost transformed from a thicket to a lawn. We’ve invited the vicar for croquet on Sunday afternoon. Cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sponge cake and lashings of rakia marks the spot where east meets west.

11 April, Thursday

Usually when our water’s cut off it’s just in our village, but today the whole city dried up. We questioned the wisdom of our investment in a new shower. The water boys insist they’re upgrading the system, which hopefully includes the introduction of water.

Mert’s parents paid 30,000 leva for a sinister looking black Audi. They’ve only one key which Papa has lost so Mama was shouting a lot in the street. Johnny Ten Levs, a strong drink enthusiast with cataracts like omelettes, joined in the search. So all is not lost… just the key, and Papa’s will to live.

12 April, Friday

The Yovkovtsi Water Company restored our supply. Hristo the plumber, assisted by Coco the assistant plumber (not clown, or Chanel), completed our bathroom modifications. But bathing’s still prohibited because sticky construction materials need to dry for 24 hours. It’s almost a week since we were germ-free post-adolescents.

Snezhinka the Wonder Dog was at the vet until early afternoon having her tumorous thing excised. She came home with a blue bandage on her paw and an ‘I was brave at the vet’ sticker. The tumour went off to a pathology laboratory in Romania. I felt miserable seeing her looking so miserable.

13 April, Saturday

Priyatelkata spent the morning admiring Hristo the plumber’s magnificent plumbing (ooh-err!), pointing out that the sealant around our new shower had been applied with such professionalism that it was barely visible. Whilst using the installation she observed our bathroom floor moisten heavily and realised we’d waited overnight for non-existent sealant to dry.

We showered anyway and mopped up the surplus. Hristo promised to return to put matters right on Ponedelnik (Понеделник, meaning Monday). Bulgarian tradesmen are famous for not specifying which Ponedelnik so we mentioned Bulgarian words for ‘the day after tomorrow’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock Psycho Killer shower scene’ to clarify.

14 April, Sunday

A morning spent shopping for victuals in Kaufland and an afternoon strimming in the garden. Neither activity is particularly thrilling but the latter is carried out where birds, bees and squirrels play and sunshine kisses our faces. On the other hand, Kaufland sell delicious cheese and spinach banitsa so we were able to stuff those faces.  

Israel and Iran have been squaring up to each other with drones and missiles. While the world screams ‘Don’t do it!’ America stands behind Israel saying ‘I’ll hold your coat’. Netanyahu’s hell-bent on dragging all nations into his war. Will he eventually attack Ukraine?

15 April, Monday

Snezhinka visited the vet for a post-operative check-up. The vet was happy but the dog expressed displeasure. She’s a very whiny dog, often sounding like she’s doing an impression of Kenneth Williams saying ‘Oh, Matron!’, which is quite impressive for a native Bulgarian. 

If ever you’re in Negushevo, the Yan BibiYan Guest House is a grand place to stay. Todor and Mariana nourished me with nettle banitsa, Shopska salad and rakia (all homemade) as we talked into the night about the strange but wonderful country we live in. Todor learned his English from clients whilst driving a van for DHL.

16 April, Tuesday

Mariana served a full Negushevo breakfast with lashings of healthy stuff. Being so close to Sofia I half expected some of the unhealthy but tasty trappings of the modern world.

Meeting all three of my kids at the airport at noon was altogether magnificent, exciting and emotional. Their first visit to these parts since before the global pandemonium.

They loved our house and garden despite the lack of Manchesterness and they loved Priyatelkata’s Bulgarian cooking and our dogs and cats but some of the cats didn’t like them at all. This happens when you brainwash your pets with pro-Leeds propaganda.

17 April, Wednesday

Snezhinka again visited the vet even though she’s almost cured but Secondborn Seán stayed in bed with his food poisoning which definitely wasn’t caused by our homemade vegetarian lasagne.

I took Firstborn Sophie and Thirdborn Rose to visit various cafés, bars, ice cream parlours, tourist tat traps and beautiful historic buildings in town. Priyatelkata stayed at home with the lasagne and temporary tranquillity. 

Luckily, Cat Crado spotted the demonic Scolopendra (a predatory and venomous local arthropod of disturbing proportions) before any of our visitors saw it so we could remove it from the bedroom wall, averting any need for screaming.

18 April, Thursday

Beyond our threshold raged an almighty tempest of such terrific magnitude that branches and immature fruits were struck from trees and nobody (including felines needing poos) could venture outside. Secondborn Seán’s intimate fluidity problem showed slight abatement but an additional curse emerged to ‘pile’ on his agony.

Approximately 60% of us visited the Museum of Illusions where some items played immense tricks on the eye and the mind but others were akin to Bridlington Seafront bingo prizes.  

Firstborn Sophie’s Zoom job interview went well so we dined at Restaurant Shtastlivetsa (Щастливецa, meaning ‘Happy Man’ but not Seán) to await results.

19 April, Friday

A cold but sunny day heralded Secondborn Seán’s readmission to So Solid Crew. Thirdborn Rose requested a return to the Gabrovo Museum of Humour and Satire where we enjoy the medieval church paintings of moneylenders and whores being dissected from the genitals upwards. Humour or satire?

Gabrovians, like Yorkshire folk, are renowned for being frugal, cutting off cats’ tails so doors can be closed quicker when letting them outside on cold days. The museum tells the tale.

We rushed Snezhinka to the vet with a reopened operation wound before our sumptuous last supper in Arbanasi.

Firstborn got the job… hurroo!

20 April, Saturday

Welcome to anti-climax land! I rose traumatically early to wave off my lovely children as they were driven away in Dimitar’s swish taxi. They returned to their distant dystopia and I returned to bed for what for a normal person would have been far too long but for me was far too short.

A cold grey day so I concentrated on yawning, reading a new book, involuntary dozing and listening to Romanian Jazz on Spotify. The tinkling on the keys of Johnny Răducanu always tranquilises me. I wish he could help with the mushy hole in the dog’s foot too.

21 April, Sunday

Some people might call me a tree hugger. This suggests intimacy. They don’t realise some of my trees are very young and some really old. Some are misshapen or recovering from diseases. Some suffer insect infestations while others are covered in bird shit. A few died so I cut them up and burnt them for winter warmth.

But I love them all.

Some people might find this relationship strange. If I showed the same feelings towards a group of humans living in my garden I would most definitely be considered a weirdo.

But no tree has ever pissed me off.

22 April, Monday

Daily trips to the vet have rendered the gammy canine foot situation repetitive and boring for all concerned. So no more updates until the job’s done and dusted.

Wintry wet weather returned overnight and despite the cheer of afternoon sun we continued feeling as cold as a witch’s mammary gland with no desire to work outside… or inside. In the lovely Rodopi town of Smolyan it snowed.

Although the level at nearby Yovkovtsi Reservoir has fallen 4 metres, Water Engineer Rosen Trifonov says there’s nothing to worry about.

Luckily we have wars to take our minds off climate change problems.

23 April, Tuesday

You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to photograph yoghurt. The absence of sharp edges and contrasting features for focussing purposes was exacerbated by bad weather necessitating an indoor shoot under artificial light. I’m reassured, however, that paparazzi images of me in compromising situations with yoghurt will be too blurred for publication in tabloid newspapers.

And I was harangued by cats throughout, some of which weren’t even ours.

Dairy produce isn’t my preferred photographic subject matter but I needed a picture to accompany a poem I wrote about our magnificent Lactobacillus Bulgaricus, scientifically proven to be the world’s finest yoghurt.

24 April, Wednesday

A huge dust cloud’s particles behaved like refugees. Originating in Africa they landed mostly in Greece. Pictures of orange-tinted Athens dominated front pages. Many continued on to Bulgaria. Neither country welcomed them. They covered our car but we let them stay because we’re compassionate souls and we’re hopeless at washing cars.

Our city’s football club, FK Etar 1924, was 100 years old today. This top-flight club with a rich history has this season been Bulgaria’s Sheffield United, so the top-flight status is almost over. I missed the big celebration at Ivaylo Stadion because Priyatelka hadn’t finished knitting my purple scarf.

25 April, Thursday

Aylyak (Айляк) is a Bulgarian word meaning ‘The art of not giving a shit, doing everything at a relaxed pace and not worrying at all.’ It’s also the word for the Plovdiv state of mind; Plovdiv being Bulgaria’s second city and the oldest continually inhabited settlement in Europe.

It rained. There were things I could have done but none seemed as rewarding as lounging with a book and a stack of CDs of Balkan Gypsy music. Surrounded by ten animals and one human woman who were also quite inactive, I’m only slightly ashamed to say that today was my aylyak day.

26 April, Friday

I had a little birch tree, nothing would it bear, mainly because it was dead. It survived three winters but perished this spring. Devastating! I blame the moles… fluffy little bastards! When I sold my house in Chippenham ten years ago the only thing I missed was its magnificent birch tree. Driving by six months later I saw it had been felled to make way for a car port. Lumberjacks are worse than moles.

Bulgaria’s date for adopting the Euro currency has been postponed to July 2025 because we’re ‘not ready’. I envisage numerous postponements. We excel at feet dragging.

27 April, Saturday

We mark Lazarovden (Лазаровден, or St Lazar’s Day) by putting flowers in rivers and streams, or just the bath, to bring healing and purity. Groups of beautiful maidens prepare for marriage by dressing in gaily embroidered dresses and parading the village with baskets to gather gifts from those wishing them a bountiful future. Today, for the first time in over 50 years, Slavka did the rounds alone. Was the hole in her basket a metaphor for life?

In town hundreds of maidens dressed as American cheer-girls and ate KFC from buckets. There was a competition apparently. I hope Bulgarian culture won.

28 April, Sunday

FIFA announced a partnership with Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company Aramco, which is the world's largest corporate emitter, and on Friday night, in a ‘must win’ game, Leeds United got a right dicking from QPR. High time, I thought, to turn my back on the misery that football brings and perhaps take up gaily embroidering traditional Bulgarian costumes as a pastime.

I dug up an invasive colony of Jerusalem artichokes to plant nicer things. They produce nice yellow flowers but need heavy duty watering during the hottest months. Their so-called edible bits taste like dog poo but aren’t as salty.

29 April, Monday

Two ticks was the time it took to evict the two ticks that had made themselves at home in the opulent surroundings of my dermis. Did the one in my armpit consider his social standing higher than that of the one encamped at the back of my knee? Priyatelkata removed them promptly because they are known to introduce Lyme Disease, symptoms of which include fatigue, swollen glands and insanity. Perhaps we weren’t prompt enough.

Beneath heavy duty rainclouds I planted hydrangeas where artichokes once lurked. In an afternoon I absorbed enough moisture to keep both species alive for a summer.

30 April, Tuesday

If I was asked to draw a graph to compare the rate at which the dog’s wound is healing with the rate at which Priyatelkata and I are losing patience with the three-times-a-day struggle to spray healing preparation onto the semi-necrotic canine tissue, I’d probably just snap all my crayons in two and go to the pub with the affluent vet.

This warm wet weather makes the snails happy but hungry, much to the detriment of our plants. We shoo them away but they move so slowly. Removing their shells to streamline them failed as it only made them sluggish.

Photograph: Snezhinka the Wonder Dog holding out her paw to show where it hurts.