1 January 2025, Wednesday
Wandering Veliko Tarnovo’s old streets gives me a tremendous feeling of calmness and pride, especially these mild, sunny winter days. Feeling a bit mushy and gushy I called in at the Retro Café for a good strong cup of the darkness. It’s a grand place for writing the first lines of a poem but people talked to me so pencil and paper never met. Chesteeta Nova Godina (Честита Нова Година, meaning ‘Happy New Year’), they said, as they shared the cake they’d brought from home. The café owner gave us plates.
With 1/365th of the year complete I still hadn’t seen a cloud.
2 January 2025, Thursday
Gabrovo is 392 metres above sea level but today, due to its snow, it was 393 metres. I always visit Lipitee café (липите, meaning ‘the linden trees’) sheltered in Aprilovska Street’s magnificent avenue.
Previously I’ve called at the Russian Shop for marinated herring, oreshki biscuits and bottles of rich dark Baltika 6 Porter. Putin-based sanctions made the import of Soviet wares impossible so now they’ve only Bulgarian copies and expensive vodka that nobody’s ever going to buy while we’ve our own wonderful rakia.
A heavy industrial past has earned Gabrovo the epithet, the Manchester of Bulgaria. But I think it’s alright.
3 January 2025, Friday
Three hours was just long enough to catch up with the Essex Contingent at the petrol station coffee café, but I forgot to buy fuel for the car while I was there. My stance on ignoring aggressive in-yer-face advertising seems to be a bit too effective.
Whilst making prawn bhuna for tea I struggled to remove the lid from my jar of garam masala. My eventual success was accompanied by a great mushroom cloud of yellowness that tinted my grey beard and eyebrows. I considered further spice spreading to make me look blonde. I’m told that I’d have more fun.
4 January 2025, Saturday
Curiosity took me to our new Korean supermarket. I came away with enough dried shredded seaweed to last me a lifetime (i.e. a 300g packet).
Nice Bulgarian people run it and it’s much different to what we’re used to but I wonder about its survival as, in these parts, anything not containing yoghurt, tomatoes or figs turns noses up. I’ll definitely return as their savoury meat balls are the dog’s bollocks.
In the Retro Café across the road I asked the owner if he’d been to the Korean shop. He said he only liked food containing yoghurt, tomatoes or figs.
5 January 2025, Sunday
I visited Echo and her Bunnyman (husband Aleks) at their house in Polski Senovets for a delicious combination of homemade Bulgarian and Chinese food. They preserve cherries fallen over a wall from their neighbour’s tree. I’m given a jar each time I’m there but the neighbour gets none because he complains about their wall. The cherries are always redder on the other side.
Echo’s first language is Mandarin. Her English is very good but she gets the words pension and penis mixed up. She told me ‘Aleks have two penis’. Apparently he’ll get another from the government when he’s sixty-eight.
6 January 2025, Monday
It was Yordanovden again (Йордановден, meaning ‘St John’s Day’). Bulgarian Orthodox gentlemen follow the custom of leaping into a frozen river to dance, chant and retrieve a crucifix chucked in by a priest. The finder’s guaranteed a year of good health and luck. Others observe from the bank, cheering, eating traditional food and discussing Taylor Swift.
In recent years the event has lacked atmosphere because the weather’s been too mild. The river selected for human immersion should display all the properties of a Slush Puppie (except the chemical food colourings and flavourings) but was too runny to be taken seriously today.
7 January 2025, Tuesday
Our Meteorological Bureau reported that 2024 was Bulgaria’s warmest year since 1930. Thinking back to those lazy, hazy, sweaty days of summer, I’d say that ‘warm’ was a bold understatement. 1930 must have been a record year for sales of Cornettos and Ambre Solaire. How did folks survive in such heat? Fascism was becoming very popular here at the time so I suppose that would have taken their minds off it.
We’re also told that electricity prices will rise by 8.24%, taking the sting out of our power cut days when we’ll enjoy thinking about how much money we’re saving.
8 January 2025, Wednesday
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Warm sunshine prompted the turning off of the heating machine and an all-day open back door policy. Liberation of the frustrated menagerie restored household calm. In the garden, small buds were budding in every direction. Trees and bushes I’d feared dead in August had made it. Had they been able to ingest cake and rakia I’d have thrown a funky flora party. I made the decision to clean the windows so I could enjoy this spectacle from inside the house too… tomorrow, perhaps!
However, the meteorology killjoys are sending snow on Saturday.
9 January 2025, Thursday
My Nan would always run the hoover round an hour before her cleaning lady arrived. I’m the same with my teeth so the dentist had little to do when I visited for descaling and polishing. Daily gargling with Cillit Bang would make him redundant.
He asked if his cabbage leaf remedy had cured my knees. I told him I’d bought a cabbage in the market but, being the glutton that I am, I’d eaten it on the bus going home. He couldn’t understand why he’d found none lodged between my teeth. The finger of suspicion hovered between glutton and liar.
10 January 2025, Friday
From the big plum tree flattened under the weight of the snow, I removed the small branches with loppers, a saw and my newly polished teeth. What remains requires chainsaw action but the steep slope situation scares me. I need someone here to drive me to the hospital if I cut my leg off, or someone in need of an amputation who could do the job for me.
Another day of spring weather. I’ve eaten my final Vitamin D tablet and feel cured so I’ll buy no more until October, which is only nine months away… oh, Im dreading it!
11 January 2025, Saturday
A taxi drove into the back of my car in the Kaufland car park exit queue. It was my fault, the driver insisted, even though I was stationary. Had I been moving he wouldn’t have hit me, at least not until I hit the car in front of me. Angrily pointing out his cracked headlight and multiple bodywork scratches (mostly concealed beneath a layer of dirt) he demanded 120 leva (£54) for repairs. In my best Bulgarian I said ‘my-nata vee’ (майната ви, meaning ‘some words you wouldn’t say in the company of nuns’).
Priyatelkata arrived home in the evening. Perfect timing!
12 January 2025, Sunday
A day of talking, laughter and tears. My French soulmate of more than five years had returned at short notice. During her two-month stay in Paris she had detested almost everything about it, coming to realise that she desperately missed her Bulgarian life of simplicity and tranquillity. It’s often said that once a person has lived in our adopted country it’s impossible to leave.
Priyatelkata’s first full day in Bulgaria called for a resumption supper at the Russian restaurant where we had eaten a last supper under very different circumstances exactly eight weeks earlier.
Eastern Europe 1 Western Europe 0
13 January 2025, Monday
Priyatelkata joined me as a guest at my exclusive club, Cybar, for a butty and a brew. How nice to see someone else struggle to get up onto those ridiculously high and heavy stools constructed from decommissioned Ilyushin Shturmovík wartime aircraft. Vacating our table, we found it easier to press the button to activate the ejection seat than to jump down in the conventional way.
A visit to a new shop stocking good quality art materials in addition to aisles of Chinese-made tat convinced Lady P that leaving Paris, the art capital of the world, had been a good idea.
14 January 2025, Tuesday
Pisspot Penka, has unusually large ears for a cat. Priyatelka trawled the web and discovered that she may be a Savannah cat; a rare hybrid developed in the twentieth century by crossing an African Serval with a European domestic cat. This would explain her lack of fear, her constant following me around and outright refusal to share eating and toilet areas with other cats. American people have been known to pay up to $26,000 for such a feline.
Feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on, I slept in the shed to avoid any risk of infecting our ultra-valuable moggy.
15 January 2025, Wednesday
It seemed my head was full of boiling soup all steaming from the holes in my face. My entire body plunged into a febrile state from the cauldron’s fierce heat as my bones ached like I’d spent a night in the West Belfast Orange Lodge when they were just after hearing about the poster of Dana on my bedroom wall.
Bulgaria eased my suffering with a stoked-up petchka and bucket of logs, enough rakia to float the Sheralga, the best settee in the Balkans (bought in a DFS autumn sale in Swindon) and an array of lazy cats for company.
16 January 2025, Thursday
From Covid times, listening to one per day, my youngest daughter Rose and I ploughed through a massive internet list of the best albums ever made. With my constructive criticism often amounting to a mere ‘awful’, I decided a couple of years ago to compile my own list and, whilst lying on my snot-encrusted settee, I completed it today. One per day would suggest 730 albums but it contains only 100. However, every one of them is an absolute gem, making it necessary to listen to some numerous times. So, despite being sofa-bound, I still managed a sense of achievement.
17 January 2025, Friday
Feeling I was on the road to recovery we set out on the road to Pizza Bianco at the top of town. On our arrival at 4:00 p.m. the waitress told us the restaurant was fully booked but she could squeeze us in at a table as long as we ate quickly because it was reserved from 8:00 p.m. We considered ordering eight pizzas each and eating slowly until we remembered that wasn’t the sort of thing that nice people did. It turned out to be a struggle to force down just one and we were safely home before 5:30.
18 January 2025, Saturday
Located at the foot of the forested Elena Balkan in the Stara Planina Mountains, the little town of Elena is such a dear place that its name is the Bulgarian word for deer (but not dear).
We wandered out there for the afternoon, stopping at the Hanche Yakovtsi for sustenance. Their bean stew is the best bean-based food I’ve ever tasted. Incidentally, the Bulgarian word for bean (or beans) is bob (боб). So tinned baked beans here could be called Bob Heinz, and easily mistaken for Bob Heinz the 1950s German comic artist, celebrated for creating the 'Pif und Alf' series.
19 January 2025, Sunday
A ceasefire began in Gaza. Gaza has known many ceasefires but it has never known terror on the scale of that encountered during the past year. Hopefully the people with their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns will try harder to make this one last.
Recently I’ve been reading and writing about Middlesbrough, the town of my birth. Despite the fact that only Gaza is a less appealing place to visit, nostalgia draws me there. Fond childhood memories of South Shields add fuel to my desire as plans for a two-centre holiday enter the embryonic stage.
20 January 2025, Monday
Donald Cerberus Trump was inaugurated as the forty-seventh, and probably last, democratically elected president of the USA. His Balkan wife wore a silly hat and attended the party as a desk lamp. I found it strange that this awful man, who had suggested the possibility of using military force to seize Greenland, chose to break with tradition and moved his swearing-in event indoors because it was a bit nippy out. I decided not to attend because I wasn’t fully recovered from my cold and didn’t want to pass any of my germs on to him. They deserved better than that.
21 January 2025, Tuesday
Visiting the relatively new Café Dolce Vita that we had previously habitually bypassed was surprisingly pleasant. Just as you should never judge a book by its cover, you should never judge a coffee shop by the busy road and unfinished footpath outside.
The young proprietor fellow welcomed us with a broad smile, described the impressive array of drinks and sweetmeats that adorned the establishment’s menu, and told us about forthcoming events. I felt small when he corrected me, pointing out that the words souvlaki and ouzo were more appropriate then Olivia, Newton and John when promoting next month’s Greece Night.
22 January 2025, Wednesday
An afternoon at the home of long-time friends from Glasgow reminded me they are always good for a cuppa and a blether. However, my visit was less eventful than usual as the cat section of their street rescue ensemble was sadly reduced to just three.
During an evening rendezvous at The Base Bar, I met fellow immigrants from New Zealand, Germany, India, America and Cricklewood. The object of the meeting was to discuss how we could, as a group, improve our grasp of the Bulgarian tongue. With a plan quickly formulated the evening then degenerated into a foreigners’ tea party.
23 January 2025, Thursday
Today I got the impression that Bulgaria’s corruption and money laundering problem was all my fault. I called at the bank to register my new phone so I could (reluctantly) use their app. Re-validating my account took forty minutes. Although impressed by such tight security I wished my interrogation had been at a time when I wasn’t so desperate for a wee.
I took Priyatelkata for her first visit to the new mega café-restaurant in Gorna Oryahovitsa. Lashings of traditional fare for the price of a bag of monkey nuts completed her readjustment back to Balkan life, back to reality.
24 January 2025, Friday
In a Skype conversation with my former missus, I told her what my dentist had recently said about wrapping cabbage round my knees to reduce arthritic joint pain. She said that she too had heard that the antioxidants contained in cruciferous vegetables are known to reduce inflammation.
She told me that when our children were very small she had heard its benefits discussed at a meeting at our local mother and baby clinic. Apparently, placing cabbage inside the bra could ease a breastfeeding mother’s painful mastitis. But only a couple of leaves, the doctor had stressed, not a whole cabbage.
25 January 2025, Saturday
The toothless old widow who sits beneath the pomegranate tree in the square confided in me, ‘Capitalism is a chip pan. Initially its richness fattens the bourgeoisie but eventually it kills them.’ She then popped her Weight Watchers food journal back into her shopping bag and dashed off to her weekly meeting at the nearby Pensioners Club.
Bean stew I had eaten a week earlier at a restaurant near Elena had been delicious but served in portions pitifully small for someone like of me who, in terms of appetite, identifies as a family of four. So I made my own.
26 January 2025, Sunday
Today I discovered we’ve had an official ‘permanent’ four-party coalition government since 16th January. This was the outcome of October’s election which most Bulgarians had forgotten about. I hope our new prime minister, Rosen Zhelyazkov, heard the news sooner than I did.
One of Mr. Z’s first jobs is to get our country into the Euro zone. We’ve been putting it off for years. EU president, Ursula von der Leyen, said we have her support. She loves her raunchy, lager-swilling holidays in Slunchev Bryag (Слънчев Бряг, meaning ‘Sunny Beach’) but finds queueing at the post office to buy Leva a loathsome chore.
27 January 2025, Monday
Finding the year’s first dismembered torso of a lizard on the kitchen floor (courtesy of a locally sourced feline menace) I deduced that Spring had arrived early. More positive signs included lush crops of yellow hazel catkins, a carpet (well, perhaps a bedside mat) of blooming snowdrops and feathered friends busying themselves in the incredible art of avian housebuilding.
Today also saw 2025’s first interruption to the water supply. Echo and Aleks visited and we ate dinner in the garden, partly to enjoy the warm late afternoon sunshine and partly because we didn’t want them to smell our unwashed bodies.
28 January 2025, Tuesday
As a flu epidemic sweeps through Bulgaria, schools close, shoppers wear facemasks and neighbours blame the new government. Old wives blame the poor quality of last year’s rakia output resulting from meagre fruit harvests.
I had a little plum tree, nothing would it bear; the cause being the combination of extreme summer and winter meteorological conditions that had killed it. On closer inspection, I saw that it was actually three plum trees growing very close together and none of them could really be described as little. Following my day’s chainsaw fun, my woodshed is replenished and my limbs remain intact.
29 January 2025, Wednesday
Jacques, an associate member of our menagerie, calls in most mornings to see us. Today Priyatelkata noticed a swollen front leg was making him limp. To the veterinarian with him! we declared in unison. After a poke about and a phial of antibiotics, our feline health practitioner suggested an overdose of testosterone was causing all the cat’s problems and a simple castration would bring joy to his life. We agreed, even though he wasn’t officially our cat. The poor wee soul had only popped in to see what was for breakfast and ended the day separated from his boy bits.
30 January 2025, Thursday
Marianne Faithfull died. I never bought any of her records but she was always there as a cultural icon during the days and decades when I was a music obsessive. The sadness of her passing was matched by the sadness of knowing they don’t make Marianne Faithfulls anymore.
In December my friend Cathy in Kilkenny sent me some Flahavan’s Pinhead Oatmeal, the food equivalent of Guinness. Ladies at two antique post offices in Veliko Tarnovo said they’d no record of the shipment but would endeavour to trace it as my description of the porridge had caused significant salivation and peckishness.
31 January 2025, Friday
During our second meeting I realised the recently formed Bulgarian Language Improvement Group for Helpless Transients (BLIGHT) was blighted by the egos of some members, so I decided it wasn’t for me. I’m useless at mingling with those immigrants who describe themselves as expats in that colonial sort of way. The word ‘expatriate’ suggests an intention to return to the home country so I could never include myself as one of them.
And that wraps up January, the month in which I had vowed to read and write more but failed. But at least the frequency of my smiling improved.
Photograph: Echo’s preserved neighbour’s cherries (it was the cherries that were preserved, not the neighbour).
This Sort of Thing - February 2025
The Archers in Cyrillic Script