1 June 2025, Sunday
During our springtime, we can wait ages for a few degrees Celsius to arrive and then, completely out of the blue, thirty-five turn up at the same time. Oozing vernal optimism, we saw to it that long trousers and socks were folded and put away as fly-swatting apparatus, salad tongs and thongs were re-commissioned.
As dusk fell, fireflies joined our celebrations. Their zoological name, Lampyridae, suggests they’ve swallowed lamps but really it’s just Latin for when your bits glow in the dark; a bodily function that makes getting up for a wee in the middle of the night less complicated.
2 June 2025, Monday
Yesterday was the 149th anniversary of Hristo Botev, our celebrated poet and revolutionary, being killed at the age of 28 by Turkish troops. Today, for two minutes at noon, his death was marked across Bulgaria with air-raid sirens, during which time pedestrians and traffic stood completely still. I’ve never witnessed such a show of respect for a national hero in any other country.
Nobody knows why it’s always a day late. Perhaps they missed it by a day on the first anniversary and then stuck to the same date in subsequent years to give the impression that it was deliberate.
3 June 2025, Tuesday
Weeping sores on my forearms suggested a bubonic plague outbreak but it was only silly old phytophotodermatitis, a skin reaction caused by contact with sap from fig trees, exacerbated by sunlight exposure. I’d lopped some small branches from one so I could reach behind to dig up a wild hop that was strangling it. Little thanks for doing a good turn!
So I updated my Tinder profile to explain that my lesions, although hideously ugly, wouldn’t require the use of leeches for bloodletting, and a bit of aloe vera gel would soon have them as right as twenty-one stotinki (ninepence).
4 June 2025, Wednesday
Since November 1980, my motto has been don’t you tread on an ant, he’s done nothing to you, but lately they’ve been irritating me. The ants living out in the garden are grand but those wishing to share our kitchen are less welcome.
Lady Internet said ants abhor cloves but clove success requires the queen to tell the workers when cloves are in situ and to stay away. Unfortunately, like in human life, queens do very little so I suppose she’ll announce it to them in her Christmas speech. In the meantime, a cinnamon solution spray has been 80% effective.
5 June 2025, Thursday
In July 1977 I spent three weeks in Basra because of my job. Twenty-six years later I watched BBC news footage of streets I recognised engulfed in flame. I feared for the lovely Iraqis I’d known there. I still have nightmares about them.
Every report of Israel’s current atrocities in Gaza reminds me of Basra and other Middle Eastern places I’ve visited where peace hangs on a knife's edge.
England’s Starmer, who described Netanyahu’s brutality as ‘intolerable’, announced that he’ll spend billions to prepare Britain for nuclear war.
Remembering that Palestinians live in a nightmare, I had another sleepless night.
6 June 2025, Friday
I love these days of cloudless Balkan skies. It’s as if Baba Marta has gone out and left the light on. Fifteen hours of sunshine has me buzzing like an insect and singing like a tone-deaf bird. On my side of the garden gate the world is perfect. I wish every day for the rest of my life could be 6 June 2025, apart from the bit where I got chewed to bits by evening mosquitos. Swooping swallows and bats try to help but if they ate every single one of the airborne bloodsuckers they’d be too fat to fly.
7 June 2025, Saturday
Two and a half years ago we acquired some extra land, not by annexing it but by buying it from a nice Bulgarian gentleman with teeth like a Neolithic stone circle.
Today we could boast that our labour of love had borne fruit (had it not been for the fact that the birds had eaten it all). Displaying unhealthy levels of love for the mature trees and investing in babies we’d grown from seeds and cuttings, we’ve finally turned our 1,300 square metres of tick-infested joyousness into a country park.
All it lacks is an arty-farty gift shop and café.
8 June 2025, Sunday
Busloads of local people set off for Riyadh hoping to find cooler weather.
Meanwhile, predatory black bitey flies outnumbered the irritating people at Hotnitsa Village Bazaar. I dislike seeing items other than local produce on sale at such traditional events so my own hypocrisy irritated me as I invested three leva in a Jack Kerouac novel.
We took a picnic to Stamboliyski lake but so did every Bulgarian sun-worshipper, so we ate it in a shady spot on a dirt road halfway up a mountain where we had only eagles for company. They don’t like tuna pasta salad. How picky!
9 June 2025, Monday
I broadened my Bulgarian vocabulary today whilst visiting the polyclinic. The words for Lyme disease are Lymska bolest (Лаймска болест), the words for still got it are vuh-seh oshtay goh eemash (все още го имаш) and the words for the arrogant and rude assistant pharmacist are unprintable in any language.
Thankfully my dear friend Dimitar accompanied me as official translator. He told me about a previous English speaker who had required similar treatment years ago. I asked how she had fared. The Bulgarian word for dead is murr-tuv (мъртъв).
Later Priyatelkata and I ate a pizza at Restaurant Ego to celebrate my new party-size box of antibiotics.
10 June 2025, Tuesday
Many weeks had passed since Municipality Mustafa promised to cut the grass in our field. We were worried as he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the Earth and wondered if he’d been sent to a Gulag for using the municipality strimmer outside working hours.
Recently, State-Owned Sasho took over the job of keeping grass verges tidy. His Facebook photographs suggested there were few places he hadn’t strimmed, and every shot included his Lidl carrier bag. Was he more proud of his workmanship or his shopping?
Anyway, I saw Municipality Mustafa today, so the mystery was partly solved.
11 June 2025, Wednesday
A slow news day in Malki Chiflik as people, plants and parasites wilted in the heat and bees could be heard sighing rather than buzzing. I removed cobwebs and assorted insect egg sacs from the eaves in preparation for Warrington Dave arriving on Monday to tart up the house.
Alone with my thoughts, I couldn’t help but wonder did Gordon Honeycombe like Crunchies, is Iggy Pop addicted to Rice Krispies, and was J. R. Hartley the ultimate Fisherman’s Friend?
It’s really nice being sixty-seven years old with not much left on my to-do list. Tomorrow I’ll make a new list.
12 June 2025, Thursday
The old man who sits at the bus stop with a gap in his teeth where his cigarette snugly fits, confided in me, ‘In this weather, if you make hay while the sun shines you’ll have far too much hay and if the hard work doesn’t kill you then the fierce sun will. So it’s best to keep cool smoking cigarettes on a shady bench.’ Marlene Dietrich always looked cool with her cigarette, so he had a point. But to be totally convinced I’d need to see her doing it in a bus shelter with a gap in her teeth.
13 June 2025, Friday
I seemed to have returned to my normal energetic self after weeks of sitting about moaning about my Lyme disease and shouting ‘Back off! I’ve got a can of Raid!’ at garden arachnids. The polyclinic disease lady had cured me. I wanted to kiss her but, wary of other diseases she’s in daily contact with, I decided against it.
To test my restored oomph, I washed all our windows, inside and out. Belgian friends Patje and Inge joined us for dinner but didn’t comment on the sparkly panes, so that was a waste of time. I won’t wash them again.
14 June 2025, Saturday
Today there was a new war. Netanyahu, having almost completed the job of exterminating Gazans, began hurling missiles at Iran. I wondered if he sang the Chicago Blues song, ‘It ain't no fun when the rabbit got the gun’ as the ayatollahs returned fire.
Totally depressed by global hostilities, I searched the internet to see what we could eat when all the supermarkets have been bombed. We’ve a profusion of edible wild plants around us that should keep us alive, but unfortunately the bindweed that smothers our garden and chases me up the street in dreams isn’t one of them.
15 June 2025, Sunday
Probably two or three weeks early, we’ve reached the point in the year when the ferocity of the horticultural battle recedes. In May our garden always looks like an Alpine meadow but by August it’s more like a Saharan wadi. We let much of the unwanted flora grow to keep the ground cool and moist-ish but some murderous twisting twining triffid-esque specimens take advantage of our hospitality.
Bathed from head to toe in fluids manufactured to protect me from insects, sunburn, mad dogs and Englishmen, I was a walking chemistry lab as I strove to be at one with nature.
16 June 2025, Monday
It was lovely to spend the morning with New Zealand Jessie and her one-year-old boy, Boyan. Sitting beneath our fig tree with iced herbal infusions and Priyatelkata’s homemade muffins, we discussed the ways of the world. She shares our approach to life. Later we compared her to three other women we know of the same age (round about forty); they couldn’t be more different to each other. We don’t know any other one-year-olds at the moment so Boyan had no competition. I hope he grows up with her spirit.
I stayed by the fig tree all day. It’s safe there.
17 June 2025, Tuesday
We had the painters in. Not a euphemism but Warrington Dave titillating our home’s external surfaces. He’s really from Leigh but says Warrington because no one’s ever heard of Leigh, and nearby Warrington slips off the tongue like Paris, Rome and Madrid.
Worrying over the Israel-Iran horror show kept me awake all night. In Iran there are people I know. During my stay there in 2011 I found it the friendliest country I’d ever visited. My friend Farzanah replied to my Facebook message saying she was safe (for now) but terrified. She’d already left Tehran when the first missile struck.
18 June 2025, Wednesday
It sickens me… America and Israel worry about nutters with nukes destroying civilisation when in actual fact they themselves are the prime nutters.
Bedtimes bring temptation to take a stiff drink to aid sleeping. Five weeks had passed since a drop last touched my lips, so just one cheeky rakia would have meant the masters of war had beaten me. For sanity’s sake, all but butterflies and fluffy bunnies are excluded from my dreamscape.
Lunch in a garden restaurant in Arbanasi and afternoon watermelon in Echo’s vegetable garden in Polski Senovets were today’s nice things. We live such privileged lives.
19 June 2025, Thursday
A day of suffering for Priyatelkata. She incurred a serious garden injury as, whilst relocating a fledgling hydrangea struggling in the heat, she put her back out. Additionally, she too struggled in the heat and required relocating to a shadier spot.
The irritating hum of our air conditioning system together with the need to have all the windows closed while it’s operational, and its contribution to greenhouse gases mean that we don’t switch it on until the weather’s so hot that we see human flesh melting. It is, however, very effective as I had to wear my parka in bed.
20 June 2025, Friday
In astronomy terms, today was the longest day but, in Warrington Dave terms, it was the shortest as he arrived for work late with a hangover and went home early with the same hangover. A gut-busting cheese and lutenitsa butty and a long cool glass of paint thinners would have had him back on his feet quicker than you can say Boyko Borissov.
Meanwhile Boyko Borissov, itching to commence a fourth stretch as prime minister, visited our barely damp reservoir. He said it’s a depressing sight and something must be done, but he enjoyed his day out in the countryside.
21 June 2025, Saturday
In popular terms, yesterday was the longest day but, in scientific terms, the summer solstice happened at 5:42 this morning. Luckily we still had a drop of woad left over to repeat our pagan ritual without revisiting the druid shop in the mall.
Snezhinka stank like she’d been dead a week. Perhaps she’d been involved in a solsticial ritual but we couldn’t imagine any self-respecting pagan going within 1.609 kilometres of her. Her scavenging in bins the likely cause. You can take the street dog out of the street but you can’t take the street out of the street dog.
22 June 2025, Sunday
I’ve always had a strong dislike for Jim Davidson, Abba, Manchester United, Cilla Black, estate agents and Ken Barlow, but I would never say I hate them. Loathe is a word that’s not used enough these days.
The only people I’ve ever hated have been politicians, but not all politicians. However, there are currently so many that my 100 words per day writing limit restricts me from listing them here. So while the USA drops bombs on Iran, joining a war game where there can be no winner, I’ll have a game of Top Trumps instead.
I also hate cauliflower.
23 June 2025, Monday
If I were a fish living in a lake near to a restaurant, I’d endeavour to conceal myself in the murky depths during business hours. At our lunchtime restaurant today, sheltered in a beautiful forested cliff-lined valley near Suhindol, aquatic colossi big enough to feature in an Ernest Hemingway novella leapt from the water every couple of minutes displaying suicidal tendencies whilst provoking our taste buds. We found the fat frogs and water snakes that hopped and slithered respectively in the shallows neither appetising nor on the menu. And huge spectacularly multi-coloured dragonflies! Surely nobody in the world eats dragonflies.
24 June 2025, Tuesday
To celebrate the anniversary of our acquiring Fyodor the friendly Fiat, we visited the avtomeevka (автомивка, meaning ‘carwash’) where the young banjo player from the film Deliverance restored its fluffy carpets and green paintwork for less than the price of a possum’s egg.
The nearby shopping mall provided shelter from ferocious sunshine but little else. The shops stocked only teenagers’ skimpy clothes or mobile telecommunications apparatus, so we killed time with delicious coffee adjacent to a chilled cakes cabinet that growled at us.
If Bogdan the Banjo washed thirty cars daily, he’d have enough cash for a Bakewell tart by Christmas.
25 June 2025, Wednesday
Our Romanian cat, Vlad, having always been a bit drippy, was terrified when a bird attacked him in the garden… twice! The bird was a beautiful golden oriole. Some immigrants call them golden Oreos out of ignorance, or golden arseholes out of a different kind of ignorance.
In Covid times we noticed we’d a pair nesting in a walnut tree, gradually multiplying to four more pairs in adjacent trees. Initially delighted, we welcomed them until we noticed they were scaring away the equally impressive, but slightly less aggressive, jay population. How long, we wondered, before they start occupying more territory?
26 June 2025, Thursday
If I were a fish living in a lake, I wouldn’t have to listen to Warrington Dave’s music while he stains my soffits. Those non-stop super-duper golden-oldie smash-hits on Radio Lobotomy broadcast live from the heart of Derby bring a level of cheesiness that even Tony Blackburn couldn’t match.
When the DJ ‘spins a disc’ by Tom Jones, Dave sings along clutching his paintbrush microphone. It's good to touch the brown, brown grass of Wigan.
We wrote in with a request to upset the applecart… If You Forget My Path I Will Curse You, by Romanian jazz queen, Aura Urziceanu.
27 June 2025, Friday
The car still being squeaky clean from Tuesday’s avtomeevka visit, I whizzed it up to mechanical Nikolai’s workshop for a service and to have squeaks removed.
Was I being helpful or mean? I’d taken it in early and when I returned to collect it two hours later he said he was shutting up shop and going off for a swim with his wife. Had it not been for me he would have had a whole day without income but also a whole day relaxing in a beautiful cool pool with lovely refreshing Bulgarian cocktails and his lovely refreshing Bulgarian missus.
28 June 2025, Saturday
Balkan summer rain needs to be celebrated and breakfast at Bey House garden restaurant was the perfect spot for celebrants to rejoice last night’s storm even though the chairs, and consequently our pants, were a bit wet.
Posh plants we buy at nurseries struggle but wild plants just soak up the sun and flourish without a fuss. We talk to them, thanking them for being our coolest friends. If they could talk back, I imagine they’d ask for a piña colada and a Harold Robbins paperback. Cutleaf Teasel, Italian Viper’s Bugloss, Greater Mullein and Grande Bardane… we love you all!
29 June 2025, Sunday
As neighbouring Turkey burned, holidaymakers from Galway to Guildford complained they couldn’t reach their air-conditioned timeshare apartments near Izmir because wildfires had closed the airport. Meanwhile envious Turkish farmers looked on from afar at Ireland’s 300 days of rain per year.
With yesterday’s torrential downpour completely evaporated, moles used pneumatic drilling equipment to surface for air and on every stone kitchen floor tile there lay some sort of animal trying to keep cool. My need for four tiles reminded me to stick to my diet.
Such discomfort hits us every summer but this year it arrived way ahead of schedule.
30 June 2025, Monday
Six months today, New Year’s Eve will be upon us. I hope the world’s a happier place by then and Warrington Dave’s finished painting our house. Perhaps conciliatory Trump could have a word and tell him to look sharp. He’d certainly get my vote for a Nobel prize if he would. Hitler was a house painter too, and he wrote a book, proving that even evil fascist dictators aren’t what they used to be.
By the year’s end my body mass indicator will have fallen and my number of grandchildren, cats and trees all risen… fingers crossed and hankies knotted.
Photograph: Some gappy teeth that I found on the kitchen table in an abandoned farmhouse in the Rodopi mountains. I would assume that they are still on that kitchen table.
This Sort of Thing – July 2025
Violetta Are You Better?