This Sort of Thing - December 2023 - Side B

 

16 December, Saturday

Fair play to the people who make those advent calendar things. It’s amazing how they fit so many wee doors into their tatty bits of cardboard. We’ve already had 93 days this month with over 100 still to go. Will December ever end?

The weather outside is frankly shite, but it won’t beat me. I’ll sit on the terrace and read my book.

Meanwhile my love for allegedly outspoken Clare Daly MEP deepens as quickly as my loathing of Ursula von der Leyen (not forgetting Biden, Sunak, Starmer, et al), my sorrow for Palestine and my fear for the world.

 

17 December, Sunday

After days of dinginess, today’s bit of sun seemed an outright champagne supernova. So we walked along lovely old cobbled Ulitsa General Gurko (the real Veliko Tarnovo) admiring the spur in the river topped by the Boris Denev State Gallery and the Asen Dynasty Monument; a view that captured my heart forever in April 2015.

Lounging in the antique-ish coffee bar in the Yantra Hotel’s lobby we could imagine Brezhnev and Zhivkov discussing the next glorious five-year plan over coffee and sticky buns at an adjacent table.

We wished more five year plans could turn out as gloriously as ours.

 

18 December, Monday

The woman before me in the pharmacy check-out queue was holding a packet of the same Vitamin D capsules as me.

She stared!

Eventually I said, ‘Neh haressvam Dekemvree’ (‘I don’t like December’, in Bulgarian).

The staring stopped and the floodgates opened. She didn’t like the whole of winter but the Vitamin D cheered her up but it hadn’t mattered when she lived in a village but it had been her late mother’s house which her sister wanted to sell for the money and now she had an apartment in town… and… and… in Bulgarian.

I wanted to kiss her.

 

19 December, Tuesday

Since I picked up War and Peace I’ve read the first three chapters twice (so I’ve only 984 pages to go) but also some other much more readable, less sleep-inducing material. Walter Macken’s I Am Alone, for example; a brilliant book which I finished today.

Eventually I will master Tolstoy’s masterpiece but for now it’s on the back burner, along with Harry Potter and the Paedophile Ring. My failure disappoints me but I’m smug in having given something up a fortnight before the world announces New Year’s resolutions.

Giving up Tolstoy is much easier than giving up whiskey or chocolate.

 

20 December, Wednesday

In Gabrovo, in a pedestrianised street lined both sides with linden trees, sits a café pronounced lee-pee-tay (Липите, Bulgarian for ‘the linden trees’). Built and furnished in an epoch predating plastic and Taylor Swift, it remains unspoilt and the perfect location for strong black coffee and traditional Bulgarian cake. In early summer it’s heaven.

We went there today. A city higher than ours so there was snow covering the stylish array of nineteenth and twentieth century buildings and daunting but intriguing Communist era sculptures.

A mountain community with a unique atmosphere. We’d both be happy to live there, but we don’t.

 

21 December, Thursday

Some December days nothing happens and I get that old song Busy Doing Nothing stuck in my head.

Today I’ve been this busy:

1. It took me an hour to get out of bed.
2. I spent an hour procrastinating.
3. I spent an hour before that planning the procrastinating.
4. I removed my unsightly nasal hairs with the gadget for lighting the gas.
5. I dozed on the settee for an hour whilst pretending to read a book.
6. I sighed 57 times.
7. I learnt how to tell my arse from my elbow.

I’d like to be unhappy but I never do have the time.

 

22 December, Friday

We celebrate today the Birthday of the Invincible Sun (Winter Solstice) even though there won’t be noticeably lighter skies until next month.

It’s the darkest day so we’re merely marking the point where things can’t get any worse; a bit like celebrating the release of a new Ed Sheeran album.

Outside at 5:27 a.m., in darkness, we danced our purple-stained naked flesh around burning oak logs whilst chanting the ancient words of a song by Kate Bush to rejoice the death of the crone and the birth of the infant year.

But we wore our wellies because it was muddy.

 

23 December, Saturday

If I had an eight-year-old grandson with the physical features of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, I wouldn’t let the parents add insult to peculiarity with a Kim Jong Un hairstyle.

The not-so-little lad’s currently staying with his grandparents across the road from us. He plays alone in the street. We try talking to him but he speaks only Dutch. His family is Bulgarian but they live near Groningen in the Nether Regions.

With his portly build we hesitated offering him chocolate but the damage seems already done. Hopefully he’ll remember our kindness when he’s aiming his nuclear missiles.

 

24 December, Sunday

These so-called festivities seem to highlight everything that is wrong in the world. Priyatelkata and I want no part in them. We simply consider how incredibly lucky we are to live privileged lives tainted only by the knowledge that we are toothless against those entranced by greed, power and a determination to destroy the hopes, homes and lives of ordinary people.

Living under a roof with sufficient food and without fear should be a right, not a privilege.

The rich and powerful sicken us, as do many who turn blind eyes to their inhumanity. How do they sleep at night?

 

25 December, Monday

The town of Tryavna dates back to the twelfth century and hand-carved wooden fridge magnets on sale in every shop there are evidence of this. A gorgeous place to visit, especially in summer as its mountain location provides cool relief from the humidity of Veliko Tarnovo. Strangely it was 20°C today, and sunny.

Although twinned with the town of Argos in Cyprus, Tryavna doesn’t have a branch of Argos. Or maybe the shop was simply obscured by hordes of people returning unwanted or malfunctioning gifts.

Driving home, we saw a pair of wild chamois goats; a perfect day’s perfect end.

 

26 December, Tuesday

Cat Nouveau sniffed the great outdoors for the first time since rescue day but wasn’t impressed. Nearby a large dog had escaped and got its cruelty chain tangled in a barbed wire fence. We’d no idea how long it had been there but it seemed pleased to be leaving as we cut it free.

Bulgaria isn’t always nice!

After a gluttonous lunch of sweet prátaí curry on our sun-kissed terrace I sat beneath the oldest walnut tree with pottertea, book and various menagerie members to read and doze away the warm afternoon until the sunset 47 seconds later than yesterday.

 

27 December, Wednesday

Whilst making coffee, this appeared in my head…

The reiki technique

Cures sick Japanese poems 

For seventeen yen

But in Bulgaria, rakia has the same effect for less.

In the absence of snow, ski slope owners are renting out bicycles. If they’d ridden bicycles all along they’d be skiing today. They consider themselves adaptable. By 2040 they need to grow flameproof skin or wear knickers made from oven gloves. A dusting of nuclear fallout may revive the pistes and festive greetings card scenes.

Bulgaria’s top astrologer predicted a catalogue of catastrophic events for 2024. How does she think them up?

 

28 December, Thursday

We got our Hoover back from the Hoover repair man, even though it’s not a Hoover. It might be a Matryoshka Mark III Deluxe. In his cramped little workshop, this man can fix anything electrical. He’d just completed work getting the Sputnik 2 spacecraft back on the launch pad and was cleaning up the dog hairs in it with our vacuum cleaner to ensure that both worked like new.

Plans to meet friends for lunch were cancelled this morning because they were expecting a delivery of something more interesting than us at an unspecified time. Being unsociable, we didn’t complain.

 

29 December, Friday

I had indigestion from eating too many Rennies. A pizza at the restaurant adjacent to the town hall was probably the real culprit. Don’t mix food and politics, they say. Attempting to discuss the genocide in Gaza with the waitress, we were told to shut up and eat our greens.

We can’t be arsed waiting for the New Year so we’ll finish what’s already in our fridge (tomorrow’s breakfast should do the job) and restore our healthy eating regime forthwith.

The local firework people can’t wait until the New Year either. Our dogs will spend the weekend under the bed. 

 

30 December, Saturday

In bed this morning, on my phone, I wrote a poem about what I’ll abstain from in the New Year. Being borderline saintly, it took only minutes to compose. In 1980 I gave up wasting money on fruit machines in pubs. I still see the cherries but I haven’t faltered, mainly because modern technology renders such larcenous apparatus impossible to understand. This time I’m giving up teetotalism and celibacy.

Later, there was nowhere in town to park the car so I couldn’t withdraw money. Even if I wanted to engage in sinful deeds I’ve no way of financing my wickedness.

 

31 December, Sunday

My Nan would say on this day that if you step outside you’ll see a man with as many noses as there are days left in the year. Thinking back, if the diabetic next door neighbour had been out in his garden, she could have said the same thing about legs.

And now, as we approach another year’s end, let’s sing an old Belgian folk song. The work, I think, of Jacobus Barbireau…

Get up, get up, get busy, do it

I want to see you party

Get up people, now get down to it

Before the night is over

 

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Read the first bit here:

Side A - https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/sort-thing-december-2023-side

 

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Image:

The end of the shortest day in Veliko Tarnovo - photographed by me.