Holiday on Ice

 

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.

 

Part Two -

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

 

The Back Catalogue -

This Sort of Thing

 

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Image:

My own photograph of Tsarevets (Царевец), our local medieval fortress.