Seven Roofers Roofing

 

Hundred Word Poem

 

How many roofers

Does it take to build a roof?

More people work atop this house

Than ever stepped inside

 

My roof was grand just weeks ago

Rustic monk and nun in style

‘til nature raged in an eyelid’s blink

Low flying mammatusi strafed

Their hand grenades of ice

Shattering gutters, tiles and minds

 

A terracotta jigsaw puzzle

So many pieces missing

But corners, edges still in place

I even have the picture

 

Glad today the banging’s ceased

Dust disperses, revealing new

As neighbours salvage old

Humanity’s great recyclers

Great Uncle Bulgaria’s blood, it seems

Flows warm through Roma veins

 

1 October, Tuesday

On the first day of October my Uncle Alec would always say, ‘Anybody fancy a pint?’ and again on every subsequent day until late September. As the only London-born member of our Yorkshire-Irish family, and the first to own a fridge, he was regarded with suspicion.

Today, builders’ dust and noise from the creation of my new roof had me craving for a pint.

Neighbour Hasan expressed gratitude for my gift of discarded bits of the old roof. He smiled the radiant smile of a man with his woodshed already full in October. He has more teeth than most Gypsies.

 

2 October, Wednesday

Noisy houses make writing difficult so I set off with newly sharpened pencil to Café Cybar near our hospital. They serve coffee that’s liquid Bianca Jagger and traditional banitsa so fresh you can still smell the goat.

The big question was which was the worst, café hip-hop music or banging roofers? A tough choice. Both hinder concentration but help me perfect my teeth-grinding habit.

In England some years back, a friend took her grandson’s Sony Walkman with her to hospital to mask the noise of the electric saw during orthopaedic surgery. She later boasted she’d had a hip-hop hip op.

 

3 October, Thursday

After lunch with Bulgarian Aleks and Chinese Echo they gave me thirty of their chickens’ eggs. In both of their countries it’s a custom for couples trying to conceive a baby to give eggs to friends and relatives.

Earlier I had coffee with Essex Dave and Jo, both septuagenarians. So there were no fresh eggs there.

Evetta in the Vivacom shop dealt marvellously with my complicated mobile phone arrangements despite appearing too young to be out without her mum. Decent career opportunities are rare here so people in jobs like hers are usually massively overqualified, the upshot being excellent service.

 

4 October, Friday

As we talked about the trauma emanating from my new roof being constructed, a Bulgarian friend asked me if I wanted to hear an Irish joke about builders. Oh no! Here we go with the racial stereotyping, I thought.

A reluctant nod of my head prompted her to continue with this…

An Irishman went for a job on a building site. To test his knowledge, the foreman asked, "What’s the difference between a joist and a girder?"

"Easy," said Paddy "Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust."

Frank Carson’s smarter sister is alive and well and living in Veliko Tarnovo.

 

5 October, Saturday

If Kamenitsa (a sort of Bulgarian Carlsberg) did sitcoms they’d have a French woman in a supermarket car park reversing her Italian car into the vehicle of a laughing Greek policeman away from Athens on holiday for a week as her friendly multi-skilled car mechanic looks on imagining the money he’s going to make from the accident while two non-laughing Bulgarian policemen wonder why they can’t work on better crimes like robberies, murders or missing puppies. But it really happened, so it would be more of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Having a morbid fear of supermarkets, I missed all the fun.

 

6 October, Sunday

Rain rained down on us all day but in Beirut bombs rained down on them. The Israeli Defence Force (defence… hah!) has found a new seam of children to murder. Google Maps says you can drive from Beirut to Kyiv in 37 hours, allowing for roadworks on the Ankara ring-road. I wonder if young Zelenskyy’s factored that into his plan.

I took my new mobile phone from its box, sighed deeply and didn’t look up from my workspace until I had installed enough apps to be deemed a technical geek. Why isn’t there an app to cure intensely painful headaches?

 

7 October, Monday

Hasan’s son and daughter-in-law told me Hasan was taking away the timbers and tiles from our old roof as fast as his rusty Communist era wheelbarrow would allow and asked if I’d bear with him until Sunday to clear the dumping ground in our garden. The answer, of course, was of course. I suggested the son might help but he pointed at his fiercely white trousers and shook his head rigorously. 

Rado the Roofer came for the money I owed for the new roof. He’d no trouble taking it away. Should I have offered him the loan of my wheelbarrow?

 

8 October, Tuesday

Just 200 metres from my house I saw a tortoise crossing the lane. It’s shell the size of a rugby ball. A neighbour described it as ‘diva’ which, before now, would have suggested to me it was either a female opera singer or a self-important person, temperamental and difficult to please. But diva (дива) is the female form of the Bulgarian word for wild.

My photography was only semi-successful as the subject ran away into the bushes.

Previous thoughts of ‘rescuing’ tortoises were abandoned when Google told me cats can’t harm them but dogs’ teeth penetrate their shells with fatal consequences.

 

9 October, Wednesday

For a fortnight my thoughts had been dominated by the new roof and the same earworm gnawed throughout:

When I come home feelin' tired and beat

I go up where the air is fresh and sweet (up on the roof)

But that came to an end today as Rado gave his work a final affectionate rub with his hanky and drove off into the sunset in his van. There’s much tidying up to do but it’s a beautiful roof. I can’t say I’ve ever had a better one.

I’ll call it Madoc, in honour of Roof Madoc the Welsh actress.

 

10 October, Thursday

Dave McKay, President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, started following me on Instagram. I never trust those finance industry big shots. He has only four followers so my wariness and my pity for his loneliness argue the toss in my mind. Suspicion that he’s the brother of a Nigerian prince wishing to share inheritance cash guides my finger towards the ‘block’ button.

When I was a kid, Dave McKay was a footballer at Derby County FC. Now that was a good job to have. If he’d stayed I’d have gladly agreed to be his social media mate.

 

11 October, Friday

To test the water tightness of the new roof, I prayed to Ian McCaskill, the god of damp things. He sent enough rain to float the General Belgrano but the house’s innards remained as dry as a disgraced prince trapped in the Mum Rollette factory.

Meanwhile, Penka the cat had an abscess in an embarrassing place. The vet squeezed out a wobbly white thing resembling a fat maggot but not before shaving her lady bits. Apparently she’s the first cat in history to have a Brazilian. The bad news is that I have to rub cream on it twice daily.

 

12 October, Saturday

In our village shop I discovered they now sell real Spam as well as their own brand of processed meat products. The woman who works on the check-out, and who shares the facial features of Ronnie Wood, said I looked like the cat who got the cream. But veterinarians profess that all cats are lactose intolerant, so I must have appeared to be crippled by stomach cramps and immobilised by explosive diarrhoea. I was really happy until I heard her remark.

I returned the tin to the shelf and opted for the usual plant-based block of slimy pink stuff instead.

 

13 October, Sunday

Hotnitsa is a lovely village where once a month hordes of Britishers gather to sell their old saucepans, Pokémon cards, discarded knickers, Britney Spears cassettes, indistinguishable rusty things and souls. Bulgarskis latching on to the idea offer handmade wooden furniture, tasty cheese and spinach banichki, plants and shrubs, rustic antiques and bric-a-brac, and home-produced honey. I bought a lovely new clock fashioned from old materials.

Bulgaria has more thermal springs than any other European country except Iceland. Polski Trambesh mineral bath is a tatty 1960s place but soaking in water constantly at 40°C, I could almost hear my muscles healing.

 

14 October, Monday

Such a beautiful spring-like day! It was confusing to see new shoots on fig trees and clematises, and even a few flowers on the Persian silk tree that had been weather-battered almost to death in June.

Woodpeckers were busy (they must get awful headaches) but swallows, golden orioles and storks have all gone away on holiday.

Bulgaria’s the only place I’ve ever seen autumn-flowering crocuses. Taller than their spring counterparts, and only in yellow. Their name here is kur-pee kozh-oohx (кърпи кожух, meaning ‘cloth coat’); a reminder to darn any holes in our cloth coats as winter will soon be upon us.

 

15 October, Tuesday

Nobody can ever find my house. Visitors phone on reaching the village square and I drive down to guide them in.

The Vivacom engineers arrived a week early. Priyatelkata was out in the car, so I walked to the square to meet them. Recognising me instantly, they knew where I lived but didn’t have space in their van for me. So I walked back to the house to find that they weren’t there. They were lost.

Eventually, they installed a television box that I didn’t really want but the internet contract works out cheaper than if I didn’t have one. 

 

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Image:

My new roof in watercolour. It was easy. All I needed was a mobile phone, a bit of photo editing software and, of course, a new roof. No artistic skill was used in the making of this picture.

 

To read the next bit, click on the link:

The Tale of the Housemaid’s Knee