Please Tell Him That I Said Hello

 

Please Tell Him That I Said Hello

 

1 February 2025, Saturday

Across the country, wreaths were laid as Bulgaria bowed her head in the annual remembrance of the victims of the communist regime. Warm sunshine displayed a welcome contrast to the political and humanitarian darkness of our past.

I love January but February’s better. With each amble round the garden I discover more new shoots on my awakening horticultural babies. I even discovered a wild plant I didn’t know we had, that being a Butcher’s Broom with a single red berry.

And there was still a glow in the western sky when I learned that Leeds United had beaten Cardiff seven-nil.

 

2 February 2025, Sunday

Did you know that France has a different pancake day to the rest of the world? Yes, today was La Chandeleur (translating into English as Candlemas), the day on which Priyatelkata and her compatriots eat crêpes and drink cider. Apparently Pope Gelasius loved a pancake so this custom was his idea.

Falling exactly forty days after Christmas, it marks the midpoint between winter and spring. In Eastern Orthodoxy it’s the time for taking down the Christmas decorations and women can be purified by presenting a lamb as a burnt offering. So it was quite a busy day in our house.

 

3 February 2025, Monday

Determined to teach those naughty people in Latin America a lesson, supporters of the porcine president of the Ewe-Esser-Vaye are apparently boycotting coffee grown in Colombia and buying Italian coffee instead. I hope for their sake that it travels well. I wonder if they’ve realised yet that the white powdery stuff that covers most of Greenland isn’t cocaine.

Meanwhile Bulgarians aren’t worrying about the effects of Trump’s proposed trade tariffs as they already can’t afford to buy his stuff at the original price and our only exports are healthy food and migrant workers which would never catch on in America.

 

4 February 2025, Tuesday

In Pavlikeni market, Gostilnitsa Ranchoto (Гостилница Ранчото, meaning ‘The Ranch Inn’) serves delicious fish dishes at little cost. A visit was overdue, Priyatelkata urged.

The sun shone, the rural scenery en route rolled resplendently and both restaurant and waitress were bright and cheerful. Unfortunately, the fish was a let-down, but we agreed that only our obsession with food had tarnished our day.

Seeing an old man with a crutch fall on the pavement, we stopped to help him up. He was embarrassed at having nothing to offer by way of thanks. I was humbled by his embarrassment. His day wasn’t so good. 

 

5 February 2025, Wednesday

The morning’s light snowfall was enough to make me appreciate every single one of the duvet’s togs. I love them and I’m sure that if I could identify them individually I’d have affectionate names for each.

Having run to a deserted Bulgarian valley to escape the rat race, I still find a need for further escapism. Netflix is ruining my life but these dark nights with a modest supply of rakia in me it’s a balm for the brain.

It might have been John Lennon who said, ‘Time spent watching Netflix is not time wasted unless you get wasted yourself.’

 

6 February 2025, Thursday

Clouds obscured the sun only minutes into my walk in the afternoon sun. Finding the Helicon bookshop’s warm glow irresistibly inviting I entered, browsed and purchased.

Vladimir Dimitrov Maistora (Владимр Димтров Майстора) is considered one of the most talented 20th century Bulgarian painters. I once visited his museum in Kyustendil, his birthplace, and was overawed by his pulchritudinous depictions of rural scenes and culture from the country’s romantic but harsh post-Ottoman period.

In a café opposite the bookshop I found his biography, written in Bulgarian, difficult to put down. In only forty minutes I had read the whole of the first three paragraphs.

 

7 February 2025, Friday

Destructive moles mess with my garden. I don’t mind their mole hills because that’s all part of nature but they damage roots of trees and bushes I’ve nurtured for years. My friend Zhivko said that to rid my land of such nuisances I would need a bucket, a thick book and a shovel. I should place the bucket upside down in the garden, sit on it and then read the book until a mole pokes its head out of the ground. At that point I should hit the mole on the head with the shovel. There is no other way!

 

8 February 2025, Saturday

Fifty years ago this week, Dana’s recording of her rock anthem, Please Tell Him That I Said Hello held a place in the BBC’s Official Top 40 Singles Chart.

My cousin Séamus in Randalstown spent years poking around in dark musty places to piece together our family tree. One of the most interesting of his findings was that the 1970 Eurovision champion, Dana Scallon (originally Rosemary Brown from the Creggan estate in Derry), is a distant relative of ours. If you look at a photograph of her I’m sure you’ll agree that she and I are almost identical in appearance.

 

9 February 2025, Sunday

At the cinema in the shopping centre’s basement we had reached the midway point in the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, before Priyatelkata remembered she didn’t like his music. Luckily for her it only lasted two and a half hours. Luckily for the cinema staff we stayed to the end because there was nobody else there.

Driving home, she sang some of his songs, suggesting she’d enjoyed the film at least a little. Unluckily for me, her voice wasn’t quite as melodic as Bob’s.

I’d hoped the soundtrack would include Subterranean Homesick Blues (Подземни Носталгия По Дома Блус) sung in Bulgarian but was disappointed.

 

10 February 2025, Monday

Having never before visited the old village of Novo Selo (Ново Село, meaning ‘New Village’) we were surprised to find a thriving community huddled round a square with two shops, a café-bar, a beautiful old church and an impressive mosque.

The brightly painted building we were sure was an antique shop turned out to be the home of Daniella and Vladimir, two Bulgarian artists who’d recently returned after living twenty-one years in Albuquerque. They invited us in to their Aladdin’s cave to look at their own beautiful ceramics and paintings, and incredible artefacts from their travels. New friends on a beautiful day.

 

11 February 2025, Tuesday

Flicking through a travel journal I read that five years ago today Priyatelkata and I were in the mountain town of San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico’s poorest state, Chiapas.

I always look back on that six-week backpacking trip with great fondness so I’d forgotten those two nights at the mamá of all grubby hostels. I had a cold, she had hurt her back and the local cuisine comprised almost entirely of mushy red beans and Doritos, so there was more life in the bacteria on the shower curtain than there was in us. But we loved it there.

 

12 February 2025, Wednesday

A short verse about a slightly longer verse…

 

With the weather too cold to leave home

I sat down and I penned me a poem

Posted on the writers’ website

No one’s yet told me it’s shite

But I suspect a few readers might groan

 

The brave outdoor thermometer growled -13°C at breakfast time and the day’s high point was when it hit zero but by then I’d decided to devote my time to drinking tea and daydreaming. The daydreaming was the subject of the poem I wrote this poem about but I forgot to mention the tea in both.

 

13 February 2025, Thursday

The town of Dryanovo gets its name from dryan (дрян, meaning ‘cornelian cherry’) because they grow in wild profusion there. We spent the afternoon buying weird old stuff in the huge derelict factory that’s now a junk shop hypermarket so we saw no such trees.

Forty years ago Dryanovo industrial estate employed thousands of workers. We wondered where they’d gone. It being alarmingly colder inside the shop than out, they’d probably all perished from hypothermia.

There were no dryan trees in Café Algrota (perhaps the Bulgarian for ‘grotty’) either but there was magnificent coffee, cake, our Belgian friends and warmth.

 

14 February 2025, Friday

At Gorna Oryahovitsa’s Friday market, Priyatelkata bought a 1988 model Singer electric sewing machine. She’d previously only owned a pedal-operated one but, having recently seen the Bob Dylan film, she’d decided to go electric.

The stallholder tried to power up his generator to demonstrate that it worked but the generator, which appeared brand new, strangely wouldn’t start. Eventually he gave up and offered to reduce the price if she would take him at his word.

Back home the machine was declared kaput but we know a man who fixes everything electrical so there was only a little grumpiness and swearing.

 

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Image:

Is it the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest champion, Dana from Derry, or is it poet and goat whisperer, Turlough Ó Maoláin? You’ve got to admit, it’s not easy to tell us apart.

 

And if you’d like to see a few recent photographs of where I live, click on this.

February at Home

 

Part Two

The Archers in Cyrillic Script

Click to view.