Don't Mess with a Meteorology Man

 

16 August, Friday

It’s official! The meteorology man from the ministry said! July 2024 was the hottest month ever in the history of Bulgaria, but it wouldn’t be rash to put ten levs on August beating it.

Long range forecasters suggest our next rain is over a month away, so I’ve got Coral King’s It Might as Well Rain Until September as a long range earworm. I’m suggesting I Might as Well Move to Burnley as an alternative title.

And another thing… all the leaves are brown even though the sky is blue. Time to accept an early autumn. Can we expect frost?

 

17 August, Saturday

A man at the bus stop said to me, ‘Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds. But Earth, Wind and Fire can get the most arthritic of our aunties up and dancing with the youngest of guests at a wedding.’

I replied, ‘It doesn’t look like the bus is coming’ and wandered away to the shop to ask the lovely lady assistant who looks like the present day Ronnie Wood if she might accompany me to Boogie Wonderland on Friday night. But she can’t. She’s busy. She’s got goats to milk. She always says that.

 

18 August, Sunday

Male mosquitoes live only six days, feeding on plant nectar but not blood. Their womenfolk with a life span seven times as long, gorge continually on blood. They blame this on hormonal imbalance, Prosecco and chocolate.

This evening a truck carrying a massive aerosol canister sprayed insecticide all over our village. As a mist drifting down the hillside, it gave Malki Chiflik the appearance of the stage set of a 1970s Genesis concert. Apparently no mosquito was safe and no mammal was harmed, but bats and swallows were peckish until the next batch of mosquito larvae metamorphosed twenty-four hours later.

 

19 August, Monday

In the Bey House garden restaurant, a pathetically bony cat sleeping in the shade woke to join Priyatelkata and I. Quite incredibly, she was even hungrier than we were. The waiter had never seen her before so now she’s called Penka and she lives with us. Here we go again!

Penka was the name of the old Russian woman who lived in our house all her adult life until about twenty years ago. In our barn, some time back, I found an old framed photo of her and her husband. After a hefty scrubbing it hangs on our kitchen wall.

 

20 August, Tuesday

The vet lady checked Penka for wiggly arse worms and things that go wrong in a cat’s first few weeks. Leeds United selling Georginio Rutter to Brighton surprisingly wasn’t mentioned. Summing up she said ‘bright, alert and quite healthy, though painfully thin.’ I foolishly thought she meant me.

A thunderstorm cooled us by surprise. Whilst sitting in the car waiting for the downpour to ease off a bit so we could dash into the house, the weather app on my phone insisted we currently had cloudless azure blue skies. Michael Fish’s Balkan cousin said there definitely wouldn’t be a hurricane.

 

21 August, Wednesday

The general election we had in late June didn’t produce a conclusive result so they want to have another one in October which can only be approved by a permanent or caretaker government. President Radev has refused to approve the proposed caretaker government so therefore we can’t have an election to choose a permanent government. Bulgaria is up shit creek without a bloody clue.

If you’re thinking of getting a new sofa perhaps you should get a new cat like ours instead because she absolutely shits on sofas. Negotiating doesn’t seem to work, much the same as with our politicians.

 

22 August, Thursday

You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had buying a hand saw. Apparently there’s no demand for them in the shops these days because everyone uses power tools instead. It’s a very sad world when even that satisfying feeling you get from cutting a bit of two by four in half has been swallowed up by digital gadgetry. Spear and Jackson (Britney and Michael) being redundant, I suppose.

Eventually successful but exhausted, I returned home to the freshly scrubbed sofa for afternoon resting and recuperation. Whoops, I almost said recharging! How long before we need an app to have a nap?  

 

23 August, Friday

Seductive Romanian jazz music intensifies the exquisite still of these sultry summer nights, but sometimes I feel Johnny Răducanu and Marius Popp need a breather. Experimenting, I found Bulgarian and Serbian jazz too folky. Let down by the Balkans for the first time, Slovakia rescued me.

Savouring what was only my second beer of the month highlighted my lack of skill as a hard drinker. I considered starting a fight but my only company was a hedgehog snuffling beneath the fig tree. He looked like he could hurt me. Why do they snuffle? Don’t their mums give them clean hankies?

 

24 August, Saturday

Today was the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of a PLO representation in Sofia to establish Bulgaria’s diplomatic relations with Palestine. There was little evidence of a party.

Meanwhile, there are protests across the country as our caretaker government published a bill banning LGBTQ+ ‘propaganda’ in schools despite President Radev’s attempt to veto it.

Meanwhile, members of our so-called government are bickering. They had supported an aid programme for Ukraine, some quite reluctantly, but are now angered by Ukraine’s ‘invasion’ of Russian territory.

Meanwhile in Britain, the boy Starmer has been prime minister longer than the lactuca sativa Truss was.

 

25 August, Sunday

As I sat in the football stadium with no covered areas, on an evening during the world's driest month, it rained. My punishment, I assumed, for going to a Lokomotiv Gorna Oryahovitsa match and shouting ‘Give us an L.’

We hard-core fans sheltered beneath trees. Others toddled off home. It was miserable to observe the lush abundance of leaves and branches festooned with bounteous yields of walnuts whilst remembering the pathetic weather-beaten skeletons struggling in our garden.

Loco’ ran out four-nil victors. I celebrated with Staropramen in a city centre bar packed with people who hadn't been to the game.

 

26 August, Monday

With the antisocial media, I’m more voyeur than protagonist these days; missing those innocent announcements about what they were having for breakfast in Croydon.

So I was pleasantly surprised by a Facebook friendship request from Bulgarian Stanimira in England who, long ago in my Wiltshire living room, taught me the Cyrillic alphabet and how to say I want coffee / wine / rakia. When people in England ask what I’ve missed since emigrating I always tell them Guinness, curry and Stanimira. So it’s grand to be back in touch, and now I understand what she’s on about. She’s still homesick.

 

27 August, Tuesday

In a building that oozed abandoned Communist era industrial architecture, surrounded by bamboo forest, I delighted in discovering Café Cybar. In its garden area, glass-topped tables of former Kalashnikov rifle crates and a floor seemingly composed of cat litter made it particularly quirky, as did old fashioned squat toilets which will always be a challenge despite lacking any post-operative requirement to return a lid to a down position. Tranquillity near the heart of the city worked wonders for this busy mind. I tried reading. I tried writing. Concentration completely awry. I tried drinking cold Starobrno (just one), which came easy.      

 

28 August, Wednesday

For the second consecutive day we let new cat Penka out into the garden. Both times she shot up the ancient pear tree to cry from a perch for thirty minutes before making her kamikaze style return to safety. In the movies we’d have called the fire brigade. Suspecting that Fireman Simeon might recommend a chainsaw to resolve the problem we avoided this course of action, waiting patiently at the foot of the tree… twice.

Via Skype, Rose my thirdborn child was able to tell me of her discovery that Weetabix contains no binding agent. Another reason to miss England.

 

29 August, Thursday

I was awoken this morning by a wheelbarrow. Hasan, our neighbourly DIY maestro, was transporting materials up the lane in his Iron Age device; its almost circular wheel having never been exposed to tyre or lubrication. If there was a Paralympic broken wheelbarrow racing event, this machine representing 1950s Bulgaria would claim outright gold.

During the eight years I’ve known him, his construction work has remained a mystery through constant tinkering with the structure of his house. Perhaps tired with its Rio de Janeiro favela shack design, he’s converting it into something with more of a Mumbai shanty town feel.

 

30 August, Friday

In a quiet corner of Kaufland’s car park, I handed over a big bag of cash to Rado the Roofer for the purchase of materials for our new roof. Electronic bank transfers are avoided here as the government might discover what we’re up to; and we all know how dodgy the government is!

With the deal done, I entered the supermarket to buy victuals and saw Rado comparing shopping list to trolley contents in the pasta aisle and then in every aisle, like you do.

Simultaneously I was delighted that his kids might eat but worried about my ridge tiles.

 

31 August, Saturday

It felt a bit nippy today. A measly 26°C being significantly cooler than on any day since April. Overcast skies with occasional holes for sunbeams to smile through have teased us with free samples of raindrops since the middle of the week. Precipitation sufficient to render washing line activity a dilemma failed to slake the soil’s thirst. But last night’s thunderous conditions washed away dust whilst terrifying dogs.

Normally I loathe those months ending with ‘ber’. They bring darkness and decay, but this year I’ll welcome them. It’s been a rough old summer in Malki Chiflik. September will be better.

 

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Image:

Mitko our Meteorology Man.

 

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