Mad Dogs and Donkeys

 

Mad Dogs and Donkeys

 

1 December, Sunday

It’s those months ending in ‘ber’ that should be banned outright for the abject misery that’s in them. During September and October my problem’s just a psychological thing as I can still go without socks, but the other two require abolition or renaming as Caligo and Tristitia.

Thinking positively, three of the offenders are behind us now and after three weeks of the one we’ve just started (the worst month), the northern hemisphere (the best hemisphere) will start leaning towards the sun… hallelujah!

So today there’s light at the end of the tunnel, albeit the light of an oncoming train.

 

2 December, Monday

Lately I’ve been trying to lose weight but baby lady cat Penka has been more successful than me. Today she went to the vet and came home without ovaries or uterus. She seemed lighter but confused. She’s not going to miss them. She never used them.

Looking on the bright side, I paid for her operation with cash I might have otherwise spent on cake and crisps. I suspect there are some cultures in the world where people eat ovaries and uteri… places like Lancashire. But how many calories do they contain? I suppose it depends how you cook them.

 

3 December, Tuesday

With a week’s worth of clouds clearing (both meteorologically and psychologically) I strolled in the nearby park, Sveta Gora (Света Гора, meaning ‘Holy Wood’). I’d forgotten how nice it was, that it had a lovely little café surprisingly open late into a December Tuesday afternoon, and that there were 474 uneven stone steps from the bottom end of the park to the top. I felt I had earned my coffee and baklava.

Yesterday’s snow had all but disappeared today. In mid-November 2016 it snowed and there was snow on the ground every day until late March. Where have all the snowmen gone?

 

4 December, Wednesday

I wonder why the word Hoover became a verb but Hotpoint didn’t. Long time ago in Ilford, I lived in a house with a Hoover washing machine and a Hotpoint vacuum cleaner. Announcing ‘I’m just going to do a bit of Hotpointing’ would cause great irritation to others but amusement in equal measure for myself.

‘I’m just going to do a bit of rusty old Volvo 340ing. does anybody want anything from the shop?’ resulted in a written warning from a landlord who’d been badly injured in an Ann Summersing accident.

I Samsunged these words whilst Russell Hobbsing my breakfast.

 

5 December, Thursday

I heard it through the brutally pruned grapevine that icy times are on their way, so I braved the mild but wet outdoor conditions to insulate my tubes. It would cause considerable discomfort if they froze and cracked. The empty lane filled with neighbours offering tube advice.

There’s an old, quite appropriate, and probably true joke in this part of the world…

Question: Why don’t Bulgarians have sex in public places?

Answer: Because if they did, a hundred people would look on and tell them they were doing it wrong.

The Bulgarian word for dogging is goating, by the way.

 

6 December, Friday

Something I detest about Bulgaria is Nikulden (Никулден, meaning St Nicholas' Day). He was known, apparently, for saving sailors. Christians celebrate with fresh carp bought from fibreglass vats crammed with these poor creatures pitifully gasping for breath outside food shops. Just pick one out, pop it in your bag, the checkout lady applies a blunt instrument and Evgeni’s your uncle.

At the open mic poetry night at Bar TaM, most contributors read in Bulgarian. I understood about 30%; slightly more than I did in ‘O’ Level English lessons as a schoolboy in Leeds. Perhaps I’ll start writing my poetry in Bulgarian.

 

7 December, Saturday

The good thing about Cliff Richard’s Christmas records is that they make me think that maybe Devil Woman wasn’t the worst song after all. Congratulations Cliff, I heard you today in the underground carpark at Jysk. A secret place, perhaps, for his fans to go to listen to him in the dark without the rest of the world finding out.

I discovered the newly opened Retro Café. There were only two other customers, both even older than me, so overdoing the ‘Retro’ bit. Nice coffee and kifla, nice music and a friendly owner made thoughts of a return visit plausible.  

 

8 December, Sunday

My attempt at a sunny afternoon stroll and a bite to eat resulted in a snarly bastard dog having a bite to eat from my calf. My assailant was the most aggressive of a pack of snarly bastards. Screaming at them whilst walking away backwards saved my life but not my dignity. A young girl watching from 100 metres away seemed equally shaken as I passed her.

The pharmacist sent me to hospital. The emergency nurse injected anti-dog drugs into my arm, dressed the dog’s front bottom teeth pattern of incisions in my flesh, and told me to be careful.

 

9 December, Monday

In Damascus, yer man Assad (which is Yorkshire for ‘has had’) has had his mansion ransacked and has had to flee to Russia. I thought, because of all these new wars we’ve got, the world had forgotten about Syrians, but today they’re celebrating. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, I hope my optimism isn’t wasted.

Russian Sage adds to the splendour of my garden. If I water or pamper it in any way it dies but, if ignored, it flourishes to the point of being invasive… ironic, eh? I cut it back a bit today and sneezed for hours afterwards.

 

10 December, Tuesday

Having been in contact with people in the know, I ended the day with a slightly extended Bulgarian vocabulary, bathroom lights that provide the correct level of illumination for performing intimate bodily functions, and a neatly coiffured Shih Tzu. Shit Zoo is also how you might describe the state of my house after extended periods of confinement of bad-tempered, muddy-pawed cats and dogs during the season’s mucky wet weather.

All my neighbours have disappeared. In a week I’ve seen no lights, heard no Chalga music and smelt no sizzling kebapche. Perhaps there’s been a neutron bomb and I missed it.

 

11 December, Wednesday

Hitar Petr (Хитар Петър, meaning ‘Clever Peter’) was sleeping in his garden when a neighbour shouted, ‘Peter, could I borrow your donkey to carry some water from the village well?’

Petr opened one eye and replied, ‘I haven’t got a donkey!’

‘But I can see your donkey now, grazing in your field’ said the man.

Then Petr shouted back angrily, ‘Are you going to believe the donkey or are you going to believe me?’

NB The source of this information is unreliable. The conversation possibly took place a century ago and possibly never at all. But in rural Bulgaria it’s quite believable.

 

12 December, Thursday

European Union bigwigs today agreed that from 1^st January Bulgaria and Romania will become full members of their border-free Schengen travel zone. Posh people in aeroplanes and ships have enjoyed this privilege since March but soon all border crossings will be crossable without a passport so anybody can hop into their car and pop over to the northern tip of Norway whenever they want.

‘A day of joy’ said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, with her fingers crossed behind her back as she thought about convoys of Lada Nivas laden with rakia and yoghurt clogging her pristine autobahns.

 

13 December, Friday

Handing cash to a stranger who had described in detail his methods for inflicting pain, I agreed that he should proceed. A sign on his door stated that he had satisfied inspectors that he practiced in accordance with the regulations of the Bulgarian Dental Surgeons Ministry (BDSM).

Ninety minutes later, stage one of a double root canal filling had been completed. I’d paid a relatively small fee for a totally pain-free experience.

On a television on the wall above the dental chair I watched live coverage of the draw for the FIFA World Cup. Some gentle music would have sufficed.

 

14 December, Saturday

I received a WhatsApp message from yesterday’s dentist asking if I felt any pain or discomfort. I told him his work had been a complete success but my knee was a constant niggle. During Monday’s root canal stage two meeting he’s going to tell me how cabbage poultices cure patella problems.

In the garden I worked with my chipper. This confuses friends in Ireland as it’s their word for a fish and chip shop. My chipper converts lopped tree branches into organic mulch almost good enough to eat whilst simultaneously bringing on lower back pain. I may need two cabbages.    

 

15 December, Sunday

It had been a week since my dog bite incident. To celebrate, I poked the scabby area on my leg to see how it was coming along. Not agony, was the verdict, but more painful than its appearance would suggest. The holes were probably quite deep; more like those made by a piranha’s teeth than by a mangy mutt. I had a nice bit of fish for my tea as an act of revenge, though it wasn’t served cold.

A bottle of dark local beer, as dark as the five o’clock sky, washed away a dark winter mood that threatened.

 

16 December, Monday

During stage two of Operation Root Canal, Dr Pavel Nikolov the mental dental practitioner, true to his word, gave me a lecture on how to wrap knees in cabbage leaves to alleviate pain. He couldn’t tell me if his miracle cure would work on other synovial joints too, or if a root vegetable could ease the effects of a haemorrhoid attack, but assured me that by turning herself into a walking salad his grandmother had extended her life by years. Instruments lodged in my mouth during the session reminded me to go and buy a new filter for my Hoover.

 

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Image:

My former neighbours, Petr and Stefka, with their former donkey.

 

 

Part Two:

All the Chai in China

Click to view.

 

 

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

December at Home