Shenanigans with Catkins

 

Shenanigans with Catkins

 

16 January 2025, Thursday

From Covid times, listening to one per day, my youngest daughter Rose and I ploughed through a massive internet list of the best albums ever made. With my constructive criticism often amounting to a mere ‘awful’, I decided a couple of years ago to compile my own list and, whilst lying on my snot-encrusted settee, I completed it today. One per day would suggest 730 albums but it contains only 100. However, every one of them is an absolute gem, making it necessary to listen to some numerous times. So, despite being sofa-bound, I still managed a sense of achievement.

 

17 January 2025, Friday

Feeling I was on the road to recovery we set out on the road to Pizza Bianco at the top of town. On our arrival at 4:00 p.m. the waitress told us the restaurant was fully booked but she could squeeze us in at a table as long as we ate quickly because it was reserved from 8:00 p.m. We considered ordering eight pizzas each and eating slowly until we remembered that wasn’t the sort of thing that nice people did. It turned out to be a struggle to force down just one and we were safely home before 5:30.

 

18 January 2025, Saturday

Located at the foot of the forested Elena Balkan in the Stara Planina Mountains, the little town of Elena is such a dear place that its name is the Bulgarian word for deer (but not dear).

We wandered out there for the afternoon, stopping at the Hanche Yakovtsi for sustenance. Their bean stew is the best bean-based food I’ve ever tasted. Incidentally, the Bulgarian word for bean (or beans) is bob (боб). So tinned baked beans here could be called Bob Heinz, and easily mistaken for Bob Heinz the 1950s German comic artist, celebrated for creating the 'Pif und Alf' series.

 

19 January 2025, Sunday

A ceasefire began in Gaza. Gaza has known many ceasefires but it has never known terror on the scale of that encountered during the past year. Hopefully the people with their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns will try harder to make this one last.

Recently I’ve been reading and writing about Middlesbrough, the town of my birth. Despite the fact that only Gaza is a less appealing place to visit, nostalgia draws me there. Fond childhood memories of South Shields add fuel to my desire as plans for a two-centre holiday enter the embryonic stage.

 

20 January 2025, Monday

Donald Cerberus Trump was inaugurated as the forty-seventh, and probably last, democratically elected president of the USA. His Balkan wife wore a silly hat and attended the party as a desk lamp. I found it strange that this awful man, who had suggested the possibility of using military force to seize Greenland, chose to break with tradition and moved his swearing-in event indoors because it was a bit nippy out. I decided not to attend because I wasn’t fully recovered from my cold and didn’t want to pass any of my germs on to him. They deserved better than that.

 

21 January 2025, Tuesday

Visiting the relatively new Café Dolce Vita that we had previously habitually bypassed was surprisingly pleasant. Just as you should never judge a book by its cover, you should never judge a coffee shop by the busy road and unfinished footpath outside.

The young proprietor fellow welcomed us with a broad smile, described the impressive array of drinks and sweetmeats that adorned the establishment’s menu, and told us about forthcoming events. I felt small when he corrected me, pointing out that the words souvlaki and ouzo were more appropriate then Olivia, Newton and John when promoting next month’s Greece Night.

 

22 January 2025, Wednesday

An afternoon at the home of long-time friends from Glasgow reminded me they are always good for a cuppa and a blether. However, my visit was less eventful than usual as the cat section of their street rescue ensemble was sadly reduced to just three.

During an evening rendezvous at The Base Bar, I met fellow immigrants from New Zealand, Germany, India, America and Cricklewood. The object of the meeting was to discuss how we could, as a group, improve our grasp of the Bulgarian tongue. With a plan quickly formulated the evening then degenerated into a foreigners’ tea party.

 

23 January 2025, Thursday

Today I got the impression that Bulgaria’s corruption and money laundering problem was all my fault. I called at the bank to register my new phone so I could (reluctantly) use their app. Re-validating my account took forty minutes. Although impressed by such tight security I wished my interrogation had been at a time when I wasn’t so desperate for a wee.

I took Priyatelkata for her first visit to the new mega café-restaurant in Gorna Oryahovitsa. Lashings of traditional fare for the price of a bag of monkey nuts completed her readjustment back to Balkan life, back to reality.    

 

24 January 2025, Friday

In a Skype conversation with my former missus, I told her what my dentist had recently said about wrapping cabbage round my knees to reduce arthritic joint pain. She said that she too had heard that the antioxidants contained in cruciferous vegetables are known to reduce inflammation.

She told me that when our children were very small she had heard its benefits discussed at a meeting at our local mother and baby clinic. Apparently, placing cabbage inside the bra could ease a breastfeeding mother’s painful mastitis. But only a couple of leaves, the doctor had stressed, not a whole cabbage.

 

25 January 2025, Saturday

The toothless old widow who sits beneath the pomegranate tree in the square confided in me, ‘Capitalism is a chip pan. Initially its richness fattens the bourgeoisie but eventually it kills them.’ She then popped her Weight Watchers food journal back into her shopping bag and dashed off to her weekly meeting at the nearby Pensioners Club.

Bean stew I had eaten a week earlier at a restaurant near Elena had been delicious but served in portions pitifully small for someone like of me who, in terms of appetite, identifies as a family of four. So I made my own. 

 

26 January 2025, Sunday

Today I discovered we’ve had an official ‘permanent’ four-party coalition government since 16^th January. This was the outcome of October’s election which most Bulgarians had forgotten about. I hope our new prime minister, Rosen Zhelyazkov, heard the news sooner than I did.

One of Mr. Z’s first jobs is to get our country into the Euro zone. We’ve been putting it off for years. EU president, Ursula von der Leyen, said we have her support. She loves her raunchy, lager-swilling holidays in Slunchev Bryag (Слънчев Бряг, meaning ‘Sunny Beach’) but finds queueing at the post office to buy Leva a loathsome chore.

 

27 January 2025, Monday

Finding the year’s first dismembered torso of a lizard on the kitchen floor (courtesy of a locally sourced feline menace) I deduced that Spring had arrived early. More positive signs included lush crops of yellow hazel catkins, a carpet (well, perhaps a bedside mat) of blooming snowdrops and feathered friends busying themselves in the incredible art of avian housebuilding.

Today also saw 2025’s first interruption to the water supply. Echo and Aleks visited and we ate dinner in the garden, partly to enjoy the warm late afternoon sunshine and partly because we didn’t want them to smell our unwashed bodies.

 

28 January 2025, Tuesday

As a flu epidemic sweeps through Bulgaria, schools close, shoppers wear facemasks and neighbours blame the new government. Old wives blame the poor quality of last year’s rakia output resulting from meagre fruit harvests. 

I had a little plum tree, nothing would it bear; the cause being the combination of extreme summer and winter meteorological conditions that had killed it. On closer inspection, I saw that it was actually three plum trees growing very close together and none of them could really be described as little. Following my day’s chainsaw fun, my woodshed is replenished and my limbs remain intact.

 

29 January 2025, Wednesday

Jacques, an associate member of our menagerie, calls in most mornings to see us. Today Priyatelkata noticed a swollen front leg was making him limp. To the veterinarian with him! we declared in unison. After a poke about and a phial of antibiotics, our feline health practitioner suggested an overdose of testosterone was causing all the cat’s problems and a simple castration would bring joy to his life. We agreed, even though he wasn’t officially our cat. The poor wee soul had only popped in to see what was for breakfast and ended the day separated from his boy bits.

 

30 January 2025, Thursday

Marianne Faithfull died. I never bought any of her records but she was always there as a cultural icon during the days and decades when I was a music obsessive. The sadness of her passing was matched by the sadness of knowing they don’t make Marianne Faithfulls anymore.

In December my friend Cathy in Kilkenny sent me some Flahavan’s Pinhead Oatmeal, the food equivalent of Guinness. Ladies at two antique post offices in Veliko Tarnovo said they’d no record of the shipment but would endeavour to trace it as my description of the porridge had caused significant salivation and peckishness.

 

31 January 2025, Friday

During our second meeting I realised the recently formed Bulgarian Language Improvement Group for Helpless Transients (BLIGHT) was blighted by the egos of some members, so I decided it wasn’t for me. I’m useless at mingling with those immigrants who describe themselves as expats in that colonial sort of way. The word ‘expatriate’ suggests an intention to return to the home country so I could never include myself as one of them.   

And that wraps up January, the month in which I had vowed to read and write more but failed. But at least the frequency of my smiling improved.

 

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Image:

The catkins that live at the bottom of my garden.

 

Part One:

The Mandarin Cherries

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