Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

 

16 June, Sunday

For the first time since Wednesday I saw a golden oriole in the walnut tree. Having feared all feathered friends might have shuffled off their mortal coil, it cheered me like nothing else had done this week. It was a bit of a Noah and the dove with the olive branch situation except there was no flood; June’s sun already has the ground baked hard like a school dinner lady’s pasty.

Am I pruning damaged trees enough? Hoping they’ll bear new leaves this summer, I’m not as brutal as Priyatelkata. Following a heated exchange, I feared she might prune me.

 

17 June, Monday

At least it was a bright summer morning. Had I got up in the darkness of winter to encounter such widespread skitterings from dogs’ bottoms on the kitchen floor there’d have been a risk of standing in them.

We bought a Lamborghini (or maybe a Fiat… it’s definitely Italian) from the woman who runs the ornamental stonemason’s beside Nikolay’s workshop. If we’ve any problems with the brakes she’ll do us a deal on a nice gravestone.

Celebrating and grieving simultaneously, we had luncheon in the garden restaurant in Arbanasi while waiters brushed up storm damage. Nobody’s hurt but everybody’s stunned.

 

18 June, Tuesday

We met lovely Maria and Petr at a notary’s office in town to transfer custody of Fyodor the Fiat which we promised to keep clean forever and not just the first month. To earn a living, Petr sculpts three-metre-tall 19^th century Bulgarian revolutionary soldiers from stone blocks for public places. 

Neighbours Ismail and Amelia can’t earn a living because they’ve no cash to repair their storm-damaged work van. Normally they work like slaves selling fruit and veg in markets. We’re mega-morose but they’re absolutely distraught. Our upfront payment for a thirty year supply of rosovi tomatoes will hopefully help them.

 

19 June, Wednesday

By 6:00 am we realised we’d been overprotective in keeping la voiture neuve in the bedroom to shield it from Balkan weather.

By 3:00 pm we realised the covered veranda at Gorna Oryahovitsa’s Auto Morgue wasn’t protective enough as a thermometer screamed 41°C. Our cars were weighed and we received 55 stotinki (25p) per kilogram for them. Old motors are cheaper than potatoes.

Back home, grinning gypsy neighbours, eager to work, took delivery of fruit and vegetables to sell in tomorrow’s market. Our new car sat in our parking space no longer littered with battered remains. There were happy tears!  

 

20 June, Thursday

It was already 26°C on our covered terrace when I drank my coffee at 7:00 am. This isn’t uncommon here for August but it’s still only June. Great swathes of a country that almost drowned a week ago are today on fire.

Cat Nouveau is all grown up now. A month ago he decided he was street tough and turned to the outdoor life. But now he suffers the heat in his Tibetan yak hairdo so he’s a house cat once more, snoring long hours under the air-conditioning.

Replacing the cat’s name with mine, you could repeat the previous paragraph.

 

21 June, Friday

The inaugural day of my 6:00 am kick-off in the garden routine. I beat the heat but not the flies nor the neighbours’ yappy dog. Tidying damaged trees and bushes is becoming less disheartening. New shoots appearing was balm to the brain.

It’s summer solstice time but, although the top hemisphere is now hurtling towards winter and in Homebase in Trowbridge they’ve got Cliff singing Mistletoe and Whine, our weather wasn’t any cooler.

Priyatelkata makes ten mosaic-top tables per day to avoid outdoor catastrophic scenes and temperatures. Not having a flat head is all that saves me from being mosaicked.

 

22 June, Saturday

It’s Cherry Day in Bulgaria. They call it Chereshova Zadushnitsa (Черешова Задушница, literally ‘cherry stew’). Bulgarians care for the souls of anyone who’s died since Good Friday. Apparently they’re double busy in Heaven from Easter onwards so souls that should get in are hanging around waiting. Wine’s poured on their freshly cleaned graves before they’re decorated with fruit, and we’re knee-deep in cherries this time of year.  

I’m only aware of Frank Ifield and the President of Iran dying in that time, but I’ve no idea where they’re buried, and the Iranian lad probably isn’t up for wine on his grave anyway.

 

23 June, Sunday

My friend Milena explained why our village, but not every village, was battered by hailstones recently.

Every Bulgarian village has a Zmey (Змей), a multi-headed dragon with golden scales. These ferocious creatures ward off the Hala (Хала) which, with a snake’s body and a dog’s head, is the personification of hail and steals from fields, orchards and vineyards. However, if villagers have angered their Zmey, it sulks in its cave allowing the Hala to wreak havoc.

In March a series of kitsch-looking, two-metre-high, multi-coloured plastic letters spelling out I Heart Malki Chiflik appeared in our village square. The Zmey couldn’t miss them.

 

24 June, Monday

I love my country because every day is celebrated as the day of something or other.

Today’s Enyovden (Еньовден), the day of St Ivan the Herb Gatherer. Before dawn, sorceresses, healers and enchantresses gather herbs for curing childless women, chasing away evil spirits or casting spells for love and hatred. In more state-of-the-art villages we just cut herbs and chai from our gardens for drying.

I hate to bang on about our recent hailstorm but today we felt quite inadequate as our garden has been blown away. So we had nothing to hang up to dry but our freshly laundered knickers.

 

25 June, Tuesday

Booking a one-way ticket really confuses Easyjet. I know because eight years ago today I flew to Bulgaria from England with absolutely no intention of returning. They still send me emails expressing concern.

I was over two hours at the KAT, de-registering and registering vehicles from our ever-changing fleet. Dimitar helped me. He gave me two litres of the finest homemade rakia to celebrate everything. Double-distilled and matured in oak barrels in his mate’s basement, it’s the stuff that makes Tsars see stars.

Priyatelkata and I didn’t touch a drop but felt happy for the first time in a while.

 

26 June, Wednesday

The day began gloomily. Our cats often stay out all night but usually return by 7:00 am for full feline breakfasts. At 10:30 there was still no sign of Crado Cat Nouveau until I visited the downstairs loo where he was asleep in the washbasin. He’d been incarcerated at least twelve hours.

Insurance assessor George came to inspect our jigsaw puzzle former roof. A very serious meeting until he sat on the dogs’ squeaky rubber duck on the settee. It squoke perfectly because it was kept inside during the storm. I hope the quacking and laughing doesn’t affect our claim.

 

27 June, Thursday

Turkey won and progressed in the Euro football thing last night. So if Russia hadn’t come along in 1878, liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman occupation, we’d be celebrating now too. Bloody do-gooders!

Five nice ladies in five chilled offices dealt, or semi-dealt, with insurance affairs too numerous to mention. Having not experienced three parties, fire or theft, we could expect little more from the ladies than them being nice.

Dining at the Asenovtsi with Scottish friends, French Priyatelkata likened the dialect of Glaswegian Brian to that of the Swedish Chef in the Muppets. Luckily, Brian didn’t understand what Priyatelkata was saying.

 

28 June, Friday

Little more than a fortnight after our general election, the Bulgarian National Assembly has at last chosen a Speaker. So now they can at least try to negotiate the formation of a coalition government. This was never a problem in those heady days of brutal totalitarianism. She’s Raya Nazaryan from Armenia and she’s young and attractive in a don’t-mess-with-me sort of way, but then she’d need to be. 

Apparently they’ve an election looming in Britain too. There’s no need to read the manifestos or watch the televised debates. Just remember that Hi Risk Anus is an anagram of Rishi Sunak.

 

29 June, Saturday

These hot afternoons it’s grand to lie on the settee with jugs of glacial tea and a summer soundtrack. Joni Mitchell, Joseph Canteloube, Bob Marley and Mississippi John Hurt on scratchy vinyl all sooth as Pavlovian mosquitos snarl from their sides of insect screens.

Recovering plants yearn for rain. Thunderstorms will arrive in the coming days. Nervously we’ll look out for mammatusi, clouds from which great ice-laden cellular pouches hang like udders. Not to be confused with Gypsy Mama Tusi who tells fortunes in a tent in a layby on Plovdiv ring road. Does she have cellular pouches I wonder?   

 

30 June, Sunday

In weather so hot my fillings melt when I open my mouth, neighbours Hasan and Slavka have no money, no transport and now no water because of their Communist era plumbing. I bought them twenty litres at the village shop. Embarrassed, they offered me spanners as payment.

I tried to order a book on Amazon. It’s called Rakiya - Stories of Bulgaria, by Ellis Shuman. They said it can’t be dispatched to my delivery location.

We’re Europe’s poorest country, here to provide the so-called ‘developed’ world with cheap labour and jokes. I say ‘we’ and not ‘they’. I love Bulgaria. 

 

Part One -

Holiday on Ice

 

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Image:

In our garden not even those in high places escape the wrath of Hala (Хала).