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Marmalade (again)

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I thought that perhaps you might like a few wintry photos from Veliko Tarnovo. It has been very, very cold the last few days. Not a huge lot of snow, but it has all looked very pretty and white and Christmassy, but it certainly has been cold!  T he river has partly frozen over, next to the suspension bridge. It was minus nine when I took Tina for her walk before breakfast. She was not bothered by the cold because she is so fat! She is a naughty little doggie and usually she sneaks into our bed at four in the morning. We have been very busy with marmalade-making, as you may have guessed from some of the photos. It is rather and long and laborious process, as first you have to wash all of the lids, the jars and oranges. Then you have to peel all of the ginger (yes, we do put in quite a lot of ginger) and then you have to “top and tail” the oranges, cutting off the tops and bottoms and then chopping them all into quarters. Next comes the mincing and I usually get given that job. After...
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Getting Cross

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Dealing with UK government departments is not my idea of fun. Back in 2024, I started trying to sort out my state pension. As I was teaching in the Middle East and one or two other places, there are some gaps in my National Insurance contributions. Not surprisingly, I have not been receiving the full state pension and so I tried to contact HMRC, with a view to paying the missing contributions. I tried again in 2025. Finally, finally, the other day I received an email from the DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions, and this gave me the information that I needed, in order to make a transfer from my bank account in the UK. The only problem was that I was supposed to include a reference number and it did not work. It really was very, very frustrating.  Last night I was at last able to make the transfer, as I used a slightly different way of paying online that did not require the mysterious reference number. Hooray!  On Tuesday we had the annual (and rather weird) cross-throwing...
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An Almost White Christmas

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Well, we did have some snow on Christmas Day. Quite a lot of it melted, but some settled and whitened everything. Since it is that time of the year, I am going to include some "snowy VT" photos in this post and no, I did not take them myself. According to a YouTube video I watched recently, the UK is heading for a massive housing crisis. Owning your own home will become virtually impossible for just about everyone. If I have correctly understood this video, it all started with building companies buying up lots of land for building. Well, perhaps that was not such a bad thing, as you do need some land if you want to do some building, I suppose. Then the building companies found that the price of building materials and higher labour costs meant that it was impossible for the builders to build anything affordable, so they stopped building, rather than build and sell at a loss. Then lots of bricklayers and other people who used to work in construction left the UK and they went el...
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Buzz Off

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Yesterday, it was very foggy you could hardly see the wooden bridge from the dining window of our apartment, as the weather was so dark and murky. It reminded me of the time when Peter and I went to see Buzludhza. In case you did not know, Buzludhza, as well as being difficult to spell and even harder to pronounce, is a huge concrete monstrosity on top of a mountain. It looks a bit like a flying saucer and it is enormous. We drove up to it on a beautifully warm and sunny summer's day, but as we came to the top of the mountain we found ourselves inside a cloud. It was very misty and really cold. When we got out of the car at the small carpark, we could not see Buzludhza, but as we walked up some step we saw it, looming ahead of us in the mist. Because it is saucer-shaped, the walls stick out and tower above you, like a concrete cliff that is about to fall on you. Buzludhza is a scary, weird place. You cannot go inside. All the doors are locked, although sometimes people do break in....
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More Holes

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Dear Peter,          Wednesday, 3rd December, 2025                                 No, my dear chap. I am really not suggesting that any of the banks in Bulgaria are about to go bust. I think that this is highly unlikely and next year this will be even less likely, as Bulgaria will be in the Eurozone. The other countries in the Eurozone would probably not be too happy if some Bulgarian banks go out of business, so they will make sure that this does not happen. As you have probably seen on the BBC news, there have been rather a lot of demonstrations in Sofia. (President Vladimir Putin will be very pleased with his agents’ work, I am sure.) What are they protesting about? Well, maybe they are unhappy with the EU, which is silly because the EU has done a lot of good things in Bulgaria. Or maybe they are protesting about Bulgaria’s entry into the Eurozone? Everyone has been tal...
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Sveta Gora

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Sveta Gora is one of those places in Veliko Tarnovo that we just keep coming back to, again and again. In case you did not know, Sveta Gora is a huge park, next door to the University and near to the big art gallery. It is on a very steep, wooded hill, with rather splendid views over most of the city of Veliko Tarnovo. It's not far away from us, maybe just ten minutes in the car. In case you were wondering, that podgy, pampered Plovdiv pooch had a great time. Yesterday it was a beautifully sunny day. The sunshine was quite warm, even though the air was cold. As usual, there were LOTS of steps and our knees were hurting this morning.  Here are a few more photos of the two of us in Sveta Gora, taken over the last few years.
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The Return of the VT Walkers

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Yes, we are now back in Veliko Tarnovo and we will be staying here until March. (I am hoping that it will be the beginning of March, but my dear lady wife seems to think that we ought to go back to Daveri at the end of March. Hmm.) Being back in VT means that on Wednesday mornings we can go for walks with the VT Walkers, a group of old drinkers with a walking problem. We had quite a long and tiring walk in the woods above Gorna Oryhavotisa (have I spelled that correctly?), stopped at the gazebo for a cup of tea and a piece of cake, and then we had lunch together at a rather nice mehana.
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