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Dear John

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Dear John,             Tuesday, 8th October, 2024  It is always splendid to receive an email from you, old fellow. When I was teaching at the British School of Bucharest, I used to get twenty or thirty emails every morning. It used to drive me mad! “Oh Lord, deliver us from email…” As I think I may have mentioned to you, Peter and I have made a bet that Trump will go to jail as a result of the hush money case. Now I am not sure that I really understand how the American criminal justice system works. My guess is that if the Police think that someone has done something a bit naughty, then that person is charged and put on trial. After the trial is over and the defendant has been found guilty, then of course he or she can appeal to a higher court. However, in order for the higher court to take up the appeal, then there has to be some grounds for appeal court to consider, such as new evidence that was not available at the time of the trial or misconduct on the part of the trial judge. Trum
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The Daily Mail

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I am not really a big fan of The Daily Mail , but my wife and I do love Bulgaria, our adopted home. That is why I agreed to contribute to this article and no, I was not paid a penny for my efforts. Even though this article had my name on it, I did not actually write it. Katrina, a freelance journalist, was the lady who cobbled it together from pieces in my blog and from what I told her in a long telephone conversation.  As you may have guessed, there were quite a lot of mistakes in it. For a start, the photo of the house in the article is not of our house at all! The beginning of the piece says that we go skiing regularly. I have never been skiing in my life! In my opinion, it is an expensive way to break your leg. There were several other examples of my comments being "jazzed up" or edited in ways that distorted the truth.  Do these mistakes and inaccuracies really matter? If you really want to get all of the details, then of course you can read my blog. Irena and I love liv
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The Great Debate

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My old friend Peter is supposed to be posting my new Barclaycard and a CD of the photos he took in Bulgaria this summer. No, they have not arrived yet and neither has anything from the HMRC. Bother! As for me, I have been quite busy recently. We finally sorted out the tiles on the “summer kitchen”, the outside seating area located above the septic tank. Yes, there were quite a lot of tiles that were broken by the hailstorm. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump finally got together for a nice little chat last night. A little bit earlier, I had quite a long discussion with Katrina, who is a journalist with  The Daily Mail . No, I am not a keen reader of that newspaper, but she is writing an article about coming to live in Bulgaria, so I was happy to help her. Yes, it is even possible that some of Peter's Bulgarian photos might be appearing with the article! I am going to include a few of Peter's pics in this post. Although my knee is still a bit stiff and painful, it is not too bad and
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Sammy

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Sutton House It is strange, how the past can catch up with you. On the whole, I cannot say that my schooldays were happy ones. My main memory from being at an English boarding school in the 1970s is one of boredom, rainy weekends with little or nothing to do.  However, the other day I was very pleased to receive an email from Sammy (Siavosh) Ardalan, a fellow inmate at Lord Wandsworth College. (We used to call it "LWC" or "the London Water Closet".) In the sixth form, Sammy used to share a room at Sutton House with my friend Malcolm. Here is my reply to his rather brief message.  Siavosh! Wow, that is a name I remember well. Sometimes I think back to a certain room in Sutton House, a room with velvet curtains, wallpaper that looked like wood, a cuckoo clock, a stereo system and a huge poster of a young lady who was not wearing much in the way of clothes... So where are you now? What are you doing? Have you retired, like most sensible people? Yes, please send me thes
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Making your mark

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Sometimes I wonder by I bother looking at things on Facebook, as many of them are so annoying. Recently I came across a particularly silly and soppy video about an older teacher who refused to mark her students' work in red ink because it might upset them. There were lots of comments written underneath, all saying that this videos was wonderful and that yes, red ink is absolutely awful and it is very upsetting and discouraging for students to read harsh and horrible comments that are written in red ink. Oh really? What if the coments themselves are very positive and encouraging? Here is my response to this deluge of citicism for those cruel, wicked and insensitive teachers who torture their poor students by writing in red.   What a lot of nonsense! Many young teachers are too lazy and too unprofessional to write anything in their students' exercise books, in whatever colour. When I was doing my teacher training, more years ago than I care to remember, I went into one teacher
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The Wall, Part 2

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As I may perhaps have mentioned before, many years ago, more years than I care to remember, I went to a rock concert in Earl's Court. In fact, it was the only rock concert I ever went to in my whole life and yes, in case you had not guessed, it was Pink Floyd's The Wall. Well, Winston Churchill did a bit of bricklaying when he was at a loose end and I now have the job of repairing and strengthening the corner of our garden wall in Daveri. The corner of this wall is in pretty bad shape. A lot of the smaller stones seem to have fallen out, as the workmen who built the wall were more than a bit economical with their cement, so now I have the job of stuffing the gaps with whatever pieces of stone I can find, as well as old bits of broken tiles, and then putting cement on top. It is a long job. The finished results do not look great, it must be said, but they will be better than the ugly pile of stones that we will be left with if the wall falls down. 
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Fiddlers on the roof?

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The hailstorm was really scary. As well as stripping a lot of leaves from the trees, the hailstones also thumped down on the roof and turned the garden white in a minute or so. I suppose that they were about the size of golfballs.   Well, apart from the damage to the plants in the garden and a cracked window in the greenhouse, we thought that we had more or less escaped any serious damage. We were wrong. A lot of tiles on the roof were smashed or cracked and our bank balance was not in good shape by the time we had paid the workmen who did the repairs. Even though we had a lot of spare tiles in the greenhouse, the cost of repairing the roof was rather more than we had imagined it would be (serious understatement there, folks). Oh and yes, they could not be bothered to dispose of the rubbish properly and they just left the broken tiles by the garbage bins.
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