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Grave Questions

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On Friday afternoon, Irena and I went to a funeral. It was in the huge cemetery, on the edge of VT. The funeral was for the father of Ivelina, a friend of ours. We did not know the father well, but we felt that we had to go along and support Ivelina, her husband John and her daughter, Lizzie. The experience was pretty gruesome, rather scary and disturbing, to say the least.  For a start, the cemetery is vast, such a large area covered by graves and stone memorials. Bulgarian coffins are usually open, so you can see the face of the dead person. The service, all in Bulgarian, did not take very long and then we came up to the coffin and placed flowers inside, next to the corpse. Next we all walked behind the hearse to the grave. There was a big pile of earth and two beams across the grave, with the coffin on top. Then the gravediggers took away the beams and lowered the coffin with two ropes. We all walked up to the grave and threw in a lump of earth. My lump of earth made a hollow th...
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17th July, 2005

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I have been trying to sort out Irena's S1. If you are retired and you have a UK passport, then you can apply for the National Health Service in the UK to pay for your state medical insurance in Bulgaria. In order to do this, you have to get a document called the S1. However, in order to get one for my dear wife, the NHS wants to know when we left the UK.  It was a long time ago. Fortunately I managed to find the exact date on some photos we took of our epic journey from the UK to Bulgaria. Yes, we were a lot younger then and perhaps even more foolish. Here is a photo of Peter, Irena and I departing from "Deande", the bungalow we were living in while I was teaching near Newbury.  
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A Very Boring VT

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Yesterday I went for a rather boring walk around Tsaravets. (No, I do not think that Peter has done this walk.) Well, it was beautifully sunny and it was good to see all of the VT Walkers again, but I don’t really like “road walks” and I could not let Tina off the lead.  I am going to include some more VT photos in this post. They are rather lovely photos but no, I cannot take the credit for them. Any other news? It will be Irena’s birthday on 2nd March and after that I am hoping that we will be going to Daveri sooner rather than later. VT is getting rather boring. Is Trump deliberately trying to wreck NATO, perhaps on Putin’s orders? On the other hand, maybe he is just a ****ing idiot. Yes, the ICE agents in Minneapolis have shot someone else. I am sure that there will be a third and a fourth person shot dead, before too long. ICE really are pretty blooming awful. Some Americans have suggested that the ICE thing in Minnesota has really little or nothing to do with illegal imm...
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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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