Bulgaria with Noodles

If you have been faithfully reading my blog, then by now you should be an expert on centralne tepline . (That is Bulgarian for "central heating", just in case you have forgotten.)  In Daveri, keeping our home toasty-warm is quite a time-consuming business. I usually go downstairs at about 4 or 5am and give the fire a good raking, so that lots of the ash goes onto the tray underneath the metal grate. Next to the fireplace we have an impressive-looking collection of tools to use. They look like instruments of torture from the Middle Ages.  Then I put some more wood onto the fire and, if I am lucky, there is soon a good blaze going once more. Then I go down again and put on some more wood at about six, when a naughty little doggie asks for her breakfast and she needs to go outside, to do her business at the bottom of the garden. Then I get another snooze until 8am or thereabouts when, if I am lucky, my dear wife brings my morning mug of tea up to the bedroom.  After breakfas...

And so we are coming to the end of what for many, many people all around the world has been a dreadful year. As well as the sickness and deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been the awful economic consequences: bankruptcies, job losses, bad debts and evictions. Here in the Bulgarian countryside, it all seems to be a long way away, but alas for many it is a present reality. Let's hope that 2021 is a better year for those who are hurting and who have lost loved ones. It was good to talk to my old friend Peter Adams and his mother on ZOOM and we also managed to catch up with Julia on WeChat. Also on a more positive note, my blog has now had more than 70,000 "hits". My thanks go to all of my readers!

Well, actually it looks as though Winter is already here. We had not even finished November and the snow has arrived.   That naughty little doggie likes to sit right next to the fire.  The good news is that our wood-fired central heating system is working really well. (I suppose it ought to, after all the money we spent on it.) The bad news is that we are getting through our stock of firewood at an alarming rate - burning through it, in fact. My dear Irena says that it will be difficult to buy some more firewood in December. The sensible thing would have been to buy more in August or September, but we could not have squeezed much more into the woodshed.