Bulgaria with Noodles

Just in case you have not already caught me out, I am now going to put up my hand, confess and acknowledge that I am a guilty plagiarist. Claire Rushton’s splendid blog Auntie Bulgaria is just too good and so of course it has to b e imitated, paralleled and, yes, copied. One of her recent posts, Why doesn’t everyone just move abroad ?, summed up my thoughts about the UK and Bulgaria so well that I simply must repeat some of the points Claire makes. First of all, I did go to university when it was free and it wasn’t just any old Uni. Oxford still has a certain cachet, a cut above yer average redbrick. Looking back on it now, I was amazingly lucky. And then I got my PGCE and that was free too. When I graduated, I did not have thousands of pounds’ worth of student debt hanging over me, unlike many students in the UK in more recent years. As for that perennial topic of English conversation, namely house prices, I think that Claire was absolutely spot on when she wrote about the problems...

Things are a bit dull here in VT. I have had an awful cold for the best part of a week and now Irena has it. I also have to go to the dentist and I am not looking forward to that. That naughty doggie Tina spends a lot of her time looking out of the window, watching the doings of all of the local cats. I had a rather unpleasant confrontation with our Bulgarian neighbour, who does not like it when I park next to his apartment. Usually, I park a bit further down the street, but of course someone else had decided to park there. Good grief! Anyone would think that this part of VT is becoming another town in the UK. Blooming cars everywhere! Well, in the end I could not be bothered to argue with him and so I moved my car about 200 metres along the street. Yes, it is not long to Christmas and the government in the UK seems to giving out a few early prezzies. I t is good to know that my TPS pension will be going up again and so will my State pension, when I finally get it. Here in Bulgaria, th...

Yes, they have finally arrived! The twelve sections of metal fence from PRAKTIKER were delivered today*. We had to make a special trip to Daveri, so that we could accept the delivery. Anyway, we cannot really do anything about this new fence until the spring comes along. I do not actually know what I am doing (what a surprise!) and I have never put up a fence before. But hey, there is a first time for everything. The old wooden fence is about twenty years old, so it has a nasty habit of falling down and then breaking into pieces. What worries me is that of course the fence sections are not going to be exactly the same length as the current old wooden fence. So what are we going to do? Cut one section of fencing, so that it will fit the gap? Or maybe we should build a little bit of extra stone wall at one end, in order to fill in the space. Yes, the Ukrainians have re-taken Kherson, but so far the Russians have not joined up the dots and they do not seem to realize that Putin is a t...