Dear Malcom 2

Dear Malcolm, 

You will be amused to learn that I was listening to Glass Top Coffin while I was having my lunch today. That weird LP by Rameses really is most unusual. The music took me back many years, to Sutton House, the cuckoo clock and the wallpapered room you shared with Siavosh Ardalan, that naughty nignog.

Yes, it is always a pleasure to receive an email from you, old fellow. And you have actually been reading my blog! Amazing! Well, I did have the impression that one or two people might perhaps be reading it from time to time, as I have nearly clocked up 100,000 "hits". 

For our lunch on Christmas day, we also had roast duck. It was rather good and I think that duck has a lot more flavour than turkey. However, you have to be careful how you cook it. It’s not just an aquatic chicken. I love roasted potatoes. I mean, baked potatoes are good too and so are chips, but potatoes that have been sploshed with fat from the roasted meat and then cooked in the oven are super-yummy. 

Having received a lot of anti-vax nonsense from an American friend who is still in China, my brother Andrew is now recovering from a bad bout of COVID. Yesterday I was saddened to learn that Bill and Julia, our dear Chinese friends, are both ill too. Bill really is in a bad way. 

While on the subject of things being generally flipping awful, the UK seems to be in a total mess at the moment. Just about everyone seems to be on strike: the border control people at the airports, the nurses, ambulance drivers, postal workers, train drivers, oh yes and let us not forget the teachers! However, I have noticed that many expats seem to take a rather strange pleasure in describing all of the problems and hassles back in the UK. (The Germans would probably call this Schadenfreude, which literally translates as “cold joy” or “gloating”.) On the other hand, maybe the UK really is in a total flipping mess at the moment.   

Jeremy Clarkson ought to stick to cars. His comments about the Netflix garbage with Harry and that dreadful Meghan really did go a bit too far. Normally I do not care too much for the Royal family, as they are a waste of money, but maybe Clarkson’s comments were too outrageous, even for him. 

Yes, almost everything in Bulgaria is going up in price, just as it is in the UK. In the Magic Kingdom, you probably have not noticed the price rises quite so much because the Saudi riyal has gone up in value, following the sharp rises in the price of oil. Now things seem to be a bit more stable and the price of oil is going down again. There are still some things in BG that are absurdly cheap. For example, in VT I can usually park my car without paying a penny. We can live in our apartment or house without paying two or three hundred quid a month in Council Tax. And yes, you can still buy a house here in Bulgaria for less than ten thousand pounds, although you might have to spend another ten in order to make it nice. 

As the price of electricity continues to go up in the UK, there seems to be a trickle (well, maybe it is a flood) of Brits who want to escape and buy a place in the Bulgarian countryside, in order to be more self-sufficient. Yes, I know that we can still watch an old episode of The Good Life and imagine what it would be like not to pay for water and electricity, as well as producing our own food. But just imagine buying a property with a river or a stream, so that you could generate your own electricity! Or maybe a house on a hill, so that you could have a windmill. Or you could just buy a house with its own woodland, so that you could take your chainsaw and help yourself to some free central heating. Most Brits have a garden that is not much bigger than a postage stamp, so of course it would be difficult to grow anything, even if you had the time, but here in Bulgaria it is quite normal to buy a house with 2000 or 3000 sq metres of land. Yes, here in Bulgaria you can install a greenhouse or a polytunnel, then you could grow loads of fruit and veggies. It might even be a lot cheaper than going to Waitrose! 

As for the Euro, I just cannot make up my mind whether or not this will be a good thing for Bulgaria (or a good thing for the EU). You need to bear in mind that the total population of Bulgaria is only five million. That is the same as a couple of fairly average-sized cities in Germany. So what difference will it make to the rest of the EU? Not much. But will things be different for Bulgaria? Lots of deals in Bulgaria are already done in Euros, whether it is houses or cars, and the BG leva has been “tied” to the Euro for as long as I can remember. So maybe it will not make much difference. On the other hand, maybe lots of companies will see the changeover as an opportunity (or an excuse) to put up their prices. However, the prices for many things are already going up like mad, so you could argue that nothing is really going to change. Another thing to remember is that Bulgaria is a poor country, one of the poorest in the EU. If you keep putting up the prices for some items, many Bulgarian people will just stop buying them because they cannot afford them!   

Best wishes from BG, as ever, 

Simon