Winter is coming Part 2

Yesterday we came back from Daveri, having stayed there overnight. Whenever we move from Daveri to VT or the other way round, my dear sweet wife always manages to find piles and piles of stuff that she wants to move from one to the other. Anyway, Daveri was blooming freezing when we arrived, but I am glad to say that our central heating worked pretty well.



What was not working so well was the electricity. There wasn’t any. Although power cuts do tend to happen quite a lot in the Bulgarian countryside during the winter months, it was a bit of a shock to arrive in Daveri and find that there was no power. Fortunately, the electricity came back on fairly soon and so we were able to get on with all of the jobs associated with preparing for winter.


If you are going to be leaving your house empty for some length of time during the winter months, of course you need to drain all of the water pipes. Before you can do that, you must turn off the water. The next day we were just about to leave when I found out that I could not turn off the mains water supply! I had used buckets to take out a lot of the water from Tina’s swimming pool, the square hole with the water mains at the bottom of it, and tried to close the levers that turn off the water. After I had taken out nearly all of the water, I noticed that there was a rippling movement that meant only one thing: we have a water leak! This is Bulgaria, not the UK, so we phoned the workman who lives in Palitsi, just up the road from us, and he came round in about twenty minutes. I think that he spent the better part of an hour working on the pipes. He stopped the leak and managed to completely turn off the water.  When he had finished, I asked him how much I should pay him. “Nishto” is the Bulgarian word for “nothing”. I insisted on giving him 30 leva, about fifteen pounds.

Now I am sitting at my computer in the narrow little room that used to be the guest room for Peter and AJ in our apartment in VT. We will not be going to Daveri again until the spring, I suppose.

Comments

  1. México1 December 2023 at 11:45

    Thank you for consistently delivering content that is both informative and engaging.

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