Bulgaria with Noodles

It was great to have Lorraine and Keith come over for lunch. (As you may have guessed, L & K are members of the VT Walkers.) It was quite a drive for them to get here, as the normal road from Veliko Tarnovo to Elena is still closed for resurfacing and the only way to get here is to take the road to Stara Zagora when you come out of VT. The road is quite narrow in places, with lots of twists and turns. Tina was very happy indeed to meet and play with our visitors. Keith was keen to have a go with the tractor mower. The bad news is that Lorraine likes our country house so much that now I think that she wants one too!  Lorraine is also a keen horse fan, so she was very interested when I told her about the riding stables near Elena.

I have written to HMRC again (this might be the third or fourth letter) and I posted it this morning, together with another letter, to none other than the one-and-only Nicholas Armfelt. We were back in VT for a few days, sorting out one or two little matters. My dear wife now has a new UK passport and it is blue. (Not surprising, as we do have a Conservative government.) What with fees for DHL each way, the total cost came to nearly two hundred pounds. Although the NHS is a flipping disaster, at least we now have blue passports. On the subject of the NHS, my friend John Cann’s surgery seems to have gone fairly well, at least so far, and the surgeon attached two of his vertebra to metal rods. It all sounds horribly painful. Mud wrestling, bungee jumping and the tango are out and he can only do a little bit of walking, at least for the time being. They seem to have done quite a good job, but John’s overall impressions of the NHS hospital were not good. Now that we are under the Bulgarian...

That naughty fat Plovdiv dog has her birthday today. I took her for a special birthday walk in the glorious countryside near our house in Daveri. It has been raining for these last few days, so it was a bit wet, but I think that Tina enjoyed herself. Someone who has not been enjoying himself recently is Donald Trump. His "hush money" trial is not going well for him. My guess is that he is going to "the slammer", as our American cousins say.