Another reply from Markoi!
I have received a rather brief email from none other than the great Markoi. My reply is italics. I have come across some rather nice photos of Veliko Tarnovo, so I am going to include them in this post.
Simon!
Please accept my apologies for not replying sooner.
Life, events, etc. Lots to report.
Will write soon.
Was thinking about you and your lovely wife.
You are so lucky.
As I am with mine.
We are lucky, aren't we?
Markoi
You are a very naughty man! However, something amazing, special and unique happened today, something so rare and unusual that it has to be celebrated: Markoi actually sent me an email! Yes, I nearly fainted. As I type this reply, my hands are still shaking.
Bulgaria, in case you were wondering, is as marvellous as it usually is. I am sitting in my study, in our country house in Daveri, and if I turn my head I can see the rolling green hills and the mountains of the Stara Planina.
I rather like being retired. It is a lot more fun than boring staff meetings that go on (and on). If you really do the job properly, then being a teacher is incredibly tiring and time-consuming. However, I do miss being with children. My students in China were particularly lovely and adorable. Even Chinese teenagers are polite, hard-working and respectful. Yes, they are a pretty weird lot, the Chinese.
I am not sure that you will want to know all of the sordid details about the Sheep, aka Randy Andy, my dear brother. He was divorced twice, became an alcoholic and then went bankrupt. Now he does not touch the booze and he is currently shacked up with some rich American woman. (I wonder how long that will last.) Andy has had several detective novels published, but I do not think that he has made any money from them.
Although I gave up visiting the UK after my mother’s death, every so often I do hear one or two bits and pieces of news from the UK. Things do not seem to be good in Dear Old Blighty. The Conservatives certainly made a mess of things (four different Prime Ministers!) and now Keir Starmer’s Labour government is very unpopular. There used to be something called “the National Health Service”. More and more illegal immigrants keep arriving. Perhaps in response to so many British towns and cities filling up with Africans, Pakistanis and Afghans, more and more people are leaving the UK. As I am slightly famous, after my Daily Mail article and my appearance on Bulgarian TV, quite a few Brits get in touch with me and tell me that they want to leave the UK because things are getting so bad.
Now I have had some wonderful American colleagues at one or two international schools over the years, so I am not one of those appallingly stuffed-shirted Brits who always moan about our cousins on the other side of the pond, even though New Yorkers do some dreadful things to the English language. As Professor Higgins says in My Fair Lady, “There even are places where English completely disappears. / In America, they haven’t used it for years.”
Well, I must say that your present president is not my cup of tea. My dear wife is a Putinista, as all of her family are in the Crimea, but my sympathies are with the Ukrainians. We do NOT discuss politics. If Putin really does want peace, then why does he not withdraw his troops from the Ukrainian territory they have illegally occupied? Trump is Putin’s stooge, his puppet. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? It is embarrassing that the “leader of the free world” is a convicted criminal, a racist and Epstein’s best friend.
We have a country house near Elena, the sort of rambling place that we could never afford in the UK, as well as an apartment in the old part of Veliko Tarnovo, aka “VT”. VT is a most splendid and historic city, full of quirky charm and architectural oddities. We can look out from one of our windows of our apartment onto the cobbled street, dating back to the 14th century, while the castle of Tsaravets, up on the hill and on the other side of the river, probably dates back to the Byzantines, although most of the major work on the fortifications started in the 12th century
I shall send you a few photos of our apartment in VT. It must be strange to live in a country like the U.S. of A., where anything dating back more than 100 years is thought to be very old.
Well, if you are going to be in London, you could always get a cheap flight from Stansted and then you could be in Bulgaria in a few hours!
Do I miss the UK? Not much. The UK seems to be a pretty unhappy place at the moment. We bought our first house here in Bulgaria about twenty years ago, so it really does feel like “home”. Yes, there are a few things that I miss, mostly food, friends and good English bookshops, but on the whole I do not spend all of my time longing to be back in the UK. Twenty years of being overseas cured me of that, I suppose.
Best wishes from Bulgaria, dentes auresque!
Simon
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