Bulgaria with Noodles

I thought that perhaps you might like a few wintry photos from Veliko Tarnovo. It has been very, very cold the last few days. Not a huge lot of snow, but it has all looked very pretty and white and Christmassy, but it certainly has been cold!  T he river has partly frozen over, next to the suspension bridge. It was minus nine when I took Tina for her walk before breakfast. She was not bothered by the cold because she is so fat! She is a naughty little doggie and usually she sneaks into our bed at four in the morning. We have been very busy with marmalade-making, as you may have guessed from some of the photos. It is rather and long and laborious process, as first you have to wash all of the lids, the jars and oranges. Then you have to peel all of the ginger (yes, we do put in quite a lot of ginger) and then you have to “top and tail” the oranges, cutting off the tops and bottoms and then chopping them all into quarters. Next comes the mincing and I usually get given that job. After...

Dealing with UK government departments is not my idea of fun. Back in 2024, I started trying to sort out my state pension. As I was teaching in the Middle East and one or two other places, there are some gaps in my National Insurance contributions. Not surprisingly, I have not been receiving the full state pension and so I tried to contact HMRC, with a view to paying the missing contributions. I tried again in 2025. Finally, finally, the other day I received an email from the DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions, and this gave me the information that I needed, in order to make a transfer from my bank account in the UK. The only problem was that I was supposed to include a reference number and it did not work. It really was very, very frustrating.  Last night I was at last able to make the transfer, as I used a slightly different way of paying online that did not require the mysterious reference number. Hooray!  On Tuesday we had the annual (and rather weird) cross-throwing...

Well, we did have some snow on Christmas Day. Quite a lot of it melted, but some settled and whitened everything. Since it is that time of the year, I am going to include some "snowy VT" photos in this post and no, I did not take them myself. According to a YouTube video I watched recently, the UK is heading for a massive housing crisis. Owning your own home will become virtually impossible for just about everyone. If I have correctly understood this video, it all started with building companies buying up lots of land for building. Well, perhaps that was not such a bad thing, as you do need some land if you want to do some building, I suppose. Then the building companies found that the price of building materials and higher labour costs meant that it was impossible for the builders to build anything affordable, so they stopped building, rather than build and sell at a loss. Then lots of bricklayers and other people who used to work in construction left the UK and they went el...