Marmalade (again)

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! 

The 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 the mincing, it all goes into the big pans with the sugar and gets cooked (and stirred) for about two hours. Finally, when it is still warm but not too hot, the marmalade goes into the jars and then I have the task of carrying them all down to the cellar in the basement.

Yes, I finally received an email about my missing National Insurance Contributions. I have waited about three years for this email and so I thought that I might as well pay all of it straight away. Since they took three years to contact me, I was not prepared to wait for their reply if I had written to them and tried to haggle over some extra contributions that might not have been necessary. That might have taken another three years!

I have checked on my online Barclays account and the money has gone out of my account, but we will have to wait until the end of the month to see if it has made any difference to how much we get each month. It should be more or less straight away, I would have thought.

I will have to email the DWP again, as they have my old email address, and I have given up on getting that account fixed. It is so annoying! (Microsoft were not very helpful.) 

Also I want to find out if it is possible for Irena to have her own, separate pension. Yes, that would probably be rather expensive… Then there is the business of her S1, the special document that means that the NHS will pay her contributions to the Bulgarian government’s health insurance scheme.

I have been looking at cars again and I have been horrified by the prices. It looks as though it is almost impossible to buy a new car for less than 20,000 euros and maybe 30 or 40 would be a more realistic price. Ouch! Some main dealers sell second-hand cars and most of them cost at least 10,000.

Lots of Bulgarians do not seem happy about Bulgaria joining the Eurozone and they are convinced that it will lead to higher prices for everything. Well, just in case you had not noticed, prices have been going up quite sharply over the last four or five years, so maybe inflation and the Euro are not one and the same thing. 

As for Trump, he seems hell-bent on destroying NATO. Well, perhaps that is what Putin has ordered him to do. The Danes (and the Greenlanders) are very annoyed with this silly nonsense about Greenland becoming part of America.

I could not believe it when I read the story about Putin being on Trump's “Board of Peace” for Gaza. Absolutely ridiculous! That would be like making Jeffrey Epstein the headmaster of a girls’ boarding school.

Meanwhile, Iran’s regime has been getting on with the business it knows best: murdering civilians by the thousands. If you want to bury the dead body of one of your relatives, you have to pay for it! Khameini's thugs really seem to be the lowest of the low.