Dear Malcolm

Dear Malcolm,        Wednesday, 13th May, 2026

So booze has finally arrived in Saudi Arabia! And not before time. In Doha, there was something quaintly called “the Qatar Distribution Company” or the QDC or just the booze shop. As well as alcohol, you could also buy some rather overpriced pork. In Egypt, you could actually buy wine that was made in Egypt. It was horrible.

I am sure that they are paying you rather well to mix some concrete, but I quite like being retired. It’s much more fun than going to boring staff meetings. Being a teacher meant quite a lot of paperwork, writing loads of end-of-term reports and so on.

We came back to our country house near Elena in March and so far the spring has been a bit on the chilly side. As usual, we are planning to go to Greece in June.

Any other news? I think I told you that M. B. was “struck off” the medical register. He was a senior anesthetist in a hospital and he made several questionable decisions that resulted in patients dying.

Occasionally I hear from James Pratt and he passes on to me any titbits of information that he picks up. LWC, aka the London Water Closet, is a very different place to the school we knew. I was also horrified to see how much The Chequers at Well has changed. I had many nocturnal expeditions across the fields to that pub and I even continued going there after I was 18.

Irena’s family are going through a tough time, as her father has some sort of dementia or Alzheimer’s or maybe both. Her mother is pretty ancient and not in great health, while her brother has injured his back and is unemployed.

Meanwhile, Putin’s “special military operation” grinds on. Some experts seem to think that the Russian army is pretty close to total collapse, as the Russian battlefield losses have been absolutely appalling and perhaps as high as 1.5 million killed or wounded. The Ukrainians have destroyed about 40% of Russia’s oil refineries and oil transport infrastructure. I do not think that there is going to be a negotiated peace, so the only way for the war to end is with the total collapse of one side or the other.

Because of the war, Irena has not been able to travel to the Crimea or see her family for five years. Sometimes she gets pretty down and depressed about her family’s situation. My mother-in-law told her that the graveyard in Simferopol is filling up with the graves of soldiers killed in the war. Nina’s datcha is fairly safe because it is out in the countryside, but she says that there are more and more strange things whizzing overhead and loud explosions in the distance.

Yes, Bulgaria has adopted the Euro and lots of silly people are blaming all of the inflation on the government’s decision to join the Eurozone and ditch Bulgaria’s own currency, the lev. It’s a lot of nonsense. There was plenty of inflation in Bulgaria that was going on years before the Euro came along. Putin’s fun and games in Ukraine must have had a big effect on inflation, not to mention the orange idiot’s goings-on in Iran. Is Bulgaria really part of Europe or not? If it is, then surely the right thing to do is to join the Eurozone? The Bulgarians have not had any problems with accepting lots of Euros for new bridges, roads and many other projects that have received EU funding.

Prices definitely have gone up, as Irena tells me every time we go to the supermarket, but the real problem in Bulgaria is much deeper and more serious: depopulation. About thirty years ago, there were 9 million people in Bulgaria and now it is about 6 million. Some experts seem to think that over the next twenty years it might go as low as 3 million! If you go to the capital, Sofia, or one or two other fairly big cities, you might not think that there is a population problem, but the reality is that many villages are empty and have been abandoned. Some smaller towns are now gradually emptying. The young people have gone to the USA, Canada or the UK and the older generation are dying off.

Occasionally I hear from The Sheep, aka Randy Andy. He always seems to have a new woman, having dumped the previous one. He is still writing his crime fiction and I think that his third one has recently been published. No, he still has not made any money from them!

I am sending you a few photos of our country house, just to make you jealous.

Best wishes from Bulgaria,

Simon