Bulgaria with Noodles

Peter is one of my oldest friends. I am including a few photographs from 2018, when he visited us in Bulgaria (yet again!) We went to Plovdiv and came back with a naughty little dog. Dear Peter, How are you, old fellow? I have not had an e-mail from you for a while, so I can only assume that you are still recovering from all of the extra strain and the stress of overwork. I really am glad that I do not have to do any more of that online teaching nonsense.    Well, in some ways I suppose that you should be grateful that you do in fact have a job, as lots of people in the UK seem to have lost or are about to lose theirs. Thank goodness you are not an airline pilot! However, I reckon that quite a lot of independent schools will have gone bust by the time this is all over. But when is this Coronavirus pandemic going to be over? So far, there have been about 45,000 deaths in the UK and 140,000 in the USA. Some commentators think that in America the death count might be as high as 2...

It was, of course, the Water Rat in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows who says what is probably one of the most famous quotations in the English language, the one about how enjoyable it is to be messing about in boats. (While I was in the Crimea, I re-read the book twice and was struck by its neo-paganism, especially the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”.)  Anyway, Peter and I took the Water Rat’s advice and went off to Decathlon, on Sofia’s ring road, to buy a three-man Itiwit kayak. It is excellent! (I wrote about the joys of kayaking in another piece for this blog, You can't have your kayak and heat it .) Just south of the ring road is Lake Iskar. It is really a reservoir for Sofia, but it is also a place where Sofiots go at the weekends, to get away from it all with some fishing and a picnic. We managed to find somewhere quite close to the lake to park and it took us about ten minutes to pump up the different parts of the kayak. Although it does...