Bulgaria with Noodles

Sutton House It is strange, how the past can catch up with you. On the whole, I cannot say that my schooldays were happy ones. My main memory from being at an English boarding school in the 1970s is one of boredom, rainy weekends with little or nothing to do.  However, the other day I was very pleased to receive an email from Sammy (Siavosh) Ardalan, a fellow inmate at Lord Wandsworth College. (We used to call it "LWC" or "the London Water Closet".) In the sixth form, Sammy used to share a room at Sutton House with my friend Malcolm. Here is my reply to his rather brief message.  Siavosh! Wow, that is a name I remember well. Sometimes I think back to a certain room in Sutton House, a room with velvet curtains, wallpaper that looked like wood, a cuckoo clock, a stereo system and a huge poster of a young lady who was not wearing much in the way of clothes... So where are you now? What are you doing? Have you retired, like most sensible people? Yes, please send me thes...

Sometimes I wonder why I bother looking at things on Facebook, as many of them are so annoying. Recently I came across a particularly silly and soppy video about an older teacher who refused to mark her students' work in red ink because it might upset them. There were lots of comments written underneath, all saying that this video was wonderful and that yes, red ink is absolutely awful and it is very upsetting and discouraging for the poor students to read the harsh and horrible comments that are written in red ink.  Oh really? What if the comments themselves are very positive and encouraging? Here is my response to this deluge of criticism for those cruel, wicked and insensitive teachers who torture their poor students by writing in red.   What a lot of nonsense! Many young teachers are too lazy and too unprofessional to write anything in their students' exercise books, in whatever colour. When I was doing my teacher training, more years ago than I care to remember, I we...

As I may perhaps have mentioned before, many years ago, more years than I care to remember, I went to a rock concert in Earl's Court. In fact, it was the only rock concert I ever went to in my whole life and yes, in case you had not guessed, it was Pink Floyd's The Wall. Well, Winston Churchill did a bit of bricklaying when he was at a loose end and I now have the job of repairing and strengthening the corner of our garden wall in Daveri. The corner of this wall is in pretty bad shape. A lot of the smaller stones seem to have fallen out, as the workmen who built the wall were more than a bit economical with their cement, so now I have the job of stuffing the gaps with whatever pieces of stone I can find, as well as old bits of broken tiles, and then putting cement on top. It is a long job. The finished results do not look great, it must be said, but they will be better than the ugly pile of stones that we will be left with if the wall falls down. 

The hailstorm was really scary. As well as stripping a lot of leaves from the trees, the hailstones also thumped down on the roof and turned the garden white in a minute or so. I suppose that they were about the size of golfballs.   Well, apart from the damage to the plants in the garden and a cracked window in the greenhouse, we thought that we had more or less escaped any serious damage. We were wrong. A lot of tiles on the roof were smashed or cracked and our bank balance was not in good shape by the time we had paid the workmen who did the repairs. Even though we had a lot of spare tiles in the greenhouse, the cost of repairing the roof was rather more than we had imagined it would be (serious understatement there, folks). Oh and yes, they could not be bothered to dispose of the rubbish properly and they just left the broken tiles by the garbage bins.

I have read rather a lot of nonsense recently on Facebook, about people coming to Bulgaria who are being advised to stay away from all British expats, as they are all a bunch of crooks and scammers. What a load of garbage! Yes, of course there are some bad apples, I am sure, and I was once told that the man who sold us our apartment in Veliko Tarnovo was wanted by the Police in the UK and was mentioned on Crimestoppers . Then there was that appalling story about a Brit who was posing as a Christian aid worker and abusing children in Bulgaria. But does that mean that the majority of Brits in this country are criminals, on the run from the long arm of the law in the UK? I do not believe it for a minute.     

The garden is not looking too good at the moment. In the middle of the day, temperatures are around 35 C and there does not seem to be any prospect of significant rain.  Yes, we did gather about four kilos of cherries from the trees at the very far corner of the garden and they were yummy.  As for the artichokes, Keith and Lorraine did not eat them after all. By the time we came back from Greece, there was a big flower and the bees were very happy. The tomatoes are coming along were, despite the heat. Yes, some of the leaves on the tomato plants are looking decidedly shrivelled, but the actual fruit (well, yes, tomatoes really are a fruit) are looking pretty good.  As for the lawn, there is more bad new. The tractor mower, my pride and joy, is hors de combat yet again. As there has been so little rain, the soil has dried out and so an old tree root was more exposed than usual. One of the blades on the mower seems to have been damaged and so Garden Max are going to give m...

Yes, we went to Greece, yet again, for our summer hols. Driving from Veliko Tarnovo to Thassos took eight hours, with the Shipka pass the most difficult bit. The sea crossing only took about forty-five minutes.  The Pegasus Hotel was okay, more or less. Our room was fairly small and did not have much of a view, but the pool was nice. Being in Thassos Town, aka Limenias, meant that it was easy to have a wander along the quayside and through the "souk".