Sunday 19th January 2020

It's a very cold, grey January afternoon, and I'm hiding up in the bedroom with Sukey cat listening to the sounds of drilling and gentle hammering coming from the downstairs room where the electricians have begun re-wiring the house. I say gentle hammering because they are currently working on a wall which is held up mainly by rat droppings and luck, so it's a case of tap tap avalanche, tap tap avalanche, as great chunks of crumbly plaster fall from the wall. I imagine the one with the vacuum cleaner is already worried about the toll it's taking on his machine.

Deliberately photographing every wire for future reference

Excitingly, one of them has just said he might be able to plumb my washing machine into the kitchen sink temporarily. That will be awesome as hand-washing or relying on the use of a friend's machine isn't anywhere near as grand as just being able to sling a heap of grubby undies in your own machine whenever you like.

I can't wait for the re-wiring to be done. Once that's out of the way I can quite swiftly start finishing off one or two rooms properly. Imagine that! New windows, cracks hidden under a dollop of plaster and a lick of paint. Ah, bliss.

Whilst I was waiting for the electricians to arrive I got to know another new neighbour. Well, semi neighbour, as it's actually her father who lives here, and she just comes and visits. Boy, has she had some adventures.

Like so many Bulgarians she's worked abroad, mainly in Sweden which she adores by the sounds of it, not least because of their apparently awesome healthcare system, but also in Greece and Britain. The UK trip turned out to be a bit of a disaster for her, though she can laugh about it now.

She went over with a friend and got offered some work at one of those car washing franchises you see in supermarket carparks. Apparently it was run by a Syrian, she says though she isn't sure, a moslem of some kind anyway, and of the five pounds clients were charged for having their cars washed, she got to keep two pounds. The place they were staying at was run by a Bulgarian woman, who had about twenty of them all sleeping on the floor, for which they were being charged £80 a piece per week.

Well, naturally the finances didn't pan out at all, and she ended up not even having the money for a trip back home. So she and her friend managed to sneak onto a train to Paris without a ticket. Once in Paris they managed a similar trip down to Brindisi in Italy, from where they planned to get a boat across to Greece where they had previously been working.

Unbeknownst to her, whilst in Paris her lichna card (the Bulgarian ID card) had fallen from her back pocket, so on arriving in Brindisi she realised she had no ID on her, and therefore no way of crossing the border (at this point I got a bit confused as up till now she seemed to have crossed a few borders unidentified). Anyway, being able to speak some Greek, she explained her situation to a very nice Greek lorry driver who agreed to hide her in the back of the cabin and thereby smuggle her back home to Bulgaria.

Once home she went to the police to report her lost lichna card. The police enquired where she'd lost it, to which she replied she had no idea, not wanting to get caught up inadmitting her escapade across Europe. Thinking that was the end of the matter she was surprised when she got a phone call from the police three days later saying that her lichna card had been handed in, and could she explain how it had made its way to Paris? I don't know how she blagged her way out of that one.

Before she went back to her dad's, she handed me a carrier bag full of make-up and perfume. Souvenirs from Sweden apparently, though maybe it's best I don't get her to divulge the tale of how she acquired them.

My reflection in the bag is the closest I'll ever come to wearing any of this

My days have been much less eventful, but some great progress is being made in the garden areas, mostly on the many gloriously sunny days we've been having. A lot of the wire fences and shrubs etc are totally overgrown with creepers - hops and old man's beard - so I've gradually been clearing them away. I'm hoping that with regular strimming they'll eventually stop putting up new shoots, because they're all over the place and really swamp things if left to grow. Here's a little before...

...and after...

It's all quite dry at the moment so it all got burned nicely on the bonfire.

Another thing I've really been wanting to do ever since moving here was to make some kind of track from the garden up to the top ridge above the house where I walk the dogs. Previously the only way up there was to walk up through the village, thereby setting all the other dogs off barking as we passed their houses, which wouldn't be ideal in the nicer weather if I fancied taking the dogs out very early in the morning (flashbacks to Gostilitsa when the farmer told me not to walk my dogs past his house before 8am as it set his dog off barking which woke the baby).

I'd imagined it would be quite slow progress chopping my way up through the shrubbery, but thought if I just did a few yards each day it would eventually get done. Imagine my delight then, when I got the whole trail cleared in one afternoon! It wasn't nearly as overgrown as I'd imagined due to the countless well trodden wild animal trails criss-crossing the land. In fact, one evening, just as the sun was setting, I spotted quite a large deer making her way into the thickets at the edge of the garden over that way. Here's a view of the trail, which is about half a kilometre long.

The dogs and I have been walking up the trail to the top ridge without disturbing anyone, and even Finlay the cat has joined us a couple of times. Now I plan to expand our walks up there to try and make circular routes. Dr Livingstone eat your heart out!

In between the more fun times, like trail clearing, there's been more rock and slab shifting. The novelty of this wears off after an hour or so, making it much slower progress, but I've managed to clear the alleyway between two of the barns, and stacked quite a lot of the slabs into various heaps.

Yesterday it was lovely and warm again, so I began tidying the end section of the barn where I wash. Like the other sections, it was a mixed heap of old hay, planks and stockings (you'd be amazed at how many pairs of nylons have turned up in the barns!), but it also contained some treasures, including a big sack of newspapers. Why's that treasure? Well I get through quite bit of paper lighting fires, so to have a big new stash is a great thing. The sack they were in all fell to pieces, but as I was putting them into a new one I noticed a bunch of these gems:

Yes, it's the Russian newspaper Pravda from April and May 1988 when Bulgaria was still communist. I've been trying to read some of the articles using Google translate, and this one particularly caught my eye:

It's a list inspiring the reader to be the best kind of citizen:

Long live May 1st - International Workers' Solidarity Day! May the great revolutionary doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin live and develop forever! Workers of the Land of the Soviets! Strengthen the economic power of the socialist Fatherland!

Oooh, I've suddenly come over all red!