Friday 12th June 2020

Most of my work on the property so far has been of the sorting, bagging and chucking variety. Sometimes it feels like the house is a giant Mary Poppins bag, and that no matter how many sacks get filled with rubbish, there are still heaps of junk to get rid of. Not that it's all junk by any means. There's been so much that I can make good use of, things such as materials - wood for construction or burning, storage containers, pipes, even an old sink which looks like it would be ideal for the kitchen. That's on top of all the more personal items left by the previous owners - photos, children's school books, rugs, blankets, little decorative items, kitchenware... the list is endless. But despite salvaging these treasures there's still a lot waiting to be thrown away.

Luckily Gabrovo is pretty well equipped with recycling bins now, so glass, plastic, paper, metal, clothing and shoes are relatively easy to get rid of. My biggest problem has been old building materials and the left overs from construction work, and the remains of eight mattresses from the old metal beds. All through winter they lurked in mounds around the property, messy and stinky!

A fraction of what needs to be disposed of

I'd looked on the council website about disposing of excessive rubbish and it seemed to suggest there was the possibility of hiring a skip. Perfect! Being a chicken when it comes to phoning for things in Bulgarian, I showed the website to a neighbour up the street who speaks English, and he kindly phoned the council to enquire on my behalf. I'd imagined, foolishly, that it would be a case of choosing a skip size, checking for sure what you would be allowed to put in it, and organising delivery. I should know better by now.

From what the lady on the other end told my neighbour, this is the process. First you bag everything up into separate categories - rubble, mattresses, roof tiles etc. Once that's done you then go to one office in Gabrovo and tell them what you want to get rid of. They draw up an agreement which you sign and take along to a different office. This is where you arrange for the skip to be delivered. Once you've then transferred the rubbish to the skip, it's taken to the official dump site where they dispose of it and tell you of any charges to pay on top of the mileage charge for hiring the skip, depending on what items the dump site require payment for. On hearing this I can now fully understand why in Bulgaria stuff is so often just dumped in hedgerows on the edges of villages.

Pesho, who on Sundays is often heard shouting loudly from the bus shelter with a bottle of beer in hand, is always touting for labouring jobs, so I nabbed him in the street one day and arranged for him to come round to start bagging up all the stones etc. Luckily there are a million old sacks here, presumably from animal feed or something, so I got a huge bunch of them out to put the rubble in. Pesho started off working well, and soon a tidy pile of sacks was being stacked up near the double gates, and the area was looking much tidier. Whilst he was doing that, I used one of my new gardening purchases to start clearing the enormous weeds which had been growing up all over the stone path. I love buying new things for the garden (not just because I'm forever putting things down and losing them) and Lidl and Kaufland quite often feature them in their specials lists. The last time, I bought a couple of trowels, another pair of secateurs, and two of these sharp chisely things which jab the weeds out nicely from between paving slabs.

We stopped for a coffee break and then lunch, during which Pesho was able to tell me what all the fruit trees were in the front garden. With a cherry, two pears, an apple, plum and quince, it sounds to me like I won't even need the orchard! Work carried on till about 3 when it started to turn drizzly, so I said we'd stop for the day. That's when the first niggle started.

I hadn't sorted out payment with him and asked if he wanted today's money, to which he said no, vaguely waving his hands around, before asking if I had any bread. Well the bread man was coming the next day, and I did have half a rather stale loaf left which I wasn't planning to eat, so went and got it for him. He then asked if I had any cigarettes. Rather tight lipped I told him no, I didn't smoke. Looking a bit crestfallen he then asked if I had any beer or wine. Sensing my rising temper he swiftly said to take the cost off of his pay. I still thought it was cheeky but found a manky dust covered bottle in the cupboard.

Don't forget you're coming back tomorrow, I said, if you drink all this you won't be able to.

No, no, he said, I'll only drink a bit of it. Like a mug I believed him.

The next day he turned up a bit later than normal and instantly asked if he could have a coffee. I'd been mulling over the question of pay the night before, and had decided to do it on an hourly rate, so if he wanted to waste time then that was his look out. After coffee we started bagging up more stones together, but he didn't seem to be working as swiftly as before, so I found myself constantly prodding him into action, and telling him not to be putting dirt in the bags, just the chunks of rock. I don't think I've worked so hard in a long time as I really wanted to get it finished that day.

The bread man was due so I went out to wait for him in order to buy a loaf. Pesho came and joined me after a while. Fair enough, I thought, he needs to shop as well. Ha! When the bread man came, Pesho asked if I could buy three loaves for him and to once more deduct the amount from his pay. Could he not have mentioned this before and carried on working whilst I was out here?

At break time he went off for a bit in a desperate bid to get someone to give him a cigarette. He returned without any luck and kept bemoaning the fact he hadn't had a cig in ages, or any beer. Frankly he was getting on my nerves, and he didn't help matters when at lunch he asked if he could have a beer with his food. Uh, that would be no!

In the afternoon we went out to the veggie patch where I'd heaped up sacks full of mattress stuffing and chunks of asbestos roofing sheets. I got the wheel barrow out so he could maybe take more items at once, but he started overloading it and spent more time trying to get the barrow upright again than actually shifting stuff. Arrgh, c'mon guy, use some common sense! Finally the job was done and the entrance by the double gates was heaped with all the stuff to dispose of.

I got his money ready at which point he asked if he could have some more wine. I reminded him he'd already had a full bottle off me yesterday. His reasoning was that it was a bank holiday weekend and he'd need a means of celebrating. He then asked if I'd have any friends visiting soon, and if so could they bring some cigarettes and beer over. That was the final straw. It's incredibly difficult, and frustrating, trying to be verbally angry with someone when you don't speak the language fluently, but I think I got the point across that he was being seriously annoying now.

This is actually the second time we've had words. The first occurred not long after I moved in when he banged on the front door in the evening for at least fifteen minutes whilst I was inside in the middle of trying to reassemble a wardrobe. That time I angrily told him if I didn't answer the door within a couple of minutes then obviously I was busy. So far we haven't had a permanent falling out, but maybe it'll be strike three when I actually organise a skip and have to get Pesho in again to load it up. Maybe I'll buy a packet of fags in advance, just in case.

Speaking of which... Pesho isn't the only one who's been suffering from nicotine withdrawal. The old boy over the road has been similarly afflicted though more due to the lock down, as his children haven't been able to come up and see him as often. One day he came over and asked if I would be going to Gabrovo, and if so, could I get him two packets of cigarettes. He gave me the money for them, and the next time I went shopping I bought some for him. No problem. This request happened a couple of times, so I thought I'd be canny and buy a few packs in advance. That way, if he was short, he wouldn't have to wait till I went shopping. The four spare packs have been sitting in the pantry ever since I bought them. Simeon hasn't asked for cigarettes since, no, now it's beer he's short of. I'm tempted to buy a couple of spare bottles to join the cigarettes in the pantry. Ah well, at least I'll be fully stocked the next time I want Pesho to do some work for me.

My immediate neighbours returned the other week after spending the winter in their Gabrovo apartment. They were busy digging over the garden when I spoke to them, and the woman (whose name escapes me) was bemoaning the fact that half her seedlings haven't done anything this year. I'd just finished planting out my tomatoes, and had quite a few to spare, so asked if she would like them. She was very happy to take them, and in exchange brought me some bush runner bean seeds a few days later. Nice!

Whilst I've been waiting for the work to start on the hot water system, I've been using some of the old roof slabs (plochi) to pave the front garden. The plan is for that area to be just flower beds with the stone patio for sitting out on. It will be much easier to maintain than the current mess of dandelions, and should also mean less gnats in summer as they won't have so much damp ground to breed in. I bought a stack of thick weed membrane when Lidl were selling it cheap, and the plan is to put this down first, then use sand to bed the slabs in and then to use smaller rocks to make borders round all the beds. The gaps between the slabs will also just be sand so that any water can still drain away easily. This was the result after a couple of days:

I was pretty impressed with myself! But then came the storms.

We had a day where the entire sky was swamped in dark grey clouds, and thunder and lightning went on all afternoon. At one point I couldn't even count one second between lightning and thunder, so I'm guessing there were a couple of direct hits on the ridge above the house. The rain was torrential and since one of the main roof downspouts drains down onto the porch roof, the combined flow of water was too much and it began lashing over the gutter and straight onto the soil below. That soon became a waterlogged puddle which flowed through my newly placed edging stones and all over the slabs. When I looked later I saw that a lot of the sand had been swept away:

I need to get more creative with the water flow on the patio roof, possibly some kind of pipe with a series of holes to share the flow out over a wider area. Looking at the slabs where it was only normal rain falling on it, the sand seems to have stayed in place, so hopefully if I get the drainpipes sorted then any heavy rainfall won't be an issue in the future. Even with the missing sand, the slabs have stayed in place and aren't wobbly, so that's something at least.

Very excitingly some of the fruit is ripening in the orchard. So far there are lots of cherries and some white mulberries. The cherries I can pick off by hand with the aid of a ladder, but with the mulberries I just spread out a tarp and then tap the branches with a long stick and watch the ripe fruits pour down. I've been stuffing them by the handful; sweet, juicy and delicious! Here's the first of many collections: