So what is the League of Arab States doing about it’s member, Syria???

Syria is a member of the League of Arab States, and I may be the odd man out here, but it seems to me that it’s the Arabs, and there do seem to be quite a lot of them, and not known for being short of a bob or two,  who should be putting a stop to the carnage which is going on in Syria, not the UN, USA, UK or any other non-Arab country, otherwise what is the point of them forming an Arab League.

The organisation has an impressive website at http://www.arableagueonline.org/ which has a section entitled “Situation in Syria” which, though containing several sections is strangely lacking in entries. In fact, despite there being a number of heading dates for News of the situation, the last one containing any copy as of today, is from the 12^th February and the more recent entries would appear to have been removed. Obviously news of small children being bound and slaughtered in an Arab League member state would tend to offend their regular visitor's sensibilities.

There are however numerous e-mail addresses through which views on the organisation can be expressed and I have taken to sending questions as to the total lack of action by the LAS in relation to the appalling situation in Syria. If you feel like doing the same here are a few of the addresses, which you may find rather ironic, as I do. Please feel free to send very pointed multiple e-mails day after day if you have the time, and you can tell them that I said it was alright to do so.

Human Rights Dept.                          humanrights.dept@las.int

Civilization Dialogue Dept.                civildialogue.dept@las.int

Arab Peace & Security Council        psc.dept@las.int

Woman Unit                                    woman.unit@las.int

Family Dept.                                    family.dept@las.int

Complaints  Dept.                            complaint.dept@las.int

Military Affairs Dept.                       military.dept@las.int

Arab Relations Dept.                       arelations.dept@las.int

Disarmament Dept.                         disarmament.dept@las.int

Making the best of things.

  

BBC Radio News - Engelbert Humperdinck failed to win the Eurovision Song Contest.

Facebooking up to the truth. (Sadly I couldn’t think of any humour to inject into this piece.)

The much heralded and increasingly acrimonious launching of the Facebook Empire going public last week seems likely to develop into a really good example of how the mightiest can fall flat on their face when they get greedy. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, makes great play of painting his 100 billion dollar baby as some form of philanthropic miracle which will help bind the world’s population together, make everyone friends with each other and encourage man’s humanity to man. In fact Zuckerberg seems to me to be just another lucky chancer who happened on a bright idea, which he allegedly stole from fellow students at Harvard, had the sense and ability to develop it and most important possibly, the ruthlessness to see off, or pay off the opposition and the ability to promote Facebook’s positive features while drawing a veil over its potential dangers and commercial shortcomings. Philanthropy I fear comes a long way down Mr Z’s list of priorities behind fame and fortune.

Beneath the Mr nice guy public image there is just another very hard headed and ruthless businessman wanting to squeeze every dollar out of the floatation of his internet empire. Surely that is exactly what all those optimistic but naïve short term internet millionaires were doing back when the bubble burst in the nineties and the dot.com empires all came tumbling down around their founder’s and investor’s heads. There is obviously no way that the existing income levels of Facebook can justify the massive valuation which has been put on it, as was the case in the nineties. The prospectus was cleverly constructed using the most optimistic estimates of future earning potential to attract eager buyers, and left the rest to the market’s own greed and optimism, again just as happened in the nineties dot.com boom and bust, but possibly with far more cynical calculations on this occasion. In the first few hours after the launch Zuckerberg and his investors must have already re-couped the bulk of the capital they have seeded the venture with over the past few years, while still retaining their control of the company, and left the eager investors wondering exactly what they have sunk their money into.

It seems to me that the only way Facebook could achieve the sort of income it would need to justify its present totally hypothetical stock market valuation is through generating massive advertising income. But surely to assume this is even possible, let alone probable for them to do, is to ignore the realities of the situation. Internet tools, such as adblocker, which is inevitably just the first of a whole generation of effective advertisement blocking tools on the internet, allow all potential customers for web advertisers to simply block out the unwelcome advertising material which increasingly clutters their screens. Without a good pay-back from their advertising on sites like Facebook the advertisers will just pull out, or refuse to pay so much for the space.

 The only other obvious method for Facebook and other p2p sites to generate large volumes of income would be by stripping out relevant information from their customer’s files which would be useful to companies wanting to target their products to specific markets via their own direct marketing, which surely is already becoming illegal with the introduction of the so called Cookie regulations, already in force in the EU, which outlaw such practices. The recent growth of independent Buy and Sell Groups on Facebook must also be a real worry for Mr Z and his new shareholders, as it would seem almost impossible for them to be easily controlled by the company and even harder for Facebook to profit from them in any significant way. What a shame, and could the increasing realisation of the dangers these looming problems pose for Facebook have been an influence for the long talked of stock market launch of the company to actually get underway before the cracks begin to show? 

Apart from all that heavy business stuff, my own view is that in the fullness of time Facebook will be looked back upon as the tool which did more than any other to isolate millions of people in a virtual world where their friends are no more than a picture on the computer screen and their knowledge of them no more than what their “friend” has chosen to tell them. Poor person to person communicating skills, or for us old fashioned types, not being able to talk to each other, has already been identified as a major problem for young people looking for a job, communicating within the workplace when they have a job or just trying to find a girl or boy friend, or any real live friends for that matter. In an increasingly competitive world the most introvert individuals are being more and more marginalised as they are constantly tempted to live in the non-confrontational virtual world of computer games and person 2 person websites and chat rooms. With over nine hundred million members and growing, the effect Facebook is having on the social development of the juvenile, teen and twenty something generations doesn’t seem to have come into anyone’s calculations so far, but it surely should do and soon.

The social influences of p2p websites is one major concern but by no means the only one. Facebook and its poorer relations are already used extensively by all manner of those with perverse or even deadly tastes to groom their potential victims and meet fellow deviants. You don’t now need to run the risk of running a website, or a seedy shop in Soho to sell your hard porn these days either, when the Facebook friend’s service is there for you to build up an instantly accessible route for like-minded perverts to get together. It is obviously also a fool-proof method for those with a desire to blow themselves up or persuade others to take the quick route to paradise, to converse with each other in superficially innocent terminology, as can drug dealers and all manner of other criminals and low life. Obviously, probably 99.9% of Facebook users use the site for purely innocent social purposes, but it is worth remembering that it isn’t in reality the totally whiter than white communication super highway it is portrayed to be by its founder and his backers, and certainly has a darker side.

You may have gathered I’m no fan of Facebook, though I do confess to having a Facebook page in my own name which I only use to give me access for a page to publicise my local news website, elhovonews.com, and have undoubtedly offended a number of friends and family who have applied to be my friend and who I have completely ignored. Sorry. That in itself shows just how insidious Facebook has become by worming its way into people’s internet world who would rather not have it there but find it hard not to.

(Sadly I couldn’t think of any humour to inject into this piece.)

Rugoff and the art of Ripoff

A few weeks ago I had one of my little tirades about The Turner Prize for tat masquerading as art and Heston Bloominhell and his chums who serve up crap masquerading as gourmet food, both aiming to extract large amounts of money from gullible rich people with no taste. Now I have to tell you that their efforts pale into insignificance when compared with London’s Hayward Gallery which is to hold an exhibition of “Invisible Art” this summer. For the modest admission fee of just £8 visitors will be able to gaze on fifty totally invisible “works of art” which were allegedly created between 1957 and the present day, though possibly hard to prove, and presumably the King’s new clothes won’t be included. The show is designed “to show how the goal of art is to stimulate people's imagination rather than merely present interesting things for them to look at”, says Gallery director Ralph Rugoff, though possibly that should be Ripoff. (This is not a joke, though I agree it does sound like one, just look on Google.)

Well apart from having a very dodgy name, a richly developed sense of humour and an obvious talent for keeping a straight face while taking the piss, Ralph seems to have slipped up badly on this occasion. Had he used his own imagination more creatively, he would surely have assembled at least one hundred pieces of artistic fresh air, including a few old masters and some Victorian hard porn in order to appeal to the widest possible audience of mentally retarded art lovers living in the community. He could then have charged them £16 for the privilege of wandering around his empty premises looking suspiciously at each other, wondering if they are the only prat there who can’t see a sodding thing other than the odd empty plinth or blank canvas.

I can’t help thinking that this is probably a very cunning ploy on Rugoff’s part, whereby the gallery will open each day to remove money from passing short sighted art lovers or those looking for a convenient empty covered space to shelter from the rain which is cheaper than going into Starbucks for a Mocha Frappuccino; then, after closing each day the decorators will move in to give the place a quick lick of Crown Emulsion while it’s completely empty. Nice one Ripoff.

I gather that if this staggeringly inventive method of getting idiots to part with their cash works there are plans to hold a number of other equally inventive artistic events. Sir Harrison Blowwhistle is planning to hold a symphony concert with no instruments, where the audience will sit quietly trying not to nod off, cough or pass wind while the orchestra and their eminent conductor smile sweetly and wave their arms about. Apparently there is already a waiting list for tickets to this event. There will be an operatic performance at Grindbourne where the fat lady will never sing, and the Rolling Stones will put on a concert at Wembley while they are on holiday in Australia. A new play will be put on in the west end where the actors will silently prowl around the stage glaring at the audience as they rustle their sweet bags, whisper to each other and wait for the inevitable mobile phone to ring, and Saint Andrew Lloyd Webber will launch a new production of Joseph and his Amazing Imaginary Dream Coat. Unfortunately at this late date it has proved impossible to make the Eurovision Thong Contest invisible.

The ultimate event to wind up this very silly season will be a mouth-watering event to mark the opening of the latest Bloominheck restaurant in downtown  Staines-upon-Thames, catchily called the “What The Hell is This Duc?” where the entire project development costs will be paid off in one night by serving a lavish buffet of completely invisible food and drink, supervised by non-existant staff, at a tasty £149.99 per head. The cream on the imaginary cake will come from selling the TV rights to the CC TV footage of two hundred mentally challenged diners gorging themselves on thin air and pretending to enjoy it. Would the last one to leave please put the light out and shut the door.

www.elhovonews.com

Stop Press – Queen’s Jubilee Relay gets underway

We are sadly cut off out here from all the pulsing excitement surrounding the impending celebrations for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, which I gather are on the 5^th June. Reception on the radio this morning was a little erratic but I think they were talking about the start of the Queen’s Jubilee Handbag Relay starting from Lands’ End. As far as I could gather this will involve three million carefully chosen individuals  carrying the Jubilee Handbag through every city, town, village and hamlet in the country, finally delivering it into the Queens own hands as she departs on her Jubilee Procession on the 5th. The synthetic diamond encrusted bag, manufactured from genuine simulated leather by the renowned Goufang Handbag Factory in Shenzen Province, China, was financed by a raffle kindly organised by Mr Patel of The Corner Shop, St James Park, W1. (First prize – A Surprise Curry Pack – Brown ticket number 10478.)

Each participant  will be dressed in an original Hardie Amies or Norman Hartnall frock, Freddie Fox hat and obviously wellington boots against the summer drought, and will pass the custom made Jubilee bag from person to person every 300 yards along the hundred thousand mile route. People of every age have been selected to take part, representing all of the two thousand, seven hundred and three religious and ethnic groupings within our wonderful multi-cultural society. Pretty people, ugly people, pretty ugly people, fat people, thin people, even very fat and very thin people, tall and vertically disadvantaged people, hairy people, follicley challenged people, gays, lesbians, Cliff Richards, all life will be there. In fact such an inclusive gathering that it is claimed they have actually found a pure bred English bi-sexual of average age, height and weight, who is even a practising member of the Church of England to take part. Apparently Ladbrooks are giving 3 to 1 on them getting lost and buggering up the whole relay as they won’t know which way to turn. (The old ones are obviously not always the best).

Hopefully this won’t happen as we would hate anything to mar the celebration of sixty years of outstanding service to our and her country by the Queen, and we hope she has a wonderful day.

Losing the will to live, again

Sometimes we all tend to lose the will to live, which out here frequently results from an encounter with the creaking Bulgarian bureaucratic machine. This is where all those who still yearn for the wonderful days of Communist iron fist control over all aspects of everyday life still lurk behind dusty and cluttered desks and work as slowly and un-cooperatively as possible to make the rest of the population’s life a misery. “Computer says no” may be a joke in Little England but it’s frequently the norm out here.

We had to form a Bulgarian limited company three years ago in order to buy our houses out here, though now you can buy property in your own name, but our company was the reason we spent much of last Wednesday in Yambol, achieving very little very slowly. The most bizarre regulation when forming a Bulgarian Limited Company is that you have to open a company bank account and deposit five thousand Levas into it before the company registration is accepted, immediately after which you can draw it all out again. This operation is normally done by the solicitors forming the company for you as part of the package, depositing and withdrawing their own money within 24 hours, so a totally meaningless procedure reflecting nothing on your own abilities to finance the company. In our case, and apparently not an un-common practice among well connected solicitors when the petty cash float is running  low, only three thousand five hundred Leva was deposited, and despite the company having been in existence for three years now, our new accountants said we needed to deposit the fifteen hundred balance to keep the books straight. Sorry about this mind bogglingly boring detail, but it was why we found ourselves in Yambol, and as we also needed to change the address of our registered office as well, we had decided the process would be worthwhile and to hell with the bureaucratic risks. Will we never learn?

Jan and I got to Dyliana’s office, she being our friend and interpreter, before ten o-clock, expecting the paperwork to be ready, which it wasn’t, and sat watching her struggle womanfully to alter all the company documentation via the Bulgarian Company Registration Office website to cover what we had naively thought would be straight forward and simple operations to undertake. While at it she encountered considerable opposition from her computer software which objected quite forcefully to dealing with documentation in dual English and Bulgarian languages, and she ended up cutting up bits of printouts with scissors and sticking them together to achieve her ends. In fact by gamely persisting against the odds we were able to leave the office after a mere two and a half hours and head for the Post Bank to deposit the fifteen hundred Leva into the Company account, only to find that the account  had been frozen as it hadn’t been used for over six months.  

When I referred to the bureaucracy here I’d hate you to think that it just exists within central and local government departments as it is far more pervasive than that and still infects almost all areas of the economy, none more so that the banking system, and among them Post Bank  tend to proudly lead the way. They have a well deserved reputation for poor and unfriendly customer service, and appear to have achieved an almost one hundred percent record in recruiting staff who are genetically modified to prevent them smiling, not to mention getting their arses into gear. You would think that un-freezing an account would be a simple enough process in these computerised times, and possibly with an operator able to type proficiently and to see clearly through her glasses we would have been in and out in something less than the three quarters of an hour it took. As it was, the middle aged lady attending to us appeared to have achieved few typing skills during her working life and obviously preferred to view life through a curtain of dust as she ponderously peered at our paperwork. Luckily the weather was dry as we then covered the few hundred yards to another bank which is designated as the repository for fees which have to be paid to the Government Registration Office. For some reason they manage to totally buck the general trend and processed the forms and took the thirty two Leva fees, with a smile, within minutes and I found myself feeling quite light headed as we walked the few yards down the road to our final destination where the various papers we had accumulated on our leisurely travels have to be submitted.

Needless to say this process demanded the filling in of another multiple paged form and I made the last of the numerous signatures I had appended during our protracted travels. We were then able to proceed into the office and submit the thick sheaf of papers which had now built up, only to be told that a further fee of sixty Levas would need to be paid at the bank up the road or the payment of the balance of the five thousand Leva wouldn’t be accepted onto the records, which was the main reason for our lengthy endeavours. Up until this point we had all managed to jolly each other along and keep ourselves quite cheerful, but I think this was the final straw for us all, and we agreed that they could do their worst, but not another cent was going their way, and left the papers to their fate with those in higher authority.

Two days later we rolled up to the Elhovo branch of Post Bank to retrieve the fifteen hundred Levas, and keeping yet another long story as short as possible, we queued for twenty minutes, were then told, without a smile, that nothing could be drawn out without the company stamp being available, which was still with Dyliana in Yambol,  we rang Dyliana, she found someone coming to Elhovo later in the day, we return home, we go back to Elhovo, the company stamp is delivered, we go back into the Bank, we queue, I am shocked at various charges which have been levied on a frozen and un-used account, draw out all that is left in the account which is only just over the 1500 we paid in a couple of days ago, close the account with a flourish, which involves appending five signatures on a single  A5 sheet of paper, and paying some form of tax, and leave, muttering darkly. We then get another call from Dyliana who gives us the silver lining behind the never ending cloud as she has checked the records on the Register of Companies and everything was accepted without the extra sixty Lev fee being paid.

Those of you who were paying attention at the beginning of this sorry tale and haven’t given up half way through may be wondering why we don’t just dump the company now that you can purchase property here as individuals. The reason is that it would cost us around a thousand Levas to do it, and judging from this week’s experience would take several years off our lives and run the risk of us both ending up in a home for the bewildered.

Obviously not Obvious to everyone

We’ve all met the odd Damien’s and Della’s in our lives who couldn’t organise the proverbial piss up in a micro-brewery, but out here in Bulgaria one is sometimes tempted to believe that they form a considerable proportion of the population. We are probably yet again looking at the residual effects of years of staggeringly inefficient Communist administration of the minutia of everyday life here, usually producing dire results but no one was allowed to criticise and anyone using their own initiative was regarded as an enemy of the State. As a result it’s well nigh impossible to go through everyday life here without encountering the lack of ability among many of the Bulgarian and Roma population to sort out life’s little challenges effectively or in deed efficiently as they seem to lack the ability to make even minor decisions quickly, if at all.

At the bottom end of the scale you have the situation where shops stock just one example of items normally sold in two’s, three’s or more to which you may say “Fair enough, just order what you want”, but frequently no such ordering facility exists, and to try and suggest such a radical procedure is likely to engender shock and dis-belief from the suspicious shopkeeper. There is an equal lack of organisational skills among the general public as we noticed last week at the local supermarket where there is usually a man in attendance who picks up the baskets from the till area and returns them to the stack for new customers to take. When we got to the tills the man had obviously popped off for a natural break and the access to the tills was almost blocked with baskets abandoned all over the floor or just thrown on top of each other after the contents had been transferred onto the belt. Queuing customers climbed over them or tried to kick them out of their way and into someone else’s path rather than make any effort to bring order to the chaos. We had wondered why the man, who I believe is the shop manager, would spend his days at such a thankless task but we now understand that it is essential work lest the flow of customers grinds to a complete halt among a tangled mass of discarded and damaged shopping baskets and seriously injured shoppers.

A perfect example of un-coordinated thinking and forethought at a higher level occurred last weekend when our village held its annual Village Festival on the Saturday. There are 22 villages in the Elhovo Municipality, and during the spring, summer and early autumn months they all hold such festivities at which there are wrestling competitions, clay pigeon shooting contests, music and dancing entertainments in the evening and during the day stalls selling all the usual tat, trivia, food and confectionary to the residents and visitors. These events are organised by the village Mayors who all attend regular meetings in Elhovo to be updated on news from the Municipal Council meetings and sort out any other business which needs dealing with regarding life within the villages they hold sway over. Personally I would have thought that someone among those present at these meetings would have suggested that it would be a jolly bright idea if they all got together and organised things so that each of the 22 villages held their Festival on a different Saturday or Sunday during the 26 week long season. This would ensure that they all got a good turnout of wrestlers, shooters, stall holders etc. and produce the best possible chance of a successful do, but obviously the simple logic of such a system is lost on Bulgaria’s local politicians. A couple of weeks ago there were three such events held on the same weekend and another three this last Saturday, our own being one of them.

Our house is in the middle of the village and last year a number of stallholders arrived to grab their pitch on the Friday evening, and by nine on Saturday morning you were able to buy anything from candyfloss to a flick knife from the various traders plying their wears alongside the roads, should you feel the urge. This last Friday evening we were rather surprised to see that just a single doughnut vendor had placed his small stall right on the corner across the road from us and blocking the bus stop. By nine o-clock on the Saturday morning, and indeed by nine o-clock in the evening the doughnut seller still reigned supreme, though I have to say he seemed to have a very successful day, being the only consolation available to those who had arrived with their children, expecting a more varied selection of purchases on offer.

There was also no sign of the expected wrestling and clay pigeon shooting during the day, and in fact the only things which did take place were an elaborate folk dancing and singing concert on the Friday evening which sadly was poorly attended as few people knew it was going to be on, and another concert of what we are assured was music on the Saturday night, but which to our obviously un-tutored ears sounded more like the ritual slaughter of the entire village population of farm animals, followed by a knees up in the village hall. Apparently our village expat Queen Bee did know what was going on beforehand but somehow omitted to pass the news on to us other Brits that we were all welcome to attend the party, so that she was the only one to show up, despite her hating parties, but re-enforcing her hard worked for reputation as being the only old queen in the village.

My initial conclusion that this year’s event had been so lack lustre because of the other two villages also having their festivals and cornering the market in wrestlers, shooters and tat vendors was in fact wide of the mark. The real reason was apparently that our Mayor, Pleven, who’s a damn nice chap generally, got in a huff with the villagers who said he spent too much on prizes for the wrestlers last year and not enough on entertainment, so he cancelled everything else and just had the folk music and Arabic wailers instead.

A Man of Many Legs and Balls

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research which is one of those “Think Tanks”, has after countless hours of concentrated thought, come up with the brilliant conclusion that the high unemployment figures in the UK, expected to near 9% by the end of 2012, are likely to damage the long term prospects for the UK economy. As the average unemployment figures for the 17 Euro Zone countries are at present nearing 11%, the 27 EU countries at 10.2% and the US on 8.2% it looks like half the developed world is also in a similar sinking craft. Personally I wouldn’t think that it takes a great mind to come up with the idea that high unemployment is bad for the economy of any county, so we must all hope that the deep and incisive thinkers at NIESR, as they are so catchily referred to, stop coming up with the bloody obvious and bend their enormous reserves of grey matter to the problem of how to solve the dilemma they have so helpfully identified and publicised.

In the UK I’m relieved to see that the days of the penny pinching Coalition Government are now strictly numbered after the recent Local Government Elections, and their ridiculous policies of trying to bring in austerity measures to pay off the enormous debts left by the outstanding Blair and Brown administrations will soon grind to a halt as the Nearly New Old Labour Party bandwagon grinds into action. It was heartening to see the obvious delight on the usually blank and seemingly comatose features of their dynamic young leader, Mr Edward Millipede, as he hailed the return of his party to the forefront of British politics with what came reasonably close to enthusiasm. Doubtless his colleague Mr Edward Balls-Up, who was chief advisor to Chancellor Prudence, ”I’m keeping my eye on it,” Brown during his years of creative accounting at the Exchequer, is at this very moment working out ways of borrowing even more money to “stimulate” the UK economy and stave off the final day of reckoning for another year or two. Perhaps their election slogan to get the UK public behind them could be “Vote Labour and Get Exactly What you Deserve again” or possibly “Millipede has the Legs for the job with Balls behind him”.

I have a feeling that Balls-Up has high hopes of getting his own blood stained hands on the leadership of New Old Labour, once sufficient time has passed for everyone to forget who ran up all the debts which now need paying off in the first place, and the totally forgettable Millipede can decently be pushed back under the floorboards from whence he emerged blinking onto centre stage. Should that happen I’m sure there will be no need for any Think Tank to come up with lots of catchy Balls-Up slogans.

Well, what a day!

Culture vultures will no doubt have been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the short list for this year’s £25,000 Turner Prize which has been announced today, and will now be earnestly discussing the relative merits of the selected “works of art”. Having been awarded now for twenty eight years, I can’t honestly say that I could describe many, if any of the 112 pieces selected over the years as art by my obviously prosaic and un-informed standards, though if there are people around who want to invest in such things then very good luck to those who knock them out. What I find curious is how the news media cover the entire event with such enthusiasm, as if it has some form of relevance to the general public.

Dare one suggest that the entire thing is promoted as some form of subtle joke by the papers, with those within the inner circle of the art world glitterati smug in their sure knowledge that the bizarre exhibits selected are indeed deeply thought out expressions of the artist’s unique view of life in the modern world. Meanwhile, the remaining 99.9% of the un-informed and ignorant hoy polloi marvel at the nerve of anyone describing such a load of crap as art and putting it on public show. Hard to imagine that there would be any chance of finding groups of young piss-head binge drinkers down at the Bed and Lettuce this evening indulging in animated discussion of which product of an over-worked and under inspired artistic imagination will scoop the prize this year, prior to falling in the gutter and showing their nickers to the world.

And on this same day I read the equally hot news that ace slow food salesman and demented chef to the chattering classes, Heston Blumenthal has two of his eateries in Restaurant Magazine’s list of the “best places in the world to eat”, coming in at number nine and unlucky for some, thirteen. Even more riveting to any of you impoverished gourmets out there will be the following piece taken from today’s Independent article on the subject, (where else?)  :-

“It is René Redzepi, however, who last night won the ultimate chef's hat-trick as his Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, secured Restaurant Magazine's coveted "world's best" title for the third year running. A few lucky London diners will have a chance to sample the work of his "New Nordic" cuisine – such as shallow-fried reindeer moss and live shrimps – when a pop-up Noma opens briefly at Claridge's hotel during the Olympics. They will need to splash out £195 a head for the five-course menu.”

(I can’t help thinking the R.S.P.C.A. will have something to say about the live shrimps!)

Thankfully I live in Bulgaria and having failed to be selected to represent the country in Behaving Pretentiously at the impending London Fringe Eating Olympics, I will have no opportunity to splash out on what I’m quite sure will prove to be a totally un-forgettable meal.

Let’s face it, surely this is the world of people who are so self-centred and simple minded that they actually live in the fantasy fairy-tail world of “The King’s New Clothes” where they convince themselves that if something is called art it actually is art, even if it is a smelly un-made bed. Here we have people with much much more money than sense, and even less aesthetic taste, who are painlessly relieved of their frequently ill-gotten and un-taxed wealth in return for worthless pieces of old tat, ranging from video installations to portions of preserved dead farm animals, which no doubt Heston would have grabbed and cooked in dry ice with a mummified tortoise on top if he’d been given the chance. These people will order something usually regarded by normal people as totally in-edible because they have been told the venue it’s being served in is where they will find the best Chef producing some of the best food in the world, then rave about how delicious it was before a dignified rush to the toilet to throw up.

One can only take ones hat off to people who are able to come up with these brilliant ploys to relieve such pathetic individuals of their un-deserved wealth, but I really can’t see why the British press wastes it’s time patronising the vast majority of us ordinary mortals by reporting on it as if it was actually worthy of any note.

By the by, I gather there’s a stunning exhibition of hedgehog installation art at Saint Tiggywinkles on Bank Holiday Monday, followed by Yorkshire Puddings filled with live frogs down the road at the Fatty Duck Café.

Art Review – I positively prickled with anticipation.

Restaurant Magazine -.We recommend you jump at the chance. 

What are those blue remembered hills?

I’ve always felt very lucky to be part of the generation born in England during the nineteen forties, both because we have lived through the most rapidly changing period in human history, and as we all know, God is an Englishman. We have progressed from big living rooms with a valve radios on the sideboard too sixty inch plasma T.V’s taking up the entire living room wall in a modern mini-home, from Bakelite phones with dials on them too iPhones with God knows what on them and Eamon Andrews and What’s My Line to Simon Cowell and X Factor, so obviously not all progress is for the better, but certainly little has stayed the same. I suppose most progress has been for the better but as the decades have passed, the rate of change has become faster and faster, and as I near my three score years and ten I can’t help thinking how nice it would be to stop the world, get off and go back to a time when life was more relaxed. Wouldn’t it be nice to leave the younger generations here in 2012, to crave for the very latest computerised gadget, which will be yesterday’s latest gadget by tomorrow, and just get away from it all? I’m not fantasising here about being able to regress back to being thirty or forty years old again, as I doubt the bladder would stand up to that, but of using that wonder of literary invention, the Time Machine, so that a seventy year old from 2012 could spend their retirement years re-living the pleasures of the simpler and more relaxed joys of the sixties, seventies or eighties.

Just imagine the pleasure of being able to buy a pint of Best Bitter for a shilling, that’s five pence by the way, a packet of fags for not much more and a gallon of petrol for four and sixpence. Then you could shuffle along to a 60’s Beetle’s concert and be surrounded by thousands of crazed, screaming pubescent girls and unable to hear a note of the music even with your deaf-aid turn full on, then break down in the Mk 1 Cortina on the way home. Or how about a lazy night in watching Dr. Kildaire or The Flintstones on the twenty inch black and white telly, with a bottle of Blue Nun alongside to dull the senses. What fun we had? Then of course in the late sixties you would have the pure decadence of Flower Power to enjoy, though I imagine a seventy year old man rolling up to a psychedelic rock concert could prove a little problematic. With his gut hanging over the top of his tattered jeans, flowered waistcoat totally failing to conceal the man boobs and a bandanna holding down what remains of his hair causing some amusement among the younger patrons. Then of course, having snatched a puff on a passing joint, he could well fall into the temptation of ogling the scantily clad nymphets who attended such drug-fests, which could well result in being exposed as a dirty old perv and being marched off to the local nick for a taste of sixties police brutality. O.K. so possibly not such a bright idea and it would be best to give the sixties a miss and stop off at the seventies instead.

As I recall the seventies started off with Glam Rock, lots of miner’s strikes, Ted He-He-Heath and the three day week, and progressed to Punk Rock and the winter of discontent in 1979, so perhaps being viewed as a dirty old perv in the sixties would have been more enjoyable. Hard to believe looking at those few examples how some people look back on the seventies as halcyon days, but then the mind tends to wipe out unpleasant memories such as Afghan jackets, platform shoes, quiffs, flares and body piercing, and I doubt I could face a second time around of that selection of bad taste, and indeed why would one want to? Which leaves us with the eighties.

Personally I thought Maggie did far more good for the UK than bad, though she was largely responsible for producing Yuppies which is hard to forgive her for, as apart from being generally unpleasant greedy and selfish little gits, they and their “Loads a Money” descendants were, over the next two decades responsible for getting us all into the economic mess we now find ourselves in.

It was also the decade when the seeds of the modern computerised and de-humanised life style most people are forced to lead now were sown. It saw the birth of the World Wide Web which despite all its’ many advantages, such as being able to use Doctor Google to diagnose your indigestion as cancer of the pancreas, establish who has a bigger, or for that matter smaller one than you have, and e-mail someone in Bahrain letting them know instantly that it’s raining in Blackpool, does also have its share of mega drawbacks. By giving the platform for Facebook to operate, or should that be Facelessbook and it’s like, as there is absolutely no way of knowing exactly who you are communicating with unless they happen to be someone you know face to face, which is increasingly unlikely, www. has made it possible for fraudsters and perverts to stalk their prey on the internet virtually unhindered and terrorists and drug runners to communicate seemingly innocently with each other with very little chance of discovery by the forces of law and order.  

The eighties also saw the birth of the Brick Age mobile phone which has developed into the greatest curse of modern times, being the tool which enslaves employees to their ever more demanding masters, husbands and wives to their ever more demanding lovers, encourages children to communicate with each other across the school yard using un-intelligible text-speak rather than actually talking to each other, and allows the truly ignorant and selfish in society to disrupt everything from theatre performances to a nice funeral with a rousing electronic jingle.

Obviously, on an even cursory examination my bright idea of trying to live out a peaceful retirement in a by-gone age is as un-realistic as the Time Machine I’d need to be able to do it. As Will said, “what’s done is done” and the pleasure of the past comes from the un-consciously censored, and often rather inaccurate memories which we store up in our minds, and all my discontent with present times is summed up in the rather nice quote, “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” Wish I’d said that.

If you are feeling in a literary mood I’ll even add one of my favourite poems by A E Houseman which sums the problem up so nicely.

Into my heart on air that kills         

 From yon far country blows:        

What are those blue remembered hills, 

 What spires, what farms are those?       

That is the land of lost content,    

I see it shining plain,          

The happy highways where I went         

 And cannot come again.

A busy weekend, by our standards anyway

This is the last of my regular Sunday pieces, but you’re not getting rid of me that easily. In future I shall post blog entries as and when I come up with something I want to say, so who knows, there could be even more of it to plough through if the fancy takes you.

Well, what a busy weekend in sleeping Elhovo with the re-vamped Shirley’s Bar opening on Friday, a Wake on Saturday and the Spring Festival which should have been on two weeks ago finally getting off the ground today. Shirley’s Bar, one of only three serving English food in the area shut down six months ago, and has since then been given a complete renovation and make-over by Nik and Ellen who have just reopened it as, wait for it, Nik’s Bar, and being enterprising people they didn’t even pay some prat at an advertising agency to come up with the catchy name. With a new logo incorporating the Union Jack and a Bulldog it was entirely appropriate that they should choose to serve the English national dish on their opening bash, so we all sat down to a Curry evening, and with everyone in the room knowing everyone else it was a very sociable and enjoyable start to what will hopefully be a successful venture for them.

Being a strictly pre-booked private party type function to get things going, the occasional passing Bulgarian villager who bumbled in looking for a beer and plate of roast pig’s ear had to be tactfully asked to leave, hopefully to return another day. Such are the economics of running a village bar out here, to say nothing of the legal requirements of their licence, that they will need to learn the art of catering for the needs of both expats and natives within quite a small bar area if they are to make the business a success, so the coming weeks will no doubt prove to be something of interesting learning curve for the couple. Let’s be honest there are some quite fundamental differences in what your average retired couple from Hemel Hempstead are looking for when they venture out for a quiet evenings dinner and what a group of Bulgarian farm workers, “fresh” from the hay or harvest field are after at the end of a long working day in the hot sun. They don’t dress the same way, eat the same things, drink the same things or even speak the same language, and certainly not at the same volume levels, to say nothing of them not smelling the same, one having showered before they came out and the others desperately needing to shower when they get home. Should be an interesting and possibly aromatic summer.

We sat with a couple of friends and I was pleased to hear that she had visited this blog on occasions, but was rather annoyed when she said that she hadn’t realised I was such an angry old man. Apart from the fact that I have always done my very best for many years now to make sure everyone knows when and why something makes me angry, which as you may have guessed is quite often, what’s with the “old”. It’s enough to make anyone angry!

The wake on Saturday was for Sue who died very suddenly a few weeks ago and as wakes go it was a very pleasant, well attended and cheerful gathering which I’m sure she would have enjoyed had she been able to be there, though she probably wouldn’t have recognised her husband who had made the effort to wear a shirt and tie for the first time in many years. The event ended with a crashing thunderstorm descending on the village which hopefully wasn’t Sue sending some message of foreboding from beyond the grave, or in her case urn.

The Spring Festival in General Inzovo which should have taken place a couple of weeks ago finally got going earlier today in wall to wall sunshine, and was again a colourful and very enjoyable event which we were pleased to see was attended by many more expats than last year. Could that have been something to do with it having been advertised on elhovonews.com, or because the organisers grafting on a car boot sale to the proceedings this year or am I being a mite cynical in thinking that the Brits do like to root out a bargain while experiencing some folk culture  in the background. No, I think that’s probably the truth.

Some pictures of the event which I thought you may like. More on elhovonews.com

Hang Ups, Hold Ups, Hopeless Tasks and Hard Hats

Most of you celebrated Easter last weekend, all off out and about doing whatever turned you on no doubt, and who knows some of you may even have gone to church, but it is Easter here in Bulgaria this weekend. Can anyone tell me who Good Friday is so good for by the way? Surely not the Main Man, as, if all is to be believed it was surely a really bad day as far as he was concerned, and enough to make anyone cross, so what is so good about it? As a child and teenager in the forties and fifties I well remember Good Friday as being the one day of the year most people dreaded, when there was no entertainment of any kind available and everyone was expected to spend the day being suitably miserable, which in the case of drinkers was quite easy as the pubs were all shut. Now you all go out on Good Friday and spend too much in the now open shops, go binge drinking and feel miserable a few weeks later when the CC bills arrive.

My main memory of the day as a child is of my Uncle coming to the farm after attending a four hour service at the local church, hungrily puffing away at consecutive Senior Service coffin nails and downing a few restorative bottles of beer. He was a big, noisy and self-important man with black hair and a ginger moustache, and was one of those sad soles, though certainly far from unique, who had attained a wartime commission and always insisted on being addressed as “Major” until the day he died. He was also the person who to this day I still remember as the personification of the true hypocrite, being a senior member of the Free Masons Mafia, an enthusiastic member of the church choir and confidante of the fat Vicar, whilst seeing to the extra-marital needs of the Landlady of the pub which he lodged at while her hapless husband toiled away in the local slaughterhouse.

Getting back to Easter being on different weekends, apparently the Catholics, Anglicans and so on have a different way of calculating when Easter falls each year from the Eastern Orthodox Churches, so last year they chose the same weekend but this year they are a week apart. Typical really that the two biggest Christian groupings on Earth can’t even agree on the day Jesus met his maker, and yet another small example of how religion is the world’s most divisive influence when surely it should be a force for peace, unity, tolerance and cooperation. If you don’t agree with that statement it’s worth looking at a list of all the wars which have taken place over the past thousand years. There are literally hundreds of them, so try and pick out the ones where the religious beliefs of the combatants had no relevance to the reasons for the combat. (Note – possibly worth working on as the basis of a party game?) As a devout Atheist I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a group of my fellow non-believers gathering together and beating the living daylights out of a group of miscellaneous God Botherers', so why do those who do have a faith have to be so bloody minded and intolerant of others who happen to have an alternative faith?

Hard to believe I think, but there are apparently around eighty different religions being practiced around the world at present, presumably most of which have their own version of God. As far as I can see, if you are hoping to meet your maker when you shuffle off, the odds against picking the right God are even worse than picking the winner of yesterday’s Grand National. Now is that really worth going around killing people for?

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I see that the two main UK Teacher’s Unions have spent a pleasant UK Easter by the sea, setting their pupils a fine example by calling for strike action to back up their refusal to accept any alterations to their regional pay scales and pension rights, and their opposition to the government's academies and free school programme in England. It’s good to know that these intelligent and public spirited individuals are prepared to set themselves up as such a fine example to others regarding the belt tightening measures which are needed from the entire British population to get the country’s finances back in order after the shambles their mate Tony “I’m a straight sort of a Guy” Blair, and his chum Prudence “No more boom or bust” Brown left it in.

                                               

NUT leader Christine Blower, (No Comment), actually said when interviewed on the subject, that they would make every effort to ensure that the strikes do not disrupt pupil’s exams. Presumably some kind soul will point out the bloody obvious to the stupid c.c.convener, that the only way to achieve that will be by not having any strikes until after the exams are over. No doubt the fact that the strikes wouldn’t really have much impact at all then would come as a bit of a blow to er.?

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I had to smile when the British Government came up with the idea of enabling GCHQ to monitor everyone’s e-mails, whilst admitting that from a practical point of view, they wouldn’t actually be reading any of them unless they suspect the sender of breaking the law. Surely unless you are a total moron you are unlikely to be using an e-mail address such as fred.blagger@criminals.con or blowmyselfup@virgin.co.afg to communicate with your equally stupid and criminally minded friends, when if you care to spend an hour or two in an internet café one afternoon you could open up dozens of totally innocuous e-mail addresses for nothing. If you only use each of them once to make your arrangements for the next attempt to nick the FA Cup, or contacting school leavers interested in Government sponsored I.E.D assembly apprenticeships I can’t see how anyone could possibly monitor them. If anyone is interested I am fully prepared to offer consultancy services in “spotting the bloody obvious loophole” to anyone who feels threatened by the proposed Government action.

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Did you hear that some M.P’s have suggested that the UK Health and Safety Police, who spend their worthy and careful lives trying to prevent ordinary people enjoying themselves taking part in life threatening pursuits, could be being over-zealous in implementing the law. Come on folks, let’s face it, the irresponsible days of letting children indulge in such hazardous pursuits as playing with each other, in the nicest possible way of course, or using deadly contraptions such as swings, bicycles or conkers are thankfully long gone. As for grown-ups, who surely should know better, thinking that they should be free to watch a cricket match without wearing a hard hat, or even walk by the sea without having a life jacket on, well I ask you? They will quickly learn their folly when they face the full force of the Total Prevention of Any Form of Risk in Everyday Life legislation which I gather will be brought before Parliament as soon as a safe way of doing it can be found.

I also hear that there are major problems in the UK with tracing illegal immigrants who have finished their prison sentences for crimes they committed whilst they were in the country illegally and who should have been deported back to where they came from before they had time to commit a crime but who couldn’t be traced until of course they committed a crime at which time they were sent to prison at the UK tax payer’s expense and then let back out into the community rather than being deported as soon as their prison sentence came to an end by the lunatics who seem to be running the mad house which is known as the UK Border Agency.

However, trying to look at things positively, it does occur to me that we have an opportunity here to kill two birds with one stone, provided needless to say that we are wearing goggles and protective gloves and not infringing the avian rights of the two doomed birds. If the new Risk Prevention act made it compulsory for everyone in the country over five years of age to wear an official Government issue, serial numbered hard hat at all times when in public places, the problem would be quickly and very safely solved. All of those in the country illegally would then stand out like a sore thumb, which incidentally they wouldn’t have got had they been wearing protective gloves. They could then be instantly apprehended and put in safe keeping, preferably in bubble wrap to prevent accidental damage in custody, thus giving unnecessary ammunition to the Cheri Blair Human Rights brigade, and shipped back from whence they came pretty dam quick, and I commend my motion to the House. 

Festival? What Festival?

Last year we were lucky enough to hear about an annual Spring Festival featuring folk singers and performers from all over the country and abroad being held in a village about 30 Km away from here a couple of days before it was held. You may well say, ‘what on earth would be the point of hearing about it a couple of days after it was held’ which is certainly true, but which is also frequently the case here in Bulgaria. Sometimes it does seem that there is a firm policy of keeping all news of forthcoming events in this area as a closely guarded secret until it’s over and done with. I can’t even claim that this is some devious way the locals use to deprive us expats who are too dim or reluctant to learn the language, and unable to read posters and news items proclaiming up and coming events, of our simple pleasures. The fact is that most of the Bulgarians you speak to are equally ignorant of what’s about to go on around them, and equally likely to miss out on all the fun, should there be any involved

So this year I did go to some trouble to investigate when the annual Spring Festival in General Inzovo would be held as we did enjoy it last year, and wanted to go again, to say nothing of wanting to publicise it on the elhovonews.com site. A couple of phone calls to ‘in the know’ Bulgarian friends not only produced no information at all, but they also seemed completely un-aware of the existence of any such annual happening on their doorstep. Eventually Google came to the rescue during last week when two well-known Bulgarian national news sites contained the information that the festival, which apparently is of international importance, would be held today, the 8^th April.

The information was duly placed on my website, better late than never, noting how well worth a visit the event would be and highly recommending it to site visitors; a friend was invited to join us, with promises of a really good day out, and we all set forth in bright sunshine this morning, leaving quite early to avoid the expected crowds. Much of the road to General Inzovo is of the ‘long neglected’ variety, and rather than having a lot of potholes in the road is best described as having a little road among the potholes, so after a slow and cautious journey we pulled up outside the village park which is the venue for the Festival. Admittedly there is a reasonably long walk through the park to get to the actual site of the festivities, and we were quite early, but the complete lack of any other vehicles or people in site, combined with the complete absence of the usual tat and fast yuck stalls which should have been there to greet us left us in no doubt that there had been a rather serious cock up on the correct date for the event front.

Determined to salvage something from the debris, we took the pleasant stroll through the park to the bar at the far end, around which we had originally anticipated finding hoards of colourfully dressed peasant vocalists, intent on singing the vintage lace undergarments off each other, fiddlers doing what fiddlers do best, jolly red faced bag-pipers puffing away at each other, and stalls selling everything from thongs to flick knives.

Instead we found a few aged locals muttering over small cups of lethally strong coffee and a couple of expat friends who live in the village just down the road from General Inzovo digging into all day English breakfasts. We ordered some less lethal coffees and started to make vague enquiries about the likely date of this year’s Spring Festival, saying that we had enjoyed last year’s event so much that we would like to attend this year’s festivities. To be honest there seemed little point in muddying the waters with talk of getting dates wrong at this point, or indeed running the risk of people wondering what sort of prat they have running their local news site, without being given the chance of laying the blame on far more important internet prats than me.

Enquiries of the villagers at neighbouring tables produced little sign of interest and even less information, but the waiter proved more knowledgeable and confidently assured us that it will all take place in two weeks-time on the 22^nd April. He stolidly stuck to his guns on the date despite my quite strenuous efforts to discredit his information and undermine his self-confidence, so I have accepted his word for it and placed amended information up on the website, along with apologies for misleading people with past miss-information. I have also placed a disclaimer as to the guaranteed accuracy of any information published in readiness for the next f**k-up.

As we finished our coffees, and by luck were just about to leave, three friends from our own village rolled up asking “why no festival as advertised”. A Gallic shrug and “well, this is Bulgaria for heaven’s sake” seemed the best response before we beat a rather hasty but I think dignified exit. By luck, on our way back we encountered more friends on their way to the non-existent festival and were able to stop them and impart the up-dated information before they wasted any more expensive fuel. The whole thing reminded of the often said WAWA when cock ups, frequently of far greater proportions, occurred when I lived in Nigeria, which anyone who has lived in the region will know stands for West Africa Wins Again.

Stress, Water Shortages and Non-Celebrities - Sounds Like Fun!

We listen to Radio York in the early mornings, as it seems to play the sort of music that we enjoy, and it provides a good alternative to the humourless and rather tedious style of Vanessa Feltz on Radio 2, but let’s not dwell on that or I may be prosecuted for publishing a racist blog, my life. Any road up, this week on the local news items they have been going on and on about schools in North Yorkshire not having enough money after recent Government cut’s, to provide trained councillors on hand to administer support for their emotionally needy pupils. Had we the time to listen to all the numerous local radio stations available in the UK I imagine that we would eventually hear many equally heart rending stories of a nation’s suffering juveniles being similarly deprived. Worried, sorry that should surely be stressed, by such problems as approaching exams, troubled personal relationships, peer pressure, out of date mobile phones, last season’s trainers, pregnant fourteen year old girlfriends and so on, the poor little mites are apparently finding it impossible to cope. Bless!

Head Teachers are obviously at their wits end as to what to do about this growing crisis of a generation facing problems apparently never before experienced by children as they grow up, and are probably finding themselves even more stressed than their acned charges. Possibly this is the first concrete sign that the UK is at last moving towards the tried and tested format common in the USA where practically every adult seems to schedule a trip to their analyst each week in the same way they do their shopping, have it away with the personal trainer or secretary in a seedy by the hour hotel and take the kids to non-confrontational sports training. So if you are wondering what to spend three years studying at University while you notch up a massive debt kids, forget media studies and I.T. and go for psychology so that you can pay it all back in a year or two as you sit dozing in a comfortable chair while some sad sod pours out the details of their muddled and mundane  life.

Perhaps they could all learn from an innovative system used here in Bulgaria, and as I remember also heavily relied on in Spain, where small numbers of children, or even single children in some cases, are supplied with on hand help during most of their waking hours from loving and caring adults who are there to help them through life’s little problems, other than the time which they spend at school of course. These amazing individuals are known as parents, and they operate in a rather old fashioned, but well tested unit known as a family.

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Still on the subject of shortages, we hear a lot on the news about the severe shortage of water in the UK, especially in the south-eastern area. In fact we live in the south-east of Bulgaria but have no such problems, possibly because the Bulgarian Government have resisted the temptation over the past few decades of doing all things possible to persuade over twenty five percent of the population to move into just ten percent of the land area of the country. This is exactly what successive British Governments seem to have been intent on doing in Britain, so no wonder there’s a water shortage, and small wonder that they haven’t also got a sewage mountain, (or would that be a lake), but possibly there is and it’s a classified secret waiting for an investigative journalist to smell out. This “let’s all congregate in the south-east” policy has mystified me for many years, and even more so with all the facilities which modern technology are increasingly making available to Government Departments, N.G.O’s and  businesses alike to enable them to operate at arm’s length from their clients, customers and markets. Can anyone tell me why this is, as to me the total illogicality of it is increasingly hard to understand or justify.

There are vast areas of deserted brown field sites and crumbling derelict housing situated in deprived areas of the UK, surrounded by populations of depressed and dejected unemployed people, doubtless in genuine need of counselling. These areas could accommodate all the extra housing and commercial developments needed to ensure the country’s future progress into the twenty first century, but still there is apparently no political will to drive business and employers away from the congested south-east with positive long term tax incentives to go elsewhere. Instead those seeking employment still have to migrate south-east and efforts continue to be directed at shoe horning more and more unfortunate individuals into smaller and smaller boxes within already overcrowded urban areas. They then build more roads for them to sit on in endless traffic jams as they breathe in the pollution their stationary cars are pumping out while they burn up scarce and ever more expensive fuel. The fact that many of these unfortunate individuals will more than likely be illegal immigrants and eastern European workers who have moved to England to do all the jobs un-employed Brits think are beneath them or are too lazy to take on is surely of little consolation.

There also seems to be a determination to find somewhere to construct another major airport to serve the area, quite unbelievably situated on the north Kent coast if Boris is to be believed; a more in-accessible area from the rest of the country being hard to find. Hopefully this at least will be stopped dead by the Endangered Duck and Goose Marsh Protection Movement, and the inevitable discovery of the well-known “rare newt” will surely put the final nail in the coffin of any such ludicrous plans when the EU Rare Newt Protection Legislation kicks in. So the fight will go on to try and accommodate more and more flights, bringing more and more passengers in and out of the existing four London airports, adding yet more congestion and pollution to the deadly mix. Sorry, but I just can’t see what on earth is motivating these people, other than the rather obvious fact that those making the decisions, be they political or commercial, are the very people who can afford to have second or even third homes well out in the peaceful countryside, well away from the overcrowded and polluted south-east. There I go again being cynical, but ain’t it the truth?

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The other day I thought that I had at last encountered a new TV program to download which would be able to source enough material for it to run even longer than Coronation Street; sorry chuc, Corry. It was called Pointless Celebrities, and surely no one could doubt that there are such vast numbers of these total nonentities around these days to fill many hours of enjoyable viewing. I was anticipating some form of brief resume of the individual’s fatuous and pointless claim to fame followed by them being thoroughly disabused of their self-importance and un-justified notoriety by Jeremy Paxman, ideally on Steroids. They could then suffer public humiliation from a high tech Mr Blobby type gunge device and be banished to some inaccessible part of the country, such as the north Kent coast, where they would have to perform voluntary charitable works, possibly looking after the needs of rare newts, in order to redeem themselves and get over any residual feelings of un-called for self-esteem which they still harbour. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that it was in fact a standard quiz show with contestants drawn from the very group of talentless no-bodies I was hoping to see put thoroughly back in their place under the stairs. Sod it, now I may need councelling!

Spring Gardening, a new Privy and exploding for God.

During the past week spring has well and truly sprung here in sunny Bulgaria the first returning Stork appeared a couple of days ago and temperatures are up around twenty. The sap is rising, buds budding, dafs flowering, birds mating and and on a more personal level I can’t say I’ve felt so stiff for a long time, but the garden won’t dig itself, so needs must. Over the past couple of years our garden has received little attention beyond a regular dose of Roundup to kill of the flourishing population of weeds we took over with the house, our own labours being concentrated on the house and immediate areas around it, so this year we are starting off with a pretty blank earthy canvas.

Because spring arrives here so suddenly and can turn to summer temperatures within weeks you have to be pretty quick out of the blocks if you are to get plants into the ground with enough time for them to get going before the hot sun stifles them. The Bulgarians and Roma don’t seem to have any problems with this routine, hoeing over their long established veg patches as soon as they can get down to sufficient layers of clothing to allow free arm movement. Most planting seems to be by way of young plants which they have brought on themselves or which are readily available from the regular markets. The colour in their gardens generally comes from long established roses or bulbs and tubers and the inevitable vines, and I very much doubt that there is a Bulgarian word for lawn. Needless to say we Brits, apart from the hard core Good Lifers, still require our patch of lawn, patio plants and flower beds, and being no different, we have spent much the last week digging borders, planting roses and the like and preparing the bed for a thankfully small lawn.

The main thing to remember at this time of year is to ensure that your outside gates are locked when you stagger into the house for a cup of tea, aching from places you thought had gone dormant or fallen off years past, and in dire need of a rest, as you could be in for a shock when you return to your horticultural labours. A friend who will probably read this entry told us soon after we arrived here that she had returned to a freshly dug border with the aim of planning what to plant there only to find it filled with freshly planted vegetables. A neighbouring Bulgarian lady had spotted the virgin soil and, having some plants left over from her own garden had come in and generously done the job for her. Unable to risk giving offence by removing the un-identified plants they were allowed to develop and produced a bumper crop of assorted marrows and squashes which none of the family would eat.

If I seem to be straying from the subject here you’ll just have to bear with me. During my growing up years down on the varm in Darset we still boasted an outside toilet or “Privy” as it was called, situated some thirty yards from the farmhouse and discreetly hidden behind the usual privet hedge. It was an appropriately rude construction of stone and tiles with a simple wooden seat arrangement inside, and it is certainly best not to proceed beyond that point as far as description goes. It was a facility I would not ever have chosen to avail myself of in preference to the WC fitted within the house, however my father continued to use it daily until well into the sixties, claiming that it was what he had grown up using. My own opinion was that he valued the relief it afforded him from my mother’s company more than the more conventional benefits he gained. Be that as it may, the point of mentioning this thankfully long demolished by-gone here is that the outside toilet is still very much a part of daily life for many Bulgarian and Roma families here in rural Bulgaria, and many far prefer to use it than the conventional WC, because it is more eco friendly, not needing water to flush it.

We have a nice young Roma family who live in the two usable rooms at the end of a near derelict house down the road from our own, and their own “facility” consists of a small brick and tile building at the end of their garden, or rather it did until some ten days ago when it fell down. As a result, while we laboured away with our own garden preparations last weekend we were entertained for three days by our neighbour and two friends erecting a new shelter over their “potto negro” as the Spanish would call it. I did consider trying to describe the results of their very obvious DIY labours but have rather unusually for me, found it impossible to put it adequately into words, so I am attaching a picture for your own assessment. To our mind it is sad that there are people living in such primitive conditions on our own doorstep, and I deliberated whether to include it in this piece, but when all said and done it is the reality of life for many people here and as such as worthy of inclusion as any other subject.

Anyway, rambling on in the garden, Bulgaria has only small numbers of Muslims, but Arabic type “music” from Muslim Turkey and beyond is regrettably popular here and while the three workers next door went about their toiletry task they were accompanied by the sound system on rather loudly, playing some particularly unpleasant selections from the Turkish top twenty. After several hours of this unwanted “entertainment” I was feeling quite suicidal  and can’t help wondering if I’ve stumbled on the reason so many of those brought up having to listen to it day after day are happy to strap themselves into a Semtex corset and take an early bath before meeting the 72 virgins.

The recent shooting of seventeen Afghan civilians by a US Army Sergeant has been followed by an admission from US officials that the man had previously suffered ‘traumatic brain injury’ during service in Iraq. Now call me an old fuddy duddy if you like, but I would have thought that someone within the mighty US military machine could have thought to themselves “I wonder if he’s the right man for the job in nerve jangling Afghanistan, or would we be safer sending him to count boot laces in a remote army storage facility in Arizona”?

Needless to say, the inevitable result of this terrible massacre will be retribution killings by Muslim fanatics who feel compelled to slaughter those who don’t choose to follow the rather rigid and, let’s face it, lacking in fun factor doctrines of Islam, with seemingly precious little condemnation from their moderate fellow believers, presumably because they don’t want to be blown up either. Surely it’s time to realise that conducting wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has achieved precious little in stopping the threat of Muslim fanatics for years now, and more covert and cunning measures are needed. As it’s obviously a fundamental religious problem isn’t it time some other prominent denominations joined in the battle? Perhaps the C of E could form a kamikaze wing of the Mother’s Union who could bombard Friday prayers at the mosque with exploding Victoria Sponges. The Pope could surely find a few work experience missionaries willing to penetrate the caves of the Hindu Kush and blow a few knee caps off. If that sounds a bit too violent for your tastes perhaps they could hold the terrorist at gun point and make them listen to recordings of Papal addresses for days on end, after which they’d probably agree to anything, or possibly ask to be knee caped. Hopefully you’ve all got the drift by now and can come up with a few ideas of your own to save the world, but I really must get back to the garden now.

The case of the spotty infant.

We had only just got back from last Saturday’s morning shop when the doorbell rang and Jan found a Roma lady who we quite frequently give a lift into Elhovo standing at the gate and asking for our help, along with her daughter and small grandchild. By means of inventive mime and wildly waving arms they explained that the 3 month old baby girl was suffering from a very bad mouth infection and body rashes, and they needed to get her to hospital in Elhovo as soon as possible. Apparently they had already asked for help from the expat lady who is their near neighbour with no luck and we were their next port of call. Jan immediately agreed to drive the family into town and they left on what we both expected would be a relatively short mercy mission. Four and a half hours later Jan returned to tell the tale, which proved quite revealing about the problems the Roma can experience when dealing with authority and services in Bulgaria.

In abbreviated form, they went to Elhovo Hospital where no doctor could be found, were sent to a doctor’s house in town who was out, returned to the Hospital where someone told them it could be Meningitis and they should go immediately to Yambol Hospital, 40 Km away. Jan’s Bulgarian consisting of hello, goodbye and thank-you, she very wisely phoned friend Lynda in the next village, who is married to a Bulgarian and speaks the lingo quite well, and she willingly joined the party to Yambol. The first doctor in Yambol refused to even look at the baby and sent them to another part of the hospital, where they were eventually seen by a doctor who, to everyone’s relief diagnosed a very bad attack of Thrush, though there seemed little inclination on anyone’s part to venture any form of treatment.

At this point Lynda, who has something of a feisty nature, and showing commendable, though as it turned out, rather badly timed improvisational skills, forcefully said in her best Liverpudlian accent that she was a doctor in Liverpool and she would prescribe penicillin for the babe without further delay. A Bulgarian nurse standing nearby responded to this outburst in quite passable English, suggesting that penicillin was useless for treating thrush and the child would need entirely different treatment. Completely un-phased by having her in-accurate prescription so effectively shot down, Lynda merely retorted “well, get on with it then”. As some of you may remember, Lynda is in fact a hairdresser, and hearing the story it did occur to me that she may have acquired some regrets during her years of wielding razor and scissors, at the passing of the old surgeon/barbers of the eighteenth century, and harbours a secret desire to administer to the sick and dying, God help them. After more than two hours in Yambol hospital and receiving quite offhand treatment from the staff, which is unfortunately usually the case for the Roma population, they were able to leave, equipped with suitable medication for the suffering infant, and eventually got back to Malomirovo at around five thirty.

At nine o-clock on Sunday morning our bell rang again and the baby’s grandmother was at the gate and assured Jan that the little girl was much improved, which we were obviously relieved to hear, and we were pleased and touched that she had taken the trouble to come down just to tell us. At eleven thirty the bell went again and grandmother stood there brandishing a file of liquid and indicating that another visit to Elhovo was needed so that the baby could be injected again. She had probably warned Jan she'd be back later during her first visit, without her realising it, so the woman obviously needs brush up on her arm waving skills. Off Jan went  again to see her mission through, and was very pleased to find a much happier and contented little girl in the car with her.

If you should be wondering how a poor Roma family could pay for the treatment and medicines used to cure the child, the answer is that they can’t, which is why they come to soft hearted expats for help, and Lynda and Jan shared the cost of one hundred and twenty levas, for treatment, medication nappies, milk etc. between them, and we gamely took the twenty levas hit for diesel. It’s the way of the world in poorer countries that the poorest will always look to those better off than them for help, as it is usually their only option, and in the case of a three month old child in obvious distress and need of urgent help, surely no one should refuse to offer that help.

Having said that, you also have to remember that a line has to be drawn, and when the grandmother arrived again on Tuesday morning asking to be taken into Elhovo again I had to refuse, indicating that we had other fish to fry, and it took a few seconds for her to accept that no really meant no this time. Rather than simply being grateful for what you have done for them there is a tendency among the Roma to see how far they can push your good will, and some expats find it very hard to say no, and do get taken advantage of. Hopefully we have drawn the right balance this time, though I’m sure we will be answering our doorbell with some trepidation over the next few days in case there is another cry for help standing on the other side of our gate; perhaps it’s best if Jan answers the door for a while.

Spring seems to have arrived proper this week with temperatures up in the mid to high teens, sunshine a-plenty and we have donned lighter clothes for the initial assault on the garden, so long may it and our energies last.                                                 

Dash or Bonus, it's all the same.

When I was an innocent and boyish thirty six year old I went to work in Nigeria to build up a new agricultural machinery dealership. Having been involved in various businesses in the UK up to that point I thought I was pretty on the ball when it came to keeping one step ahead of the game, and all manner of other clichés, but I wasn’t prepared for the endemic levels of corruption which existed in West Africa in those days, and I imagine still do. Corruption was an all pervasive feature of everyday life, be it in business dealings or the challenges of day to day living.

The first thing I learnt was how to make out a quotation for the supply of machinery or goods to a customer. You may think that having been running a main Ford Tractor dealership in the UK prior to accepting the Nigerian job I should already have been well capable of constructing such a quotation, but I found that there was one very important item which I had never encountered in my UK dealings, that being TPC. Third Party Commission, known colloquially as Dash, was a basic part of almost every quotation given out and every bit as important as the machine itself, additional equipment, after sales service and so on, and on some occasions could account for more than half the total quoted price. TPC was what you needed to pay to the man responsible for awarding the order, who could be anyone from a business manager to a senior Civil Servant, and as far up as a State Governor, as most big orders were placed by The Central or State Governments or N.G.O’s. They would then in turn, pass a share of the bribe down to those below them in the system who had to process the order for payment, the so called “small boys”.

On one occasion a quotation to supply 120 Fiat tractors, which were assembled in the northern city of Kano, and were to be supplied to another northern state a few hundred miles to the east, were priced at five times their list price to cover the outrageous cut the purchasing State Governor was demanding as his commission. On another deal I found myself wedged into a small storage room in a State Governor’s house, along with the very large Governor, his equally over weight Treasury chief, and a considerable quantity of tatty tables and chairs, in order to finalise the dash content of a multiple order for machinery. We were so confined because he was paranoid about being overheard, which had nothing to do with being found out in his corrupt dealings, but because the fewer people who knew what was going on, the fewer people he would have to cut in on the deal.

The same sort of situation existed throughout most areas of everyday life. When stopped by army patrols, the police or traffic wardens the only question was how much the bribe would need to be for them to “forgive you”, to the extent that a German worker who killed a policeman at a road block he drove through when drunk was released and deported after a suitably generous payment by his employers to the Police Chief. If items were in short supply, which was normal with many things, you just needed to know the right people and pay the right price to jump the queue. A friend whose wife had run off with another expat, leaving him with two small children to care for found it impossible to get a visa extension for his UK nannie and faced giving up his job and leaving. I told the State Director of Immigration who I happened to know well that she was my girlfriend and he gave her an indefinite visa extension on the spot, “until you are fed up with her my friend” as he so delicately put it. In fact I never met the woman, and the favour my friend had to do in return was simply to get some plans drawn for a property the Director was building.

Oddly enough there was never any great evidence of corruption within the judiciary in Nigeria, which was one of the great safeguards against organised crime gaining a significant hold in the country, and almost certainly due to the fact that the judges and barristers had all been trained in the UK . In other words, their fees were so high they didn’t need to be corrupt. So corruption was generally such an integral and indeed open part of everyday life in Nigeria that you either had to embrace it and work with it if you were to do your job and live a reasonably comfortable life, or give up and go home, so I put a brave face on it and stayed.

At the moment corruption is something of a buzz word here in Bulgaria as the EU are becoming more and more insistent that the Government take strong measures to stamp it out, not least because they are getting awfully fed up with so much of their grant money being syphoned off. Having said that, it is a different form of corruption than in black Africa, as it doesn’t take place so publicly and only fills the pockets of those already at the top of society. Try and bribe a policeman or border guard here and you will almost certainly be arrested on the spot. I may be ill-informed or possibly just naïve, but I think the bulk of normal business deals here go through without anything other than a good meal out being offered as an inducement, assuming you can find one, and the majority of the population view the corruption which is certainly going on at higher levels with considerable resentment.

Bulgarian corruption is generally the exclusive preserve of politicians, the heads of Government Agencies, senior Civil Servants, Judges and so on, normally through their very close ties with those running organised crime and big business interests. In other words, the remnants of the old Communist hierarchy or their heirs. The problem is that we aren’t just talking about people who are very dishonest, but people who are also frequently very stupid. They have reached the positions they are in, be it Member of Parliament, head of this or that Government agency or department, or even a senior judge, not through their ability and record of achievements, but through the people they know and the influence that they wield. The consequence is that they are not only corrupt but frequently totally incompetent as well, unable to perform the demanding tasks that are expected of them but too stupid to realise how obvious their inept chicanery is to the general public.

We have a situation in full flood here at the moment where it has been discovered that many of these people have been paying themselves very large annual bonuses out of the funds of the organisations and departments they run without any authority to do so. Thankfully it all came to light when a woman who was put in charge of a Government agency did such a bad job that she was made to resign and the bonus payments she had authorised for herself came to light. As evidence of her own stupidity she refused to leave gracefully and started issuing press statement claiming she had done a wonderful job and thoroughly deserved the bonuses, and those in authority who are not corrupt, and obviously a tad brighter than her, realised she was just the tip of the iceberg. A general enquiry was undertaken and now hundreds in authority who have been doing the same thing over the past few years are having to pay the money back to the treasury or face immediate dismissal, the total so far reaching nearly seven hundred thousand Levas. Apparently there have been queues of panicking miscreants dashing to Sofia banks to raise loans for the re-payments. It’s tough at the top.