If I Were a Fish

 

If I Were a Fish

 

16 June 2025, Monday

It was lovely to spend the morning with New Zealand Jessie and her one-year-old boy, Boyan. Sitting beneath our fig tree with iced herbal infusions and Priyatelkata’s homemade muffins, we discussed the ways of the world. She shares our approach to life. Later we compared her to three other women we know of the same age (round about forty); they couldn’t be more different to each other. We don’t know any other one-year-olds at the moment so Boyan had no competition. I hope he grows up with her spirit.

I stayed by the fig tree all day. It’s safe there.

 

17 June 2025, Tuesday

We had the painters in. Not a euphemism but Warrington Dave titillating our home’s external surfaces. He’s really from Leigh but says Warrington because no one’s ever heard of Leigh, and nearby Warrington slips off the tongue like Paris, Rome and Madrid.

Worrying over the Israel-Iran horror show kept me awake all night. In Iran there are people I know. During my stay there in 2011 I found it the friendliest country I’d ever visited. My friend Farzanah replied to my Facebook message saying she was safe (for now) but terrified. She’d already left Tehran when the first missile struck.

 

18 June 2025, Wednesday

It sickens me… America and Israel worry about nutters with nukes destroying civilisation when in actual fact they themselves are the prime nutters.

Bedtimes bring temptation to take a stiff drink to aid sleeping. Five weeks had passed since a drop last touched my lips, so just one cheeky rakia would have meant the masters of war had beaten me. For sanity’s sake, all but butterflies and fluffy bunnies are excluded from my dreamscape.

Lunch in a garden restaurant in Arbanasi and afternoon watermelon in Echo’s vegetable garden in Polski Senovets were today’s nice things. We live such privileged lives.

 

19 June 2025, Thursday

A day of suffering for Priyatelkata. She incurred a serious garden injury as, whilst relocating a fledgling hydrangea struggling in the heat, she put her back out. Additionally, she too struggled in the heat and required relocating to a shadier spot.

The irritating hum of our air conditioning system together with the need to have all the windows closed while it’s operational, and its contribution to greenhouse gases mean that we don’t switch it on until the weather’s so hot that we see human flesh melting. It is, however, very effective as I had to wear my parka in bed.

 

20 June 2025, Friday

In astronomy terms, today was the longest day but, in Warrington Dave terms, it was the shortest as he arrived for work late with a hangover and went home early with the same hangover. A gut-busting cheese and lutenitsa butty and a long cool glass of paint thinners would have had him back on his feet quicker than you can say Boyko Borissov.

Meanwhile Boyko Borissov, itching to commence a fourth stretch as prime minister, visited our barely damp reservoir. He said it’s a depressing sight and something must be done, but he enjoyed his day out in the countryside.

 

21 June 2025, Saturday

In popular terms, yesterday was the longest day but, in scientific terms, the summer solstice happened at 5:42 this morning. Luckily we still had a drop of woad left over to repeat our pagan ritual without revisiting the druid shop in the mall.

Snezhinka stank like she’d been dead a week. Perhaps she’d been involved in a solsticial ritual but we couldn’t imagine any self-respecting pagan going within 1.609 kilometres of her. Her scavenging in bins the likely cause. You can take the street dog out of the street but you can’t take the street out of the street dog.

 

22 June 2025, Sunday

I’ve always had a strong dislike for Jim Davidson, Abba, Manchester United, Cilla Black, estate agents and Ken Barlow, but I would never say I hate them. Loathe is a word that’s not used enough these days.

The only people I’ve ever hated have been politicians, but not all politicians. However, there are currently so many that my 100 words per day writing limit restricts me from listing them here. So while the USA drops bombs on Iran, joining a war game where there can be no winner, I’ll have a game of Top Trumps instead. 

I also hate cauliflower.

 

23 June 2025, Monday

If I were a fish living in a lake near to a restaurant, I’d endeavour to conceal myself in the murky depths during business hours. At our lunchtime restaurant today, sheltered in a beautiful forested cliff-lined valley near Suhindol, aquatic colossi big enough to feature in an Ernest Hemingway novella leapt from the water every couple of minutes displaying suicidal tendencies whilst provoking our taste buds. We found the fat frogs and water snakes that hopped and slithered respectively in the shallows neither appetising nor on the menu. And huge spectacularly multi-coloured dragonflies! Surely nobody in the world eats dragonflies.

 

24 June 2025, Tuesday

To celebrate the anniversary of our acquiring Fyodor the friendly Fiat, we visited the avtomeevka (автомивка, meaning ‘carwash’) where the young banjo player from the film Deliverance restored its fluffy carpets and green paintwork for less than the price of a possum’s egg.

The nearby shopping mall provided shelter from ferocious sunshine but little else. The shops stocked only teenagers’ skimpy clothes or mobile telecommunications apparatus, so we killed time with delicious coffee adjacent to a chilled cakes cabinet that growled at us.

If Bogdan the Banjo washed thirty cars daily, he’d have enough cash for a Bakewell tart by Christmas.

 

25 June 2025, Wednesday

Our Romanian cat, Vlad, having always been a bit drippy, was terrified when a bird attacked him in the garden… twice! The bird was a beautiful golden oriole. Some immigrants call them golden Oreos out of ignorance, or golden arseholes out of a different kind of ignorance.

In Covid times we noticed we’d a pair nesting in a walnut tree, gradually multiplying to four more pairs in adjacent trees. Initially delighted, we welcomed them until we noticed they were scaring away the equally impressive, but slightly less aggressive, jay population. How long, we wondered, before they start occupying more territory?

 

26 June 2025, Thursday

If I were a fish living in a lake, I wouldn’t have to listen to Warrington Dave’s music while he stains my soffits. Those non-stop super-duper golden-oldie smash-hits on Radio Lobotomy broadcast live from the heart of Derby bring a level of cheesiness that even Tony Blackburn couldn’t match.

When the DJ ‘spins a disc’ by Tom Jones, Dave sings along clutching his paintbrush microphone. It's good to touch the brown, brown grass of Wigan.

We wrote in with a request to upset the applecart… If You Forget My Path I Will Curse You, by Romanian jazz queen, Aura Urziceanu.

 

27 June 2025, Friday

The car still being squeaky clean from Tuesday’s avtomeevka visit, I whizzed it up to mechanical Nikolai’s workshop for a service and to have squeaks removed.

Was I being helpful or mean? I’d taken it in early and when I returned to collect it two hours later he said he was shutting up shop and going off for a swim with his wife. Had it not been for me he would have had a whole day without income but also a whole day relaxing in a beautiful cool pool with lovely refreshing Bulgarian cocktails and his lovely refreshing Bulgarian missus.  

 

28 June 2025, Saturday

Balkan summer rain needs to be celebrated and breakfast at Bey House garden restaurant was the perfect spot for celebrants to rejoice last night’s storm even though the chairs, and consequently our pants, were a bit wet.

Posh plants we buy at nurseries struggle but wild plants just soak up the sun and flourish without a fuss. We talk to them, thanking them for being our coolest friends. If they could talk back, I imagine they’d ask for a piña colada and a Harold Robbins paperback.  Cutleaf Teasel, Italian Viper’s Bugloss, Greater Mullein and Grande Bardane… we love you all!

 

29 June 2025, Sunday

As neighbouring Turkey burned, holidaymakers from Galway to Guildford complained they couldn’t reach their air-conditioned timeshare apartments near Izmir because wildfires had closed the airport. Meanwhile envious Turkish farmers looked on from afar at Ireland’s 300 days of rain per year.

With yesterday’s torrential downpour completely evaporated, moles used pneumatic drilling equipment to surface for air and on every stone kitchen floor tile there lay some sort of animal trying to keep cool. My need for four tiles reminded me to stick to my diet.

Such discomfort hits us every summer but this year it arrived way ahead of schedule.

 

30 June 2025, Monday

Six months today, New Year’s Eve will be upon us. I hope the world’s a happier place by then and Warrington Dave’s finished painting our house. Perhaps conciliatory Trump could have a word and tell him to look sharp. He’d certainly get my vote for a Nobel prize if he would. Hitler was a house painter too, and he wrote a book, proving that even evil fascist dictators aren’t what they used to be.

By the year’s end my body mass indicator will have fallen and my number of grandchildren, cats and trees all risen… fingers crossed and hankies knotted.

 

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Image:

My own photograph of someone else’s painting of a fish in the county of Cork.

 

And if you'd like to see a few recent photographs of where I live, click on this...

June at Home

 

Part One:

Marlene Dietrich’s Gappy Teeth

Click on the link to read