Papa’s Got a Brand New Chainsaw

 

Papa’s Got a Brand New Chainsaw

 

1 November 2025, Saturday

On National Awakeners' Day everybody gets a day off so they can stay in bed a bit longer, but this year it fell on a Saturday so we’ve to wait until Monday to stay in bed a bit longer.

It’s a day to honour people who preserved and revived Bulgarian identity, culture, and education during Ottoman rule, such as educators, writers and revolutionaries. If Hristo Botev and Vasil Levski were still alive all their drinks would be free today.

I tend to stay in bed a bit longer every day. Such a great mark of respect for my adopted country.

 

2 November 2025, Sunday

I forgot to mention that a few days ago we got our car back from the menders. The task was performed far more speedily than expected, but it cost us the price of a holiday by the Black Sea. Looking on the bright side, we’d put Mechanical Nikolay in a position to be able to afford a couple of weeks in Varna, provided that lugging his heavy wallet around with him didn’t give him a hernia.

Apparently the seaside weather was windy and cool today but in our garden it was sunny and warm, so we claimed a moral victory.

 

3 November 2025, Monday

Vlastta na naroda! (Властта на народа! meaning ‘Power to the people!).

After three days with an uninterrupted water supply, we woke to discover it had deserted us again. Talk of demonstrations to block the nearby dual carriageway faded as nobody wanted to be the first to stand in the busy road. A petition was the second suggestion at the mass rally in the square.

The good citizens of Malki Chiflik had had enough, all 313 of them. Though possibly not Johnny Ten Levs who’s never had enough, no matter how many times his requests for wine are declined by the village shop lady.

 

4 November 2025, Tuesday

A grand day for reptiles!

Whilst hacking back Russian Sage that had strayed into garden territory without invitation, I spotted a magnificent toad with a body as wide as my foot.

Tucked beneath a nearby stone path, our friendly viper woke, rubbed his eyes and went back to sleep.

Yesterday I used the final teabag from the two boxes of Barry’s tea I’d brought back from my recent trip to Ireland. Without regular infusions my blood turns cold, and my skin dry and scaly.

Both toad and snake were left undisturbed, but it’s been said that I’m quite the opposite.

 

5 November 2025, Wednesday

At the Vasil Levski Palace of Culture and Sport, the performance of Tant-sut na Epok-ee-tay (Танцът на Епохите, meaning ‘The Dance of the Ages’) could have been described as a history of the Ottoman Empire recreated using the medium of dance and a set designed by John Noakes, but without reference to the slaughter and slavery suffered by Bulgarians over five centuries. Only an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical about 1930’s Germany on stage at the Tel Aviv Palladium could have been more inappropriate.

But for the intensely loud Turkish language commentary and musical accompaniment, it was like Riverdance with bare flesh and döner kebabs.

 

6 November 2025, Thursday

Crazy Ludo’s cat fight injuries are too frequent and repetitive to mention but today he peaked. Fully recovered from last week’s episode, we allowed him to go outside this morning. He returned this afternoon with swathes of skin missing from his front legs. To the vet’s we sped! When Priyatelkata and I die they’ll put brass plates bearing our names on the waiting room seats because we spend so much time sitting there.

Meanwhile, today was the birthday of Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone), Johnny Giles (Leeds United and Ireland footballing legend) and Turlough Ó Maoláin (despondent cat owner).

 

7 November 2025, Friday

On the anniversary of many hangovers I was hangover-free, but our poor cat was looking rough when we picked him up at the vet’s. The stitched up patchwork of skin on his front legs and miserable look on his face were heartbreaking to see. Dr Tatchev said the nature of the injuries suggested he’d been asleep under a car bonnet when the engine was started.

As another four-week indoor recovery period began we considered changing his name from Ludo (Лудо, meaning ‘crazy’) to something else, but not Lucky, even though he was lucky to be alive. Eric seemed a safe bet.

 

8 November 2025, Saturday

Papa’s got a brand new chainsaw, but still loves his old one. The new baby’s for pruning the slenderer branches from trees, powered by rechargeable batteries and small enough to operate in bed. Using it for cutting toenails was briefly considered as weather conditions were too wet for working in the garden.

Papa watched YouTube videos about how much plastic is used to construct the average teabag and decided that the search for a proper one-man size teapot would resume. His small metal teabag contraption designed for loading with loose leaf tea was as much use as a chocolate teapot.

 

9 November 2025, Sunday

The perfect teapot smiled at us from a shop window in town but the shop was closed so we went for a coffee in the park. Bulgarians don’t really do tea unless it’s picked from a wild meadow and covered in bear shit.

An old Scottish friend never liked fancy herbal tea and always called it ‘ballet dancer’s tea’. An old English friend doesn’t like black tea and always calls it ‘monkey tea’. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the nineteenth century French socialist, philosopher and economist, who was considered to be the father of anarchism once declared that ‘all proper tea is theft’.

 

10 November 2025, Monday

Until today I thought that synaesthesia was a surrealistic Ken Russell musical about nasal congestion, but really it’s defined as a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

My experiences of it are:

• Whenever I see our neighbour Maria I smell rakia.
• I taste boiled diced swede on hearing the words ‘lunch bell’.
• The number 666 reminds me to visit the dentist.
• Vivid red conveys me back to a Leeds house party in 1981.
• When the light’s switched off at night, November invades my mind.

 

11 November 2025, Tuesday

True remembrance lies in the actions we take to prevent all further wars. I don’t know who said that but I wish it had been me.

It was Irish president Michael D Higgins’ first day of retirement. He’d continually reminded us of Ireland’s traditional policy of military neutrality that had always kept us from seeking NATO membership. Also a poet, a broadcaster and a grand fella altogether, Mickey D will be missed.

Thankfully, new girl Catherine Connolly seems to know what she’s on about. Bob Geldof and Conor McGregor considered applying for the job until they remembered nobody likes them.

 

12 November 2025, Wednesday

Dr Tatchev said Crazy Ludo’s wounds were looking good (not my choice of words) and, as every drop of the clinic’s medication had already been pumped into him, a return visit wasn’t necessary. We could have said he’d been discharged, but the word ‘discharged’ had been used in a different sense many times before when discussing this poor cat’s health. At home in his recuperation room, he looked bloody miserable which was a big improvement on last Thursday when he’d looked bloody and miserable. In two months Dr Tatchev and Dr Gunchev had both worked miracles on the same leg.

 

13 November 2025, Thursday

Papa’s got a brand new teapot. Its output is exactly one cup because tea isn’t made for sharing. Loose leaves go in a little mesh compartment that could be refashioned as a chastity contraption for a small rodent if tea was ever to become extinct. Boiling water’s poured in and because the pot is of glass construction I can watch the liquid turn the colour of John Power & Son’s Gold Label Whiskey, which is another beautiful drink but doesn’t have the same kick to it that the tea has.

In our house, other fine-looking teapots are available but faffy.

 

14 November 2025, Friday

Summer weather returned so sweat ran off me in torrents as I laboured under hot sun to coil up our hosepipe collection and collapse garden umbrellas and furniture. Such symbols of the summer months are things I treasure, so I kissed each of them goodbye as I lovingly placed them in the shed. Tears mingled with perspiration.

Absolutely nothing in the world is more exciting than seeing the first signs of shoots appearing on grapevines in spring, so chopping them all off today was as painful as chopping off my own leg. But they were dead anyway, so sod them.

 

15 November 2025, Saturday

I could only describe the feeling as orgasmic as I pushed my aging wheelbarrow for the first time after pumping a bit of air into the tyre. Its deflated state had been annoying me for months but I couldn’t find the foot pump. And besides, I’d always thought a foot pump was only for people with flat feet.

At last I understood why all those Formula One racer boys love pulling into the pits for the new wheels. Barnsley’s the pits but you wouldn’t go driving round that place in one of those flashy motors, as Lewis Hamilton will testify.

 

---

Image:

Out and about on a November day in my little town. My own photograph.

 

Next Part:

The Strange Case of Dr Gunchev and Crazy Ludo