I’ve Got a Gal in Tiramisu

 

1 January 2026, Thursday

Emerging from my chrysalis of December gloom I’d become a new superior lifeform. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I leapt from the bed and ran round the house rejoicing the arrival of January, a month named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions and warehouse clearance sales. The sun shone all day.

I resolved to give up hope of the world ever being a better place, so effectively I’d given up my panic-infested insomnia. In Pavlikeni market I bought a tee-shirt with ‘I surrender’ printed in eight languages to welcome whoever chooses to invade us.

Gh géillim!

 

2 January 2026, Friday

In winter, groups of elaborately costumed men known as Kukeri perform traditional rituals to scare away evil spirits. Folklore experts say they’re a remnant of a Thracian cult of the god Dionysus. Tonight we watched them dance in the square beneath the fortress. They impressed and entertained but failed to scare away the five-year-old monster in pink that ran around on the wall only centimetres in front of us, restricting many people’s views.

Due to a combination of supply problems and a nation’s reluctance, we haven’t yet been able to spend a physical euro. People without bank cards will perish.

 

3 January 2026, Saturday

The first week of January’s traditionally the time when people return to the shops all the dodgy stuff that’s come their way during the festive period. What better time than now for President Gobshite to hand back his FIFA Peace Prize? Perhaps he could exchange it for vouchers or a FIFA Violating International Law Prize.

I like to think that getting his heavy mob to blast Caracas to bits and kidnap the Venezuelan president was a dress rehearsal for a raid on Tel Aviv to bring Adolf Netanyahu to justice.

In the meantime, I hope his next shit’s a hedgehog.

 

4 January 2026, Sunday

I usually ignore the pop-up advertisements that pop up when I turn on my computing machine. Years of waiting for one advertising pop-up toasters were in vain, but should I ever need split-crotch surgical support tights, a sit-on lawnmower in the shape of Harry Potter’s car, or a device for scratching my arse without getting up from the chair, then I know exactly where to find them.

Today there popped up a short video of a Bulgarian woman asking me in her native tongue if I’d like to learn to speak English. I was overcome with feelings of cultural assimilation.     

 

5 January 2026, Monday

Bemoaning bodily weight gains, we questioned how this could have happened. Our diet consists of healthy, fresh, locally-produced, home-cooked ingredients that give a wholesome glow during preparation, consumption and digestion. Perhaps we’d been too wholesome.

Local restaurant food is equally good. We know the staff and they know us. Their provocation with delicious morsels, often free of charge, is downright wicked but nice. Shopska salads and grilled fish at restaurant ‘Etno’ are irresistible but so is their freshly made tiramisu. Even our socks have felt too tight so sacrifices must be made. Either the tiramisu goes or the socks go.

 

6 January 2026, Tuesday

Barry’s Irish tea isn’t grown in Ireland and it’s not sold in Bulgarian shops. It starts off in East Africa, gets shipped to Cork for packaging, and then people in Canada buy some to sell online to international tea drinkers like me. So, the contents of the teapot that sat on my desk as I wrote this had travelled more than 25,000 kilometres. I was pleased it was perfect because sending it back would have been a right old rigmarole.

Eight packets (i.e. two kilograms) arrived today, on Bulgarian Orthodox Christmas Day. I must have been on Santa’s nice list.

 

7 January 2026, Wednesday

The euro is at last seeping into our society. A woman complained on Facebook she’d bought some Bulgarian produced vegetables in the market, paid for them with Bulgarian euro but was given change in French and German euro. ‘Why can’t all these countries in the European Union keep themselves to themselves?’ she asked in bitter upper case to emphasise her fury.

Elsewhere a man was arrested for trying to pay for a drink with a forged fifty euro note. Hats off to him for showing willingness to embrace the togetherness of our European cousins, albeit in his own unconventional way.

 

8 January 2026, Thursday

I learnt a new word. Not a Bulgarian one, but sort of English. America’s new word for kill is unalive because they’ve worn out the old one. I tried it myself with I could unalive a cuppa tea.

America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (known as ICE though they’re not at all cool) unalived thirty-seven-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis as she drove away from them. Trump called her a domestic terrorist. If he ever had a brain in the first place someone must have unalived it.

Former Leeds United star, Terry Yorath, died under completely different circumstances. Sad but civilised.

 

9 January 2026, Friday

I’ve always taken pride in my own personal symmetry. I dribble from both sides of my mouth at the same time, both of my feet are useless at football and there are exactly 623 hairs on each side of my philtrum.

What’s puzzled me lately in this respect is why the painful arthritis in my carpometacarpal joints rips through both thumbs with equal intensity when it’s the right one that does all the work. They’re only ever in action together when I’m practising my gymnastics routine on the parallel bars, working a nightshift at Mucky Monika’s Massage Parlour or typing.  

 

10 January 2026, Saturday

We spend very little money in cold weather, not because we’re canny with the cash, but because Bulgarian shopkeepers set their heating to gas mark Saudi Arabia. In Billa you could take a Findus frozen ready-meal for one (if they sold them) and it would be warm enough to eat before you reached the checkout. So when rugged northern types arrive, such as us, suffocation can only be avoided by either stripping down to vests and pants at the door or just nipping in and out sharpish to grab absolute essentials. Today I lost consciousness whilst buying a pork Viennetta.

 

11 January 2026, Sunday

I watched the snow falling. Intricately woven crystalline discs of virgin white delicately floating from sinister black skies.

I watched a garden disappear and four old episodes of Father Ted. I watched eight cats, two dogs and a European female sleeping. I slept myself, briefly.

I watched the pot on the stove so long that I saw it boil and I watched the contents of the food cupboard dwindle.

I watched the place beyond the trees where I’d have seen the sun set had it made an appearance at all.

I watched the side of our valley disappear. Everything disappeared.

 

12 January 2026, Monday

I watched the snow falling.

I washed old fountain pens I’d discovered in a box brought from England ten years back. Holding them underwater to squeeze the rubber part of barrels blocked and blacked with dried up ink left over from stories written long ago, I saw a frenzied attack of wrathful squids in my kitchen sink. Childlike satisfaction in the absence of candlewax to peel from a wine bottle neck.

A reminder of the pleasure to be had from writing on a sheet of paper with a fountain pen. A reminder of an Irish country schoolroom in another age.

 

13 January 2026, Tuesday

I considered going out into the garden to build a snowman but then I remembered that I was no longer six years old so the associated level of excitement would be virtually nil. And even if I had been six, or even eight, I would have returned to the house twenty minutes later feeling cold and wet and wishing I hadn’t bothered because my icy creation would have looked nothing like a real man, or even a real snowman, and it would melt within a couple of days making everybody sad and weepy like the kid in the Snowman film.

 

14 January 2026, Wednesday

The highlight of the day was the point in the mid-afternoon when the temperature on our terrace reached minus 6°C, having risen dramatically from the minus 14°C it had been at the point in the morning when I rose somewhat less than dramatically from the warm sanctuary of the bed. Had I known how the day was going to pan out I probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of rising at all.

The newsreader lady on the telly listed the names of the countries that Trump was going to bomb, invade or mispronounce, and Bulgaria wasn’t one of them.

 

15 January 2026, Thursday

Despite the day’s Arctic conditions, the Quink in my recently rediscovered fountain pen hadn’t frozen. The pen had become a necessity as my computer had fallen ill and needed to visit the menders whose shop sits at the top end of a precipitous street where car parking is impossible even on warm days. The snowplough’s deposits would have filled all vacant spaces and destroyed all hope. Two doors along from the computer shop there’s Mucky Monika’s Massage Parlour with a parking space to the front that’s constantly empty because people won’t use it for fear of wagging tongues, myself included.

 

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Image: My own photograph of one of the Kukeri performing traditional rituals to scare away evil winter spirits.

 

Part Two

I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Tie-Dye My Raggy Socks