Was Danielle Steel in Steely Dan?

 

Was Danielle Steel in Steely Dan?

 

16 March 2026, Monday

At the Stihl shop the bossman accepted the repair-our-petrol-chainsaw challenge. We call him Mr Stihl and wonder if his wife’s called Danielle. We bought a Stihl-brand long alloy stick thing to which we attached our small Stihl-brand electric chainsaw and spent the afternoon trimming the high branches of trees we’d been leaving in the hope that hungry giraffes might visit.

With the Steely Dan track ‘Rikki Don't Lose That Number’ as my afternoon earworm I wondered what other things I could trim that had previously been out of reach. Our neighbour Slavka’s toenails came out top of a lengthy list.

 

17 March 2026, Tuesday

We’d sad news times two from Ireland.

Lovely folk singer, Dolores Keane from Tuam, with the silken voice gorgeous enough to lull the faerie folk to sleep, died yesterday at the age of 72.  

To the annoyance of every decent Irishman and Irishwoman, Taoiseach Micheál Martin spent Patrick’s Day in the company of the world’s most detested Orangeman at the White House (a place ironically named after Mary, the moral campaigner). 

Irish government officials always go over there to celebrate the day. Would the Paddy’s Day craic not have been a thousand times better in a wee bar in Tuam?

 

18 March 2026, Wednesday

At the end of a long dark corridor, in a brutalist concrete building from the Communist era, a door opened. Having entered, I heard it lock behind me within a split-second. A man, muscular and stocky with scars on his cheek and a millimetre of stubble covering face and head, spoke in a deep East European accent. ‘This will not hurt’ said Dr Pavel Nikolov, the mental dental practitioner. His wife, brandishing a hypodermic syringe loaded with anaesthetic added, ‘But it may tickle.’ After sitting with my mouth open for thirty minutes and handing over €60, I was released, unharmed.

 

19 March 2026, Thursday

It’s incredible the mess you can clear when you’ve a chainsaw in your hand. With my fully serviced pulsating beauty back to its old self I converted a field full of storm damage into a neat pile of logs for next winter. However, it felt like last winter had returned as the icy wind cut through me.

It’s a strange wind altogether that blows these days. Bulgaria has the largest native Muslim population in Europe and, looking over their shoulders towards Israel, people seem nervous. Our neighbour, Hasan, wouldn’t talk about wars. He’d heard it all before from his grandparents. 

 

20 March 2026, Friday

In 1963 Harry Secombe’s song suggested that, if he ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring. Well today was the first day of spring, the Earth’s subsolar point having crossed the celestial equator to head into the Northern Hemisphere. I’d vote for Harry but I wouldn’t want every day to be like today with its wind like a tormented penguin with toothache and a Stanley knife.

Yesterday’s garden labours brought aggravated carpometacarpal arthritic agony today, but my cynicism towards health supplements evaporated as turmeric capsules restored my thumb pain to the bearable levels of 2023.

 

21 March 2026, Saturday

Each March we scan the sky for returning storks. It’s considered lucky to see one, or more, but there were none today. Instead we had a profusion of ducks. The collective noun for ducks is a flock but what’s the collective noun for flocks of ducks? Nobody knows so I stuck my neck out (as ducks in flight do) and decided it’s a quacksalver.

But why so many ducks today? Had the storks evolved into ducks? And why do ducks and sheep both gather in flocks? Do some flocks contain both species? And where’s David Attenborough when you need him?

 

22 March 2026, Sunday

Our storks did arrive today. We didn’t see them because the rain also arrived (two wishes coming true simultaneously) so we didn’t leave the house. Desislava, our village’s Facebook page organiser lady posted a photograph of them patching up what remained of last year’s nest at the top of an electricity pole in the square. They looked mucky and bedraggled, probably because no matter what direction they’d come from, they must have flown over troubled lands or Burnley. It was lovely to see them home but envious mallards were displeased, noisily protesting in what might be described as dystopian duckspeak.

 

23 March 2026, Monday

Whilst reading the news on the telescreen I learned that the range of an Iranian Shahab 3 missile was 2,000 kms, so London and Paris were safe but Romania and Greece weren’t. Having a GCE ‘O’ Level in geography I knew that Bulgaria was on the same ring of the dartboard. Hopefully the lads with the missiles would forget we existed, just as the journalists had.

During the early 1980s I regularly visited the Shahab restaurant in Leeds. How fortunate I am that immunity from rocket attacks is one of the benefits of carrying their loyalty card in my wallet.

 

24 March 2026, Tuesday

At the second leg of the big dental adventure, Dr Nikolov said it would be wise to fill the big hole where an old filling had fled a lower molar as there was a danger that returning storks at this time of year might build a nest in such a space.

It rained in our village but on nearby mountains it snowed, so meteorological conditions and a bruised jaw justified afternoon laziness. I read my book and thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t a stork or a dentist.

‘Nice weather for ducks!’ my dear old Nan would have said.

 

25 March 2026, Wednesday

Beneath a pile of logs we discovered a common toad i.e. common in the sense of being not unusual rather than of being a bit chavvy. It was about the size of a Cornish pasty.

We stared at it for a few seconds before covering it up and walking away. We’re keeping it a secret from our cats and dogs, partly because common toads aren’t as common as we are led to believe, and partly because when they’re rubbed up the wrong way they secrete a milky toxic substance that can severely irritate or even kill a pet if ingested.

 

26 March 2026, Thursday

The toad left around lunchtime. In warm sunshine and Bulgaria’s sweatiest vest, scrounging Hasan saw us examining the amphibian-free woodpile and announced that he was cold and out of logs for his petchka. We told him to take the wood but to use some of it to boil water to wash his underwear. He smiled and said there was enough to wash Slavka’s underwear too. But I doubted that… not that I’ve ever seen her underwear. 

Rakia Maria once said she could make alcohol from anything that would ferment. And so Appellation Château du Gilet du Gitan Chaud was born.

 

27 March 2026, Friday

The toothless old woman who sits all day in the lane by the abandoned Soviet Lipetsk T-40 tractor on which she had learnt to drive in 1964 said to me, ‘A woman without a tractor is a woman without a starting handle, unless she has a T-34 tank.’

This made me wonder if all heavy automotive machinery from the С.С.С.Р. had names beginning with the letter T, and had the Talbot Avenger that I drove in the late 1980s been an essential tool for modernization, state administration, and efficient transport for the state leadership, or just a rusty old banger.

 

28 March 2026, Saturday

As I tilled the land in verdant vernal surroundings, today’s earworm was Symphony No. 1 in D major by Gustav Mahler, the first movement of which he named ‘Spring and No End.’

Meanwhile, as woodpeckers tapped in treetops for early grubs to feed on, I tried to remember the collective noun that represents them. Would it have been a pint of woodpeckers?

Wildlife spectacle of the day was a twilight bat. The first I’d seen this year, and a sign that good weather was imminent. It prompted me to repeat the old Kyrgyzstan proverb ‘See a bat, discard your hat!’

 

29 March 2026, Sunday

The feeling of relief experienced as timepieces are adjusted to embrace the impending long summer days is akin to that felt after the lancing of an enormous carbuncle. So that’s another winter passed and polished. I’ve survived sixty-nine of them now, at least physically.

This is also Johnny Ten Levs’ favourite day of the year. He finds that the task of keeping his body completely topped up with Victory Rakia is 4.167% easier on a day with only twenty-three hours in it. He has a rhyme to remind him what to do. It goes, ‘Spring fall sideways. Fall fall back.’

 

30 March 2026, Monday

Oh the fun we’ll have with the new spade we bought today. With its fluted edge it’ll be perfect for digging up stubborn roots, and it’ll double as a pastry cutter.

With pastry on my mind (didn’t Hoagy Carmichael sing that a long while back?) we wandered into the new café opposite Praktiker (Практикър, meaning ‘B&Q’). It’s called Nedelya (Неделя, meaning ‘Sunday’) but as the clocks had changed they didn’t mind serving us on a Monday. Taking traditional recipes and modifying them for twenty-first century palates, their outlets sell the best cakes in Bulgaria. You might just call them tarted-up Tartar tarts.

 

31 March 2026, Tuesday

Borislav Mihaylov, former international goalkeeper and captain of the Bulgarian team that reached the semi-finals of the 1994 World Cup in the U.S.A. died today in Sofia. His nickname was ‘the Cat’ and our cat Boris is named after him. Boris, although saddened, was too busy licking his arse to comment.

The first sign of life in seeds planted in pots in cold frames three weeks ago was exciting enough to stir life in me too. I now need to show patience and be careful not to prick out before the final frost, the consequences of which can be devastating.   

 

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Image:

I don’t own a book by Danielle Steel so here’s a photograph of the book I’m reading at the moment. My own copy and my own photograph.

 

Part One:

Is Kerry Katona a Cat Owner?