A Scratched and Dented Tin Harmonica

 

A Scratched and Dented Tin Harmonica

 

1 October 2026, Thursday

Today being day one of year four of this whimsical journal-writing undertaking, I looked back at my entry for day one of year one. Just like today, the world was largely on fire, but different lunatics were holding the Bic lighters, and the Manchester City scandal was only a flicker in a billionaire’s eyes.

Manchester is a city, which has been a scandal in itself since 1853, but we’ve never before had Piers Morgan, Gary Neville, and hundreds of Johnny-come-lately financial experts bombarding us with their three penn’orth.

Is anybody at Manchester City likely to know what three penn’orth means?

 

2 October 2026, Friday

At the hospital in Sofia, Dr Kacheva said my nose was completely cured but blasted it with her mobile cryosurgery machine to make sure. I’ve to return in April because she said she wants to look at my whole body. The freedom of speech enjoyed by medical staff amazes me.

I spent seven hours of the day degenerating on hot buses, the only light relief being a chat with Scottish football fans in Sofia bus station. They were on their way to Skopje for Scotland’s game against North Macedonia. Reluctantly I declined their invitation. I’d been down that road before.

 

3 October 2026, Saturday

I wished I’d stayed in Sofia an extra day for Tsar Samuel’s funeral. Bulgarians are customarily buried within twenty-four hours of dying, but he’d been dead 1,022 years.

In 1964, archaeologists unearthed his remains in a chapel on an island in Lesser Prespa Lake near Greece’s border with Albania. He’d been there since just after the Battle of Kleidion. Following the discovery, there’d been constant "can-we-have-our-bones-back-please" pleas, which the Greeks had ignored until we recently became friends because we buy their natural gas.

Samuel was joined today by close family members, all of whom had also been dead 1,022 years.

 

4 October 2026, Sunday

When I asked the immigrants at the British Expats in Bulgaria Facebook Book Club where we’d acquire copies of our chosen book of the month, I was told, “Amazon Kindle.” I replied, saying that, for ethical reasons, I don’t patronise Amazon, and was without warning removed from the group, probably by Pat, hopefully soon to become an ex-Pat.

I think Groucho Marx said, “I don't want to belong to any club that has members so officious that I’d be tempted to whack them with a golf club," or was it me? And is that where the word "Marxism" originates from?

 

5 October 2026, Monday

This sunny autumn day, I worked in the garden cutting back plants and shrubs that looked like they’d had enough of 2026. I suspected they were thinking the same about me, with my Irish bogman white skin and my nose the image of a failed assassination attempt.

In our world filled with bigotry, bombs, Benjamins, and bitterness, it was refreshing to be in a place where my mind was occupied only by the question of when was the best time to relocate gladioli bulbs and what would our cats use as a toilet if I dug up our strawberry patch.  

 

6 October 2026, Tuesday

Bulgarian seaside towns don’t usually have illuminations like you’d find in Blackpool but in terms of putting on a spectacle, lovely little Byala (бяла, meaning ‘white’) went one better as two commercial ships passing close by were attacked by drones, probably Russian but possibly Ukrainian.

One vessel sank with all lives lost, and eighteen crew members were evacuated from the other as it burned out of control. This happened only a day after two people died when a Romanian cargo ship was hit in a similar attack.

The outlook for Black Sea trade and for our tourist industry became exceedingly black.

 

7 October 2026, Wednesday

Legal historians, such as Professor Conor Gearty at the London School of Economics, profess that those who colonised the world are trying to convince us that resistance to colonialism is terrorism.

For this reason I don’t complain when Hasan plays his Chalga music loud in the afternoons, when Ismael’s son races his quadbike up and down the lane, or when I’m bitten by Bulgarian mosquitos, centipedes, dogs, or Mucky Monika at her Mucky Massage Parlour. They were here first, though technically they weren’t because I’m older than them.

Professor Conor Gearty wouldn’t really be a professor if he didn’t profess.

 

8 October 2026, Thursday

A whole holiday’s holiday money disappeared in a morning thanks to requirements for a new washing machine and house insurance renewal. The washing machine came with a five-year warranty, which is something I envy. It’s a pity it’s not possible to insure ourselves against spending all our money on boring things.

Tavern ‘Hadzhi Mincho’ is a lovely little place serving authentic local cuisine to die for. It was my first time there in ten years because back then chain smoking had been compulsory. These days it’s under new management, the previous owner having died after choking on his vaping gadget. 

 

9 October 2026, Friday

Although I’m not an expert, I’ve always taken pride in having plumbing skills sufficient to install an automatic washing machine. But today, as the boys from Technopolis (Bulgarian for Curry’s) delivered our new flat screen front-loader with spin speeds up to 1,800 rpm and a corresponding hard disk drive, it became apparent that computer know-how was also required.

The new device has Bluetooth connectivity so we can lie in bed, watch Peaky Blinders, and put on a hot wash at the same time. We’re just a bit concerned that our smalls might get hacked in devious acts of international espionage.

 

10 October 2026, Saturday

It became clear why so many unauthorised migrants land in small boats on England’s shores. It’s because they can’t afford the budget airlines’ spiralling ticket prices.

Today I booked a flight for an upcoming trip to Manchester, forking out three times what I’d have paid seven years ago. And more than 50% of the total cost was for my checked-in bag! Perhaps an inflatable dinghy would have been a better investment.

Dear Mister EasyJet, please define the word 'budget.'  

Another reason for Britain’s new arrivals ignoring the ‘bugger off back to where you came from’ demands of the political far-right.

 

11 October 2026, Sunday

Walking slowly up the lane came a Gypsy with a long, matted beard that grew to the very tops of his cheeks like the ivy on the cemetery wall, his trousers stitched for a man twenty centimetres shorter. Behind him walked a goat, and behind the goat, a dog. All three had coal-black hair as if delivered from the same womb. His cape, which may have been woven from the shearings of himself and his companions, had an oily lustre that suggested the ensemble had kept warm beneath it on many a night and no bar of soap had ever come within a sniff of sweetening its grimy threads. On a scratched and dented tin harmonica, he played the melancholy tune of an old Serbian battle song, then stopped three paces in front of me. His music stopped too. A silver tooth flashed in the sunlight as he began to laugh, and the bell in the church of Saint Atanas rang twice from behind the ridge.

 

12 October 2026, Monday

In this whole wide world there’s no happier bloke than Stefan the chimney sweep. We’d waited over a month for his visit, as he was in such high demand, and then he didn’t even get his hands dirty during the thirty minutes he spent with his magic hoover shoved up my flue. His €70 fee, by my estimation, suggested an annual salary of around €140,000, which exceeds what someone in a senior position in the Bulgarian Mafia might expect to earn.

Tradition says it’s lucky to touch him, but even luckier if you can get your hand in his pocket.

 

13 October 2026, Tuesday

More seafarers died as another two merchant ships were hit by drones and sunk near Bulgarian seaside towns. Media outlets said it was absolutely definitely the work of the Russians, or maybe Ukraine or Israel, as the Bosporus competes with the Strait of Hormuz for spilt blood and oil.

Hidden by the Balkan Mountains’ thick cloud and wild rain on the Stara Zagora road, we felt safe from attacks, but clearer conditions at our holiday destination forced us to take cover in the wonderful restaurant “Uniqato” until nightfall. Later, the Disney 'Frozen'-themed curtains in our holiday apartment served as camouflage.

 

14 October 2026, Wednesday

Stara Zagora’s Museum of Religions was a place where a variety of gods had been worshipped over the course of three millennia. It comprised the remains of a cult pit from the Early Iron Age, a two-thousand-year-old pagan sanctuary, a medieval Christian cemetery church that had been in use from the tenth to the thirteenth century, and a mosque built in the fifteenth century.

On this same site, each shrine had been built on top of its predecessor, and each was bigger than the one before, like a broken set of interdenominational Matryoshka dolls. The admission price of €1 per person equated to 25 cents per temple, though the beautiful Islamic art of the building in its most recent manifestation was significantly better value for money than the original cult pit, which was little more than a hole in the ground. The cult pit didn’t even have a cult pit pulpit in it, so I couldn’t say I was sorry that the Iron Age had ended when it did.

The ticket office of religions lady said we weren’t allowed to take photographs, but we did anyway when she wasn’t looking, which made the visit much more exciting, as did seeing the look of consternation on her face when we asked where the Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism departments of the Museum of Religions were to be found.     

Close to the remains of the Roman arena, we made our second stop. It was there that through the iron bars of the city’s sturdiest fence, we admired a congregation of wild cats in an enchantingly overgrown garden. Like fools, we spoke, and the noise of our words alerted elderly Anelia, who appeared from nowhere to talk to us. She told us that she didn’t have any cats of her own. Those that we saw simply called in about three times a day (and always near to mealtimes) to keep her company. She lamented the fact that she had no one else to talk to as she toured her inner-city wilderness, topping up with Bulgarian Whiskas the trails of saucers that meandered along paths leading to her front door.

None of the cats were black, which was a good thing, because she didn’t like black creatures of any species, and that was why she hadn’t enjoyed the visits she had made to Paris during her teenage years. She apologised for not being able to invite us in to stroke the cats, her reason being that she didn’t have a key for the gate. We’d initially stopped because we’d felt sorry for the stray cats, but as we bade her farewell, we felt even more sorry for Anelia, as she was the only captive, for her loneliness, her racism, and the holes in the knees of her tights.

At around 3:00 p.m., having already spent more than an hour in the Regional Historical Museum, we decided that to give all its artifacts the attention they deserved, we would need to spend a whole day there. The section of paved Roman road in the basement was particularly impressive, as were the Thracian gold and the glass objects, including a baby’s soother, that had survived intact for almost two thousand years.

We always find these things fascinating but had to admit that on this occasion, our main reason for spending so much of the day in museums had been to escape the wild weather outside. Consequently, our next port of call was the restaurant in the park where we’d be kept warm, dry, and amused, probably to the same extent that we had been by the history lessons. As we tucked into our Thracian sea bass and Neolithic chips, we promised ourselves we’d return to the museum one day in the near future to view the four floors of treasure in glass cases and the gift shop we’d almost unavoidably missed.

 

Amazing Bulgarian Facts #6

Stara Zagora is Bulgaria’s fifth largest city. Its name comes from the Slavic words star (стар, meaning ‘old’) and zagore (загоре, meaning ‘beyond the Balkan mountains’). It has traces of civilisation dating back to the seventh millennium B.C.E., and it was a major Roman settlement from 161 C.E. until the Goths arrived three centuries later with their black eye-liner and their skinny jeans.

On 31 July 1877, the first major battle of the Russo-Turkish War took place there as the 48,000-strong Turkish army advanced on the town defended by only a small Russian detachment and Bulgarian volunteers. The Russia-Bulgaria squad surrendered after a six-hour fight. During the next three days the Turks razed the town to the ground and massacred 14,500 Bulgarians. Another 10,000 young women and girls were sold in the slave markets of the Ottoman Empire. The only public building to survive was the mosque, Eski Dzhamiya, which still stands today as the Museum of Religions.

It’s not the jolliest of places to go to for a holiday, but we did our best.

 

15 October 2026, Thursday

I often think it is wrong to trust pedestrian directions, especially if it is me who has given them, but it became quite obvious today that even my mental compass operates with more accuracy than Google Maps. On our trek to discover the Defenders of Stara Zagora Memorial Complex, our mobile telephone apparatus applications sent us through some sleepy residential areas with public rose gardens, pavement cafés, and haberdashers’ and ironmongers’ shops in the 1970s style. So far, so good!

We were then guided over a motorway flyover where we would have surely been killed had the road not been closed for repairs, but we were nearly killed anyway because they had taken away the safety barriers and introduced strong sidewinds. Even the motorway repair workers hadn’t braved the precarious conditions, which was to our advantage, as the Portaloo lavatorial facility was the cleanest I had ever visited, though it must have been some time since work had stopped on the bridge, as the potpourri was definitely in need of freshening up a bit. We didn’t appreciate it until after the event, but there was something strangely exciting about walking along a three-lane motorway full of holes with no one else about and not a motor vehicle to be seen except on the roundabout twenty metres below us.

The memorial was a fifty-metre-high concrete monument. We saw it long before we arrived there, so even if we had died on the flyover, our mission would have been at least a partial success. It resembled a waving flag to symbolise the Samara flag of the Bulgarian volunteers at the Battle of Stara Zagora in 1877 and was built on the site of their command post. A hundred stone steps took us from the road to its base.

To the right of the monolith were bronze sculptures of six Bulgarian volunteers and a Russian officer, representing the six local battalions under the command of Russian generals. An ossuary contained the remains of some of those who had died in the battle. The nearby eternal flame in a structure made in the form of parallel bayonets had been extinguished because of the rising cost of natural gas since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Inscriptions touched on the gratitude of the Bulgarian people shown towards the glory of the Russian people, but I suspected that at the time of its construction in 1977, exactly one hundred years after the event, the Bulgarian people would rather have had the money it had cost to build.

There was nothing to indicate that the battle had ended in a terrible defeat meted out by the might of Turkish forces and which had been followed by a large-scale massacre in the city and surrounding villages. At this vast site of bronzework, concrete, and a sea of paving stones, only Priyatelkata and I stood there. The place had a great eeriness about it, as on that warm sunny afternoon the breeze seemed to blow cold on our backs while we paid our respects to those remembered and to the many more who had been forgotten.

Taking a safer route back to the city centre we discussed what a shame it had been that Google Maps had not been in use during the rise of the Ottoman Empire. With such unreliable technology at hand, their armies would have arrived at the battles either late or exhausted or not at all, and so much bloodshed would have been avoided.

 

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Image:

My own photograph of my own harmonica on which, after thirty-four years of practice, I’m able to perform a reasonable rendition of ‘Camptown Races’.

 

Part Two:

The Sun Says It’s Time For a Drink