Oh Ambassador You Are Really Scaring Us

 

Oh Ambassador You Are Really Scaring Us

 

1 August 2026, Saturday

Due to the hot weather there was very little going on, so I interrogated Google to see what events had taken place on other firsts of August in Bulgarian history.

They had all been pretty similar to today, except in 1912, when our army’s Balloon Regiment sent the country’s first domestically built hydrogen balloon up in the air on its maiden drift about.

This was perfect timing for the First Balkan War, which started in October 1912 and which we won. Turkey had nothing to match our inflatables, especially after we’d modelled them into the shape of a sausage dog.

 

2 August 2026, Sunday

Today was European Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial Day, on the eighty-second anniversary of that terrible night when 4,300 Gypsy men, women and children were murdered at the Nazis’ Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Roma people here are still treated as second-class citizens. Our Gypsy neighbours knew nothing of the special day. They’re so second-class that people forgot to tell them about it.

There are currently no wars in the Balkans, but Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey are ablaze with wildfires. The twenty-first century presents a new humanitarian crisis ignored by those people in power who prefer to fiddle while their countries burn.

 

3 August 2026, Monday

My beautiful, sensuous Lady Dunav (the Danube) is currently as dry as a woolly mammoth’s bone. The water level in Europe’s second longest river has dropped so low that a woolly mammoth’s skeleton was revealed in its mud only 120 kilometres from our house.

Discovering that such mighty beasts wandered this region as recently as 7,000 years ago inspired me to dig our garden with extra vigour and the hope of rescuing a Pleistocene pet. However, it’s depressing to think that the Dunav must be at its lowest since 5,000 B.C.E. It was a Thursday afternoon, around teatime, I believe.

 

4 August 2026, Tuesday

Our final trip to see Claire in Velkovtsi. She gave us an old bath that had lain idle for years in her wild garden. I was surprised she wasn’t taking it to her new home in Donegal, as in Ireland every field has an old bath filled with water for cattle to drink from. Without an old bath people will mock her like they would a new kid in its new school wearing the uniform of its old school.

I’ll keep my mucky old bath with my lucky Irish shilling and my father’s rosary beads. You could say I’m Donegal-ready.

 

5 August 2026, Wednesday

Early evenings, I sit on the bench near the horizontal truncated trunk of our old walnut tree to gather enthusiasm for lengthy garden-watering sessions. Lately, a magnificent wasp as long as the width of my hand has joined me, relaxing on a nearby rock.

I photographed and googled to identify it as a mammoth wasp. It lives alone, laying eggs in dead wood on the larvae of rhinoceros beetles. Despite its stiletto stinger it won’t bother a human unless it’s threatened. Apart from the egg laying, I behave the same way towards insects.

It’s nice to have a new friend. 

 

6 August 2026, Thursday

Shock horror! One of my offspring became middle-aged. Yes, my firstborn hit forty today. A father and daughter can’t both claim to be middle-aged, so that must mean I’m officially old, though I’d always suspected it.

I sleep soundly in the armchair for thirty minutes most afternoons. You might say that’s a sign of ageing, but it’s something I’d fancied doing since I was in my thirties. Being old only makes it acceptable. I haven’t become right-wing or racist, contrary to predictions, but policemen seem too young to be policemen, and their parents seem too young to be policemen’s parents.

 

7 August 2026, Friday

Having earned my fortune in the chiropody trade, I consider myself an authority on matters of the pedal extremities and confidently diagnosed sharp pains in my heel as plantar fasciitis. I was on the brink of exchanging serious cash for corrective orthotics when the pain suddenly worsened.

Sitting down to perform a self-examination, I found a dark lump containing a foreign body. Two minutes of nifty scalpel work released a dog hair in an explosion of pustulence. The old magic was still there after ten years in retirement.

Crazy Ludo, with his own infected lesion, looked on in comradely admiration.

 

8 August 2026, Saturday

‘Whoops, sorry!’ said Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Heorhii Tykhyi when one of his country’s drones crashed near the Bulgarian village of Kardam, 280 kilometres from our house and only one kilometre from the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline. Military analysts said it had been carrying significant amounts of explosives, and that it was definitely Ukrainian, but they had no idea where it might have been made.

For several years the manufacture and export of military drones has been the mainstay of our economy. So perhaps we’d sold Ukraine a homing drone.

Heorhii Tykhyi, apparently, usually ends his speeches with ‘Death to Iran’.

 

9 August 2026, Sunday

I’m beside myself with glee when I’m in Sofia you see, and today I arrived in a bit I’d never visited before.

The leafy residential quarter of Lozenets (Лозенец, meaning ‘place of throat lozenges’) has numerous Commie-era apartment blocks separated by the usual grassy recreational areas, but also newer blocks designed to blend with the 1970’s grey concrete. Artistic murals add colour, as they do in much of the city.

On a late-night balcony with a book, jazz and rakia, I heard the distant sound of boy racers tearing up and down Boulevard James Bourchier. Their exhaust fumes kill the mosquitos.

 

10 August 2026, Monday

The doctors at the Acibadem Clinic’s Dermatology and Venereology Department were all attractive young women. I’ve never had a venereal problem (honest!), but if ever I do, it would be shamefully embarrassing to go there for treatment.

Dr Kacheva was particularly lovely but ruined our meeting by diagnosing the lump on my nose as a basal cell carcinoma and insisting I return next Monday for her to chisel it out.

Close to my lodgings stood the American Embassy. News bulletins showing Iran bombing the shit out of all things American concerned me. The ambassador was apparently hiding behind his settee.

 

11 August 2026, Tuesday

On the three-hour bus journey back to Veliko Tarnovo my head spun with ideas for my new regime for avoiding strong sunlight, particularly in the head and neck region.

My family’s suggestions included wearing either a French Foreign Legion hat or a Viking helmet complete with metal nose shield. A Mary Poppins parasol was also a great idea. Another was for me to stay in the house for the rest of my life, which is exactly what the vet proposed a week earlier for Crazy Ludo.

I love the Bulgarian sunshine. Without it I may as be living in Manchester.

 

12 August 2026, Wednesday

We wondered had autumn arrived as plants crisped and trees shed leaves. The village water supply was off all day, but even if it hadn’t been, we couldn’t have watered everything. Normal life was restricted by the weather as much today as on winter’s snowiest days. Even breathing seemed difficult when I stepped outside to pick some already stewed plums from the tree.

I skipped the partial solar eclipse, having witnessed the full picnic in South Australia in 1976. I never recovered from the local radio station’s continual eyesight protection warning spins of Manfred Mann’s record, ‘Blinded By the Light’.

 

13 August 2026, Thursday

On roasting hot days the city centre’s deserted, so there’s never a queue in the bank. I’d been summoned to present my new passport.

Cashier Number Four Please had a scene from the 1877 Battle of Shipka Pass tattooed on her chest. I asked if she spoke English. She replied, “Yes, a little,” but it transpired that they were the only three words she knew.

She then told me to fill in a four-page form requesting details of absolutely everything about me. This had been necessary every time I’d got a new passport, Government I.D. card, pair of pants, etc.

 

14 August 2026, Friday

Madame Manoushka’s vaccination trip turned out a right old commotion, but she learnt it’s not possible to dig an escape tunnel in either the floor or roof of a hard plastic pet carrier box.

Doctor Tatchev was so used to seeing problematic Crazy Ludo, I introduced her as our best cat to put his mind at ease. After ten minutes of spitting and snarling (from the cat, not the vet), he asked if I was sure about her feline quality rating.

On the homeward journey I told her about my forthcoming nasal surgery, and she kindly shut up… well, almost.

 

15 August 2026, Saturday

Further family suggestions regarding the protection of my head and nose from the sun included wearing the following:

• A burqa.
• A hollowed-out watermelon.
• A Comic Relief red nose.
• A welding mask.
• The Pink Panther fancy dress costume I once rented.
• A Sombrero.
• Four baseball caps, each pointing in a different direction.
• My Leeds United beanie hat (which I gave to an Australian barmaid in 1978).
• Count Binface’s Bin (he lost the election and no longer needs it).
• Very long hair (the least feasible suggestion).

Or I could just sit in a dark corner of the church and repent my sins.

 

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Image:

A woolly mammoth by the Dunav, but not THE woolly mammoth. My own photograph.

 

Part Two:

She Had Me In Stitches