Crazy Scenes at Club Hypnagogo

 

Crazy Scenes at Club Hypnagogo

 

16 September 2026, Wednesday

The world was boycotting Ed Sheeran because he’d failed to stand up to billionaire Zionists and kicked his Palestine-supporting rapper mate, Macklemore, off his North American stadium tour.

I’d shunned him and his insipid music years earlier, so I couldn’t help. He’s originally from Yorkshire, he’s the spawn of Irish stock, and he has £400 million in the bank. Two of those three things also apply to me. Can you guess which one doesn’t?

I chanced upon Johnny Ten Levs trying to make a withdrawal at the bottle bank. He was unable to comment or even form a coherent sentence.

 

17 September 2026, Thursday

With the eschar gone and only a lumpy scar remaining, my nose looked more like a new potato than a small slice of salami. I celebrated with a return to the garden, firing up the chainsaw to dispose of our pear tree’s broken limb. I was extra careful, of course, as I was in no mood for more stitches.

There’s no better feeling than one of back to normal. I hadn’t been ill, but sitting around the house doing sweet Fanny Adams, even though I had been instructed to do so by a doctor, had bred lethargy, laziness and irritability.

 

18 September 2026, Friday

Martin was on his way from Toledo in Spain to Stuttgart in Germany when we bumped into him in the square in Gorna Oryahovitsa. He’d been dropping his mum off home, where they’d both lived before emigrating in 2004. He’d decided his native Bulgaria was an unwelcoming place, but, over a coffee, we convinced him otherwise. These days we rescue blokes in their thirties instead of cats, but we’re not keeping him.

As a child he remembered there being a fountain near the café but, during times of water shortages, people drinking from it had died as the pump short-circuited.

 

19 September 2026, Saturday

Paskalevets village car boot sale comprised only of a man in a van in a garden with a dozen banana boxes filled with chipped coffee mugs and a group of gypsies enjoying a Shumensko and Marlboro lunch beneath an awning.

We already had old mugs at home, and they wouldn’t sell the chips separately, so we went to our posh fish café by the lake near Suhindol, where a Romanian family were taking photographs of themselves with their yappy little dog in provocative poses. Was our submerging the dog in the lake more or less illegal than their softcore bestiality?

 

20 September 2026, Sunday

As hosts of next year’s Eurovision Song Confrontation, Bulgarians expressed disappointment on hearing the news that Ireland could not compete alongside Israel and would boycott the event.

When asked if I’d be attending, I said I would as soon as I’d been added to the artists’ line-up for Ed Sheeran’s North American stadium tour, and Israel’s programme of ethnic cleansing in Palestine had ceased.

Ed said in an email that he’s waiting to hear back from Polly, the chalet maid from TV’s hilarious Hi-de-Hi! sitcom series, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s tap-dancing Auntie Esther. If they turn him down, then I’m in.

 

21 September 2026, Monday

Priyatelkata’s son, Son of Priyatelkata, along with Bride of Son of Priyatelkata, visited us today. They live in Sofia now, and in November there’s going to be a Grandson of Priyatelkata. Even allowing for the three-language conversation, it was very nice to see them, as such occasions are so rare.

This prompted me to hatch a plan for visiting my own offspring in their even more distant city and its surroundings. So if you’re reading this and you’ll be in the Greater Manchester area in mid-January and you fancy a pint and a plate of tripe, then let me know.

 

22 September 2026, Tuesday

Chinese Echo and Bulgarian Aleks came to ours for lunch. The last time we saw them, Echo said that when she makes crème caramel, she puts fish in it. Today she informed us that she had been putting sugar on her cat’s skin complaint. I was sorely tempted to tell her she’d got these two household tips the wrong way round. The cat, the fish and Aleks must all have suffered.

If anybody from MI6 is reading this, I’d be interested to know if President Xi Jinping has a favourite dessert and what state of health his feline is in.

 

23 September 2026, Wednesday

The precise time of the autumnal equinox was 3:05 a.m. I stayed up to watch it. The photographs are quite dull. At 3:10 a.m. the rain began and continued for ten hours, the new season immediately showing who was the boss.

Yesterday was the third of our Independence Days, marking the occasion in 1908 when Tsar Ferdinand proclaimed Bulgaria had broken the final shackles of her Ottoman rulers. And he did his proclaiming at the Church of the Forty Martyrs just down the road from our house. Today we proclaimed that we’d go for a pizza in town to celebrate.

 

24 September 2026, Thursday

Amazing Bulgarian Facts #5

Years ago, near to where I currently live, there was a forklift truck factory proud that its goods were exported throughout the Soviet Bloc.

In the 1980s, a large order from Japan, a country considered the most technically advanced in the world at the time, had Bulgarian management and workers overjoyed. So a delegation travelled out to see the machines in use.

There they discovered the lead ballast was being removed for the manufacture of other commodities, and what remained of the forklifts was scrapped. This was more cost-effective than importing lead in refined ingot form.

 

25 September 2026, Friday

I spent what seemed like ten hours but was really only nine in the Vivacom shop buying a new phone, at home faffing about with it, and then at the bank registering the device so I could see on their app that I’ve no money because I blew it all on the new phone. If you’re a teenage text-speak person, let me tell you that the Bulgarian for FFS is ФФС, pronounced as FFS.

In the upper reaches of the majestic Pirin mountains, near to our borders with Greece and North Macedonia, it still hasn’t rained, but last night it snowed.

 

26 September 2026, Saturday

 

Club Hypnagogo, drinks are free

Fun and moonshine, two big jugs for everyone

People go there from Dundee

And if you’re peckish, there’s a chip van

 

As Malki Chiflik’s trendiest nite scene opened its doors for the first time, boob tubes and glitter balls replaced galoshes and mothballs. A splendid time was had by all until Johnny Ten Levs accused one of the lovely Hypnagogo go-go girls of spiking his rakia so she could indecently fiddle with Giorgi, his young goat. Baba Stoyanka could barely stand, but that was because she’s ninety-six.

At midnight we toasted absent friends with ayahuasca.

 

27 September 2026, Sunday

I awoke feeling I had an old Brillo pad lodged in my throat, my head throbbed with more pain than a Coldplay album, and my body was hotter than a Bolton Wanderers half-time pie.

I wondered if I had Lassa fever, but what multimammate rat (the wee monster that wees out the virus) in its right mind would ever come near our cat-infested house? Perhaps I had a hangover from last night’s cheese and hallucinogenic tea party, but that had all been imagined.

Typing my symptoms into Google, I learnt that I was again the victim of a common cold.

 

28 September 2026, Monday

With the inner reaches of my nose making such a mess, today’s trip to the hospital in Sofia to have my nose’s external wound examined by Dr Kacheva of Dermatology and Venereology fame had to be cancelled.

I was feeling considerably less than satisfied with the current status of both nasal complaints, but, looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t have to spend six hours of the day sitting on buses with the germ-ridden masses.

But perhaps I should have gone today, as, being germ-ridden myself, the threat from other germ-ridden people was surely less of a threat.

 

29 September 2026, Tuesday

Pavlov, and his young son Pavlov, came to mend various kitchen appliances. We wondered if they’d feed our dogs for us while they were here.

Our washing machine, a blood-stained relic from the Russo-Turkish War, was beyond repair. Actually it still worked, but noises made during the spin cycle were not dissimilar to those of a cat in great distress, and, as it was located in the utility room where many of our cats hang out, we decided it was time to put it out of its misery. But not before asking Dr Tatchev the vet, for a second opinion.

 

30 September 2026, Wednesday

On a Tel Aviv-bound passenger plane, somewhere over Saudi Arabia, a hijack attempt incorporating stabbing, screaming, and plummeting was foiled by an off-duty plumber. Had this happened in the skies above England, he’d have had to call round one day next week to have a look at what needed doing.

Police said a terrorist raid on USS Fairford was the work of either Iran’s ruthless Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or local youths running a stolen diesel racket.

With my increasing mistrust of what I read in the media, I wondered if those trick-or-treat street urchins had started early this year.

 

 

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Image:

My own photograph of the grand façade of Club Disco Belogradchik, Club Hypnagogo’s sister swingin' hot spot.

 

Part One:

All the President’s Haemorrhoids