Introducing Turlough Ó Maoláin, Performance Poet

 

Introducing Turlough Ó Maoláin, Performance Poet

 

15 April 2025, Tuesday

If I wrote about the passing of every iconic influential individual from my more youthful days, this journal would become a mere obituary column. So I’ve elected to be selective…

Death of the Week: Pioneer of reggae music, eighty-year-old Jamaican, Max Romeo, left us on Friday. As a tribute I thought I’d either grow dreadlocks or put on an iron shirt and drive Satan out of Earth. Five days into my plan I’ve realised that the latter is probably the more doable.

Now I’m panicking in case another old favourite dies in the next day or two. Keep well Keef!

 

16 April 2025, Wednesday

I worked in the garden, made a bean casserole and wrote a story. I’ve little else to say really. Except, whilst working in the garden I noticed that this year’s crop of opium poppies is going to be bigger than ever. Perhaps I could add some to a bean casserole. What a story that would make.

Our colony of red lily beetles also thrives. Their shiny little scarlet bodies remind me of liquorice torpedoes bought from the sweetie shop when I was wee.

During Bulgaria’s Communist era, the president’s wife was called Red Lily, and she just loved the Beatles.

 

17 April 2025, Thursday

At Bar Tam’s open mic poetry night, I did my first ever stand-up performance. The audience and readers were of a 70/30 Bulgarian to English speaking mix so, using my knowledge of the local tongue, I opened with words of apology for having to revert to my first language to read my poems.

With my bit out of the way, the nerves’ state of tatteredness subsided. I enjoyed rubbing shoulders with very talented people. I’d never spoken face to face with poets before.

By closing time, I was a man with a mission. I need to write poetry in Bulgarian. 

 

18 April 2025, Friday

Sipping brown Bolyarka beer on a balcony overlooking everybody’s favourite bend in the Yantra, atop which stands our beautiful gallery and horse monument, each kissed by vernal sunshine, I debriefed with Jessie and Ivo from last night’s fun.

We concluded that speaking in public was never going to be dangerous where 70% of the audience didn’t understand our language. Next time I’ll try comedy. Merely speaking in Bulgarian should suffice as whatever I say usually brings laughter, or at least a smile to the host nation’s faces.

To avoid boring any non-football readers, I’ll say just this… Oooh, Leeds United!

 

19 April 2025, Saturday

Sing…

I'm a gardener and I'm okay

I ache all night cos I strim all day

I cut down weeds

Breathe petrol fumes

Ticks love to feed from me

In evenings I’m often groaning

While Priyatelkata laughs at me

 

My suffering from chronic muscular pain distracted me from including these words in my song:

industrial respirator mask

protective goggles

hot sun

steep slope

piss off Priyatelkata, it’s not funny

 

I doubt even David Attenborough could justify the existence of the black creatures that multiply in the long grass and hurt when they bite. They’re like mini horseflies… pony flies, perhaps. 

 

20 April 2025, Sunday

There are no chocolate Easter eggs where I live, partly because consumerism is only in its fledgling stage and partly because, on a hot day such as this, they would appear in liquid form.

Children enjoy real eggs coloured with homemade vegetable dyes that they smash against each other’s. If their egg doesn’t break they’ll enjoy good health and if it does, they can eat it.

This year our German supermarkets sold ready-made rainbow eggs from Polish factories. They’re happy to earn pots of cash from centuries-old Bulgarian Orthodox traditions. For the first time, Easter was celebrated with E numbers.

 

21 April 2025, Monday

Having banged six goals into Stoke City’s net, Glory Glory Leeds United secured promotion to the top tier of England’s football league. Sadly, Pope Francis missed it, having died in the morning. Catholic friends assured me he’d be back by Thursday.

One day in 1963, headmistress Sister Josephine sent us all home from school an hour before the Angelus bells rang, to pray for the soul of Pope John XXIII who’d died. It was no time to be doing sums.

My Ma, who’d usually meet me at the school gate, was shocked by my arrival, exclaiming ‘Your dinner’s not ready!’

 

22 April 2025, Tuesday

Hasan told me I’m malko mek v glavata (малко мек в главата, meaning ‘a little soft in the head’) because I strimmed the long grass and weeds alongside a 200 metre stretch of the roadside verge near our house. ‘It’s the work of the municipality!’ he scolded.

Municipality Mustafa visits twice a year to give us a onceover (or twiceover). His method alternates between strimming and blasting with apocalypse strength weed killer. The latter is certainly effective but I fear we’ll all die. I’d rather go to my grave with strimmer wounds.

Apparently, Mustafa’s liquid death is what we pay our village tax for.

 

23 April 2025, Wednesday

This summer I’ll explore Bulgaria’s remotest mountains. The hiker’s lodge where I’ll scoff, quaff and snore sits at twice the altitude of Ben Nevis.

I’ve begun a brutal fitness regime as between now and departure I must shed a kilogram of ugly fat every forty minutes to return to my fighting weight. Not that there’ll be anybody up there to fight with as even the bears don’t venture above the tree line. 

I trimmed my toenails and whiskers to commence the weight loss and emptied my bottle of Irish whiskey (inside me) to remove temptation. Some call me Mr Motivator. 

 

24 April 2025, Thursday

Approaching the counter, I said, ‘Good morning. I’d like to make an appointment for an eye test.’

The young lady assistant replied, ‘What? In the butcher’s?’

Over at the vet’s, Ludo was voted Difficult Cat of the Month. The injection he had would initiate the healing but at home we must rub antibiotic cream on a wound in his groin twice daily. Following the first application, Priyatelkata and I had wounds of our own.

Living in rural Bulgaria I find that my skin is punctured one way or another every single day. I had imagined retirement to be more blissful.

 

25 April 2025, Friday

This season, Municipality Mustafa will mostly be an eco-warrior. We saw him strimming the verges, his evil herbicide now confined to history. Having gradually befriended him, today he agreed to help us maintain our vast pampas using the municipality’s strimmer, for a reasonable fee.

At Pavlikeni nursery I bought an American oak tree. I’ll use its botanical name, Quercus Alba, for US boycott purposes. The nursery lady said her husband works as a painter and decorator in London. Every time she stays at his shared house in Wembley she arrives home pregnant, apparently because the water is different in England.

 

26 April 2025, Saturday

If you don’t want to know about our pomegranate trees, look away now. We have three, all still immature, and all embracing the spring in different ways. One has only tiny leaf buds on its branches, one has nothing growing on its branches but very healthy new shoots coming up from ground level, and the other has a profusion of young leaves sprouting from old wood. How can this be? I didn’t know that pomegranate trees had different traits. I’ve pored over a dozen copies of What Pomegranate magazine but the suggestion is that they should all be the same.

 

27 April 2025, Sunday

Malki Chiflik’s Facebook page lit up with gossip this afternoon. Apparently there was a Gendarmerie truck parked outside the village shop. Residents gagging for tasty gossip suggested our little Co-op was a narcotics outlet. Others said they’d known for years that it was a front for any number of the following: money laundering, human trafficking, prostitution, Littlewoods Pools and dry cleaning.

I thought that maybe it was just a matter of the boys in black nipping in for a packet of fags and a bottle of cheap plonk to take the drudgery out of policing a place where nothing happens.

 

28 April 2025, Monday

On being told the price of a new pair of bifocals, Priyatelkata overindulged in the bowl of complimentary boiled sweets on the reception desk in an attempt to get her money’s worth from the optician. Only minutes later she had lost a crown from a tooth and had to phone the dentist to make an appointment for repairs. Meanwhile, blood gushed from my lip because I was biting it hard in an attempt to stifle laughter.

Gaïa, our elderly Shih Tzu, might be going blind. We discussed taking her to the optician’s too, or getting her a Labrador guide dog.

 

29 April 2025, Tuesday

Past attacks of writer’s block were eventually overcome but in recent months I’ve been unable to shake off my reader’s block. The bedside table groans under the weight of good books anticipating my attention, but reaching a fourth chapter has become an inexplicably insurmountable task.

Is this a common failing in the human mind? Might I fall victim to other obstacles such as butcher’s block, breeze block, Soviet bloc, Jenny from the Block, the H-Blocks or toilet rim block?

Irritating rashes on my hands caused by hairs picked up from cactus stems during garden weeding distracted me from mental failings.

 

30 April 2025, Wednesday

The array of home produced fruit and vegetables in Polski Trambesh market was second to none. However, once we’d bought what we needed, I found that all interest disappeared. Browsing through tomatoes and aubergines is as much fun as browsing through a nuns’ outfitters.

During lunch with friends Echo and the Bunnyman in nearby Restaurant Venezia, we chewed the cud with the Shopska Salata.

Working all afternoon in warm sunshine with my beloved trees, it seemed like the winter had gone for good, and I spent April’s final daylight hours in the company of bees, slow worms and green lizards.

 

 

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Image:

Local people reading poetry as a stony-faced Hristo Botev (Bulgaria’s most revered poet) looks on. My own photograph, taken on Hristo Botev's birthday last year.

 

Part One

The Fish on the Hill

Click on the link to read