Some time at the end of April.

At last the weather is a bit awful and I can have a day in the house without feeling guilty in that English sort of way – you know …. the sun is shining therefore I must go outside. This works well in a climate where sun shining is rare but of course, in some places, like here, it just goes on shining day after day. I haven’t written this blog since February and thats because, one day just a month ago, it suddenly stopped being winter and spring just erupted. One day nothing, then next its was plum blossom everywhere and the grass started to grow – very quickly and very thickly.

I have considered getting an animal to keep the grass down in the field but after my episode with Alan Shearer, I’m a bit off grazing things. So its just me and the strimmer and of course its now decided to only work for 7 minute spells. I organise my day now around short bursts of strimming but sometimes I look up and see the enormous amount of grass and wild flowers and it’s a bit daunting. Why aren’t you using the traditional Kosa, I hear you say — because its too hard! Cutting grass with it requires precision Kosaring skills that only people like Drago have. I can cut down evil big weeds and I think I’m doing great then I look up and see Drago effortlessly scything away and making neat little piles. I aspire to having a lawn mower – one of those neat little things on a quad would be cool.

My first volunteers of the year arrived on exactly the first day of spring – it was snowing the day before – and they were great. Adele and Maxim from Brittany and their dog called Eureka. There were such great people to have around – they did loads of work, they cooked great food (French ..mais oui) and they were jugglers. Maxim got it organised to go and do a circus skills workshop up at the school (youtube videos to follow at some point). It was great fun and the kids loved it. He was also into cross country unicycling – this involves hurtling down steep hillsides on a unicycle – very impressive.

Adele is a journalist - she’s doing an article about Voditsa for her newspaper and we’re planning a photography project for next year. I did warn them of course that people sometimes end up wanting to live here and guess what happened after about 3 days?? Maxim is interested in setting up a circus troupe here so I thought I might put my career aim of being a pirate on hold for a while and I could run away with the circus. I love it when interesting exciting people come by here and then decide to stay.

Julie has also been back to visit and to finalise her house here – she’s coming for a while in the summer with the lovely Lielle and Dani who fixes strimmers. Hopefully she’ll be coming the following year for longer and maybe setting up some creative workshops for kids – could be circus related?

Lisa and her family are also here right now. She bought the huge piece of woodland in the next village last year and now she’s doing one of the houses up

16th May 2009.

It quickly stopped raining and i haven’t really been inside the house much lately but its actually getting hot now so I’ve adjusted my working time to stop myself from roasting to death in hot midday sun. Now I’m getting up at 6ish and getting outside by 7 and then for a couple of hours in early afternoon, I’m going to sit in the house and do my computer stuff – that the plan!.

The strimmer is driving me crazy – it just works for little fits and starts and there is no way I can keep up with the rate that the grass is growing. I’m back to thinking about watering again – it takes up so much time. Stuff is getting out into the garden – peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers – the usual stuff but I’m starting to think more about salads again but it’ll be another few weeks till my tomatoes are ready meanwhile the ones from the market are not the same standard – even if I do say so myself!

Its been great having Lisa and her kids around – she has done loads of work on one of the houses on her land in Osikovo and of course, lots of wood clearance. They’ve gone to Ireland for a month and then they’ll be back for most of the year. Their dog, Dilly, is with me now – I used to know her in Ireland – she’s old and deaf and stubborn like Jess.

A guy called Reuben has been here a couple of times now and has bought a piece of land up the back of my house – in the wild. Not sure what he’s going to do with but he’s been spending some time just sitting there playing is flute.

And two great new people from Rotterdam passed by the other day – great energy and interesting ideas. They’re off to Syria but they’re kind of looking for somewhere interesting to live – what can be more interesting than Voditsa?? They inspired me to start thinking about putting on a music and arts festival – thats a new idea that’s still floating about..waiting for the right people.

I have just moved outside – I’ve spent the last two days tidying everything up, sorting out tables ( I actually have 7 tables – dont know how that happened), getting the pots and pans moved out and getting back to walking a lot when I’m cooking – half the stuff is inside the house. We made a great new BBQ when the French volunteers were here and we christened it the other night. Sitting chatting and it struck me as bazaar that we were sitting, in the dark, half way up a field in Bulgaria at a table with a sparkly tablecloth and a candelabra..but the stars were great. But hopefully, that’ll be me outside till the end of September.

The cherries, apricots and plums will be starting soon – I actually have run out of jam and I think I’m ready for the onslaught this year – I was taken by surprise at the apricots last year but I am prepared to turn slightly orange this time.

It has been surprisingly windy the last few weeks – lots of pleasant breezes making a lovely noise in the trees and right now, its bringing a sweet scent of acacia blossom – so lovely – it always make me think nice places in the Mediterranean. That’s the first crop of the year that gets made into rakia.

I have a washing machine!!! Well its not exactly mine – it belongs to my new best friend Kareena. She has a house in the next village and comes here afew times a year. She borrowed the car for a couple of days and loaned me her washing machine in exchange. That may not be a huge thing for most people but it saves all the time going to the spring and …..the clothes are clean!

On an interesting note, I had a conversation with the Mayor of Voditsa the other day and he is interested in my development plan for the village. I got it translated into Bulgarian, I’m gong to meet with him to discuss it and then hopefully we’ll actually do something about it and get some EU money coming into the village.

I had an interesting random email the other day from a woman who manages events and wants to use this as a venue and maybe she wants to bring 80 volunteers here on a capacity building project in September ….interesting and loads of possibilities.

Great business opportunity : the bar and restaurant in Voditsa is for rent for 400lev a month – that includes electricity. Its fully equipped –although I haven’t actually been in the kitchen. It has huge potential to be a great place to hang out. It needs a little bit of reorganising and some good music – there is space to have a band on in the corner. This village so needs a buzzy little bar and a place to eat. If my development plans work out, there’ll also be a lot more people coming around this place in the future.

I had a little holiday – my friend Patti came over and took me for a few days in a nice hotel in Varna. We just walked about, talked and ate lovely cakes. It was a lovely week.

Its sheep’s milk season right now. I happened to mention that I would like to buy some sheeps milk yoghurt and two days later, a woman came round with 5 kilos. It was pretty nice but that is a lot of yoghurt when there is only me.

The sun has now moved away from the very hot place where I was relaying the path so I have to go back out and finish it. Lots of love to all my friends, how are you doing, whats the craic, where are you are…..send me your news.
Lece veche.

Last week I was happily thinking about seeds and greenhouses and digging over beds in the warm spring sunshine. Then on Friday, as the Moon went into Sagittarius, a metre of snow fell in about 24 hours and here we are in the middle of winter again. I know all that about the Moon because this winter weather was predicted in my moon planting calendar – I wish I knew more about the planets. But anyway, its just like last year now and I spent the day in bed writing my book and messing about on the internet.

Ziggy has become a house cat – the snow is to deep for him to go out. He was jumping from one of my wellie holes in the snow to the next but then he got stuck. So I let him sleep in the house at night but he’s not very sure of this sleeping thing – me sleeping I mean. He keeps coming and touching my face with his paw in the night – a bit strange and annoying but he is cute.

Apart from the snow, things are getting exciting here and I think that this year things might start to happen here. I’ve now set up a company, CKMI Training and Development, with Marc and Cara and we’re hoping that a Bulgarian called Ivan who is in Canada right now, will son come and join us. We’ve applied for some funding to be partners in a project around traditional food and we’re also involved in generating an organic hemp industry in BG. We’ve got a name, nearly got a logo and a website and we’ve got loads of ideas so we’ll start putting ourselves about a bit and see if we can generate some work. There is so much potential here with community projects and new ideas – I just hope we aren’t let down by political decisions and corruption here.

On the property front, my son Alex has just bought a really great, very old house. Its all built in the traditional style (and it was very cheap) and I’ve got someone who can do the old building things. It’s a very different style to this house and doing it up will be more like a project to preserve the old and traditional building methods. Should be fun but I might change my thoughts totally on that as the work progresses. My experience of BG builders is that they may be skilful but often they’re unreliable – we’ll see.

A great piece of land came up the other day – its just up behind my house – in the wild place – and we sold it (in 24 hours) to a guy who, I think, wants to live in a yurt. Now that should turn a few heads here! We’re getting more interest from people who are just sick of their life in the UK and want to start again – great and very exciting for Voditsa. I just wish someone would come and open a good bar here! People sit around the shops in the village, drinking beer and eating bits of sausage, but its not really a bar – there’s no atmosphere, the seats are not comfortable and there’s no music. I’ll keep on about this to everyone and one day………..

Lisa is moving over here in April and Julie is coming from Israel next month and Jo is coming in May. I’m also getting loads of visitors this year – I’m so looking forward to all my lovely friends who are coming.

Jorge is still not really speaking to me. He doesn’t ignore me but there is something different in his manner. He hasn’t forgiven me at all for Tino and he blames me for not taking enough care of him. I guess it’ll work out in time – I hope so.

On a happier note, we are having our first mini-festival here in July. Elly is having a birthday bash here and we’re expecting around 40 people to be camping in the field for a few days. This is what I really want to do with the field – I cant really be bothered with random campers just turning up – one or two are ok but I now know that a proper campsite is not what I want to have here. But doing some hard work for a short time, like a week, is great. If I can do about 3 of these a year, it’ll be brilliant. This is the tester this year – I have to finish flattening the field, organise extra toilets and showers, sort out a bar (done that), buy more plates and generally start coming up worth ideas that will make the week and the whole experience great.

I learned a new food thing recently. Dancho’s father killed a pig and I bought some meat from him. Its hard to say which bit of the animal I ended up with because butchering is not a skill here – the dead animal is just cut up. Anyway I got one piece that was meant to be cured and dried. Dancho kept coming along with the next set of instructions from his granny – first of all the meat was rubbed in salt and then covered in salt for about 2 weeks. I had to drain it and rub it some more everyday. Then it was washed and soaked in water for 3 days to get he salt out. Then I rubbed it in herbs and hung it up outside to dry off in the air for a few days. Dancho’s granny injected hers with red wine but that was a bit advanced for me but I did compare the taste and the red wine helped so next year I might do that. But the meat was lovely and now I have new preserving skill.

The sun is shining outside now – its minus quite a lot but the sky is blue and the white is dazzling. I really could do with some snow shoes – I thought this last year – I’ve just remembered that I have some handmade wooden skis – I might go out and give them a try – I’ll have to dig my way to the museum first tho…..

I went to visit some friends last weekend in a little village south of VT. I met them last year when 5 people and two dogs dropped by one night. They were part of a small group who wanted to buy a big piece of land to build a kind of eco-village. They now have the land and the project will soon start to happen – very exciting and hopefully I’ll do some work with them on planning the whole thing. So I needed a break and I went off to visit them and to my surprise, I ended up in Brit-land! 50% of this little village are Brits and there was money oozing out of every wall! Some of the houses had been renovated beautifully but there was nothing remotely like a real Bulgarian village about the place – it was a bit surreal. Lovely people but a bit too ‘ex-pat’ for me. This village is not where the land is by the way.

But I did manage to go to VT this time without driving down the wrong side of the motorway – that’s good progress!

I’m so enjoying listening to Radio 4 again but the down side is that I hear all the news from the UK and its so unhappy. I cant believe how many jobs are being lost and people loosing their homes. I guess when you’re in it, your own concerns are paramount but when you look at this from a distance, it seems so unreal. Especially when life here just goes on as ever. The weather , the goats, the apricots and whatever just keep on in their own cycle – I always feel that life here is about keeping up with nature – especially when there is yet another mountain of fruit!

I think I have to get out of bed now and maybe venture out to the shop – I need some bread. The road is clear – I just have to dig my way to the gate. I also need to go and see if my new greenhouse has fallen down with the weight of the snow – hope not.