Blog
Mushroom season
It’s been a dry month, with hardly any of the afternoon storms that usually punctuate June. Which is great. The garden has enjoyed the abundant heat and sunshine. But it’s not so great for picking mushrooms. Every time we’ve been mushroom hunting this season the...
Lost in Lyulin
After so many years here, it’s always fun to find a new Bulgarian thing that confuses me. I mean, it’s not always fun at the time but it generally makes for good blog fodder. And so we found ourselves wandering around Sofia’s Lyulin 5 neighbourhood – a nice, leafy...
Why doesn’t everyone just move abroad?
UK readers, please tell me, why are you still there? Why haven’t you buggered off abroad yet? I don’t want to come off as an ingrate. The UK did alright by me. I turned 18 in the late 90s, a particularly optimistic time to be a Brit. I went to university when it...
Life lessons from our five (ish) cats
If you’ve been here a while you’ll know we’re mad cat people. And as any fellow mad cat person will know, cats are masters of the universe who are supremely confident in their own wonderfulness. Here are five ways we can all Be More Cat. Stretch Cats delight in a...
What to sling on the barbecue this summer
Whiplash-inducing turnaround, as per usual, on this blog. Last time moaning about the unseasonably cold April, and this time telling you to fire up the barbecue. Because SUMMER IS HERE, folks. We’ve had a couple of weekends where it’s been warm enough to cook and...
A predictably unpredictable Bulgarian April
It’s a tale as old as time (or, more accurately, as old as this blog): I write about the excitement of kicking off the new gardening season and, sure enough, the weather says, ‘Nuh-uh. Here, have some snow. And some frost. Would you like more snow?’ Needless to...
Welcome to Gardening Bore 2022
If you’re wondering where I’ve been all month, we went to England for two weeks, which was rather nice actually, and I got COVID, which wasn’t so nice. Not that I was very ill, luckily. It was more inconvenient than anything, isolating in a house with a partner who...
Recommended reading
I’ve got just the thing for you this week. A good book to lose yourself in, but something deeply thoughtful – so you can distract yourself from the scary state of the world, but with something a bit … worthy, if you know what I mean. Look at me, recommending an...
Priorities
Someone on Instagram was recently talking about life choices, particularly the things they choose to prioritise (time, mortgage-free living) and the things they choose to sacrifice in return (big house, plenty of disposal income, a retirement plan). I needed to...
Sexy Paul. Also, more bread
Right, so I caught a bit of that Beatles documentary Get Back and I have FEELINGS on the matter. Confusing, sometimes sexual feelings. Mostly about Paul McCartney. Which is very weird because, for me, Paul McCartney has always fallen into the same category as Bono...
Supermarket excitement, what to eat this winter
Very exciting news from our corner of Bulgaria: we’ve now got a Fantastico supermarket near us. I say ‘near’, it’s a 50-mile round trip. But that’s as close as any big supermarkets get for us. (There’s a small T-Market in our nearest town, about 10 miles away,...
Misadventures in sourdough
I have a habit of adopting trends several years after everyone else. It’s like an in-built aversion to doing anything popular at the time that it’s popular. For some reason, I wait until the popular thing has eventually tipped over into cliché and everyone’s...