First ten minutes in Burgas again

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  1. First ten minutes in Burgas again

    May 25, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    There have been some developments in Burgas, evident within the first ten minutes of our arrival. The town Council has invested in neatly restored pavements and a fleet of pickup trucks.

    The pavements are a sight for any eyes used to the cracked and heaving obstacle courses of countless years. You must remember how loose broken slabs would pivot and release an ankle drenching shower of hitherto invisible foul water The paving stones are now set flat and neat ; their clean expanses are an invitation to the aged, the infirm and the Abiturentka (celebrating High School graduate) striding out confidently towards her ball in shiny dress and stiletto heels.

    We stop behind another car –just opposite the Technical College, in order to pay our TV and Internet bills. As Annie hunches by the SKAT shack window, I sit admiring the glistening new pavement from the driver’s seat of a car that has just crossed Europe. As I blink at the clean level expanse of geometric heaven, I become aware – almost too late – of the arrival of a truck at my off-side. It takes me but a second to comprehend the purpose of its crane and swinging chains. It stops beside the car in front. A young man leaps down from the cab, looking purposeful. I give Annie a toot. She is of course in the midst of some impenetrable bureaucratic wrangle regarding our status. I put the car into reverse just as a second truck draws up beside me. I am now nearly boxed in. I know the score. They want to hoist my car into the air – with me inside it if necessary – and transport me to some God-forsaken dust pitch somewhere in the still derelict Communist industrial zone, where I will sit contemplating rusting pipes and plastic Bila bags blowing in the wind till Annie comes and rescues me with wads of cash.

    In London the clampers and pick-up boys are merciless. Paid by results, they are often partially reformed criminals ready to extort eye-watering sums from motorists who have no choice but to pay – even when they had originally parked their cars legally. But this is Bulgaria where a threat is sufficient to maintain manly pride. Alerted by the neighbours the driver of the car in front of me appears, jumps into his car and is allowed to drive off unhindered after receiving an ear-bashing from the now purposeless young man. I breathe a sigh of relief as I too am waved on my way.

    As I drive up to the New Post Office intersection, I realize my mistake. I should not have parked safely on the road, where, by the way, I was obstructing no-one. I should have followed the Bulgarian example and parked on the pavement. The new spotless carefully aligned pavement continues to provide much needed parking spaces for harassed drivers and so wobbling pensioners and tottering newly graduated schoolgirls are still forced out into the road.

    Still the stretches of visible pavement are very impressive. And I realize that a local election must be imminent. In Communist times, urban regeneration only occurred when President Todor Zhivkov was scheduled to pay one of his lightning visits. Then any reconstituted pavements would be covered by artificially enthused workers and pupils, waving flags and banners provided by party agitators. Now in the democratic cycle, local politicians have to turn their attention away from the daily burden of self aggrandizement and seek out visible ways of placating the electorate. As those most likely to vote are over sixty, what better way to gain votes than to improve the pavements? Drivers of all ages will be so busy trying to find new places to park that they will have no time to express their frustration.

  2. Serendipity – ancient sites and industrial wasteland

    May 24, 2009 by Christopher Buxton


    To Romania – where unlike Bulgaria very little is being rebuilt. Town centres contain baroque and art nouveau buildings alongside crumbling panel blocks. Even the capital Bucharest features few of the post modernist developments that obscure the views of Vitosha and crowd the once empty spaces in Sofia. But as in Bulgaria remains of Communist dereliction are ubiquitous and are often in such close proximity to historic sites that a sense of wonder is often tinged with that necessary melancholy that should accompany a moment of beauty.

    On town outskirts, shopping outlets and new shiny factories sit side by side with the all too visible communist heritage of stark deserted hulks. Here a smart cut lawn fronts the glass frontage of an aspiring electronics firm. There a heap of rusting pipes in a dusty yard draws the eyes to the graffitied off white walls and smashed windows of yet another derelict communist workplace. All this machinery –what was it for? All these distorted chimneys – what did they disgorge into the air? And the piping, that goes on for miles, and even surrounds towns like a weird dystopian defense system – what is its purpose now?

    But let’s go and see something historic! Hunedoara contains what our guidebook describes as the finest castle in Romania – once the home of Janos Hunyadi, national hero in both Romania and Hungary, victor over the Turks at the battle of Belgrade.

    We approach a town that looks like a cross between Pernik and Kremikovtsi. – a dusty landscape of strange shaped ovens, soaring chimneys, rusting dinosaur machinery, and blank grey walls of long deserted buildings. The whole town is an industrial zone – it must have been once Communism’s pride and joy – a paradise where there would always be work for everyone. One can almost see Ceausescu waving his hand to ecstatic crowds amid the now forlorn residential blocks. Was there a reason for surrounding this historic site with such ugliness? No doubt Ceausescu could point to how far Romania has evolved from medieval tyranny!

    For lurking behind the factories which now provide little or no work is the Hunyadi castle – the end point of our excursion away from main route to Bulgaria. Set into a steep valley beyond one of the steel works, the outer walls rise sheer into the sky from a chattering stream below. Crane your neck and marvel at the conical towers that decorate the sky like ladies’ hats from a courtly romance.

    You enter the castle over a high draw bridge. At the gate you have yet another chance to look back and compare the two worlds. Once those chimneys would have been belching smoke. Turn back and walk into the courtyard. An ornate stone staircase leads to a renaissance upper hall. This was built to specifications laid down by Bethlen Gabor – another Romanian national hero with a suspiciously Hungarian sounding name.

    We practically have the whole castle to ourselves.

    Well this was true compensation for the hot delays , sitting at the wheel in queues – once for a whole hour outside Sebes where we moved a hundred yards every ten minutes. Romania like Bulgaria is a country of staggering beauty even though you have sometimes to keep one eye closed.

    So let’s look at Razgrad – we’re passing by there anyway. There’s a historic mosque and substantial remains of a Roman town. The centre of Razgrad looks uncared for. The few older buildings are unrestored and flaking. The Mosque is closed. Its windows are broken. The Odessa style steps – probably built under the aegis of Liudmilla Zhivkova – lead to a monstrous Balkan Tourist hotel, and are now sprouting weeds. There are no signs for Abritus – the ancient site – and we have to ask for directions. It’s just by the factory – you can’t miss it.

    This sounded ominous and indeed beside one brown sign and a policeman chewing sunflower seeds we found the factory, site and the museum shaded by trees just off the main road to Shumen.

    The Roman gateway and part of the wall have been crudely restored with cement blocks to give a sufficient idea of the scale of the original town. But in 1956 a pharmaceutical factory was built and this occupies most of the centre of the site. You have to skirt round its entrance to reach the Roman forum, where columns stand in competition with the factory’s chimneys. Close one eye and you might be in Greece, Turkey or Rome.

    The museum contains far more than it is able to display in its one room. Funds are promised for fitting exhibition space and appropriate security. There are no funds for further archaeological excavations of a site which predates Roman occupation but has to suffer a factory eyesore that no longer provides work for the town.

  3. Anxiety dreams

    May 16, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    24 hours away from once again taking to the road and driving to Bulgaria – first stop Dusseldorf, then Stuttgart then all points east, as heat and cicadas and distances increase.

    In the soon to be deserted house, the dust is settling after they hacked away the plaster from walls still damp from the long undetected silent leak. That was yesterday. The heavy dinosaur drying machines have been taken away. No longer will their indefatigable roar behind closed doors fray nerves and accelerate the electricity meter.

    Upstairs the spare bedroom has filled with bags and crates – all to be squeezed into our car once darkness falls – in the hope that our flit will be unobtrusive.

    And so the anxiety dreams begin.

    It is the interval and I leave Annie in the theatre bar. I have three minutes to stow my bicycle somewhere safe and get back in time for the second act. Picking up the bike from the pavement outside the theatre I wobble across two lanes of traffic and ride up the wrong side of a busy shopping street. The theatre is further and further away. Then I see an estate agents with other bikes parked outside. I spot that they are not locked. This must be a good place to leave my bike. Should I ask permission? Probably, but I have no time. The audience will be filing back to their seats by now and Annie will be wondering where the hell I am. I start back up the pavement. It leads to some stairs. I climb them and my route leads me through an open door. No-one in the flat appears to notice as I pass through living room and kitchen. It must be an established right of way. I go through the back door and climb some more stairs. Suddenly I am in an enormous classroom. There are at least a hundred kids sitting behind desks and I am taking form period. I hover over a tape machine that doesn’t work. I start walking round talking to individuals but when I look up, I find that all the kids are gone. It’s time for me to find my next class. But I have to pick up coat, scarf, books, tape recorder – I drop a towel and stoop to clutch at it with my two spare fingers. Then still struggling with all this stuff in my arms, I am in the busy school corridor looking for my class. I find them sitting crammed onto two tables in the crowded refectory. Surely I don’t have to teach them here. My head of Department is sitting with them with her deputy. Is this an observation? But fat Wendy turns to me. What are you doing here, sir? You haven’t got us now. You’ve got the other lot. Of course! I nod to my head of department, not daring to ask her where I’m supposed to be. Out in the corridor again, I look into classrooms. Lessons have started. Where is my class? The corridor turns into a shopping mall then street. Shops turn to houses and I realise I need to turn back. I’m now in a car with Annie, still looking for this class. What sort of impression am I giving the school? A teacher who doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be teaching; a teacher who cannot locate his class – that teacher must be woefully underprepared.

    I wake and struggle downstairs. I switch on the radio. Something about tourists being turned back from Lundy Island by rough seas. I switch on the TV – yet another Labour MP caught out over his expenses. I switch on the computer. It’s set itself to the wrong date and time again and I get a red message from Norton that my subscription has ended and I am defenceless against virus attacks. Ay Caramba!

    I try to ring Dad in Verona, but he has gone out with his key. Vlad – who rhymes with Dad – is in Kurdish Iraq – racing back to the Turkish border before his visa expires – so he can pick up another visa for Iran.

    I must lighten up.

  4. Thoughts on 1st May

    May 8, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    First of May – I wonder how many of my generation find their fingers instinctively curling into fists? – only to blush at the memories of naïve youth – 1968 the year of European revolution and dreams of a better world as across the channel students and workers manned barricades from Paris to Prague, we English marched in protest at the Vietnam war, chanting We are all foreign scum and many young men wanted to look like Che Guevara while women espoused the Joni Mitchell/Joan Baez look.


    The peoples’ flag is deepest red!

    Dee-dum dee dum dee dumdeedum

    This is pretty much what we sang when our university sit-in had to end in 1970. An alliance of left wing and liberal groupings had followed the lead of their colleagues at the University of Coventry, who had “discovered” that secret dossiers about them were being passed between an unholy alliance of Professors, Government and Employers.


    It was an article of faith that files on all of us must exist, so we seized the administration building in the midst of a dramatic snowstorm, erected barricades of tables and chairs and the students’ Union set up a 24 hour a day session in the Lecture theatre where we could pass resolutions condemning every reactionary government from Greece to Argentina, and send messages of solidarity to the brave fighters in Cuba and Vietnam. Of course we found no files, the University authorities denied their existence, but we continued to believe with a religious fervour worthy of St Dominic.


    But late winter turned to balmy spring and our protests ended in dum-dee-dum. No student was going to continue to occupy a soulless administration block with the Easter holidays coming on. So in spite of our promise to the radical Edgar Broughton band who had come all the way from Coventry to perform a free concert in our honour and a letter to the Vice Chancellor stating that we would never desert the barricades until he produced secret files on all of us, we marched out the Thursday before the holidays and rashly decided to sing the Red Flag, assuming that our comrades knew the words.


    No-one knew anything beyond the rousing first line.

  5. This much I don’t know

    April 21, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    The Sea of Faith
    Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
    Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
    But now I only hear
    Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
    Retreating, to the breath
    Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
    And naked shingles of the world.

    (Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach)

    I have become obsessed with certainty and its acolytes.

    President Ahmadenijad denounces Israel as a racist state and representatives of the civilized world walk out and express outrage. Ken Livingstone says the same thing at a recording of Any Questions and middle England responds with applause. Meanwhile liberal Jews who raise doubts about Israel’s actions are denounced as anti-Semitic self-haters.


    Every day in the US, Rush Limbaugh castigates liberals and tries to educate anyone listening into his alternative truth that climate change is an anti-capitalist invention and that Obama is a thug spearheading an attempt to undermine the sacred principles of the founding fathers and bring about a socialist state in God’s chosen country. He is as convinced of the truth as President Ahmadenijad.


    Recently accused of being a bleeding heart liberal in one of those polarising arguments in which a rush of blood drove me into an indefensible position, I confess to certain crusty gut instincts, formed in my youth. But I grow to regret these instincts, fear my passionate outbursts and wish I could be witty and detached.


    “Only Connect” is E.M. Forster’s command at the outset of his pre-first world war novel Howards End. “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” is the super confident opening of a writer who is in total command of his fiction.


    In the 1920s the writer John Buchan is less sure. One character blames the First World War for a loosening of the bolts of reason and the rupture of the barrier wall separating the conscious with all its necessary scruples from the flooding irrational subconscious. English gentlemen in the security of their private clubs express disquiet:


    "Lord!" he cried, "how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy.
    The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly
    childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in
    a kindergarten world.  That meant that we had a cool detached view
    and did even-handed unsympathetic justice.  But now we have got
    into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor.  We
    take violent sides, and make pets, and of course if you are -phil
    something or other you have got to be -phobe something else.  It is
    all wrong.  We are becoming Balkanised."


    Scepticism seems the correct approach but it leads us straight from the shingle of Dover Beach to Margate Sands where the super intelligent TS Eliot could “connect nothing with nothing.”


    Reserve passion for the individual outrage. You cannot walk on the other side. But make no attempt to generalise from the particular lest you find yourself enrolled in one of Arnold’s ignorant armies. These no longer “clash by night” but from London to Bangkok and from Afghanistan to Gaza there is a 24 hour struggle between those who are sure they are right.


    And in my fiction I remain powerless before the strange actions of my characters. In my fiction I know even less than I think I know about the real world.


    And we are here as on a darkling plain
    Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
    Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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