It’s over for another year. The revealing bespoke dresses, the champagne-wielding tuxedoed hooray henrys, the extravagantly painted faces, the idiotic counting up to 12, not to mention the heads dangling dangerously outside the tooting car windows - a health hazard not only to themselves but to others.

The lure of the prom ball and its surrounding celebrations is lost on me. But I’ve never been one for the one-off, blow-it-all in-an-evening party. It’s well known, for example, that in Jewish circles a bar mitzvah marks the onset of manhood. I once attended such an event in the ballroom of a London hotel hired out especially for the occasion. The whole evening must have cost several thousand pounds. I remember thinking, back in 1980, that the family in question could have dined out at their local cafe several hundred times over. Needless to say, I passed on this ostentatious rite of passage. And I’ve always shirked big parties since, believing that such events herald impossible expectations: hence a quiet 18th birthday celebration, a low-key wedding and a rapidly dispatched baby before the ‘paparazzi’ could take their snaps.

Why do young Bulgarians view this strange celebration as so compulsory? Most Sofians, for example, live in dilapidated blocks. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Unlike the residents of these buildings in the UK - often single mothers on welfare, the unemployed and unskilled workers - Bulgarian buildings also house a variety of accomplished professional classes. Still, they are forbidding nevertheless. And yet, once a year, beautiful princesses leave these depressing monuments to socialism - avoiding the putrid puddles and potholes - and head to a hired Mercedes to whisk them downtown where they fritter away a fortune in a posh hotel.

On one memorable rain-soaked May day outside a block in Mladost, I remember seeing a group of boys carrying girls astride their shoulders to avoid the princesses soiling their feet. But that image - from the perspective of the British outsider, at least - seems to sum up young Bulgarians. Starlets gliding through the air above a cesspit. Most Bulgarians, it seems to me, learn to disregard the deficiencies of their common parts. Run-down housing estates, parks, streets, pavements, buses, schools, hospitals and kindergartens pass them by. Personal appearance, on the other hand, is everything.

Bulgarian women are easily more attractive, elegant and fashionably dressed than their British counterparts even though their income is meagre by comparison. Yet they will spend a good slice of it making themselves look even more exquisite. The fact that they be splashed by a passing car on their way out of the hairdresser is a mere occupational hazard.  

The cost of the prom ball, especially for girls, can be phenomenal - hairdo, make-up, special cosmetic procedures - as well as the hiring of the hotel. They could blow several thousand leva - easy. That could be the equivalent of three months’ salary here. And all for an event that marks graduation at 18. So what’s the big deal? Getting married or celebrating a landmark birthday perhaps would be reason enough. But why spend bundles on something so mundane? Let’s face it, before the night is half-done the silk shirt will be stained with wine and the bouffant hair will look like it’s been through an egg-beater.  

The UK has no such tradition. Graduation from high school at 18 is no big deal. But perhaps affluence is the key. In the UK, partying, clubbing and general drunkenness is more common. In Bulgaria it’s a more recent fad. In communist times, people couldn’t dress the way they would have liked. Now young people have access to Western fashions and big brand names are everywhere. The dourness of the urban surroundings also lends itself to the one-off celebration, the fantasy of escapism, the chance to be stars for the night.

Peer pressure to show off their full regalia is relentless. But when they wake up the following day, hung-over and berated about the stains in the car from the empty champagne bottle and the general detritus en route to the sofa, they may wonder whether it was all worth it. Meanwhile, their parents have a massive bank loan to pay off.