A few weeks away from Bulgaria over the festive season gave me time to reflect on the balance between living dangerously and taking control of our health and safety. Many people have wished me a happy, healthy, safe and prosperous New Year. Let’s see how many near misses there have been recently, and which of the main dangers ahead are (a) visible and (b) avoidable.

The masterly operation to round up the 25-person "Impudent" kidnapping gang makes me sleep better. Walking around central Sofia at lunch time is now dangerous in case of a stray bullet from further gangland shootings. I hope my Echo column is not controversial enough to make anyone feel I have to be silenced.

I thought about popping over recently from Amsterdam to Detroit but I’m glad I didn’t. I applaud president Obama for admitting that all his security agencies screwed up, but he still insists the sole agenda is to make America and Americans safe. Not once has he acknowledged that there may have been other nationalities on that plane, nor apologised for how exposed they were. He also hasn’t got the point that Americans also travel to other places on many different airlines. So the entire system worldwide must be made safe for everyone who may get caught up in Al-Qaeda’s war against whoever.

Body scanners are all very well but as a form of X-ray creating an electro-magnetic radio-active field they are probably as big a health threat as microwave ovens, mobile telephones, medical X-rays, and the outrageous insistence by the EU that we all change to low-energy light bulbs which emit pulses that are already claimed to damage your health.

Miraculously, Bulgaria has avoided the worst of the snow and freeze-up that has crippled Western Europe. Nevertheless the first snowfalls here brought all the usual heavy crashes around Sofia and a new round of arguments about snow clearing. The heads of the previous and present Sofia mayors should be banged together until this is put right.

Sadly, when I took my five-year-old Lada to a car service for its annual technical check recently, the charming girl on duty said it looked great and issued the certificate and windscreen sticker without even taking it into the workshop. My experience is just the tip of an iceberg in Bulgaria, leading to many road accidents and deaths.

Finally, my Bulgarian friends and I are now eating mainly fruit and vegetables, avoiding red meat, not smoking, and measuring our daily exercise quota with an electronic step counter. My New Year resolution is to get a bike, but it would be so dangerous on weekdays in Sofia that I’ll only use it at weekends, mainly off road. As foreshadowed a few months ago, I got a pair of roller-blades for Christmas on which to exercise in city parks.

Reverting to cigarettes, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a general strike over the huge hike in excise duty. I’m pleased that smoking in public places is really now to be banned from mid-2010, but on a business trip last month to Albania where a similar ban came into force a year ago, people were smoking at 10 out of the 12 tables in the restaurant where I dined each evening.