“Tell me three things about yourself, two of which are true, one of which is a lie.” This is one of Guy’s favourite games, played in the pub over a few beers. Today, I am asking him. “Ok: I appeared in an advertising poster campaign, I did a voice-over and I’m a published retail analyst,” he says.
Guy is from London, Hammersmith to be precise. He was born in a police station in Charing Cross. “At that time it was the old Charing Cross hospital, just a stone’s throw away from Nelson’s column, but Margaret Thatcher thought we had too many hospitals and not enough police stations in central London, so now it houses lots of coppers.”
He lived and worked in London, doing “loads of different jobs”, including in an investment management firm and, “I was a journalist once, like you, but for a trade magazine.” But about three-and-a-half years ago, he “opted out of London” to “do a bit more travelling and see a bit more.”
“What brought me to Bulgaria?” he says. “My 100-pound car, which I bought with my twin brother.” Guy and his twin, Nick “bought it from a mate of ours. It was sitting on his drive reminding him of his ex-wife, who he doesn’t like. So, we thought it would be a good idea to take it off his hands and he kind of thought it was a good idea too.”
The two set off across Europe. “I think the general plan was to keep heading south. We both wanted to go to Poland. So, we got to Poland and then just sort of headed down and Bulgaria was where we ended up.”
After they arrived, Guy was offered a job “more by fluke than by design” on the Black Sea coast in Varna and Nick went off climbing in South America. “That was the point of the mission. We hadn’t seen each other for a while – I’d been in South America – so we thought it’d be nice to spend some time together before he went away for a year.”
After Nick left, Guy got offered a teaching job with the British Council in Varna, and he now works for them in Sofia.
Before coming to Bulgaria, Guy lived and worked in various places around the world. He worked as a teacher in Mexico city, Chile and Santiago, as a landscape gardener in New Zealand – “very hard work, but the pies are good and it’s easy to hitchhike around” and in Australia – “which everyone likes really.”
Asked to choose the best and worst aspects of life in England and life in Bulgaria, Guy says: “I think you have to pay a lot of tax under Gordon Brown in England these days, so that’d be one thing I don’t like about England.”
“The best thing about England is playing football on grass on a Sunday morning.” After consideration, though, he says, “Actually, no, on a Saturday morning – on Sundays you’re usually too hung-over.”
The most difficult thing about life in Bulgaria is “getting out of bed for my eight o’clocks,” says Guy, referring to the early morning classes he teaches. And so far the language is still “gobbledegook”. The best thing: “snowboarding on a Sunday morning”.
Given the choice of snowboarding or skiing, snowboarding wins out every time. “Skiing’s alright – it’s better than staying at home watching TV, don’t get me wrong, but snowboarding’s miles more fun and you just get a different feeling going sideways.”
As to his favourite snowboaring spot, Guy says: “I like Bansko a lot, but Borovets is only an hour from my door. So, you just hop in the motor and you’re there by the time you’ve woken up, so to speak. That’s been a feature of this winter and I feel a bit sorry that the snow’s melting now and it’s not going to be around for much longer.”
So, what will this snowboarder do when the season is over? “I don’t know, I think I’ll have to set up a tiddley-winks league or something like that...”
So, which of his three facts was false? I know he was a journalist, so I think the last one is true. Maybe he was lying about the first. He smiles, “I cheated; they’re all true.”
