Day One: We move house. By my count, it is the 12th time I have moved in my adult life, counting in moving from Cape Town to Sofia; the 13th overall in my life. Our life is in about 70 boxes, ranging from special cardboard portable wardrobes complete with hanging racks to shoeboxes of precious and fragile things. I have bought coloured stickers to colour-code all boxes to designate for which room they are destined. Very methodical. My mother was fond of saying that when my father marshaled a house move, it was like a military operation. A private joke between my brother and myself was that this took no account of the fact that most military operations are foul-ups. The movers, the Bulgarian outfit of an international company, are very impressive – courteous, efficient, systematic and unrelenting in their work, meticulous about the fragile stuff. No commercial endorsements here, but I will go so far as to disclose that I got them from an advertisement in this newspaper.
Day Two: Moving is one thing, living is another. The move was the easiest part. The prelude, the protracted Byzantine process of dealing with pompous notariuses and the needlessly complicated ins and outs of a property transaction in Bulgaria, is over, thankfully. We are the proud and outright owners of a three-bedroom 1930s property on a quiet street very close to the centre (Well, “we” in the sense that we are married in community of property; but not “we” because I am a foreigner and because the property includes the garden land, I am barred from ownership – so my name is not on the title deed. The latest instance of two Bulgarian statutes that are mutually exclusive in their effect). Now we are “in” but much remains to be done. On the back of an envelope, a list of “things to do” is written out and stuck on the fridge. Install heating, commission re-doing of kitchen, install lighting, buy new beds, new desk for the laptop, new chair for said desk, new wardrobe for master bedroom, get cable internet connection installed, cable television installed, telephone re-connected; these are just a few priorities. The previous owner, a pretentious old fart who likes to be referred to as “the professor”, has perpetrated a number of factual inexactitudes in his dealings with us, making this list longer than it should be in some respects. The sofas are put out and the paintings go up, the books are unpacked. Books and paintings inspire the space of home with soul. Now it’s our home, not territory occupied with the consent of the “professor”.
Day Three (Some Days Later): Work is keeping me very busy, just one reason among several why I am not very much (any) help in getting things sorted out. Maestori (artisans) to fit out the kitchen are commodities not easy to come by. The interval between choosing a bed and the date on which it may be delivered is extraordinarily long, more than a calendar month. We acquire a table for the laptop; in spite of choosing one that is 75cm high, the one that is delivered is 65cm high, too short by far, but – it turns out – the only height remaining in stock. Solution: put it on rollers, 10cm high. The chair is very nice, stainless steel and leather, not quite your classic work chair but very stylish and very comfortable. Hm, usually it’s the other way round, a computer chair is on rollers and the desk is not. No bed yet, we try a borrowed inflatable mattress, of which one side deflates, a very handy automatic alarm clock. When you wake up flat on the floor, it’s time to get up to go to work.
Day Four (Further Days Later): Still no kitchen yet, we’re still camping, with the Chinese place and the nearby restaurant in Zaimov/Oborishte/Zaimov Park providing the staple of our diet, and one of the bathroom’s sink serving as the washing-up basin. We have new tiles for the kitchen wall, and one day, shall have someone to put them up. As to any manual work, I have no shame in confessing to being bottom of the class in my one year of compulsory woodwork at school. My manual skills end at typing, which doesn’t get anything done. The cable internet people run a black cable through a white wooden window frame, then accidentally cut their own cable, then tape it back together. We are online. The TV people bestow on us a satellite dish, and once again we can watch the sagas of others as Kevin McCloud narrates Grand Designs. We seem like small potatoes next to some of these epics. Still no bed, now using sleeper couch in the lounge. Watching television from bed always seems very self-indulgent.
Day Five (Yet More Days Later, Not Sure, Have Not Put Wall Calendar Up In Kitchen For Obvious Reasons): But work on the kitchen is moving along, electrical power points in places somewhat more intelligent and practical than previously, plumbing shifted to suit our needs. Two boxes of tiles are on the kitchen floor, two still in the boot of the car. Whoever puts them up can first carry them. Now sleeping on fold-out couch in child’s room. Colleague suggests borrowing lorry from someone and crossing border into Greece and Ikea. Have decided to commission Maestro, once in hand, to build bed. In bathroom, confuse liquid soap and dishwasher, go to work with lemon-fresh grease-free hands. If I was a plate, I’d be shining.
Day Six: At a spa hotel in Velingrad. We languish in mineral water and massages, facials (no, not me) and other such indulgences. Very nice bed. Regrettably, will not fit in car.
Work on the kitchen is progressing. It will all be over by Christmas.
