Golden shower.

I'm back, it's February,  it's cold!

Fuzz is in the UK,  we meet at  Gatwick,  arrive at Sofia.  Hire car picked up & we are disappointed at the lack of snow along with all the gobby teenagers lugging skis through the airport. A 2 and a bit hour drive to Lom, we're in T market buying bloke essentials, beer, ham, beer, cheese, beer & bread!

A grey overcast day, we get to the house, light the fire & get the water back on. The next day it's beautiful sunshine, 17 degrees, a quick mooch round to see if anything has been nicked but everything is fine apart from a big pile ol rubble where my barn used to stand. The weight of the previous few weeks snow has finished it off.

So after realising we can't live on ham, cheese & bread for a week we go to town for a kebab. Then back into tea market to meet our dietary requirements I stock up on beer & for the rest of the week we dine like kings on chicken nuggets, chips & beans (plus beer, kebabs & cakes)!

We stop off for a lunchtime refreshment at the recently built hotel on the road to Stanevo from Kovachitsa, due to the woeful decor we have named it the horse head hotel or Triple H, I still have no idea of what it's actually called. So I'm half way through my 5 day visit & still have not done any work, so a a quick hole in the wall for the waist pipe, glue the shower try to the wall with some silicon & go for a beer.

I've now scrounged a tile cutter from the next village & set to work tiling, this is pretty much now just drunk DIY, I've decided to change how I was tiling, going for easier with less cuts rather than it looking nice. I've glued the whole tiles on with the magical Bullmaster adhesive & have now realised how pissed the walls are. The cuts are made, gobbed onto the wall & grouted!

The grout is going off before I can get it onto the tiles so I fix the shower cubicle to the wall, seal it with silicon & it's done.

This is a major milestone in the development of Festerville, I no longer have to wash my arse over a bucket, I have a working shower! Admittedly the waste pipe just dumps the water into the garden but that's a job for another day.

To celebrate being clean it's time for a quick one in the Black Pussy😉

Fuzzy fashion!

So, let's step back a bit to Luton airport, a small mortgage was taken out to purchase 7 pints of Guinness & a full English. I'm now bored & half cut so it's time to go shopping, ooh look duty free crap! So I'm in Curry's or whatever the electrical shop it was connecting my phone to various Bluetooth speakers to see how loud they are, turns out that not everyone is a Hawkwind fan!

Vaguely aware of my travels ahead I head to WH Smiths for some sustenance for the journey, so the drunk diabetic heads off to the boarding gate with a bag full of M&M's & jelly babies!

Fast forward to the hotel in Sofia, the restaurant is closed as it's getting late & the next pisser is my train to Lom is  at 07.10 & the hotel breakfast does not start until 0730. The train to Lom is around four & a half hours so basically all I had to eat in about 24 hours were M&M's & jelly babies, not my greatest bit of planning but I had made it from home to Lom using public transport.

Now my old mucca Paul was picking me up from the station, as the train rolled in I spotted his van parked outside. Now what I saw next was possibly a fashion disaster even by Bulgarian standards, in BG the shell suit is not making a comeback,  it kind of never left! Usually combined with a pair of Bulgarian stringy shoes , the shell suit is not gender specific & can be enjoyed by anyone of any age & in any temperature!

What I saw next kind of left me feeling like my soul wanted to escape via any available orifice. Walking towards me was Paul wearing a tee shirt, and shorts with his usual braces, this wasn't the issue, the shorts were cut down jeans cut quite short, then I though he had rigger boots on, but no, they were hand made Bulgarian knitted winter socks with a matching pair of Crocs!

Needless to say, Hot pants, Crocs & socks didn't make it to the catwalk for Sofia fashion week!

So enough piss taking for now. The main point of this journey was to buy bathroom tiles, a rough measure up to get enough for the bathroom & possibly the kitchen we visited several did type stores. Now when enquiring with the wife what colour she wants, the answer of "well you know what I like" is a trap to see if you've taken any notice of anything she's said over the last 16 years.

So after visiting several hardware/DIY stores it became very apparent that they were keen to sell you all the brown,  orange & cream patterned tiles that they had in stock since the mid 70's. Plain white was to be the safest option so after finding an off white I liked, I placed an order that would be there Monday. Monday arrives & we go back to the shop only to be told next day, just to be safe we gave them until Wednesday & they still weren't there.

It's Thursday, I'm due to get a train back to Sofia at 2pm, we pop into the shop & the tiles are there but it's too late for me so Sue & Paul return after lunch to pick them up for me.

I'm waiting for the train & there in a little old lady standing there with the biggest bag I've ever seen. I lift her bag onto the train for her & she says thank you in perfect English, not something you expect from an older generation, I'm stuck with her & her BO for the next 5 hours!

I've returned to the same hotel as before, rooms are clean etc & it's a few minutes walk from the station. I'm in the small bar area ordering food from an old blonde girl that's dressed like an ageing stripper. The food is cooked in a restaurant over the road, the old bird totters over in her stripper heels to collect it. I'm sitting eating by meal and in the hotel reception is a younger blonde dressed in black who I assumed was a lady of negotiable affection. She approached a chap in the bar, they exchanged a few words & went upstairs,  I wondered why she never approached me earlier as a potential customer. The next morning the same girl served me breakfast & it turned out the guy was her boyfriend who worked there too. That could of been embarrassing!

So I set off home that morning, I walked to the metro station which is all new, managed to work out the route & where to change & made it to the airport, the new metro station at the airport is really nice, all shiny marble (looking) floors. Jump on the shuttle bus to terminal 1 & I'm on the plane.

The loneliness of the long distance plumber!

Apologies if i start repeating myself, as BG beer is about 25p a pint i feel i usually come back with considerably less brain cells than what i went with!

So August 2014 was a family holiday, so far i have moved the water supply to the far side of the kitchen, we have running water to the kitchen sink & a flushing bog, a boiler is on the wall but not plumbed in. A 2 week family holiday nipping round to see Fuzz & Sue for a shower & various trips out to a few other towns & tourist sites. Too many mozzies & the girls are being bitten, i'm not being bitten so being an alcohol sodden diabetic does seem to have its advantages. I don't get much work done but i do get sunburn whilst sorting out the leaking porch roof.

Happy family shit over with i return in October alone to play with my plumbing! Now i must admit, thermoplastic welded pipe is the dogs dangly bits, no messing around with copper pipes that would either freeze or be stolen, instead  you buy 2 or 3 metre lengths of plastic pipe with whatever fittings you need, elbows, straight joints, threaded tap fittings etc. You buy a £20 pipe tool with male & female fittings, melt the end of the pipe & the fitting, line them up & push them together, piece of piss! We should use this in the UK!

So my next break through after a week of cheap beer & kebabs is hot water! This is a milestone in Festerville history! You learn to appreciate these small triumphs, as you're standing naked in front of an open fire washing your nuts in a bucket of hot water from your own tap! (note to self, must buy curtains!)

So, the new hot water is on the day before i leave, which means i have to now turn all the water off & drain the system for the winter, the novelty was indeed short lived.

I return again in the spring with the family to do more, mainly to see if anything has burst during the minus 20 temperatures of the winter, the only issue is the outside tap has blown out of its fitting, i screwed it back in & we were leak free. More family orientated holiday type stuff, strangely enough the girls didn't seem to share my enthusiasm in washing in a bucket so trips to Fuzz & Sues shower it was.

My next plan was to return in the summer alone, i was to ride my motorbike down to Austria with a few friends over a couple of days then leave them to ride on through Swiss territory, Stelvio pass etc while i buggered off to BG. It didn't happen!

In the mean time i had managed to get tickets to see ACDC at Wembley, on the day we drove up to Wembley & parked in the Multi storey car park & saw the concert. We planned to sleep in the car rather than wait 2 hours to get out of the car park, we slept reasonably well, paid the robbing bastards £50 to get out of the car park then went to the nearest McDonalds for a coffee & a McShit! This was around 7am & we decided to drive to Southend for breakfast, we found a cafe & sat on the hard wooden chairs then i felt a clunk in my back, i then spent the next 8 weeks off work unable to sit down & walking like the elephant man. Summer over!

We move house at the end of August & i return to work. After 2 months of opiate based pain killers, muscle relaxants, an MRI scan & a finger up the arse from a lady doctor with nice small hands, the conclusion is my old back injury has reared its ugly head & i need two prolapsed discs removed (its now March & still not happened!).

October 2015, i feel fit enough to travel so i manage to book flights with Wizzair from Luton in a big pink Dildo! Using all public transport, high speed train service from Ashford to London which was delayed, another train from London to Luton then a shuttle bus to the airport. The flight is then delayed by about 3 hours so marooned in the airport i went shopping. 7 pints of Guinness later we are finally boarding & the mysteries of the bladder begin! After 3 or 4 visits to the bog we land, by the way, 7 pints of Guinness in an airport costs more than the flight.  So its now around 8pm in BG, its pissing down & i need to get to my hotel, i find a man selling shuttle bus tickets to the station for 6 lev, result as my hotel is a 5 minute walk from the station, after 20 minutes of standing at a bus stop in the rain the wanker comes out & gives me my money back & says no driver. I get a cab to the hotel but the restaurant is closed as its so late, i head to my room to sleep off my liquid lunch.

Thats enough for now.