FORUM

I'm sorry to report that today, on the ground floor of our building, I found a fresh pile of human excrement. It took me by surprise, but it is only the last instalment in a series of unprovoked attacks on the building. So far it has featured the theft of bikes and the smashing of window panes on the entrance door. When a workman came in a white van to put in a new pane of glass, I went to chat to him and let off some steam. Turned out he had far more steam to let off. In fact, he was the human Flying Scotsman.

"What's wrong with them, why do they do this?" I asked rhetorically.

Those Bulgarians who reached Britain in the early days after EU accession should be sure to mention Saddam Hussein in their bedtime prayers. In his final hours, the former Iraqi dictator spoke of his execution as self-sacrifice. He perhaps hadn't pictured Bulgarian emigres as the ones who'd go free in his stead. But, as in many countries, Saddam's hanging just before New Year filled virtually every page of every newspaper in Britain for days, leaving no room for those other bogeymen the media plainly had in their sights: our new EU cousins from Romania and Bulgaria.

With the collapse of the Soviet regime and the subsequent opening of borders, the Russian diaspora in Western Europe and the US has lost part of its charm. The romantic image established over the years by Tsarist emigres and dissidents has been shattered by the invasion of the crassly-mannered nouveau riche into tourist hot spots and the immigration of hundreds of thousands of people ready to do anything to survive.

For once The Sun seemed lost for words. On the day Michael Shields returned to Britain, the nation's most widely-read daily newspaper, and one-time champion of his cause, consigned his repatriation to the inner pages.

"You need a 64p stamp to Bulgaria," said the clerk at my local Indian-run postoffice. "It's not in the EU."

"Yet," I added.

"Ah yes," he smiled. "I read in the paper. They're afraid Bulgarians and Romanians will take their jobs."

"We just bought a house in Bulgaria," a woman in the queue said. "Frankly, I don't think they'll come in their hundreds of thousands. Why would they, there's so much going on there."

Hackscomplainthat little is happening in Bulgarian literature these days, but they are wrong. In October, a book by a young woman made headlines in the tabloids, some of which took the unusual course of kindly publishing both sympathetic interviews with the author and large excerpts from her oeuvre. Some Bulgarians old enough to remember Communism and its collapse at the end of 1989 were infuriated, but others hailed the book as a "literary phenomenon".

OK, you've been to Greece, Turkey, and possibly southern Italy. You've kind of got used to manic drivers, street dogs, piles of litter, and Roma women approaching you with offers to read your palm. You had a dodgy tummy in Athens; you developed aches, pains and allergies in Istanbul; and your purse got nicked in Naples. You think you've seen it all? Bulgaria can still surprise you.

On the day Bulgaria was told it could join the EU in 2007 (probably the most ardently awaited report in history since the press releases for the Treaty of Neuilly), I got a call from a friend who was stuck in a mid-afternoon traffic jam. Nothing particularly noteworthy, I thought, traffic jams are hardly anything to write home about these days, unless you are driving to the Mediterranean and end up spending half your holiday on some Italian motorway.

A Bulgarian friend told me an interesting story about Ireland today. There is a well known poster "The Doors of Dublin", showing the city's Georgian doors in all their colourful splendour.

On the internet she had found the explanation for this profusion of colour. An Irish tour guide had told a party of visitors that on the death of the English queen (unspecified) the citizens of Dublin had been ordered to paint their doors black as a sign of mourning. The rebellious Irish decided instead to paint them anything but.

"She probably studies medicine," a young man says to his friend as their eyes appreciatively follow the pretty girl in a headscarf as she crosses Dzhumayata, Plovdiv's central square.

This presumption is probably correct as the Medical University in Plovdiv attracts students from Turkey who don't feel they can comply with the ban on wearing headscarves in educational establishments in their native country.