WAITING FOR THE GOATS

If you have travelled in Bulgaria, you should have noticed: the deserted, slowly dying villages. The crumbling houses. The abandoned kindergartens and schools. The overgrown healthcare facilities. The empty squares, adorned with monuments to long-forgotten men. The boarded-up stores. The decaying farms. The white rectangles of death notices for people who had called these spaces home plastered on trees and walls lining the empty streets.

Sometimes, you would glimpse some signs of life. A slow-moving old woman. A couple of men sitting on rickety plastic chairs in front of the only store around, sipping beer from bottles at 9 am. A herd of sheep or goats, returning from pasture, their udders heavy with milk, their bells ringing in the air.

Christopher Fenton's memoir Waiting for the Goats is a book that tells what could happen if you settle here. Told by a man with a background in landscape archaeology who has dedicated years of his life to free wandering across Europe in search of a slower, more sustainable life, the memoir is a journey into one of Bulgaria's most forgotten corners.

Waiting for the Goats is about a British couple's journey to the fictionalised village of Podgoritsa, in Bulgaria's northeast, to pursue their dream of establishing a smallholding. Unlike so many expats who settle in Bulgaria attracted by the cheap cost of living and never really understand the people around them, they truly become part of the community. They make friends. They organise a festival and open a guesthouse. Christopher plays in the local orchestra and explores lesser-known archaeological sites. When the day comes to an end, they sit by an abandoned house to wait for the goats to come home.

The memoir is not some rose-tinted account that delves into memories about rural sights, strange characters, authentic food etc. An honest book, Waiting for the Goats explores the strangeness of the place and of its people, and the author's own awareness of his own oddity in his hew home. As an archaeologist, he has done his research about the country and its past: the ancient and medieval remains, the constant change of peoples, the invasions, and the reasons for the slow decay of rural communities after the nationalisation of land under Communism as well as the unrestrained transition to the free market after its collapse. He has masterfully woven these into the narrative, explaining the what, when and why to readers unfamiliar with Bulgaria's ancient and current history.

In the slowly spreading ruins around them, the people of Podgoritsa go about their lives. They wait for the goats. They joke bitterly about the closure of their cooperative bakery. They make their food and booze entirely by themselves. They resist rampant capitalism when they can. One of them pulls out the "Private Property" signs a British expat has placed on a plot of land that everyone used. They all boycott the goatherd's effort to raise the fee for looking after the animals. They are eager to listen to the music at a festival organised by Christopher and some of his friends. To share personal stories and local legends with him. To be vulnerable and to ask for a lift to the nearby hospital. To invite him to their funerals.

Waiting for the Goats often reads like a melancholy story about a dying community that is all too aware that its days are numbered. Yet among the gloom sparkle the gems of the author's sense of humour – always warm, never self-deprecating. And there are the memories of his childhood, and of the years before Podgoritsa, of the travels in the life-battered truck in which he and his wife Claire reached Bulgaria, following the advice of the only Bulgarian they knew at the time.

Why did they follow the advice? Because of the promise of freedom. Now Christopher Fenton is sharing all of this with us: a well-written, mesmerising story that repeats, time and again, stories of life and death with the same regularity as the changing seasons, the natural calendar of rural communities. A gulp of fresh air in the increasingly virtual lives that we live now.

Waiting for the Goats (Fimber Press, ISBN: 978-1-0683743-0-2) is available on amazon.co.uk