Job Swap 4

  1. Job Swap 4

    March 31, 2012 by Christopher Buxton

    The story so far: As part of a European work-sharing initiative, the GLB  Greatest Living Bulgarian Boyko Borisov and Posh-boy David Cameron have swapped jobs.  Batty Boyko is now in Downing Street and firing on all cylinders. David Cameron is somewhat less comfortable in his Boyanna Residence)

    Previous episodes can be found in earlier posts

    BB:

    E-e-ekh these spoilt English! I talk plain down-to-earth common sense to them and they lose their glass balls. Sometimes I feel homesick for my patient countrymen who know how to handle a crisis because they meet one every five minutes.  And they like queuing!  It gives them a chance to catch up on the gossip and complain about the black market.

    Don’t talk to me about shortages. In my house we always had fifty plastic 5 gallon containers full of water, so we could flush the toilet when the tap water stopped; my mother had five hundred candles and matches for the electricity black outs and we always had twenty Turkey cans full of petrol in the cellar. You call them Jerry after your enemies.  I’ve decided to call them Turkey.  My word is a new dictionary entry. I’ll tell Volen.

    So grow up English! All I said was you could use Turkey cans and learn to queue.

    What’s all this about pasties? I got a phone call from Chancellor George. He put a tax on hot food.  And now all hell broke loose.  I asked George – what’s a pasty? He hasn’t got a clue. Then I get Prince Charles on the phone because they’re Cornish. Turns out they’re some kind of meat banitza. I called a press conference so I could be seen eating one. Mmmmm! (eukh!) I get a very strong taste of turnip, but I manage to smile.  I’m not posh – not like my ministers. It takes me five hours to get the taste out of my mouth.

    Not been a good week. Some sneak photographer snapped me with Abramovich before the Chelsea game. It seems I have to steer clear of rich people for the time being – especially after Chancellor George cut the higher rate of tax. Then some clown in the Toff’s party was caught on camera saying that ₤250,000 would buy a lunch with me. Actually I’m a lot cheaper, especially now I’m eating pasties. I had to fire his bottom and then go find a pub which wasn’t full of bankers and let working folk buy me beer and bend my ear for ₤2.50.

     

    DC:

    I keep asking my ministers about Romania.  It’s Bulgaria’s neighbour but no-one seems to know anything about it. Not like Greece, Serbia and Turkey.  My ministers seem to know a lot about these countries.  There are even jokes.

    Don’t worry about Romania, David! they say.  Only gypsies live there. Well, these gypsies want to own Bulgaria’s Black Sea oil. Or was it gas?  It’s like the Falklands all over again, only closer.  I phoned up Basildon Council for advice. We don’t want caravans on our nice new oil rigs.

    There’s a pretty grim island in the Danube where they’ve wanted to build an Atomic plant.  Gosh! the size of the fish there is already jaw-dropping. Once the generator gets going, I’ll be able to sign up Bruce Willis for Sturgeon Jaws 1,2,3 and 4. Perhaps I can get Hugh Grant to play me.

    I phoned Boyko the other day about my health reforms.  When I told him all the Bulgarian doctors were leaving to come to the UK, he just laughed. Then he asked me if I was going to put a tax on hot banitza.

  2. Branding Bulgaria

    March 29, 2012 by Christopher Buxton

    I recently attended a Conference chaired by Professor Holden at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute at the Embassy.  The issue under discussion was Bulgaria’s image. Many interesting points were raised in front of a mixed audience of Bulgarian emigrants and UK Bulgarophils.

    Representation in UK  media and popular culture range from Graham Norton’s Olympic Tsunami joke featuring a giant hairy fatso on the high diving board labelled as Bulgaria’s diving champion; and then the Sun’s recent headline about a captured murderer: Bulgarian Butcher Bagged in Bermondsey; to the slightly more positive but fairly arrogant Viktor Krum in JK Rowling’s Hogwarts saga. Let’s not forget the enduring Bulgarian umbrella and Mo’s “Bulgarian” champagne that gave all of Albert Square headaches.

    What emerges is an image of virile arrogant physicality combined with a certain criminal danger. It may be coincidence but Bulgaria’s current prime minister, Boyko Borisov exudes virile physicality in spades along with a no nonsense approach to issues that some see as arrogant.

    Studies of the experience of migrant children in UK schools point up the importance of positive representation of their homeland. Good news might boost playground cred. Bad news and you keep a low profile.

    Our son was at Primary School the morning after Stoichkov and Lechkov scored the goals that put Germany out of the world cup. He walked on air.

    For boys the importance of football in providing positive role models cannot be over-emphasised. Our son had Stoichkov. Present day Bulgarian boys have Berbatov. What a contrast between public personas! Loud swaggering and outspoken Stoichkov; skilful patient sensitive and long suffering Berbatov; Stoichkov European footballer of the year and, a star in Barcelona’s Hall of Fame and Berbatov joint Premier League top scorer in 2011, left to sit on the substitute bench in 2012.

    Hristo Stoichkov spoke out recently in defence of Bulgaria’s long serving Communist Dictator, Todor Zhivkov. A frequent guest of Bai Toshko’s palaces, Stoichkov points out that Zhivkov was not to be blamed for the situation he found himself in, rather to be admired that he survived so long and made sure that along with all the inescapable Communist misery there was wine, dancing and singing in the Concrete complexes.

    It should be no surprise that Stoichkov is a big admirer of Bai Tosho’s former body guard, Boyko Borisov. Borisov and Zhivkov share his blunt common touch. Bulgarian intellectuals – as sensitive as Berbatov – have a label for all three: Prosti selyani, which translates as stupid peasants. This fastidious view goes all the way back to Aleko Konstantinov’s prototype the ignorant cunning Bai Ganyo.

    Stoichkov does have a point though. When he compares Boyko Borisov with his political predecessors, Sergei Stanishev, the Tsar, Ivan Kostov et al all appear distant colourless figures, singularly unable to cope with the tides of corruption about them. At least when there’s a blizzard, populist Boyko is out in the streets with a spade- in front of cameras of course. And when the latest criminal corruption scandal hits his government he is able to come up with some salty down-to-earth news-bite.

    Back in the UK Bulgarians would have been excited to learn that one of the contestants on the popular Reality TV show The Apprentice was to be a successful young compatriot. British young men were writing tweets saying that Bilyanna was the babe of the group, clearly impressed by her physical beauty. The Media noted her rise from grey Bulgarian housing complex to a top job in London finance.

    In the first round of The Apprentice, it is always dangerous to put your head too far above the parapet, especially if you are on the losing team. The task was to design, print and sell. The product was great. But the team leader woefully mismanaged the costing and fatally delayed Bilyanna’s sales group. Bilyanna showed herself a capable sales-person but then committed the fatal error of claiming to know the area and leading her group on a wild goose tour down leafy shopless roads. She was not though the reason the group failed.

    During the board room sequence, Bulgarians would have watched in horror as Risk Assessor Bilyanna talked herself out of the competition. Just as Alan Sugar’s finger was levelled at her co-competitor, a woman who had contributed nothing to the entire exercise, Bilyanna interrupted him and her final passionate plea led to her being fired. She exemplified a fiery unapologetic spirit. Stoichkov would have approved. But what a shame!

    Back at the conference, Julian Popov enlarged on the near-untranslatable Bulgarian word otsramvam se. It means to clean oneself from shame.  It’s a word used often in the context of hospitality.  Entertain your guests to a lavish spread and you clean yourself from shame. The use of the word would seem to indicate an enduring cultural legacy.  Bulgarians feel ashamed in some obscure way. Popov held writers Vazov and Konstantinov most to blame for this.

    The room was full of successful folk who wished to distance themselves from this concept. Scientists, poets, musicians, novelists, business folk – they all reflected a positive self confidence.

     

  3. Thoughts on genocide

    February 9, 2012 by Christopher Buxton

    It was only a matter of time before the word genocide appeared in headlines describing the state inspired atrocities in Homs. The western world watches noisy but impotent as hospitals are rocketed, babies have their incubators shut down, children are tortured and horror builds on horror.

    This impotent noise is a comfort blanket. Outrage at Russia’s and China’s support for Assad cloaks the reality that western leaders would not know what to do.  Everyone repeats as a nervous mantra: Syria is not Libya. How would the “civilised world” intervene to support a disunited opposition which if it once gained the upper hand might massacre the Alawite minority that has ruled Syria for the last fifty years?

    Russia has imposed a veto on any “civilised” response and so the horrific massacre continues. But from Iraq and Libya we know the cost of “civilized response”. “Civilized response can lead  leads to significantly greater loss of life and the possibility of an even less “civilized” regime being installed. We also know – as does Russia – that hands can be sat on. Did anyone in the west lift a finger when the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956?

    And while the Turkish Prime Minister fulminates against the Syrian government, he is no less incensed by the French charge of genocide levelled at the former Ottoman regime. Turkey has responded by accusing France of genocide in Algeria. Reports have recently emerged of how the British castrated their Mau Mau captives in Kenya.

    The word genocide is often used in place of massacre or even atrocity. If we call the bombing of Dresden genocide, we would have to come up with a new word to describe Hitler’s Final Solution or the Ottomans’ Great Crime.

    A sorry aspect of history is that every empire and dictatorship has resorted to massacre when its fading power is threatened either by its own people or by particular ethnic groups. In the past, the “civilised world” so often the indirect beneficiaries of imperial atrocities, has salved its conscience with a dismay that was merely verbal.

    Should the British feel a flicker of pride that at the end of the nineteenth century an election was won by Gladstone’s pamphlet on the Balkan Atrocities. No TV pictures, just a few photographs, but mostly stirring prose caused such revulsion against the distant Turkish Empire and the Conservative Party that supported it that Gladstone obtained a landslide victory.

    None of these hot words however prevented the harsh imposition of unreal borders on the new principality of Bulgaria.  This Anglo-French-German imposed settlement, driven by the fear of Russia, resulted in continuous Balkan instability and arguably the eventual outbreak of world war.

    Nationalists in Bulgaria still live off these outrages. The massacres that occurred after the failed April uprising, mostly carried out by irregular Pomak forces (ethnic Bulgarian Moslems), are routinely called genocide. The ethnic cleansing that took place in Northern Thrace following wars with Turkey and Greece, as well as the ethnic alienation in former Yugoslavian Macedonia, is described as “genocidal”. Nationalists demand that modern Turkey grovel in apology and offer large financial reparation. Nationalist politicians routinely try to block all programmes of neighbourly co-operation. These policies do of course expose the fault lines in the EU’s ambiguous relationship with Turkey.

    The punk post-modernist Baudrillard built on Barthes’ concept of myth to formulate the idea that in a world mediated by special effects, the Gulf War never took place. What we experienced in the west was a spectacular TV simulacrum. As a logical extension of  Baudrillard’s theories, Martina Baleva has seemed to state that the Turkish massacre of Bulgarian civilians at Batak was a myth. This shocking conclusion arose from a PHD structuralist analysis of pictures depicting the massacre. The result for Baleva is that she can no longer safely return to Bulgaria. She’s given the nationalist cause a blood transfusion.  The word genocide is trumpeted through the TV cables.

    I prefer the word atrocity. Right now, I am translating the poetry of Ivan Buzakov a man whose mission is to express the horror of the Red Terror following Russia’s invasion of Bulgaria in 1944. This attrocity gets less attention from nationalist spokesmen many of whom turn out to have been supporters of the Communist regime.

    Past atrocities are much easier to deal with or even exploit than present ones, provided they are known about and not denied. Present atrocities confound us.

     

     

     

     

  4. Job swap 3

    February 3, 2012 by Christopher Buxton

    The story so far: as part of a new EU initiative, European Prime Ministers have the opportunity to exchange places for a year. Here, Batty Boyko, the Greatest Living Bulgarian (GLB) is rewarded for presiding over Europe’s most successful economy by being entrusted with the UK Premiership, while UK Eurosceptic PM Cameron has been forced to swap Downing Street for a secluded palace in Boyanna.

     

    GLB: Everything’s going pretty well here. Better than a fur lined french letter.  Yesterday I dispatched pretty Prince William to the Falklands. One in the eye for the Argies and a good write-up in the Daily Mail. Would you believe Melanie Philips has got my picture on her bedroom wall after my speech on Political Correctness. I wonder if Duchess Katya’s feeling lonely? I’ll give her a call later after I’ve delivered a broadside to the Bishops. They need to **** their mothers and just accept my Bulgarian welfare model. My people are brilliant at organising their own survival. I’ve arranged for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Power Company chiefs to visit Stolipanovo to see how social problems can be tackled by community initiatives. Boris was on the phone earlier wittering on about bankers’ bonuses.  I told him straight. Why is Bulgaria in Angie Merkel’s good books?  Because it allows its businessmen to get on with no interference. Boris snorted something about getting away with murder.  I told him to shut his trap and make sure babies get tickets for the Olympics. I want pictures of me holding a new-born in the Olympic swimming pool. Kicked a few balls with John Terry yesterday, before my PR man told me he’d been accused of racism.  I had to cancel the photo shoot. They take all this very seriously here. I might invite Volen over for an Arsenal Tottenham match so he can get himself arrested and put in prison for a few years. But from what I hear from Dave, Volen’s not the force he was.

     

    DC: Gosh, it’s three-pairs-of-underpants weather here, and no young fag to warm your hands on – just Tsvetan who always looks so mournful, the temperature drops six degrees every time he comes into the room. Cheer up! I say.  Didn’t I give a five star speech praising the police handling of the Pernik affair? Kidnapper arrested and his suicide in police custody saved the state a lot of money. He mutters that the local police may have had a hand in the girl’s murder. Well that was a bit of a downer. Still I have to remind him: Eton wasn’t built in a day and we just have to accept that for the next few years, the justice system’s going to creak a little. Some major criminals will get off. There’ll be bad police apples. But we have to keep up the good fight.  Play up! Play up! And play the game! It took five hundred years for our British major criminals to turn into respectable politicians. We just need to set realistic targets and learn to work with the right private enterprises. No repetitions of the Tsar Kiryo debacle.

    I got a visit from Volen Siderov yesterday. He’s not the man he was but he still warms a room better than a Bulgarian radiator. Why haven’t I declared war on Turkey? Why haven’t I cut off relations with Macedonia? Why haven’t I interned the gypsies? Golly Volen – have you checked out your rating in the latest opinion polls? You’re doing worse than Milliband. Talking of Milliband – Sergei Stanishev is even wetter.  He reminds me of Snotty Caruthers after he stuck a whole pear up his backside for a bet at the Bullingdon. The expression on his face – I thought I’d never see it again. Well Sergei’s got his problems now. Super-smoothie Purvanov is after his job now he’s not President any longer. With his elegant hair style, he’s bound to get the women’s vote. I phoned up Boyko.  Anything to worry about? Boyko pointed me to a large file in Tsvetan’s office. A lot of stuff about DANCE. Purvanov looks the sort of chap who could manage an elegant fox-trot. Sam keeps on asking when we can hold a ball.

  5. Macedonia demands justice for Tsar Izkaryou.

    February 2, 2012 by Christopher Buxton

    Bulgarian persecution of Alexander the Great’s direct descendant constitutes a serious breach of human rights.

    We all know – or at least our Acadamy knows – how throughout the history of our glorious nation, Bulgaria has been our enemy – and has even tried to steal our language and heroes away from us.

    To the roll-call of outstanding Macedonians in history – Adam, Alexander, Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, Kiril and Metodi, Vaptsarov, Smirninski, Georgi Dimitrov, we now add a new name Tsar Izkaryou, now languishing in a Bulgarian gaol on trumped up tax evasion charges. A successful businessman, Tsar Izkaryou has traced his family back through their ancient Roma journey from Pakistan, where Alexander the Great fell in love with his distant ancestor the seductive  Aisha.

    Now since claiming his Macedonian heritage, Tsar Izkaryou has seen his beautiful palaces in Wagonville burnt to the ground by Bulgarian nationalists. His drinks business, built up carefully over decades with local government and police co-operation, has now been temporarily closed in a brutal contradiction of all Bulgarian business norms. His children are no longer free to exercise their feudal rights over their neighbours, but have been hunted out as if they were some kind of Mafia family. They have even had to run over Bulgarian villagers in order to protect themselves

    Now instead of sitting in his palace and drinking from a bottle of his family made brand, Iskander Vodka, (made to an ancient recipe from wood shavings), he is forced to undergo confinement in the prison hospital, waiting for his lawyer to arrange bail and fix any witnesses.

    Macedonians demand an end of persecution for its citizens in neighbouring Bulgaria and demands that Europe rethink its dubious relationship with this Turkic pseudo-nation. For too long our traditional enemy has tried to hamper our proper progress into the European Union, by misrepresenting our treatment of  citizens who are crazy enough to claim Bulgarian ethnicity.  Of course Macedonians suffering from schitzophrenic Bulgarphillia need to be restrained and have their teeth removed for their own good. Care for lunatics is the mark of a civilization founded by Alexander.

    Tsar Iskaryou’s imprisonment shows Europe the extent of our neighbour’s barbarity. We appeal directly to the European Parliament and the International Court of Human Rights.

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