From my writing so far, it should be clear by now that my family is built on two Colossi with diametrically opposed world views. Mine and Emo's. How we've managed to coexist for 17 years now remains a mystery both to everyone who knows us and to ourselves.
And as our sons have grown up, it's become clear that each of us has reproduced our own world view/way of thinking in one of our children.
The elder, Viktor, is all me. He minds his own business and has no wish to get in anyone's way, as long as he's been fed. In return, he'd like nobody to get in his way either (an unfulfilled dream both for him and for his meek mother).
It's an unfulfilled dream because the other two at home love nothing more than controlling us. Our younger son, Nikola, is all his dad. His main passion is being the pillar of his family. The family pillar has no duties, only rights. These include knowing who is where at every single moment. As well as subjecting their actions to strict scrutiny followed by a critical debrief.
Nikola's other passion is also inherited from his father. And that is doing business with suckers. “Business”, for both Nikola and his dad, always means one thing. You get hold of suckers you've found in advance and softened up nicely, and sell them some rubbish at a massive mark-up.
The good thing about Nikola, though, is that as unscrupulous as he is towards suckers, he's every bit as caring towards his mother. A simple example:
When I'm on a business trip, our family Viber chat, which Nikola has named “Family Pro”, looks like this:
Nikola: 10:28 Mummy, please message before the plane takes off and please message me straight after you land.
Me: 10:30 OK. We're taking off shortly.
(While the plane was in the air)
Nikola: 11:45 Have you landed?
Nikola: 12:05 Hellooooo
Nikola: 12:07 @nia yotova, Is everything OK, why aren't you answering?
Nikola: 12:11: I'm ill, call me right now, I don't feel well (in desperation he's brought out the heavy artillery)
Nikola: 12:12 @nia yotova!!!
(The plane lands)
Me: 14:38 Just landed in (say) Lisbon, everything's fine.
Nikola: 14:38 Phew, thank goodness you finally wrote…
Emo: 15:00 That's your mother for you, it won't even cross her mind to drop us a line to say whether she's alive or dead.
Viktor: 17:30 Mummy? You're in Lisbon??? Who's going to cook my dinner now???
Nikola: 17:31 It's a business trip, Viktor, how can you not know where your mother is!!!
Viktor: 18:40 Ohhhhh so you were leaving TODAY…..right
Emo: Honestly, that Viktor is even more scatterbrained than your mother….
For some reason, all this wonderful family dynamic continues to be sought after and invited to every family party thrown by our friends Anna, who's Polish, and Stevie, who's English. (You can read about our adventures at their wedding in Wrocław here).
This time we're special guests at Stevie's birthday in London. Anna and Steve have invited us to one of their houses in Notting Hill, which I've told you about before. The house is a work of art, without a single speck of dust. Everything is very expensive, but also arranged with great taste. Until recently the 3 floors of our friends' home were full of objects from all over the world that they'd brought back from their round-the-world trips. Now there are 5 floors, as they've built another two, only at levels -1 and -2.
Against the backdrop of this house I always feel like a greasy, sticky Eastern European stain, unworthy of inhabiting such perfection. Thank God its owners fight this inferiority complex of mine by continuing to invite us there on all sorts of occasions. This time they've invited not only Emo and me, but our children too.
Since we'll only be in London for the weekend – nowhere near enough time to see the city – I've told the kids to pick 1 interesting thing each to do there.
Twelve-year-old Nikola has already chosen. He wants to touch London's greatest magic. And that's not the London Eye, the Greenwich Meridian, Buckingham Palace or Big Ben.
No, my friends, London's greatest magic is something else. In this blog you'll find out exactly what.
We landed at Luton at 9 pm, and another 2 hours passed before we made it into the city itself. From Marble Arch we had to get an Uber. Add the two-hour time difference with Bulgaria and it was already 1 in the morning Bulgarian time. I knew from experience that when we arrived our hostess would want to talk for a very long time. I was desperately sleepy – for the second weekend running I was being robbed of the sleep I was owed. The previous weekend I hadn't slept properly either, because of an Asics party, which I'll describe to you with the following emojis:
That's more than enough information for you.
Back to London. I tried to round up my family, who had already scattered among the still-open shops of the English capital, which is one of those cities that never sleeps.
My efforts were in vain. Before I could blink, the eternally hungry Viktor had vanished somewhere to buy sandwiches. Emo and Nikola had disappeared into one of those huge, permanently lit, permanently open shops that sell plastic figurines of King Charles, T-shirts saying “My sister went to London and all she brought me was this lousy T-shirt”, magnets shaped like phone boxes and so on.
The reason this particular shop caught my younger son's eye was that its window featured a pyramid of multicoloured plastic bottles. The pyramid was strategically lit from every side; phosphorescent lights crawled triumphantly over it, and all that was missing was two guards of Her, sorry, His Majesty standing on either side of it.
Because, my friends, in that shop window was displayed the magic of London! The greatest attraction of the English capital and the main reason my younger son had deigned to visit the city.
A soft drink called PRIME. An ordinary plastic bottle filled with a foul-tasting soft drink. Which, however, was selling like hot cakes to 12-year-old boys, even though its price in this particular shop was 16 pounds a bottle. 16 pounds is 37 leva.
Here's its official page.
Why is it so expensive, you ask? Because the two YouTubers in the picture advertise it and because you can't get it in Bulgaria. Well, apparently there was one shop that had it in Paradise, but it was 100 leva a bottle. The younger son looked at us with eyes shining like this while he told us these mystical secrets.
With the promise that he wouldn't buy anything else in London (forgotten the next morning), Nikola walked out of the shop with a spring in his step and the bottle of Prime under his arm. He sent photos and videos to his friends, never mind that in Bulgaria it was already the small hours of the night. He immediately got 7-8 orders. Nikola and his dad's favourite business model – “resell rubbish to a sucker” – began to take clear shape in his little number-one-buzzcut head.
That the drink was rubbish he'd already worked out for himself by trying it. He found it so disgusting that he made me, his eternal rubbish bin, who finishes off his melted chocolates and his stale pizza, finish off the Prime as well. It tastes like something between the Step drinks of the 90s and antibiotic for babies.
With the business prospect taking shape, two problems immediately arose for Nikola, or as they say in business language, two barriers to his entry into a new market.
1/ Transport. How would he get the miracle drink to Bulgaria? – We only had hand luggage, which doesn't allow liquids. Nikola's attempt to make me invest in checked luggage so he could bring his goods over without a worry hit a brick wall.
2/ Price. If he bought the Prime at 37 leva, he'd have to sell it at a price similar to that of the mysterious trader in Paradise (100 leva) for the sums to add up. When he announced 100 leva for a Prime in his classmates' Viber group, the number of takers dropped dramatically.
The family went to bed slightly worried about the setbacks in the little one's business affairs.
The next day we woke up and crawled into Anna's kitchen, from which drifted a lovely smell of coffee and warm breakfasts. Huge as the kitchen was, it was already full – besides the hosts, the 4 of us had slept in the house, plus 7 of Anna's relatives and friends from Poland. There are 70 guests invited to the birthday, and more than 10% of them are sleeping at the hosts' house.
At the sight of rosy-cheeked, well-fed Polish men and women crawling sleepily from every room of the huge house towards the kitchen, Viktor was horrified. He saw them as competition for Anna's attention – a treasure he believed should be reserved for him alone.
Anna, who was selflessly churning out breakfasts on a conveyor belt, piping hot from her oven and hob, would not be his alone. He'd have to share her with other hungry people, some of them small children!
“Mummy, there won't be enough breakfast left for me!” Viki pulled me aside to share the fate he feared most.
Don't worry, Viki, Mummy's taking matters into her own hands!
“Anna, Viktor's worried there won't be any food left for him!”
At that moment Anna was taking a tray of buns out of the oven.
She straightened up, wiped her hands on her apron, hugged Viktor and made the following official statement:
“Of course, sweetheart, you'll be fed as a priority!” She gave me a sideways look and stressed the following words: “I don't want to read on your mother's blog in a month's time how I left you hungry!”
For the first time in his life, Viktor appreciated the advantage of being my son.
Once we'd eaten our fill, the next big challenge remained. Wrapping Stevie's present.
As true run-of-the-mill Bulgarians, and as I mentioned above, we're not the kind of people who'll do the low-cost airline a favour by paying for checked luggage. Even I, the most free-spending member of the family, was against paying 160 leva per person extra for luggage, considering we were only there for the weekend.
So we hadn't wrapped Steve's present in Sofia. We figured the wrapping would get crumpled in the hand luggage anyway. The moment for wrapping, however, mercilessly went and arrived! We had 2 sheets of wrapping paper, scissors and sticky tape at our disposal.
But tell me now, how do you wrap this present? If it were a proper square or rectangular shape, I could have put together something half decent. But a present with this shape….
Personally, I managed to wrap it in one single way. Ugly.
Emo sharply criticised my skills at wrapping irregularly shaped objects. One of his few objective criticisms of me. He didn't miss the chance to add that if he'd wrapped the present, it would have turned out very beautiful. In general he loves threatening what he would do and how perfectly, always making sure these threats concern something that can't possibly be checked. For example, if we're on a beach in the heat, he starts convincing me how he'd win a ski slalom with ease.
In this particular case he started with the threats about how well he'd wrap the present if he had the chance, but sadly the paper had run out. Otherwise he would have…..
He hadn't noticed, though, that we had a whole extra roll of wrapping paper left, with which he could have gone to town.
“Well, you wrap it then, Emil! Here's some paper, here's the scissors, here's the tape.”
Emo declined my invitation to wrap with the argument that he'd already proved himself on many fronts in this life. He had absolutely nothing to prove to me by wrapping presents. What was he, some little woman?!
Emo finished his defence with a targeted attack on my flank with his favourite plea, namely – listing the degrees in the scale of world cheekiness:
“Heyyyyyy, Cheeky –> Cheekier -> Cheekiest –> Nia! That's you, Niyo!”
Well, that's settled then, we'll go with the ugly-wrapped present. We set off for the restaurant where the party was.
I did, however, have a damage-limitation plan. I put on the dress I wear to ask forgiveness from men I've wronged. The saintliness of my nature can be judged by the fact that I was using this dress for its intended purpose for only the second time in my life.
The first time was quite recently, when I had to inform my teammate Vasko, whom I'd promised to pace on the philosophical segment of V100, that I wouldn't be able to. Not that I didn't want to, but V100 went and coincided with my trip to London. After I offered my apologies in this dress, Vasko gave the appearance of a man who had forgiven me. So I concluded the dress works.
Now I would use this bright pink, figure-hugging weapon once more. This time to distract Stevie from the wrapping on his present.
While we waited in the queue of guests to present our gift to the birthday boy, Emo and I tossed the ugly-wrapped present back and forth as if it were a bomb with a lit fuse that could go off at any moment. With every step that brought us closer to the birthday boy, one of us would toss the ugly thing to the other. Who would instantly, almost on the volley, send it straight back. I felt a bit like we were playing “Musical Chairs”, the game we used to play as kids. You play with your heart in your mouth, knowing that at some point the music will stop and you might end up between two chairs and be out.
The equivalent of the music stopping here was who'd be holding the present, which we kept passing to each other like a hot potato, at the moment we found ourselves in front of the birthday boy.
Of course, that turned out to be me.
Anna and Stevie are well-off people, and so are most of their friends. It fell to me to hand over the family present right after a distinguished lord and lady, who were presenting a huge painting, beautifully wrapped in black and gold, which filled half the restaurant with its size. Probably an original Picasso.
But such is life, Stevie! Highs alternate with lows. One moment you get an expensive painting, and the next in the queue are the Yotov family and you get this:
I sucked in my tummy, thrust out everything north of the sucked-in tummy and approached Steve.
“Stevie, happy birthday! Our wrapping is very ugly, but I'll take it off right now,” and I took it off with a deft gesture. Mind you, the sticky tape I'd wound round it to stop the wrapping falling apart was barely holding anyway….
It's no accident that Steve has made it and made it big. Because he knows how to behave so as not to further embarrass people who've already embarrassed themselves quite enough on their own.
“It doesn't matter what my present is wrapped in when the woman giving it to me is in the most beautiful wrapping!”
Oh, my pink figure-hugging little dress! You saved me again! Thank goodness Ani Vancheva made me buy you – the best-spent 39.99 ever.
The hard part was over, now all that was left was to have fun. While the conversation flowed, the drinks flowed generously too. Unfortunately the food wasn't handed out quite so lavishly.
Viktor, smartened up in a shirt and trousers, lay in wait for the waiters to appear. He was counting on getting a nice big plate all to himself. With, say, a schnitzel and braised potatoes on it. But he'd reckoned without his host. Instead of individual plates, the waiters were carrying round sharing platters with some tiny swirly things on them, with which Viktor couldn't have filled so much as a cavity.
On top of all that, he was expected, when the waiter came by, to politely take a napkin, put on it one single miniature roll of salmon with dill, for example, and nod politely to the waiter by way of thanks. As if to say – that's quite enough for me and my refined stomach, thank you, you may go.
Meanwhile, Nikola had managed to draw one of the guests into a casual conversation about the high prices of the Prime drink. To my surprise, the man knew about this commercial phenomenon. It later turned out that this was because he regularly sent it to his nephew in Sicily, where apparently it isn't sold in shops either. So from him Nikola learned that you could buy Prime for 4-5 pounds at some petrol station chains in London. Not all of them, but some.
Instantly Nikola's priorities for the next day were rearranged from visiting museums and Chelsea's stadium to touring London's petrol stations.
As the evening went on, everything fell into place just as my children wanted.
Viktor, springing a polite ambush from behind the very first corner from which the waiters brought out the new platters, managed to win their sympathy, and after about an hour he got a whole platter of skewers. All to himself. Here it is.
“How kind, how good people are in England,” he told me, moved to tears, with his mouth full.
The kindness of the people of England unfolded in its full might towards Nikola too. Telling the tale of his far-from-easy lot in obtaining bottles of Prime, he'd clearly touched the heart of the man he was talking to, Michał, because Michał promised to send him a surprise via Amazon tomorrow.
The next day, after we'd had our fill of breakfast, of course, we set off around the city. Nikola wanted us to scatter immediately to the 4 corners of the city, each of us searching the petrol stations for Prime. But I put my foot down: these children had to acquire at least a little culture.
I insisted we visit two of the museums that I remembered from my previous visits to London as being very interesting. The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum.
In the Natural History Museum we lasted exactly 15 minutes.
The tragic figure of Nikola, rhythmically banging his despairing forehead against a column, with martyred, broken shoulders and his gaze fixed tragically on the museum floor, managed to convey the message: “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
After all, the child was in a city with countless petrol stations where you could find Prime at good prices, so he could get some little business going. But instead of helping him with his entrepreneurial ventures, his mother had parked him in front of the bones of some dead animals.
For the rest of the day we not only ticked off the museums, the stadium and a pub in short order, but also managed to buy several bottles of Prime at humane prices. Coming back “home” in the evening, the Amazon delivery was waiting for us – a present from Nikola's new friend. Another 3 bottles of Prime – two pink and one red. (It turns out some bottle colours are more sought after than others. Ridiculous as it may sound to you, Prime even has a colour hierarchy.)
At dinner even Steve, a serious businessman, wanted to know what all the hysteria around Prime was about.
One of the barriers listed at the beginning of this blog – the one about the high price of the goods – had been removed. Nikola explained to Stevie that at the moment only one problem remained – how to get the Prime to Bulgaria, given that his mother (here he shot me a reproachful look) wouldn't buy him checked luggage.
The conversation was like businessman to businessman.
Nikola told Steve he was thinking of pouring out the original liquid so he could at least bring the empty bottles in his hand luggage. Then, in Sofia, fill them with some cheap liquid that tastes similar.
Stevie immediately spotted a hole in the business plan.
“And how will you explain the broken seals on the caps? Look, Nikola, in this case what's valuable to your potential buyers is the brand. Why don't you find someone in Sofia to print you some Prime labels? Then you buy bottles of soft drink and stick the Prime labels on them. That way the caps won't have been opened.”
“Or,” Emo chipped in, “you can take the empty Prime bottles to Sofia. Then pour in the new liquid anyway, and when they ask you why the caps have been opened, say that customs wanted to check there were no drugs in the Prime….”
I bit my tongue so as not to point out that, at those prices, it's not at all out of the question that Prime bottles are used for smuggling drugs.
Which strategy do you think Nikola went for, straight after landing in Sofia?
