Hearing echoes of the past

WOKE up dis mawnin’… Or, rather, by the time you read this, yesterday morning, but why mess with the opening line of every self-respecting blues lament ever written? Anyway, waking up, whatever de mawnin’, is always an encouraging start to the day, I find.

Pulling back the curtains in my hotel room, I was rewarded with the sight of blue skies, bright sun, the huge, hulking shape of Mount Vitosha — still mottled with snow on its upper slopes — and, clearly visible just across the trees and rooftops of the city, the pencil-thin floodlights of the Vassil Levski Stadium.

So this must be Sofia. It’s as well to check because after two weeks on the road shuttling between Rome, London and now the capital of Bulgaria — pausing just briefly for a stop-off at home in Dublin to kiss my dirty laundry and throw my loved ones in the washing machine — your roving correspondent is prone to being more brain-addled than usual.