Today I am wearing the Socks of Pepintude, and so attired I shall stride forth decisively. There is of course a risk that curs will snuffle at my socks, and kittens too, possibly, for the Socks of Pepintude emit odours which convulsively befuddle our four-footed friends, though they remain undetectable by the human nose. Or so I have been told by my spy at the lab, who keeps me up to date on such matters. It is best to wear a pair of tough Uruguayan Air Force boots over the Socks of Pepintude. This will go some way to deter curs, and kittens, and thus one’s decisive progress through the boulevards meets with less travail.
You may ask where I am going, so decisively, through the boulevards of this important town. I am going to the post office. Alas, unlike the post office in Plovdiv it is not emblazoned with a mural painted by the Plovdiv Fivesome, but none the less it is a very fine post office. Outside it on the esplanade is a flagpole with a big blue flag flying atop it. The doors are made of some weird iridescent metal and swoosh open as one approaches. Having thrown off any trailing curs and kittens I am going to cause those doors to swoosh and I shall make my decisive strides into the post office lobby, where a cadet in a cadet’s cap and tunic will point me towards a queue leading to a counter behind which I know in the innermost fibres of my being there will be a tally-stick person ready to sell me some postage-related items.
When the exchange has been made, I will exit again through the swooshing doors, having saluted the cadet, and I shall stride decisively into the esplanade, and gaze at the flag atop the flagpole, and I shall not flinch.
Source : Forty Visits To The Post Office by Dobson (out of print)
What a difference a few facts can make; I was convinced that your statements about a post-office mural in downtown Plovdiv was yet another of your tall, tall tales, but no. The link which you have kindly provided us all with confirms the actuality of the Plovdiv fivesome and their many artistic accomplishments.
This new Plovdiv learning amazes me!
Here are two views of Plovdiv Central post-office.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/apfelbaum/230376980/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/allilinin/18685587/
It is the second that I find most appealing, the first being an example of the photographic ineptitude that abounds in this age of digital photography.
Let us ignore the first photo and attend to the second. It depicts a family posing in-front of an incomplete building, the same building which would one day be adorned by Slona’s great mural. The structure is monumentous, grandiose and imposing – a shrine to the Bulgarian postal-service, a microcosm of that former Soviet state.
I imagine this family spent a moment in patriotic reverie, gazing at the building which had been constructed in the centre of Plovdiv by decree of the Bulgarian politburo.
Who is the photographer? No doubt Plovdiv’s chief postal comissioner, perhaps the very man who when a map of central Plovdiv was brought to him by the office lackey or factotum, spent hours pondering at it, and only after those hours became days and those days became an entire week did he place his pencil mark in the very centrer and exclaim: –
“here… here next to the canal, this shall be the location of the central post office at Plovdiv. I have decided, and it will be so. On this site a colossus shall be built which will rival all of the postal wonders of Europe. Here, let there be towers, ducts and important looking peumatic tubes… here, a place for busy postal persons to shuffle documents and doff ther hats, and here let there be a plaza strewn with flowering spurge where families may gather and look upon this triumph of the proletariat.”
That child… if she still lives she will be old and crumpled by now. Will she have fond memories of the bumpy pantechnicon ride to Central Plovdiv. Will she remember that the air was thick with the pollen of the wild-spurge that ran rampant or perhaps the hiss of pneumatic cylinders and the conical hats of the busy postal workers? Most of all will she remember her first glimpse of that modernist marvel, the as-yet unadorned, incomplete central post-office at Plovdiv?