I have been going through my old letters to my mum, which she returned to me before she died. Every now and then I dip into one and find out what a lousy memory I now have.

Scary.

Many things that happened, I could never reveal publicly at the time, of course, but I guess … who cares now, right? Like this, written by me in 1992 in Vienna:

“We were invited to lunch on Wednesday by the Bulgarian Ambassador. He spent the whole time complaining about the terrible state of affairs in his own country, and in the USSR–he’s an old-fashioned communist who doesn’t approve of the way things are going at all. Thinks Lenin a genius, Gorbachev a fool and that he and Shevardnadze were just as guilty of Soviet crimes as their forebears, and both of them helped wreck their country. He was absolutely furious that the Turkish-Bulgars have been permitted to have their own nationalistic party in Bulgaria and is sure it will lead to civil war.”

His name was Popov.

Ah, life was interesting…