Free With This Issue

I mentioned recently that there was a story I should tell, which I was pretty certain was already in a post I had written and published some time ago. I thought the simplest thing would be to find and repost it, but I cannot now find it anywhere in the blog, despite being able to recall phrases and references used in it (at least, so I thought) that should have made it easy to retrieve. I am therefore confused. Where's it gone? Am I going mad? Perhaps I am even further down the forgetful road of old age than I had thought. Except, of course, that I am remembering in this instance – albeit falsely, it seems – rather than forgetting. It's very strange. But, never mind: write again, write better!

So. Cast your mind back to 1978. The world was a very different place. We still used to have winters, then, for a start: real ones, with snow, ice, and everything. They didn't call it the Winter of Discontent for nothing. Well, actually, that did have rather more to do with some outbreaks of industrial action, which was also something we used to have a lot more of back then. Late capitalism was clearly in its death throes, and quite a few of us felt that just a bit of a push was all it needed to get us over the hump into the socialist utopia that would surely follow. At the time I was in my first years of employment, and an active member of NALGO, the local government trade union. In fact, I was Education Secretary of our local branch [1], which represented all the clerical staff in the University of Bristol.

Continuing the "cold" theme, the Cold War was still a permanent fixture, and the USSR was stuck in its so-called "period of stagnation" under Brezhnev. No-one on Britain's political left looked any longer to the Soviets for leadership, of course, not even members of the Communist Party itself, which was in the process of self-destructing, as a result of internal tensions and contradictions rather greater than those within capitalism. I had found myself a job cataloguing Russian and German books in the university library, and a tangible sense of that "stagnation" emanated from everything produced in the Eastern Bloc. Russian books in particular were incredibly shoddy, often using several different colours of paper stock within the same volume, and bound in some curious substance that resembled the textured rubber of a hot-water bottle. Dissident works that had been smuggled out for publication overseas after clandestine distribution within the USSR – generally referred to as samizdat ("self-published") literature – were becoming ever more prominent and seemed far more vital. As well as heavyweight, Solzhenitsyn-style revelations of the labour camps, and the work of older writers who had fallen foul of Stalinist disfavour like Bulgakov, Zamyatin and Pasternak, there were new, satirical accounts of everyday life, such as Vladimir Voinovich's Ivankiad, describing his attempts to get a new apartment, frustrated at every turn by bureaucracy and nomenklatura favouritism. Beneath the frozen surface of the stagnant pond, something was clearly beginning to stir.

So, yes, 1978. On most Sundays it was my habit to call home, to see how my parents were doing. They were not in the happiest phase of their lives – Dad had been made redundant and had his pension stolen by Tube Investments when they took over the engineering firm where he had worked for decades, and Mum had suffered a heart attack and had had to give up working – and as a result this phone call was always a bit of a chore, as their lives, never particularly adventurous, were now constrained and invariable, week after week. But one Sunday they had a curious novelty to share: some junk-mail catalogue had come in the post and, when they opened it out of curiosity, a couple of banknotes had fallen out.

These were not Pounds Sterling, however, but two crisp, brand-new notes covered in what Dad described as "Russian" writing. Which was strange, to say the least, and hardly the usual sort of thing to come as a free gift from a mail-order operation. I couldn't help decipher them over the phone, so Dad put them in the post for me to examine properly. When they arrived, it was clear they were not Russian Rubles, but actually Bulgarian Lev notes, each of 500 denomination. Naturally – though in retrospect naively – my first thought was to establish what 1000 Bulgarian Levs might be worth. Which, in those pre-internet days, necessitated a trip to the bank.

Disappointingly, the exchange-rate display at my bank did not include the Lev, so I had to enquire at the cashier's window. She was not able to help, and neither was the manager, but they took my details and said they'd let me know. In due course a letter arrived from the bank, informing me that no Eastern Bloc currencies were "convertible" in the West, and therefore the notes were effectively worthless, unless I intended to visit Bulgaria. Which made sense and, as I had no such plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, the two Lev notes ended up in a drawer: curiosity value only.

However, my phone began to behave oddly for some while thereafter: there were strange noises, sudden changes in the ambient background "soundscape", occasional voices in the background, calls with no caller, and so on. It seemed possible that my phone was being tapped. To be honest, I was quite flattered, if puzzled, that the Education Secretary of the local NALGO branch might attract such attention. True, we were actively involved in planning industrial action ourselves, Tony Benn was our local MP and a frequent attender at our activists' meetings and training sessions, and some of our number were so-called "entryists" into the Labour Party from various Trotskyist factions (remember Militant?). As I say, to a certain frame of mind, some sort of revolution seemed imminent. Although, as it turned out, no-one had really anticipated the sort of sort-of revolution that actually did take place, in the 1979 general election.

Not being an avid follower of the news, it was only later that I realised that the Bulgarian secret services had been active in Britain at that time. The assassination in September 1978 of dissident Bulgarian author and broadcaster Georgi Markov by a poison pellet delivered on the tip of an umbrella as he crossed Waterloo Bridge is perhaps no longer as notorious as it once was. But it was a big deal at the time and, clearly, anyone in possession of crisp, new, high-denomination, but non-convertible Bulgarian Levs was likely to be a person of interest, or at least of mild curiosity to the security services. However, if that was the case, I pity any poor operative detailed to listen in on my weekly phone-calls home.

Of course, none of this explains what those mysterious bank-notes were doing in a mail-order catalogue sent as junk mail to my parents in Stevenage. Clearly, it can hardly have been the innocent error of some warehouse employee ("Now where did I put my nice new Bulgarian Levs? Oh, shit..."). No, I expect someone, somewhere, got it in the neck, perhaps quite literally, for their mistake. Unless, of course, someone, somewhere had a large amount of unusable, possibly incriminating currency they needed to get rid of in a hurry, and hit upon this novel, if rather over-elaborate method of distributing it. You'd have thought that simply burning it, KLF-style, would have been a lot easier.

And if this version of the story of the Bulgarian Levs goes missing, I'll have to presume that this blog is being bugged, too. Hello, you secret, silent lurkers, we know you're there! I just hope you're finding reading this more interesting than your putative predecessor will have found listening to my parents' account of their week. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it...

1. Not as Maoist as it sounds ("So, comrade Noreen, you don't agree with the Executive's decision to weapons-train the secretarial pool? Some re-education may be in order!"). In fact, apart from attending interminable executive meetings, and even more interminable regional and national conferences, the main role was distributing the bumpf that arrived continually from the union, in large fat packets and boxes. None of which ever contained any money of any sort.