Hungry Bears Don't Dance
What free and fun Bulgaria can teach us about ban-it-now Britain.
Bulgarians are famously lax about health and safety. It’s common to see men, young and old, zipping around on combustive organ donor machines—motorcycles—protected by little more than hubris.
Bulgarians eschew helmets. The skittish still mock the Gods. They wear nothing but shorts, flip-flops, and a builder’s helmet. Those helmets serve as handy bowls for the rider’s brains when they fall off at speed.
In this second-world Balkan country, one can enjoy a smoke with a beer or a rakia. No faux coughing. No tutting. No tiresome, prissy remonstrations. Indeed, one can enjoy a drink in the most remote of places. I’m not kidding. Nestled in the corner of Praktiker, the Bulgarian Homebase or Home Depot, sits a bar with Kamenitza beer on tap.
Spend a few days here, you’re lulled into believing that Kamenitza is the name of a benign, omnipotent dictator who saved this indebted nation from its many historical molesters. His name and slogans litter billboards, umbrellas, buildings, pavements. If Kamenitza’s PR team wishes to expand their advertising acreage, they’ll have to tattoo Bulgarians.
King Kamenitza occupies the most incongruent of spaces. Bulgarian fuel stations have beer gardens. Why? Because King Kamenitza says, fuck you. That’s why.
Bulgarians treat the sensual pursuits with adult alacrity. Yes, they’ve heard the rumours—smoking, drinking, red meat—all constrain one’s life expectancy. So what?
A Bulgarian proverb reveals an endearing Slavic realism: “The Bulgarian drowns in the last stretch of the river.” Taken liberally, this proverb underpins the Bulgarian attitude to best-laid plans: Life often has other ideas.
At a fuel station, I witnessed a cultural anachronism. Fuel pump attendants! Four of them. In the 37-degree heat, all of them sat beneath a Kamenitza umbrella, supping Kamenitza. Just metres from the petrol pumps, they sucked deeply on cigarette after cigarette.
Here in therapeutic Britain, such unacceptable conduct amounts to social horror. Such spontaneity would spark a national outcry. We’d endure a National Day of Mourning followed by a week of silent penance before a month of raising awareness.
On the airwaves, talking heads versed in Lego language would press together prefabbed words and phrases into sentence shapes.
This phalanx of lawyers, social workers, harm prevention officers and lanyard larcenists would implore us to do better and to develop best practice to prevent harm to stakeholders.
The inevitable three-year public inquiry would deem mistakes were made, but new laws would author a fresh chapter in our national healing journey. Declaring war on abstract nouns, Prime Minister Keir Starmer would decry: ‘Harm has no place in modern Britain.’
The undefeatable nature of these illusionary bugbears is the appeal: And Alexander wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer.
But conquer, the modern redeemers must. This week, The Times split open a new front in the forever war on pleasure.
‘A daily croissant can take a toll on your heart in under a month,’ ached a headline.
Admittedly, I wondered how one could roll up a croissant, light it on fire, and smoke it. The croissant could yet become the next device with which I goad my wearied cells into cancerous mutiny. But how?
Magicking crack out of powdered cocaine requires insider knowledge. Perhaps a member of the local crack appreciation society could show me the ropes? We could desiccate croissants and cut the powder with a bicarbonate of soda. The result? Highly addictive, brain-bursting rocks of illicit croissant in convenient smokeable form.
Anyway, The Times rattled on. “Treating yourself to regular morning croissants or biscuits can ‘silently’ increase your risk of heart problems—even if you don’t put on weight.”
An Oxford University study found that eating buttery pastries and cakes each day for just three weeks tolled the bell on one’s heart.
Volunteers munched through butter, croissants, sausages, cakes, and chocolate. This diet, high in saturated fat, spiked ‘invisible markers of heart health’ even though volunteers controlled their calorie intake.
“Their cholesterol rose by 10 percent on average, while there was also a 20 percent rise in the fat in their liver, increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, which can cause heart attacks and strokes,” said The Times.
Not to indulge in stereotypes or to assign behaviours to certain groups, despite those observations being true. But I may have noticed that French people enjoy the odd croissant.
Scientists fret over the French Paradox. The French eat diets rich in saturated fat whilst enjoying much lower rates of heart disease.
They smoke more. They booze more. The French live longer, healthier, richer, more productive, and—dare I say it—more enjoyable lives than we Anglos. The French don’t fret about globules of fat, grams of sugar, or wisps of smoke. Neither do many of our European cousins.
On the continent, they’ve this lunatic notion that life is for living. They believe ordinary people should enjoy prosperity, too. These cheese-eating nutters heartily reject our work-till-you’re-dead Anglo-Saxon model.
And yet, on almost every measure, northern Europeans do better than us. Perhaps Maslow and his pyramid were on to something. As they say in Bulgaria, Gladna mechka horo ne igrae, — ‘Hungry bears don’t dance.’
Following the spectre of evil croissants, I’m refreshing the YouGov homepage. With illicit wonder, I wait for the Great British Public to smear its sado-masochistic fantasies across the screen.
The results are in. Over 106 percent of British people demand a ban on croissants and butter-based foreign breakfast pastries. Two-thirds support deporting all 300,000 croissant sympathisers from London’s French-populated quarters.
When asked why, seventy-three percent said, to save ‘are NHS.’
Over one-third said we should force-feed croissants to paedophiles and young people who waste their money on avocado toast instead of buying houses.
A sizeable portion went further. After the forced feeding, they said we should hang the offenders and harvest their organs, selling the saleable parts on the Chinese black market. All proceeds would then help fund ‘are NHS.’
Which brings me to a British paradox. As we well know, the British public loves to ban anything which may cause harm, unless it’s a murderous breed of dog which routinely chews through toddlers and wilting pensioners. On that, they’re a little more circumspect.
According to a growing body of medical research, ultra-processed foods are the new smoking. The reliably sober New Statesman reports that ‘UPFs’ such as pies and pasties and pizzas may cause diabetes and cancer and depression.
As smoking rates decline, and the opportunity to bash smokers over the head retreats, ultra-processed foods will replace tobacco as public health enemy number one. Many of your friends and acquaintances will soon swear they saw Goody Proctor eating ultra-processed sausages with the Devil.
Apparently, these Frankenstein foods make up two-thirds to eighty percent of the British diet. That said, will the poll-addled British Public soon support a ban on the evils of ultra-processed foods?
Reader, the question is rhetorical—I’m just kidding! Don’t be so silly. Of course they would.
“On the airwaves, talking heads versed in Lego language would press together prefabbed words and phrases into sentence shapes.”
Maybe my favorite satirical phrase of the century! Thank you, oh humorist!
Indeed. Some things never change. “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” ― H.L. Mencken