Category: Jons blog

The flea market of Zageb is stuck between an army base and a land fill hill next to the river Sava only a couple of miles from the city centre. It is huge. The only one I have seen larger was in San Francisco and that was a long time ago. Anything and everything is for sale at Hrelić, I have seen wooden dildos, Olympic mascots made of lego, vintage machine guns, pianos, and white elephants amongst the piles and piles of clothes, books, tools and tat! The weather and the season effect the nature and number of stalls that set up each Sunday, Saturday and Wednesday morning. On average it takes about 2 hours to walk up and down every row but allow 3 hours if you want to look properly. This time of the year there are masses of skis and ski boots on offer  in the summer there are more sunglasses available than on could possibly imagine!

This market is the source of most of the books that are sold in the Sto Citas bookshop. Markos and Sunni have been “doing” the Sunday market for so long that the are well know by most of the regular stall holders (as is Ena their dog  who begs an incredible amount of bread and bad dog diet stuff from stall holders and customers every week!) Some give them advance warning of new books coming and even invite them to come and collect books from their houses or storage units. There are many “business stalls selling new stuff mostly cheap clothing and tools my favourites are the wooden product stalls from where I recently replaced my wood dining plate. The rest of the stuff is second hand, “knocked off” or in some way “shady” as all the very best flea markets are. (RIP Hackeny Wick car boot sale!).

The Barabrith crew tend to go most Sundays. We get up early enough to make it to the books before most of the other book dealers do. There are several hideous cafebar’s around the edge of the market in shacks that I doubt would pass any H&S inspections and stink of dead burning animals but thankfully some only do drinks. Inside the market are two mini bakery outlets one of which often has vegan croissants! They are vegan by default rather than intent, the margarine being cheaper than butter, we guess! The best local speciality food wise though comes from a little stall in the middle of the rows stalls that do large flat Pogacice which are a cross between a donut and a pitta bread, most folk have them with nutella on, I have mine covered in garlic oil, lovely!

If you are visiting Zagreb and want to see something real  and maybe bag a bargain I can’t recommend Hrelić too highly.

Yesterday we had visitors from Banja Luka, which I think is a great sounding name, not sure why but there you go! The snow remained all around and I reckoned it was time to go visit our woods whilst they are covered in this photogenic white stuff. So off we went….

Back in at the house Matchka was getting a bit annoyed by the “attentions’ of the visiting infant. She tried to escape by climbing on my shoulders and stayed there for 20 minutes or more even remaining in place when I got up and started doing the washing up!

 

The weather forecast said it would snow last night and they were right.

Sunni and I dug out the snow shovels and cleared some paths.

Ena loves to run around in the snow and bury her snout into it in search of something live to kill.

Access to my room is by two outdoor steps both of which needed clearing of snow. Untill I get my ‘bathroom’ plumbed that means a rather tricky trip down snowy stairs at night to reach the toilet ( or I just pee out of a window!).

As I said before it’s pretty but cold stuff and my poor feet had had enough of being outside. Now I’m staying inside, keeping the stove lit and putting draft excluders on my door frames!

 

Over my last few  visits to the flea market in Zagreb I’ve been picking up random rugs and carpets that caught my eye. I was bit unsure about what price to pay for a rug but when the stall holder for the first rug I bought started the negotiation at 50kuna (about 6 quid) I knew I was on to a bargain. Further purchases have cost the same or less so I now have the beginnings of a small collection of rugs to cover my shiny, cold and rather unwelcoming laminate flooring.

Anyway my rugs have come from ‘who knows where’ so I decided to give them a good scrub before introducing them to my home. A bright sunny day, washing up liquid in a bowl of warm water, on my knees with my right hand in a rubber glove, my rugs proved thankfully to be relatively clean. The rugs stayed out for the remains of the day and were dry enough to bring inside by sundown. I’ll give them a thorough going over with the vacumn cleaner and then cover up some of my new laminate floor. I think I’ll keep an eye out for more rugs and rotate them around occasionally.

or should that be flawed?

The laminate is all down, tomorrow once we have returned from the Zagreb flea market – that is the source of much of our wealth! – we will install the stove and then I will begin to fill this virgin space with my stuff!

Both Marko and I are still suffering from the hours spent on ours knees laying this stuff out. Well that and getting old.

Today I did the plumbing supply shops with the son of Mr Voda Karlovac’s premier plumbers. It was like visiting sweet shops with the son of Mr Cadbury! We ended up at a store calle Frack which although unfortunately named is very friendly and “good quality” according  “son of Voda” . After choosing my sink, pipes and shower base,  I asked if I should leave a cash deposit (the shops computers were out of action due to a stock check) and was told that “Mr Voda was my deposit”, Mr Voda beamed.

Anyway here is my room all floored and vacuumed and ready to be filled with my stuff. There is gonna be a lot of shelf building in the next month!

The last two days have been “flooring” days. We checked out the options and prices at the local wood supply places and ended up choosing to get a laminate that looks pretty similar to the wood on my ceiling.  We calculated that we’d need about 92 square meters to do the whole room with a bit left over for mistakes.  That was 43 packs which at 15kg each proved to be too much for our little van to manage and so we left half behind and slowly drove home, very slowly in a struggling first gear on the final hill!

It cost me about 5000 Croatian Kuna for the laminate and the green underlay, that’s about 600 quid in “real” money which besides the plumbing bill I hope is the last of the large financial outlays I have to make for the foreseeable future!

The laminate is pretty easy to lay once you get the hang of it as long as there aren’t any pesky beams in the way or awkward un-straight raised platforms. Yeah we have a few of those, so the jigsaw got a lot of use. Today we picked up the second half which is now acclimatising to its new residence and tomorrow we will click it in to place where according to the 25 year guarantee (if used in a residential space) it will probably out last yours truly. There’s a happy thought!

The green stuff in between the chipboard and the laminate is for sound proofing. But never fear I’ll be able to make the ground floor chandeliers shiver  and swing once I get my HiFi system set up. Then I’ll finally feel like I’ve moved in properly.

The last two days have been incredibly bright, warm and sunny. Difficult to believe how cold it was a few days ago and that it’s December. Anyway this gave me the chance to get on the gazebo roof and finish the shingles whilst they and the glue were not all but frozen solid as they were last week.

The top of the gazebo provided the last tricky bit to sort out. Maybe we’ll get a metal cap and weather cock later! In the meantime let’s hope that this combination stays put over the coming winter months.

The view from top is rather special a 360 degree vista of our house, land and the hills and forest further away.

Black cat white cat! Now that was  great film.

I’ve always enjoyed “doing things with my hands ” as they say. Not just sexual things but DIY, fixing, building and creating things. It started with my early bicycles and adapting them to have oversize handlebars, double back brakes and the like. When I started doing the book distribution the joy of putting up shelves became part of my life. I kid you not. When I was working at my first “proper job”, doing mail order and wharehousing at a record label we had to build  loads of shelving. The boss brought in a mate of his who “needed a job”. This guy used to be in the early London punk band called Brigandage and now he was going through a mid life crisis and the rest but he was amusing and he tried hard to convince me that he needed nothing more in life than to be building shelves. “More satisfying than sex” he used to say, I wasn’t convinced but I knew what he meant!  Anyway back then I was slowly building up a tool kit with special bike bits and pieces and a few other tools I had picked up along the way. After my Dad’s dad died I was really annoyed that his great collection of tools was given away. I had spent working holidays with him and Alice his wife painting and fixing things and had really appreciated all old hand tools  that he had. I managed to inherit a caged lamp on a long old cable from him that I both treasured and used extensively for illuminating hundreds of stalls in dingy gigs all over Europe. Twas a sad day when it went missing. One of the few tools I did pick up from my Dad was an old school G-Clamp, a wickedly robust and powerful device that has also been used to secure numerous bookstall constructions. This is one of my favourite tools.

Around the same time my cable lamp went missing I had the good fortune to be associated with PA Rik a squatter electrician who had lots of interesting contacts and with whom I was working on the Emmaz Social Centre project. Rik was going to be  big part of our dream music venue and he once told me that he knew someone who might be able to supply us with loads of free equipment. Free equipment always makes my ears prick up. Turned out Rik knew someone at the BBC who was responsible for getting rid of studio equipment every year regardless of its condition to make sure they have the best and new stuff. A couple of weeks later Rik produced a huge extension cable with the thickest rubber cable I’d ever seen for me courtesy of the BBC (unofficially so don’t tell anyone!) This cable has been in use ever since and was used last week when the builders doing my room accidentally took home Marko’s extension cable and it took us a day or two to work out where it had gone!

Vanja, mi amor, has  a very generous nature and she bought me a Makita drill far superior to any I have previously owned. This beauty has helped build and dismantle many book shelves and since moving here it has been in almost daily use. Its not heavy, the battery packs are super quick to recharge, it has multiple speed options and a light! I love it!

A drill is of course not much without its “bits”, you could say the same about people I guess. One drill bit I particularly like that I acquired I’m not sure when but think it was at the sadly long gone Hackney Wick flea market is this wonderful (yellow) circle cutter. The joy of cutting a perfect circle to feed wires through instead of making multiple holes and linking them up with a chisel is profound, trust me I know it sounds “dorkish” but once you’ve tried it there’s no going back.

And finally where would be without my newest Swiss army knife. This little beauty has been used all over Barabrith. I lost it for two days back in June and cursed the fact that I had told Vero that the camouflage colour looked cool! Vero was staying in Switzerland with her brother at the time and asked me what she should bring as a present! What else would I want from there? It took me  along time to get over the loss of my favourite Swiss army knife that I bought from a store in Switzerland whilst driving a band around back in the early 2000’s. I’ll never forget the enormous range of knives on offer and the fact that the shop was happy to accept any of the various currencies I was carrying at the time (this was long before the euro came into play). I transgress. I spent hours looking for this little knife out in the field where I last remembered using it. Eventually I got a fork and moved a large pile of brambles and other vegetation we had cut down with machetes. There glistening in the sun right under the bottom of the heap was this knife, phew!  I would have hated having to tell Vero I had lost it, I felt bad that my Mexican friend had spent so much money on me in the first place, but by now I can truly say that this little knife has justified itself several times over as a useful present. For starters, I’ve picked several splinters out of my hands with the little tweezers which usually I always lose quite quickly.

Thank you Dad, Rik, Vanja and Vero.

If you felt this was geeky just wait for my Leatherman posting!