The difference is that while the other groups are merely statistical categories and their non-payment and cutting supply can be dealt with on an individual basis, the Roma are a group which has been assigned a living space within each town, often on the edges, sometimes behind walls. This means that the company is dealing not only with a supply-payment configuration, but with an identifiable and demonstrably disadvantaged group in the society that is effectively housed in a ghetto. It’s going to require a high degree of creative management to solve that one…

After the visit we return to the hotel for a shower and an afternoon surfing and wandering around the old town. Plovdiv is one of the oldest, continuously occupied urban sites in Europe and is built on a series of hills, like Rome. It has also been linked to trade and industry since antiquity—one of the lesser Silk Routes passed through here—and in addition it is still a major centre for national and international trade fairs and conferences. As coincidence would have it, one of the first trade fairs lit by electricity in the 19th century used equipment imported from Austria.

Up and down the hot hills; we visit a house from the Bulgarian national revival period and look at the Museum of Ethnology from the outside.

In the cobbled street there is an old man with a barrel organ. I record the street atmosphere while L talks to him. He turns out to be well over eighty years old and mentions, wistfully, his youth working for the Reichsbahn as a train driver in pre-war Germany for regular pay. And now he is reduced to this, he says, with a certain degree of bitterness, turning the handle. I watch him for a while as we slowly go down the hill and notice that the length of time he plays depends on the amount of money the people are dropping into his collection tin, a small coin gets only a couple of half-hearted turns… We go for coffee in a café that is literally stuck onto the hillside—a terrace with a view down the steep slope and across the valley. It is also a second-hand shop with a number of compartmentalised steamer trunks for sale, one with hotel stickers from the Twenties. This is something I’ve noticed in junk shops all over Europe and I wonder when hotels phased out putting stickers on your luggage. Later we pass a restaurant with a pig lying at the entrance pretending to be a dog.

It is L’s birthday so we decide on a slightly more expensive restaurant, one with a view over much of the city too and a terrace where we can watch the sun go down. We are the only people in the restaurant and are served by two waiters in full uniform. We talk with them about the history of Bulgaria and phrases occur like ‘under the Ottoman yoke’ and ‘during Ottoman slavery’. They sound like phrases learned in school and the waiters are certainly old enough to have finished their schooling under the old regime. Is this attitude still prevalent? Then we notice a tower of thick black smoke rising in the distance. In Austria it would signal a major blaze—a house, business premises or even a small factory—but the waiter just shrugs and says ‘it’s the Roma quarter’ as if it was only to be expected. I store the shrug away for future reference. L says she has the impression that it wouldn’t have mattered to the waiter if the whole Roma district would have burned down.