Perils of chatting with strangers on holiday

Have you ever been had? It’s a painful and often embarrassing experience, especially when it’s a good friend catching you out.

Many, many moons ago, SWMBO was asked to help take a group of children from her school on a skiing trip.

Being a star turn both on and off piste, she accepted the invitation and in the Spring of 1992 we found ourselves on a Balkan Air flight from London to Sofia for a week’s skiing in Borovets.

When I say we, I mean SWMBO, me, and our friends Mrs and Mrs O.B. – I have changed their names to protect the guilty.

I spent most of the week carting ski gear up and down the mountain and sitting at cafes with Mr O.B., sipping tumblers of cheap Bulgarian brandy while the others in our party paraded/ slid/traversed/ fell (delete as applicable) down the slopes.

That meant I had plenty of time to hone the skills of my favourite pastime – talking. I met many interesting people, from all over Europe including several Russians, and spent many a happy hour (literally) chatting away and swapping business cards.

The week passed without major incident.

A couple of weeks after our return to Blighty, I got home from work one day to find the answering machine (we didn’t have voice mail in those days) blinking.

As I played back the message, my heart sank. “Hello, Mike”, said the distinctly Russian voice. “This is Vlazhni. We met at Borovets and you said if we were ever in the UK to look you up. My wife and children are with me here in London and we were wondering if we could come and stay with you”.

Panic set in. I tore the study apart, looking for the business cards I’d collected in Borovets. None bore the name Vlazhni. Oh no – was he that Russian man I got chatting to in the gondola? Or that eastern European in the bar?

Then SWMBO came home. I explained the dilemma and she, being wise, played the message back. “Oh, that’s Mr O.B.” she said. “Don’t you recognise his voice?”

The realisation that I’d been had really did hurt. I eventually got over it, after a couple of years, and even managed to smile disdainfully whenever Mr  O.B. regaled fellow guests at dinner parties with “The Bulgarian Stitch-up”. Oh how I laughed.

Anyway, why mention this now? Why bring up such a painful memory?

Well, my post of August 7 (Tentacles of power reach a long, long way) elicited a comment from my reader, Sven.

“Perhaps your Russian follower is Vlazhni come back to haunt you!”

Visions of Mr Putin’s henchmen surfing the net for derogatory comments about their wise and wonderful leader and then issuing warnings to the perpetrators left my stomach knotted.

Until I read the comment again, out loud this time, and recognised the name Vlazhni.

Oh rowlocks – 23 years on and the O.Bs had stitched me up again.