Nicholas - The Stolen Reindeer

Nicholas would like to wish everyone a very happy Christmas. He's been busy for the last few days, but you can find out how to hear his story by visiting this website.

'Nicholas - The Stolen Reindeer' is a traditional Christmas story that's available as an app and features illustrations and words from Marina and Tom.

Colourful Star hopes that you've had a wonderful Christmas and wishes you well for 2015.

Marina, Tom and Vasilena xx

Весела Коледа/Merry Christmas

"Once upon a time, in the mountains far away, there was a farm. On it lived Mary Torpipit and her parents, Elspeth and Gregory ..."

Here is the beginning of a new collaboration ...

'Nicholas - The Stolen Reindeer' is a seasonal children's story with illustrations by Marina and a text by Tom.

It's a traditional festive adventure in which a young girl living in the mountains sets out to save the Christmas spirit and, in fact, Christmas itself.

It's published by x-ovation and is now available as an app - with hand-painted illustrations, animation and audio version - and is for children aged between four and seven.

You can download it in English (and other languages) from Amazon in territories across the world, including the UK, America, Australia, Spain and there is also a German version on iTunes here.

If you have liked our posts on Colourful Star so far, we hope you will like this new children's story too.

Colourful Star will continue and we'd like to wish you a very happy - and, of course, colourful! - Christmas,

Marina, Vasilena and Tom xx

Петдесет/Fifty

Петдесет картини,

петдесет стихотворения,

с много работа и много любов

намираме

един общ език,

откриваме

една обща земя.

През планини и гори,

по мостове и улици

през малки, китни села,

съхранили спомените от детството

през моментите на пътуване,

от България и Англия

ние тръгваме

по нови пътеки.

Нима има нещо невъзможно

на този свят?

Не можем да знаем ...

защото това пътуване

продължава.

Fifty paintings,

fifty poems,

much work, much love

so as to find

a common language

common ground.

From mountains and forests

to the bridges and streets

of small and beautiful villages,

from memories of childhood

to moments of travel,

from Bulgaria and England

we look for new paths.

What isn’t possible

in this world?

We cannot know ...

this journey

is to be continued.

This is Colourful Star's fiftieth post

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips and Vasilena Shiderova.

Before snow

Smudged yellow light at dawn suggests a cold snap.

On this new route to work, trees fluster with russet leaves;

the snug stone of a church, village cottages, a vinegary purple

line up like opportunities beyond barbed-wire fences

snaggled with accidental wool scrapings from sheep.

Flowers still bloom. Or seedheads flaunt their ochre fruitfulness.

Keats looms – but then buses pass, aircraft wheel in

and the great long winter opens up between the clouds.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Trees

What to us was a park lined

the drive up to that country house

where The Beatles’ maharishi

made arguably plausible claims.

Damp yews turned out to be

promises made but not kept.

At that age, of course,

we raced amongst them,

played war games in thickets

on the far side of ploughed land

which led to Bridego Bridge –

a 1960s topography.

Where Beeching’s cut line

swung around the border

of an aristocratic estate,

we fired air pistols into bark.

Dunstable lovers came out

to woo in secluded lanes.

We were already there –

witnesses and irritants.

In the decade’s last evening,

we marched home, immune

to sunset and shadows,

a geometry of trees.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Atanaska

How your blue eyes stopped me.

Your exhausted mother was out for the count.

In that small room we’d been moved to,

upstairs somewhere

in the maternity hospital,

a nurse came in and handed you over,

asleep for the moment,

and I was like what now?

No more than one hour old,

you woke up on my knee,

took a look and went back to sleep.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Baba

A face is etched at the years’ expense.

In the longest of runs, something reached at

comes down to a look, a landscape,

a placement – to the particular

arrangement of time and space,

and then, sobering, biology.

Emotions tumble like circus gymnasts.

In the longest of runs, it boils down

to discoveries in the asteroid belt

and this etched face.

We'll say ‘I’, of course, but pronouns

are always more than

the first word in a story.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Old Bridge in Winter

Because I only remember the place in summer,

it will never be the same, revisiting

arrangements of wood and stone,

angled balconies, shuttered windows –

the histories I thought to decipher

by running my fingers against the grain.

Too cold for that now. And the trees

have sharpened for winter,

thinned along a softened horizon.

What’s fixed here’s illusion seen

in different weather, affirming the old thought

that every return is also an arrival. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Gourds and pumpkins

If I had my time over,

I’d make more pumpkin soup.

I’d bring you coffee in bed

on Sunday mornings,

then we’d dress for the weather

and scout market stalls

for gourds and squashes,

testing for signs

of ripeness in the rind.

You’d wear the scarf

you’ve had since before we met,

your favourite coat,

and we’d blow steam from our mouths

like children pretending

they’re smoking cigarettes.

Back home, we’d ignore

the recipe books and be

profligate with flavours,

promiscuous with spices, herbs.

While the thick liquid

bubbled in our largest pan,

we’d sit at the table

and talk of other lives

we might have led.

If I had my time over,

I’d make more pumpkin soup.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Medals

To hear him speak of it,

perhaps you’d think him unclear,

the way sentences spiral outwards

until, reaching what’s yet to be spoken,

he’s finding new fixed points –

a dangerous promise, the hurt

which even triumph contains,

this year’s anniversaries of war,

the specific occasions and their weight.

It is not enough to reverse

into commemoration. That’s something –

but here he is and saying it again:

the game’s not up yet, no.

No, it isn’t. Not by a long chalk.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Autumn in the Mountains

A landscape’s engrained.

Differentiated perception

gives name to, tries to

surface the unfathomable.

And coming up that slope,

up a last stretch of path

which seemed to give out

before you spotted footprints

in mud beyond slabs of granite –

there we were, at a vantage,

looking out and down

on mountain woodland,

unintended spectacle.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Rhodopchanka

Facing each other across a tiled hall,

mirrors exchange reflections

into a diminishing infinity –

our shrinking reflections

look back as if imprisoned

in some alien dimension.

Elsewhere, in unvisited rooms

of this former royal palace,

crates, uncatalogued, hold

blouses, jackets, skirts,

painstakingly embroidered,

painstakingly collected,

but left, for now at least,

like miraculous secrets

on the far side of a looking-glass.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Paprika

A reservoir’s evening sheen,

not fifteen minutes out of the city,

extends to matt, interleaving slopes

which pepper with house lights

as commuters, running late, come home.

By a converted rowing station,

I’m browsing a translated menu,

picking up conversations from a year ago.

What to choose for this return visit?

Flavours don’t just recall themselves –

they are memories and places,

friends you shared them with.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Grandmother with Apples

Orchards were an Eden

just beyond the end of our lane –

a temptation for boys with scuffed knees

and memories of last year’s crop

as a daredevil scurry over railings

and a clandestine feast.

Come autumn, pickers turned a blind eye

to our impertinent raids:

what were a few scrumped apples to them?

Fruit trees are generous. Had we known it,

apples are gifts to be offered over fences.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Independence Day

A grounded constellation in the distance

I’d like to think is your city –

but threaded onto radio beams

we’re coming in to land

in another country.

Not that anything’s far in time and space.

Crossing another decided border,

I’m handing over my passport with one hand,

texting news of arrival with another –

 then watching plimsolled shoes

measuring out paces along the yellow pavements.

In this swirl of whistles and vuvuzelas,

plash of fountains and shrieks from the tramlines,

I’m making for what I know,

I’m making for somewhere

which feels like home,

which doesn’t feel like a missed target.

20 September is independence day in Bulgaria - the anniversary of the 'de jure' declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire in Veliko Turnovo in 1908.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Wildflowers

Beyond the orchard and plain church,

escaping some fury of my own invention,

I’d be crossing the road to the railway station

to the edge of a wide, familiar view:

uncut wheatfield extending to stands

of remnant Victorian planting –

oaks and cedars which at one time lined

the driveway of those misnamed Towers.

How to decipher mechanised pastoral

under Luton Airport flight paths

might well have proved distraction –

in another emptying village, pale blues

and yellows in an overgrown courtyard

are plants which, had I given attention

to what was growing among the cornstalks

I might have been able to name.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

For 6 September

As the sudden dusk mellows stone distances,

crowds shuffle down, find spaces to regroup

below the citadel on this poised thoroughfare.

We’ve been walking all afternoon

through suburbs and past the blue house

where that war artist lived – in the heat

our son complains, is demanding a drink.

The crowds are a memory from this time last year,

how they gathered into this space,

and if I listen, I’m sure to hear them again –

those exultant whispers, that ripple

at the furthest edge of history that we’ve reached. 

6 September is a national holiday in Bulgaria and marks the anniversary of the unification of the northern and southern parts of the country in 1885.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Shells

A flotsam of pebbles and shells

she’s gathered on our window sill –

they’re from strands and shores

we’ll have found time

to idle on, browse

for mementoes of summer.

Forgetful of each occasion,

they won’t take us back

to where, looking down,

she found mother-of-pearl,

 or striated curiosities

of granite, flint and jet –

yet on some cold morning

we might be close enough

to interrupt ourselves

with rough textures,

banded colours

accumulated over years.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Grapes

Suggesting a different season,

breeze through a classroom window

seems to take us back to his question:

‘When you’re happy, why bother to write?’

Does the bookshelf’s scarred parade bear him out?

Can happiness survive murderous dissection?

Only just too late, as students file away

over cypress-shadowed lawn,

I remember that day a few months before –

how, having climbed between stone houses

to the monument, we sat looking out

across rooftops, gardens, from the shade.

And yes, perhaps, there’s nothing need be said,

but here I am again, returning to coffee

in paper cups, scribbling down details,

happy all right to be trying to retrieve

the sweetness of those late-summer grapes.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Pine Tree

It was a place for kite-fliers and tobogganists,

the bare dome of a wind-flustered knoll,

but that chalk figurehead fronted a ridge

whose flanks and gullies were thick with trees.

That was more my scene – where branches raised

hopes of adventure in an elevated world,

where birdsong might be taken for promises,

and, running between the tall pines,

I’d be sure to come home reeking of their scent.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Baba Dana

That winds change and rain lifts,

that weather comes and goes,

that thought feels much the same –

its abruptness, its evanescence –

as it has always done,

that the imaginable may happen,

that we are momentary,

as unique as cloud formations,

that anticipation endures,

that life may be cumulative,

that the beauty of age is unflinching.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

A Cup of Cherries

Outside the kitchen, from the bench,

you look up into branches that you might call –

were they human – over-enthusiastic.

Sparrows, finches occupy

a wooden cascade.

Let them have their gluttony.

Their chirping arguments

are a kind of drama.

When it’s time again,

we'll remember –

go out picking with plastic bowls,

put cups of cherries on the sideboard.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Piper

Intrigued by affinities,

we’re talking again

on a favourite theme:  

how traversing

reputed distances

we keep stumbling

across common ground.

Maybe here’s something

we might take for a clue:

suggestive plangencies,

bagpipe music,

exiled to the shores

of Celtic Europe,

held tight to

in the Rhodope Mountains.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

July Morning

How light works to bring back world

and summer put on rash splendour:

such homecomings and departures

as city rooftops shield appear –

as they might rightly be – adventure.

Not so much grateful for small mercies

as learning to spot small miracles,

you’ll be savouring thick coffee smells

and prospects of a day unfolding

into distant car-horns, rumorous traffic

as colour glides in to repossess

the crags and angles of night’s canyons.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Old Trees

Somewhere, not far inside the gates,

but not so far beyond the artificial pond,

its muddy cusps slimed with frog spawn,

I’d be little more than five years old

and struck by the lightning-split trunks,

the furred bark, the sheer age of trees.

Like that sliced-through giant Redwood

in the Natural History Museum

with rings picked-out marking dates

of human events, it wasn’t so much

our frailty they brought to mind

as their own solidity, their endurance.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Old Bridge

How far stone endures,

not in only great monuments –

temples, ruins, castles, cathedrals –

but wonders of the everyday:

how, quarried, split, cut, shaped,

it’s fabricated for houses, bridges,

pocked and scored by climate,

worn-smooth by traffic,

inscribed by time and the impulse

to see what’s on the other bank.

Leaning over grainy parapet,

we’re pausing again to look

down into water furling at pillars,

heading for an elsewhere we can’t tell.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Midsummer

Static heat and a veil of light across fields,

a too-bright sky bring us back to this path,

its attendant hedgerows and here

in the nooks of dry stone walls

pale seasonal flowers as if in hiding.

Between shifts we’d be out in midsummer,

taking to that familiar stretch of farmland

and each other: infinite worlds

among the cornstalks, under pebbles,

in the splash and froth of busy streams –

soon we’ll have to return or move on,

but for the moment, love, here’s

the pair of us, out of harm’s way,

shading our eyes against the sun.

Midsummer’s Day is on 21st June in Britain and 24th June in Bulgaria.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Bloomsday

Judiciously in absentia from rumorous circulations,

Joyce embarked on his reconstructive journey

somewhere beyond the plate-glass windows

and reversing lorries of Zürich bahnhof –

conjured Bloom to wander a Dublin question mark,

and Stephen, his fallen, fearful Telemachus.

Rough magic and heavenly music,

from Sandymount Strand to Eccles Street,

from declarative ‘Stately’ to reparative ‘Yes’,

signatures of all things, words changing colour –

a single day amounting to an odyssey,

refindings of the ineluctably modal.

16th June is Bloomsday – the anniversary of the day in 1904 on which James Joyce set ‘Ulysses’ – a novel written in Trieste, Zürich and Paris.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Apples

Sharp, crisp smells in the packing shed,

another year’s crop despatched

along conveyors, boxed, crated

loaded onto trucks: our village industry

of pickers, sorters, packers,

ladders propped among branches,

trugs of cookers and eaters,

a methodical tree-by-tree advance.

All I would do to take you there –

to those orchards beside our lane,

their close fruit-heavy ranks,

some time towards the tail-end

of a Cold War summer

of beer gardens and mown grass –

all I can do amounts to these words,

the taste of these apples.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Jean Valjean

Articulate among the rocks

of this expedient exile

not so far from home,

what thoughts, what stories

recur like aftertastes

of not so haute cuisine ...

Victor Hugo on Guernsey,

amongst his poems

and les miserables,

plotting the fate

of convict Jean Valjean,

the sea his own barricades.

22 May was the 129th anniversary of Victor Hugo’s death.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

За 24 май

Как да пиша, но с букви

от една древна азбука,

със звуци от сърцето?

Те носят дълги години,

спомени и истории:

една култура стои тук

в техните обикновени линии.

Тя следва моите ръце,

които създават думите,

които откриват карти

в най-малките кътчета.

Без тях – никаква любов,

никаква болка, никаква песен.

"Красиви са," казва тя.

How to write but with letters

from an ancient alphabet,

with sounds of the heart?

They bear long years,

memories and histories:

a culture stands here

in their plain marks.

She follows my hands,

which make the words,

which discover maps

in the smallest places.

Without them, no love,

no pain, no song.

“They’re beautiful,” she says.

24 May is Bulgarian Education, Culture and Slavonic Literature Day or Ден на българската просвета и култура и на славянската писменост. It is also St Cyril and Methodius’ Day, commemorating the brothers who devised the Glagolitic alphabet from which, in turn, Cyrillic is derived.

Images: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips (with help from and thanks to Iliyana Mircheva and Tsvetomira Peykova)

Bulgarian Monastery

A freshness as after rain

in this deeper seclusion

where our putative span figures –

from gardened beds to slim trees –

in an architectural scheme,

epitome of calm between storms.

Navigating corridors and cloisters,

we thicken patina and paintwork

with thoughts we’ve brought to bear

from guidebook précis,

biography of this or that artist,

history of dates and erasure.

By a bench on these stone flags,

some internal murmur frets,

pushes out into a penumbra

where others meanings

might wait to be distilled

from a precinct’s iconic silence.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Kettle

 So simple in construction –

but who first thought

to fashion that shape,

add spout and handle?

And who before them

found that leaves dropped

into boiling water

blossomed, made tea?

Or that clay transformed

to porcelain? And who

took fire and tamed it?

An untraceable regression –

but one which leads back

from this corner of the kitchen,

through centuries, millennia,

to a moment of discovery

on the margins of
a vast and unmapped plain.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Гергьовден

Inside this hushed rotunda, frescoes,

haloed figures, patches of worn plaster

around serpent-dragon, horse and lance

are like a map of endurance,

faith held to and held onto

through years of omen and eclipse.

We move through incense traces,

iteration of prayers and blessings,

not so far from shopping hall and traffic,

along a cusp of the sacred and shadow,

where everything might be laid out before us

in resurgent light across the iconostasis.

6^th May is Гергьовден or St George’s Day in Bulgaria. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Tulips

They seemed to bloom for weeks,

banks of tulips in the college yard –

bright as crimson envelopes you filled

with mementoes, drawings, news.

Hurrying back from the post-room –

a student in daps and my own world –

and rashly tearing open what you’d sent,

I had to stop beside those vivid beds:

breeze-taken, a lock of your red hair

scattered across those sun-dappled flowers.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Valia Balkanska

Always a story there if you stop and look:

hers begins in mountains and meadows

and will not end until, on some distant planet

or in the emptiness between stars,

the fragile messengers we've sent

meet whatever their fate might be.

We will not, cannot know –

but might take some hope in thinking

that these traces of ours will be found

and that the song of a хайдук rebel,

music drawn from the grass and earth,

will be heard beneath unfamiliar constellations

will sound beneath an otherworldly sky.

Valia Balkanska’s recording of the Bulgarian folk song ‘Излел е Делю хайдутин’ features on the Golden Record, a selection of the sounds and music of the Earth sent into space on board the two Voyager probes. The song's on YouTube here. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

On 'Twelfth Night' (For Shakespeare's 450th)

I was tempted to ask it myself

as the ferry ground against

seaweed-greened harbour walls:

‘What country, friends, is this?’

Overlooked by abandoned palace,

remnant of some earlier kingdom,

we pulled in by a customs house

with handwritten welcome sign

and sprouting wire palms

across the dockside development area.

Who knew what we would find?

In a dark cell,

perched above shale-beds

in this corner of a promontory,

I’m overlooking absences

of a neatly turned plot,

a plunging watercourse.

‘We’ll come out of it

all right in the end,’

I think I heard you say.

Over our heads, birds plunge

and swoop into the thermals.

Stripped down to no more

than a bare, forked fear of heights,

I’m walking back up the slope

into a myriad coincidences,

opportunities for love amended.

23rd April marks the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth - and we wanted to celebrate it on Colourful Star, not least because Marina took inspiration from Shakespeare for the design of the project's logo. 'Twelfth Night' seems an apposite choice of subject for this post, because the answer to Viola's famous question at the beginning of the play - 'What country, friends, is this?' - is 'This is Illyria, lady', effectively locating the play in SE Europe.

Images: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips