Borimir Totev: Christmas tree turned Executive Editor
Borimir Totev shares with a doze of humour memories of his first days in the UK, his time at University College London and the postgraduate academic journal SLOVO, of which he was the Executive Editor:
In 2003 we celebrated my ninth birthday in a small Leytonstone kitchen. I remember the colourful yellow table cloths my parents had laid out, no such thing existed in Bulgaria. I had just moved from the town of Yambol in Bulgaria to London to join my family in the UK.
I stumbled upon an identity crisis during in the UK. My first primary school teacher was from Iran and wore a hijab. A sweet and great woman, key in my personal development and integration. Of course, I would’ve thought no such thing had you met me a few months prior to that. Having been fed with monumental propaganda films about the yolk of the Turks in history classes in Bulgaria, I had been terrified of anything from turban to burqa, and anyone covering their face. London gave me my worldly education. It is precisely because it continues to provoke me on a daily basis that I love it.
I remember during the first nativity play I was given the part of the Christmas tree. A mute part, as you may have guessed. It was difficult to grasp the language, but I had to, in order to survive – or simply, in order to successfully ask and visit the loos.
A boy named Brendan was my first English friend. When we moved to the other side of London, I had to change schools and let Brendan down. He cried ferociously. It is still a mystery for me to understand his sadness for me, after all, at that point, my vocabulary equalled that of a Christmas tree.
Before embarking on a degree many years later, I spent some time thinking whether to take up documentary filmmaking or a degree in the social sciences. Although I had some experience (and dare I say – success, albeit local) in filmmaking, I decided that the degree which held the most answers to my questions was in the social sciences field. ‘’Why do I not live in my own country?’’ I have recently just finished a Masters degree in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies from UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. A world-class and wonderful department, dating back to 1915.
The School is a factory for manufacturing specialists in area studies. Some of the best minds in the world teach and learn there. I had the pleasure of being the School’s specialised postgraduate academic journal’s Executive Editor in 2016-17. We published some great research into the region on the edge of the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
To this day, I still regularly think of Yambol, comparing childhood games outside my block of flats against the vast city landscape of London. There was once a more easy going world I lived in.
