How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat

To Sofia, then, on a ten-seater NetJet Falcon from Farnborough, accompanied by Bryan Ferry and a small coterie of GQ apparatchiks, including the best-dressed man in Shepherd’s Bush, Nick Foulkes.

Some of my friends are big in Japan, some of them are big in America and some of the larger ones are big all over the world. Me, I’m big in Bulgaria. Not as big as government corruption or the drug cartels, but big enough to warrant a mention on the early evening news (bumping Prince Charles’s 60th birthday celebrations into second place, I kid you not).

A few years ago I wrote a moderately successful etiquette book — Mr Jones’ Rules — which kicked up some dust but which didn’t exactly cause Jeremy Clarkson to look over his shoulder (although he did supply a puff for the jacket). In the emerging markets, though, it has gone gangbusters, and there are now editions in Russia, China, Poland, Hungary, Korea and Romania as well as in Greece and the United States. However it is in Bulgaria that I am really big, and this has caused me some reflection.

I was being flown by private jet to Sofia for the launch of the book, at a party at the Kempinski Hotel, where Bryan Ferry was due to play his flat-pack Roxy Music show. Tickets for the event were changing hands for E250 on the secondary (‘black’) market, and for a while I seriously thought about selling my own. There was a TV crew on board the plane who interviewed Bryan and me for the following morning’s Bulgarian equivalent of BBC Breakfast, and who kept asking pointed questions about Gordon Brown’s ability to manage the economy (‘He can’t,’ I said, to their obvious delight).