At the corner of Gladstone Street and Kniaz Boris Street is the Yellow Cafe, a meeting point for the local lottery fans. If you go there on a Thursday, the day of the lottery draw, you may see a guy filling in his lottery slip with the help of a conical weight tied to a thread. He holds the thread in one hand and swings the weight backward and forward until it hits a number on his slip. He puts a cross on each of the numbers hit by the weight. The lottery kiosk is on the other side of the street. On Thursday afternoon the guy and his lottery "colleagues" cross over holding their completed slips and then return to the caf? to watch the draw on the telly. They write down the numbers and order themselves a beer or a vodka with a sad face. Gladstone was four times Britain's prime minister. When Bulgaria was still part of the Ottoman Empire he stood up in support of Bulgarians' independence. After Bulgaria's liberation from Ottoman rule, in a reversal of fortune of the kind dreamed about by the lottery guys, he became prime minister and was faced with a difficult decision - whether to support the unification of the Principality of Bulgaria with Eastern Roumalia. Some say that Gladstone's cabinet was against the Unification, others say that it supported it...Still others say Gladstone was not prime minister at the time of the Unification. It may be some relief for the lottery guys from my street that sometimes even the past, not just the future, can be uncertain.