Problogue

The Muse Has Left Me!

As I've wandered the streets of Woking these cold / damp Winter mornings, or traipsed across the Golf Course knee-deep in 'clarts' (a Geordie word, meaning mud), inspiration for a theme on which to base my blog concerning our up-coming trip to Mallorca has been sadly lacking.

And then I've become a little obsessed (believe it or not) with my attempts to up-date my Espanol capability through Duolingo, which has very unfairly erased any recognition of my previous attempts to improve my language skills in readiness for the trip to Palma and rendered me having to start afresh - it was only two years ago that I had straight 'Level 5s' across the board and my certificate.

The problem is that since I started blogging in 2014, we've visited Mallorca three times previously and those of my avid bloggees who keep-up with such things will know that I have already themed my blogs from these parts on such diverse things as classic literature (George Sands' Un Hiver a Mallorque), Punk Rock music (Never Mind the Balearics, a pun on the Sex Pistols classic album) and Monty Python (Life of Brian).

Interspersed in these blogs have been sub-texts dealing with such things as spanish words that took my fancy as I learned to speak the lingo, gastronomy in all its guises, phobias etc. etc. in my ever more desperate attempts to make our holidays interesting to friends and anyone else who might be daft enough to waste their time reading my prattle.

As the days have passed in recent weeks, I have thought of and then quickly rejected numerous themes, before hitting on the blindingly obvious, which had been staring at me all along in the guise of Duolingo, which reminded me that the Spanish word for 'language' is 'idioma'.

By Jove, I Think He's Got It

When Castillo Hotel Son Vida's very capable Concierge, Pep Toni, enquired in a recent email whether I had considered a Mallorquin idiom (the English definition of the word), 'Faves Comptades', my 'eureka moment' quickly came to me.

Like you I imagine, I'd never come across 'Faves Comptades', literally 'counted beans' in Mallorquin / Catalan, but according to Pep it is widely used across the island in the context of stating the obvious ..............'in other words, there is no doubt about it''.

Whenever I have chatted with our friends at Castillo Hotel Son Vida over the years, they have been very helpful with my understanding of the language, educating me along the way in their usage of such idioms and I have often shared with them my own English equivalents - much to their mirth on the occasion of likening chatterbox Porter / Doorman Tomas as 'talking the hind leg off a donkey'.

So, taking my love of a pun, it was a short leap to 'The Idiom's Guide to Mallorca', which I was surprised to find not registered as a blog title by Penguin, publisher of the totally unrelated 'Idiot's Guide' series of 'How To' reference books.

Be warned, another one of my blogs is soon to hit the airwaves, as we oldies like to call the inter web / cloud thingy so beloved of the youth of today.