Mobile phone training

Provided by the Junta de Andalucía in collaboration with Vodafone. Don’t forget your glasses, and enjoy the raffle, presumably to be held in the rest break between the Introduction and the Practice sections: The English Wikipedia says that the history of Andalusia ended with the Muslims, which seems like fair comment. The Spanish version says…

Deserd Avenue

One for the Correctors Union’s hunt-the-error day today. This torrent lined with Andalusian auto-construction on the edge of Planas de Vallvidrera is gradually being overrun by wild boar: I imagine things got rather like this when the Romans left Britain.

Inventing al-Andalus

MM has kindly mailed the story of an illegal from Mali found climbing one of the Sierra Nevada’s major peaks in flipflops. Jorge Rodríguez’z story in El País, plagiarised by Elizabeth Nash for The Independent, has Anthony Braxton Tony Brascons making the same journey in reverse undertaken in sandals by Judar Pasha, who they describe…

Return of the demon barber of Calais

Such was the worldwide stir caused by my revelation that the Sweeney Todd story is at least a century older than previously thought that I know many of you will be impatient to read this new story of sinister stylists across the water. It’s from a French tutor, Méthode rationnelle suivant pas à pas la…

Banned language methods

Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville.…

Don’t shoot that hare

El Niño de Tetuán singing fandangos (MP3s or him and a superb selection of others). We’re probably talking early 1930s, but I don’t know where–Seville or Jerez seems more likely than Tetuan :-): A esa liebre no tirarle cazaores de la sierra a esa liebra no tirarle porque está haciendo en la tierra madriguera pa…

José Tomás vs Manolete

I’m different, says the former: The death of the latter: Bar Manolete in Mogón is excellent.

The oldest surname in the world

Ramón J Sender’s La tesis de Nancy is the account of an affair between strawman and strawwoman, in which Curro, Work, a part-gypsy ingénu-cynic from the Seville town of Alcalá de Guadaira “who devotes himself to the resale of bullfight tickets in the summer and to wine-tasting for the rest of the year” leaves Dutch…