My Thoughts

Now, I've just returned from a holiday in Mallorca and, despite the appearance of the picture to the left of this, it wasn't one of those kinds of holidays. The... interesting (for want of a better word) setup of the picture is simply the corollary of heat and a pool tournament. However, while on this holiday, a number of strange thoughts cropped into my head, mostly the fault of other people.



Thought Uno is this: I think we value certain jobs a little too much. A prime example in the current climate would be bankers, what exactly do they do, except piss our money up the walls. Another is pilots- don’t get me wrong, it’s a job that requires incredible skill and years of training and practice, but on the flights to and indeed from Mallorca, we had some delightful passengers in our section who insisted on providing impromptu rounds of applause for takeoff and landing. Yeah, congratulations Mr. Pilot on doing your job. I don’t mean to detract from pilots, but if he’d done anything other than takeoff and land successfully, I would have been seriously disappointed... and probably dead.

Thought Dos is this: The man in charge of the hotel's entertainment every night was a jovial Spaniard named Justo. He spoke excellent English and German and yet myself and every one of my friends overlooked this for the simple fact that instead of saying 'give them a big hand' or 'let's have a round of applause' he would say (I'll spell it phonetically) 'Bigaplows'. This was a source of much hilarity to us and forced us all to look past the man's remarkable charisma in 2 languages that weren't his mother tongue. There were numerous jokes made- 'What was your favoured method of agriculture again, Justo was it smaller ploughs or...' or 'This field has been fallow for too long and yet these small ploughs make barely a dent in the sod, what is it that we need, Justo?'

Thought Tres is this: Despite being generally a good linguist, my area of expertise lies in German and not in Spanish which meant that me and my friend Tommy (the man 'giving' in the picture) decided to dub channel Cuatro's big money dating show Eligeme with our own comments (mostly about Herpes, mostly because the Zovirax advert had an unfortunate use of Spanish in it, which led to the famous cold sore cream being advertised as 'creme labial'). Now this show was everything that's wrong with all the rubbish reality television that we regurgitate in this country... only in Spanish and hosted by the lovechild of Hugh Jackman and Richard Madeley (see clip for details). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqLWLBNypKs. Essentially, a dashing (or otherwise) bachelor is paraded in front of a panel of women who rate him on his physical appearance initially and then on his promo video, job and skills, before he brutally cuts them down, based on their physical appearance and a witty caption, none of which I understood. In my time there I saw a man dressed as a Stormtrooper and Zoro, a permed ginger rocker and a rip-roaring bender (or closet homosexual as common decency would have me say) all waltz out of the studio with a bronzed, young Spaniard on their arm. It's like Blind Date on narcotics... and not blind. It was obviously mental... and yet I do find myself missing it somewhat.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the week, yet more self-indulgent than usual. Excellent.