Some FAQs, and a welcome to folks coming from TheOlivePress.es

... which caught me the other day after an extremely heavy lunch but manages to make me sound pretty coherent.

A couple of people have suggested over the past couple of years that this blog is Hispanophobe, part of a venerable Anglo-Saxon plot against the Catholic Monarchs, or something. My original nom de plume makes clear that this is not so--"Alfonso el Idiota" is an ironic reference to the extraordinary efforts made at the court of Alfonso X el Sabio to translate classics from Arabic into the vernacular--and my target is more limited: large private and public bodies which had the resources to promote themselves and their products or people in a professional fashion; to build a decent education system; to reform the labour market to make opportunities available to the most able instead of to friends and family; but which, evidently unaware of what happened to Marie Antoinette even before Sophie Coppola got hold of her, preferred to waste those resources on pomps and prides.

Most of my translation work involves things resembling Dutch and French--more info here--but my main business is running the guided walking tour network, FollowTheBaldie.com. I can provide contact details for anyone who wishes to get in touch with the excellent Justin Roberts, mentioned in the piece.