Pinas

A reminder that pronunciation matters

I have the devil in me today, so I’m going to recount a story that was possibly on one of my podcasts, behind the relative safety of a paywall, aired a year, maybe two, ago. It also happens to be one of my ‘dine out’ stories, which gets dragged kicking and screaming out of retirement with the preface, ‘Please stop me if I’ve told you this before.’

Pic: Avi Richards

It has absolutely nothing to do with creativity at all, aside from the writing, and resides in the ‘stuff wot happened to me’ file of my life.

But there’s another, more experimental edge to this for those who listen to this podcast in their cars, particularly those who use the Apple Podcasts app.

This is not my podcast player app of choice, and so it was a friend of mine, Lynn, you know Lynn, the one who uses my ramblings as a sleep aid, who alerted me to this only yesterday, as it goes.

She was listening to Monday’s episode called Old Fartism, and commented that the car player was giving some kind of screen text running commentary to the piece. An AI tool I am imagining segmented the episode in a sort of news-ticker-tape way, you know, with words appearing at the bottom of the screen as the announcer talks.

So let’s see how it deals with this story then. And in a similar way to how we used to think as kids, it was hilarious to spell out rude words on a calculator, keep tabs for me, will you, whilst I test AI a little in nuanced spelling and word sounds.

As a child, my mother, father, and I holidayed in a variety of places and establishments. We camped, we caravanned, we rented small cottages overlooking sweeping fields of Barley or well-stocked cattle pastures. Dad had attended agricultural college, and though he eventually chose a different career path, he had an affinity with farms and farmland, and a certain confidence around a field of (2500-pound) animals.

He’d not consider, for instance, a longer route around the edges of a field that contained a bull, a footpath that might well take you miles in an opposite direction. No, he’d size the bull up and decide more often than not that the bull was either too far away, too lazy, or upwind and recommend we wander through his territory. I’m sure that it was one of his famous shortcuts that first had me experience what it felt like to accidentally grasp the wire of an electric cattle fence. He wasn’t fearless or stupid, but calculated and experienced when it came to grazing cattle, bulls and even wild running horses.

We very rarely stayed in hotels, in fact, I think we only stayed in one; Mr Thurtle’s place in Studland Bay, on the Dorset coast, just up the way from Old Harry’s Rocks, a famous geological reference waypoint for yachts, I think.

As a youngster, I had trouble with the name Thurtle, and this charming hotel, which definitely played to a period in British seaside hotel history when the breakfast menu would boast a melon boat and orange juice, became known instead as Mr Turtle’s. We had, from my sketchy memory, a family room on the first floor, up the stairs opposite the entrance door with the round porthole window, and turn left.

We never stayed in any kind of holiday camp, and resorts on foreign shores were something my friend John Harding did each year with his family in Ibiza. This island sounded very exotic to me, and the idea that you could only reach it via an aeroplane made it all the more so.

The family holidays I have taken with my wife and two boys have followed more of a Harding family ritual, and we have ticked off Ibiza, alongside other European islands and countries, under the welcoming flag of one particular brand of family holiday resorts.

It’s a win-win, if not for the pocket, as time has passed and holidays have vastly increased in price. They love a pool, we love a swim-up bar, they love all-inclusive eat as much ice cream as you like, we love all-inclusive, come back for as much baklava and Greek yoghurt as you can muster, they love the evening family stage show, we loved the opportunity of someone else taking charge for an hour or two of being the entertainment.

That entertainment was for them, a ‘pretty high up on the list, have to be there on time’, feature, nee highlight of the day.

7pm would beckon, and if Mum and Dad, Sam and I, were still returning for baklava and Greek yoghurt, they’d both visibly be tetchy, visualising all the best seats gone by the front of the stage.

After a while, we adopted a policy where Mum or Dad would forgo dessert thirds and instead go find a set of four chairs, with a round cabaret table if we were really lucky, guarding it like Brits on holiday, reserving sun loungers with Chelsea football club towels at 5.30 in the morning. You’d be sitting there feeling guilty that you were being stared at by judgmental guests, who were in themselves doing the very same thing as you.

After a day’s games in the pool, half a hundred weight of ice-cream and baklava, the obligatory afternoon open-mouthed snoring on a well-loved sunlounger reserved before the sun came up, and an attempt at the family record for bat and ball keepy uppy, we’d enter parents’ time, known to us in our family, as the best time of the day show.

It was an all-inclusive cocktail hour at roughly 5pm. We’d swim across as a family and sit ourselves around the pool bar, on stools submerged in the water, and across two weeks, we’d navigate through the various flavours and names, chuckling at the boys’ fascination with each of the odd-sounding names.

“What’s that on the beach, Dad?”

We’d drink pina colada, they’d drink kiddy mocktails that looked positively radioactive.

“Another Pina darling?”

“Yes why not, be rude not to. Two pinas, please.”

“One for closing time by the pool, sir?”

“Oh yes, why not, two more pinas please.”

We’d be out of the pool at 5:30ish, quick shower and into the restaurant within half an hour. Time was tightish for curtain up at 7, but after a few days, you had the system licked, if not all the ice cream flavours too.

Showtime.

A really well-choreographed show by the resort’s young entertainment team, and various panto-style skits, challenges and sing/dance alongs.

Our Jack’s favourite part of the show featured a character called Russel the Brussel. Essentially, this was a papier-mache’d head just slightly larger than an adult-sized football, painted vegetable green, ingeniously veined like a brussels sprout, with big googly eyes, a mouth you could post things in to, with a flap in the back where the stage host could pull those cards for requests, mentions and daily quiz winners.

The head was mounted on a pole; if I remember correctly, it had no moving parts. Its life came completely from the amplified voice given to it by a man in the control booth at the back of the outdoor auditorium. Russell was irreverent, cheeky, and rude enough that parents got the joke, but not so much that grandparents removed their grandchildren from the theatre, never to return for the two weeks they were there.

It was clearly an on-brand thing, but we saw Russell in various guises, in terms of his vocal character and his freedom to sprout close-to-the-knuckle humour, our favourite being in Ibiza, when the man in the booth was clearly auditioning in his mind for a turn at open mic night.

“Ello Mr…” Russell might say over the PA loudly with a deep Essex wide boy voice that might not be out of place in an episode of Eastenders, “What on earth are you wearing tonight, d’ you think this was fancy dress night?”

“Oi, lady at the back, put ‘im down, you don’t know where he’s been. I do, and so do half the entertainment staff, if you know what I mean.”

There was something about Russell that tickled our Jack, so much so that one year we made our own Russell when we returned home, and I’m pretty sure I had to do the voices.

Aside from picking on awkwardly dressed holiday makers, Russell would set a nightly quiz, which the next day you’d join in, by popping your answer through his mouth in reception like a Brussel postbox, and by night a winning entry would win a child a chance to appear on stage with a parent to play a competition, with the prize being a coveted Russell the Brussel tee shirt.

Our Jack entered religiously, and then one night, his name was called.

He nervously made his way to the stage, and the host, a dancing holiday rep, asked him if he’d like to play a game and which adult he’d choose to help him.

“My daddy,” said Jack, which still, to this day, makes me smile with pride that I was entrusted to bring home the ultimate prize.

“Don’t mess this up,” I said to myself as I stood up from my chair.

Music played, like a night at the Oscars, I made my way up onto the stage, and there we both were, in the spotlight.

“Who’s this then?”

“Daddy,” said Jack.

“No, I know that, but what’s his name?”

There was a pause.

“Daddy,” said Jack again.

He’s a bright lad, he starts his studies in medicine next year in London with any hope.

The host moved on.

“Who else is with you then? Point to them.”

“My mummy and my brother Thomas, over there.”

A collective cute kid ahhh sound could be heard, at least from the front row.

“And what does daddy like to do on holiday?” asked the holiday rep.

“Eat and drink,” said Jack, enjoying the laugh that came back. A natural entertainer, it seems.

My PR was faltering, but he was broadly right, I mean, it’s a holiday.

“Oh right,” replied the host, “And what does Dad like to drink?” he asked, hoping that my son would make me sound like a right old soak and receive a knowing chortle from the audience once more.

Jack seemed confused, so the rep asked again.

“And what does Daddy like to drink?”

“Penis,” replied Jack.

“Umm, what?” spluttered the host, not sure he’d correctly heard Jack’s response, and worried that the family might be finding something out that wasn’t in the script of the day.

“Penis,” came back Jack’s much brighter response.

“Penis,” he repeated, before the host sharply pulled the mic away.

The rep looked sheepishly confused until Sam, my wife, rescued the day.

“Pinas,” she shouted, “Pina Coladas!”

The universe returned to normal, the rep gave Jack a T-shirt, kicked us both off stage before any more upstaging could be done, and the show went on, with a beaming Jack clutching the prize he’d been waiting to collect.

Next day, around the pool bar at 5pm, cocktail hour was announced, and we swam up to the bar to commence the best time of the day show.

“Yes sir, what would you like?” asked our familiar pool bar waiter.

“A mojito tonight, I think. Yes, two mojitos.”