YO!

YO in Spanish means ‘I’, Y means 'and', and YA means ‘right now’. Therefore “Yo y tu ya?” could be a (rather direct) invitation, no?

Probably not, but I do love playing with languages. 

And there's another thing - if the past tense of 'slide' is 'slid', why isn't the past tense of 'glide' 'glid'? It's a puzzle.

YALDING LEES is near Maidstone in Kent, and as I set my novel Helter-Skelter in that area, I found it during my research, because Yalding Lees was, until the 1950s, one of the many traditional stopping places for gypsies.

Yalding itself is a pretty village, and the Lees now a sought-after location – just as it was in the last century for the travelling families who kept the Garden of England supplied with labour until the introduction of mechanised fruit-picking.

Hops equal beer, and England wouldn't be the same without its beer, would it?

YUCCA there is a row of yuccas outside our building’s garage, and when they’re in flower they look lovely. I haven’t YET worked out which part of the plant one can buy in the vegetable shop and use to thicken a stew - perhaps both the fruit and the root?

YO, YUCCA & YACHTS

YO means simply “I” which is what I am going to concentrate on next month! 


YUCCA The first time I saw a yucca in flower I was amazed – the yuccas I’d seen in England were pot plants. Then I saw these strange roots for sale and learned they were yucca too – known in some places as manioc or cassava. You can boil it and serve with a mojo (sauce) – it’s rather bland on its own – and it thickens a stew beautifully. It can be fried in slices or made into chips – in fact you can treat it as you would a potato. Apparently you can also put the flower petals in a salad and eat the fruit.

YAMS are another favourite, though yam is what my OH calls them – batatas is the Canarian word, and in England you know then as sweet potatoes. I love them, though it’s difficult to tell whether I’m buying blanca or naranja unless I scratch one – I prefer the nananja. Its orange flesh tastes divine, particularly when roasted like a parsnip, and like the yucca they go beautifully in a stew or curry.

YACHTS are everywhere here – not surprising on an island – and some of them cost more than a house. There was speculation in a local newspaper last week about who owns a luxury yacht in Los Cristianos harbour – if it’s going begging I’ll take it off their hands!

Many little fishing harbours, like this one in Las Galletas, have gone up-market in recent years with marinas, but alongside the luxury yachts you will still find the local fishing boats, and the beaches will still be scattered with battered rowing boats.

A friend of ours is repairing his yacht after sailing it across from America singlehanded. I typed up his personal log of the 40-day journey, and although he makes light of it, I was scared silly by the laconic way in which he wrote of a tanker just missing him, or of losing half his drinking water, or climbing the mast to effect a repair. At least he wasn’t attacked by pirates.

YOUNG As the OH is fond of saying, with such a name we will always be young. Shame it’s not true, and the body lets us down more often, but age is a state of mind too. So as the YEARS pike up inexorably, nil desperandum!