Magari

All English speakers of Italian will know how useful the little word magari can be. It expresses regret or longing, irritation or delight, according to tone and context. Whatever it means, it means it more effectively than any single English word. Students who ask for a translation watch me squirm as I come out with a five-, six-, seven-word expression that works just once. They're generally too polite to say it, but their faces say it for them. How on earth do you manage?

Magari is one of a thousand words that don't have any simple linguistic equivalent in English. Italian, on the other hand, doesn't have a host of mundane, earthy terms such as, well, splodge. You can't skedaddle in Italian or faff around (I don't think) or squish. The range of Duh is only half-captured by the more historic Boh, immortalised by Moravia. In language, evolutionary niches always get filled but no one would seriously suggest that a giant terrestrial parrot has the elegance of a gazelle. Nor that a gazelle has the wonky charm of the now sadly extinct giant terrestrial parrot.

If you're amused by this kind of thing, as I am, you'll probably enjoy, as I would, a book called Toujours Tingo by the splendidly named Adam Jacot de Boinod. For more about the book, see this review. Here's the first paragraph, to whet your appetite and, possibly, if you're French, to wet your finger (Yes, I'm thinking chapponage):

Tsonga speakers who have had a fruitless day's labour know it simply as walkatia. For Anglophones, it is the act of throwing down a tool in disgust. Someone fluent in Bakweri might soothe his walkatia by looking at a womba – the smile of a sleeping child. But all would probably shy at a Frenchman's offer of a spot of chapponage – the act of sliding a finger into a chicken's backside to see if it is laying an egg.

Book-loving in Catalonia

No, I'm not dead, in case you were wondering, and I haven't been resting either, in the Thespian sense or otherwise. As we say here in Italy, when struck by wistful longing, magari (to the latter, obviously: I mean, not death, of which I've had already had more than enough these past few months). To be honest, it's been a period of unrelenting distress and confusion and now we're getting the builders in for three weeks just to finish us off completely. I say three weeks. I must be mad.

Which means that I'm looking forward even more to spending a few days in northern Spain this summer in the company of people who write books and people who love them, and possibly write them too. I've been invited by an organisation called 7 Day Wonder to take part in their book-lovers' holiday near Girona, from 3 to 10 September. The other authors will be Ann Cleeves, Claire Dudman and Adam Nevill, so it's a pretty varied and exciting line-up. Plus, I've been told, the food is fantastic, so you'd be crazy not to sign up this very minute.

Girona, too, is a wonderful place to visit. We went there years before Ryanair started pretending it was a suburb of Barcelona, and loved the high sunlit square in front of the cathedral, the balconies dripping spider plants, the river weirdly packed with fish and some rather interesting chicken rissoley things we ate in a bar. We were travelling with a very complete guidebook, which even told us where the town's red-light district used to be. But we still weren't prepared for the sight of a middle-aged woman in a doorway, black beret tipped teasingly to one side, slit skirt and lightly swinging handbag, looking for all the world like a provincial Marlene Dietrich.