Irritating foreigners

A BIT like wasps around a jam pot, the British me‐dia is buzzing with sto ‐ries about a so‐called se‐cret Spanish word for irritating foreigners which is Guiri.

This writer has owned a property in Spain for more than 20 years and neighbours have been calling him a Guiri for all that time, when they can’t think of anything more appropriate.

To the Spanish it im ‐mediately explains something about the person who may like to think of themselves as ei‐ther an expat or a holi ‐day maker, but in fact is a just a foreigner.

It isn’t always insult ‐ing, just describes who the person is and is prob‐ably less offensive than the British word Dago or Chilean word Godo (and there is another but that is too rude to repeat in a family newspaper) to a Spaniard.

There are at least two songs which spell out the meaning of the word, Guiris (go home) by La Maquineria del Fango and Guiris by Los Ra ‐tones, but if you are British or Irish, don’t worry, it’s aimed at any foreigner who gets into a Spaniard’s sights.

So emotive is the word that various Spanish newspapers have picked up on the ‘storm in a tea cup’ as can be seen from an article in La Van ‐guardia.

In this woke atmo ‐sphere we live in today, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ may no longer be the case, but at least we stiff upper lip Guiris can learn to live with it.

BIRD fans will be pleased to hear that the Hanuman Plover has been reinstated as a species in its own right, after spending almost a century classed as a subspecies.

Plovers are a family of shore‐birds that live all over the world, except for the very poles. They feed on inverte‐brates, but otherwise have a range of different habitats and lifestyle.

In the 1930s, the ‘diminutive Kentish Plover’, Charadrius See‐bohmi, was merged into the Kentish Plover Charadrius Alexandrinus, as both species were considered to be the same.

Now a team of scientists, in‐cluding co‐author of the study and Principal Curator in Charge of Birds at the Natural History Museum, Dr Alex Bond, have