About us (jobs)

A few years ago Trevor the Baldie found himself in Barcelona with some redundancy money from a City bank and a fairly substantial eating and drinking habit. He started going hill walking to mitigate the latter and in the process started to wonder what he was going to do when the former ran out.

Fortunately friends started coming out walking, one of them suggested putting up a website, and so was born FollowTheBaldie.com, which has turned out to be an exceptionally pleasant way of getting poor slowly.

We have since grown to a network of geezers and geezeresses with varying degrees of hair cover, and operate along the Spanish coast, with outposts in France and Italy. The indefatigable Mr Emperor Wu provides us with administrative assistance and scolds us every now and again. We make most of our money doing city tours for cruise operators, but we enjoy the country walks immensely, any marginal liver damage being more than offset by coronary-pulmonary gains made running to catch the last train home.

Jobs

If you want to work with us, write to us here. You’ll need impeccable English; an encyclopaedic and critical knowledge of your location, its history, language and culture; to be cool with interactive guiding, as per our WSGâ„¢. Don’t worry if you haven’t yet got everything together: we’ll help you think about the route you offer and the way you present it to clients.

By the way

FollowTheBaldie.com is also of course a tangential tribute to the 16th century monk Theophilus Folengo’s magnificent Liber macaronices, which, providing a handy precedent for Rabelais, is an account in Latin as might half conceivably have been spoken by a deranged Eastern Lombard of

the adventures of Baldo, son of Guy de Montauban, the very lively history of his youth, his trial, imprisonment and deliverance, his journey in search of his father, during which he visits the Planets and Hell. The narration is constantly interrupted by incidental adventures. Occasionally they are what would be called to-day very naturalistic, and sometimes they are madly extravagant.

But Fracasso, Baldo’s friend, is a giant; another friend, Cingar, who delivers him, is Panurge exactly, and quite as much given to practical joking. The women in the senile amour of the old Tognazzo, the judges, and the poor sergeants, are no more gently dealt with by Folengo than by the monk of the Iles d’Hyeres. If Dindenaut’s name does not occur, there are the sheep. The tempest is there, and the invocation to all the saints. Rabelais improves all he borrows, but it is from Folengo he starts. He does not reproduce the words, but, like the Italian, he revels in drinking scenes, junkettings, gormandizing, battles, scuffles, wounds and corpses, magic, witches, speeches, repeated enumerations, lengthiness, and a solemnly minute precision of impossible dates and numbers. The atmosphere, the tone, the methods are the same, and to know Rabelais well, you must know Folengo well too.

Help us make even more money by buying Ann Mullaney’s 2007-8 translation of Baldo in two volumes, Volume 1 and, ahem, Volume 2.