Adopting Positions: Chopin should have played golf

Chopin is to be made an adoptive son of Mallorca. No doubt he’ll be rubato-ing with contentment in his Parisian grave, well away from where his interred non-missus, Amandine Dupin (aka George Sand), will be cursing the fact of his joining her in adoption but rejoicing in her having secured the gig before him; she was made an adoptive daughter of Mallorca some years ago. Beat yer to it, Freddie, you sexual inadequate.

Chopin and Sand were simultaneously enchanted and appalled by Mallorca, and specifically Valldemossa. It’s the enchantment that gets hyper-brochured, alongside mentions of Chopin’s output while in his mountain retreat and of Sand’s legacy to the island, commemorated in the annual Winter in Mallorca cultural programme, named after her book. The selective writing of the history of the Chopin-Sand stay in Mallorca disguises the brevity of that stay and the deterioration in Chopin’s health during it, a consequence of a miserable and cold winter. How he actually managed to play the piano, rubato or otherwise, is a mystery. Or perhaps he was blessed with warm extremities. Well, a couple if not one other, if George is to be taken at her word.

Chopin was from Poland. It’s a happy coincidence. Name some of the “new” markets from which Mallorca hopes to attract more tourists, and Poland will appear high on the list. Having an adoptive son to boast about doesn’t presumably harm that objective: the tourism juan-ies should be frantically casting around for a few Russians or Chinese who might have some adoption credentials, other than members of the Russki Mafia or owners of shops in a Mallorcan McDonald’s style – the Chinese bazar; one on every street.

While Chopin and the not-missus Chopin are invoked as part of the island’s cultural and winter tourism, they might have greater contemporary impact had they played golf. Perhaps someone could conveniently unearth a 170-year-old pitch ‘n’ putt in Valldemossa; it would do wonders for the golf tourism project. Possibly. Golf, though, holds the key to greater off-season riches than piano playing. Or that’s what they would have you believe.

It’s doubtful that Chopin ever made it as far as Muro or the north of the island. But it is here that the battle for golf tourism is being waged – as if you weren’t aware of this already. Muro’s golf course development is going through yet another eighteen holes of it’s on, then it’s off; the promoters threatening to sue is the latest. Not, I imagine, that you care. No one much does any longer, except the main protagonists, one of which is the enviro doom merchants GOB.

The pressure group has been playing its own statistics game. What it has found, it reckons, are figures which “prove” that golf doesn’t do anything to bolster tourism off-seasonality. I had hoped that the figures would be proof, as at least it would have been evidence of someone making a hard case one way or the other as to whether the Muro course, or indeed others, are of any significant tourism value.

The statistics show that in the lower months of the “summer” season, i.e. April and October, occupation in hotels in Muro and Santa Margalida (for which, read Playa de Muro and Can Picafort) is higher than those in Alcúdia and Pollensa. From this, GOB argues that golf does not benefit either of the latter two resorts, ones where there are golf courses extant, while it also argues that Muro and Can Picafort are already doing nicely thank you by comparison, and therefore, by dubious extrapolation, don’t need a golf course (or courses). It then goes on to extol what are the highly limited business virtues of small niche tourism in the resorts, e.g. bird-watching.

What this argument overlooks is the fact that the early-season occupancy of hotels in Playa de Muro and Can Picafort can be explained by these resorts being centres of cycling tourism, more so than the other two resorts. By concentrating on hotel occupancy figures, it also neglects the fact that Pollensa has a far lower number of hotel places by comparison with the other resorts. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the fact that golfers might stay in other types of accommodation (and GOB doesn’t take this into account), the findings do underline a point that I have made in the past, which is precisely the one that GOB is implying. Were there real tourist demand for golf in Alcúdia and Pollensa, then more hotels would open. Wouldn’t they?

GOB’s argument is persuasive up to a point, but there is one big hole in it – there are no figures for the months of November to March. The seasonality issue is a twelve-month affair. Winter tourism, or the lack of it, cannot be defined in terms of April and October. Which brings us back to Chopin and Sand. Has anyone ever attempted to prove a link between Winter in Mallorca and winter tourism? Maybe they have, and they’re keeping schtum. GOB’s claims are based on some science, but they seem post-hoc. However, they are not without a dash of merit. There ought to be more science, but one suspects that certain vested interests would rather there weren’t.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

White Stripes: Why did the tourist cross the road?

Sledging in cricket has produced some fine moments of insult. One of the most famous exchanges went along these lines … Bowler inciting batsman who was not hitting the ball: “it’s red, round, in case you were wondering”; batsman responding, having hit the next ball out of the ground: “you know what it looks like, now go and find it”. The true origins of sledges have tended to become confused. This one is sometimes attributed to South Africa’s Shaun Pollock and Australia’s Ricky Ponting, which is almost certainly wrong. More commonly, it is attributed to Greg Thomas of Glamorgan and the West Indies’ Viv Richards. Not that it really matters. This is not an article on sledging.

The sledge has, though, occurred to me when driving along the local main roads. It would be something like: “it’s white, striped, now walk on it.”

The re-modelling of the main road (Carretera Arta) through Puerto Alcúdia and Playa de Muro and ever eastwards is to enter its third phase in October when the grotty thoroughfare in Can Picafort is given a similar makeover. The whole scheme has been about giving priority to pedestrians, and to a large extent it has been successful in this aim. What has not been wholly successful has been convincing pedestrians to use the white stripes and the non-striped islands as the means of crossing the road.

Bone idleness, especially while on holiday, is pretty much a given, but the planners have failed to comprehend this. True, it might bring traffic to a complete halt were there to be crossings every ten metres – you can have only so many of them, and doubtless they’d still be ignored anyway – but there are some points along the road where the non-crossing is glaring and potentially dangerous. One of the most striking is near to the Palma roundabout on the Playa de Muro-Alcúdia boundary. The Marítimo hotel is just before this roundabout. There is an island a few metres to the left where one comes out of the hotel to cross the road. Who uses it? No one. It’s in the wrong place, assuming one accepts the bone idleness theory, and I am who subscribes to it. I don’t use the crossing either. Another example is given by the hordes who head out of the Delfin Azul and Port d’Alcudia hotels. The straight line to the beach is halfway between two islands. Consequently, they are also unused.

Why did they undertake the road remodelling in the first place? It was to make the road safer. But how can it be described thus, when there are pedestrians, centre road, waving damn great lilos around and attached to the ubiquitous baby-buggy? The buggy has become that de rigueur that one wonders whether it is used solely for the transporting of infants or whether it houses all the other paraphernalia without which no day on the beach would be complete. Whatever. I am uneasy as I pass a family or several in mid road whilst a truck or coach approaches in the opposite direction. And woe betide if you stop to allow them to cross. Inevitably it takes an age for them to appreciate the fact that you have stopped for that purpose, and meanwhile matey-boy behind is getting into a strop.

When they re-do the road in Can Picafort, they’ll probably make the same mistakes, such as the beautification of the Playa de Muro stretch with its crossings where emerging pedestrians are obscured from drivers’ vision by parked cars, hedges and palm trees and the failure to prevent the inner roads parallel to the carretera from being used as rapid rat runs. One can but hope, though. The current system of Can Picafort crossings and side roads into which or out of which you can neither enter nor exit is confusing enough as it is, without having to contend with the lilo-flapping jaywalkers. Least they can do is get a new walk, don’t walk system: it’s white, it’s striped, now use it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Secret: Art and graffiti in Mallorca

Mallorca is an island of artists. It must be something to do with having so much time on their hands.

The great tradition of art, in the north of the island at any rate, grew out of the creation of the Pollensa “school” in the early years of the last century. As with much of the island’s alleged culture, the impetus for this came not from locals but from mainland Spain and Argentina, while the best known pieces of the sculpture branch line of art, such as those on the roundabouts, are the work of an Italian and a Hungarian – the hideous horse of Alcúdia and the knotty conundrum of the Magic area.

It’s hard to avoid art, be it in galleries in Pollensa town or in its port, or in restaurants which, through their own exhibitions, acquire for themselves the canvas of sophistication. The Bennassar gallery in Pollensa is its own white background, grafted onto which is an interior design of minimalism and a rotation of splashes of the abstract or the Fauvist post-impressionism with which Pollensa is sometimes associated. The Llompart gallery in the Seglars square at the foot of the Calvari is a wooden abundance of every bit of space being competed for by prints. It’s a gallery in which you feel you can blow your nose, unlike Bennassar’s where you would fear being quarantined in its starkly pristine clean-room laboratory.

Not a fiesta passes without the programme being brushed with an opening of an exhibition here, another one there, all the work of artists you have never heard of. The fiesta posters are their own works of art, grandly announced in advance of the release of the fiesta schedule itself, like the single promoting a new album. Art is everywhere. In the towns you may stumble across some German ancients on folding camping-chair canvas (of a different variety), sketch pads in hand and an earnestly inquisitive expression as they commit to paper a town house with its green persianas, a tumble of bougainvillaea and a balcony flowerpot or two. The owners should sell image rights or if not, then engage in some surreptitious mooning.

Mallorca has not escaped the artistic vandalism of the modern day, be it the pictorial ramblings of a scrambled abstract creator or the urbanism of street art – graffiti, to you and me. The deceit of street art lies in a connivance by an ultra-liberal, social services movement of expression of one’s inner caveman. Normally I would approve, but when it comes to uninvited decoration of walls or shop shutters, I am less inclined to, irrespective of the merits of what are often astonishing statements. One can at least appreciate the creativity of the Mallorcan Banksys, though quite how citizen dismay at street art squares with another aspect of the fiesta programme – the street art workshop – is a question only the connivers can really answer.

But then there is the graffiti scrawl. It may often have its own signature style, but it ain’t art, except perversely as some kind of Dadaist artistic anarchy. The scrawl is vandalism impure and simple, but occasionally, when it is intelligible as words, an enigma arises. And we have one. Mallorca has a secret. Look around, and you will see that it does. The secret’s out, as in that it’s all over the place; on this wall, on that pillar or utility’s control-box housing. In Puerto Alcúdia one such pillar poses the question “Secreto?” on one side, and answers on the other – “El secreto es sexy Nena”. What is this secret? I have no idea. Maybe there is no secret. Perhaps it is just a conceit. Whatever it is, it’s intriguing. It may have no merit, it may be vandalistic, but it does make you think, which is, after all, a purpose of art. If you can call it that.

Thanks to Ben Grimley for drawing my attention to the “Secreto” graffiti.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The German Air Force: Tourist and air taxes

The Germans are creating a stink. From next year there will be an air tax applied to all tickets for outgoing flights from German airports; the levy will amount to eight euros for a flight to Mallorca. German airlines are none too impressed with the Merkel government’s decision, Lufthansa saying that it will have to pass on the tax, the director general of Air Berlin in Spain and Portugal, the former head of the Mallorca Tourism Board (Fomento del Turismo), describing it as totally absurd, and  Balearics president Antich also condemning the measure.

This is not exactly the first time that a major market for Mallorca has introduced such a tax. Who else? The UK, for one. The air passenger duty is set to rise to twelve pounds in November this year. Has it had a negative impact? Well, has it?

The Dutch are ones who would argue that this type of tax can be harmful. They abandoned theirs a year or so after it had been introduced. One drawback to the Dutch scheme was that passengers nipped over the border to Germany where there was no tax. Then. Or at least that’s what they said. Add on the costs of getting to a German airport, and the saving was probably marginal at best. Nevertheless, the Dutch did apparently experience an overall loss on the deal.

Air taxes, tourist taxes, call them as you will, are easily justified – by governments and the environment lobby – as ways of saving the planet, a justification that has more than the hint of dissemblance, to say nothing of hypocrisy. Build another runway here or there, crank the number of flights up, haul in the tax cash. The environment is served better by improved aircraft efficiency, which is why the British government toys with the idea of a levy on older, less-efficient planes.

The taxes are a system of revenue generation, why not come clean? The airlines believe this to be so and that they are viewed as cash cows to be milked by bankrupt governments.

Into this argument, locally, comes a comparison being drawn between the German decision and the abandoned eco-tax. If you don’t recall the fuss that caused … the plan was to levy a tax of one euro per night on tourists. It was a crap scheme, not because there wasn’t some sense behind it, but because it was highly discriminatory: the tax was to be gathered by hotels and other providers of accommodation. It took no account of other types of visitor.

The then socialist-led government, presided over by the current president, was quite clear as to the purpose of the tax; it was to be used, in effect, to clear up the mess years of tourism had created. Whether the money would ever have been used wisely, who can tell? And we were to never find out because the Partido Popular came into power a year after its introduction and scrapped it, the tourism minister of the time claiming that it had caused a reduction in tourism, something which the UK travel industry, for one, didn’t necessarily agree with. His predecessor, who is now the head of the dreaded Costas authority, said in 2001 that the tax was a consequence of the Balearics “tiring of cheap, destructive tourism”.

Things have changed since 2001, one change being the more rapid growth in low-cost airlines: from the UK and from Germany. As “The Bulletin” has asked, it is legitimate to question how President Antich squares his opposition to the German tax with the abandoned eco-tax. Does Mallorca now wish to carry on with “cheap and destructive tourism”, contrary to the view nine years ago, keeping flights from Germany as cheap as possible?

Another thing that has changed of course is the increase in competition to Mallorca, hence, one supposes, Antich’s opposition. But the tax would be universal in terms of destination; it wouldn’t just be Mallorca. So where, really, is the problem? The British have lived with it, the Germans, generally more eco-conscious than the British anyway, would probably stomach it, and German treasury coffers would swell. Where a problem would lie, potentially, would be if the eco-tax were to be revisited. There is support for such a thing. For example, there is a group calling itself “Mallorca Goes Green”. This advocates a ten euro tax on any visitor coming into the island via ports or the airport. A double-whammy tax might just make people think twice about flying to Mallorca. Or it might not. And even were it to, as I pointed out a couple of days ago, Mallorca can afford to lose tourists – cheap and destructive ones, if you like.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Work Ethic: September’s return

Almost a week may have passed, but today is when September really starts. A weekend creates a pleasant intervention in delaying the inevitable. Work.

August is a month of blissful indolence. One can excuse one’s own inertia on account of that of everyone else’s and the closed signs which go up, if only metaphorically. Come September and some time snatched on the beach seems vaguely fraudulent. It is said of the Mallorcans that they cease going to the beach in September because 26 or so degrees are the equivalent of a grey January day in Worthing. Or maybe they stop because they reckon they should, as though commanded by an unwritten labour law, even if a compulsion to work is the last thing you would normally associate with the Mallorcans.

There remains something of the school holidays in all of us. What seemed like months of the back garden, the estate streets, the woods and sometimes the beach came to a highly unwelcome halt at the start of September. The discomfort of a tie around a new shirt collar, stiff from the outfitters (and one shop used to have a bizarre monopoly for my schools’ kits) and the retching over the morning milk that had been left out in the still warm sun. It always tasted sour, and never more so than when the sourness of the new school year curdled a dreadful realisation that Christmas was light years away.

School, through its routine of day and term, may be designed to teach us as to the horrors to come, but it also teaches us that it, school, is there against our will. Much as it might make us collude in the conspiracy that life isn’t one long game on PlayStation, it fails miserably in making us want to do what it tells us. Like going back to work. Furthermore, it teaches us that September is a month to resent: for the loss of summer and because of the gradual fading of summer through the September days until it becomes a distant memory and because also of the gloom of the workplace with only that memory to convince us that it will return and we can start the whole process over again.

Mallorca is back to work today. In “The Diario” yesterday there was a four-cornered interview which took this return as the springboard for discussing some of the island’s problems. I had hoped for a revelation or two; headings such as “Change of mentality?” suggested there might be. There weren’t. But I know what they were driving at. While there’s the sun and the beach and the summer it can be easy to switch off from what is to come. Mallorca creates its own sense of unreality, and it lasts from at least the middle of June when the schools shut up, climaxing in the other-world surrealism of lazy August. September comes with a jolt. The article should have been titled “Trepidation”, because that’s where we’re at. Despite the promising statistics, this has been a rotten summer for many, and it will soon finish completely. Then what?

Unfortunately, though we rather might like the idea, we can’t all go back to school. Oh, that we could.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Of No Value: Tourism that doesn’t count

If you were a business chief executive and you sanctioned the payment of a “lagola” to an MBA-toting consultant, you might find yourself on gardening leave and to later be in receipt of your own lagola as compensation for your profligacy. A lagola, incidentally, is a pejorative term for eight hundred thousand euros or so (La Gola, the cost of converting a stagnant wetland and vandalised scrubland into a stagnant wetland and vandalised scrubland with a car park, OED).

You might remain in your post were it not for the fact that the consultant had cut and paste research from the internet dating back twenty years to comply with his commission – namely a cost-benefit analysis of your least valuable customers. The saving grace might be what he had discovered, assuming you had taken any notice.

I’ve made this up. There is no chief executive and there is no consultant. But there is a tourism minister (in fact there have been any number just recently) and any number of advisors and organisations. The tourism minister is probably only on a tenth-lagola, if that, but if she is worth the money then she might do her own bit of cutting and pasting.

In 1990 a researcher at Palma university published a paper on income from tourism. In it he showed, via cost-benefit analysis, that ten per cent of tourists spent very little, so little that they caused a “negative addition to the net social benefit of tourist activity”. In other words, it cost the Balearics more to have them on the islands than was taken as a benefit.

This was twenty years ago, in the days before all-inclusives. Ten years later, the same researcher published another document in which he and a colleague pointed out that “the average expenditure per tourist … diminished in the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s”. The worries about tourism spend are nothing new; they’ve been around for a generation or more.

In 2006 other researchers at the university presented a paper which examined the impact of all-inclusives. They revealed that over a three-year period from 2002 to 2004, the percentage of tourists opting for all-inclusive had risen from 9.58% to 16.32%. They also showed the average spend of tourists in different types of accommodation in 2004, figures taken from the same research organisation which recently released numbers showing an increase in tourism spend in July this year. This, in terms of euros per day, was 23.20, over a third less than that of the next lowest-spending group (those on half board) and under a half of the highest-spending sectors – those purchasing transport only to the islands and those opting for bed and breakfast.

We’ve moved on since then. Given the increase in all-inclusives, especially those at the economy end of the market, and also given a highly conservative estimation of a 0.5 percentage point increase year on year, 20% of tourists are now of no value. It’s almost certainly higher. The increase in all-inclusive since 2004 has been marked. No one is exactly sure because of the numbers who upgrade to all-inclusive on arrival, but it is at least double.

You come back to that chief executive, for which read the tourism minister. It is her responsibility, as with a CEO, to form strategy. To be fair, there has been a lot of talk about tourism strategy over the years, which is part of the problem. Much of it has been talk only. We are no nearer a strategy than we have ever been. If that 10% is indeed now 20% or higher, then why bother with them? Design a strategy that excludes them.

There are reasons why not. One is a form of altruism. Just as higher education has been deemed a “right”, then so also is a holiday, a foreign holiday, a right, in the sense that a right equates to being a necessity, which is how the foreign holiday is now defined. Low income should not debar people from taking a holiday; of course it shouldn’t. But how far can any destination or country be expected to take this notion of social responsibility when the generosity is not being reciprocated? Come to our island, use our resources, and spend nothing. Ingrates.

The other reasons revolve around the same numbers game as that which gives rise to the tourism spend statistics – the volume of tourists and, in particular, the volume of tourists passing through the airport in Palma. Cut that 20% out and the total numbers would slip under the nine million mark (those coming to Mallorca on an annual basis). Psychologically and politically, it would be hard to accept. The airport needs as many passengers as possible: a) to justify the costs of its development and expansion and b) in order to meet traffic numbers that will guarantee that local politicians can get their hands on managing the airport. Then there are the strategies of others – airlines and tour operators, neither of which are unduly concerned so long as they stay profitable.

You can’t arrive at a sensible strategy when you have competing needs. But that research needs to be revisited and revised. If it means a slimmed-down tourism market, then so be it, so long as the rump market does make a positive rather than a negative contribution. The problem, as ever, is what the all-inclusives will bring. You can spend all the lagolas you like, but if no one bothers to even go take a look, then what’s the point.

Eugeni Aguiló Perez, “An Estimation Of the Social Income of Tourism”, Papers of the Spanish Economy, 1990.
Catalina Juaneda Sampol and Eugeni Aguiló Perez, “Tourist Expenditure Determinants in a Cross-Section Data Model”, Annals of Tourism Research, Vol 27, No 3, 2000.
Joaquín Alegre and Llorenç Pou, “The All-Inclusive Tourism Package: An analysis of its economic implications in the case of the Balearic Islands”, University of the Balearic Islands, March 2006.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Road To Damascus: Banning bullfighting

We all change our opinions. Sometimes this change is as a consequence of persuasive argument. How fully we might believe this new opinion though is debatable. Previously held convictions rarely suddenly evaporate into a dissipated ether of memory, for the simple reason that memory is the coalescence of a battleground for competing beliefs and values – old and new. And rather than an ether, defined if you will as a “clear sky”, the memory is thick with clouds. To undo an opinion takes time.

In psychology there is the concept of dissonance – how one reconciles competing ideas, values or opinions. Aesop gave us a fable about dissonance – the fox wanted the grapes, but couldn’t get at them, and so came to the conclusion that it didn’t want them. Sour grapes.

Dissonance theory is but one basis of organisational behaviour, be it in business, politics, religion, sport, whatever. An inability to overcome dissonance might lead to adopting more extreme positions or, for instance, to resigning from a job because one cannot accept a policy decision. So it is with an argument. One side’s point of view conflicts with your own. In heated arguments, the dissonance grows wider, less rational often. It demands a change in a belief to restore the tails to the head of the dissonance coin, otherwise known as consonance.

In a sense, it’s like compromise, but this implies the finding of some middle ground. Reducing or eliminating dissonance requires the supplanting of an old opinion with a new one, someone else’s. One might argue that Nick Clegg is a good example of a politician who has had to contend with dissonance. He has arrived at certain opinions, not through compromise, but because he is faced with little alternative but to adopt an opinion that is contrary to what he may long have felt.

Crucial to this casting-out of dissonance is the rationalisation as to the newly held opinion. The fox reasoned that the grapes were sour, but it would have still eaten them had it been able to. A true change in belief or opinion is a drawn-out process. Even for those undergoing religious conversion, the establishment of new, deeply held principles is hardly ever the result of a Road to Damascus moment.

Which leads us to the exception that was Paul. It took him three days of blindness (whilst en route to Damascus for a bit of persecution), the laying on of hands and a swiftly arranged baptism to cease being a Pharisee and to become an apostle. Three days seem apposite. But they are highly unusual. Chances are that they are a convenience, a contrivance even.

Let’s say, for example, you are the editor of a newspaper, and you express an opinion on a Tuesday. Let’s assume, if we will, that this opinion has to do with bullfighting. You are equivocal on the matter. You don’t like it, but you wouldn’t ban it. Nothing wrong with this. There are plenty of others who hold this opinion. I am one of them, even if my rejection of a ban has less to do with the emotiveness of animal rights and more to do with a libertarian streak that makes me wary of “the ban” as a generic solution to perceived ills. However, three days later, a Damascene intervention has occurred, resulting in a new opinion being expressed on Friday. You now believe in a ban on bullfighting.

Without being party to your mental processes, neither I nor anyone else can say with certainty how this opinion change has come about. But let us further assume that your readership has expressed opposition to what was your original argument. What you have, potentially, is dissonance. How do you react? Does the need for consonance kick in? Quite possibly. And what might the rationalisation be? The bullfighting issue has been politicised.

Of course, all this theory might just be bollocks. Who can say? Or is it bullocks?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Madman Crosses The Water

The things you find out.

Bite-sized sucking pig with pomegranate sauce; white flowers and Scandinavian air; red roses and roses without petals; Macià Batle wine from Santa Maria del Cami; 23 metres high and 50 metres wide; 25 lorries from the UK and mainland Spain.

Want to hazard a guess?

The answers – in order – are: part of the menu for the VIPs; the design of a VIP area; the star’s choice of flowers (forgive me, but what are roses without petals?); the same star’s supposed choice of plonk; the size of the stage; the number of lorries transporting kit.

Come on, you must know now.

Over the past weeks we have been able to read interviews with three stars (well, two stars and a starlet). During this week we have been able to see photos of a man with a mobile phone (the promoter), a lorry, some stage being built, some more stage being built, and, yes, even more stage being built.

What we have also found out, we think, is that there will be 34,000 people, or maybe 20,000, or perhaps 25,000, assuming all the seats are sold. As of yesterday afternoon, at least 3,000 were unsold out of whatever the total number actually is. No one seems to quite know, or they do, and the press is just offering a multiple choice.

We have also discovered that the two main stars will bring “synergy”. Ah yes, a word beloved by management consultants and by managers brainwashed by the consultants into believing such a state can be achieved. At least the consultants would argue that there should be a certain similarity between entities in order to bring about synergetic benefits. When the two stars are from diverse fields, one does have to wonder. But let’s not quibble. Synergy there surely will be. Just don’t tell those who may be going only for one or the other and who might have paid less had there not been any synergy.

What we have yet to find out is whether it will be a success. But we can predict that it will be, even if it isn’t. As we can predict that we will read gushing editorials, see photos of the occasion and, if we’re lucky, yet more photos of stage, but this time being dismantled. The editorial will be along the lines of it just goes to prove that Mallorca can put on a “great”, “spectacular”, “amazing”, “remarkable” (select as you will) concert.

When the media is so in lunatic thrall to the appearance of two stars, then what else can you expect, other than pages devoted, on a daily basis, to the minutiae and drivel surrounding that appearance. This manic fascination does, it must be said, appear to have something to do with sponsors’ names. Go to the “Diario de Mallorca”, for example, and you will find only the occasional, discreet mention. No prizes for guessing where the pages are being filled.

I’ve got a lot of time for Elton John. He may have been through his own drug-induced nuclear winter, but he has come out of it articulate and sane: unlike the barely intelligible half human Keefronnieryders from the Planet McGowan of the sort Kirk and Spock might have encountered. It’s as well that before tomorrow’s concert he will never have previously set foot or piano hands in Mallorca, and that afterwards he’ll be swiftly away. Sane? He soon wouldn’t be.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Horn Of A Dilemma: Correbou and animal traditions

The animal right-ists have been getting into a right old tizz again. There was a barney in Fornalutx on Sunday when the Anima Naturalis group protested against the annual “correbou” in this village near Soller. Locals, in favour of the event, reckoned that the group, all twenty or so of them, acted “provocatively”. There was a scrap, the boys in green got involved, a car window was smashed, and insults were hurled.

Anima Naturalis flew solo on Sunday. Other animal-rights groups had condemned the protest, as they believed they were edging towards an agreement with the village mayor to introduce changes to the correbou. That process may have been harmed by the protest. Amenable the mayor may be to changes, but this didn’t stop town (village?) hall representatives siding with the pro-correbou-ists.

The correbou involves a bull being hauled, cajoled, run – describe it as you will – through the streets on the end of ropes. In Fornalutx they don’t apply fire to the horns, as is the case with similar events in Catalonia, but the animal is taunted before being dragged off to the slaughterhouse, cut up and nosebagged by carnivorous locals. The correbou is primitive, with none of the spectacular and ceremony of the “corrida”. There is no pretence of dignity, honour even, being afforded to the bull, as is the case with the bullfight. The animal is, essentially, the object of derision, and there is simply no comparison with other animal events, such as the innately potty duck tossing in Can Picafort.

A letter-writer to yesterday’s “Bulletin” took the editor to task for defending both the bullfight and the correbou and for calling for a “compromise” that would satisfy those in favour and those against these events. This compromise was not enunciated; it’s an empty call when you don’t explain what this might entail. I was more taken aback by the editor’s admission that he had never attended a bullfight. One can hold opinions as to bullfights without witnessing them first hand, but without experiencing them one fails to get a complete understanding. Such journalistic incuriosity is staggering.

Nevertheless, some sort of a compromise might yet occur in Fornalutx. The mayor has apparently been talking about shortening the “run” itself, holding it on a working day when fewer would attend and not having the bull crowned with a laurel wreath. None of this will sound like a better deal to the bull if it is still subjected to the taunts and ends up between two chunks of bread. Besides which, it is the kill or the angering of the bull that most spectators of a bullfight or correbou expect, a point the letter-writer makes.

What is clear, though, is that there is a growing movement against alleged animal cruelty during fiestas, be it the bullfight (as in Alcúdia and Muro for example), the correbou, the duck throwing of Can Picafort or the cock on a soapy tree in Pollensa. What is also clear is that emotions are being heightened and, in certain instances, the law being flouted. The traditions are so ingrained, though, that it is difficult to see how they can be undone. There are calls for there to be no animals involved in any fiesta events, but even where the law intervenes, it is obeyed reluctantly (as by Santa Margalida town hall in the case of the ducks). And what happens when and if the law does step in? We now have Tony Blair, who had made a fox-hunting ban an electoral pledge, admitting he got that wrong. And British traditions are nothing like as strong as Mallorcan or Spanish ones. But a question about the law, which is a bit of an ass and a load of bull. How can the ducks of Can Picafort be subject to law on animal protection and the bulls of Fornalutx not? It’s hypocritical, and as I have suggested before, the ducks are a far easier target.

Here are photos of the aggro in Fornalutx. The chap who is daubed in black was meant to portray the bull. Some locals reckoned it was racist, thus completely (and probably deliberately) missing the point. What you mostly see in these photos are shots of the Guardia contending with the locals who support the correbou. What seems evident is that this support comes from all age groups, but especially younger ones; something which you might not have expected.

http://comunidad.diariodemallorca.es/galeria-multimedia/Mallorca/Batalla-campal-Fornalutx/17508/1.html

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Nightswimming: September’s Here

What a difference a day makes.

While still in August we feel as though we can look forward to endless summer, and then suddenly September arrives and we look back at a summer disappearing below the sunset horizon of a shortening day. As night arrives earlier, so summer starts to wind down and enters its own twilight. We look forward, but without enthusiasm, to the inevitable storms, the infuriation of the autumn flies, the enclosure of the terraces with their wind-beaten plastic drapes. One day may seem much like the previous one, but we know that it isn’t; it’s coming to a close again, and we wonder, as we wonder each year, where on earth it went.

Rarely is September a month of uninterrupted bliss. The mid-month malevolence of the “gota fría” can be forecast without the advice of the meteorologists. We know it’s coming, coinciding with the “vuelta al cole” (back to school) of 12 September. The ferocity of the September storms is the evil witch of weather who mocks our desire for a lingering summer and simultaneously kidnaps the vitality and shouts of children which, though we might have cursed them in high summer, become the muted manoeuvres and idleness of beaches, as summer passes into old age. And at times, in September, a sea fret encloses the beach with a chill blanket for the rheumatic, fooled into the fading warmth of summer.

September’s coming soon. We announced it as though it were a distant omen. Now September is here. It arrived when we weren’t looking. Be damned its apparition. Cock a snook at the ghostly and life-sucking presumptuousness of its shore mists. The sea’s still warm. Very warm. The recklessness of water. We assume, if only briefly, the recklessness of childhood. If not now, then not again. Nightswimming.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.