Manners Maketh Mate

The worst aspect of David Cameron’s calm down, dear was that it showed, once again, that politicians are best not trying to be funny. Unless they are plainly mad and have a gift for the comedic, a la Boris, they should zip attempts at gags. Cameron has come across as a buffoon; Eton boy tries to be populist by quoting an irascible old buffer and fails miserably.

It was the use of “dear” that exercised the indignation of those to the left and of a strident feminist persuasion. The dear salutation is as patronising as always prefixing “feminist” with strident or ardent. A feminist is never anything else.

I can sympathise, though. “Dear” or “love” is an expression of familiarity with an archaic quality that sounds out of place in a house of respect. It can sound out of place elsewhere and so can other familiarities of address.

Take “mate” for example. I mate, you mate (assuming you’re a bloke), we all mate together. Well actually, I do and I don’t mate. If someone is a mate, then I probably do. Otherwise, I tend only to mate if I am being condescending. Yet mate has become a sort of lingua franca of address. Everyone is a mate, especially in Mallorca and Mallorca’s Brit bars.

Lingua franca isn’t strictly accurate. Mate is more lingua antipodeana. Ricky Ponting and the inhabitants of Ramsay Street have much to answer for. They have mated spoken English and, in the process, have created an entire mode of intonation; what Rory McGrath memorably dubbed as the “moronic interrogative”, the upward inflection of Neighbours-speak.

Ok, mate goes back much further, but it has now assumed a position of common expression that was once reserved for something less familiar, such as “sir”. So used am I, in daily Mallorcan routine, to being mated that I was once hugely taken aback when two youthful gentlemen of bellydom and their respective Kylies sidled up to me and one enquired as to the whereabouts of the nearest bank. It wasn’t the question that threw me but the fact that he said, “Excuse me, sir”. I suppose he could have been taking the piss, and in case he had been I did somewhat relish being able to point to the building next to which we were standing. A CAM bank.

And mate is not solely an expression for those who have passed into adolescence or adulthood. In one particular bar, which for the sake of bringing down the wrath of the work inspectorate I shall not name, a child was once let loose on serving. “What would you like, mate?” he enquired, all ten years of him.

This familiarity might be said to be indicative of a loosening of the formality of expression. To some extent, it is not unwelcome, and other languages have similarly become less rigid. Once upon a time, the hugely formal Spanish were that stiff that a child might be expected to refer to papa as “usted” and not with the familiar “tú”.

When I first arrived in Mallorca, my gestor addressed me by my surname, which was very nice of him, but as I was calling him by his first name, it seemed an inequitable relationship, while I explained to him that it was now pretty uncommon to do the Mister etc. routine. Even the Germans have started to relax, the younger generation having come to recognise quite how absurd it is to have so-called “duzen” parties at which people who might have known each other for years get together to break the ice of “Sie” and replace it with “du”.

Though mate is, for me, a matter of selectivity, I can appreciate its prevalence. Of course I can. It may not be my preferred expression of address, but for others it is. The owner (Jamie) of a favoured breakfasting hole (Foxes) mates all the time and has to endure my referring to him as “landlord”. And I’m not being holier than thou. I have my own term, one which, in terms of locating it linguistically, probably comes from slightly west of Walthamstow. I use it for women and it is a hybrid of “doll” and “darling” that comes out as though I were ordering something off an Indian restaurant menu. “Dal”.

So, though I personally would eschew a Cameron-esque “dear” and might be a reluctant mater, I am not averse to the use of the familiar. Manners might require that we do not mate but sir, but now manners maketh mates and not (gentle)men.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Keep It Simple: Design

“The Bulletin” has been re-designed. As part of a stable that boasts the Catalan daily “dBalears”, which won an award for its makeover, the result of this re-design should be positive.

The “dBalears” revamp was contemporary in one very strong regard. Its look owed and owes much to internet presentation. It is perhaps an irony of digital competition that the print media should ape this competition, though it is not a surprise. Good layout on a screen demands clean lines and appearance; the same principle applies to whatever format.

There is, however, design and there is design. No, make that that there is design, design and design. Design that is simply no good, that which is good, and that which is good but completely misses the point.

I was in a bar the other day (the Jolly Roger). There was a poster on one of the wooden posts. I looked at it and I continued to look at it. I had to go back and look again. Finally, someone (Grizz) came in and without asking pointed at something on the poster and announced that a complaint should be made. There it was. What I had been unable to see. The date.

If you are going to have a poster for an event, in this case a horse spectacular in Alcúdia, one fairly basic requirement is that you clearly communicate when it’s taking place. This poster does nothing of the sort. The reason for my being unable to locate the date was how it had been designed.

The problem with the design was that the date was not only to the left, it was also vertical. Its positioning and style broke two fundamental rules. One is that the eye tracks to the right, unless you’re an Arabic reader and the eye goes the other way, in which case you will have just read “daer tsuj evah …”. While the main visual look of the poster, that of a horse, strangely enough, grabs the attention, it is the information that needs to be communicated which is as important, and being informed as to when the show is happening is far from unimportant.

Just as the eye tracks to the right and not to the left, so it also, or rather the brain, needs to adjust to a vertical visual and more specifically text that runs vertically. It’s why I couldn’t see it, even though it was literally staring me in the face.

There is nothing wrong with breaking rules, but design which may be good (and to be honest the overall poster design isn’t that good) has to keep to the point. Which is to communicate.

In Mallorca, there are an awful lot of designers. It seems, at times, as though whole school years leave education armed with a design qualification. There are hordes of them, armed with Photoshop and Illustrator and with innovation firmly in mind. This has spawned some remarkably good graphic work. The standards of Mallorcan design are high, owing at least something to an artistic heritage on the island.

However, the craving for innovativeness can get in the way of the message. Similarly, a lack of appreciation as to audience can also obscure what it is that is meant to be conveyed. I’ll give you an example.

A few years ago, the Pollensa autumn fair had a visual that was meant to be some sort of agricultural tool. You could have fooled me. It looked more like a sex aid. I was completely baffled by it. While it may have meant something to the local Mallorcan population, it meant nothing to anyone else. Too much promotional material suffers from a failure to communicate in different languages, but when the visual imagery misses the point of its audience, or potential audience, then any innovation becomes pointless.

Simple really is often the best. Take design for restaurant adverts. Tedious may be the almost default style of advert which shows a terrace or an interior, but it is actually important. It was a message that came over when someone was analysing different designs as a tourist. Those with shots of what the place looked like were more meaningful than something more arty that didn’t. The message was very powerful, because the very audience the adverts were being intended for was being influenced by one of the most powerful things a restaurant has to sell – its look.

And look is everything. Adverts, brochures, newspapers. And simple is also very often everything.

N.B. The re-design of “The Bulletin” is from Saturday, 30 April. This article, forwarded as usual for reproduction in the paper, would appear to have been vetoed on the grounds that the design team responsible for the re-design might be a bit “touchy”. Can anyone explain why? Given that this article had been knocked out earlier than would normally be the case, as with a now alternative, in order to help them out for their grand re-launch (at a time when I don’t have a lot of spare time), I feel I have every right to be a tad pissed off. Perhaps sensibilities towards contributors and remuneration might be as strong as that afforded to a bunch of designers.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Zoo Time: El Clásico

It was El Clásico on Wednesday night. Again. You couldn’t avoid it or the boards that were chalked up outside bars. If there is one Spanish football match that tourists would know about and might want to watch, it is Real Madrid and Barcelona.

The regularity with which the two sides are meeting at present does not diminish the status of the match. Rangers and Celtic may play each other every other week and may also be able to command the attention of far more than just regular football-goers, but they do so because of absurdities far removed from a football pitch.

Barça and Real Madrid are also both an awful lot better than their Glasgow counterparts. They are, along with certain other clubs, such as Manchester United, a fashion item, and not just because of the wearing of a Messi or a Ronaldo shirt. They are football accessory, one to be worn on the chest like a famous brand name, a sporting superficiality for the marketing-manipulated, the johnnies-come-lately of soccer sophistication that brandish boastful awareness of major teams, or worse still, allegiance, as they would brandish a Gucci mark.

When did El Clásico become El Clásico? For the British, at any rate. It never used to be, but now it is, to the extent that Barça and Real merge into one. They are not separate teams, but a combined entity, and it is classic. They are distinguishable only by red and blue and white. Which isn’t of course true, but they may as well be.

The marketing of El Clásico has now informed the previously uninformed as to the historical significance of the match and of the two clubs. Barça has long claimed to be more than just a club, but so also is Real Madrid. They are more than just clubs, because the marketing says so.

The classicism of the contest, that which it has now unavoidably assumed, is in the tradition of football puffery, one that Real itself did much to elevate to the heights of hyperbole with its galácticos. Like El Clásico, the term seeped into and then burst out into the consciousness of the distant football fan or nouveau fan, thanks to the compliance of a media that, with the fashionista pretension of a foreign word here or there, granted the match and the two teams an exoticism for the brigades of Roy Keane’s prawn-sandwich eaters.

Barça v. Real Madrid has assumed a position of football tourism. Even for the tourist with only passing interest in the game, to be present at El Clásico, in a bar, and especially a Spanish bar, has become an attraction in its own right. It has become de rigueur. The match itself can be unimportant, a largely irrelevant blur of action on a large plasma screen with a commentary that is unintelligible. What is important is the being there. And the being able to say that you had been there.

It may happen that Spanish tourists to England have desires to seek out a pub and sample the atmosphere of a Premier League equivalent, but I somewhat doubt it. Certainly not to the extent that El Clásico would be sought out by a British visitor. But were that Spanish tourist to do so, one would also doubt that there might be quite the same propensity for patronisation, voyeurism, the visit to the zoo; watching the locals wrapped up in the match and smiling inanely and uncomprehendingly at a new best friend who has just exploded as the ball hits a post. “Oh, it was amazing, so passionate, so atmospheric.” El Clásico is the new quaint.

But of course, it is passionate. Despite the marketing, despite the pretensions, it does mean a great deal. And there is no Premier League equivalent. Not really. In Scotland, Rangers and Celtic might be, but what it and any major English match does not possess is a quality that makes it culturally correct to be a bar witness not just to the match but also to the natives as they shout, scream and hug each other. And this is the real point about El Clásico. The marketing has reinforced and emphasised its cultural importance. It is more than just a football match, and the clubs are both more than just clubs. The football match as culture.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Nostalgia Trip: The wedding

Sadly, I was not wrong. I had hoped that I might have been, but had known that this would be a forlorn hope. My solace is that I had been right.

Street parties there will be. Union flag bunting there will be. The inevitable charity event will coincide. The British at play, doing what the British do, which is to organise, so long as the organisation involves tea and cake, probably a tombola and the imploring of God to save the Queen and to wish the newly-weds a long life.

I am not anti-monarchist. I am royalist agnostic and royalist apathetic. The British royal family means little, except as the source of occasional amusement. The Queen, who has now assumed the role of the British nation’s favourite grandmother, one handed down in true hereditary fashion from the previous holder of the title, has always been there. Of the royals, she offers a certain comfort. I have never not known there to be The Queen. Like some old LP disc, you know she’s around somewhere, stashed in the loft, gathering dust, but she can always be dragged out in some act of nostalgia.

The Queen and the royals and I go back a long way. When I was small, we used to be ushered to the end of the school lane once a year so that we could wave our little flags as Her Majesty rode past in the royal Bentley en route to the passing-out parade at Sandhurst. Mothers would wear flowery summer frocks and hats, as though they were attending the village fête, rather than standing on a roadside for a few seconds of Liz in her limo.

Some years later, I found myself in the inner sanctums of royalty, the palaces of Kensington and Buckingham. On leaving school, I worked for Johnson Wax, which was by appointment and which had the gig for polishing the floors. Of the various royals who I encountered, only one – who wasn’t really a royal anyway – seemed to have a lot going for him. Snowdon. He was grounded enough to take the time to explain the workings of his glass-blowing that had created a phantasmagorical peacock that hung from one wall of his workshop and also to insist that the head-housekeeper gave the “men” Fremlins beer to drink, rather than tea.

But this was all a long time ago. It is nostalgic, like the royal family itself. And with time has come an indifference, one that is so profound that I have no particular feelings about the merits or not of having a royal family. They’re all generally harmless enough, and a proneness to wackiness makes them, on balance, an institution worth persevering with.

Except, of course, Kate and Wills aren’t wacky. Well, not yet anyway. They are unremarkable enough that I can’t even manage to form an impression of Kate in my mind. I don’t know what she looks like. It was never like this with Diana. As a couple, they are bland and distinctly middle of the road. They are royalty that has been focus-grouped; uncontroversial and uncontentious, the New Labour of a “Daily Mail” brand of monarchy.

I would feel the same wherever I was, but in Mallorca there is an additional feeling. It is a sense of unease at displays of overt Britishness or Englishness, of nationhood in a foreign land that comes no more assertively than through Rule Britannia or God Save The Queen and scattering her enemies and making them fall, confounding their politics and frustrating their knavish tricks. The wedding and the street parties are the nationalistic refinement of the British to the more common lack of refinement of the football shirt and “England till I die”.

There is a further sense of unease. That the street party is all an act of nostalgia, one of Brooke, the church clock at ten to three and there still being honey for tea. The meadows of Grantchester on the tarmac or terraces of Mallorca. Like a village fête transported hundreds of miles and transported through time with little union flags and mothers in flowery dresses.

But then, in years to come, some will look back and remember the street party for His Royal Baldness and the woman whose face I don’t know. They will remember a knees-up and standing to attention. How wonderful it all was. A little bit of Britain in Mallorca; and they will look back with nostalgia. And, you know, it might even be fond.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Taking A Dive: Balcony-diving

One swallow doesn’t make a summer. One swallow dive doesn’t make a summer of balcony-diving. We don’t know for sure that it was a balcony dive, but what we do know is that there will be dives and they will make the summer. They really ought to run a sweep on what the final number will be.

Barely open a week and Alcúdia’s Bellevue registered the first fall of the season. The several pints of Guinness and many a chaser Book Of Records says that this was an early-season record. It was a fairly unspectacular affair, first floor only. At the Aquasol in Palmanova at the weekend, it was a bit more like it. Third floor. Thud.

The occurrences of balcony-diving are avidly greeted by a blood-thirsty and bone-breaking media and by tut-tuttery from various quarters. The Spanish ambassador to Britain even managed to get in on the act last summer when the sport was at its seasonal height. Cheap booze was the issue, he said, thus inadvertently drawing attention to an attraction of Mallorca that many had thought was something of the past. It was good of him to have mentioned it.

So seriously is the problem of balcony-diving taken that warnings are issued. “Do not dive from this balcony as you might get hurt,” or something along these lines. Hurt, and splattered over concrete. It can make a dreadful mess, and not just of the concrete.

But then, what are balconies for if not to jump off of? Admittedly though, and before balcony-diving, they used to merely be base camp for re-enacting the scaling of the north face of the Eiger, as eager, would-be mountaineers clambered from one balcony to another. Without the aid of crampons, similar results were obtained as from balcony-diving, if at slightly lower velocity. Legend are the stories of the balcony climbers, such as the one of an extremely large, not to say fat German whose descent and ultimate collision with terra firma registered on the Richter scale.

In an attempt to limit the number of dives, some hotels are offering an alternative. Bedjumping. Yes, we know you like to come on holiday and jump around, so why not try our beds. Get similarly gargantuan Germans as the ex-balcony climber and the divan on the third floor will soon be a divan on the second floor or even in reception.

Less accommodating is the idea of increasing the heights of barriers and railings. Why not go the whole hog and enclose the balcony with a sheet of perspex? Why not indeed, and wait for the new craze of wearing a crash helmet and smashing through the perspex pre-dive. At least the crash helmet might come in handy when the concrete looms into view.

Or why not just accept that people want to throw themselves off buildings and give them some real sport? Mini cannons on balconies for human cannonballs. “See the Great Gonzo lagered-up tourist take to the skies.” As he is launched into the night sky over Magalluf (or wherever), you will believe that a man can fly.

Mallorca appears to have acquired a reputation as the in-place for balcony-diving. Perhaps it’s something to do with the quality of the balconies; I really couldn’t say. But it is a worldwide sport. In Australia, there is a now former Australian who, only from a first-floor balcony, achieved immortality by proving that he was most definitely mortal. In Florida, the climbing of balconies is now illegal and punishable with a fine. What a good idea. As me laddo prepares for a back one-and-half somersault, there would be the forces of the law writing out a ticket. “You can’t move the body until the fine’s been paid. That’ll be a hundred euros.”

Though the injuries and deaths create the headlines, balcony-diving is not supposed to be some suicidal kamikaze leap onto solid terracing. The intention is to land in water, as in a pool. But here’s the real madness. Why on earth would you do this in April, in a late April such as the one Mallorca has not been enjoying? Dive into a pool right now and you’d die of hypothermia. Some people really have no sense.

Oh, and if someone does fancy starting a sweep or a book, I think I’ll have, erm … well, it won’t be one or two, that’s for sure.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Something To Remind You: Books

It was St. George’s Day on Saturday. Sant Jordi’s day. It was also the day of the book and of the curious ritual of exchanging a rose for a book. What happens nowadays? Do Interflora and Amazon both deliver?

The personal may be being taken out of many aspects of life, the Kindle and the iPad may be assuming greater significance, but the book itself endures. Rather like vinyl, the book is more substantial, more tangible than a disc or the physically non-existent, the download. It is more personal.

In Palma, they celebrated book day. Politicians took the opportunity to celebrate some time as last men and women standing. Before they succumb to their probable fate in May, the regional president and the mayor of Palma were among the visitors.  Antich was talking a good book, or was he a talking book? The next legislature will introduce initiatives to develop reading, so he said. The education minister was on hand to echo this and to insist that it was necessary to give strength to plans for reading development. What have they been doing for the past four years?

Reading, sales of books, financial assistance for parental purchase of books; these all crop up among the statistics that are regularly trotted out in the press. More than literature, Mallorca has been creating a generation that can read figures rather than prose. The attention that is paid to reading does, though, emphasise the role of the book in local society.

But this same society has been bemoaning standards. Last September, at the literary gathering in Formentor of book publishers, concern was expressed at the fact that children no longer had the “experience of the book”. Public education is sub-standard enough for it to have been admitted that, while children read, if not as much as they might, they don’t understand. Levels of comprehension in Mallorca and the Balearics, along with other core benchmarks in education, are below those of the Spanish average and well below those of Europe as a whole.

Despite a tradition of the book and literature, Mallorca has produced little by way of great works. Not on an international scale, at any rate. Yet, the island can lay claim to being the birthplace of the European novel. Ramon Llull’s “Blanquerna”, written in the thirteenth century, is often held up as the first of its kind. It was written in Catalan, emphasising the importance of the language in civilising mediaeval European society, something that is conveniently overlooked by many.

There was a mere gap of some 700 years before something approximating to a great work about Mallorca came along, Llorenç Villalonga’s “Bearn” about the fall of the Mallorcan nobility. But for most people outside Mallorca, both it and Llull’s work are obscure and generally ignored. A more recent Mallorcan literary tradition hasn’t been one at all, but a foreign invasion of Peter Mayle-apeing pap.

For the visitor, Mallorca and books mean not the unknowns such as Villalonga, but what gets thrown into the suitcase. Holidays are reading time; for many, the only time they read a book. New technologies may spawn greater interest in reading, but the Kindle is still subject to the same drawbacks as the book on holiday: Ambre Solaire thumbmarks and grains of sand working themselves into the crevices.

The book on holiday can take on greater significance than merely a means of whiling away some hours on a beach or by the poolside. It is a remembrance, something to remind you. I know exactly where I was when I read William Trevor’s gut-wrenchingly sad “The Story of Lucy Gault” or when I laughed hysterically at the insanely irreverent “Henry Root Letters”.

Both are somewhere, among all the other books, the old copies of “Wisden”, the Ian McEwan first editions, the translation of the bible for the Inquisition, the “Malleus Maleficarum”. These are my own descendants of what I grew up among – Hemingway, Dickens and the less cerebral Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins.

The day of the book is a fine idea. There should be more of them. If only as a reminder of the greater aesthetic of the book. It can be read, but it can also be seen as a single object and even smelt. The new technologies don’t offer the same pleasure and appeal to the senses.

In years to come, will the day of the book become the day of the electronic book? Stalls of handheld devices? Will the exchange of gifts mean a rose for a Kindle? I very much doubt it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Always Take The Weather With You

I’ve invented a new word. Meteosnobology. This is a whole new discipline of meteorological psychology, one by which weather is used as a form of one-upmanship, whether conscious or existing in the sub-conscious. The meteosnobologist is one driven by the principle of dissonance, and he or she can also be categorised as suffering from O.C.D. – obsessive climatological disorder.

Having invented both the word and the discipline, I did wonder if either actually existed. There is psychology of the weather, of course there is, though possibly not as I have now conceptualised it. As for the word, it doesn’t exist; not according to Google at any rate. As an alternative, I tried “weather snob”, and got no further than an entire website by the name. What appeared to be distinctly relevant, as in it says it is for the “weather obsessed”, turns out to be something through which you can purchase all manner of gadgetry that tells you what the weather is. Obsessed? You can be.

In future years, weather psychologists will be able to discern when the concept of meteosnobology was first raised. Easter 2011. In Mallorca. The scientists will be able to explain that the concept was invented owing to the fact that the weather in Mallorca was complete pants; “pants” being, of course, a meteorological term. They will also, through the study of weather records, be able to ascertain that, at the same time, the UK was enjoying Mediterranean conditions.

To cut to the chase. Let’s take dissonance, which is the state under which competing ideas conflict in someone’s mind. How do you combat it? The meteosnobologist is confronted by just such a problem, one compounded by location, Mallorca in this instance. Weather in Mallorca is rubbish; weather in Britain is brilliant. The simple way of dealing with it, assuming you are on holiday in Mallorca, is to just accept the situation and make the best of a bad job, but the meteosnobologist goes further. Mallorca’s better, even if the weather is pants.

This is complete garbage. People don’t come to Mallorca for rain, regardless of how good or better the island may be. They certainly don’t come if they know that when it’s raining in Mallorca it’s going to be 28 degrees back home and they can get the barbecue out. Why go to the bother? Overcoming dissonance demands that a justification is made for what has turned out to be a lousy choice, and the justification is that the UK is pants, despite the good weather.

Why is that prospective visitors to Mallorca constantly ask the question, “what’s the weather like in such or such a month?” They ask it not in the hope that the reply will be that it’s rubbish. They hope, expect it will be the opposite. It’s why they come. End of.

Then there is the one-upmanship. It is, one suspects, largely unintentional, but there can be an element of the boastful that the meteosnobologist displays, especially when it comes to temperature. In a way, the same principle of combatting dissonance, a need for justification, is at play. Out comes the sun, and bingo: “Look at that thermometer, it’s reading a hundred (or 37.8 to be more up-to-date)”. Of course it is, if it’s in the sun. You would get some similarly distorted measure in the UK. And the distortion can be huge. 24 celsius in reality; in direct, radiated conditions, it can be up to 40. It’s a nonsense of exaggeration, with one meteosnobologist eye on the Mallorca’s better gauge and a disregard of the danger to health were it really 40.

But more than all this is when weather gets personal. This is when the meteosnobologist actually begins to lose it. There’s still the justification angle, the Mallorca is better one, but it assumes an altogether greater edge when the British media start gloating that it is hotter in the UK than in Mallorca. And why shouldn’t they gloat? The weather is normally pants in the UK, so when it isn’t and it’s better, then go for it, I say. But when they do go for it, the meteosnobologist response is along the lines of the normal “paradise island” guff, so yah, boo, sucks to you, UK. It is utterly absurd.

However, maybe it isn’t so absurd. There’s the other aspect of the meteosnobologist, the O.C.D. We all, every single one of us, suffers from it. We are obsessed, and with very good reason. The weather affects us all. Most of what we do is influenced in some way or other by the weather. It affects our moods, even if it means we take the weather personally and irrationally, like we would a driver who cuts us up on the road. It affects us to the extent that we need to boast about it, to look to justify it. We do so because, yes, we are obsessed, and because we always take the weather with us.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

In Praise Of Naffness

If you are going to build a new gallery and arts centre, where would you put it? On a shortlist of towns in England, you would probably not have Margate at the top of it. Yet this is where the Turner Contemporary has pitched up.

The fact that Joseph Mallord William Turner spent a couple of years at school in Margate has been enough to have the town honoured by his heritage. There is something of the clutching of straw paint brushes when it comes to the connections between ancients of the arts and where they once had a garret or watered for the season. The Turner connection is like the clutching of author’s pen that has been dallied with in Puerto Pollensa. Simply because Agatha Christie stayed there and wrote a thrillerette has been enough to suggest the old trout as the “face” of the resort, an idea that mercifully seems to have been forgotten about. More spectacularly spurious has of course been Chopin, despite his short-lived, tubercular vituperation of Valldemossa.

I confess that it is many years since I have been to Margate. But I can remind myself as to what it was like at the time that I did go there. In Paul Theroux’s at-times savage “The Kingdom By The Sea”, written in the early 1980s, he said of Margate that it “had never been fashionable; it had never even been nice”. Like many an English seaside town which has always been either totally or partially naff, Margate was always one of the finer examples.

This is not, however, to seek to defame Margate or naffness as a whole. Quite the opposite.

Naffness comes in different forms. In general, it can be considered as lacking in taste or as unfashionable, uncool or unlovely. Mallorca, for years, cultivated a reputation for naffness. If you wanted a synonym for the touristic naff, then you sought no further than the M-island word: Madge-orca. Yet, it was also always the obverse; it was fashionable, cool and lovely: My-orca.

Nevertheless, the prevailing image was summed up by Madge-orca. At some point, however, it was as if the island suddenly developed a Turner Contemporary and My-orca assumed a position of cool dominance. Yet nothing fundamentally changed. To put the transformation down purely to marketing would be too simple, and the curiosity as to quite how it happened remains, because Mallorca remains an island of contradiction.

While Margate may now acquire for itself a makeover of artiness, it will retain its essential naffness, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t or indeed should seek to dispense with it. The reason why it shouldn’t is that naffness is engrained into its very being. Its culture, like other English seaside towns, is what gives it its appeal.

Mallorca, despite its own makeover, retains its enclaves of naffness. They are the contradiction with the sophistication and tradition that reside elsewhere. We all know where they are to be found. Alcúdia’s Mile, parts of Magalluf, Arenal and elsewhere. They are all museum pieces to an extent, but such a description disguises their enduring vitality, and their naffness is one that is due, in no small part, to an importing of culture, akin to but not the same as that which has long found expression in a seaside town. While Mallorca seeks to proclaim a distant cultural heritage, it also has a more modern one, that of Del Boy import-export, with bars that reverberate with the endless exclamations of “you plonker, Rodney” or with the Schlagermusik of the Biergarten.

And to deny this would be a huge mistake. Calling somewhere naff may sound derogatory, but, and this may come as a surprise, naff is what a lot of people like. The unfashionableness of old-style entertainment, the lack of taste of the karaoke or the pub, the sheer silliness of being on holiday are what you get from some resorts. And this is just how people want them to be.

Mallorca might wish to go further in turning itself into one giant Turner Contemporary and one Turner Contemporary alone, but it shouldn’t. The contradiction of the island should remain, and thank goodness for this, for otherwise it would be a case of forgetting what put Madge into Majorca rather than the Mallord into Mallorca.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Body Electric: Cars and energy

At Puerto Alcúdia’s recent spring fair, one of the exhibits was that of an electric car. The fairs are often the venues for environmentally-conscious propaganda and promotion. The local environment ministry is always to the fore with its recycling bags and leaflets. Planet saving has become a tradition of the traditional.

The local environment ministry has a thing about electric cars, or should I say electric buggies. They are described as buses, but they are like what you get on a golf course except bigger – the electric multi-people carrier. Not that these buggies would ever set wheel onto a golf course, if the environment ministry had its way, because golf courses, more of them, there would not be.

The regional government, courtesy of the environment ministry, bought three of these buggies in 2006. They cost 60,000 euros. Five years on and the three buggies are unused, as they have been unused ever since they were acquired. One of them would be especially hard to be usable. It was never actually delivered. Who was ultimately responsible for their purchase? Jaume Font, he of the new La Lliga, and then the Partido Popular’s environment minister.

They were bought because … . Well, why were they bought? No one seems to have really known what they were going to do with them. And they don’t move very fast. Indeed, so slowly do they go that they weren’t considered appropriate for somewhere with as slow a pace of life as the Albufera nature park. Visitors apparently would prefer their bird- and wildlife-watching on something with a bit more zip. Whether they would have even been suitable for the terrain is quite another matter. What about using them at the Mondragó park in Santanyí? Well, what about doing this? The buggies were despatched, and there they remained. Unused.

For two years, at a cost of 4,000 euros to rent a space at Mondragó, the two bus-buggies which did turn up stood idle. Finally, when the PSM Mallorcan socialists got hold of the environment ministry early last year, they had the good sense to move them again. Not that they were going to be used for anything, just that they were on their way to some government land where it didn’t cost to store them. Maybe the university might now want them? Maybe it would. Or maybe the government should just sell them to a golf course at a no-doubt knocked-down price.

At a time when the cost of petrol rises by the week – it is now an average of 1.363 euros per litre – the attractions of electric vehicles grow. President Antich, one eye on the environmental vote no doubt and critical of the previous administration’s lunatic purchase of vehicles that didn’t do anything, has announced that he hopes that, by 2015, there will be some 7,500 electric vehicles knocking around the Balearics.

As ever, figures can be put on what this would mean. A 67% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, for example. How is the figure arrived at? Pass. But arrived at, it is. This fleet of quietly-moving vehicles, and it should be noted that electric vehicles are criticised on safety grounds because you can’t hear them coming, would not solely be those of the government. Far from it. The car-hire sector has been engaged in discussions.

Electric vehicles are all well and good. They are well and good for the environment, potentially. But how is the electricity created? Currently, so we keep being reminded, the power station in Alcúdia is one of the main culprits when it comes to emissions. It may move to being fuelled by natural gas, but it would still emit pollutants, admittedly at lower levels than coal. And then there are the renewables, solar energy in particular.

The regional government, at a cost of nearly 200,000 euros, commissioned a study which suggested that it would be possible to generate all the Balearics’ energy needs with clean renewables. When might this happen? Ever? A bit over one per cent is at present from renewables, and the prospects for much more, any time soon, aren’t that great. They have not been helped by the fact that central government has turned down over 40 projects that might have contributed to increasing substantially the amount of solar energy in Mallorca.

Herein lies the rub. You can create greener vehicles, but the advantages of doing so need to be complemented by how you create their “fuel”. There again, there is one way you can be sure of not polluting the atmosphere; that’s to buy vehicles that you never use. Just ask the environment ministry.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Feels Like Team Spirit

Easter is here and tourists are flocking in. They come expecting sun and what do they find? Oh well, never mind. What they also find is an abasement of language. While some words – gay, pants, sad – acquire additional meanings, some do not move on, but become un-words. There is no word that is as un-wordly as “team”. Yet, the poor tourist will find him and herself surrounded by, confronted by, greeted by, wished by, served by teams. Tour operators have teams, hotels have teams, even some bars have teams.

“Your so-and-so team.” We will be here to attend to your every need, we will be as one. One for all and all for one. We will all adhere to principles of the highest standards of customer service and will work to the greater good of the company we represent with shoulders-back, chest-out pride.

That’s what you are meant to believe. That’s what “team” is meant to mythically convey. It is of course managerialist doublespeak. The word means nothing of the sort, because it hardly ever means any of the above. It is an un-word.

Put two people together and you have a team. Put more than two people together and you also have a team. Actually, you don’t. What you have are more than one person as part of a pair or a group. You do not have a team. But by saying that you do, you seek to convince customers – tourists – and probably also yourself, that you are somehow guided by some light of righteousness that will indeed attend to the every need. Team is an un-word and it is usually complete drivel.

There didn’t used to be teams, except on a sports field. When management consultants realised that there were some new wads to be made, they delved into the world of sport and found that there were teams. They then highlighted examples of great teams. Liverpool FC of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Zealand rugby team under David Kirk in 1987, and others. They divined the factors that made for teams.

Shared objectives and goals, clearly defined responsibilities but also flexibility, clear lines of communication, total support from a leadership figure, the right systems, the right training, the right mix of abilities and skills. These were some of the factors, and some organisations set about putting them in place. They were not wrong to do so, and nor had the consultants been wrong to invent these factors. Away from the sports fields, some teams did emerge, but for the most part they were teams by name alone. Puffery, gloss, delusion and misrepresentation. Un-teams.

“You will be a team-player,” usually in a fast-moving and dynamic environment. Thus chants the recruitment ritual, and so the tourist, in the hotel, at the airport or wherever will be in the hands of just such a team-player, even if he or she isn’t and hasn’t the faintest idea what it means. But they will have said they are, because what else are they supposed to say. “No, I am a socially-inadequate loser with psychotic tendencies.”

Teams, team-players. They are lost in lexicography. But are found in teams because someone has said that they are teams and probably have the t-shirt or the uniform to prove it. And like sports teams, they will even have their names to add to the impression. Your reception team, your entertainment team, your kiddies-club team, your kitchen team, your toilet-cleaning team. They will smile from display units and will be teams.

Why do they do it? Partly because team is an un-word, one used by default and one now demanded by convention. But used properly, as in the concept of the team is applied correctly, then it can be powerful in delivering true service. Some businesses locally do deliver this, sometimes systematically perhaps and sometimes by luck or instinct. They do actually employ people who are genuinely team-players. They themselves have good team leaders. And more often than not, they are the ones which don’t puff themselves up behind the “team” facade. They do it anyway.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.