Unfinished Symphony: Albufera

Two in the morning. Save for the Saturday-into-Sunday night birds that swoop along the main road to and from the clubs and bars of the north and who create their sampling of engine rush and techno from the in-car system, the nights are quiet. With the arrival of May, the music of the machines will start to become unrelenting. But for now, there is motor silence. Not that there is silence.

During the day, it is hard to tell what noises come from Albufera. Those which there are, are usually drowned out by the incessant traffic. At night, it is a different matter. Amidst the quietness of the road, there is only one man-made sound that comes intermittently; the throb and sometimes roar of the Es Murterar power station, a rumbling synthesizer that conveys a mood music of mystery, an industrial electronica that is aurally surreal when set against the other sounds – those of the nature park. In April, in springtime, the sounds of Albufera build up, they are constant, always changing; they are their own unfinished symphonies.

In the mix of sound and limited vision, to the fore there is the sight of the puff monsters of pines silhouetted against moonlight or the distant lights of Muro and Sa Pobla. They are the maestros, the mute conductors of the orchestras that they hide. Unseen, in the pit of Albufera, whole string, horn and percussion sections stay up all night and play for a sleeping audience. They are the phantoms of an opera that the puff monsters mask.

It is too early for the crickets. In summer, they come to dominate, with their drum-box rhythms. For now, it is the marsh frogs that are the main percussion. It is subdued, understated at present. As the weeks pass, the frogs’ chorus reaches a crescendo before being supplanted by the crickets in this unending and cyclical opus.

The music of the wetlands is variously symphonic, jazz orchestra or an ambient soundscape dreamt from the imagination of Brian Eno or Philip Glass. The syncopation of the frogs is a rapid chatter of scat drumming over which wails an improvised, viola screech of a startled barn owl or over which is the high-pitched piping blast of a scops owl. This jam session with its shifting members can bring the single, irregular hoot of a different owl, a sonic bleep that rises and falls as though it were being spun around on a radar screen.

The counterpoint to the melodies of nightingales and even robins are the crow-like bursts of a night heron on its discordant Ornette Coleman sax or the comedic intermezzo of a duck disturbed into a deranged trumpeting. The party animals that fly-dance to the tunes of the Albufera night club are the bats, darting and diving and ignoring the admonitory stares of the puff monster conductors.

You can sit and listen to all this. You can have a front-row seat for an astonishing concert that costs nothing. But you can’t sit too long. Not before there is a different sound, one of a sawing buzz by the ear. The mosquitoes are alive again and they are giants in spring. The bats are hungry, thankfully. They do their best, but there are only so many mosquitoes they can eat as though they were chomping on their equivalent of popcorn taken into the auditorium for the Albufera concert.

As the night orchestra quietens around dawn, so a different shift takes over. There are over hundred different types of bird in Albufera at present, some that are there all the time, like the hoopoe which joins with the bats in being a natural destroyer of the nasty. For the hoopoe, it is the moth of the processionary caterpillar. Other birds are passing through, one or two are there by accident, such as the golden eagle. And most announce themselves as dawn comes, when they can be heard because the road is nearly always silent. Just at the moment.

The sights of Albufera, during the daytime when it can be seen, are what attracts, but there is a different attraction. What can’t be seen but can only be heard. At night. The unfinished symphony of Albufera.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Cappuccino Kid

The Capuchin monks have to take the credit, if credit is indeed due. There is no real historical basis for saying that the order, or one of its members, first mixed a particular type of coffee. It wouldn’t, in any event, have been possible for a monk to have done so, back in the seventeenth century. The espresso machine wasn’t around then. The religious origins of cappuccino are probably an urban, suburban even myth.

In the sixties, sixties Britain that is, vogue cuisine and beverages, and their pretentious naffness, were no better summed up, scoffed and imbibed than by Black Forest gateau and Blue Nun. They were the de rigueur selections of an upwardly-mobile, former working-class, flirting with the new fad of a restaurant meal. A trip to the steak house above a barn of a car showroom was my introduction to the sophistication of dining out. It really was a case of prawn cocktail, steak and chips and gateau. The permission of a small glass of Blue Nun should have been enough to have put me off alcohol for life. Oddly enough, it didn’t.

There was another beverage. Coffee. The cappuccino, though, didn’t inveigle itself into the drinking consciousness of the nouveau-estate dwellers so much as it did into the mouths of the regulars at the coffee bars. Coffee, and cappuccino especially, was the added caffeine rush to the amphetamine-fuelled energy of the Mods. Cappuccino rode a Vespa, its engine noise the clack that put the clack into Clacton.

The Saturday afternoon coffee at the coffee bar in the Army & Navy store. The Campari Boy, who looked much older than his sixteen years and who had developed the taste of a bitters with soda, was also the cappuccino king (or, more appropriately, queen) and spooned froth from his cup as he quoted from “A Clockwork Orange”. He, we, would sometimes head off to Woking for the early-evening, so-called 3-D cinematic experience and then to a dingy club that blew our minds by being the place that first introduced us to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”.

And in Woking, a few years later, there was a face who was to become the unknowing leader of a south-west Surrey scene which, finally more constructive than engaging in the mindless vandalism of dreary suburbia, now less inclined to squaddie-baiting in Camberley or, if you really didn’t value your life, Aldershot across the border into Hampshire, spawned Graham Parker, The Members and The Jam.

Paul Weller. The Cappuccino Kid. Cappuccino didn’t come from monks, it wasn’t from the Alex-minded queerism of Campari Boy, one that finally burst out with unashamed androgyny once Bowie had stardusted his own version of “A Clockwork Orange”; it flowed from an estate in Woking, the home of the homilist for the Mods. Cappuccino rode a Vespa.

Somewhere along the way, cappuccino acquired a chic, one removed from the insouciant coolness of an ace face in a mohair suit. Weller himself delved into the pretensions of the cappuccino life. The first outing of the Cappuccino Kid with The Style Council was unintentionally reflective of a wine-bar Thatcherism and was swiftly eschewed in favour of Red Wedge and the acerbic anger that had characterised The Jam. The onward march of cappuccino-ism, however, led to the faux-sophistication of Starbucks and Costa. And has led to the Café Cappuccino.

Puerto Pollensa now boasts a Cappuccino. Four euros, fifty. That’s all it costs for a cappuccino at Cappuccino. That’s the price for chic nowadays. There are few more appropriate symbols of how Mallorca has changed. What was a coffee-bar phenomenon of a new consumerist age of the 60s and 70s, a time of the first tourists descending en masse in Mallorca in search of cheap beer and spirits rather than a coffee, has now become a motif for the island’s coffee-table presentation and presumptions.

Just as the Mods adopted the espresso machine as an accessory to the suits and the Fred Perrys in cultivating an image, so cappuccino is now an accessory for the image-conscious tourist or resident; oh to be seen at a Cappuccino, even if it costs four, fifty for the privilege. And the image extends into its own musical symbolism. Cappuccino has its discs of “cool”, a bossa nova style mixed with understated jazz. Stan Getz for the neo-Mods of Mallorca who have been shown the alternative to the greasy spoon and the Grease tribute shows of a rival, greaser fraternity.

I can’t think of cappuccino without thinking of Campari Boy and the Cappuccino Kid. Of a bitters and soda and the bitter attacks on the drudgery of suburban life. It should now taste different somehow, a cappuccino drunk under a bright sky, the froth a smooth Mallorcan antidote to both British and coffee bitterness. The music should seem altogether more relaxing. But then Weller’s words, when he was winding up The Jam, have the potential to well up and catch in the throat. “The bitterest pill is hard to swallow.” Which is not to decry nor to criticise; cappuccino chic is the new vogue. Just to remember the days when cappuccino rode a Vespa.

* Café Cappuccino is at Sis Pins hotel in Puerto Pollensa.

 

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Look Back In Anger: Pedro Iriondo

The Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourism Board, is not a public, governmental agency. It is a private organisation. Its “junta”, its own board, comprises directors of Grupotel, MAC, Sol Melia and Iberostar hotels as well as representatives of a bank (Banca March), business associations and others. The Fomento is proud of its “independence”; it is one of its values, along with, inter alia, “altruism and plurality”. These words, respectively, mean concern for the welfare of others and a system of society which respects and includes minorities. They are fine, noble words. But they are just words.

The president of the Fomento, Pedro Iriondo, has been having some words of his own. They are extraordinary. They may be an expression of the independence that the Fomento holds so dear, but they do not accord with its other values. His attack on low-cost airlines, on the passengers they bring and on workers in hotels is anything but altruistic or pluralistic. It is small-minded and borders on the xenophobic. It is insular. No man is an island, and that includes Sr. Iriondo. No island is any longer an island in a global environment, and that includes Mallorca. Try telling Sr. Iriondo this.

At a forum organised by the university’s school of tourism, Sr. Iriondo launched into both RyanAir and easyJet, accusing them of not bringing “quality” tourists. He lambasted the airlines’ passengers, the British, who stay in unregulated apartments and in villas that they rent from other Britons. He attacked waiters and other workers who are not from Mallorca and who therefore cannot know Mallorca and cannot adequately “sell” Mallorca because they don’t have a feeling for the island.

He went on to criticise the lack of business tourists from Britain, those who might attend conferences (an area of hoped-for development in Mallorca), because they don’t want to fly with the low-cost airlines. He laid into the internet and into an image of Playa de Palma that is one of card-tricksters, Romanians, prostitutes and “masseurs”.

If the Fomento were a public body, Sr. Iriondo would be sacked. As the head of a private body which features hotel groups for whom, one might presume, foreign waiters work, quite what other members of the junta make of his remarks, who can tell. Independence and an independent voice are fine, but not when they fly around in all directions, attacking anyone and anything in sight. EasyJet and RyanAir may attract all manner of criticisms, but they are also big business when it comes to Mallorca. One feels pretty confident in saying that Sr. Iriondo’s predecessor, the director-general in Spain and Portugal of Air Berlin, Alvaro Middelmann, would never have uttered the same words.

When Sr. Iriondo rose to the presidency of the Fomento, he looked back at a time in Mallorca when everything was rosy, there were parties on the beach and everyone was happy. During his contribution to the forum, he looked back again, to his time when he started in tourism and when all waiters and other workers were Mallorcan and bought into an “I love tourists” philosophy. By looking back, not once, but twice, he has condemned himself. He is of the past.

He has looked back with a current-day anger to a time when everyone may allegedly have been happy, but they were also poorly paid (still are, many of them), lived under a dictatorship, were pretty much told what to do and what to think and did not have the greater opportunities that they now enjoy. Sr. Iriondo will know, but hasn’t said this, that the tourists who came to Mallorca did so partly because the island was dirt cheap. His insistence on referring to “quality” tourists, and he is not alone in this, can be interpreted as a shocking insult.

Those not afforded the quality status are branded with something else. Yet, he ignores the fact that Mallorca was largely built on an economy-class tourism. Its tourism history is one of the mass, and the mass does not always come with huge wads of cash. It has always been the case. It was in the 1970s and remains so. The difference, back then, was that not having huge wads of cash didn’t matter; indeed there weren’t always huge wads, among the British, because of foreign-exchange restrictions.

Had Sr. Iriondo moderated his language, had he been less inclined to reminisce, then his words might have been treated with greater sympathy. You can just about understand what he was driving at, if you were being kind, but instead an impression has been given that is no better than one of the bar bigot for whom altruism and plurality are alien concepts.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Every Day People: Mallorca-ism

Politicians always say the right things. Or try to. Ahead of elections, they try particularly hard. They also have a tendency to repeat what has been said before. María Salom, the Partido Popular’s candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca, is no exception.

“I wish that Mallorca could live from tourism 365 days a year.” Amen to that. We all wish the same thing. Incumbents of various political posts have wished the same thing in the past, and will doubtless continue to do so. They, and we, can wish all manner of things. Like Roy Wood and wishing every day were Christmas, so we might wish tourism brought Christmas gifts every day of the year. Sadly, it doesn’t.

Salom is ticking the right boxes. She has even suggested the creation of “fiesta routes”, such as for Sant Antoni in January. It’s not a novel idea, as it has been suggested on many occasions, not least by myself. But for it to be given a political airing verges on that rarest of political attributes, some creative thinking.

Unfortunately for María Salom, she might not have much influence on a 365-days-a-year tourism. It seems to have escaped her attention that her own party, quite rightly, has said that it will do away with a tourism department at the Council. It’s unnecessary when there is already one along the corridors of the regional government. Ditto, of course, much of what has been grabbed as an irrelevant duplication of responsibility by the island’s Council. She herself has pretty much set out a blueprint for trimming the Council. It seems strange, therefore, that she should pronounce on something that is not hers to pronounce on.

Yet, it isn’t all that strange when you consider what else she has been saying. The dream, the wishful thinking of every day being a tourism day, is purely political froth. As also are her declarations in favour of preserving the countryside and of defending “Mallorca-ism”. It is just possible that she personally believes all this, but her party has shown little evidence that it does.

Or possibly she has been put up to fire a shot across the ambitious bows of would-be tourism minister, Carlos Delgado, who has made it clear enough in the past that he would give tourism needs priority over those of land and environment. Equally possible is that she has been allocated the role of portraying a cuddly, feminine face of the PP and of encroaching upon the virgin, untouched land of the island’s left wing along with its own avowed Mallorca-ism, the dual domains of the government’s current environment minister, the Mallorcan socialists’ Gabriel Vicens.

It doesn’t really wash, though. As sure as it was that when Vicens clambered aboard the environmental horse and cart and sought to kill off developments such as the Muro golf course, so the PP, newly restored to office, will take to its fleet of gas-guzzlers and flatten the finca. If they don’t, it will be a surprise and a reversal of a reputation as the life and soul of the 19th hole and the eighteen before it.

The right and left of the island are poles apart. Vicens once committed an act of “disobedience” by being one of those who went off for a trek along the camí (way) of Ternelles in Pollensa when he shouldn’t have done. In his other capacity as transport minister, you can be pretty certain that he hadn’t gone on a reccy to eye up the way as the site of a new motorway. Had it been a PP politician, he or she wouldn’t of course have been disobedient but instead would have been on the phone to place the purchase order for the tarmac.

It is this polarity that underpins the upcoming elections. While the diversions of corruption and the pressing need for economic growth will be two of the battlegrounds, it is the philosophical differences in terms of what Mallorca should be that are at the heart of the elections. They can be nuanced as a type of quasi-Luddite romanticism on the left and an industrial pragmatism on the right.

Campaigning for the elections is not meant to be occurring at present. The official date for the start of campaigning is 6 May, but it isn’t stopping the unofficial hustings taking place. Hence María Salom’s pronouncement and indeed the words of other politicians.

The Mallorca-ism to which Salom refers may, for a PP population, sound like an attempt at mollification of the more left-inclined who have been alarmed by some of the strident noises coming out of the party, but it is a central theme of what these elections are about; indeed what they should be about. As for tourism 365 days a year, where does this fit in with Mallorca-ism? There are some who, and I leave it to you to decide who, would rather this were never the case.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

We Told You So: Lack of bank credit

On every bright horizon lurks a dark cloud or two. The optimism for the coming season is not, it would appear, being matched by a sector of the economy every bit as important to tourism, if not more, as hotels, bars and restaurants – the banks. Their purse strings remain pulled tight, so complain business associations. Without their injections of credit, bars find it difficult, if not impossible, to undertake the type of work that is typical of this time of the year – some improvements, some decoration, the purchasing of stock or new equipment. The lack of credit is reflected along the chain. Suppliers have pulled back in extending particularly generous terms, often for the same reason as their customers are experiencing difficulties – their own access to credit.

As the world’s tourists all descend from the skies onto Mallorca this summer, so the sight of a bar without a lick of fresh paint or some chairs minus wicker where wicker used to be will be the inspiration for complaints that standards have slipped. You can already detect the sound of indignant keys being stroked.

If not bars and a chipped tea-cup, then the annual whipping-boys of the car-rental world. To three years of crisis, hire cars are now subject to the effects of natural disaster; the earthquake and tsunami in Japan mean limited supply. On top of this, car sales fell in March anyway; by some 48% in the Balearics, though only a modest percentage of this was attributable to rental agencies not renewing their fleets.

Despite an understandable complaint that the banks might be more forthcoming and be more willing to join in with a general air of pre-season jollity, and also despite whatever impact a distant disaster might have on the price of a week’s car hire, is there perhaps a sense in which retaliations are being got in early? Don’t blame us, blame the banks, and the banks are as much a factor for the car-hire agencies as they are for bars or restaurants. A shortage of credit over the past couple of years has had an effect.

The apologists of the bar and car-hire trades are sharpening their keyboards as fast as the disgusteds of wherever press the send button on their emails or internet forums. The apologists are pressing their press releases. It’s not our fault if bars are in a bad state. Just blame the banks; oh, and the government while you’re at it for the smoking ban. Oh, and throw in the hotels and all-inclusives as well. On and on it goes. As ever.

It is something of a new excuse for the apologists that they can turn to the forces of nature. This year Japan. Last year Iceland. And one turns a wary eye skywards, as the anniversary of Ash-Cloud Wednesday looms. In fact, the volcano hasn’t been forgotten. It is still being trotted out as a reason for certain inactivity this year, on account of last year having been affected, albeit for a short period and before the season really got going, and having meant a poor year.

The excuses never cease. You can understand them. Up to a point. There is a legitimate beef when it comes to the banks, but were things so difficult then why are businesses preparing and readying themselves for the season? Cash is coming from somewhere, even if the Scrooge-like tendencies of banks and suppliers suggest that cash has ceased to flow.

The truth is that you never really know for sure. There may well indeed be bars that are facing an impossible situation because of a lack of liquidity, but the tendency towards a manipulation of the press, by the very obvious mechanism of the press release or conference, can rarely be taken as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If it is indeed the case that the effects of smoking ban have been so deleterious, then should not there now be whole towns with barely a bar still open?

This is not to make light of difficulties and obstacles which are placed in front of bars and other businesses, car-hire agencies included. There are difficulties, but the propensity on behalf of various business associations to flood the media with bad-luck stories and the headline-grabber, e.g. 70% loss of revenue owing to the smoking ban or whatever, should make you stop and question them for a moment.

It was informative, the other day, that a director of a well-known business on the island said to me that his company was good at working the press. But this is how it is. Good companies, good business associations do just this. And in the case of the associations for the bars, the intention is either to shame the banks or to simply get the excuses in. So if things don’t work out according to the optimistic tourism figures, they can at least tell us that they told us so, even if the fact that things don’t work out has nothing to do with the excuse given.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

I Know My Place: Magalluf

It was some time since I had been to Magalluf. Coming in along the coast from Palmanova, was to realise that it still has the power to, depending upon your perspective, inspire and overwhelm because of the towers of hotels and the claustrophobic tight roads with bars that seem to topple from the pavements, or to horrify, for much the same reasons.

Depends upon your perspective. This about sums it up. How you look upon Magalluf, how you look upon other resorts. The first time I went to Magalluf, I thought the place was mad, a modern bedlam that made no sense. The most powerful initial image I had was turning a corner and seeing Benny Hill in front of me. You still expect Fred Scuttle to appear at the doors, offering a salute and wearing a lascivious grin as scantily-clad 18 to 30-ers (the female variety) hare towards the beach in speeded-up motion. Like the rest of Magalluf, Benny Hill, if only by name, is completely and compulsively crackers.

But of course, Magalluf makes perfect sense. As with other resorts, its sense is one of being fit for purpose, this purpose being the one it has chosen for itself. It knows its place in the order of things. Yet, it is this order which deals it a death by a thousand cuts and criticisms, many of them delivered by those who barely know the place or who don’t know it all, and occasionally by what is unfortunately highlighted by the media.

Who among you remembers the sketch on “The Frost Report”? The one with John Cleese and the two Ronnies. “I look down on him.” “I look up to him.” “I know my place.” If Mallorca’s resorts were comedians from a 60s’ review show, then somewhere like Puerto Pollensa would be Cleese. Magalluf would be Ronnie Corbett. Alcúdia would probably be Ronnie Barker, essentially lower middle-class but with aspirations towards something greater.

But even this metaphor is inaccurate. It makes an assumption not only about the resorts but also about the people who go to them or indeed live in them. Just because you’re Ronnie Corbett and are endlessly saying “Sorry” doesn’t mean you are barred from Puerto Pollensa. A cat can look at a queen and all that. But there are plenty of cats knocking around the bins of Pollensa, and rather more queens in Magalluf. Probably. So, that’s another metaphor that doesn’t really work.

A metaphor, or more a simile really, is that Magalluf is like Blackpool. Unfortunately, for the ones who would make this comparison, so too is Alcúdia. Or at least, this is how the criticism goes. It is one of a kind of collective presumption of prejudice, a conspiratorial knowingness of condemnation. Oh well, we all know what Magalluf is like, when of course we don’t. We think we do, and it is Blackpool.

For all the Blackpool shorthand, strangely enough, neither Magalluf nor Alcúdia is like Blackpool. And what, pray, is meant to be wrong with Blackpool anyway? No, Magalluf is like Magalluf, even if Alcúdia is sometimes reckoned to be like Magalluf, but never the other way round. You see, that Ronnie Barker place in the scheme of things is not so completely inaccurate.

Recent events in Magalluf merely conspire to confirm what is believed. But stuff happens. What conclusions do we, for example, draw about Pollensa from the fact that an octogenarian allegedly deliberately drove over his wife or that another eighty-year-old, a female, was attacked in her home? I’m not sure that we draw any. With Magalluf, though, it’s a different matter.

The resorts of Mallorca are highly diverse. Their differences add to an overall diversity on the island, of landscapes, towns and of people. But one feels there is a desire to somehow standardise Mallorca and to do so along some idealistic lines. Where does Magalluf feature, for instance, in a coffee-table-style advertising for Mallorca? It doesn’t. And it doesn’t for the very good reason that it doesn’t conform to an image. Yet, by neglecting it, a major aspect of the island’s diversity, and its tourism, is shunted into the background, shunned even. It is a neglect that says to Magalluf, and it is not alone, that you should know your place.

Well, it does know its place. It’s there on the coast in Calvia, resplendent in its hotelmania, gloriously bar crazy. It may be nuts, but all power to it for being so.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Taking The Biscuit: The language of promotion

Fancy having a biccy when you’re in Palma? Seems like an odd thing to have a website to tell you about. It would indeed be odd, which is why bicipalma.es is of course nothing to do with biscuits. It is to do with bikes. Bikes you can use for free. Or can you? Can you in fact use them at all and how free are they?

The other day, in “The Guardian”, there was this thing about what’s new in the Balearics. “Life may be chilled in the Med’s coolest islands, but it doesn’t stand still.” Hey, hip, daddy-o. Do people really talk like this? Presumably they do at Guardian house. So chilled are they, that they don’t exactly pay a lot of attention.

One thing that isn’t standing still and that is now cool is, the paper informed us, the fact that Mallorca has “gone all Boris” with a “free bike scheme”. Just chill, and click onto Bicipalma. No HobNobs or Garibaldis, just a load of gibberish in Catalan; gibberish if you don’t happen to speak Catalan. Many Guardian readers do of course.

Ah, but there is always a Spanish version, which is rather more intelligible, but still not exactly English. A Guardian readership may dream of hours riding around on a bike and being abused by car drivers and driven off the roads of Palma, but dreams are what they will remain. You see, the Palma biscuit ride isn’t for tourists. The site says so. “It is not a public system for hiring bikes for tourist or recreational use.” It says so, but in Spanish and in Catalan.

The chilled journos of The Guardian have rather overlooked this slight drawback, as they have also overlooked the fact that the site adds, but not in English of course, that “in order to use Bicipalma, you only have to have a citizen’s card (and be over 16)”. Yes, only have to have a citizen’s card, for which read an identity card or a residency card, were one still available. I may be mistaken, but most British tourists would have neither; nor, indeed, would many a British resident of the Med’s coolest islands.

So, life may not be standing still in the oh-so-cool islands. It may be clambering aboard two wheels, finding the roads of Palma mercifully free of buses because they’re on strike, before being knocked over by a taxi, but life, for the cycling tourist, is well and truly stationary. Nice try, Guardian, better luck next time.

Oh, but there is also this free bit. Irrelevant the service being free or not may be to a tourist, its actual freeness is not all that it seems. There is a free period of use, but there is some confusion. Is this free period for 30 minutes or two hours? The site seems to suggest both, but to be fair I didn’t tarry long in trying to fathom it out. I shall not be availing myself of the service anyway. You have to be insane to want to drive a car in Palma, but as for riding a bike …

The absence of a language other than Catalan or Spanish on Bicipalma does rather give the game away. Or you would think that it does. That there may be no English doesn’t automatically mean that the tourist is being ignored. What it usually means is that no one can be bothered. As is the case with pretty much any fair or fiesta you may care to mention.

Someone remarked to me recently that the poster for the upcoming extravaganza in Alcúdia that is the annual rubber-ring gastronomy fair is only in Catalan. What on earth does he expect? Of course it’s only in Catalan. It’s always only in Catalan. And even were it in English, it would still insist on referring to “sepia”, which wouldn’t mean anything to an English reader. Even if it were translated as cuttlefish, it wouldn’t exactly have hordes of Brits rushing to the nearest restaurant, unless possibly they were Guardian readers of the cuttlefish-eating classes of middle Islington.

“Oh wow, amazing. Gideon, there’s a cuttlefish gastronomy fair in Mallorca. How chilled and cool is that. We simply must go.”

“Oh, yuh, amazing. Can you hire a bike as well?”

“I’m not sure, but there’s something here about biscuits. They’re free apparently.”

“Cool.”

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Dog Day Afternoon: Santa Maria

Late summer came early on Saturday. The heat consumed the interior for the first time this year. The Sirius dog star had not risen, but the Luna dog, with the madness of the moon that had yet to wax, was crazy with the smell from a grill and trophies to be sniffed and dug from the sienna terrain, the red-stone earth, scrubbed like a maquis beneath the hills of plane and pine trees.

Here is the hinterland, and within it a duo-turreted folly of a finca home of some one hundred years provenance. In the dog days of late summer, the heat will wrap you in its bear-like paws, the escape being the mid-afternoon breezes that flap like swallows carried on the cooling thermals of the mestral or tramuntana, except when the Sahara blows its occasional and contrary migjorn from a stifling south.

This is Santa Maria. Santa Maria del Camí, to give the village its full name. Saint Mary of the way. Along the way, through Santa Maria, are the local areas from Son Pou in its northern entrance to Es Torrent Fals at its southern exit. As falls Santa Maria, so falls Torrent falls. And along the way is this house. Cal Tio Tomeu. Uncle Tom’s house, I guess. Certainly more than a cabin. Built like an outhouse. “It must be cold in winter.” Yes, it probably is, but not on this day of phoney summer.

Rural Mallorca or even the real Mallorca. This is where they come for an excursion. “You will not see tourists.” And you don’t. We are not tourists anyway, but we have been following the route down the highway into a cradle created by hills but high enough to be as lookouts for the arrival of the Civil War.

You scan south from the scrub that stretches to a dip, on top of which is a natural watchtower for observation. We are at journey’s end. At Uncle Tom’s house. The excursion itself, when it starts for summer and lasts through the dog days and into the stormy shifts of September and October, is to the markets of Maria de la Salut and Binissalem, to collect the vegetables for trampó and pa amb oli, to a bodega to collect the wine, all to complement the meat that has already been collected and marinaded for the grill.

Amidst the scrub, there’s a small garden that has been laboured on over the winter. It has a baby apple tree and a yet to be born kiwi plant, and other shrubs lining up in a carefully constructed grid formation. The makers of the excursion have been making the garden, frills of flowers and flora, Uncle Tom’s tribute allotment.

Rural Mallorca and Mallorca without frills. A large trestle-style table for the food’s preparation; everyone chips in, that is part of being a part of rural Mallorca. Ordinary plastic chairs that you fear might bubble in the dog day heat, sheltered by creamy shades in the dreamy other world of the still interior. Still, save for the chatter and laughter and the spit from the grill, save for the odd bark of a mad dog pleadingly looking for scraps.

The simplest can be the best. Everyone says it’s the best, or one of the best. And when the food is finished, when the wine has been drunk, when the photos of the old boy who has been the chef and who had waited patiently, drawing on a cigarette, are all taken, so they take the highway back. Away from Uncle Tom’s house, back along the way of Santa Maria, towards the sun that will set and towards the dog star as it rises. And there is a contentment, one of simple being the best and one of having peered into an other world of ruralism, away from the madding crowds.

* No Frills Excursions’ “Rural Mallorca” tour will be available throughout the season. Luna, by the way, is Seamus’s dog.

** Music references duly acknowledged in this piece. Paul Simon, “Graceland”; Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls”.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Our Honourable Friends: Mallorca’s mayors

How many are likely to mourn the decision of Pollensa’s mayor, Joan Cerdà, not to seek re-selection? He himself is probably not mourning the decision. On Thursday, he walked past me, talking into his mobile. He was actually smiling, rather than wearing his usual care-worn expression. The burden has been lifted. You wonder why he ever subjected himself to the post and to the vilification that has been directed towards him and which has characterised his term in office.

The chances of Cerdà’s party, newly named with the mouthful that is the Convergènica i Unió de Pollença, securing a further term must, you would think, be low. Transformed it may have been by name, it remains tarnished by its previous incarnation as the discredited Unió Mallorquina. From the less than good ship that was the UM has jumped the odd defector, such as the mayoral candidate for Jaume Font’s La Lliga, the not unappealing Malena Estrany. If the selection of Pollensa’s mayor were simply a beauty parade, then Estrany would cat-walk it. But it isn’t, as Joan Cerdà proved.

Who would be a mayor in Mallorca? Why would anyone wish to be? The honourable view is that it is an expression of civic duty, of doing the right thing. The honourable view is not one that is widely held; among the citizenship, at any rate. There may well be paragons of public virtue in Mallorca, but for every one that there is, there is also an Hidalgo or a Perelló, respectively former mayors of Andratx and Muro, and both languishing at the citizens’ pleasure.

The theory of very local democracy is one that should be unquestioned because of the closeness of the people to the people in authority. It is a fine theory, but the very closeness is what makes the mayoral office both difficult and open to abuse. Difficult because of the endless criticism that is likely to arise and which can rarely be avoided in the day-to-day of such small communities. Open to abuse because. Well, because you know why.

The politics of Mallorca’s towns, the positions of mayors in these towns, are reflections not of politics so much as of tribalism. Of networks, of families, of business association, of old scores that can go back to schooldays. Those who used once to fight in the playground now fight in plenary sessions, and the level of sophistication is not always greatly advanced from the days of the playground.

The political parties in the towns and villages are more social and tribal clubs than they are necessarily ideological. Mayors become mayors partly because of who they know, and their selection still owes something to the old system of the “cacique”, the local political chiefs, the fixers of the towns and villages of the nineteenth century. It is a current-day system that, for all the good intentions and of what is honour among some, retains the suspicion of favours.

Why is it that in many Mallorcan towns there are local variants of the main parties or simply “other” parties? Are these an expression of dissatisfaction, or is there another reason? The party political clubs have more than a hint of the self-serving.

The people who most matter when it comes to the election of parties and the selection of mayors are the Mallorcan people themselves, the majority of whom, of those to whom I have spoken about the elections, damn each and every party equally. It is not the recent corruption that colours their views and releases their damnation, it is the unspoken body language of a raised eyebrow or a shrug of a shoulder. It matters not which party is elected, nor which mayor is selected. Favours will arise, and everyone knows it, or suspects it.

But can anything other than this be expected? It should be expected, but how difficult must it be to refuse an uncle or cousin, to be immune to a parent’s longstanding friendship with someone who was the one who did, after all, give the old man the job that paid for the family finca? How difficult must it be to not be influenced by your wife’s suggestion that her brother’s business might be an excellent choice for such or such a contract?

Added to these conflicts of interest, mayors and councillors have to contend also with the demands of those largely disbarred from the grace and favour of the network – the foreigners. Those such as the British with their own agendas. Candidates may smile and say the right words, but what are they really thinking? Do they honestly care about whether someone has or hasn’t got a residency card? About whether someone has or has not to hold a piece of paper instead? Why should they? It doesn’t matter. Sorry, but it doesn’t matter. Inconvenience is not or should not be a political issue. Discrimination is, but it goes a lot deeper than a piece of paper.

Ultimately, what does matter is that a mayor presides over what his or her town or village is meant to be responsible for. Nothing more and nothing less. Waste collection, street lighting and cleaning, police. The stuff of the everyday plus the less than everyday, such as the fiestas. Should it really matter that just because someone is a relative that his business secures the contract for certain services? Of course it should matter, but until now it has been the unwritten rule. What is changing, though, is the impulse towards greater transparency, something which the island’s town halls have preferred to obscure. The impulse is also towards citizen participation and involvement, a movement that should assist in this transparency. The problem then, though, is who has the loudest and most important voices among the participating citizens.

Being a mayor in Mallorca. Who on earth would want to be one? Even for the honourable.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Going Swimmingly: Mallorca’s pools

What is it with swimming-pools? Not swimming-pools and the mercifully only occasional outbreak of cryptosporidium or swimming-pools of all-inclusives and the legends that are the stories of defecatory deposits which are left in them. No, not these, but swimming-pools of the local authority variety.

The Rebecca Adlington gold award, were there such a thing, would long ago have been claimed by Puerto Pollensa’s indoor pool for its services to public amusement. See that roof. It’s on the wrong way round. Well, it isn’t now, but it once was. A splendidly pre-fabricated upside down cake. How about someone paying the electricity bill? Not we, said the pool’s operators, Algaillasport. Endesa were none too amused. Not that we should really care what Endesa think, but when they’re owed 20 grand or so, we know what they are going to think. Finally, an agreement was brokered with the town hall, and the pool did not close once more, as it has been prone to since it first opened.

Joining Puerto Pollensa on the winner’s rostrum and clutching its own medal, we now have Alcúdia’s swimming-pool. For five years since it opened, relationships between the operator, Gesport Balear, and the town hall haven’t always gone swimmingly. Now, they’ve got a bad case of cramp in the deep end and are foundering. And why? It’ll be electricity again, or the cost of heating the pool to be more accurate. We’re switching off the boiler, say Gesport, unless we get some 300 grand. The town hall isn’t prepared to play water polo and has taken its ball home. No heating, no swimming, unless you’re mad.

Oh that the two northern rival towns were isolated examples of the curious swimming-pool management art of Mallorca, but they are not. Santa Margalida, just down the bay from Alcúdia, has been doing its best to claim the gold medal. Keeping itself closed for a couple of years and then still managing to leak itself. Not to be outdone, Inca came roaring along in the final stretch with its over-budget of 600,000 euros, a vigorous butterfly of profligacy to beat off the more sedate breaststroke of Alcúdia’s lost thousands.

When the plunge was taken to improve the island’s health and build proper swimming-pools in various of Mallorca’s municipalities, there would appear to have been less than sufficient attention paid to how they would actually operate. All very good it may be in theory, but the idea of contracting-out has hardly been a great success; indeed it has been about as unsuccessful as some of the actual building.

And how successful have the pools been in terms of their usage? Doubtless, there are statistics to prove that they have been, as there always are statistics, but they’ve tried hard for them to not be. Alcúdia again …

Not long after it opened, a local British woman, who speaks perfectly serviceable Spanish, went along to the pool and asked for a list of services and prices. It was in Catalan. Did they not have a list in Castilian? She received short shrift for having the temerity to suggest that they might. How long had she been living here and why couldn’t she speak Catalan? Yep, you can use the swimming-pool, so long as you pass a language test.

I once suggested to the pool’s director that they could do with letting more people know of its existence. Publicity perhaps. For tourists maybe. I think I was speaking a different language. It was Spanish admittedly. But then when there is publicity, it is of a singularly strange variety. When Puerto Pollensa’s pool announced its re-opening, now that the roof was as a roof should be, i.e. the right way round, there was a poster of splashy-happy kiddies. Nothing wrong in attracting children to the pool, but as it was a summery outdoor scene and the indoor pool was re-opening in March, the message didn’t quite fit. Nor did it with the fact that the municipal pools are, oddly enough, meant for swimming and not cavorting around on giant rubber ducks.

No, if you want fun in water, you can go in the sea or to a waterpark. Leave the municipal pools to the geriatric speedo set with their goggles and their morning’s twenty lengths. Yes, you can have fun at a waterpark, so long as you don’t try and take your own water in, to one particular waterpark at any rate. Enjoy being searched and having your bottle taken off you. I pointed out to the waterpark’s director that the internet was incandescent with rage at the practice, as indeed were real-life tourists in the vicinity. Has it stopped? Will it have stopped this summer? It damn well should have.

Swimming and Mallorca should be somehow synonymous, but they are not because ways are found to prevent this being so. Best perhaps to forget the pools and just head to the sea. But then there are always the jellyfish. Still, no one has to worry about switching the boiler on or getting the roof on the right way.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.