Rationalising Tourism

A fortnight is not a long time in Mallorcan politics. It has proven to be a very short time when it comes to the organisation of the island’s tourism politics. Two weeks ago, 27 July (Guilty By Associations), I wrote about all the various bodies that litter Mallorca’s tourism industry, little knowing – but always hoping – that there was about to be some tidying up. One of these bodies, the Fundación Mallorca Turismo, is to have its foundations dug up. It will collapse into the island’s dusty ground whence it should never have been allowed to rise in the first place.

Responsibility for all tourism promotion and affairs is to be handed back to the regional government and to the Delgado tourism ministry. The Fundación, which falls under the Council of Mallorca, will be wound up.

One imagines the decision was not a difficult one. The Partido Popular, in charge of the Council and the government, has made it clear that it will seek to eliminate duplications in public administration, and the divvying up of tourism responsibilities between Council and government was one of the most obvious and one of the most absurd.

During the last administration, the Council and therefore the Fundación had acquired ever more responsibilities for tourism. Not all were duplications, but some, especially those in respect of promotion most definitely were. Quite what the thinking was, was hard to fathom, yet one partner in the old administration coalition, the PSM (Mallorcan socialists), had sought even more tourism powers for the Council. It was hard to fathom because tourism is central to Mallorca’s economy, and so should be right, slap bang in the heart of the government, not in an island authority. The PP is righting this mysterious wrong.

One area of responsibility that will stay with the Council is that for the Mallorca Film Commission. Going to the ministry, in addition to general promotion, are various others, such as the commercial missions to China and so-called product clubs – for cycling tourism and the other tourism “alternatives”. What happens to staff is not entirely clear. There will probably be some jobs found for them at the ministry, but underlying the scrapping of the Fundación, in addition to the wish to get rid of duplication, is an unstated sense of the PP being determined to also get rid of a system of jobs for boys and girls. And it is this system which raises a huge question mark over the whole of the Council of Mallorca.

Maria Salom, the president of the Council, has announced that the Council is up to its neck in debt to the tune of 329 million euros. It is some way short of the debt that the regional government has, but it is a public debt that Mallorca can ill afford to have hanging over it and it is a debt that is hard to understand, for the simple reason that it is hard to understand what the point of the Council is.

Salom, you begin to think, is like a chief executive sent in with the express purpose of rationalising a business within a conglomerate; rationalisation that is usually a euphemism for elimination. The left are expressing their concerns that this might in fact be the intention. Coming on top of the announcement of the closure of TV Mallorca, also under the Council, the winding up of the Fundación might indeed represent a step in the direction of what the PSIB (the Balearics wing of the PSOE socialist party) is claiming is a process of seeking to “liquidate” the Council. Salom, to emphasise the point, has said that were the Council a business it would be declared bankrupt.

I make no bones. I’m not a PP fan. But the left are surely barking up the wrong tree when they see a political agenda to what, were it to come about, would be sound public administration. I’ve argued the case for cutting back the Council or getting rid of it for some years. Not for political reasons, clearly not in my case, but for organisational reasons. And with the island’s public finances more or less down the pan as it is, then quite how sustainable the Council is, is a very reasonable question to pose.

PSIB seems to think that responsibilities for the highways and social well-being would disappear along with the Council. This is crazy. The government is just as capable of administering these as the Council is. The fact that such responsibilities are granted to the Council under agreements relating to the running of the autonomous community of the Balearics doesn’t mean to say they have to be granted.

I see no political agenda. This would not be a Thatcher-style vindictiveness, one that put paid to Ken Livingstone’s GLC. It would be straightforward pragmatism, something that the left seem not to appreciate.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Revolution Is Televised

The riots have claimed Mallorcan victims. Bar Brits. The cancellation of the international footy has deprived them of an important date in their calendars; those, that is, for whom the “season” revolves around the peaks of the football season and England internationals in particular.

Rather than cries of “England till I die”, Bar Brits reverberate to the calls of “shoot ’em” and not “shoot, come on Rooney, shoot”. These calls mix with demands that the army be brought in, that water cannons be used, that the birch be brought back along with National Service and, for good measure, hanging. Enoch is invoked, as Enoch tends to be invoked at such times.

There isn’t a whole load of sympathy as Sky plays over and over scenes of unrest, looting, burning cars, burning buildings and fights with police. The Bar Brit punter doesn’t want any of this; he wants to be able to watch the telly in order to vent his frustration at another dismal England performance and to shout abuse about Capello.

Sky though, along with the rest of the media, have played their own part. Social media may have been significant (why should anyone be surprised by this?), but rolling 24-hour news and constant images are also significant. They fuel greater disturbances as the hoody class seeks to find itself captured on camera.

This is, after all, the happy-slapping generation, one brought up on actual and personal depictions of unruliness and violence and on its self-aggrandising glorification. Being seen, albeit with a face masked or covered by a hood, is what counts. Being caught on digital film is the esteem maker for those without esteem. Attacks on reporters are not attacks to prevent filming, but attacks for attacks’ sake. To prevent filming would undermine the ethos of riot in 2011; these have been riots by media and not social media. They disprove Gil Scott-Heron’s poetry of  the revolution not being televised.

And in Bar Brits, as in bars in Britain, the public is served its media diet and only too willingly regurgitates it. Words on the lips of Bar Brit occupants are “pure” and “criminality”, a curious juxtaposition of adjective and noun, but one spouted as the on-message spin-bite by police, the Home Secretary and a Prime Minister forced to leave his tennis kit behind in Tuscany.

In 1981 the revolution was televised, too. A difference, however, was that there wasn’t the cachet attached to being at the end of a lens. It was a televised revolution which gave an incomplete and at times false picture. Ealing, where I lived then, was caught up but not to anything like the way the trouble was represented. Unlike this time.

The revolution is televised not only on Sky and the BBC but also on Spanish TV. Riot by media is a global event, and the whole world can have its say. Spanish telly and press are lapping it all up, as are the chatterers on news sites. Spanish explanations for the riots cover easy access to benefits, Muslims, British imperialism, Conservative governments, a British mob mentality dating back to the Mods and Rockers, and the absence of a middle class in Britain. Some will be the same explanations of Brits themselves; others will make no sense, like the belief that there is no middle class and only rich and poor.

The Mods and Rockers one initially seems odd, but may not be as the riots are only partially a race thing. Whitey is engaged as well, finally finding a cause about which he can riot, one that The Clash called for as long ago as 1977. And the cause is a pair of Nike trainers.

Buried among the Spanish prescriptions on the internet, which have expanded into a free-for-all aimed at Magalluf and Benidorm tourists and demands for Gibraltar and the Malvinas to be returned, are the occasional voices who wonder if the same thing might happen in Spain. But as Spain has a middle class, and Britain doesn’t have, then presumably it won’t. You do get some pretty weird and distorted views, as you do from the Brits themselves.

Everyone knows what the causes of the riots are; or rather, they reckon they know. I have my own views as to the causes, but why should you be interested in knowing them? They might be right, they might be wrong. However, unlike 1981, when I lived in a part of London that was caught up in the riots, albeit to nothing like the extent that the media suggested, and lived in a city where I knew well enough the issues in Brent, Brixton, Southall, what do I know now?

Perhaps I know far more, however, because these are riots by media and the revolution is very clearly televised.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Image Rights? The right image of Mallorca

Gabriel Escarrer is the president and founder of the Mallorca-based hotel group Sol Meliá, now renamed Meliá Hotels International. An interview with him appeared in “Ultima Hora” at the weekend. When someone of Sr. Escarrer’s eminence speaks, it is worth taking note.

A newspaper interview can only go into so much depth, which is unfortunate as it would have been instructive to have had more detail, such as that to do with the improvement of Mallorca’s image.

This, in a way, was one of the more surprising parts of the interview; surprising because the image has improved, certainly when compared with one that the island had not so long ago when Mallorca was looked down upon and when it was very much Madge-orca, a place lumped in with Eric Idle’s Watney’s Red Barrel Torremolinos of so many years ago.

In part, it still is, but the image has shifted and the shift has been ongoing for quite some while. So a question I would like to ask is, what image do you believe Mallorca has? Your answers are likely to be diverse, which is what might be expected, as Mallorca is a place of huge diversity.

Recently I was asked to write about some of Mallorca’s towns and villages. I was given a list of those to be covered. The piece ended up as a sort of tour. It started in Sóller, cut down to Banyalfabur, went across to Campos and Colonia Sant Jordi, up to Porto Cristo and then Artá and ventured inland via Santa Margalida, Campanet and Santa Maria until it came to an end in Lloret de Vista Alegre and Sineu, the geographical and arguably spiritual centre of Mallorca.

With the exception of touching on Can Picafort (as part of Santa Margalida), there was little by way of vast tourist resort in this tour (I would exclude Colonia Sant Jordi and Porto Cristo from such a description). Instead it was a route that embraced orange and lemon groves, an old railway, mountains, the terraces of Banyalfabur, Es Trenc, the view to Sa Cabrera, the caves of Drach and Hams, Talayotic Bronze Age settlements, the fiesta of La Beata, peculiar water phenomena, ancient hermitages, old markets, a baroque church with a blue bell, rural culture and the palace of the kings of Mallorca.

Want diversity? You’ve got it. The problem is that diversity does not mean image. Or not as the island’s image is largely perceived. Sr. Escarrer said in the interview that the image needed to be cleaned up, that there needed to be a repositioning of Mallorca and one at an international level.

He was not wrong in saying this, but there is something distinctly not right about it. Because all this diversity, this different image is meant to have been part of a repositioning, one at an international level. Is Sr. Escarrer saying that the efforts of all that promotion that has gone on, or is supposed to have gone on, has been ineffective? One suspects he may have been being diplomatic.

I shan’t be. It has been ineffective. Partly it has been ineffective for the right reasons, those of sun and beach, which remain Mallorca’s most enduring attractions and reasons for being. Despite promotion of alternatives, sun and beach constitute the island’s number one product and the most important of the elements of the island’s promotional mix. And rightly so.

But sun and beach bring with them attendant problems. They are ones we are only too aware of and may well be to what Sr. Escarrer was alluding when he spoke of cleaning up the image.

In another newspaper at the weekend (the “Diario de Mallorca”) there was an article which delved into crime in one of the main tourist centres of the island, Playa de Palma: pickpocketing, prostitution, drug dealing. To this can be added the periodic reports of violence. The need for an image clean-up has moved on from the days when Mallorca and some of its resorts were simply considered as being naff.

Despite media negativity and reporting of crime and violence, Mallorca’s image has changed. But the change in image has a way to go, a long way to go. The question is how this image change is truly effected, how the diversity of the island is truly conveyed, and in such a way that the harmful consequences of seasonality, to which Sr. Escarrer also referred, are mitigated.

It’s the sixty-four million euro question. And it has been ever since the euro was introduced. Prior to this, it was the the ten billion plus peseta question. It’s a question, the answer to which no one has found. Sadly, one fancies it will never be discovered. Yet it should be. Start in Sóller, cut down to Banyalfabur … .

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Habits Of A Lunchtime

Television killed the art of conversation. Wrong. The art of conversation, the British art of conversation, never existed, especially not at meal times. Its absence is wrapped up in British habits of a lunchtime or a dinnertime.

The British on holiday at meal times are a morose bunch. They are long-faced and impatient. Service is criticised for its slowness, but this is an excuse to disguise the fact that meal times are suffered rather than enjoyed.

Nations are defined by their eating habits: the habits of what is eaten; when it is eaten; how it is eaten; where it is eaten; why it is eaten; and what is said (or isn’t said).

The British meal time was traditionally a purely functional occasion. It was a utilitarian intrusion, characterised by social awkwardness and by the consumption of food which, at best, was no more than unremarkable. It was the same on the rare occasions that the British ventured out to eat. The tables were silent, the food was hopefully rather better than rank.

Things changed with the gathering pace and numbers of cookery shows and celebrity chefs. From Fanny Craddock through the Galloping Gourmet to Floyd, Delia, the boys Rhodes and Oliver and to Ramsay, a nation has acquired an appreciation of cuisine. But this is pretty much all it has acquired. A nation of shepherd’s pie eaters still marks its meal times with dutiful muteness while the TV shows them food being prepared, discussed, rated, reality-ed and celebritised by celebrities other than chefs themselves; food they are unlikely to ever attempt themselves.

On holiday there isn’t the box with celebrity chefs to fill the silence. Or there may be at the Brit bar which will serve up pie and chips with peas; the telly of a Brit bar is a comfort blanket for the non-communicative.

Meal times as social occasions is a largely alien concept to the British; about as alien as the concept of meal time is to the Mallorcans and Spanish, or indeed the concept of time full stop. The notion of mediodía and therefore lunch can mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean. It almost never means midday, which comes as a shock to those who are the most rigid adherents to time – the Germans, for whom midday and lunch means midday. It doesn’t mean one minute past midday.

Such rigidity is what rules the eating habits. It is the complete opposite of a Mallorcan haphazardness by which meals seem to simply happen. A Mallorcan lack of rigidity is what governs everything else surrounding the meal. It is rarely anything other than a noisy and protracted affair. It is an event in its own right. There can be a theatrical element to it, such as with the presentation of a paella or fideua. The taking of tapas is totally contradictory to the set-piece style of the British main course and dessert and is a style of eating that demands and was in no small part brought about by a social dimension to meals.

The British have never really understood the ethos of meals as events. The inconsequentiality of eating extends to the fact that the British never invented a good wish before a meal. They had to borrow one from the French. “Enjoy your meal” is a ludicrous and recent Americanism, about as ludicrous as the literal translation of bon appétit to “good appetite” that one can encounter in a Mallorcan restaurant.

Climate as much as a non-rigid attitude to meal time has influenced differing eating habits. One might call this the alfresco factor. Eating outside, especially on long, warm evenings, requires a degree of affability and sociability. The alfresco factor is arguably the most significant in having created the differences in eating habits between northern and southern Europe, not so much in terms of what is eaten (though clearly there are differences) but in the nature of the meal.

The meal as social event is celebrated at fiestas. The alfresco evening supper is a feature of them. To the disgust of many in Alcúdia this year’s supper was dropped from the fiesta programme, a curious decision that could have been only marginally based on finance as it was the norm for people to pay. And they did pay. In great numbers. Three thousand or so would sit down in the market square.

The food at such suppers is never grand, but it doesn’t have to be because it is the event itself which matters. Not grand maybe, but a mix of trempó, tumbet and pa amb oli doesn’t taste at all bad on a sultry summer evening. This is what they had at a supper in the enclave of Ses Casetes des Capellans in Playa de Muro the other night. A thousand people having a meal together in even this tiny little place. And was there conversation? Above the noise of the talking, who could tell.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Hornblower Effect?: Film and tourism

An old friend of mine used to return after months away on location and relate stories of derring-do and actors behaving badly. He was the producer of the “Hornblower” series of films, a highly successful franchise, to use an Americanism, and one that used a series of locations around Europe. The fifth film in the series, which aired in 2001, was mostly filmed in Menorca.

You can still find references to “where Hornblower was shot” on websites to do with Menorca. But what was the enduring benefit to the island of the film’s location? Was there a “Hornblower” effect?

Perhaps there was, but if there was in tourism terms, it was shortlived. Menorca has spent the years since then confirming its position as the Balearics basket case. The island may still derive some kudos from “Mutiny” having been filmed there, but it has been worn away along with the memory of the film itself.

The relationship between film location and tourism is one I’ve considered before (“Lights, Camera, Inaction”, 21 March). And the issue is cropping up again thanks to a burst of excitement surrounding the possibility that Mallorca might be a location for the filming of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry).

Note that I say “a location” and not the “the location”. The distinction is important not just in terms of the use of the indefinite as opposed to the definite article. It is also important because, though the filming might indeed bring benefits, these would be as nothing compared with those which would be derived were it to be filmed almost entirely in Mallorca.

The most obvious example of a location benefiting in tourism terms from a film, as I mentioned in the previous article, was that of New Zealand and the publicity it attracted because of “Lord Of The Rings”. The setting of Tolkien’s trilogy was so well known that no one could have been mistaken into thinking they were really looking at Middle Earth and not at a land of sheep and rugby players.

The point is that, with a single location, the connection can be made and made very forcibly. With multiple locations, the connection is far less strong, to an extent that it may carry little or no force. Yes, a location could be promoted as having featured in a particular film, but it would rather depend on the prominence given to the location and to the extent to which it would be evident.

One site in Mallorca that is being mentioned is Sa Calobra. The problem is that unless you know what you’re looking for, you wouldn’t necessarily know what you were looking at. A dirty great arrow doesn’t suddenly appear over Tom Hanks’ head pointing to Sa Calobra with an accompanying legend announcing “Sa Calobra, part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Tramuntana mountains”.

The fact that Sa Calobra, on the coastal periphery of the mountain range, is in the running does raise the spectre of what happened when there was talk of the island of Cabrera being used for filming (“Betsy And The Emperor”). The environment ministry vetoed it because of the island’s sensitive ecology. The Tramuntana are more robust but they are also ecologically protected. One can already hear the sounds of the enviro lobby preparing their complaints were there to be film crews trampling over the countryside.

This is premature though. No agreement has been reached as to the location. Croatia is another place that is up for the gig apparently.

But assuming Mallorca were to be chosen, what benefits other than to tourism might follow? One might be that to the island’s film industry. Yet would producers from Hollywood and elsewhere suddenly descend on Mallorca with all manner of blockbusters to be filmed? Only if the locations are what they want. “Cloud Atlas” might help in putting Mallorca more on the location map, but you might be surprised to learn that film companies, producers, location managers and whoever are already well aware of the island’s locations. As indeed they are of those in pretty much any part of the world you care to mention.

Location databases, full of thousands of images, exist for all sorts of places. They exist to promote the locations but also to aid the decision-making of producers from foreign lands. Palma Pictures, for example, has a database of some 30,000 images.

“Cloud Atlas” would be a feather in Mallorca’s cap, but the benefits can be overestimated. A single-location blockbuster is what would really bring about the benefits, but, and notwithstanding the fact that the Hornblower films were made for TV and were not Hollywood, never forget the lack of the Hornblower effect in Menorca.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pile ‘Em High: Hotels

Pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Remember this? It’s your starter for ten. Whose phrase was it? To give you a clue, he founded a supermarket chain that in the late ’60s and early ’70s no self-respecting, middle-class housewife would be found dead in. You know who it was. Of course you do. Jack Cohen. Tesco’s.

Tesco used to be a by-word for total naffness. Back in the day it was the loon pants and platform heels of retail; the Noddy Holder and Slade of grocery. What saved it was Lord (then plain Ian) MacLaurin’s makeover of sophistication, matched by an aspirational style of marketing, as well as its product expansion; Tesco was the first supermarket to become a petrol station as well.

Pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Tesco as it once was (and also as it has become) is a metaphor for much of Mallorca’s hotel industry, both all-inclusive and conventional. A guest at one of Alcúdia’s all-inclusive ghettoes was telling me how he and his wife (they were grandparents) were squeezed into a room with two double beds along with their two grandchildren (girl and boy). The arrangement was not exactly satisfactory, nor was the size of the room. Barely enough space to swing a cat (and there is probably, as an aside, a fiesta event somewhere in Mallorca which involves swinging a cat; but I digress).

A correspondent of mine was telling me of the situation in a Magalluf hotel. Two-bedded rooms have increased in size by 100% in becoming four-bedded rooms. At the prices they’re being charged, the guests shouldn’t have grounds to complain, went the hotel’s explanation.

In the Alcúdia hotel, they were and are being piled in high. But are they being sold that cheap? Three grand for the four of them, I was told. Maybe this is cheap, but when you take into account their circumstances plus the time it takes to get served with a drink or to manage to get into a lift plus the cost of add-ons (this is an all-inclusive, remember), then maybe it isn’t.

More than the cost, however, is the philosophy. Pile ’em high with scant regard for any sophistication or aspiration. Some of Mallorca’s hotels are locked in a timewarp of old Tesco days, and some of them were built around the time that Tesco was reaching its early-70s, pre-MacLaurin nadir.

Tesco discovered that in order to change its entire business and marketing philosophy some of its older supermarkets had to be done away with or greatly improved. It was no use having outdated stores that didn’t stack up with the new aspirational message and which weren’t fit for purpose. And in addition to building new supermarkets, Tesco became, in effect, an all-inclusive retailer; everything from petrol to music.

The Tesco metaphor is pertinent because in terms of philosophy and bricks and mortar, a good part of Mallorca’s hotels are in precisely the same situation that Tesco once found itself. A key difference is that many moved into the all-inclusive line quite some time ago. So they attempted product expansion but did so without considering any of the rest. Or if they did consider the rest, they were unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The result of this was, and remains in many cases, that the hotels are not fit for purpose. They were not built or designed with all-inclusive in mind. The facilities simply aren’t there. Moreover, some hotels are little more than human processing plants. A mechanistic approach, predicated on the pile ’em high philosophy, induces a mindset which is the antithesis to sophistication or aspiration.

Of course some of the market to which the hotels pander, let’s be frank, is or can be low rent. And the low-rent market perpetuates a low-rent attitude among hoteliers, even if, as the Alcúdia case suggests, the rent isn’t so low that it can truly qualify as being categorised as cheap.

The problem is that the market, be it low or higher rent, has witnessed for itself or learnt of what exists elsewhere. Mallorca’s hotels have not responded, very often because they have been unable or not allowed to respond, to the brand spanking new out-of-town, indeed out-of-Mallorca competition; that of the eastern Med and north Africa.

An expectation has therefore grown, and it is one that is more aspirational and demands greater sophistication. For this reason, plans for hotel renovation, if they ever see the light of day, or changes to use cannot come soon enough. What some of Mallorca’s hotels need is to undergo a process of Tesco-isation. The punter can’t continue to be piled high.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Coughing Blood: The bullfight

AnimaNaturalis is not popular. Animal rightists, it offends traditional animal abusers, other animal-rights groups and a fair chunk of what you might think would comprise its natural support, the youth. Its modus operandi of strident agitprop and public protest, be it against the correbou, the circus or the bullfight has failed to garner significant popular support.

Last year AnimaNaturalis staged a protest in advance of the bull-run correbou in the village of Fornalutx. It was most revealing that to the fore among those hurling insults in its direction were the young.

A curious and ill-formed philosophy, if one can use such a word, exists among Mallorcan youth, especially that in more rural areas. Catalanist, Luddite in a hankering for a return to the values of the land and in rejecting mass tourism, politically right-on in being eco-conscious, it is also largely politically incorrect in respect of animal welfare.

Whereas this youth philosophy coincides, to differing degrees, with the values of certain political parties and campaigning groups like the eco-warriors of GOB, it diverges on the matter of animals and animal tradition. It is cultural fundamentalism.

AnimaNaturalis is not popular because it poses difficult questions. In attacking traditions to do with animals, it also attacks an insularity of Mallorcan society by confronting it with issues that this society is ill-equipped to deal with; ill-equipped because a not untypical Mallorcan response to individual or collective attack is to adopt a haughty and petulant righteousness. Mallorcans are argumentative, but they are not great at argument or with dealing with confrontation.

The unpopularity of AnimaNaturalis extends to other animal rights groups who prefer, they say, greater diplomacy. A reason for these other groups distancing themselves from AnimaNaturalis in Fornalutx was that they believed their approach would have brought about greater concessions from the village mayor in amending the correbou. Instead, the mayor, though he did make some changes, was pushed into a corner in siding with those who lobbed the insults at AnimaNaturalis. Or so it was claimed.

There is another way of looking at this. AnimaNaturalis is not passive. As much as fierce defence, passivity is what symbolises attitudes towards animal rights and most obviously the bullfight. It was once explained to me that there would be greater public displays of protest against the bullfight were it not for the fact that people do not wish to be seen or cannot afford to be seen to be protesting. This is cultural fundamentalism of a different order; it is one with echoes of a style of Mallorcan feudalism, the passing of which was only relatively recent and which thus remains within society’s consciousness as well as within some of its current-day mores.

Though opinion polling has shown that the popularity of the bullfight has declined in Spain as a whole, the lobby for its continuance is strong, as is the social dynamic which appears to neuter protest. In an uppity and liberal part of Spain such as Catalonia, the dynamic operates in reverse, so much so that legislation was driven by popular petition to ban the bullfight. Yet a Catalanist sympathy among some of Mallorca’s youth does not extend to what has been nuanced as the real reason for Catalonia’s bullfight ban – anti-Spanishness.

In Mallorca the numbers that have gathered to protest at the annual bullfights in Alcúdia, Muro and Inca have been small to the point of irrelevance. In Inca AnimaNaturalis couldn’t have anticipated what might actually prove to be a turning-point in both its fortunes and the whole bullfight debate in Mallorca.

One of the bulls was on the rampage. No matador was to be seen. The bull was unscathed, it was being taunted from the safety of the wooden barrier and the terraces. Until, that is, the promoter of the event took it upon himself to act as matador, thus, so it is claimed, breaking a regulation that only those listed, i.e. the matadors, can participate.

There is a video on You Tube which has gone not exactly viral but which shows what happened. I have been to the bullfight and I have witnessed similar scenes, but I had a sharp intake of breath when I saw the bull cough blood and stumble having been struck with the sword by the promoter-matador. I am neither for nor against the bullfight, for the reason that it is not my argument, but this was sickening, and the power of the video might be to persuade those whose passivity has been the norm and those of a culturally fundamental bent to recognise that perhaps AnimaNaturalis has a point.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Keeping Up Appearances: Travel fairs

The tourism ministry has decided to cut by half the budget for the three main travel fairs that take place over the winter. Good. It might have done even better had it decided to go the whole hog and withdraw from the fairs completely. But that would never do. How could it do when these fairs exist for existence’s sake?

Within the ministry’s explanation for the cut is a most germane point. The involvement of the tourism minister and the director-general for tourism at the fairs is to now be strictly limited to meetings with contacts in the industry – those with hoteliers, tour operators, travel agencies and airlines.

The point is germane because this should be one of the main points, if not the main point, of the fairs taking place. There has been plenty that has been extraneous and costly, and this will be done away with.

Important though the industry contacts are, does it really require a travel fair for them to be made? Of the three fairs, two are overseas, those in London and Berlin. The industry contacts being made at these fairs are not with hoteliers from the UK or Germany, but with Mallorcan hoteliers. They are also with the likes of TUI, Thomas Cook and Air Berlin. In the case of the latter, it is based in Mallorca, while TUI practically owns the island. So what’s the big deal with the industry contacts?

The travel fairs are more for appearance’s sake. Non-participation would equate to being conspicuous by absence and a snub to what has become a self-perpetuating merry-go-round, driven by fair organisers who know full well that tourism authorities, not just from the Balearics, feel obliged to attend.

The merry-go-round has had the trappings of all the fun of the fair. What appearances they have been; those made for appearance’s sake. The Balearics have dragged along a succession of celebrities whose involvement has amounted to little more than a drain on finances and a boost to the egos of former tourism ministers and presidents; Jaume Matas was the most culpable in seeking the reflected glory of co-opting a Schiffer or a Kournikova.

The merry-go-round has had all its extraneous stalls and attractions – the candy floss of some gastronomy, the dodgems of sports tourism, the Music Express of folk song and dance. This is what will be done away with, along with the “Balearics day” at the three fairs. The islands’ hoteliers, now fully engaged in their love-in with their new-found best friend, the tourism minister Carlos Delgado, approve heartily of what is to be concentration on business and on business alone.

A leaner and meaner, half-the-budget, smaller exhibition stand does not mean that those in the business will be unimpressed. Quite the contrary, one would hope. Tour operators, for example, will admire a more austere approach and the message they would trust that would be sent out to Mallorca’s hotels that they should be equally cost aware when negotiating their prices.

There is another constituency which will admire and approve. The public in Mallorca. Its approval is now the reverse of what was previously sought, that of grand exhibitions and celebrities which, because of the exhaustive press coverage given to the fairs, were designed to impress as to how much effort was being made, despite it having been unnecessary. The public now demands greater humility, even from the island’s main industry. To have not made significant cuts to the fairs’ budget would have been a political misjudgment.

Playing to the domestic market cannot be underestimated in the whole marketing mix that is and has been the selling of tourism in Mallorca and the Balearics. The fairs have been one way of demonstrating that politicians and the tourism industry are being active. So also have the adverts. Rafael Nadal on his boat was as much for home market consumption as it was for foreign markets.

Selling directly to the travelling public is only and has only ever been a secondary and relatively minor purpose to the travel fairs. Selling thanks to adverts is similarly only a small part of Mallorca’s tourism marketing. Far, far more important are the contacts. Though the fairs are largely irrelevant because these contacts are readily accessible all year round, for appearance’s sake it is necessary that there is a presence at the fairs.

The fairs are a necessary evil, but at least Sr. Delgado has had the common sense to realise that he doesn’t need to surround himself with a gaggle of celebs and a folk-dance troupe.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Bandanarama

Dock. Dock. Dock.

I am searching for the best onomatopoiea. You may have better. But you’ll know to what I refer. Lie back on a beach, close your eyes, think of nothing in particular, and within seconds your personal bit of tranquility will be invaded by the sound of wooden-racket beach paddle tennis. Dock. Dock. Dock.

There is little that is more irritating. Piers Morgan perhaps, but at least he doesn’t generally speaking plonk himself down next to you on a beach and annoy the hell out of you with his supercilious smugness. I have a theory that Morgan was bullied at school, and that he is now taking it out on the world. I digress though.

The irritants of holidays. Some aren’t irritants as such, more why in God’s name is someone doing thats, such as walking barefoot the ten minutes or so back from the beach. Given, as previously mentioned, the propensity of the local Rovers to scatter their messages from a bottom hither and thither, it is preferable to soil the sole of a flip-flop than the sole of a foot.

Others are genuine irritants. Like the I’m completely ignoring the sign at the entrance to the local Eroksi which asks that I don’t enter minus a top (presuming I’m a man, that is) and minus footwear (with or without whatever might have been trod in en route).

Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you come from Luton. Do you go to the local Tesco wearing only a pair of shorts? As a rule, you don’t. Do you walk the ten minutes to Tesco’s in bare feet? Normally, not. And do you, either on a work day or at the weekend, wear a bandana?

In Luton there are, even now, building workers, plumbers, chartered accountants thinking to themselves, “you know what, when I go on holiday I’m going to get me a bandana.” Or get the whole family bandanas. And a Jeep convertible. A family of bandanas, all black paisley affairs, rode into town the other day, with his and her matching bandanas and those for the kids as well. A statement of bandana-ism is clearly best made when everyone can see it. Wearing bandanas whilst concealed by a Ford Focus would be pretty stupid.

According to the website coolbandanas.com, a cool bandana is “great for heat-related health problems”. I can accept that there may be a health benefit to the bandana, but so there also is to the hat or even the hair. A further advantage of the bandana, so says another website, is that it keeps hair out of your face, which it would if the person wearing one had any.

The typical bandana-wearer (male) has usually gone the full Phil Mitchell. It’s the double whammy of fashion victim-ism: a number one covered in a square piece of fabric with connotations of gangstas. The number one (or lower) is hugely impractical in hot climes. Just ask former England cricketer Chris Lewis, for instance. He shaved his hair off during a match in the West Indies and promptly got heat stroke. The bandana might have helped stave it off, but then why opt for two fashion statements when you can do without either?

That’s the thing with the bandana. It is a fashion statement. No more, no less. But, in addition to its association with American gang culture, it is also has an association with gay culture. I’m not about to explain how this works, but suffice it to say that some wearers, giving their heads a relief, might wish to avoid putting the bandana into a back pocket.

Nevertheless, one could excuse the bandana on the grounds of metrosexuality. New men wear bandanas. Unfortunately, they are also inclined to wear something else: the sarong. This does at least, and mercifully, seem to be declining in popularity, which can be put down to Luton metro man having had a rare rush of common sense and realised that he looked a complete pillock.

But of course, there is more to it than just a fashion statement. It is about doing things, and wearing things, that you wouldn’t dream of doing when not on holiday. The bandana is about letting your hair down, not that most wearers have any. We should in fact praise the bandanarama on display in a Jeep convertible or strutting along a prom; praise it as a symbol of being on holiday and really not caring a stuff. Because back in Luton, you really would look daft with a bandana and would probably be arrested if you went into Tesco’s only wearing shorts.

But if bandana it is, please, please don’t dock, dock, dock and please, please, put something on your feet because … watch out! Oops, too late.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Organist Entertains

In September 1971 there was a rock concert at The Oval cricket ground in south London. Called “Goodbye Summer”, the headlining act was The Who. During the hiatus while waiting for Daltrey et al to take to the stage, and staring into what was a starry evening sky, over the speakers came a sound I had never heard before, or rather never appreciated before.

What I heard was “By Your Grace”. It came from an album named “Gandharva” by Paul Beaver and Bernard Krause. What was extraordinary about it, and what made me take notice for the first time, was the church organ; cathedral organ in fact. The album was partially recorded in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The track was essentially just the organ, complemented by a touch of guitar and a lament by the great American jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.

When you’re sixteen and rocking up for some rollicking rock ‘n’ roll courtesy of The Who, The Faces and Mott The Hoople, a bit of organ music isn’t what you might expect. It took me aback because it was so ethereal and evocative. I stared into that starry sky and was taken to a place wholly different to Kennington.

Beaver and Krause were experimentalists. They were “new age” long before New Age became a music genre. They chose Grace Cathedral because of the acoustics;  echo and delay hung on the organ timbres and Mulligan’s mournful sax.

Organ music, prior to the epiphany of The Oval, had meant the Wurlitzer and Reginald Dixon at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool that once used to assault your ears over the Light Programme. It was music designed to give you a sinking feeling, equivalent to the depths to which one plunged on hearing “Sing Something Simple” or Vince Hill and the BBC Light Orchestra murdering The Beatles.

Radio 2 has managed to cling to Reg’s roots. Nigel Ogden’s “The Organist Entertains” is an accurate programme title only in the sense that the Wurlitzer entertains because of its surreal swirling sound. It is a joke noise. It’s only the fact that it is a leviathan of stops and pedals that distinguishes it from the kazoo. And it is an insult of cheesiness when compared with the church organ.

A series of organ recitals in a tourist resort doesn’t grab you as being designed to have the hordes beating a path to the nearest parish church. One can’t imagine a disgorging of visitors from the all-inclusives of Playa de Muro and Puerto Alcúdia and their heading to Sant Albert just by the Alcúdia boundary in Muro. But as from Friday, there will be a concert every week till the end of the month.

Mallorca takes its organ music seriously. The first two Fridays of the Muro series will feature Arnau Reynés and pieces by Bach and the Pollensa-born composer Miquel Capllonch. Reynés, a professor of music at the university in Palma, has played some of Spain’s finest cathedrals. In the organ world, he is a bit of a name, but hardly anyone will know his name or be aware that he is performing at a small local parish church.

Sant Albert is not possessed of the type of acoustics that so inspired Beaver and Krause and that were captured on “Gandharva”. It is not capable, because it is only small, of giving the impression of music being suspended in space, which was one of the achievements of the Grace Cathedral recording, but Mallorca does have some fine churches and some even finer organs. Reynés has played and has been a co-organiser of the annual international organ music week held at the Basilica of San Francisco (by coincidence with Grace Cathedral) in Palma. This is not the only organ festival; one is also held in October in Palma Cathedral.

And around Mallorca there are some astonishing organs. Arguably the finest is that of Sant Andreu church in Santanyi. It was built by one Jordi Bosch in the eighteenth century, who was responsible also for the organ in the Basilica. The Santanyi organ, restored in the final part of the last century, is not as big as it once was, but it lays claim to being the biggest in the world insofar as its mixture of pipes and ranks is the largest of any organ. The internationally acclaimed Czech organist, Michal Novenko, released some years ago a record of pieces he performed on the Santanyi organ as part of a series entitled “Great European Organs”.

Church organ music clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The concerts in Sant Albert will attract only a smattering of tourists, if that, but what they represent, as do, for instance, the Novenko recordings in Santanyi, is a hidden musical secret of Mallorca as well as the huge regard in which the island’s church organs are held, both in Spain and elsewhere.

I have remarked before that you don’t have to be religious to be in awe of Mallorca’s churches. Similarly, you don’t need to have religion to be held in awe by the music of an organ. I wasn’t religious in 1971 and still am not, but I was converted all those years ago, and suddenly The Who didn’t sound so good.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.