Look Bach In Anger

Where had the Welsh been all summer? At the going down of the season, they suddenly emerged, orange-wristbanded, into Bar Brit (Foxes Arms), which temporarily became Bar Bridgend, Pub Pontypool, Café Cardiff.

A huge Welsh flag partially blocked the entrance, the rest of it was blocked by a huge Welsh front-row forward: Tiny, as he’s known, released from culinary duties to mingle front of house and prop up his compatriots. Was there a special Welsh breakfast on the menu? Laverbread and leek perhaps? Not as such. There was no sign of any Brains having been shipped in specially either.

Prior to the Irish match, an encounter too close to call, a New Zealand newspaper came up with cultural aspects of the two countries to decide the winners. Most were still too close to call, e.g. music (U2 v. The Manics), but one had a clear edge – beer: Guinness v. Brains, a no-brainer, even if it proved to be wrong.

Guinness is usually the de rigueur tipple for the rugby aficionado, even at ten in the morning or perhaps especially at ten in the morning. Not that there was much of it in evidence either. Magners (very Irish) or something soft; a Coke for the teetotal rugby fan, a rare breed, rather like a teetotal rugby player is rare. Such abstinence was appropriate, however, as the main actor, as it was to turn out, is said to be teetotal: Sam Warburton, who sounds like a character from “Emmerdale”.

One had expected the streets of Puerto Alcúdia to be alive with the sound of “Bread Of Heaven”. The only bread was that of a bacon sandwich. The atmosphere was subdued, tense, one of anticipation, of destiny. The French were, after all, rubbish, and indeed, for much of the game, they did little to disprove the idea. Here was a team with the capricious Lièvremont sitting next to an assistant with a mop of hair that made him look alarmingly like the wackily-astrological Raymond Domenech, the French football team’s former coach. What is it with French teams that they get lumbered with coaches that they have no alternative but to completely ignore?

For nearly twenty minutes, all went well. The French had made a clear statement of intent; they were as rubbish as everyone had said they were. And then it happened. From a melee of what seemed merely to be one of those ingredients sadly all too often missing from contemporary rugby – a good old, stand-up fistfight – a forlorn figure trooped off. Sam took up his seat at the pitch-side Woolpack for a glass of non-alcoholic Brains. No one knew the awful truth, least of all the commentator Nick Mullins. Only when the words “sent” and “off” flashed onto the screen did the truth dawn on the myopic Mullins who had managed to miss the red card.

The tense atmosphere turned into an indignant one. Tiny said, more than once, “cheated by an English referee in the first game, cheated by an Irish one now.” What had happened to Celtic solidarity? But what else could have been expected? Monsieur Rolland, Irish by birth but French by name. Fluent in the language. There had been a clue before kick-off, his coming onto the pitch wearing a beret, a string of onions around his neck and whistling “La Marseillaise”.

One of the punters believed that a half-time review would result in the card being rescinded. It wasn’t. The half-time punditry was no less indignant, whipped up by the one-time poor-man’s Des Lynam, Steve Rider, managing to do a passable impression of a presenter who hadn’t the faintest idea about the sport he was presenting. Francois Pienaar abandoned his Afrikaans roots and became an honorary Welshman. Dieu, he was incandescent. Martyn Williams looked stunned, but maybe years of smashing into opposition forwards have left him permanently so.

Sam remained sadly rooted to his seat, as Monsieur Rolland removed the earpiece of his iPod with its collection of Maurice Chevalier tunes, spat out his Gitanes and blew to start the second period. Bar Bridgend needed a burst of “Cwm Rhondda” to lift the spirits. What did raise hopes was the try, but Hooky had kept hooking his kicks, Jones The Boot booted one against the upright and Halfpenny lacked half a yard.

And so the dream died. The Welsh flag came down. Bar Bridgend returned to being regular Bar Brit, Puerto Alcúdia returned to normal and the wristbanded Welsh returned through the barren land of late summer to the all-inclusive to “feed me till I want no more” and to wonder at what should have been.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Drinking World Cup

When Saturday comes. This Saturday it will be all-day pinting. Footy in the afternoon, but before comes England’s first match in the Rugby World Cup. All-day pinting for Bar Brits.

A 10.30 local time kick-off. Too early for pinting? Not on your life. The rugby fan has a prodigious capacity for alcohol. Any time, day or night, it matters nought. Cometh the rugby, cometh the drinking. A match lasting eighty minutes. A game of two halves, and a game of at least four pints.

I became truly aware of the industrial amounts of beer that can be consumed in the name of rugby in 1978. Wales versus the All Blacks at Cardiff Arms Park. A match that ended in controversy, which was about the last thing I remembered before waking up the next morning in a bedroom that was unknown to me, in a house that was unknown to me, and in a house that wasn’t in Cardiff. It was in fact somewhere in Somerset.

The obsessiveness of the true rugby devotee is as great if not greater than that of the most myopic of football fan. A then house mate of mine (who also happened to be captain of Wimbledon 1st XV) used to rise uncommonly early for him on a Saturday morning in order to watch the Lions tests against New Zealand in 1983. The early rise was doubly necessary; one, to watch the match and two, to prepare and then consume the entire contents of a supermarket by way of breakfast, liberally washed down with cans of Guinness.

For Bar Brits, the opportunities await during the World Cup. Other matches may start at eight local time, but there will be hordes of thirsty and hungry rugby aficionados banging on the shutters demanding extra full breakfasts and several large, foaming drinks. It should be rugby gold for the next few weeks.

This said, not every bar benefits from a rugby audience. During the 2007 competition, one particular bar, no longer with us (and not particularly surprising) seemed determined to do everything it could to deter the rugby watcher. An England game was suddenly switched off and the dual TV system went over to some God-forsaken Championship football match and the racing from Haydock. “No one’s interested,” came the explanation from the misery of the bar owner, which came as a shock to those who were. He was left, studying the form for the racing in his copy of “The Sun”, as the rugby deprived trooped off to find another bar.

Rugby, like cricket but unlike football, requires an intimate acquaintance with rules that not even the true fan, let alone the players, really understands. Furthermore, it is such a whirr of big blokes smashing into each other, that no one has much idea what is actually going on, and no one can follow the ball, which seems at times to be largely incidental to the game itself.

But for the completely uninitiated, suddenly captivated by the possibility and excitement of England winning something, it is a total mystery, which nevertheless demands a running commentary of incomprehension interspersed by matters unrelated to what’s happening on the plasma screen. I give you, therefore, the ladies’ view of rugby, as it was during the 2007 final, with occasional male interjections to offer a correction or information:

“Ooh-ooh, come on, push them. That’s good, ooh-ooh, what’s happened? He’s good, who’s he? Tait. Ooh-ooh, come on guys, what was that for? Too many tackles? No that’s League. I am trying you know. Ooh-ooh, that was good. Who’s he? Robinson. I like him. That was good. What’s happening now? Did you breast feed? That was a try. Who was that? Ooh-ooh, Steyn, he’s good. But he’s not one of ours. Isn’t he? Oh no, come on guys, well, George got this allergic reaction to eggs. What’s happened now? Who’s this referee? He’s Argentinian. Ooh-ooh, push him. Oh look he’s pushed him into that camera. England are better. Ooh-ooh. Oh, is it over?”

Sadly of course, England failed in their attempt to win the last World Cup. But four years before. Four years before. Matt Dawson’s incursions, Jonny Wilkinson’s drop goal, Mike Catt’s boot into the terraces. England had won, and a bar in Puerto Pollensa erupted. It must have been, I guess, one o’clock or later, thanks to the extra time. The pinting had been going on since mid-morning, and by the time that Catt kicked to touch, few could really make out what they were meant to be watching. All they could make out was that England had won, and it was therefore time for yet more pinting.

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.

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.

The Bars’ Big Day Off

What on earth is everyone going to do? A day with no bars or restaurants. We’ll all have to do some work for once. And re-arrange the location for all our meetings. Where? Nary a café nor bar with its doors open, we’ll have to use things like offices. We’ll have to make our own coffee and, so, rather than complaining about the cost of a café’s cortado, we’ll moan about the price of a packet of molido from the supermarket. Life will simply be unbearable.

The bars and restaurants of the Balearics are planning on taking a day off. All of them. Ha-ha-ha. As if. One day in the not-too-distant future, in an act of protest against the smoking ban, the coffee machines will lie idle, the tapas will be taped up and the cañas will be canned.

One supposes that the bar owners will hope that this decaffeinated day will prompt an uprising of the dislocated populace, wandering aimlessly like the lost tribes of Israel in vain search of a welcoming terrace. Government buildings will be stormed. Riots will ensue. “We need our coffee!” will shout the dispossessed. Spain’s “coffee revolution” will occur.

Will it? Hardly. First problem is going to be getting all bars and restaurants to agree as to the day. What about a Sunday? You must be joking. Busiest day of the week. Erm, so how about a Tuesday? Are you kidding? It’s market day in … (add as applicable). Tell you what. A Saturday. 9 April. You what? It’s the first day of the boat fair in Puerto Alcúdia.

The bar and restaurant owners aren’t totally stupid, unlike the airport workers. They intend to have their day of protest before the tourism season kicks in. Of course they will. They’re not going to close once the punters start streaming in from the easyJets.

But getting agreement or universal support for a day’s closure sounds as unlikely as the local population announcing a collective abstinence from coffee, regardless of whether it’s inspired by bar closure or not. There’s one very good reason why it will be hard to agree to. Self-interest. Takings may, allegedly, be down by 20, 30, 40%, but mass action by a suddenly co-operative union of bar and restaurant owners would reverse the tradition of looking after number one. If this day does go ahead and is a success, I’ll eat my coffee machine.

This is not the first time that a protest of this sort has been considered, albeit that previously it was for an altogether different reason. In Alcúdia, rather than a pointless street demo, the idea was floated of a mass closure – during the tourist season – as a way of voicing discontent with the effects of all-inclusives.

Damaging though this might have been, in various ways, it would have been intended to show the damaging, long-term impact of all-inclusives – a resort with no bars or restaurants open, because they no longer have the business. Over-dramatic perhaps, but, as demonstrations go, it would have been powerful. But it would never have happened and never will happen. It’s all down to self-interest.

If the bar and restaurant owners’ day of inaction does get agreed to, what would happen were some bars to ignore it? Are there going to be pickets flying around, trying to prevent customers getting in?

Assuming that the bars and restaurants are prepared to forego a day’s business, what about effects to other businesses? The hard-pressed ensaïmada industry, sales already generally down, will suffer a day’s loss of fresh lard being scoffed. Newspaper publishers will also suffer, because there will be no bars to buy their papers for the clientele to read, though they might also benefit as said clientele would have to actually fork out for a paper for once.

There would be ripples in the wider economy from a bar’s day of inaction, but these ripples would be nothing compared with the floods that might occur. No bar open. Where the heck do you go for a pee?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Space Monsters Ate My Atmosphere

One of my nieces is an animator. She makes models that are transformed through computer-generated imagery. She has a penchant for strange, Gerald Scarfe-like grotesques that inhabit an alternative world of the weird. I have an idea for her. Creatures with mushroom heads, thin, skeletal torsos and one tree-trunk-thick leg. These would lumber across landscapes, terrorising man and environment alike with their noxious fumes which consume air and the atmosphere. These monsters would be the Space Eaters.

One impact of the smoking ban has been that the sale of heating units for terraces has shot up. Space heaters have been common enough in bars and restaurants, but suppliers have been recording record sales as owners look to keep their clientele warm while they smoke.

Is there anything quite as ridiculous as heating outdoor air? This, let’s call it the “batty proposition”, is one argument against space heaters. But heating outdoor space has long been with us. Bonfires, braziers, no one ever objected unless they were being set fire to. The difference with the space heater is that it is environmentally harmful. Supposedly.

Space heaters have been around for years. The Germans, for example, have used them to warm Munich beer drinkers and Glühwein imbibers at Christmas markets since the 50s. In the UK, they were a rarity, only coming into vogue in the late 90s before being elevated into the position of number-one environmental killer thanks to the UK’s own smoking ban.

The side effect of all the legislation aimed at driving smokers outside was that previously unknown carbon emissions started wafting into the atmosphere and onto the radars of environmental groups and tree-hugging politicians. Friends of the Earth leapt to the defence of the environment, earholed a Liberal Democrat MEP and, bingo, the European Parliament agreed to ban space heaters, in that it agreed with a report that was to form the basis of guiding decisions by member countries.

This was in 2008 though and bans, were they to be introduced, have yet to be implemented. But don’t discount them being so. If something can be banned, then politicians will find a way of getting it banned.

Inevitably, sides have been taken in the space-heater debate, which has been warming up nicely since Brussels and Strasbourg started to stoke the fire.

An average heater uses the same amount of energy as a gas hob would use in six months and produces 50 kilograms of carbon dioxide annually, said the UK’s Energy Saving Trust. No, it produces less, said Calor Gas: 35 kgs. Compare this with the average 3000kgs from a car, said someone else. The overall impact of heaters on emissions was minimal, said an Eric Johnson from the UN’s Convention on Climate Change: less than plasma TVs, for example. Electric outdoor heaters have greater carbon burdens than the usual gas ones, said a report for the UK Government’s sustainable energy policy, but can be more efficient as they provide focussed heat.

So, round and round the debate goes. Locally, I am unaware of enviro watchdogs having had their centimo’s worth, but it can only be a matter of time if they haven’t. GOB will surely come to the aid of the environmental party, but I wonder how many GOB-ists take a coffee on a space-heated terrace. Perhaps they don’t indulge in such a past-time because to do so would be environmentally incorrect as coffee plantations are destructive of Brazilian or Kenyan eco-systems and the greenhouse effect of a bar’s coffee machine is equivalent to the warming caused by all the methane from the dung of the entire wildebeest population of sub-Saharan Africa. Or something like this.

There is apparently a law covering heaters, one which says that they must be movable and can only be used during winter months. Which sounds like the bleeding obvious. But it also says that they should be used for only four months. Really? This is the first I’ve heard of this, but it comes from one of the many reports that have appeared in the local media regarding the sudden growth in space-heater sales.

For the time being though, and until any definitive moves to put a stop to space heaters, smokers and others can be kept warm on open-air terraces. But the Space Eater monsters’ days may be numbered, because, as Friends of the Earth have said, there should be a ban on “these carbon-belching monstrosities”.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Is The Price Right? Yes and no

What was I saying yesterday? The year has barely started and the recurring theme of prices, their alleged excessiveness and their control is already being aired. As every year. And as ever, the discussion is littered with anecdotal evidence that can be cited to support an argument of excessive prices. My personal favourite remains the one about the cost of a packet of paracetamol. Five euros at a supermarket, lamented a tourist letter-writer. An example of rip-off Mallorca. Yes, it was a rip-off, but more importantly the supermarket had no right to be selling the drug; the example was the right symptom but the wrong diagnosis.

For all the talk of high prices, the Balearics’ consumer price index is one of the lowest among the regions of Spain. The most recent data related to price increases, those for November, show that the Balearics’ increase was in the lower range. Statistical information, though, does not give the whole picture, certainly not when anecdotes can be dragged out to contradict it. For the most part, the debate is biased towards individual experiences of price, be it for a meal, a coffee, this or that product which are then used as a basis for a call for someone to do something; this something often being the demand for price control.

Price regulation does exist to an extent. In the case of tobacco, for example, it is not only prices that are subject to control; so also is the distribution chain. It is an example of price regulation that might be said to work. It doesn’t create a shortage of supply or any obvious black market, two disadvantages of price control in the form of a price cap. Generally, as with the control of all medication through chemists alone, the market mechanism functions to the benefit of the consumer, eliminating any need for a more liberalised market.

Could a price-control approach be applied more widely? To the bar and restaurant sector, for instance? It’s hard to see how. Unlike the sale of tobacco through the licensed tobacconists, bars and restaurants are too diverse. Even items such as a coffee are far from being homogeneous. There are too many types of coffee, too many types of bar in too many different locations with too many different circumstances.

Price controls can bring with them certain downsides. One is a loss of quality, assuming the cap is set too low (and set too high would make a nonsense of the attempt at control). Another is the sheer complexity and cost of enforcement. Yet another is that controls run counter to the principle of the free market which, by and large, Mallorca and Spain abide by. And the free-market element has an historical political factor. Current-day market liberalism is the culmination of dismantling any vestiges of what once existed under Franco – that of price control and centralised, statist regulation of most economic activity.

The market dictates, which is how it should be. That a coffee or a plate of steak and chips might seem expensive (or cheap) is the consequence. When President Zapatero, quizzed about the price of a coffee on Spanish television, gave his reply of 80 centimos, he also offered the caveat of “it depends”. And it does depend. Depends on the market and on the bar or restaurant owner being allowed to fix his own prices. If he gets them wrong, that’s his problem. No one else’s.

It is not for government to intervene where it has no right to intervene, and one thing that the local government can do little about is the in-built disadvantage of Mallorca in terms of its isolation and its limited resources, land most obviously. Nevertheless, it is here that government should be more involved.

The costs of this isolation cannot be underestimated. The director of the small to medium-sized businesses organisation (PIMEM) has said that transport alone adds some 30% to the cost of production in Mallorca. And transport cost applies both to businesses importing as well as exporting. For the local producers, they also have to factor in the cost of land.

The vice-president of the local chamber of commerce has called for an end to the speculative acquisition of industrial and commercial land that has pushed the average cost per metre to buy a plot and establish a factory to roughly six times as much as it would be in, for example, Aragon on the mainland or over a third more than in somewhere even more isolated, the Canaries.

A further pressure on cost comes from what PIMEM’s director has described as the “minimal installations for goods transportation at competitive prices and the lack of competition between shipping companies”. This, combined with other factors, goes a long way to explaining why there is a lack of competitiveness in Mallorca, which has seen its industrial base decline by nearly 30% since 2005 (far greater a decline than in any other part of Spain). It also goes towards explaining why certain prices in Mallorca, because of the island’s geographical competitive disadvantage, are what they are.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Smoke And Mirrors: The smoking ban

Although we had thought that the smoking ban had been approved some months ago, it hadn’t fully been approved. Amidst the debacle of the downloading bill, Congress finally signed off on the smoking ban on Tuesday. Just as well really, given that it is to come into effect on 2 January.

The publicity surrounding the ban has, one would think, left no one in any doubt that lighting up inside a bar, restaurant or other public place will be prohibited. Less publicity has been given to the fact that some open-air areas are also affected. There is to be no smoking outside hospital doors and in children’s play areas. This aspect of the smoking ban makes the Spanish ban one of the most restrictive anywhere in Europe.

You wonder if the open-air aspect isn’t the thin end of the wedge. The zeal with which the Spanish Government has pressed ahead with the ban suggests it might be inclined to go further. Where? Beaches perhaps? There would doubtless be a great deal of support were it to. How long before the ban is extended to bar and restaurant terraces? Again, many would approve of such a move.

The bars and restaurants of Mallorca had launched, somewhat belatedly, a campaign to stop the ban. There had also been talk of an amendment to the bill which would have meant that the ban’s introduction would have been delayed for six months. This didn’t make a lot of sense. Everyone knew the ban was on its way, and crisis or no crisis, six months make no difference.

The arguments for and against the ban are well-known. The dire predictions of lost revenue, lost employment and potential business closure in the bar-and-restaurant sector are also well-known. There is little point in going over old ground. It is now a case of seeing whether the proof of the bill’s pudding will be reflected in less or more demand for a pudding and main course by those who disapprove or approve of its introduction.

Until the effects of the bill have been given time to show what sort of an impact the ban will have, it’s probably right to now just to keep quiet and see what this impact is. But there’s a problem with waiting for official or unofficial reports as to the impact, and it is the same problem that has dogged the propaganda of the pro- and con-lobbies throughout the time it has taken for the bill to become law.

The government’s stance, in addition to the health one, is that the ban will mean more, not less business for bars and restaurants. It bases this claim on what has happened elsewhere, such as in the UK. And this is where the problem comes in. For every bit of information that might support the claim, there is other information which refutes it. As with business, so also with health. One study can point to the harm from passive smoking, another says it is unproven, another one still debunks the whole notion. And you base what you believe about the smoking ban on your own view of smoking, backed up by information which may or may not be accurate.

We can probably predict that some months into the Spanish ban, the government will report that businesses are benefiting, while the hostelry and business associations will say something different. Who would you believe? It would all be down to where you stand on the issue. As ever.

Personally, I am hugely in favour of bars being smoke-free, but I have a mistrust of “bans”. It’s a personal liberty issue, but even this goes round in circles. What about the liberties of those who are forced to breathe in other’s smoke? (And these are pretty much the exact words that get trotted out by those who challenge the personal liberty argument.)

There is some scepticism as to whether the ban will be enforced effectively. This is scepticism largely of the “yes, but this is Spain” type. Being Spain, they do things differently, as in ignoring laws. Maybe, but don’t underestimate the power of the “denuncia”. If a bar is flouting the law, you can bet that someone will dob it in to plod, a rival bar perhaps, just as is the case with noise.

There is also some possibility for confusion. What exactly is the situation with a bar that temporarily encloses its terrace, as is the case during the colder months or when there is poor weather in summer? Does this then become “inside”? Will, as has been predicted, there be the emergence of the “cigarrón”, i.e. smoking and also drinking in the streets outside bars, and the potential for disturbance that would accompany it?

The answer to these questions and indeed to the impact of the ban we will get some time after 2 January. Whatever the answers are, the picture is unlikely to be clear, despite what government or other sources report, just as the picture from the arguments leading up to the ban have been unclear through the smoke, mirrors and smoke-screens.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Bouncy, Bouncy: Regulation of bouncers

The bouncers of the Balearics are going to have to go back to school. The regional government is proposing a law that will require bouncers to undergo an official course and to pass a test that will gauge both physical and psychological abilities to do the job.

The requirements for being accredited are wide-ranging, from understanding rights under the Constitution to being able to resolve conflicts without resorting to violent methods and to having basic abilities in both Catalan and Spanish.

The background to all this is three-fold: the death of a club goer in Madrid at the hands of bouncers; the legal vacuum surrounding the club security business; the bad image that bouncers have. The colloquial term for a bouncer is “gorila”; the nicer one is “portero”, the same word for goalkeeper.

Bouncers have tried to improve their image. In the UK they have been re-invented as “door hosts” or “door supervisors”, but the image endures, one of intimidating muscle-bound gym monkeys – gorillas. The law in the Balearics will not be too dissimilar to requirements in the UK for obtaining a “door supervisor licence”, which demands 30 hours of training; in fact, it seems to be more stringent.

At the same time as the Balearics are going down the same sort of track as the UK, there are concerns that the UK is about to take a backwards step. The Security Industry Authority, which licenses bouncers, is also a Quango and may well be disbanded. The fear is that this will mean a return to the bad old days and the re-emergence of organised crime running the club security business.

A question arises as to why there hasn’t been effective control of bouncers. A central law transferred responsibility for its being enacted in the Balearics several years ago. But it was never acted upon. A conference on civil responsibility, held in Ibiza in June this year, looked specifically at the failure to introduce regulation and recorded various reports of attacks by bouncers, including one that was racially aggravated (the Balearics law includes specific mention of racism).

One aspect of the new law, and which may explain why it has not been introduced before, is that it is likely to end up costing not only individual bouncers but also club owners. Licence charges aren’t that high in the UK, but this doesn’t mean that they might not be in the Balearics. But even a low charge adds some further financial burden as well as further regulation to an industry that awaits the introduction of the smoking ban with some trepidation; of all the “hostelry” sectors, clubs and night bars are expected to be the hardest hit by the ban. So we can probably expect some condemnation of the law.

What doesn’t seem to be being mentioned, though, is anything about tourists. As is often the case, it can be salutary to see what is being said on internet forums. In the case of bouncers, they are “aggressive”, turn people away without explanation and, in one instance, did nothing to intervene when someone was being beaten up “for 15 minutes” in a particular club. Then there is the question of age. Unless you look really young, you shouldn’t have problems getting past the bouncers was one piece of advice. A further aspect of the new law will be to deal with underage drinking, something which has been poorly tackled across the board in Mallorca and Spain, and so check ID. A problem, especially for British kids, is whether they have any.

As ever though, there will be an issue as to how rigorously new regulations will be applied and who will be doing the applying, and in the case of those currently working in the “industry”, they will have until 2014 to pass their tests. To which one might ask: why so long? Bouncers will be going back to school, but the lessons won’t be starting for some time yet.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Wear Your Shirt With Pride: Football returns

England play Hungary this evening. On Saturday, the Premier League kicks off again. Rarely have two football occasions been greeted by such a lack of enthusiasm. By me, at any rate. Not so by the local Brit bars. There is at least one that counts the number of England matches through the tourist season; days when it can expect a full house and empty barrels come the end of the evening. It won’t be the only one.

The dependence upon football, England or Premiership, seems a bizarre way of running a business. But it’s not so bizarre when one witnesses the hordes that take to the bars when Saturday (or Sunday or Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday) comes. Has anyone ever attempted to measure the level of “ancillary” business that football creates – the takings in the bars of Mallorca and elsewhere?

One wonders, though, at the enduring capacity of footy to entice tourists into parting with good money to demonstrate affiliations with teams unworthy of the price of a pint of Saint Mick. During the England game against Slovenia, I started to contemplate the peaks of beer buying during a match and the average pint consumption per punter. I never arrived at a scientific figure, but the peaks were rarely troughs and the consumption seemed massive. There are a lot of cold drinks imbibed in the name of … in the name of what?

Come the day of a match, the football shirt is ritually removed from the hotel or apartment drawer. Wear your replica shirt with pride. In England’s case, it’s the last thing anyone should be admitting to, let alone donning. Affiliation? Ah yes, a team run by an Italian, increasingly being exposed as an idiot, and populated by numbskulls such as Potato Head. Premier League and affiliation? Ah yes, to whole African tribes and a European dribbling diaspora handed fat cheques by representatives of superpowers, past and present. Rod Liddle in “The Sunday Times” at the weekend raised the possibility of Premier matches provoking nuclear attacks. To the USA and Russia, we must now, in all likelihood, add China, to say nothing of the threat of Islam.

Why does anyone care any longer? My own team, Spurs (who it might be said were to blame for a movement towards football fan alienation when they grabbed footballing aliens – Villa and Ardiles), do at least have an English manager and a smattering of English/British players, but it’s not the club of Greaves, Mullery, Gilzean and the rest. Yet, curiously, alienation has never quite caught on, despite the hopelessness of success for any club unprepared to spend the equivalent of an African nation’s GDP on … on an African player, and despite the not infrequent references to the size of those cheques and the disproportionately lamentable performances they pay for.

It’s all due to marketing, one presumes, a process that can result in a red-cheeked English child walking the streets of Alcúdia in a Messi shirt. Why? The only good reason I can think of is because it’s not a Rooney shirt. Marketing, constant and exhaustive media coverage, the 24/7 outpouring of inanities and also, just as important, the weird tribalism of football, one that is not just reserved for the English. Wear your replica shirt with pride. It’s a statement, one of lurking confrontation and of territorial bravado, like a dog urinating against a lamp-post. When England played and I hacked along to the bar, I felt under-dressed not wearing an England shirt, akin to turning up in jeans at a wedding and finding everyone else in morning suits. The replica shirt sends out a message not just to supporters of other clubs, it does so also to Johnny Foreigner. Once upon a time, a foreigner in a foreign land was advised to keep his head down, unless there was a pith helmet on top of the head and he was running the foreign land. Not now.

One can understand the Blackpool supporter turning up at a bar with an orange torso and a bright pink face. An affiliation to the totally lost cause. He’s likely to be bought drinks out of sympathy. He also knows that this season will be his only opportunity. But for most of the others, it’s an exercise in compliant manipulation, in the pressure to affirm a marketing concept rather than a football team, in tribalism disguised as support, symbolised by the replica shirt and shouted over the constant chasing of yet another pint. Not, though, that the bars will be complaining.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.