United We Speak: Catalan or Mallorquín?

When is a language a dialect, and when is a dialect a language? Opinion as to the distinction between the two is one on which you will find a lack of unanimity. Linguists themselves can’t agree.

If you are inclined to do so, you can go back far enough with most “languages” and argue that they are in fact dialects. It all depends where you want to start. But for current-day purposes, there are languages which are undeniably languages, one of them being Catalan. Or is it? A definition of a language is that it should be that of a “state”. You may have noticed that there is no Catalan “state”.

Alternatively, a language is a language if there exists a “standard” form, which is the case with Catalan. Except, of course, that there are variants. Nevertheless, the language has its own “code” in that dictionaries determine the standard form. The fact of there being variants does not negate a claim to being a language. Were it to, then English would fail the test. In the case of English, standard codes of language as set out by dictionaries, most obviously the Oxford English Dictionary, are important as there is no body which arbitrates on what is or isn’t standard English, as is the case with Spanish (Castilian) or French.

The problem with these variants, however, is the vagueness as to the language-dialect distinction. Let’s take Mallorquín. Is it a language? There is no Mallorcan state and there isn’t a specific language code, or at least as far as I am aware. Where it appears, in dictionary form, is in the work of Antoni Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll who included Balearic languages (or are they dialects) in an all-embracing Catalan dictionary.

Greater unanimity of opinion surrounds the political dimension as to whether a language is a language or a dialect. Think what you will of the politicisation of the language debate in Mallorca, but to deny the importance of politics would be to completely fail to understand the debate, and it is a debate that has been sparked into ever more controversial life by the leader of the Partido Popular (PP), José Ramón Bauzá, who has said he will reform the so-called law on linguistic normalisation if his party wins power in May next year. This would have the effect of relegating Catalan in favour of Castilian and the languages of the individual islands.

What Bauzá argues is that there is no such thing as a “unity of Catalan”. He seems to believe that Mallorquín and the other languages of the Balearics are that – languages, and not therefore dialects of Catalan. Why does he think this? The reasoning is political. If Mallorquín is distinct, then so is Mallorca from Catalonia. The political motive lies with his alliance with the Spanish state and not the aspirations of a Catalan state, language and all.

Bauzá has attempted to prove linguistically that Mallorquín is not a dialect by mentioning certain Catalan words that are not used in Mallorca or the Balearics. He has come unstuck, his theory being disproved by teachers at the institute in Inca from where a protest of schools in Mallorca is being planned against him. Moreover, even if they weren’t used, this wouldn’t prove anything. Dialects do tend to change words. Indeed Bauzá’s whole linguistic argument is preposterous. The Catalan lineage from the time of the conquest of the thirteenth century is indisputable, except by a few who claim that a brand of Catalan was imported directly from southern France. Mallorquín has fundamental differences to Catalan, such as with the definite articles “es” and “sa” (and even these aren’t used in all instances), but the differences are not so great as to suggest some sort of separate development or major divergence that might qualify it as a distinct language.

Town halls in Mallorca have responded to Bauzá by approving Catalan as Mallorca’s “own language”. Manacor has just followed the likes of Sa Pobla, Pollensa and Inca in doing so. Why should they do this? Apart from the political aspect, the town halls are their own local repositories of culture, and language is indivisible from culture. In Manacor, there is an additional political flavour. The mayor is Antoni Pastor, a member of the PP who does not see eye to eye with Bauzá.

But what makes this all the more curious is that claims for a Mallorquín language are therefore being denied by those who oppose Bauzá, be they from his own party or from the left of the political spectrum. So Mallorquín is a dialect, and to say it isn’t would be to deny the supremacy of Catalan. It is a somewhat bizarre argument when you consider nationalist pretensions to the existence of a Mallorquín language, though perhaps it isn’t so bizarre when you consider that in a different Catalan-speaking part of Spain, Valencia, the far-right has supported the notion of a separate language to the extent of calling for linguistic secession from Catalan.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether you call Mallorquín a dialect or a language. What does matter is where you stand on the issue politically. And that, it would appear, is all that matters.

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.

Comprehension Lessons: Education in Mallorca

Hype, spin, fantasy. Ill-informed, wrong, misleading.

Pick any of the above. Now interpret it. Comprehend it, in other words, by using other words, and also be able to use it in context.

You are probably not a student at a secondary school in the Balearics. Were you to be, you wouldn’t be much good at interpreting or comprehending. And this is not an English test. Interpretation of text, any text, is something you’re pretty lousy at.

Why choose the above words? It can often be revealing to discover what is trotted out on the internet in the name of Mallorca and the Balearics, and which can be any of the above. “Fantastic.” “High standards”. Just two examples of what is said about education in Mallorca. You can interpret these examples as being indicative of these words. Or rather, you should interpret them thus, if, that is, you take time to look at the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report into educational standards which is produced under the auspices of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

This report looks not only at national standards. In the case of Spain, it breaks them down by regions. Not all, because not all are covered, but most. In three main categories – mathematics, reading comprehension, science – the Balearics are in the bottom five. In fact, only in maths do the Balearics climb out of the bottom four, and only the Canaries and the “autonomous cities” of Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, are worse than the Balearics.

Fantastic? Doesn’t sound like it, does it. Of the three measures, the Balearics are below the Spanish average and, by quite some margin, the OECD average.

The findings are significant. They give a wholly different impression of educational standards than the “hype” would have it, and there is an unmistakable pattern to them. The four non-mainland parts of Spain are the worst places for children to be educated. This raises its own question. Are these places somehow disadvantaged when it comes to the provision of education? There is another possibility. Maybe they’re just not very good. The teaching unions would suggest that there is a disadvantage and an inequality between regions of Spain.

If one considers economic performance and levels of wealth as indicators of advantage or disadvantage, there is something to be said for this argument. Ceuta and Melilla have the lowest GDPs of all the Spanish regions. The Balearics rank only 12th out of the 17 regions plus the two autonomous cities, but there is a very different picture when you consider GDP per head of population. The Balearics are one of the wealthier regions, up there with the big earners such as Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia.

Living and educational standards do not necessarily coincide, but a generally accepted principle is that the higher the standard of living, the better the education. So what’s going wrong in the Balearics?

For some, the low standards being achieved will be evidence of the politics of language. Possibly so. The problems with comprehension could indeed be evidence of this, as may also be the level of immigration. But there is arguably a more important issue, and it is one that contradicts the “fantastic” image. It is one of indiscipline and poor motivation and one, moreover, which debunks the notion that higher standards of living automatically mean better education. Or better pupils at any rate.

In state schools, and one probably should distinguish between public and private education, a complaint that is made is that disruptiveness is often the product of children of the better-off. Why should this be? A reason lies with the wealth and with the knowledge that an education doesn’t matter if there are over-indulgent parents who will see the kids right when they leave school. A further issue, and particularly so in coastal areas, is the lifestyle. The beach, the summer and all that goes with them are seductive in creating a laidback atmosphere. It might sound great, but not if it inculcates an attitude whereby school is an inconvenience prior to papa setting you up in a bar or the family business or your taking a job as a waiter or on a boat.

It is no coincidence that the best-performing regions are the likes of Castile-Leon and Madrid. It is also no coincidence that two other regions with strong sun-and-beach connections aren’t that much better than the Balearics, namely Murcia and Andalusia.

The language of education and the constant fuss that surrounds it will probably be singled out as the reason for poor educational performance, but to do so would be to disguise other factors which may be the real reasons for this performance. Whatever the reason, interpret the words correctly and don’t believe the hype.

* The findings of the report relate to 15-year-old pupils. All regions of Spain were included except for Valencia, Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Culture At A Price

Where would we be without the plenitude of statistics that inform every last bit of Mallorcan and Spanish life? An awful lot less bored probably. To the diligent data collection performed at national level, we must add the micro-managerialism of the Balearics own mathematically minded. The islands’ statistics institute has been bean-counting around in local cultural life in contributing to the national annual report into cultural stats. Yes, every last thing is entered into Excel, given a percentage, an average and a comparison. It is numerical Nirvana.

It doesn’t come as a huge surprise to learn that spending on culture (broadly defined to include entertainment as well as the more high-brow) has fallen. This descent into Philistinism is not as pronounced in the Balearics as some other parts of Spain, but spending slumped by nearly 7% in 2009. The growth areas were home entertainment and the internet, which are culturally questionable, and the theatre, which isn’t. Live music performance has been one of the biggest losers.

The staggering precision of these statistics is that we are told that in 2009 there were 11,378 popular musical concerts in the Balearics. Who on earth counts this stuff and why? Indeed, how do they count it? The decline in concerts was to the tune of 1,541 and the number of spectators fell by 132,000. This is mind-boggling in terms of its apparent uselessness.

Nevertheless, a snapshot of cultural health or sickness has some merit in allowing for general quality of life to be gauged. So the number-crunching is not completely useless. What is unclear from that figure for concerts is how many, if any, were free. There is an awful lot of culture in Mallorca which doesn’t cost anything, such as that during fiestas or staged thanks to the generosity of town halls or whoever. But this free culture isn’t free because much of it comes out of the public purse, which means taxpayers’ money.

As a very rudimentary guide, let me give an example of what this costs. In Santa Margalida a couple of years ago, they proposed raising the annual spending on fiestas to around 800,000 euros. The town has a registered population of roughly 10,600. 75 euros per person for the fiestas in the town, Can Picafort and Son Serra, and a goodly chunk of this goes up in smoke in a short period – the half an hour it takes to send rockets into the sky. Well, fireworks are culture, are they not?

75 euros doesn’t sound a lot, except of course it isn’t distributed evenly, while there are plenty who pay not a centimo – tourists and those from other towns. Sometimes there is an attempt to generate income, as was the case with the Carl Cox concert in Can Picafort this summer. Free to residents of the town, it cost up to 35 euros a pop for anyone else, and wasn’t that well-attended, probably as a consequence and despite Cox’s celebrity.

A question arises with this “free” culture as to whether, rather than simply compiling numbers, anyone ever indulges in some more meaningful maths, as in conducting a cost-benefit analysis. If income to a town, through its bars, restaurants and so on, outstrips the costs of putting on events, then fine. But it would be nice to know if it actually does.

Of course, one can argue that even running at a loss should not matter, as fiestas and their like are all part of “cultural life”. True, but this highlights the nebulous nature of what cultural life actually means, especially to visitors.

That great example of specious statistics gathering, tourism spend, has, as one of its core measurements, money tourists spend on “excursions”. The problem with this is that excursions are undefined. They can mean anything from a trip to an historic site or to Pirates and Marineland, and I rather suspect that it normally means the latter two. Both are “cultural” in the broadest sense of the word, but neither qualifies as cultural tourism of the sort tourism bodies have in mind.

Buried within the report into cultural spending is a rather telling statistic (yes, there is one). It is the fact that the number of visitors to the Balearics in 2009 who came for cultural purposes fell. Don’t ask how they arrive at the figure; let’s just accept that they do. As cultural tourism is supposed to be such an important element of “alternative” tourism, such a decline does not lend support to this importance. And again, one has to ask what the visitor means by cultural purposes.

Where this report is good is that it does at least attempt to distinguish between different cultural activities, and it is this specificity is what is missing from information we are fed about tourists. If this were to be forthcoming, then we might be able to form a better appreciation as to what culture means to tourists, but one has the suspicion that the vagueness of the concept is rather as tourism bodies prefer it. This-a-way it can mean anything you like. But whatever it means, it will still cost, and there will be a statistician to put a figure to it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Double Fault: Nadal and celebrity advertising

Rafael Nadal has played his last match as the promotional face of the Balearics. An amicable parting of the ways between the Manacor muscle and the tourism ministry means that the latter will not have to cough up for the final part of its contract, some two million euros.

Is this a case of seeing sense that Nadal’s celebrity amounted to buying a pig in a poke when it came to the islands’ promotion? Actually not. There is an altogether different reason. The tourism ministry is technically bankrupt. It owes 47 million euros, much of the debt being in the form of repayments to financial institutions. The regional government has had to step in and find around 20 million to help the ministry out. The remaining 27 million will need to be recouped from what Joana Barceló terms a “stability plan”.

Stability and the tourism ministry. Chance would be a fine thing. One has to have some sympathy for the minister Barceló, only the fifth incumbent in the post since the current administration took office in 2007. We have come to appreciate, thanks to the various corruption charges and hearings, that the ministry, via its agencies, was out of control. We hadn’t appreciated, until now, just how much out of control it was. The ministry’s debt equates to 70% of its entire budget.

Some months ago, I spoke to Antoni Munar the new director-general of tourism development. Pleasant chap, Sr. Munar, jocularly telling me that there wasn’t any money. I knew about all the problems, he asked. Yes, I joshed in return. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Munar and Barceló face one hell of a challenge.

The first challenge is knowing where on earth the money’s coming from for promotion. The second is knowing on what to spend it. Wisely. And the celebrity promotion has been anything but wise: Douglas, Schiffer, de Lucia, Kournikova (Kournikova for heaven’s sake!) and Nadal – where has any of it led to?

The casting of celebrities has, to an extent, been understandable, assuming, that is, you adhere to the principle of celebrity obsession. In no small part, the use of celebrities reflects the perception, of some, that Mallorca is a celebrity island. Perhaps it is, but such a perception creates a falsehood of shallowness and an image that is unrelated to the lives of many who live in Mallorca and, more importantly, who come to Mallorca on holiday.

Just one of the problems with celebrity advertising, and indeed much of the tourism advertising full stop, is that it treats its market as being one. This is a nonsense. There is no one tourism market, be it in terms of geography, age, income, and any other distinction you care to mention. It treats its market as one, but in reality speaks to hardly any of it. Nadal might have seemed appropriate, but he is also immensely wealthy and he was careering around on a luxury boat.

As a consequence, the advertising excludes the “ordinary” tourist. There may be an element of aspiration, but this is meaningless to an altogether more savvy and cost-conscious tourist than might once have been the case. Turn the celebrity image around, if you will, and imagine someone more “ordinary”. For sake of argument, an actor such as Philip Glenister, one with some Mallorcan connection. Ordinary bloke. Believable enough. But ordinary blokes mean ordinary tourists. And this is exactly the point. Extraordinary celebrities mean extraordinary tourists, and they alone. Extraordinary tourists do not mean tourism in a Mallorcan style.

There were also logisitical and branding problems with the Nadal promotion. Adverts either not appearing or doing so at strange times of the night or on obscure channels. Nadal promoting a brand which doesn’t exist – the Balearics – as opposed to those which do, the Mallorcan brand or those of the other islands.

It is not as though this latter aspect and the need to differentiate between different groups of tourist are not understood. Looking back at the 2009 season, in an interview with “abcmallorca” given by the then director of IBATUR Susanna Sciacovelli, she said that “we want to address customers by areas of interest” and that “every island needs its very own brand image”. So what was with the Nadal promotion, then?

Celebrity advertising is well-established, but its effectiveness is very much open to debate. In India, cricketers are paid huge sums to endorse products. An article from rediff.com of September 2003 by Madhukar Sabnavis, the Ogilvy & Mather agency’s country manager, pointed to advantages, such as the attention-grabbing nature of such advertising, but also to negatives. Take these. “Celebrity advertising is seen as a substitute for absence of ideas.” “(The client) feels that the presence of a well-known face is an easy way out” (when a better alternative can’t be thought of). “Few agencies actually present celebrity advertising as a solution to client problems.”

Nadal was probably an easy way out. Mallorcan, famous, successful. He’ll do. Here’s Sciacovelli again: “TV advertisements featuring him … in the UK and Germany … are (were) highly effective.” They were? And they and Nadal cost a fair wedge. Money that is no longer available, if it ever was. Joana Barceló is hinting that, though there is a hope that Nadal can still perform a promotional function, the days of celebrity advertising are over.

With less money around, let us hope that what there is will be spent wisely, but don’t discount the celebrity making a return. Sabnavis also said that a further reason for celebrity advertising was “a desire to rub shoulders with the glitterati”. And such a desire is the fault not just of those who commission such advertising. It is the double fault of an element of local society that is in thrall to celebrity. Be very careful what you wish for.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Sport For All (Except Mallorca)

The World Travel Market in London takes place from 8 to 11 November. What is described as “the premier global event for the travel industry” will this year be devoting considerable attention to sports tourism. Which is why the Balearics will be concentrating on promoting wine.

At the WTM a report on sports tourism will be launched, one that will present a “road map for lucrative opportunities within the sports tourism industry”. According to the WTM organisation, sports tourism is flourishing where traditional tourism is in decline. It goes on to say that tourism boards need “to be more proactive in identifying events and activities which (will) attract visitors and promote their destination to a wider audience”.

Sports tourism falls into two categories – spectator events and participation. The reporting of the WTM in November has focussed on the first, with particular attention being given to the “legacy” and “minefield” of major sporting events. For Mallorca, this is something of an irrelevance. There have been attempts, unsuccessful ones, at staging major events – well, one, the America’s Cup – but otherwise they have been pipe dreams, such as Formula 1 in the streets of Palma. This was the brainwave of former president Jaume Matas. A trip he made to Valencia as part of this idea is just one of the many items that has cropped up in the list of allegations he faces.

Unfortunately, anything that smacks of something even vaguely “major” ends up smelling less than rosy. Another great Matas venture, the Palma Arena velodrome, was the prime cause of all the allegations that started to flow in his direction. The velodrome itself has hardly been a huge success. The Mallorca Classic golf tournament, from which the current government pulled the financing some three years ago, even managed to find itself caught up in corruption investigations when the police paid the Pula golf course a visit earlier this summer. Then there were the ambitions for Real Mallorca, further pipe dreams, those of the man with the piping business, Paul Davidson. All those tourists flocking to watch the team – so he had hoped. Last heard of, Davidson, having been removed from the board of his own company, was in the US looking to flog a gadget that plugs oil leaks. Shame he couldn’t have come up with something that plugs leaks in a football club’s finances.

When it comes to the “lucrative opportunities” of sports tourism, Mallorca probably has to settle for less of the lucre through participation rather than events. Which brings us inevitably to the familiar themes: golf, cycling, canoeing, Nordic walking. Stifle that yawn.

If only the promotion of this tourism was done effectively, there might be grounds for some optimism. But it isn’t. Take golf. In 2008 a promotional campaign was devised under the bizarre slogan of “much more than golf”. What was this supposed to mean? It is probably as well that the tourism promotion agency IBATUR has been scrapped. Not because it was allegedly up to its neck in corruption, but because it was useless.

At least we can console ourselves that the bay of Alcúdia “Bienestar Activo” brand of canoeing, hiking etc., etc. has been revived, albeit with far less money. I say console ourselves, not that it is any clearer what it all entails than it was when it was ditched in September because of lack of central funding.

The WTM organisation very kindly points out that sports tourism “will post record profits and contribute an astonishing 14% of overall travel and tourism receipts by the end of 2010”. There’s a nice thought. For someone. Somewhere other than Mallorca. But if not sports tourism, then how about a bit of sacred-sites tourism? At the WTM there will also be sessions on what is a fast-growing sector of tourism – visits to ancient places of worship. Well, I suppose there is always Palma’s cathedral.

Sports tourism. Sacred-sites tourism. It sounds like things will be a bit slow for Mallorca and the Balearics at this year’s WTM. Just as well there’s all that vino for them to get stuck into and to promote. And all those thousands of wine-buff tourists to anticipate. If only.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Probability And Logic: Tourism occupancy and spend

A good friend of mine from university days went on to become a government statistician. I once spent an afternoon lounging in a villa pool, having him explain to me the meaning of certain mathematical symbols. I can’t say I was significantly the wiser as a result, but I had at least tried to attain some understanding.

All mathematicians, like chess players, are mad. This stems from having a world view determined by logic or equations and having to deal with the rest of us who are determinedly illogical. Even the act of getting up in the morning is an equation, where E equals the effort of shifting yourself from under the duvet, T is the time it takes to have a shave and eat a bowl of muesli and x (or maybe x-squared) is the probability of being hit by a meteorite when you step out the front door.

So when statisticians present us with their figures, we are inclined to believe it is all the work of crackpots. (And, yes, I know there is a difference between maths and stats, but you’ll just have to accept they’re the same for now.) Equally, because none of us have the faintest idea how they ever arrive at the figures, we dismiss them as mathematical mumbo-jumbo.

There have been some good statistics lately. For this July, by comparison with the same month last year, hotel occupancy rates in the Balearics have risen by 10.1% and tourism spend has also increased – by 12.5%. We might dispute the former, but at least we can appreciate that the calculation shouldn’t be that difficult. The latter, though … well of course we say it’s crap because we saw a restaurant with hardly a soul in it the other day. We resort to our anecdotes and subjectivity, because we have no other way of questioning the men with wild, staring eyes and electric grey hair who inhabit the statistical other world.

And so it was also with the editorial in “The Bulletin”. Who was spending all the money, it asked. “I don’t really know and nor do the people who have complied the report,” came its own answer. It’s not for the paper to try and find out; it is only a newspaper after all. The answer, one of them, lies with the mysteries of the statistician’s science, such as regression modelling, which for the paper would mean ever more of a regression into a Janet and John mode of journalism or a stock photo of Naomi Campbell.

One thing Mallorca does quite well, along with beaches, cold lager and pouring oil on bread, is the study of tourism. The university in Palma is world class when it comes to research into the economics and statistics of the industry. It’s this academic rigour which translates itself into governmental research and statistics. We might not believe the figures, and governments are not unknown to massage figures, but the science, be it academic or governmental, is generally robust. Academics, for example, can’t just pluck numbers out of thin air, as their published work is subject to independent peer review.

In Palma they have found out who spends the money. There is research there into the use of statistical modelling to ascertain – by age, by nationality, by professional grouping – who spends what. What you get with statistics is the attempt to give as realistic a snapshot as possible within the parameters of the probability models applied. They are never completely accurate, but nor are they fiction. Were they, and some might say the latest occupancy and spend figures are made-up propaganda to give a feel-good lift to the tourism and wider economy, then why have previous figures been negative? But because we don’t understand the methods, and because academics and governments are generally lousy at explaining them in simple terms, if at all, we fall back on our anecdotes and consider these to be the truth, when they are nothing of the sort.

There is a problem, though, with the figures in that they are too general; they don’t, for example, distinguish between different resorts, hence the not unreasonable scepticism we may feel. One is reluctant to say that July’s figures indicate a real recovery – and the predictions before the weather in the UK went belly up was that August’s wouldn’t be as good – but they are cause for some hope.

There is another, simpler way of looking at the July figures. 10.1% rise in occupancy; 12.5% rise in spend. The two may not match, but they are not so far apart. Logic might suggest that one would lead to the other, though for the statistician the 2.4% difference would – in all probability – not be logical.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Public Sector General Strike In Mallorca (8 June)

In line with strikes in other regions of Spain, there is to be a public sector general strike across the Balearics in protest at measures adopted by the Zapatero administration to tackle Spain’s parlous economic situation.

The strike will take place on Tuesday, 8 June. All the main unions are supporting the strike and have the additional support of the unions for the police and the Guardia Civil. To what extent the police will be affected by the strike is unclear, but areas of the public sector which will most certainly be affected are – among others – health services, schools, colleges and the university, train services and the town halls. There will be minimal services at hospitals, similar to those on Sundays, and the regional government has said that there will be services for other areas affected by the strike. It has advised, for example, that children be taken to schools as usual, though the indications are that most teachers will be on strike. At present, it is unclear whether the transport sector, other than trains, will be affected. Were it to be, then there could be an impact on airports, ports and buses.