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.

Mr. Kyle’s Holidays

Goodbye, summer. Goodbye, August. Goodbye to 31 days of total … of total, erm, brown stuff. For the hyper-sensitive, I have changed one word and substituted it with two.

Facebook is a fabulous resource. When you’re mulling over what to write, toying with the withholding of state money to various town halls in Mallorca or grants for various trade fairs being stopped while at the same time the building of the Palacio de Congresos is going full steam ahead, Facebook can throw up something altogether more important. Like August.

The bit about the 31 days of total you know what are not my words. They come from Facebook. He knows who he is, as he will also know his reference to “The Jeremy Kyle Show”. A commentator will also know who he is, he who has made reference to chav families and scenes from “Benidorm”. (I have incidentally deleted the expletives.)

Ok, a bit of context is needed here. These remarks emanate from bar owners in The Mile area of Alcúdia. Less than complimentary about August, they are also less than complimentary about some of the punters to be found in the area. How to win friends and influence potential customers, you might think. Possibly, but the sentiments have not exactly been known not to be aired previously. What they refer to is the fact that August’s tourism, if I can be polite, is not of quite the same standard as that of other months of the summer, such as July or September.

The August moan, as I suppose we should call it, has long been with us. Longer certainly than since August 2007 when I wrote about this very subject and wrote about it, moreover, from the point of view of a business in Playa de Muro where the tourist might be thought to be less chav, have deeper pockets and tend not to appear on “The Jeremy Kyle Show”. The August moan is most certainly not solely confined to Alcúdia’s Mile.

The allusion to “The Jeremy Kyle Show”, if you’re not quite up to speed with this, is one that characterises tourism punters (the female variety, that is) as being akin to Karen Matthews, though possibly not quite as attractive and mercifully less likely to indulge in fake kidnappings. The Kyle show is inhabited by such people.

The reference, that to the programme “Benidorm”, has, for me, some association with the Kyle show. One of the funniest moments in any episode of “Benidorm” was when an Al Jolson tribute (“Mal Jolson”) was performing. The look of jaw-dropped, appalled bemusement on the face of Gavin when he realised that he was watching an act who had “blacked up” was both hilarious and probably very similar to my own when I first saw the Kyle show.

This is, of course, extraordinarily unfair on the overwhelming majority of tourists who aren’t likely to turn up on the Kyle show and is also unfair on those who are neither chavs nor simply cheapskates. But the point is taken.

However, it’s not as if August is the only month when Kyle-like tourism descends on parts of Alcúdia or other resorts. In early June, a month of generally genteel and well-heeled tourism, I happened across some visitors who were staying in a certain hotel not that far from the bars owned by my friends mentioned above.

“It’s like ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’,” said one.

What we have to deduce from this is that Jeremy Kyle, whether he is aware of it or not, has introduced a whole new category of tourist, a whole stratum of society (British) that is now Kyle-esque. (In fact he probably is aware of it and more than happy that it exists.) His show, and his type of guest, has passed into the popular lexicon. In a sense, it is a great cultural achievement; to have lent your name to a section of society.

No one deserves to be barred from holidaying, whether Kyle-esque or not. Everyone deserves a holiday. Most people would probably agree, so long as some of the holidaymakers were not in their own backyards.

August, peak season, should be a month for businesses to really reap the benefits. That it may not be is not, however, just down to the Kyle-like tourist. It’s an expensive month for any tourist, and it is a month which attracts a predominantly family tourist, for obvious reasons, who has forked out heavily on the cost of the holiday alone.

It isn’t the best of months. Not as good as it should be. I can totally understand bar owners and others being grateful to see the back of it. Welcome to September.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Flick When You’re Winning

Spain have failed to add a further World Cup title to the nation’s list of footballing honours. They were knocked out in the semi-finals, going down three-one (on aggregate) to Belgium who then succumbed to Italy in the final, the home nation being crowned the 2011 Subbuteo World Cup champions.

The World Cup was played over the last weekend in Palermo. It has fallen in the midst of Mallorca’s fiesta season during which all manner of table games are played. Pollensa’s Patrona, for instance, has more or less a whole day of such games.

Table football games, eclipsed by PlayStation and what have you, still hold a place in nations’ affections, and the Spanish are one of these nations. The most obvious of the games is table football itself, a crash-bang-wallop of wrist action and toe-ended attempts on goal. Though some finesse is required, as in the manoeuvring of the ball under close control in order to set up the shot, it is a deeply unsatisfactory game. It is inflexible, a rod of players that can only ever move in formation, square across the pitch, as though they were Ray Wilkinses on a steel pole.

Table football, though, is a survivor. It is still with us in bars in Mallorca and elsewhere. And here, as with with the full English breakfast tradition, is an opportunity for Bar Brits. International table football tournaments. Put them on over a few days in a resort like Alcúdia and they would be a recipe for fierce national pride and considerable drinking among any number of nationalities.

But more sophisticated, more refined, more skilful would be the Subbuteo tournament. Though there is greater potential for harm to be caused to Subbuteo players than to those on a rod of iron, there is a code of conduct that is applied by the Federation of International Sports Table Football, of which the Spanish Association Española de Jugadores de Futbol de Mesa is a member. Anyone guilty of snapping an arm or the legs of a Subbuteo player is subject to disciplinary procedures (I’m not kidding, you can have a look for yourselves on the federation’s website).

Subbuteo was always the Barcelona of table football to the hard-working, long-ball, huff-and-puff of table football itself. The spin around an opposing player to effect a deft touch on the ball, a push to the right with a gentle flick by the index finger and, in seemingly one movement, the unleashing of a shot past a despairing goalkeeper, skewered like a kebab on the end of a thin metal rod of his own (or in more modern versions, a plastic controller).

My own Subbuteo career spanned some fourteen years. I was only 25 when I decided to hang up my plastic men on plastic domes. It was not an injury that caused my retirement, it was not that I had been unable to cope with the stardom and had gone off the rails in a George Best style (and Subbuteo never produced a drunken George as such). I called it a day because I knew I had reached my peak.

In 1980 I played the perfect Subbuteo game, one of high tempo, fabulous flicking, slick spinning and passing. It was the enactment of the Everton-West Ham FA Cup semi-final. My hapless Hammers opponent was brushed aside; he was given a Subbuteo footballing lesson. It was his Hidegkuti and Puskas moment. Brian Kidd bagged five, and the result was 11-0.

In the World Cup just played, Spain had a player called Flores. He was the one to register the one in the 3-1 aggregate loss to Belgium. In an otherwise dull encounter (2-0, 1-0, 2-1 to the Belgians in the three other match-ups), Flores trounced Dehur 10-2. Subbuteo has flowered thanks to the Spaniard Flores, just as it had 31 years ago. And despite going out in the semis, it proved that Subbuteo is alive and flicking in Spain.

With this in mind, I propose a grand Subbuteo bar tournament, one to bring the nations of Mallorca together. But I would only be a spectator. I’ve had my day. It’s a young man’s sport now, demanding highly trained index fingers as opposed to those whose training was mainly confined to curling around a pint glass. But I would hope that an English champion could emerge, one who could be encouraged by our singing “flick when you’re winning, you only flick when you’re winning”. Because in Subbuteo, if you are not flicking then you cannot be winning.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The World’s Most Popular Breakfast

The bacon must be lean; crispy but certainly not incinerated. The egg yolk should be runny but white sealed and without pools of what comes from a docker’s nose. The tomato should, on no account, be from a tin and therefore not be a tomato. The sausage should, like the bacon, be reasonably well done and not be pink inside. The beans’ sauce should not have acquired a glutenous state.

I am, you might realise, somewhat fastidious when it comes to the full English. I don’t mind confessing both that I demand high standards and that I actually eat full Englishes. They are a guilty pleasure. Firstly, because it is claimed that they aren’t necessarily good for you (I’d dispute this). Secondly, because consuming the full English is being oh so British. I should eschew the bacon ‘n’ eggs in favour of going-native breakfasting, which means the ensaïmada. Sorry, but if I’m going to have any lard, I want it with sausage and not in the form of a twirly thing with a sugar coating. The ensaïmada is rubbish. Over sweet, over hyped and over here.

It is a short pastry step from the execrable ensaïmada to the puffed-up contortion of the croissant. The two are dough to the pretentious fellow travellers of anything but the full English. And neither is any good.

The croissant is not originally French, but French it has become. Because it is French, as with anything else that can be noshed or imbibed that has a French label, the French would claim it to be superior to anything from anywhere else. Such culinary jingoism makes it the more surprising, therefore, that the French themselves have placed the full anglais in the number-one position on the breakfast chart.

A poll by Hotels.com has revealed that 19% of French people rate the full English as being number one. The survey of 2,400 travellers from more than 20 countries in all finds that the F.E. is the most popular first meal of the day.

The breakfasting habits of different nationalities can be hard to comprehend. The Dutch are arguably the maddest of all. Whatever made them think that putting little bits of chocolate onto bread and butter was a good thing? Probably the same thought process that has led them to eating raw herrings. They simply have no idea. Yet the Dutch, giants that they are, should thoroughly enjoy getting stuck into a full English. As should the Germans and the Scandinavians, and most obviously the Danes who, rather than eating Danish bacon, export most of it to the UK.

The discovery that the full English is in fact the world’s number one breakfast should come as no surprise, as it quite obviously is the best, and should cause Bar Brits across Mallorca to stop and think for a moment.

The much-spoken-of gastronomy of Mallorca is naturally enough Mallorcan, but some of it, the ensaïmada clearly, is lousy. Both the lousy and the not lousy gets itself a fair amount of the spotlight, but what of the gastronomy that isn’t Mallorcan?

One of the most bizarre reasons I have heard as to why a restaurant should not advertise was one offered by an Italian restaurant. People don’t come to Mallorca to eat Italian food was the argument. If this is so, then it begs a pretty fundamental question as to why the restaurant exists.

The argument was rubbish, because “Italian” has its own power to promote and to attract. So why not, therefore, “British” or “English”? Because of the association with Bar Brit and consequently with tattoos, bellies, white-turning-pink skin and Sky, this gastronomy is ignored. Yet, it can boast the best breakfast in the world, one that can come in different varieties. It could be, for instance, the grand full English, that which might be served at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand (nearly twenty quid for the real thing or “the ten deadly sins” to include also kidneys and bubble and squeak). It could come with accompanying Guinness – in a bottle and not out of some peculiar can with a syrup. It could be promoted as the “world’s most popular breakfast”.

Bar Brits could co-operate in pushing a gastronomy fair of their own, directed at the nationalities who come to Mallorca (and who also live here) and who are unaware of the great British fry-up. They could educate as to quite why a bean has been covered in a tomatoey sauce; advance the cause of the black pudding which isn’t, after all, that far removed from local sausages about which a song and dance is made.

The world’s most popular breakfast. Now get frying.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The World’s Greatest Newspaper Outrage

When Angus Deayton became the news, his position as presenter of “Have I Got News For You” became untenable. You can’t have a news comedy show in which one major item of news might be skirted around (it wasn’t of course) and in which that major item is squirming as the barbs come in from both sides.

Deayton was caught in a web spun by the “News Of The World”. Like Deayton, when a newspaper becomes news – bad news, really bad news – its position becomes questionable. Newspapers exist to report news, not to be the news. A truism you might think, except that it isn’t true.

Newspapers acquired long ago a sense of their own importance to such a degree that they have made and make their own front pages. But when this self-importance becomes so inflated that it causes a break with reality and becomes so arrogant that it strips away any vestige of moral code, then all respect is lost.

This self-importance witnessed its final, appallingly self-congratulatory act on Sunday. “The world’s greatest newspaper 1843-2011.” How dare it?

Journalists at the “News Of The World” can rightly feel indignant at the paper’s closure – those whose methods have not been underhand, that is – but they have reaped the failed harvest of a culture into which they bought. Taking the “News Of The World” shilling meant living by its moral code, or lack of one. Its fall from grace may have been the product of a small and secretive cadre associated with the paper, but this lack of grace had long existed within the paper’s consciousness and ethic of nastiness, bullying and arguably anti-democracy through abuse of power.

The Brit bars of Mallorca will now be deprived of a paper that, on Sundays and as breakfasts and roasts were consumed, became ever more grease-marked and ketchup-splattered. Many a Brit bar applies a principle of the LCD and provides for its customers the lowest common denominators of “The Sun” and the “News Of The World”. The bars may not have to wait long for a replacement. Rather than titles that have been suggested (and indeed registered two days before the announcement of the closure of the “News Of The World”), why not simply call a new rag “Sunday”. Murdoch has aspired to dominate in other spheres, so taking over the sabbath should pose no great difficulty and thus reinforce the arrogance and self-importance.

The LCD principle and its accompanying salaciousness play well among an expat and tourist audience, just as they play well with the inpat (I’ve invented another new word) back in the UK. This audience no longer has the “News Of The World” to feed its hunger for scandal and the shallow, but it will not cease to have an appetite.

William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of “The Times”, has referred to losing touch with the moral codes of the readership, defined – by him – as common sense, goodwill, help to neighbours and decent conduct in general. However, because the audience’s appetite will never be fully sated, is Rees-Mogg right? Be the audience expat or inpat, what actually is its moral code?

Amidst all the discussion about the goings-on at the “News Of The World”, it was the more sensationalist aspects of the paper’s desire for the sensational, the hacking of the phones of dead servicemen’s families and those of the parents of murdered children or the children themselves, which informed the expat (and inpat) audience debate as it thumbed through the last copy and sipped a cold San Miguel or a warm John Smiths.

The moral code of the audience isn’t offended; rather, it is stripped as bare as that of the perpetrators at the “News Of The World”. The audience laps it up and craves more; it requires being outraged by further news of the actions of a newspaper it relied upon to pander to its own outraged voyeurism.

The “News Of The World” could only have ever gone out in one way: the way it has chosen, through one grand act of self-destruction born out of the uncontrolled pursuit of the sensational, out of its disregard for morality and out of its self-importance and viciousness. The audience was not a participant in this final act, but it was a willing participant in all that went before. It feels let down. Not so much by the actions of the paper but by the disappearance of a source to feed its fix of the drug of being outraged.

Edwina Currie, who knows a thing or two about the salacious exposé, having manufactured one of her own, has placed blame for the paper’s downfall on the audience being voracious consumers of the questionable or the immoral. But then what comes first? The chicken of the public’s prurience or the egg poisoned with the salmonella of journalistic immorality? Both parties are culpable.

The “News Of The World” may have believed that whatever stories might have emerged from its hacking would have had the public on its side. Sadly, it was probably not wrong in believing this. It is the conspiracy between paper and public that is the real moral of this story and how low each will stoop in feeding and consuming the salacious.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Free Bag Of Crisps: Spanish pensionistas

It’s the moment that bars dread. They see them coming. Should they put the shutters down swiftly? Should they flee? Take to the hills? They come ever closer. A huge gaggle of them. An invading army commandeering a bar. A court like that of the Catholic Kings which would turn up wherever it would on its itinerant and peripatetic caravanning around Spain and take over a hostelry or several. British bars generally are spared, because they are British. It is the Spanish, the Mallorcan bar which bears the brunt. Who or what is this unstoppable force? It is that of the Spanish pensioner. The pensionista excursionistas.

Maybe bars should join together and arrange for lookouts at all access points into a town or resort. These lookouts could warn of a sighting of a coach that isn’t loaded to the gunwales with nice, friendly, grateful, money-loaded tourists from foreign lands. Beacons should be lit. Rockets fired. The pensionista charabanc has hit town.

The noise alone is bad enough. An elderly Maria, having secured a corner table, shouts across the room to another elderly Maria, and so it reverberates, back and forth, the pensionista vocal ping-pong. If it’s Spanish, it is not quite so decibel-shattering. If it’s Mallorquín, it breaks the sound barrier. A Concord boom of wailing. Cats on hot tin seats, screeching.

A bar in Alcúdia town was once deceptively Spanish. It was run by two British chaps. The pensionistas used to be blissfully unaware. They would enter, take over every available seat, place orders for a cortado or a caña and then … . Then they would issue their demands. Demands which were greeted, not by the resigned acceptance of a Spanish bar owner buckling, as though some protection-racket extortion were being performed, but by a curt four-letter word accompanied by a three-letter one (or their Spanish equivalents).

The demands are for free plates of crisps or olives or nibbles of other varieties. While a bar might commonly dish these out in any event, it is not the norm for them to be demanded, and demanded by entire busloads. But it is, and it is expected. The other norm is for the cortado to act as a lubricant to the packed lunch or boccadillo that pops out of many a handbag. Yet a further norm is the time. These are never swift cortados, these are never in-and-out jobs. The bar owner looks on forlornly, calculating the revenue from the cortados and balancing it against the loss from platos combinados that sit in the kitchen, waiting for their microwave. And waiting.

The bar is not the only potential target. Also in Alcúdia town, a friend explained how once there was a ring on the bell of her house. A pensionista was on the doorstep and asked if she might use the toilet. Being of a naturally altruistic disposition and being confronted by some Spanish antiquity in need of relief, she took pity. Pity which quickly turned to rejection when, as with male hitchhikers who hide behind a bush while their female companions flag down an unwary driver, the toilet-seeker called out to her compatriots. Household lavatories are ill-prepared for flushing on fifty occasions over a short period of time. Always assuming the period of time would have been short. And there was no guarantee of that.

Moving on from the pensionistas and, for once, a second, unrelated subject. Mallorca Rocks.

The confusion that surrounds the concerts at the hotel this season grows, the regional tourism ministry effectively turning down a request for a licence on the grounds that it doesn’t have the authority to grant one. Where are we at with all of this, if, as reports seem to suggest, the hotel cannot make the concerts open to the public (which presumably means an entrance-paying non-guest)?

The opposition to the concerts is, notwithstanding issues in respect of licences, unfortunate, to say the least.

Ask yourselves this. How can these concerts that would bring music acts of international renown to Magalluf and the island, that would positively enhance the reputation of resort and island, that would be a smack of originality among what is all too often a poverty of innovation, that would, moreover, finish before midnight on their once-weekly occurrence be anything other than a benefit, and one not just to Mallorca Rocks? I’ll say no more.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Manners Maketh Mate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Zoo Time: El Clásico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Feels Like Team Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.