Vive La Différence: It’s all in the mind

“They come and expect a load of money. They work one day, and then the next, they can’t be bothered to get up. They’ve been out till late, at a club or somewhere. Drinking or, you know, other stuff. Tell me, how many make a success of their businesses? Only a few. It’s the mentality. That’s the problem.”

Fancy taking a guess as to who this is about and who said it?

Give up? Then I’ll tell you. It was a Mallorcan who said it, and he was talking about the British and specifically British business owners. The mentality is one, I have to presume, of idleness and a proneness to hedonism before graft.

I did argue the point, but it wasn’t really worth it. Once the mind is made up, it is made up. One, two, maybe three examples from the past that fit the argument, and the argument is won. That’s how it works. From small examples, whole generalisations are made. Mallorcans do it. The British do it. We all do it. I can turn the argument around, cite examples of exactly what he was complaining of in the British and apply them to Mallorcans. But what would be the point?

It was unfair. Yes, there probably are, in fact I know there are, cases that confirm his argument, but I know an awful lot of cases which don’t. Bar owners (and this was really all about bar owners) may not be making massive successes of things at present, but they are doing ok, working long hours, not going to clubs. Who can honestly say they are making massive successes of things just now? Mallorcans included, especially the ones who complain endlessly of the effects of the “crisis” and all-inclusives.

Why did this even come up? It was apropos of very little. Just going off on one. Or maybe it was indicative of something more deep-seated, more inclined not to usually be stated. And if it was, then it raises a question. What do the Mallorcans really think about the British? Not tourists so much as the British who live in Mallorca and especially those who make their livings in Mallorca.

From one example, I could make a case for saying that they don’t rate the British very highly. But this would be to fall into the generalisation trap. The answer to my own question is that I have no real idea.

I have been trying to figure it all out, though. Was this outburst somehow representative of a tendency that has been perceptible over the recent past of crisis? One of a closing of Mallorcan ranks, one that has not been entirely surprising as a reaction to difficult times? But even if it were, it still doesn’t explain the outburst. If a business owner, British or anyone, decides not to work hard and to not make a success of his or her business, then why should a Mallorcan care? Unless they’re expecting the rent to be paid perhaps.

Is it that there is a more fundamental division? While plenty of British people have “crossed over” through marriage or through business partnership, while there are plenty of British people who have been so long on the island that they even speak Mallorquín, are the British a breed apart? If the answer to this is yes (and it almost certainly is), then it raises, and hardly for the first time, the whole issue as to how well or not the British integrate.

Yet, integration is a largely illusory state of being, especially for more recent comers, assuming you can actually define integration adequately, and I defy anyone to do so, given a contemporary society in which communications, media and other factors conspire to maintain and reinforce cultural, linguistic and social differences rather than break them down.

Ghettoisation exists not just in a physical way through proximity. It exists through social contact and, as importantly, in the head. It’s for this reason, more than any other, that integration is such a specious concept. Barriers reside through a state of mind. My Mallorcan friend was right in one respect when he referred to mentality.

But of course, the reverse applies. The indigenous population is its own ghetto of supremacy, a state that was alluded to in Guy de Forestier’s definitive “Beloved Majorcans”, and one that exerts supremacy over mainlanders and the British and which has recaptured its resonance recently, following the years of encroaching cosmopolitanism. Mallorcans, obviously, have no need to go native, because they already are. And like any native population, they assume the birthright of primacy, just as the British do in their own land. And their own mental and social ghettoes are those of looking after their own. ‘Twas ever thus, wherever you care to think of.

Own land, foreigners in a foreign land. Is that what this was all about? Maybe. Vive la différence? Is there long life to difference anywhere? Probably not.

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.

The Same Procedure As Every Year: Mallorca in 2011

For reasons best known to them, the Germans (and indeed other nationalities) broadcast a short “comedy” featuring Freddie Frinton every year around Christmas or New Year times. “Dinner For One” is largely unknown to the Brits, probably because it isn’t any good, but the so-called comedy, always shown in its original English, is so much part of German life that its catchphrase (and there isn’t much dialogue otherwise) has passed into general usage. “The same procedure as every year.”

The procedure is the same every year. The crystal ball is brought down from the loft, dusted and peered into. What does 2011 hold for Mallorca?

The odd natural disaster. Airplanes grounded. Moans about all-inclusives. That sort of thing. Pretty much like 2010 then? Same procedure as every year.

Some things you can predict quite easily, like the moaning. Come May, there will be talk of protests against all-inclusives. How do I know this? Because it happened last year and the year before. The same procedure as every year.

Less of a procedure than every year will be that all bars will close as a consequence not of the smoking ban, but because there is no football this year. Not even the rugby World Cup will compensate, especially as games will be kicking off at around eight or nine in the morning at the latest. And bars don’t really do the rugby in the same way as football in any event. I was once in a bar watching an England match during a World Cup and the game was switched off. “No one’s interested in it other than you,” came the curt explanation. Some football match featuring Coventry City came on instead. Not even Coventry though will be able to save the bars from permanent closure in 2011.

There’ll be a procedure that takes place once every four years, and that is the local elections. All the printers on the island will be log-jammed with churning out posters and literature, so all commercial life that requires printing will shut down in order that we can all be cajoled by the imperative to “Vota” this way or that, and which everyone – Brits, that is – will ignore. Same procedure as every local elections. Brit residents don’t give a stuff. Most will not even be aware that they’re taking place. Unless they want to get some printing done.

The same procedure as every four years will occur after the elections, in that most Brits will pay no attention to the fact that there may or may not be a new government and a new regional president. That the current one, Antich, may be eclipsed, along with other regional administrations of a socialist style will barely register with the Sky-watching, Sun-reading expatriate populace. They will similarly fail to acknowledge that the national president, Zapatero, might be forced into resignation as a result. Or acknowledge that the Spanish economy will be plunged into ever greater uncertainty or turmoil as a consequence.

The same procedure as 2010 will be, some might hope, the further spiralling out of control of the euro. “The Daily Telegraph”, which not be said to be entirely neutral in matters European, runs regular predictions as to the collapse of the euro, and this collapse could acclerate in 2011.

I have to thank my old friend David Novi, who writes about property matters, for drawing attention to a “Telegraph” article which reckons that sterling will be the best-performing major currency next year. Not the same procedure as every year therefore. And, if it proves to be true, some good news. Strengthening pound, Brit tourists and property buyers flocking back to Mallorca.

President Antich believes it will be a different procedure this year, with tourism increasing, thanks to improved economic outlooks in Germany and in the UK. In the UK? Does he read the papers? Maybe his prediction will prove to be right if the strengthening pound proves to also be right, but whether he’s around to welcome the tourists off the plane is another matter. More likely, there will be the new president, the gaffe-prone Bauzá of the Partido Popular, to offer his remarkable insights into tourism. This is the man who said that the Baltic states are a competitive threat to Mallorca’s tourism. And he might be president? God help us.

Otherwise, it will be the same procedure as every year. The fiestas will come around with the same programmes as usual, there will be warnings that there may or may not be a jellyfish plague, there will be talk of summer temperatures being slightly hotter or slightly cooler than normal, everyone in Puerto Pollensa will complain about dog mess, there will be letters to the press complaining about the price of car rental, a cup of coffee and paracetamol. Yep, the same procedure as every year. In a world of change, there is nowhere that remains as unchanging as Mallorca.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Intensive Uncared-for Units

“Look at all these places that are closed.” I had bumped into a mate in Puerto Alcúdia. There were a number of “locales” that were empty. The tell-tale signs of abandonment were clear – whitewashed glass, mail piling up on the floors inside, fraying posters for this and that fly-billed onto the exteriors. “Yea, but they’re units under the apartments. It’s no wonder. They stick these places up, and on the ground floor they always have ‘locales’. There’s just too much of this stuff.”

Too much. Too many bars or cafés, too many shops. There is too much of everything. Too little of what matters. Demand.

The economic crisis has served to highlight what should have been obvious – the over supply of bars and shops. Perversely, the crisis has not reduced the supply, it has seen it increase, thanks primarily to the units that sit, mainly empty, under residential buildings.

The reason for these units is the consequence of a land law in the Balearics, one that has not been adopted elsewhere in Spain. The law goes as follows. There has to be a limit to the number of apartments per building. Were the ground floor to also be used for residential purposes, the average size of all apartments would have to increase. A solution, that of making buildings lower, isn’t a solution when it comes to the owners of land who want to maximise their returns. Another would be to scrap the law on the maximum number of apartments, so long as their sizes do not go below a minimum.

One view in favour of ground floors being reserved for commercial use is that people simply don’t want to live on the ground floor. It’s an understandable view, but only up to a point. Not wishing to be on the ground floor may have more to do with where the buildings are constructed rather than with a reluctance per se to inhabit a street-level apartment: a thoroughfare in Puerto Alcúdia is probably a case in point. But even this ignores the fact that houses, of older stock, open out onto narrow pavements right next to busy roads all over the island.

The downside of the regulation, apart from adding to the unnecessary supply of units, is that the buildings end up creating an impression of reducing desirability rather than the one that you would hope they would – that of increasing desirability. And this applies not just to the building itself but also to the general environment. Empty units benefit no one, but the mystery is why anyone thought that they could keep being created and keep being filled. Where they have been occupied, and some have been in Puerto Alcúdia, they have then become unoccupied. The crisis is not solely to blame; there is just no point to most of them.

The surfeit of bars and cafés should be enough to make any prospective tenant of the under-apartment “locales” wary of handing over his traspaso or, if he has any sense, just the rent. Other types of commercial exploitation should be met with a far bigger “buyer, beware” sign. What, for the most part, have they been? Fashion shops, if Alcúdia is anything to go by. They might also have been gobbled up by the johnnies-come-lately of the estate agency world, but the carnage in this market has robbed the units, as it has the island’s high streets in general, of their absurdly excessive presence. For the fashionista chicas who take on a unit, there is something else to bear in mind, not just the fact that their shops are an irrelevance. This is the relaxation of rules on commercial centres. Out of town, in other words. The pointless units become even more pointless as consumers shift their own centres of operation.

The law needs to be changed, but any reform should be more fundamental in terms of more coherent appraisals as to the style of towns such as Puerto Alcúdia where residential and commercial building has created a functionalist mish-mash of architecture. Attention should be paid to greater harmony in terms of the look of buildings and also to the introduction of semi-pedestrianisation. This might, for example, enable the apartment blocks to be shielded by gardens at their entrance, enhancing their appearance and greening the dominant and characterless sense of concrete.

If a change means the government and town halls interfering with the market and telling owners that the ground-floor “locales” have to go, that they have to stick to reasonable prices and they lose the rents from the units, then so be it. They’re not gaining rents as it is, while everyone else is losing out.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The October Paradox

October is a paradoxical month. Lacking quite the same “fall” as Britain or the same striking changes in colours of the landscape, it is easy – when the sun shines on a Mallorcan October – to believe that it is still summer. But its heat has a ghostly presence. The increasing dampness makes it morbidly vaporous: nature’s equivalent of the spectres escaping from a butane-fired burner or from a paraffin heater of distant memory. If heat can be allocated a colour, that of a Mallorcan October is a pinky-blue.

October is a month of apparitions on the beach, the ghosts of summer fading into the memory. If September is the sad month, one of the winding-down of summer, it is, nevertheless, and from the middle of the month certainly, far enough away from the season’s end for a period the length of a school summer holiday to still stretch ahead and console us with the knowledge that summer has life left in it. But in October, there is the incongruity of the dawn and twilight of finality. There is nothing beyond October.

Before the season proper starts in May, April is the month of the phoney season, the warm-up for what is to come. October is the warm-down. It is the month of the forsaking season, the giving-up month, in more than one sense. It is the giving-up on summer and, for some, the giving-up on everything – the abandonment month. The final weekend sees the clocks going back, but there is no turning the clock back on a business fading as surely as the sun does. Ever more for sale and for rent signs appear. These signs conspire, together with the gradual covering-up of glass frontages with whitewash or newspaper and the wrapping-up in plastic of lamps and lights, in making the resorts slowly wither away for another year, taking some businesses with them – for all time.

The remains, as October proceeds and gradually imposes its cruel decomposition, are skeletal resorts. They are shaking bones and skulls with rictus grins which mock tourists with a sinisterness of closure as ominous as the gathering clouds that bring the fierce storms of late summer. And on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day at the start of November, the days of the dead represent the final passing of summer into its afterlife and the resorts into their clichéd state of the ghost town.

October is the cruel month, but not completely. Though its storms can bring turmoil, it can also bring tranquility. The end of the season comes ever closer, the days are counted down. A growing sense or anticipation of relaxation takes hold. It can be a cruel month, but it can also be sublime through the elated spirits of knowing that the sentence of summer’s hard labour has been served. Sublime also in a stillness, when the storms don’t blow. If the landscape doesn’t alter that greatly, the seascape can. Hovering above the calmness of a bay, let’s say Pollensa’s, is a haze that is the product of the vapour of October warmth. It forms an eerie range of colorific monotones, a blanket and shroud of greys and silvers for the sea and hills. If it is appropriately deathly, it is benignly so, the kindly smothering of our last few days. It has the comfort of strangeness.

For this is what October is. A strange month that is between states. From life to no life. And from summer to winter, because of the strange division of the Mallorcan seasons into two semesters, one that denies October its right to be what it is – autumn. The paradox month; not really one thing and not really another.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Ryder White Swan

All sports are, at a basic level, absurdly simple. Football – bloke kicks ball into net. Cricket – bloke hits ball with a bit of wood or bloke hits bits of wood with ball. Golf – bloke hits ball with a stick into a hole. They cease to be simple when they become tangled up with jargon, statistics, strategies, tactics and, with some, the sheer length of time they take. Someone once had the bright idea for golf that rather than a bloke hitting his ball with a stick into one hole, or five or seven or eleven, he should do it eighteen times. In the process, he came up with the most tedious sports spectacle known to man.

My resentment of watching golf is based largely on having once been abandoned on Sunningdale’s course by my father and his mates who had escaped to the beer tent while I was left to get soaked to the skin following a player who may or may not have been Tony Jacklin; it was hard to tell through the rain. It was a short and irrational pitch from the misery of a drenching to a lifelong condemnation of golf-spectating as mind-numblingly dull.

Except when it comes to the Ryder Cup. It has entirely to do with team sports. There’s something in that CV stuff you get presented with and the modern mantra of finding “team players”. You simply file in the bin anyone who under interests and activities lists chess (mad), boxing (mad with violent tendencies) or golf (mad with an obsessive disorder). No, you look for those who will willingly hurl themselves against an eighteen-stone lock forward as evidence of common sense and the placing of the team before their own mortality. In the same way, you look for a team event to ignite the passions of collective spectator identification and involvement.

It’s only when golf does team play that it becomes interesting. Not just interesting, but also unbearably exciting and tense. Which is the Ryder Cup all over. And no more so than when McDowell was coming down the seventeenth.

But what is it about the Ryder Cup? The team, after all, is an amalgamation of individuals from different countries, an all-star twelve engaged in what Rory McIlroy had described as an exhibition. Yet a patriotic spirit rises to the surface, one which makes it possible to be supportive of a totally useless German for heaven’s sake. Maybe it’s all to do with putting one over the Yanks and their full metal jacket whooping.

For all this though, the Ryder Cup is not like football. Does it pack the bars of Mallorca – the Swans, the White Roses – with face-painted, flag-waving, replica-shirt wearing “Europeans”? For starters, what flag are you supposed to wave? What shirts are you supposed to wear? Who really wants to go around pretending they’re Miguel Angel Jimenez by having his name on their back in the way they would a Rooney or Gerrard? The odd Spaniard perhaps, celebrating the fact that golf can permit a cigar-chomping vision of non-health and efficiency in the way that only golf can – think such porkers as John Daly and Craig Stadler. But otherwise the local sports shops aren’t suddenly going to stock up with juniors’ and seniors’ Westwood or Fisher shirts.

Then there’s the singing. “YOU-ROPE, YOU-ROPE.” No one can do it with conviction because no one is really sure what they’re supporting. It’s a false identification that hides the temporarily submerged nationalism of an “inger-land, inger-land”. Do you get groups of lagered-up lads in the bars giving it large with a Europe chant? Because golf takes so damn long and thus goes way beyond the average tourist’s 90-minute attention span, do you get anyone bothering to spend several hours in a bar when there is something else to do – like sitting around the pool?

The answer is – remarkably – that you do. The bars do get taken over. Why? Because the Ryder Cup is one of the most remarkable sporting contests known to man. It totally transcends the tedium of a normal golf event, it does indeed have the power to mould an unlikely European nationalism. And it comes down to the fact that sport is very simple. Not just in how it’s played, but in the fact that one team wins and one team loses. And guess which team won.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Oh What An Atmosphere: Football on holiday

Football on holiday. There is this thing that baffles me slightly. Chanting support for our boys. In bars. Outside bars. Does it somehow permeate the plasma and filter across global satellite communication systems to be relayed above the noise of the vuvuzelas in a South African stadium? Probably not.

“England till I die.” At the clinic next to Foxes, the lady in charge was getting anxious. The noise was such that she couldn’t hear someone on the phone. So she said. “England till I die,” and someone on the end of the phone gagging his or her last. Maybe she should be grateful that the clinic is not next door to a Spanish bar, though possibly she was unnerved by the raucousness of those feared English footy fans – and their ancient reputation. A police car passed, just as a Rooney was launching himself into a one-man Peter Kay conga. “Are you on your way to Yellow, sir?” The police might have asked. “Yellow?” He was English, after all, and a Rooney, to boot. The clinic Oberführerfrau, arms sternly crossed, watched as the police car kept going and watched as it came back and kept going.

Rooneys, Gerrards, the odd (very odd) Crouch, the occasional, nostalgic Beckham, an absence of Heskeys. England versus Slovenia. I felt possibly under-dressed in a sky-blue Man City reminiscent Karl Hogan. Not a red or white for me. “I am the only Slovenian in Alcúdia,” said I in my best Slovenian accent. I used the gag, if you could call it such, once. Unlike the gag from the Rooneys and Gerrards. “Well held,” every time James caught the ball. Ho-de-ho-ho.

Then there are the pints. Hundreds, thousands. Has anyone ever measured the peaks of pint purchase as a game progresses? A graph with game time on one axis and pints on the other, superimposed by another – pints purchased in the immediate aftermath of an England goal. Someone should. I will, if I’m given the grant to do so.

Around The Mile. A party on the Goodfellas terrace, or what looked like a party. Some mascoty beings, wrapped in St George, a white with red cross sun shade over a baby buggy. The passage way by Linekers packed like Wembley Way. Wayne with a mini-Gazza blond look, lacking only a lob, a goal and a dentist’s chair. And a multitude of Rooneys; a potato field of Rooneys.

Football on holiday. Football on holiday in the afternoon sun in Puerto Alcúdia. “Oh what an atmosphere.”

And it was only Slovenia. And it was brilliant.

* Some photos on the HOT Alcudia Pollensa Facebook page.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Accentuating The Positive: Friendly Alcúdia

Once more “The Diario” has gone out talking to tourists where other papers sit in the air-conditioning and pen pieces about the cost of a coffee. Tourists the paper spoke to were in Alcúdia. The impetus for doing this was the visit of the representatives of 25 tour operators who came to Alcúdia (and Can Picafort) on Friday and an observation that was being made during that visit that greater friendliness needs to be shown to tourists.

A lot is said about friendliness (or lack of it). But it is not a factor that has ever struck me as being much of an issue; only if someone wants to make it so. As always one can pull out an example of poor service or surliness, but generally speaking … ? I’m not convinced. Nor are the holidaymakers to whom “The Diario” spoke. Friendliness, helpfulness were the positive aspects of the paper’s investigation. Less positive were prices (more expensive than Malaga or the USA, according to a family that was spoken to) and the absence of good transport, i.e. the absence of a train to Palma. Some American visitors had expected that there would be one. Many people in Alcúdia had expected that there would be one – before the politicians proved themselves incapable of arriving at a compromise. Another visitor said that she thought that taxis were expensive and not always easy to find. The paper does point out something which most visitors would be unaware of, and that is that taxis in the different municipalities along the bay of Alcúdia – Alcúdia itself, Muro and Santa Margalida – cannot pick up outside of their municipalities. One can understand that this might cause some frustration. An empty cab goes past and keeps going past. Maybe the issue needs to be addressed, and not set aside only when Muro taxi drivers are called in as reinforcements by an Alcúdia taxi brigade which gets overwhelmed by demand on market days.

But overall the paper was pretty positive, albeit that it spoke to less than a handful of visitors. So, proves little, but at least it was trying.

Also positive is the word that business appears to be on the increase in bar world. The past week seems to have witnessed a significantly higher level of trade, and not just because of the football, although this has had an impact, an impact that does make one wonder. One bar, Mile-based, reports that Saturday last week was the second best day in ten years. Ok, England were playing (after a fashion), but so they have also played over the past ten years (when not failing to qualify). So, what of those fears that the hotels would gobble up the Sky footy trade? And moreover, what of all-inclusives and their effects down The Mile? The protests against all-inclusives seem to have been forgotten amidst a burst of recent good business.

* The Diario article is here: http://www.diariodemallorca.es/part-forana/2010/06/15/amabilidad-problema/578954.html

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Day The Music Died: Puerto Pollensa and live music

On Sunday, the press was reporting on issues with bar noise in Puerto Pollensa. The reports had to do primarily with one particular bar and with the fact that music was going on till the wee small hours. This was the main aspect of the reports, but when I read them – the Spanish as well in order to check that “The Bulletin” hadn’t got it wrong – there was a piece at the end which struck me as being far more important. The mayor, it was reported, said that there could be no live music in bars in Pollensa. Can’t be right, I thought. Then, on Sunday night, plod did the rounds. At least one bar was told that they had to “see the mayor”.

Apparently it has never been the case that there could be live music. Seemingly, it’s one of those things that has just gone on. But to prevent it would be complete madness. There is a huge difference between live music that stops by or before midnight and a club or disco that goes on till four, five or six in the morning. Live music should be a feature of a thriving tourism resort, but one wonders, as ever, whether the town halls and others actually want this – thriving tourism. Noise is a facet of tourism resorts. It can be moderated, but it can’t be eliminated; nor should it be.

But how far does this apparent prohibition extend? The hotels with their entertainment, the church with its occasional concerts, the golf club with its proposed China Crisis concert? What about the music in the old Tango? The jazz sessions in the old Fat Cats? Under this “rule”, they should never have been happening. It would be utterly unfair if different rules were to apply, or in fact if one rule were to apply – that of no live music. It’s absurd.

Chances are that the town hall will see sense. Oh, what am I saying? But you can but hope. This isn’t necessarily an attack on Puerto Pollensa, as clearly this so-called rule applies everywhere. The bars in Pollensa town would also be affected. Nevertheless, it is indicative of a town hall that has a thorough lack of appreciation of tourism and of evening/nightlife in the port and the town. To all the other moans of the protest on Wednesday can be added another – the killjoys of the town hall. But you wonder if this move isn’t somehow coincidental. It might be construed as driving a wedge between factions in the port, those who do want and those who don’t want music and some noise. The town hall can say that it is “doing something”, unrelated to the items of the protest manifesto, but can attempt to take the higher ground. Whatever the motives, it sucks. Sucks big time.

HOT! Online
For anyone who might have been following my trials and tribulations, there is a version of HOT! that can be seen in its entirety on the net. Go to the home page of http://www.thealcudiaguide.com and you’ll see the banner to the right for HOT! Click on it and the PDF will download. Depending on your broadband speed, it might take a bit longer than in just an instant. The resolution is not the highest because this version had to be reduced drastically in size, but it’s ok. Oh, and I know that the ad for El Limón (page 17) has slipped down the page.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Acts Of Mindless Vandalism

So you arrive at your bar in the morning. Seems normal enough. Until, that is, you notice that something is not quite right.

Mindless vandalism does not always require grand gestures, those of highly visible destruction or defacement. Sometimes its nature catches you out. Like break-ins, and don’t I know, initially you don’t latch on, until it becomes apparent. Some time on Saturday morning, someone decided to try and pull the barrier out of the ground between the doctor’s clinic and the Foxes Arms in Puerto Alcúdia. Decided to do this and also try and break in half a strut holding up the “toldo” (terrace sun shade). This someone didn’t succeed in either. The barrier didn’t look worse for wear, until you touched it; the strut was bent rather than broken. But the extent of the damage didn’t matter. There was, as always with these things, a sense of invasion. The visible signs may not have been that obvious, but a broken this or a broken that is dangerous – for the customer. It means a day closed, a day’s loss of earnings and a day spent spending money on some repairs.

A different matter. There are new neighbours. Hotel workers. Polish, it would seem. Let’s not go down the Poles-on-the-rampage routine of the Don Pedro hotel in Cala San Vicente last summer, as in let’s not start castigating an entire nation. But. But, when the noise on the terrace is sufficient to require two visits – from myself – to let them know that there is noise on the terrace, then I get – how do I put it – a tad hacked off. The noise is most uncommon in a quiet urbanisation. It is most out of place. Two warnings, I was at pains to point out, despite three chaps seemingly prepared to confront me. Two warnings. Number three, and I hate the idea, and it’s the “denuncia”. They got my drift. They might also know that I can find out which hotel they are working at. Hotels do not take kindly to being told by stroppy neighbours that their shipped-in workforce is keeping these stroppy neighbours from their shut eye. Especially as they are usually handing over the ackers for the workforce to keep stroppy neighbours awake.

Unlike residencies close to hotels and the commercial centres, you do expect peace and quiet.. It’s why people don’t live near to hotels and commercial centres. If you do, then you have to expect rather less peace and quiet. There is also the business about the definition of “evening” and “night”. This may seem bizarre, but it is a facet of the law. Noise on a domestic terrace, after midnight, is equal – in law – to noise on a bar terrace.

Yet, these two incidents are curiously instructive. In my discussions with those with several decades of living in Alcúdia, Pollensa and elsewhere, it is clear that there is a certain nostalgia for the old days of the “generalisimo”. Heaven forbid, you might think. But crime was almost non-existent. No one would think of smashing a toldo support for fear of getting a thrashing from the Guardia and a lengthy stretch in the slammer. On the other hand, back in the days before Franco died, no one did much about noise. You could be on terraces till the wee smalls, playing music, dancing, drinking. It didn’t matter. Now it does. The perpetrator of the Foxes vandalism will not be found, he will not get a police kicking or a sentence, but the hotel workers, high-spirited but not malicious, can get a police visit or can get a hotel-issued one-way ticket back to Poland. It doesn’t, somehow, make much sense.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.