Potato Heads

Remember Mr. Potato Head? Not Wayne Rooney, but one that has been with us far longer and which now comes with his own head. Mr. Potato Head became self-sufficient, a fully-integrated toy, courtesy of a prosthetic potato, putting an end to the weekly shop being deprived of a King Edward or two, as was once the case. One suspects, though, there is less pleasure to be had than when the eyes or glasses were pressed into a real spud and out squirted some juice. Mr. Potato Head was one of the great toys. Hours of endless amusement. How simple and how much fun.

Toys and potatoes. Where do they come together? Sa Pobla. The town has a museum of toys, and it also has an awful lot of potatoes. It was this dual tradition that once made me think that town fairs should have mascots. For Sa Pobla, it would be Senyor Cap de Patata. They did once have a mascot for an autumn fair in the town, but I never found out if it was indeed a Mr. Potato Head; it certainly ought to have been.

The potato has been a theme of Sa Pobla’s autumn fairs and it was also the theme of the town’s gastronomy event over the weekend just gone. The night of the potato. Spud evening. I read a report which said that “only Sa Pobla, highly regarded for its farming, would have the ability to organise a fair dedicated exclusively to the potato”. The only town with the ability, and the only one bonkers enough to arrange one. Chip batty, though not quite as bonkers as Muro and its pumpkin fair.

The great night (in fact nights) of the potato was a great success. And so you would expect it to be. Twenty-five bars and restaurants dishing out plates of potato-based meals at a minimum of a euro a pop. If you can’t get a successful gastronomy event for a hundred cents, then how can you get one at all?

The thing about gastronomy is that the word suggests rather more than what you get. It hints at fine cuisine. Not that there was anything not fine about the array of dishes available for scoffing in Sa Pobla, just that they weren’t particularly remarkable. You just had to look down the list of the different dishes to get a flavour, so to speak, as to what was on offer. “Frit de patata”, for example. Chips. Rather grander was cod au gratin with potato. Three euros and worth every one for the cod and the cheese.

Still, the bigging up of the Sa Pobla potato came up at an opportune moment. It had briefly become a victim of Cucumbergate, the Germans banning imports on the basis that … . Erm, on what basis? They swiftly unbanned the spud.

The potato night was important also for reaffirming the potato’s place in the hearts of all the people of Sa Pobla. It has taken a bit of a knocking from rice, so much so that last year’s autumn fair was dedicated not, as usual, to the potato but to rice. The great rice and spud war has broken out in Sa Pobla, the former now considered a genuine alternative for cultivation to the potato, and a crop that has grown in significance since its introduction to the edges of Albufera in 1901 to the extent that now some 20 hectares are devoted to it.

The potato farmers have faced problems other than the advance of rice and Germans banning their produce. At the end of March last year, they took to their tractors and blocked the roads in protest against financial help that had been promised by the regional government, but which hadn’t been forthcoming.

Other than just the boost to the local agro-economy, the potato fair does highlight, not for the first time, quite how well publicised, or not, such events are, especially to visitors. With the poor weather around at the weekend, this was one event that could have made a break from moping in a bar, while there were a couple of other fairs – shoes at Lloseta and the fourth annual fair in Biniali, devoted, echoes here of Sa Pobla and its toy museum, to traditional Mallorcan games. This fair was something not just for adults but for kids. Who knew about it? Who would even know where Biniali is?

Potato heads. Not announcing themselves well enough.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Merry Wives Of Muro: Pumpkins

“Peter, Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.”

The pumpkin shell, as with most of the pumpkin, can be eaten. It is not used solely to store wives nor to have a ghoulish face carved into it and to be made into a lantern. There are few more versatile vegetables than the pumpkin and no vegetable that is monikered with quite the same suggestion of humour.

“Pumpkin”. It sounds daft, and the sound is sufficient to detract from its usefulness. Its comedic possibilities extend also to its inhabiting the end-of-the-pier, ooh-er-missus nudge-nudge alongside the marrow, especially when the pumpkin grows not in its more conventional round shape.

A friend of mine, a local journalist with the Spanish press, did a piece last year about a pumpkin grower from Pollensa who had cultivated a pumpkin that was over a metre in length and substantially engorged in its girth. The accompanying photo, fortunate or unfortunate, depending upon your prurience, showed the grower lying on top of the vegetable. I leave you to imagine exactly how this looked and where one end of the tuberous protuberance was located.

The pumpkin, butt of jokes or not, is celebrated locally. It has an autumn fair more or less in its honour. Muro’s. Local restaurants prepare different pumpkin-based dishes and there is, inevitably, the how-big-is-your-pumpkin competition. Pity the poor and humble pumpkin, forever cast as the vegetabilist jester for whom size is all that matters.

In Muro and neighbouring Sa Pobla, the soil hennaed red with Saharan dust is the production line for cabbages, potatoes, pumpkins and other veg. Sa Pobla is undergoing a shift in its traditional produce allegiance, the more widespread cultivation of rice challenging the potato sufficiently for it to assume the place of honour at the head dining-table of the town’s own autumn fair this year. Muro though maintains its idiosyncratic pumpkin roots, a mere un-sizeworthy three inches into the earth around the town at the commencement of the vegetable’s growth.

The pumpkin is, however, a deceiving fellow. Its orangeness hints at something rather more succulent than it actually is. Like packaging elaborated to entice the consumer with a product that is no more superior to one without the benefit of a design consultant and budget, the pumpkin suggests more than it delivers – in its raw or basic state. It’s what you can do with a pumpkin which is more rewarding than simply, say, tossing chunks of it into a pan of boiling water.

It has, for example, and thanks to its seeds, given the world the finest bread known to man. Pumpkin bread. “Kürbis-Brot” in German. As with their fabulously diverse beers, the Germans do things with bread unimaginable to those raised on a loaf of Mothers Pride or Spain’s insanely named Bimbo. In Muro the pumpkin has been aligned with prawns, mixed with couscous, made into a pie with pork and parsley, combined with chocolate and mandarins and – naturally enough of course in the land of the ensaïmada – been added to the pastry.

In its honour and in honour of Muro’s fair, time it was, thought I, to follow a recipe for a casserole with local sausage and pumpkin. Simple enough. To concoct that is. But in the greengrocery section of the local Eroski, at the time of the pumpkin fair, was there a pumpkin to be seen? There was not. All the pumpkins had gone. Where or where could my pumpkin be?

The answer was simple. All those Pedros, Pedros pumpkin eaters. They have made for their wives some seasonal shell suits. And now they are the merry wives of Muro, thanks to their Pedros, Pedros pumpkin eaters and how big that the pumpkins grow. Ooh-er, missus.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Foc You: Event publicity

Demons from Ibiza, Menorca, Binissalem, Sóller, Consell and Pollensa. Pyrotechnic displays. Fire runs. Folk and rock groups. All on one night. What an event. One to rival even the fire nights of Sant Antoni. Traditional culture at its best. Yes indeed, a spectacular occasion. What a pity no one knows about it.

You now do. It is tonight. In Pollensa. It is the first “Fira del Foc” or fire fair.

The first I was aware of this fair was a brief mention in the Friday What’s On pages of “The Bulletin”. I had to do a double take. Had I actually read this correctly? Yes I had, and it was taking place the next day. A phone call to Pollensa confirmed that posters had started to appear – on Thursday. The fair was appearing on some listings sites, mostly all late in the day, as in Friday. The earliest mention seemed to be on the website of one of the demons’ groups themselves, that of Binissalem: one guaranteed to have less than worldwide impact on the worldwide web.

Where else might it have been mentioned? What about the regional government’s tourism website? Perhaps under its “Hivern a Mallorca” programme, the rather misleading title for the Winter in Mallorca series of events that runs from October until April. There was no programme. There was a list of activities. Third page. Ah yes, there it was. With little or no information. There was a link to a blog for the federation of demons. The most recent entry was for an extraordinary general meeting in May. Demons have EGMs!?

What about Pollensa town hall’s website? The fair is on its patch, even if it wasn’t directly organising it. Nothing, save for a link to a PDF for an announcement in the press – on the Friday. Under its activities there was one for Saturday – the Miquel Costa i Llobera poetry prize. Even the normally assured culturapollensa site seemed less than sure. The event was listed, but it was faded, meaning there was no link to any actual information.

Of the mentions of the fair, there was, however, one that did perhaps shed a bit of light onto the darkness of this event of the night. It came from a blog called “d’en Potti”. There appears to have been a bit of internecine strife in the demon world. A new “union” of devils and beasties has emerged in parallel to the federation. Maybe there was a good reason for that EGM after all. But if so, then why was the federation being linked by the government’s tourism website? It was the new union that was behind the fire fair. Perhaps the government didn’t know. In fact, why should anyone know? Fractiousness in the potty otherworld of demons might make for an amusing story, but whatever ideological or power struggle is being waged by the wearers of horns and the wavers of tridents shouldn’t matter. Not to the earthly world at any rate, to the humans who might like to know about the fire fair.

Division or no division, it still doesn’t excuse the tardiness with which the publicity appeared or the fragmented nature of its appearance. It does, though, say a lot. It is typical of the shocking disregard for the promotion of events. Staying on Pollensa town hall’s website, there is a link for the town’s fair in November. It leads you to official notices in Catalan for God knows what. It doesn’t actually give anything useful. Like when it’s on. Also in Pollensa, it may be several months away, but the dates for the wine fair in spring are a mystery. It is possible that they have yet to be decided, but even if they are, information is most unlikely to be released until close to the dates. And I have tried to find out, having emailed the co-organisers. No reply.

The wine fair is of a different nature to the fire fair. It is commercial as well as an attraction for tourists, a showcase for Mallorcan and Balearic wines. It may have escaped the attention of the organisers that tourists, who might well fancy ordering a case or several, could do with some decent advance notice to book flights and accommodation.

But no. One of the problems with fairs and fiestas is the publicity process. It goes something like this. Firstly a poster is presented. Dates are given but no more. Some days later, normally a week before the event starts, out comes the schedule. Either the poster or the schedule is afforded a ceremony: the mayoral and organising committee’s photo opportunity. Advance information is jealously guarded in order not to undermine the egotism of the official “launch”.

Through a combination of short-sightedness, self-importance, insularity (as with language) and inefficiency, Mallorca’s events are undermined when it comes to their being broadcast effectively to a wider market. The events don’t deserve to succeed. That some do is in spite of themselves and their promotion. There is more than just a slight sense of the foc you when it comes to publicity that isn’t just local, assuming even this is done well. Ad hoc is the foc; they couldn’t organise a burn-up in a fireworks factory.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

On A Carousel: Mallorca’s Fairs

You can tell that summer has shifted into autumn. The fiestas cease to be fiestas and become fairs. The transition is all but seamless. The fairs are fiestas without the religion. It is replaced by a different religion – that of commerce. The Mallorcan fair, such as that in Alcúdia this past weekend, substitutes the worship of images being carted through the streets with a bowing before the polished icons of agricultural machinery. For what in summer might have been a Saint John, in autumn read a John Deere.

The Mallorcan fair has something of the English country fair. It’s the village fête colliding with the landed gentry. Horses, a touch of medievalism, stands for this or that, local delicacies fortunately not being judged by a Maggie vomiting in front of a Judy. On top of this are the trappings of the fairground, the carousels and dodgems, the exhibitions of government departments, shows for boys and their toys – classic cars and trial bikes – and of course the stuff of the land, such as the tractors.

Just as the fiestas are a reclaiming of the past, so also are the fairs. A key difference is that the fairs are a reminder of Mallorca’s pre-industrial age, i.e. the time before mass tourism. They are as much a celebration of an agrarian past (and present) as they are an expression of modernity, be this equipment or a DJ’s night party. (As with the fiestas, there’s always a DJ or several on hand to scratch into the early morning.)

As such, it is appropriate that the fairs take place once the tourists have started to clear off. The reclaiming of the past can be equated to a reclaiming of a present without the hordes cluttering the place up. Moreover, the fairs are representative of a Mallorca that most tourists have no interest in, that of the land.

I say this, but of course plenty of visitors are interested, while the fairs are also symbolic of a “patrimonio” (heritage) that the tourism authorities are keen to make tourists take an interest in. Which does therefore beg the question as to why they don’t feature more prominently.

Come to Mallorca for its fairs. In November you can nip from one to the other, as they coincide or follow on. Pollensa and Muro, Inca’s Dijous Bo and Sa Pobla. In the case of each of these fairs – Pollensa less than the others perhaps – it is the land which is the point of them. Dijous Bo has its traditional and huge farm market. No towns are more synonymous with a Mallorcan agricultural heritage than Muro or Sa Pobla. They still are, given that they are centres for potato-growing and market gardening. Muro is taking this culture further with the laudable revamp of the ethnology museum to depict rural life pre-tourism.

The local agriculture industry may have declined, but after tourism and construction it is still significant in terms of the island’s economy. It is significant in a different way, in that it is an indigenous industry. It hasn’t been artificially created. It is, if you like, the real Mallorca, one that isn’t so far removed from the present; it is a recent past to which the fairs provide an important link.

But the significance of the fairs seems to be lost on those who would like to promote this heritage. As ever, the promotion of the fairs is inherently parochial; it talks to the converted, those who know what to expect and when to expect it. A few years ago, I mentioned to someone in Puerto Pollensa, a Brit, that the Alcúdia fair had been on. He hadn’t known about it. Therefore he hadn’t known about the horses. His daughters would have loved to have seen them. And this wasn’t a tourist. He was a resident.

As far as tourism promotion goes, the fairs hardly get a look in. Yet at a fair you can typically encounter “alternative” aspects of tourism that are supposed to hold so much promise, such as gastronomy, Mallorcan produce, wines and so on, topped off by the traditions of giants, “big heads”, pipers and dance. They are, or should be, showpieces for the towns and a tourism ideal. But they are not. And you have to ask why not.

The local fairs are not like this:

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Push Pineapple

You know the confession game; the sort of thing you might get on radio. Phone us now with one thing you have never done that mostly all adults would have been expected to have done. Never driven a car!? Never been to a pub!? Never watched X Factor!? 

I cannot claim any of the above, but there is one confession I have. And it is this. Until yesterday, I had never attended an ESRA event. Ever. There. I feel cleansed. I have come out as being ESRA-phobic. But now I am ESRA-phile. Possibly. 

ESRA, the English Speaking Residents Association, held its “mediaeval fayre” in the cloister of Pollensa’s Sant Domingo yesterday. A place more reverentially associated with the sophistication of the classics of the Pollensa Music Festival and less obviously and most absurdly Tony Hadley. From outside the cloister, there was a dreadful sense of foreboding: a Middle Ages and middle-aged Frank Sinatra giving it large with a full “My Way” treatment. From the old courtyard that this past summer staged Joanna MacGregor, the London Gospel Choir and cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic, there came the sheer horror that is “Agadoo”. Push pineapple. Except there weren’t any pineapples to push. There was, though, a pig on a gas spit, someone with a tea towel on his head and some very mediaeval stands devoted to security systems and currency transfer. It needed some inquisition, a touch of “auto de fe”, but the only “tormento” was a set of stocks and a bloke being assaulted by small children with wet sponges; oh, and Black Lace, who were frequently to be found at the court of Edward III, even if Edward – it has been revealed in historical documents – did have a preference for Russ Abbot and his fabulous mediaeval madrigal, “(Oh What An) Atmosphere”.

This was a peculiarly English weekend. On Saturday, there was the car boot sale without any car boots at Puerto Alcúdia’s Jolly Roger. Not that this is an exclusively English/British occasion, just that it is something of a weekly rendezvous and gossip-exchanging point for old Britannia. The two events, the Roger’s and the fayre, were worlds apart, and not just in terms of location. One cast one’s eyes around the cloister of Sant Domingo. How many were there from Alcúdia? Hard to say, but only a very few who were recognisably so. One cast one’s eyes around the Roger’s terraces. How many were there from Pollensa? None, or none who were recognisably so. 

Two towns divided by a common language and by a few kilometres. Rarely do the twain meet. It is not only the British. Many a Mallorcan rarely ventures in either direction, but at least the Mallorcans will, usually, be aware of what exists outside of their own domains. How many of the British do? How many in Alcúdia know of Cala San Vicente? Or how many in Pollensa might know of Mal Pas? 

Two towns divided by a perceptual gulf, one of supposed superiority beaten back along the coast road by suggestions of supposed snobbery. Alcúdia is Corrie, karaoke and the Roger’s boot sale; Pollensa is Howards Way, harmonics and ESRA. Two communities in non-alignment, except. Except there is always Black Lace. Could have been Alcúdia – allegedly.

 

John Hirst – revealed

Well, I had chosen not to use the comments, but now … Perhaps I should. “The Sunday Times” has come clean where others might have preferred not to. It says: “Hirst was sentenced to five years in prison in 1992 for ‘obtaining deception’ while working for Allied Dunbar”. And this, pretty much, is what those comments all said.

Time After Time

It was that familiar problem. Where to park? It is one of the mysteries of the local fairs and fiestas that anyone manages to get to them, unless they have arrived on foot. In Pollensa, it doesn’t help that one of the main access roads into the town is closed anyway. How about trying here, you think? Nope, they’ve closed that off as well. Put up tents. Hmm, where else? Oh look, a blue P, in front of the sports pavilion. Boing, bounce, bang. The sound of stones crunching under tyre makes a satisfyingly disturbing noise, and you take a quick look at the rubber when you get out. There is only so much of this waste land to occupy, part of it has also been roped off, reserved for cars it says, which seems slightly odd as cars are everywhere else on this unmade parking lot. Perhaps it has been reserved for the dignitaries, those who always make an appearance at fairs and fiestas. The official programmes always make a point of scheduling their arrival. Maybe let’s those who might wish to voice some discontent make a note in their diaries.

From and into the pavilion emerge and disappear children in martial arts robes. They make a big thing of the sports events that coincide with the fairs. Not that they hold much interest for anyone other than parents and a handful of supporters. The real stuff, the fair, is over the main road, past the cockerel roundabout and into the town. 

Everywhere there is food. Pastries, cakes, sweets, baguettes, bread, various concoctions. Everywhere someone is consuming something from a paper plate. The fairs are a non-stop exercise in exercising the jaws and the palate. The only ones not chomping away are on the stands themselves. Here is one for Cuxach, the building materials company. Thirty years of Cuxach, it proudly says, or rather doesn’t. But that’s the reason for the stand, and red sacks of what are probably building slag. Here is a tent, two gentlemen in suits looking bored. It is the government’s environment ministry, a display of spectacular dullness, except … What is that noise? Edge a little closer, but without wishing to show any interest in case one of the boreds attempts to engage you in conversation. That noise. Good God, it is. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but not by Queen. Some Freddie tribute being played over the speakers by the environment authority. What on earth for? “Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frighteningly. Galileo, Galileo … ” Maybe the ministry is wishing to prove that the Earth is round. Very strange.

Ever more food. There is a makeshift table with paper-cut letters stuck onto a brightly-coloured dining table. Something about a voyage to Berlin. Schoolkids selling yet more cakes, raising some euros for a school trip. One feels inclined to tell them that first they must take Manhattan, but it’s most unlikely they would have a clue why. Turn a corner, and they’ve set out some plastic chairs and tables; makes it easier for dealing with those paper plates. The Fira d’Artesania, the craft fair. There are pots, those earthenware ones that make for good tumbet and light casseroles. Loads of plants. Doesn’t seem that crafty, but they look very green and, well, plant-like.

Up into the main square, the Fira Pagesa, country or farm fair. There’s a startling construction that looks like a junior Wicker Man – Wicker Boy. One looks around nervously in case Edward Woodward is about to be incinerated. In the raised area of the square are a number of ancient-style wagons for moving hay. The work on these wagons is superb, the craftwork of a wheelwright is one understood by only a few nowadays. I know one in England; the shaping of the wood and the bending of the iron are rural achievements shared by different countries, albeit by a dwindling number of true craftsmen. 

Then more food. Turrón, the local nougat, in cellophane packets. And for some peculiar reason, amidst this farm produce and workmanship, is a stall selling kitchen equipment – frying-pans, ladles, knives. The evening before, here in the square, they held a farmworkers’ dance, a ball de bot with an agricultural twist, but probably the same as the other balls de bot (or is it ball de bots?). 

Later, there was a procession with a drum and bugle band, as there are always processions with drums and bugles, and over this same weekend, there will be a how big is your pumpkin competition in Muro, as there is always a pumpkin competition. There was also, in Inca, the night of burning the bonfires, as there always is in advance of the coming Dijous Bo (good Thursday) fair. And everywhere there is food and more food, fuelling the Mallorcans and the few others, who come, as every year, to see the same produce, the same products and to hear the same music (except Queen) and dance the same dance. 

Time after time, the fairs and their collisions of ancient and of new, of rock or dance music (as at the Sa Pobla autumn fair pre-event this coming weekend) and of traditional dance and music. The fairs of Mallorca. And Pollensa fair.

In Another World

All the fun of the fair. Candy-floss, woven sugar sticking to the hair; no bumping, but there always was, and the sound of The Kinks from a tinny speaker at one end of the dodgems track; a rare exotic fruit, the coconut, knocked down in the shy and smashed open at home to provide a slug of its sweet milk. There was also something dark and sinister about the fair. Not just the ghoulish apparitions of the ghost train and the screams as a luminous skeleton with a lascivious smile sprung up from the floor. Not just the crossing of the palm with silver, Gypsy Rose and her powers of the afterlife and future. Not just the itinerant lowlife, the travelling bands travelling at the edges of conformist society. It was the otherworldiness of the fair. The annual transformation of the local rec or park. When the fair came to town, the promise of all the fun hinted at something unseen and mysterious. It was an alteration, a disturbance to the normalcy of suburban living. The arrival of a certain brutishness. It was also long before health and safety, zealous revenue inspectors and the Benefits Agency. Gypsy Rose probably has to register for VAT nowadays. And issue a receipt. It was also before “love” and “mate”. It was a time of “missus” and “squire” and “young man”, the latter intoned as if by a bleating sheep. The fair, the circus and the panto. These were our altered states, and they had all been passed down along a time continuum dating back decades. The fair was partly the bastard child of the Victorian freak show, yet it was also the distant descendant of the fairs of both rural and urban life. It was the very intangibility of the past that lent the fair its air of otherworldiness. 

 

At some point the fair had diverged, had taken different turnings, and one was given the Jack the Lads from sarf London with their carousel transporters and the real squires, the squirarchy that presided over the country fair, an altogether more genteel affair of fairy cakes, the local Roundtable, horsemanship and agricultural workers shovelling the droppings into bags of manure. 

 

The fair in Mallorca never underwent such a divergence. It is a collision of fairground and trade fair. All the fun and all the commerce of the fair. Dodgems there are, trampolined into contemporary proximity to the bouncy inflatable. And a bit away, the stands for farm machinery rubbing shoulders with wine and herb drinks and local ministries issuing recycling propaganda. And so it will be next weekend when the fair comes to town in Alcúdia. It is the season of the fair – all over again. And the programme betrays a familiarity. A possible concession to economic hard times lies in the absence of a full-on thrash on the Saturday night, replaced by a karaoke “show time” for local amateurs. As with reality TV, reality party nights cut the costs of production, even taking into account that a winner can hope to trouser 300 euros. 

 

There is not the same sense of unseen darkness about the local fairs. They have their past, as will Alcúdia, in the form of the “caparrots” (the giant heads), the giants themselves and the pipers. As ever, tradition outs, even among the shiny agro-technology. But the tradition, this past, can be seen. It exists. It moves along the streets of the town, the giants lumbering from the town hall while the bag-pipes screech. The figures themselves may have an appearance of mystery, of the bizarre and surreal, but they are real enough, depriving the fair of that unknown menace, that untouchable otherworldliness. All the fun of the fair. It was what you could never see that made it so.

 

 

(The programme for this year’s fair is now available on the WHAT’S ON BLOG – http://www.wotzupnorth.blogspot.com.)