All That Noise: Back to school and beaches

Get a day of beach transcendence, such as yesterday, and you realise there is only one blemish. Other people. Sundays should be for highly vocalised church-going, leaving non-believers in sandy peace and quiet.

It was the last day of summer yesterday. Schools are back today. 12 September can normally be relied upon to unleash biblical weather. It did, but was an Araratian failure and a success of Eden, save for the great unwashed who came to take the waters.

September here and the British have largely fled, leaving the Mallorcans to attempt to stave off German sunbedsraum and for them to both compete in the sonorous league. Which is louder? A Mallorcan or a German? Teutonic volume should be a thing of research. There is no obvious explanation for it other than a direct correlation between size and loudness. The Mallorcan bellow, on the other hand, is easily understood; it has been genetically programmed in order to be heard over the thunderous growl of a “moto”. Smaller families have not eliminated another form of conditioning, that of feeling the need to shout to be heard.

The Mallorcan child’s noise does not seem to register with the Mallorcan child’s parent. It is fair to say that the child is also indulged. Today, a communal song and dance will be made about the return to school, while the cacophony on the streets will be matched only by the sound of heavy boots ensuring a smooth first day of the new school year. So much is made of the “vuelta al cole” that the press report the number of police being pressed into action to supervise it. One can only attribute the number of column inches to the fact that the summer holiday occupies a quarter of the year; the return is an event. There is even a whole website devoted to it.

To coincide with the vuelta, a survey has been conducted regarding issues in local education. The greatest concern involves discipline. It doesn’t come as a surprise. Kids are not out of control, but that parental indulgence translates itself into the classroom. More importantly, what one has is often the reverse of deprived conditions which lead to school indiscipline. The presence of a “class” of offspring of wealthy Mallorcans who come to appreciate that they need to do little but whose cups will still runneth over once they leave school, allied to that indulgence, creates its own lack of discipline. It’s a phenomenon that has been explained to me more than once by local teachers.

Back to school though means that the beaches will be quieter, the late summer sun can be enjoyed, until the torment of the stormy “tormenta” arrives, which it will. And then you won’t hear the shouts for the sound of the thunder.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Work Ethic: September’s return

Almost a week may have passed, but today is when September really starts. A weekend creates a pleasant intervention in delaying the inevitable. Work.

August is a month of blissful indolence. One can excuse one’s own inertia on account of that of everyone else’s and the closed signs which go up, if only metaphorically. Come September and some time snatched on the beach seems vaguely fraudulent. It is said of the Mallorcans that they cease going to the beach in September because 26 or so degrees are the equivalent of a grey January day in Worthing. Or maybe they stop because they reckon they should, as though commanded by an unwritten labour law, even if a compulsion to work is the last thing you would normally associate with the Mallorcans.

There remains something of the school holidays in all of us. What seemed like months of the back garden, the estate streets, the woods and sometimes the beach came to a highly unwelcome halt at the start of September. The discomfort of a tie around a new shirt collar, stiff from the outfitters (and one shop used to have a bizarre monopoly for my schools’ kits) and the retching over the morning milk that had been left out in the still warm sun. It always tasted sour, and never more so than when the sourness of the new school year curdled a dreadful realisation that Christmas was light years away.

School, through its routine of day and term, may be designed to teach us as to the horrors to come, but it also teaches us that it, school, is there against our will. Much as it might make us collude in the conspiracy that life isn’t one long game on PlayStation, it fails miserably in making us want to do what it tells us. Like going back to work. Furthermore, it teaches us that September is a month to resent: for the loss of summer and because of the gradual fading of summer through the September days until it becomes a distant memory and because also of the gloom of the workplace with only that memory to convince us that it will return and we can start the whole process over again.

Mallorca is back to work today. In “The Diario” yesterday there was a four-cornered interview which took this return as the springboard for discussing some of the island’s problems. I had hoped for a revelation or two; headings such as “Change of mentality?” suggested there might be. There weren’t. But I know what they were driving at. While there’s the sun and the beach and the summer it can be easy to switch off from what is to come. Mallorca creates its own sense of unreality, and it lasts from at least the middle of June when the schools shut up, climaxing in the other-world surrealism of lazy August. September comes with a jolt. The article should have been titled “Trepidation”, because that’s where we’re at. Despite the promising statistics, this has been a rotten summer for many, and it will soon finish completely. Then what?

Unfortunately, though we rather might like the idea, we can’t all go back to school. Oh, that we could.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.