Swine Flu / In A City That Never Sleeps

The swine flu situation in Mallorca is gathering some momentum. The first death attributed to “Gripe A H1N1” was recorded last week on the island, though the number of cases remains relatively low. There is a belief that, because of the degree of mobility in Mallorca, the likelihood is that it will register more cases than some other parts of Spain. Perhaps. There are plenty of regions, however, that have high levels of mobility – the major cities and of course all the tourism centres. A British tourist from Birmingham is in hospital on the island and apparently responding well.

 

The reports that started coming out of Germany last week, led by “Bild”, have insinuated that Mallorca is something of a hotspot for the virus. This is overstating the case, but the actions of the police (national and local in the case of Calvia) in taking to wearing masks have not exactly lessened a certain sense of unease. It is being left to individual officers’ discretion as to whether they don the masks or not. But if there are police roaming around with masks on, the rest of the population is quite likely to ask, then why not us. The health department thinks they are unnecessary. Nevertheless, well over 200,000 masks are being made available in the Balearics. The Partido Popular opposition in the Balearics has accused the health minister of having contributed to a “general alarm”. Meanwhile, the ministry says that there is a reserve of more than ten million antiviral treatments – in Spain. 

 

Of course there is alarm, but much of it, as in the UK, is overblown. The effects of the flu virus are not necessarily that harmful, but all that Mallorca needs right now is a dose not just of swine flu but also bad publicity. And images of police officers wearing masks do not exactly inspire confidence, even if there is sense that the police, and especially the police, take what precautions they can. But the same applies to other sectors. They may as well issue masks to everyone.

 

The regional government has issued its own advice to citizens. Its information provision is not that brilliant. Go to the website – http://www.caib.es – and you will see there is an announcement to click on. Try the Castellano or English pages, and what do you get? The same default information – in Catalan. Only the menu to the side of the page changes language. How useless is this? Well, one of the pieces of advice is that the transmission of the virus is the same as for any other strain, hand contamination being one means. Given the amount of handshaking that goes on in local society, one measure might be to give that a rest for the time being. 

 

Oh, and there’s one other thing health-wise. Temperatures are hitting 40 degrees in parts. Stay home, stay out of the sun, keep cool, and you probably won’t get heatstroke or swine flu.

 

Patrona 2009

There must, you imagine, be a point in the early morning of the second of August when DJ Enigma or Pako passes by a group of worthy pollencin ancients who look aghast at the ponytail and eyebrow piercing and who are weary from the noise of a night of endless partying in three whole squares of the old town, but determined to be there at five am for the traditional alborada. Fiestas are all about the old meeting the new, but not necessarily in the streets as one lot gets up and the other makes its way to bed. Except, that is, in Pollensa. Why anyone feels the need to get up for a tradition that was invented at the end of the nineteenth century in order to herald the final day of the fiesta week is lost on me. They could just as easily, you would think, pack it all in to thirty minutes at some sensible hour, like ten o’clock; time enough for a decent snooze and a lump of lard and sugar together with a stiff hierba for breakfast. But not with Patrona. 

 

The locals have to suffer for their fiesta art, and that may well mean not having had any sleep ahead of a day that features make-believe Christians and Moors rampaging through the streets and a bloody great fireworks do at midnight. It might not be so bad, but the night before there was another grand party – the marxa fresca – that techno-ed across the Plaça Major. Actually, techno may not be accurate. There is a youtube of last year’s marxa and that’s got Madness playing. So much for traditional Catalan house or whatever the flavour of the dance world is these days. At least on the night of the Wednesday, the provocatively entitled “Decibels Pollença 2009” is confined to the footy pitch. No sound limiters there, one supposes. God forbid that an unsuspecting tourist booked his family of toddlers into the Hotel Juma on the Plaça Major in anticipation of a quiet few days of cultural tourism at the end of July and start of August. He’d get culture alright, Pants Breakers on the stage in the square and DJ Full-Attack larging it within easy sleep-shattering distance in the Monnares plaza. 

 

Pollensa town hall, strapped for cash as it has been for several years now so much so that it is running a regular deficit in the region of a million of your European Euros, was meant to have been cutting its fiesta budget this year. Not that you would think that were you to take a look at the schedule for Patrona. It’s like a mini-Glastonbury, replete with sound, Quakerist, saving-the-world enviro children’s parties and benefits for Rwanda and the like. All that’s missing is the mud, which is a shame as it would allow the Batley Townswomen’s Guild to re-enact the Moors and Christians. 

 

The simulation, Pythonesque or otherwise, is – in its billing – something of a curiosity, given that the Moors were anything but Moors. They were Turks, intent on turning the inns of Pollensa into kebab restaurants, but Moors is how we must call them. The term “moro” is one commonly used in the local languages; indeed Patrona features a comedy (ho-ho) called “No Hi Hara Moros A La Costa” which translates, more or less, as the coast is clear, i.e. there are no Moors on the coast. It will be one of the events that attracts rather fewer tourists than others, one would guess. Another more obscure feature of this year’s Patrona is a “return to the sixteenth century” with music and entertainment of the period. 1550 was the year that the so-called Moors attempted their invasion. At Patrona they’re making music to repel Moors by. They’re making rather more music than that – 14 DJs, 20 groups of different sorts, plus some Mallorcan traditional music and that stuff from the 1500s. 

 

Patrona – the fiesta of the sleepless.

 

Information on Patrona 2009 is on the WHAT’S ON BLOG – http://www.wotzupnorth.blogspot.com.

Join Together

Starting on Saturday, Alcúdia will be celebrating its annual Sant Jaume fiesta, the events climaxing on Saturday 25 July, the day of Sant Jaume, with the fireworks that bring the fiesta to its close. There is a further dimension to this year’s fiesta. Indeed there is a double celebration. It is eighty years since the town hall building was opened and thirty years since local democracy took off following the period of Franco’s dictatorship. To mark these anniversaries, there will be an act of commemoration during the fiesta week and the presentation of a book that looks at the building of “la Sala”, the town hall. 

 

These two anniversaries – of 1929 and 1979, half a century apart – are in themselves significant as they top and tail, as it were, the period of descent into turmoil, Franco and finally the restoration of the monarchy and the establishment of democracy. Though overshadowed by who and what was to come, in 1929 Spain was governed by another dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. He presided over the inauguration of the building, praising its “sumptuous construction”. He was accompanied by Jaime, one of the sons of King Alfonso XIII. It was an ironic pairing, and whether Jaime knew anything of the compliments lavished on la Sala by Primo de Rivera is doubtful; he was a deaf mute. By the time of the inauguration, 10 September 1929, Primo de Rivera was on his last dictatorial legs. He had assumed the dictatorship in 1923, thanks to the support of Alfonso, but the king was reaching the point of wanting to sack him. A few months later in early 1930, the army failed to back the dictator: he resigned and died in March of that year; the Republic was declared the following year; the monarchy abolished and the path to Civil War created.

 

Primo de Rivera is sometimes considered a bit of an irrelevancy. He was far from that. Franco learned from his regime and was thus ruthless in crushing unions and Catalanism in a way that his predecessor had not been. Primo de Rivera had also headed a period of economic advance, much of it based on extravagant public spending, which partly contributed to the collapse in the peseta and to his demise. But that spending was what brought about not only la Sala but also significant other works in Alcúdia. Much restoration and construction in the town dates to the period of the first dictatorship. 

 

La Sala was not to be the location of an actual “ayuntamiento” (“ajuntament” in Catalan) of Alcúdia until 1979. That was when the first democratically selected mayor, Pere Adrover, came to office – fifty years after the building which houses the town hall’s meetings had been praised by a former dictator for its sumptuousness and for being “extremely artistic”. The words “ayuntamiento” and “ajuntament” come from the Castilian and Catalan verbs ayuntar and ajuntar, meaning to join. It took half a century for them to truly join together in la Sala.

 

Information on the Sant Jaume fiesta and also the Sant Jaume and Santa Margalida fiestas in Sa Pobla is on the WHAT’S ON BLOG – http://www.wotzupnorth.blogspot.com.

 

 

Swine flu

How’s your swine flu doing? Want some? Then come to Mallorca. Only kidding. Not that the German newspaper “Bild” seems to be kidding. It is saying that around ten cases of swine flu in Germany have their origins in Mallorca, specifically in the Playa de Palma area. The local health authorities on the island are flatly denying that it has been contracted in Mallorca. Officially, there are, to date, six cases that have been reported in Mallorca and two more in Ibiza and one in Menorca.