The Three Degrees: Mallorca’s winter tourism

I was dreaming of a less-than-white Christmas. No rubbish weather for me. Bronzed, golden brown. I was dreaming and then I was told to stop. By the BBC website home page. Make it real. Make what real? Make a holiday in the Canaries real, courtesy of Iberostar. I clicked the link. Dreams can come true.

You’re given no false impression as to why you would wish to make it real in the Canaries. Off you go with the family, one of whom is the child with the snorkel kit who greets you as you click from the BBC site. And why is he wearing snorkel kit? Because he wants to go snorkelling of course. In the sea. Departing from a beach. In the sun. Sun and beach. In winter.

This is a promotion by the same Iberostar which grew rich on the back of Mallorcan tourism – Mallorcan summer tourism. Once you have scrolled down the list of the 13 four or five-star hotels on the four main Canary islands – all available with special offers to the end of November, for booking through the winter to the end of April – you come to a footnote. It is under “most popular destinations”. Hotels in Majorca. Click.

Well, having clicked, you can probably guess. The red squares on the calendar mean the hotels are closed. All of them. Until April. Mallorca is “most popular”, when it is open. But who can blame Iberostar for flogging the Canaries? They’re doing what has long been one half of the mainstay of winter tourism promoted by tour operators, travel agents and now hotels. What do they all promote? Either snow or winter sun.

Summer tourism means sun and the movement of millions in its pursuit; winter tourism means snow or sun and the movement of millions more. But you move the millions to where you can pretty much guarantee good coverings of snow or good amounts of sun in temperatures of at least 20 degrees.

Sorry, Mallorca, but you fail the 20-degree test. By three degrees. It may not seem much, but the average temperature for the six months of the off-season is only 17. The psychological barrier is 20 degrees (minimum). Tenerife, by comparison and despite having almost as many days of rain if not as much rain as Mallorca (10 millimetres less on average), comes in at 21.9 degrees (which also happens to break the 70 Fahrenheit barrier). This is why the boy has his snorkel kit on, this is why dreams can be made real – in the Canaries – and this is why Iberostar makes them real there, and not in Mallorca.

Weather does matter. In fact, it is all that matters.

Mallorca’s winter tourism. Discuss. Culture, gastronomy, bird-watching, hiking, Nordic walking, cycling, golf, senior tourism. There is much which is available and promoted; it combines to create an under-mass of winter tourism approximately one-tenth the size of that which comes in summer. Unless there were real incentives, such as major, and one means major, attractions, the ratio is unlikely to ever alter fundamentally. And it’s all down to those missing three degrees.

There is a great deal of what one might call apologism for Mallorca in winter. And it is apologism that entails preaching to oneself or the converted. It is apologism that can cover all the list above and more that bring about the around one million off-season visitors. But it can only ever get the apologists so far, because something’s missing. Three degrees’ worth. At least.

This all said, it’s a nonsense when you think about it. A nonsense, not that Iberostar or any other hotel chain, airline or tour operator would choose Tenerife over Mallorca, but that Iberostar and all the other hotel chains are sitting on colossal amounts of prime real estate in Mallorca which sit idle for six months of the year. All that asset being unproductive, being wasted; an asset and an investment that have contributed to the cost of land in Mallorca for everyone else, largely deprived of their own productiveness for twelve months of the year.

The tourism industry in Mallorca would probably like to believe that it is efficient. It isn’t. It is massively inefficient. Inefficient in terms of asset and resources and inefficient in having been singularly incapable of arriving at solutions to make these resources more efficient, twelve months of the year. But then, what can it do about the weather? Not much. It makes efficient use of one resource – the sun – for six months, and that’s it. In the Canaries, on the other hand … .

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Cry Wolf: Winter in January

Some of you may remember contrasting photos being published in British national newspapers in June 1975; they were those of Buxton cricket ground in Derbyshire. On 2 June there was snow, on 9 June the ground was bathed in hot sunshine as the cold weather gave way to the first of the two successive hot summers of the mid-70s.

Weather in January in Mallorca does not stretch to such extremes in terms of the 1975 heat, but one week on from “Summer in January”, winter has indeed, as I had suggested that it would, made its presence felt. Snow has fallen with even some flakes at sea level. The sea has been roaring in spitefulness, but has not deterred the wet-suited extreme sportists of the kite-surfing fraternity. The air being brought in on the waves has cut and torn. It’s nothing unusual though.

It snowed at sea level twice last year. On one occasion it was sufficient to leave a good covering. That was unusual. The current cold snap is not. Yet, and proving that you should always take the weather with you, because in Mallorca, as in the UK, weather is the most predictable of talking-points, some cold temperatures, whiteness on the mountains and even on the beaches become a major event.

Weather is never far away in Mallorca. It’s not surprising; it is an island after all. During the course of 2010 there was, on average, one weather alert issued by the local met office for every week of the year: too hot, too cold, too windy, too rainy, too stormy. You can’t avoid taking the weather with you, you can’t avoid being compelled to say in an awe-struck fashion that the island is on a yellow or an orange alert. If it were on red alert, then you really would know something about weather, but the alerts are so common that they are almost like crying wolf, except for the fact that they tend to be accurate.

Weather, therefore, is bigged up. It is over-hyped, over-stated, over-reported, afforded the status of event that over-blows its real importance or rarity. Like cold and snow. Neither is rare and nor is the narrative that accompanies it.

With the same predictability with which the weather becomes the narration in the media or by the bar, so the predictable invades the description – a big freeze or a winter wonderland. With the same predictability, the camera lens is turned towards layers of white on mountains and landscapes to impress upon an audience, that should know better than to be seduced into believing in the rarity of the event, the existence, the verity of this winter wonderland.

The cry-wolf narrative, the reaching out for the cliché and the facile, paints a false picture, one removed from the commonness of Mallorca’s weather. It is the same predictability and impoverishment of narrative that strips away a lexicon of presenting Mallorca in anything other than the obvious and the unthinking. There is, as a consequence, a loss of meaning, a loss of context, a loss of perspective. What is a winter wonderland anyway? I really have no idea. I do have an idea as to a “big freeze”, having been around when Britain endured one in the early 60s.

Rather than over-stating, the description of weather, such as the current burst of winter, should, in the absence of an original narrative of descriptors, superlatives, metaphors or similes, be proportionate in its understatement. It’s a bit on the cold side will do. Because that is the verity. And being a bit on the cold side will soon give way to it not being so much on the cold side. Normal. Usual. Pretty much the same weather as most years, pretty much at the same time as each year (summer in January giving way to winter in January), pretty much always taking the same weather with you.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Summer In January

In the days when there was such a thing as summer holidays, I used to have bad dreams prior to them; bad dreams of snow in summer. Winter in July. That was Bomb The Bass; perhaps they read my dreams.

There’s a symmetry between this and summer in January. Six months between two months of J. The seasons turned upside down. It doesn’t seem right, not least to one of the old men of the neighbourhood who was wandering by the beach. How was he? His reaction was spontaneous. It’s never easy to deal with someone crying in the street. He must have been crying for six months now, since his wife passed away. It doesn’t seem right. She should have died now. In the winter. Except it isn’t.

Parked by the beach is a mobile home, a remnant of summer that shouldn’t be there in January. There are anglers with their anorexic cranes strained by bait anchor and taut in the sand. A girl sits by the water’s edge, reading and idly tossing posidonia kiwis into the idly lapping wavelets.

It’s twenty degrees or so, but the chill water and air from the sea is the reminder that this isn’t really summer. Once upon a time you used to be able to head into the dunes and find sand banks that were breaks against the dank air and which created sun traps. You still can, I guess, but they’ve roped them all off. They only want you to look now, not actually be a part of all this nature.

This is not unusual, this summer in January, this gentleness of the sea that allows one of the fishermen to wade out in search of a catch, this stillness of sky a rhapsodical blue above the tops of pines and palms. From the upper terrace, the one onto which it is impossible to venture in summer because of the ferocity of the heat, the wall obliterates everything apart from the peaks of trees and the sky. The sun burns, even in January.

The sounds are those of distant gunshot during the never-ending hunting season, of the buzzing of winter saws cutting into deadwood or making firewood. For over from where the gunshot comes, fires are being built on the streets of Sa Pobla and Muro, fires that will be lit and which which will light the sight of demons playing with their own fire. It seems incongruous that there should be fires. Not now, not when it is summer in January. But when the sun falls into the horizon of the eel farms of Albufera, the cold descends with the tumbling yellow, as though this were a desert.

The smoke will stay you feel, it will hang in the still air. There will be a kind of smog, because of the night and morning fogs that have crept in with stealth and cloaked the stillness of this eery winter-summer, which have wrapped the crystallised spiders’ weaves around car wing mirrors, gates and leaves and which have added a rare sound – that of a fog horn belching across the bay of Alcúdia. The fogs clear but their dampness lingers. The sand, which is never absent from the streets and pavements but may be all but invisible, sticks to shoes, glued there by the wetness that tells you this isn’t really summer.

There is other incongruity. It is the rogue mosquito at night, a fly or two whizzing in and out of an open door or window, a brown, decaying cricket that should now be dead but which has survived the suicide dive against a brick wall that it would have performed in October and November, wanting it to all end quickly. There is even the sound of scraping legs, buried in an unattended, holiday-home garden, in this late or is it early summer or spring, for the daffodils are shooting as well.

But in a few days, you imagine, it will be winter in January. It’s not so unusual to have summer in January, this reverse of the bad dream of winter in July, just as it’s not so unusual for the month to head towards a deathly cold and the reactivation of daytime wood burners and heaters which, for now, need only be fired up once the sun has set. And now, at around half past six, it has just about faded completely, leaving only the streaks of red and orange above Sa Pobla and Muro, the red and orange into which will flame different reds and oranges of the Sant Antoni fires.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Don’t Be Cold, Don’t Be Angry To Me

The 1970s were responsible for some real horrors perpetrated in the name of music. Pilot were not in the A-list of offenders, but they did bequeath us “January” and memory of a lead singer who looked like a girly Peter Marinello, which was saying something, given that the new George Best appeared to have stepped out of Pan’s People.

“Don’t be cold, don’t be angry to me.” I’m all in favour of obscure lyrics, but how does a month display its anger? And why is it angry “to” me? Wrong preposition. But nevertheless, now I think of it, it is – a month being angry – rather poetic. Pilot were the new Wordsworths. Well, maybe not.

January isn’t usually angry. But it stores up trouble. It is the month to reconnoitre the tree tops. You wander lonely staring at clouds, but in fact at the pines, their branches crowned with the coconut shies of the caterpillars’ furry, testicular wombs. Through the needles, though, you see only blue sky, for this January is like so many – alarmingly warm and bright. Don’t be cold with me; not at the moment it isn’t.

The warmth, however, is the threat of trouble being stored up for when the weather breaks and for when the caterpillar nests also break and tip their crawling caravans earthwards. In the lonely days of January, the cats can sleak around and scavenge undisturbed, but then they come across the caterpillars. From the litters of moths to the litter of a cat prone on the ground, feigning sleep but in fact stone cold dead.

You make me sad with your eyes. I’m not so sure it does. September is the sad month. January’s melancholic, but because of its silence. Until it bursts into flames. The eyes of January look down on the fires of mid-month and on the beasties that roam the villages and towns spitting the sparklers of Sant Antoni. January, the curious month when fiesta has no right to occur but does so in an incendiary fashion that is more pyrotechnic than the summer fireworks; more pyrotechnic because houses, whole streets are in the line of fire.

The month’s eyes cast a glance also at how the shorelines shift with the wind. Beaches’ edges are moulded and sculpted by the sea’s changes in direction and by the harvesting of marine crops that form bulges and mounds which, from a distance, appear as rocky outcrops newly exposed by displaced sand but are the abstract grotesques of packed seaweed and posidonia. The eyes watch as you bounce along the trampolines of the springy and spongy sand topped with its ocean scrap.

You’re telling me lies. This is what makes you worry about January. It’s what it’s telling you about what’s to come. It cascades from the skies at the stroke of the new year with the cheer of optimism, but it can be deceitful and deceiving. What’s to come? The clear skies of January can just as easily become the dark clouds of gloom, but unlike an English January when you slowly count off the days to the onset of spring, here you might hope for its delay. January doesn’t tarry though. It rushes in the spring and thoughts of the season with the swiftness and surprise of a bore racing along an estuary. Maybe it’s an illusion, but no; the days are already longer. And then suddenly January’s gone. Don’t go, don’t go.

Why would you not want it to go? January is non-month, it barely exists other than to be set light to. But this is what makes it the month that it is. Because when it’s gone, the pretend time of fiesta and holiday from early December goes with it. And things begin to start all over again. The never-ending cycle and repetition of Mallorca’s months and seasons.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Hot House: High temperatures (wrongly) and wrong rubbish

Here we go. The weather season is upon us. It never leaves us of course, but it peaks as peak summer arrives along with peak temperatures. The question is, though, what are those peak temperatures and how accurate are they, especially those which get reported from unofficial sources, i.e. anyone other than the local met boys who are, despite met office reputations wherever you may care to mention, the only ones who can be vaguely relied upon.

It has become quite warm, there’s no doubt about that. Sweaty, sweaty. No doubt. But the current heat is nothing unusual; indeed it feels pretty normal and not excessive. However, the weather season demands a rather different take. Among figures that have been thrown about, erroneously, we have had anything from mid-30s to mid-40s. Or approximately 95 to 115 in old money. If the temperature were, or had been, in the mid-40s, then one might have expected that people would have started to drop like flies. Indeed, you might not be reading this, as I would have evaporated. Mid-40s is danger territory. You would also have expected there to be issued some serious health warnings and advice.

None of this has happened, because the temperature hasn’t been anything like on this scale. Official numbers are barely breaking the 30 degree barrier (86); quite normal and quite hot enough, thank you very much. And where they have, inland, they do not compare with the coast where it is always cooler.

Last year’s great weather event in terms of heat saw a maximum of a bit over 42 degrees in Sa Pobla. That was serious heat, yet some reports had it so high (on the coast) that the temperature was equivalent to that which the poor sods fighting in Afghanistan have to endure – nudging the 50 mark.

I suppose it is partly down to the reliability, or not, of one’s measuring device. As I write, in the middle of the afternoon, mine is showing 84 in old money, 29 in new. Maybe it’s too low. I can’t honestly say. But it seems about right and seems the same as it has been for a few days; it is the same figure, as it turns out, coming from the local weather station. The thermometer is, and has been, in the shade, which is of course what is actually measured.

Still, the temperatures are due to rise – 88 by Wednesday is one forecast. So, expect some danger levels to be bandied about, well above 31 Celsius. We should be careful what we wish for where temperatures are concerned. At mid-80s, they are about manageable. Sometime in the not too distant future, those really high temperatures might just start to become the norm. Then you’ll really know about serious heat.

A load of rubbish
Look at the photo here. What is wrong with it? Some of you might recall a similar photo some time ago. The issue is getting worse, because what is wrong is that the bin on the left shouldn’t have any garden stuff in it; it is for household waste only. This bin was emptied yesterday; by the evening it was full to overflowing. Partly, this is just downright selfishness, but it is also the case that the garden bin gets emptied only irregularly and that the garden rubbish that has gone into the one on the left has mainly come from a house that had not been occupied for some months, i.e. a holiday home. You can, to a point, forgive them if there is nowhere else to put the rubbish.

However, it is not that long ago that there was no separate bin for garden stuff, and that the household bin was emptied every day, which it still is, but only in season, and which isn’t the point anyway. Then there is the fact that the rubbish tax has risen considerably. For what, exactly? And then there is another point. Some gardens are large, with all manner of plants, trees, lawns, you name it; other gardens are not large without bloody great trees. Some householders do not fill a bin with their own stuff, knowing that it is somewhat selfish. Like me, who does not have trees, but hedges which keep on not getting cut down because the bloody garden bin gets filled up as soon as it’s emptied. There is also the fact that the above photo gives lie to the idea that Mallorca has suddenly become fabulously recycling conscious and also gives lie to the campaign by the town hall to inform residents of the different bins by sending someone round with a leaflet and a form that you had to sign to say that you had been told about it. Fat lot of use when it’s done in winter.

I have a solution, and I shall send this photo to Muro town hall, along with my solution. This is – a garden tax. The town hall sends the boys round, checks all gardens for size, number of trees etc., and then sends out the bills. That’ll learn ’em.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Hole In My Snow Shoe: Snowy weather and potholes

Winter tourism in Mallorca. Come to Mallorca, land of snow and cold. For the second time this winter, it snowed at sea level yesterday, rather heavier than the first time, though it did seem to vary as to how much. Moving between Playa de Muro and parts of Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa, it was evident that there was a great deal more snow that had actually settled in the former two than the latter, so much so that, for instance, there was even a slush trail on the road by the foot of the Sant Marti mountain (at the back of Bellevue). A bit further on, heading towards the town of Alcúdia and then off to Puerto Pollensa, there wasn’t any snow covering the grass or trees, as there most certainly was – and a fair bit of it – near to the Muro hospital.

All very exciting of course and all very tempting for the weather exaggerators to get into full out-of-proportion mode. “Five inches in Sa Pobla.” Probably not, one feels. Rather like heat in summer brings forth claims of 48 degrees, as was the case last summer but was clearly rubbish, so the oddity of snow inspires drifts, blizzards, entire towns cut off, etc, etc. But snow there was, and our man with a camera, Ben, was out and about photographing it and helpfully Picasa-ing the evidence – http://picasaweb.google.com/mallorcaben/SnowInAlcudia#.

The rotten and cold weather just adds to the ever-present problem of the state of some local roads. Pothole City, i.e. Puerto Pollensa, doesn’t really need much assistance from the weather, but some roads do, and tend to get it from heavy rain which has the habit of flaking surfaces and revealing holes, always assuming that the rain is not so heavy that the holes have not been revealed and therefore are not avoided. Thud. There goes another tyre. One does have to have some sympathy with our cyclist friends, confronted not only by barely more than freezing temperatures but also by dirty great trenches in their way, to say nothing of the bay of Pollensa that had been left scattered across the cycle lane on the road between Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa, following the howlin’ wolf of a wind three nights ago. Ah yes, winter tourism. What a splendid idea.

But to return to potholes, you may have heard of the town in Germany which is selling pothole sponsorship. What a ripping idea this is. Who says the Germans have no sense of humour? Fifty euros and you get your name badged onto the fixed hole. “We Need Tar” says the website from the town of Niederzimmern – http://www.niederzimmern.de. Usefully, they’ve done an English version of their “Kaufen Sie Ihr Schlagloch” campaign and there is a daily tally of Schlaglöcher that have been sponsored – 111 as of yesterday. How many are there, for God’s sake? Rather fewer than on the fine Calle Pere Melià in Puerto Pollensa alone, I’d venture, the road that has assumed the mantle of pothole king from the sadly-now-smoothed Calle Arse, aka Bot. Pollensa town hall, and indeed others, could take a leaf out of the Niederzimmern book and raise badly needed funds by having their own hole sponsorships, though there is one slight drawback. To be able to see the sponsor’s name would require a close examination of the road surface, which may not be such a wise thing to do as some local chico-racer comes haring around the corner. But they could always issue a map showing newly filled-in potholes with the names of local sponsoring bars arrowed to the relevant hole. Definite winner I’d say, but being Pollensa, rather than getting some international support, they’d do it all in Catalan, so no-one would have a clue what was going on.

* The photo shows Hole number 7 available to purchase in Niederzimmern. They might possibly consider using a rather larger truck, though for 50 euros what can you expect? The photo comes from the site named above. You might also be interested to know that the same site promotes a song dedicated to the holes in the ground by one Michael Altmann. Click on where it says “Ur-Version” and you can hear some of it. Truly dreadful it is as well and therefore highly recommended.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Summer Is Over

“I’m off to gather mushrooms.” Those wacky French, always truffling around in the undergrowth snouting out fungus. It had never occurred to me that anyone, let alone a French visitor, might trek up to La Victoria and usher away the mountain goats before they could snaffle all the fungal booty. But it’s that time of the year. Into the forests they go in search of firewood – not, I guess, that they’re meant to – and the they is anyone with a wood-burner. Unused for several months, the burner is now being relieved of old ash and being re-commissioned once more. 

 

The dew hangs thick on the grass that leaps up in a matter of a few days. It is this, the dew, as much as the torrents of September, that brings lawns back to life and to enjoy a spell of rapid re-growth before the sun loses more of its power and the gardens retreat into the winter time. Snails slime out from beneath stones, while the dying cicadas, in their shrouds of browny-grey, slam against walls in their last moments of disorientation before coming to rest and to await the ants. Flies crawl on terrace furniture and erratically buzz into faces; persistent, they land on arms or lobes, seek out spots to rub their legs in kitchens and bathrooms. The spray should kill them as well the autumn-returned mosquitoes, but rarely seems to. 

 

The days shift from clear skies to grey, from calm to wind and from temperateness to chill. The beaches, where in summer the kiters and surfers are barred, now are littered with the colours of sails, boards with graffito go-faster, heavy-metallic blazes, and obsessive, freaky-haired surfies squeezed into wet suits. The wind from the sea is starting to cut. Hands reveal a purpleness unseen since early in the year, and jackets are zipped up to the neck, heads poking out from upraised collars that are caught on gusts and smack against an ear. 

 

The “butaneros” are newly busy. Orange bottles, hidden in utility rooms, are lugged onto the streets to await the parping of the gas truck. Heaters are wheeled out and re-acquainted with the containers that vaporise their spectral, watery toxicity. In the supermarkets, the shelves change their contents, the greengrocery becomes greener as the likes of broccoli come back into fashion as the complement to legume-based stews. Refreshing summer whites begin to disappear as heavy reds regain their dominance in the wine sections. 

 

From wardrobes and drawers come sweaters and sweatshirts, destined for the wash to fragrant-conditioner away the mustiness accumulated in the dead air of summer. Heavier clothing may be needed, but there are still tourists spirited enough to be shirtless and to take the iciness of a beer where a tea is demanded. The glass facades of some hotels are already whitewashed as end-of-summer shutdown signals the sad end of another season. 

 

Winter’s coming, and the tramuntana north wind blows south, forcing sand back against the wooden barriers and the flaking paint of shore-side villa walls. The sea rebels against the turquoise of summer. Turbulent, tossed by the tramuntana, it shrieks a green-seaweed greyness – an army colour, that of a tank – splashing up its detritus onto the water’s edge, building castles of kiwi-moulded sea grass on the sand. The anger of the bay roars through the night, remonstrating with a forlorn and desperate desire to eke out just a few more hours and days of the season. 

 

Summer’s over. 

 

Always Take The Weather With You

Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-five, forty, forty-five. Take your pick. Choose a number and let it be the temperature. There is a colossal amount of old pony that gets trotted out in the name of the weather. Let’s go back, shall we, to the summer. The highest temperature in the north of the island was 42.3 in Sa Pobla. There may have been somewhere else, Muro town for example, that was a fraction hotter, but Sa Pobla is the main weather station. It is not by the coast, as to be by the coast does give a different value; the temperatures are always lower, by a factor of at least three degrees. During the very hot summer, there was never a time when the temperature reached 48. But there were some who would have you believe it did. Had it, not only would it have been massive news locally, it would have registered across the world, so extreme would it have been. The 42 was, in itself, extreme – for Mallorca. And 42 was quite damn hot enough; don’t wish for anything higher, for God’s sake.

 

Let’s now come to October. Notwithstanding the return of storms on Friday, the temperatures have been unseasonably high. But not that high. Not as high as thirty-four, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, all of which have been reported. The official highest has again been in Sa Pobla, in the interior, away from the coast where it is always cooler. That high was 32. By the coast, it would have been 29 at most, when the highest temperatures were registered midweek. But we still get the exaggerated reports, and, by now, one would have thought that the message might have got through that thermometers in direct sunlight and indeed many little thermometers hanging on the terrace are far from accurate. For those values that are cited are those that are given by either a dodgy thermometer or one in the sun; they are not the ones given out by the meteorologists. We may not always believe weather forecasts, but I, for one, cannot query the actual temperatures the met boys record. 

 

There is, though, the question as to why some people feel moved to report what are exaggerated values. It is a curious psychology, one that varies between boastfulness and one-upmanship and a desire – at all costs – to big somewhere up and make it appear wonderful. It is especially curious as anything much over 27 or 28 degrees becomes less than pleasant for anything other than a trip to the beach. Who needs 36 or 37? No-one is the answer, so why exaggerate the temperature to make it so, when it isn’t? It is doubly especially curious that one might take the weather with one as a means of some sort of self-aggrandizement, parading around with an imaginary t-shirt saying “I am 38 degrees” and then when back in freezing England, getting the same t-shirt out and sitting down in the centrally-heated warmth of the neighbour’s house, showing the inevitable photos of when it was 38 or even 48. “It was 48 degrees when we were there.” “Was it really?” “Ooh, yes, ever so hot.”

 

The bigging-it-up psychology is part of the same “beautiful” motif. It (wherever it is) is “beautiful” because the temperature says so, even if the temperature is not as is reported. And one still has the question as to why a 33 should be more beautiful than 25. Much of this comes down to a sort of justification of existence, itself a facet of the self-aggrandizement-through-weather mentality. We live by the weather, we always takes the weather with us, and much as we may be prone to exaggerate almost anything, there is nothing more exaggerated than what is truly registered on a thermometer – one that works properly and in the right conditions.

Rain Until September

Are we seeing a change? The weather, that is. The stifling humidity of yesterday suggested that the almost unbroken sun and fine weather could come to a crashing halt; crashing as in the crash, bang and wallop of storms. Since early May there has been barely any appreciable rain. There have been some spots and some cloudy spells, but apart from a cloudburst that deluged Puerto Pollensa some weeks ago, there has been nothing … no rain, only heat upon unrelenting heat, dry upon unrelenting scorched earth.

 

This has been a summer similar in some ways to the fierce one of 2003, the one that claimed lives across western Europe. In that year interior temperatures nudged the 40 mark in June and hardly fell below 30 for the next two months. And then right on cue, almost at the stroke of midnight on 1 September, came the storms. And they lasted for several days. The end of August and into September is the stormy season. Indeed it is far from unusual for there to be fierce storms and heavy rains in August. It was one such August storm that led to the closure of the farcically ill-prepared new metro system in Palma that was flooded. When was that? Three years ago?

 

This year has seen some record temperatures. The 42 of July in Sa Pobla was the highest for some fifteen years. The heat of this summer, say some, was nature’s correction following what had been a generally wet winter. Nature’s correction could be about to be experienced in a different way – deluges. It would not be altogether surprising. The heat and the dry weather may have turned some gardens shades of brown or even grey, but the landscape is resilient. It is a remarkable feature of Mallorca that so much retains a greenness despite the lack of rain. The dryness has its dangers. There have been large billboards – in Catalan of course – warning against fires in the forests. Make that also fires on mountains. A Briton has been detained following the fire on the Puig Sant Martí in Puerto Alcúdia on Sunday. The helicopter with its demolition-ball-style water bombs was scooping from the Lago Menor and the Canadair firefighting planes from the sea. On Monday there were other fires in the interior. 

 

Mallorca, though it has its forests, is not as densely wooded as other places. Fires do not tend to take on the levels of seriousness that were the case in southern Spain earlier this summer and have been the case just recently in Greece. Unlike another Mediterranean island, Corsica, it is not the site of devastating fires, usually deliberately started. Having experienced the proximity of a major fire in Corsica and witnessed the environmental disasters visited on that island, it is something to be grateful for that Mallorca is spared such natural violence, albeit artificially created. 

 

The most powerful remedy to fires, however, is natural, and that means rain. And rain, lots of it, is not, one fancies, that far away. Some will be saying thank goodness.