The Image Has Gone

National treasures, my own bits of Brit treasury, which remind me that among the tapas and tumbet there is a place that is forever tea and Tunbridge Wells. In the case of A. A. Gill, he occupies, I suspect, no more than my own personal expatriate-in-Mallorca treasury. Not because no one here buys a newspaper more highbrow than “The Daily Mail” (tempted though I might be to suggest that), but because no one, other than me, is mad enough to spend five euros on “The Sunday Times” as a way of assuaging the conscience for having read “The Times” for the rest of the week for free on the internet. The Sunday version occupies a whole week in any event; the following Friday, it must be the Barnsley v. Scunthorpe match report or a return to Gill in order to re-discover something about television programmes I have not seen and will, in all likelihood, never see.

Gill has been to Vienna, to which you may well ask what this has to do with Mallorca. More than you might imagine. Take the ubiquitous croissant, borrowed, one thinks from the French, and a more pointless piece of non-nutritious lump of grease to defile a breakfast table it is hard to conceive of (except the Mallorcan ensaimada). Not French though. Made in Vienna, as was the café, equally ubiquitous and often equally as pointless in terms of its sheer numbers. The Viennese café though is possessed of history, grandeur and intellect. “Cafés,” observes Gill, “are the crucibles of culture; more great thoughts have been had in cafés than in all the world’s universities”. Not in Mallorca though, unless one counts as great thoughts choosing between pig or sheep for the evening meal or between a bucket of sangria or a bucket of lager with which to wash it down. Anything more cerebral is strictly for the Austrians.

The contrariness of Gill is that he can observe one of Europe’s great cities and still find room for the everyday, specifically that lightweight, fold-down facilitator of family mass tourism – the baby buggy. Mallorcan restaurants could yet offer a great service to humanity by creating buggy parking lots. In Vienna, it seems, they have already deemed the buggy a curse on civilised society. “The waiter looked at the double buggy the way a French polisher might regard a lawnmower on a dining table, and suggested ever so politely that he could put it somewhere else.”

It is not really the Panzer divisions of buggies marauding the summer streets. It is the buggy through the camera lens that causes me grief. If it is one’s lot to have to take enticing photographs of sunny terraces with happy tourists, there is a great deal of sympathy for a restaurant owner who on no account wants people in any shot as they “make the place look untidy”. Even the best crafted of terrace shot has the almost inevitable pitfall of an image of a fork exiting a mouth next to which is a lump in the cheek the size of Gibraltar; that or Mr and Mrs Glum, long-faced and longing, one assumes, to be anywhere else other than on holiday with each other. But after several weeks of waiting for good weather and a good crowd on the terrace, the heart leaps with joy at the prospect of a suitable photo. Line it up, frame it, take it … wait a minute. The heart sinks. The baby buggy. Always the baby buggy. And often the baby buggy with an attractive accessory, like a Spar bag hanging from a handle. It may add to a notion of “family friendliness” but for a decent photo it is the kiss of death or the vomit down the bib. Perhaps I should just go to Vienna.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Acker Bilk. Today’s title – the lyric continues “only you and I”. Where is it from?
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