A Free Bag Of Crisps: Spanish pensionistas

It's the moment that bars dread. They see them coming. Should they put the shutters down swiftly? Should they flee? Take to the hills? They come ever closer. A huge gaggle of them. An invading army commandeering a bar. A court like that of the Catholic Kings which would turn up wherever it would on its itinerant and peripatetic caravanning around Spain and take over a hostelry or several. British bars generally are spared, because they are British. It is the Spanish, the Mallorcan bar which bears the brunt. Who or what is this unstoppable force? It is that of the Spanish pensioner. The pensionista excursionistas.

Maybe bars should join together and arrange for lookouts at all access points into a town or resort. These lookouts could warn of a sighting of a coach that isn't loaded to the gunwales with nice, friendly, grateful, money-loaded tourists from foreign lands. Beacons should be lit. Rockets fired. The pensionista charabanc has hit town.

The noise alone is bad enough. An elderly Maria, having secured a corner table, shouts across the room to another elderly Maria, and so it reverberates, back and forth, the pensionista vocal ping-pong. If it's Spanish, it is not quite so decibel-shattering. If it's Mallorquín, it breaks the sound barrier. A Concord boom of wailing. Cats on hot tin seats, screeching.

A bar in Alcúdia town was once deceptively Spanish. It was run by two British chaps. The pensionistas used to be blissfully unaware. They would enter, take over every available seat, place orders for a cortado or a caña and then ... . Then they would issue their demands. Demands which were greeted, not by the resigned acceptance of a Spanish bar owner buckling, as though some protection-racket extortion were being performed, but by a curt four-letter word accompanied by a three-letter one (or their Spanish equivalents).

The demands are for free plates of crisps or olives or nibbles of other varieties. While a bar might commonly dish these out in any event, it is not the norm for them to be demanded, and demanded by entire busloads. But it is, and it is expected. The other norm is for the cortado to act as a lubricant to the packed lunch or boccadillo that pops out of many a handbag. Yet a further norm is the time. These are never swift cortados, these are never in-and-out jobs. The bar owner looks on forlornly, calculating the revenue from the cortados and balancing it against the loss from platos combinados that sit in the kitchen, waiting for their microwave. And waiting.

The bar is not the only potential target. Also in Alcúdia town, a friend explained how once there was a ring on the bell of her house. A pensionista was on the doorstep and asked if she might use the toilet. Being of a naturally altruistic disposition and being confronted by some Spanish antiquity in need of relief, she took pity. Pity which quickly turned to rejection when, as with male hitchhikers who hide behind a bush while their female companions flag down an unwary driver, the toilet-seeker called out to her compatriots. Household lavatories are ill-prepared for flushing on fifty occasions over a short period of time. Always assuming the period of time would have been short. And there was no guarantee of that.

Moving on from the pensionistas and, for once, a second, unrelated subject. Mallorca Rocks.

The confusion that surrounds the concerts at the hotel this season grows, the regional tourism ministry effectively turning down a request for a licence on the grounds that it doesn't have the authority to grant one. Where are we at with all of this, if, as reports seem to suggest, the hotel cannot make the concerts open to the public (which presumably means an entrance-paying non-guest)?

The opposition to the concerts is, notwithstanding issues in respect of licences, unfortunate, to say the least.

Ask yourselves this. How can these concerts that would bring music acts of international renown to Magalluf and the island, that would positively enhance the reputation of resort and island, that would be a smack of originality among what is all too often a poverty of innovation, that would, moreover, finish before midnight on their once-weekly occurrence be anything other than a benefit, and one not just to Mallorca Rocks? I'll say no more.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.