Don't Dream It's Over

A Sunday afternoon in June. I shouldn't be where I am. I am where I am, in Playa de Muro, because of one of those unforeseen annoyances of life. We can't always foresee things. Just ask Spain's politicians.

Because I am not where I should be, there seems only one place to be. The beach. Yet the wind is blowing. It is blowing quite strongly. But this is an inland wind. When it blows like this on a June afternoon, it doesn't blow on the beach.

I am at a loss to explain why the wind should blow only a few metres away from the beach and be only intermittent and little more than a breeze on the beach. This is how it is, though. I have come to understand this. I would have thought the local Mallorcans would have understood this far better than I do.

The sea is calm. It is virtually suspended, save for the odd yawning wave. When the surf is down as far down as it is on this Sunday afternoon and when the breeze is little more than a snooze, the beach assumes its dreamtime quality. But look at this beach. Where is everyone?

There are some Germans, immune to everything it would appear. The sun's rays, economic crisis, they both come easily to the Germans, as they never seem to be affected. There are hardly any Mallorcans, hardly any Spaniards. But this is a Sunday afternoon, when the picnics usually break out, and whole tribes congregate on the sand. They surely haven't been fooled by the inland wind. They can't have been. And the Spain footy match is hours off.

This is no ordinary Sunday afternoon. The beach is in its dreamtime, but the dream has died. Maybe this is why the beach is empty. It would be inappropriate to go to the beach. Perhaps this is a Sunday afternoon when reality takes over from the dreamworld.

The conclusion doesn't seem right, though. However bad things might be, there is always the beach. Its dreamlike quality has always been a haven, but it has also been the source of the storm. It has helped to create unreality. It has drawn the young to easy jobs in summer and to the building sites in winter, so taking them from education. It has drawn the expats, constantly blind to realities that creep up on them unforeseen and ignorant of anything other than the unrealities of "Big Brother", a few soaps and life back home. The beach has fooled so many with its dreamtimes.

The dream died, and on a Sunday in June Spain and Mallorca finally woke up to the reality that the dreams of so many years had kept hidden. From the days when wads of notes could be handed over to the beneficiaries of the first-wave tourism to the days when Europe came with its suitcases of cash, to the days at the end of the last century when the next great land grab occurred. It was all so easy. And there was always the beach as well. Paradise in Mallorca, paradise in the kingdom of Spain.

Prime Minister Rajoy says that his government has avoided "intervention in the kingdom of Spain". He has avoided his worst nightmare, of determination of fate by powers from outside the kingdom. Intervention may have been avoided, but events just prior to this Sunday in June confirmed that it had all been a dream, as many had warned Rajoy's political predecessors that this was all it had ever been.

Walking back from the beach there was a sign for a development of newly built properties. Newly built three years ago. How many have been sold? Any? The leaflets accompanying the sign flutter forlornly in the stiff breeze as forlornly as they have been scattered by the wind these past three years when they have been attached to the windscreens of cars of the Sunday visitors to the beach.

But on this Sunday, there are no visitors. The development was one final testimony to the folly of the dreamtimes, and it now stands as though it were a curio, a folly in its own right.

Come next Sunday, though, maybe it will all have been forgotten. This Sunday in June was a bad dream. Everyone can wake up and things will be back to normal; back to unreality and so back to the beach. Assuming the beach is as it should be, though, and hasn't been invaded by the unforeseen, by the ships of fools, dreams wrecked on its dreamtime sand.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.