Villains On The Road

Which collective in Mallorca is the greatest villain of all? Politicians? No, they're too much of an obvious and easy target. The wretches of Magalluf, Santa Ponsa and Playa de Palma who masquerade as prostitutes and can resort to pepper spraying victims in their pursuit of loot to pacify their mafia bosses? Quite probably they are the greatest.

They, the prostitutes, are villains of criminality. With certain other collectives there may be some issues of legality, but that's not the same thing. Legality or illegality is often a question of legal interpretation. Beating someone up, robbing him and being run by organised gangs carries no equivocation of interpretation. Or shouldn't, as oddly enough it can seem as though it does.

Let's consider three other groups. Hoteliers. Here is a collective which is castigated for its greed. They put up prices, invest the profits in luxurious all-inclusives in distant lands, pay employees meagre wages and butt heads with the heroic angels of the holiday rental sector. Villains. Well, possibly, but such generalising does rather fail to take into account the fact that the hoteliers have been the cause and conduit for much of Mallorca's wealth.

Then we have cyclists. These occupiers of drivers' territory, they are terrorisers of the road. They are without courtesy, without manners and, worst of all, they wear lycra. Their villainry is such that it is greater in the eyes of some than that of the hoteliers. This is villainry that brings with it venom and even hatred. Will they introduce cyclist hate crimes into the penal code at some point? Perhaps the legislators should, but there again they are politicians, and what do they know. But cyclists bring with them off-season employment and business. The villainry argument cannot accept that there are indeed cyclists who spread wealth rather than keep it hidden inside the lycra.

The third collective is taxi drivers. Oh dear, oh dear. This reviled group is the manifestation of rip-off, it exploits and seeks to maintain some form of cartel, it defies all attempts at transport reform, it is the antithesis of the "collaborative economy". Fine, but it costs to operate a taxi, there are regulations to abide by, and, strangely enough, some punters quite like taking a taxi.

While there can be justification for characterising these three groups as villains, there is also a good deal of irrationality. Villainry brooks no perspective. The cliché narratives are thus littered with greed, lycra and rip-off.

Justification comes when the villains act in a way that makes them their own worst enemies. The taxi drivers did just that last week. Stopping work at the airport for over three hours was no way to win over hearts and minds that had hardened because of their opposition to new bus services. The president of the travel agencies association was right to describe the action as pathetic. The fact that it took place on the evening before the government was due to approve its decree on touting for business on the public highway (a decree to clarify the situation to the taxi drivers' advantage) made it even less acceptable.

So, the taxi drivers, especially as the cyclists have mostly all gone, can now claim the number one villainry spot. Is there no sympathy for them? Personally, I have some, as I do for the hoteliers and cyclists. Ten thousand drivers from across the land marched on Madrid on Tuesday. Their protest was directed at so-called VTCs, vehicles with drivers, a specific form of transport into which Uber and Cabify are falling. In other words, they are not taxis; they are a category apart.

Neither Uber nor Cabify operates in Mallorca. Yet. In fact neither is particularly widespread on the mainland. Uber was ordered by the courts to stop operations at the end of 2014. It has since re-emerged as UberX under the VTC umbrella but is still very confined. The taxi drivers, though, fear the spread of both services, which is why they were protesting.

The problem for the taxi drivers is that their villainry is such that their critics cry competition and a dismantling of a form of monopoly. Uber is the über-example of competition on the roads in much the same way as Airbnb is in apartment buildings. While Airbnb is viewed as a villain in some quarters, it is hailed as a hero in others. Uber, at present, appears only to be a villain in the eyes of taxi drivers. Otherwise it is the people's hero, effecting the free marketing of transport.

However, these rival services exploit a situation not of the taxi-drivers' making. It is one of legislators and regulators who have so over-regulated the taxi sector that it can't adequately react even if it wanted to. Consider them villains if you must, but maybe it is the politicians who are indeed the greatest villains.

MALLORCA TODAY - Cyclists and horse riders will need permission to use Lluc road

Ever more on the arguments over access to the old road between Pollensa and Lluc. This time it concerns cyclists and horse riders. Groups of cyclists which exceed twenty and of horses that are more than fifteen will need to gain permission from the Council of Mallorca in order to use the old road, this being a stipulation in a draft to regulate use of the road.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

Riders On The Strom - Cyclists return

And so things start to come to life. Unlike the first swallows of summer, the first cuckoos of late winter and the phoney early spring emerge in their cocoons, strapped and wrapped in lycra and clip-clopping across the floors of the supermarkets, sports drinks in hand and then barking to each other along the roads of the north. The cyclists are a-gathering once more, the Tour of Mallorca is not far off, but mostly these two-wheelers are the German and Swiss fanatics, keen-eyed, skin-face-taut, wind-and-weather-beaten like yachties, visions of facial health contrasted with the pasty, winter visages, the frumpy fizzogs of the locals. By the pointed thing roundabout, the boundary between the town and Playa de Muro, Alcúdia town hall has erected a special welcome poster of the cycling world in motion. Welcome, "willkommen", and then as they make the return trip, leave the municipality and enter Muro, the cyclists are sent off with a hope that they will be seen soon - till soon, "bis bald" in German. Piss off, baldy, might the odd, unsympathetic driver cry, and don't come back any time soon. On their two wheels, the much- and oft-cursed riders on the "Strom" ** are the current that sparks the early season, ignites activity among the first-mover bars and restaurants. Restaurant Boy will be "abierto" 9 February, opening its plastic-sheeted terrace to the Max-Hürzeler-ites of a nearby Playa de Muro Iberostar, moistening the Weizenbier glasses, flaming the grill under marinaded lumps of fleshy protein. Elsewhere, non-cycling-route bars are making their preparations; new shelving for the kitchen, sprucing up tables and chairs. The hibernation, the long sleep of post-October is a passing slumber of inertia and survival. Hope springs, or rather, late-winters eternal. Despite the mood of pessimism that depresses the long sleep period, optimism - muted maybe - begins to course through veins woken by some activity, any activity that is the pre-season.

It's starting again.


Note: for those of you not up to speed with the German, "Strom" means electricity or current.


QUIZ
And riders on the strom should be ...?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Laid Out For All To See

Road works. Roads work. When there are road works, do roads work? On and off, according to the stop and go. There is a view that all public work is compressed into the weeks before the season starts. This is a view based on the idea that to do such work earlier would impress too few people; because there are too few people around. So, this view continues, do it all in March and April and there will be folk about who can admire the effort being made. This is probably garbage, but not without some substance. Why, for example, is the road in Playa de Muro being laid now? Again. Over the bridge. How often does one stretch of road need to be laid and then relaid. Several times, it would seem.

As the season hoves into view, traffic gets heavier, ever more cyclists are veering all over the place, foot-based tourists are wandering in the middle of the road, dogs and cats get in on the act and, to cap it all, there are ruddy great tarmac-laying machines massively lumbering along the local roads. This is not a criticism of road works per se; indeed, I am all in favour. Just - why do they happen now? And please don't give me the road-laying-needs-heat argument, because I don't buy it, especially given that some road laying does occur in colder winter weather. I have long thought that Mallorca is inherently non-productive in just about everything it does, so add in road works and all the rest and the resultant delays and that non-productivity is increased severalfold.

Anyway, moan over. As for all those cyclists, of which there are seemingly thousands at the moment, where do they go? I am back in that territory widely and incorrectly known as cyclists contribute nothing to the local bars and restaurants and only buy bananas, Ritter Sport and water from the nearest Eroski. This is simply not so. I have mentioned this before, but it is worth repeating. Boy, Restaurant Boy, Playa de Muro, half past five in the afternoon. Packed. Jam-packed. How many? 60? 70? 80? Nearly all cyclists. Drinking, mainly large glasses of Weizen, and eating. Eating the great lumps of meat that Boy serves up. (And that is great as in size and quality.) The reason why there are so many? The restaurant works closely with Max Hürzeler. I've said this all before, but its repetition is needed to counter this utterly fallacious view of cycling tourists. They don't spend. You'd better believe that they do.


Time share, sorry holiday club, touts. Anyone know exactly what's happening? This was a big story last year, with complaints posted to me as well as to "The Bulletin". The office that was their base has been for rent, and there is no sign - as yet - of our favourite street vendors.


Someone asked something surprising of me yesterday. Actually, the someone was Marshall at the karts in Bellevue. Had I changed my look? That was the question. I confess to having been taken aback, not that I was affronted, just that I had never considered that I had a look. Anyway, this is by way of warning you that whatever this look might be will be on display in the island's leading daily this Friday. Long have I eschewed revealing the true me via this blog - no vanity here - only for "The Bulletin" to come along and break the visual silence.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - "Radio", The Corrs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS8w0hNpJ2w). Today's title - this comes from a song by the group whose name came from William Burroughs.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)

On The Road Again

Arguably, there are no two groups less well liked - among the Brits anyway - than cyclists and the Germans. Which is doubly unfortunate given the fact that most cyclists are Germans. All along the main road they pedal, barking out orders and holding conversations at enormous volume. But this is unfair. Many of my best friends ride bikes, and some of them are even German. However, despite British success on the Olympic cycle track, the British have never really had an affinity with the bike in quite the same way as the Germans have and do. And it shows; shows in terms of the relative numbers of cyclists on Mallorca's spring roads. Locally, these roads are dominated by two-wheeled tourists from Thüringen, invited here by cycling tourism providers such as Max Hürzeler. Springtime for Hürzeler and Germany (and Switzerland).

I was enjoying my morning coffee, flicking through the several pages of the Mallorca Top Gear Rally in "The Bulletin". I beg your pardon, that should be the Mallorca Classic Car Rally: I'd forgotten that there are drivers other than Clarkson, May and Hammond taking part; silly me. I was enjoying that coffee and overhearing a conversation about cyclists and the havoc they create. That's havoc on the roads. Cycling tourists tend not to cause mayhem in bars and late at night, which is part of the problem; cyclists don't go out and spend panniers full of euros on many a pint of foaming ale and vast plates of high cholesterol and chips. They reserve their vandalism, their shocking and anti-social behaviour for the open and not always open road - the latter usually the case in March and April when the stop-go road-work boys are out for a day or several with their signs. These cyclists are tormentors - tarmac tourist terrorists - and economy-class, to boot, which some would like to do.

But this is not me speaking. This is not me saying that these terrorists take the piss. This is not me saying that the road between Puerto Alcúdia and Can Picafort is littered with the dashed hopes of trying to overtake a cyclist and the twisted frames of bikes smashed into by the irrationally irate. No, no, this is not me. Since they lowered the speed limit and built all those obstacles along that road, driving has been turned back several decades. One can take to the wheel and pootle along at a pleasant 30 an hour. Here comes a cyclist. Please, kind sir or madam, do have right of way, do please occupy both lanes of this fine stretch of road, do please cut across my fellow driver and force him to brake suddenly, so that I may shunt him up the arse, so to speak.

I repeat, though, none of this is me speaking. It is someone else. They are someones else. They are the demons of two or four wheels. Every spring. Completely without reason. They shout and they curse. They scream and they bawl.

What the hell does it matter? Relax, and enjoy the ride.


And Jee-ez, Ireland. Triple Crown, Championship and Slam. Was that exciting. Hugo McNeill, professional Irishman, says that sport can sometimes "take you to a different place". Must have meant Gavin's bar. Except of course, Wales didn't win.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Tears For Fears. Today's title - high tinned temperature.

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My Ever Changing Moods

Serenity. October can have this feeling, if, that is, the weather is as benign as it is at present. Sitting on the terrace a couple of afternoons ago, there was a certain stillness; that of the season closing, but closing gracefully with a warm but hazy sun. Even the radiator effect in October by which the heat stokes up the heavy dews and causes a kind of dopiness like a wasp drunk on fermenting apples felt softer than usual. And there was an order. After the blistering sun, and the bustle and franticness of summer, there has been time for growth and a regularisation. The grass has grown and recaptured its greenness but has been cut to shape for the first time in weeks. Autumn is the mellow season, but here this chill-out is observed not so much through the colours of leaves and the disappearing sun but by the onset of a tranquility, the gradual acceptance by the sun that it should slowly retreat and the shifting colour tones of sky and sea. Driving back along the coast road from Puerto Pollensa to Alcúdia yesterday morning, the seascape was calmness, the haze creating a mercury pool of barely rippling water, the hills of Manresa and the sky above them a kaleidoscope of grey and silver tones. Rather than the russets and golds of an English October, you see a Mallorcan autumn as a pastel black and white image, a refraction in negative of the now-being-forgotten vibrancy of blues and yellows of summer. But no less uplifting.


And then the serenity is shattered. You never know quite what to expect. This is the time of year for the payments of some taxes, car tax for example. I collect the mail, and there is one more advice from the town hall than there should be. It is for a car I have no knowledge of, yet there it all is: name, address, personal identity number, all correct. I call the town hall and they say they will pass the information to Trafico. Seems ok, then I think, well no it's not ok, and how long might it take them to inform Trafico. What if this vehicle, to which my name is attached, has an accident, and, moreover, how the hell has my name become attached to it.? So I go to the branch municipal office in Playa de Muro. The ever super-helpful Cati rings the same office as I did, adding some pressure, then I go and see the just as super-helpful Guardia Civil. The lady there gets Trafico central to run a check. Turns out it is ok. The vehicle doesn't seem to exist. No need to worry. Seems it's a town hall cock-up.

Coming back, I think this is a pretty decent system; not the cock-up with this payment advice, but the centralisation of services into one building. At the Playa de Muro office, there is the town hall, tourist office, local police and Guardia. All there under one roof. Life is made pretty easy in what can otherwise be a bureaucratic labyrinth of pass the parcel that generally exists in local public administration. Talk to town hall, town hall talks to Guardia, Guardia talks to Trafico - panic over, and only took a few minutes. I commend the arrangement.

And maybe serenity returns, but then I wait at the red light of one of those entrances from the side road onto the Playa de Muro carretera. The lights flash orange. I start to go. I know to look left. Not everyone would. Two ladies on bicycles riding past me, blissfully unaware of the red light it seems. I gesture with open hands at one of them, and she smiles, not a sarcastic smile but one that suggests she has seen someone who has been kind enough to let her pass and that also suggests that isn't this a lovely day for a bike ride. Exasperation. From serenity to exasperation. It only takes a moment. And that, in an autumn nutshell, a conker of conflicting moods, just about says all you need to know about life in Mallorca.


THE JUDGE DIGGING UP THE PAST
Despite the Spanish attorney-general's opposition, Judge Baltasar Garzón has ordered an investigation - in the context of crimes against humanity - into the actions of Franco and others during the Civil War and into the early '50s. The judge, someone with a history of investigating repressive regimes (Pinochet's, for example), has also ordered the digging up of graves, including that of poet Federico Garcia Lorca, one of over 100,000 people believed to have been killed by the Franco regime.

Why is he doing this? It may bring closure for relatives, but otherwise how necessary is it? The investigation is most unlikely to turn up any surviving perpetrators to be brought to book; it will rake over, literally, the ground of the trauma of the war and its aftermath before Spain began to emerge from its self-imposed dark age around 1953. Does anyone doubt that Franco committed crimes against humanity, other perhaps than hardcore supporters?

The Spanish have never been made to really confront the awfulness of, in particular, the early Franco regime. An amnesty was declared in 1977, though there was never anything like a truth and reconciliation process of the sort that worked with reasonable effect in post-apartheid South Africa; instead, everyone just sort of agreed to forget about it all. But now the Spanish are being made to remember, through the law of "historic memory", the removal of Francoist symbols and now the Garzón investigation. Perhaps they should be made to confront the past, but an investigation which can result in only posthumous convictions is largely hollow in merely confirming what anyone, save the more insane elements of the far-right, will understand to have been the situation. It can only bring back the trauma.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Pointer Sisters (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBw1rgHeRkM). Today's title - the cappuccino kid's second band.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)

Completely Automatic

One of the blog's early-days regulars was that of driving; the rubbish state of it here. It's been a while, but it's back, along with that associated old regular, the mobile phone.

It is now, what, two years since they introduced tougher penalties for driving infractions; I could look it up, but the length of time is not important. What is, or should be, are the points on the licence, the possible suspensions and so on. Yet the mobile phone is still very much the driver accessory-of-potential-accident choice. But it has occurred to me that, though illegal phone use goes on elsewhere, here there is an added dimension. I had stopped at some lights the other day. In the rear-view mirror I could see the female driver behind. She was gabbing on her phone. She looked quite nice, I'll be honest. Lots of smiles, a bit of a laugh, some very expressive hand gestures ... And that was it. Hand gestures. The Mallorcan/Spaniard cannot open his or her mouth without a full set of body language extravagance, whether talking on a mobile or in his or her sleep. Herein, therefore, lies the greater danger posed by mobile-phone use when driving in Mallorca. Hands free. Hands free from the wheel, that is. One hand for the phone, one hand for the gestures. You don't get too many cars with automatic transmission here, but they should be mandatory; automatic gear box and automatic steering, allowing the Mallorcan to pursue his or her normal, everyday conversations without the worry of actually handling a vehicle. The only problem then would be whether they were watching the road or looking at some passing totty, and the chances are that it would be the latter.

Where would we be, when it comes to roads, without our good friends on two wheels. Before you say that this is a dig at female drivers and cyclists, it is just coincidence that it was a female cyclist. For those of you who know the main road in Playa de Muro, you will be aware that, at lights, you are meant to turn right in order to turn left. I say meant to, as this does seem something of an option, but be that as it may. So, I'm duly following this rule, the lights flash orange and I start to cross the main road. And then I stop. A lady cyclist has decided to ride straight across in front of me through the red light. She sort of gestures (more gestures) to indicate that I should stop and let her go past. Well, I could have driven into her, but it wouldn't have got me very far. Instead, setting aside my normally cool nature, I shouted out the window "idiota". Made me feel a bit better. But the point of this is, of course, that I could have driven into her, and it would almost certainly have been deemed my fault, as cyclists are the sacred cows of the Mallorcan and Spanish road. It is, I would suggest, the thing that antagonises most where cyclists are concerned; that some appear to be unable or unwilling to obey some basic rules. And they know they can get away with it, generally. Only once have I seen someone pulled up, and she went through a red right under the noses of a Trafico 4x4. It would have been difficult even for them to have ignored it.

And finally on matters vehicular. At journey's end there is the parking, another not totally unfamiliar subject for this blog. I should like to thank John who has regaled me with a tale of the nature of fines in a car park in Datchet, in which he says:

"And then one that reminded me of Mallorca. If your wheels were outside the painted lines - £10 fine. I can remember how many people (locals I think) used to take up two bays when they parked. I found this very annoying, especially in the season when parking is at a premium. The local authorities could clean up at the parking area at the port in Alcudia."

Now, you know, the size of the fine is one thing, but the lack of, how can one call it, parking discipline, is another, and a very Mallorcan another at that. I once said that for the Mallorcan driver, why use one parking space when two will do just as well, because that's how it tends to be. I really must get a copy of the local equivalent of the "Highway Code" as I recall reading somewhere some gems that exist within its covers (assuming someone wasn't just being funny), One of these was the "rule" regarding double parking. Basically, ten minutes was considered the right sort of length, even, I guess, if you had only intended to park for a minute or two. Why double park and clog up the road for just one minute when ten minutes will do just as well; time enough to pop in for a quick coffee or into a tabacos to top up your mobile.


THE SPANISH GENERALS WAR BRIBES STORY
Churchill apparently bribed some Spanish generals in order to deter Spain from entering the Second World War. Big deal. Lining the pockets of another's military to keep them quiet is old-hat tactical stuff. Viking chieftains often received inducements to go and pillage somewhere else. They used to take the ancient moolah and then pillage those who'd paid them anyway. No honour in those days. The bribes are said to have been arranged through the banking intermediary Joan March, the founder of the present-day Banca March in Mallorca, and the suggestion is that they kept the generals sweet and therefore Spain sweet and out of the war.

It's a fascinating old parlour game to speculate what might have happened had Spain entered the war, but the fact is that it didn't. Whether the bribes made any difference is debatable. It's not as though figures in authority in Spain have been immune to the temptations of backhanders - then or since, or indeed at present. Unlike the Vikings they were probably quite content to have taken the money and run - away from the action to which they had little intention of seeing anyway. Maybe the bribes did make a difference, but it shouldn't be forgotten that Spain's military was in no fit state following the Civil War and that Franco didn't care much for Hitler, and the feeling was mutual. Maybe they just didn't like each other's stupid moustaches.

However, the story is not as new as it's being portrayed. If you do just a little bit of searching, you will find a reference to the claim and to the historian making it that dates back to 2004. And some of the reporting of it has barely touched on the key role of Joan March. The book in which the claim is made is in fact about March, who was born in Santa Margalida. Banca March was founded in 1926. March was a supporter of Franco, and was referred to as Franco's banker. Hang on a moment. What was all that stuff about things associated with Franco?


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Smashing Pumpkins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV_XMQ7uXHA). Today's title - American female trio, biggest in the '80s.

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Who's Gonna Drive You Home?

"Cyclists, blah, blah, cyclists all over the road, blah, blah, cyclists going the wrong way, blah, blah." It didn't actually say this, but a letter to "The Bulletin" was along these lines. Crikey, never heard of this problem before. But not that I will disagree. I have said as much myself here on many an occasion. Someone said to me the other day that cyclists "play games". Pretty dangerous games, taking on a Mallorcan car driver, or indeed a car driver of any nationality. Cyclists here are untouchables. You touch them, or rather your car touches them, and you are at fault, even if they have ridden straight at you on the wrong side of the road. It's an uneven playing-field or open road if you prefer.

There are certain stretches of road that tempt both cyclists and drivers into ever more dangerous games. Take the road going from Can Picafort to Son Serra. Much of it is nice and straight and relatively quiet. The local Alonsos hack along as though it were the Mulsanne straight and the cyclists treat both lanes as their own personal fiefdom. Like many other stretches of road, it is an accident in the making.

I'm not here to defend drivers. There are enough arseholes here who defy defence, but many a cyclist might well be defined with an abbreviation - F.T. I'll leave it to you to fathom out what F.T. stands for. Maybe there is some mathematical equation that measures the level of F.T. It is related to the size of the brain that determines awareness of and courtesy towards others. F.T. = X (brain) divided by A + C. Or something like that.

While on roads, the bit of the carretera going towards Can Picafort from Playa de Muro, newly laid out with chicanes and whatever, is to be a 50kph zone between the months of April and October. Fair enough I suppose. But some bits of road at 50kph do seem especially slow. I had some practice today. Behind a driver of exceptionally advanced years. Still, 50 it will be, so you have been warned.


But so much for the joys of roads. Never let it be said that I do not respond to being corrected. Someone emailed me about the number of "relax houses" in Alcúdia. Apparently, there are seven, not four. How about that? Seven knocking shops in little old Alcúdia. You don't get this sort of information in your average brochure you know.


QUIZ
Last time - "Woodstock", Joni Mitchell. Today's title - Who did it? And what made it particularly and rather oddly famous?

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