A Horse, Of Course

Look away now, if you are easily offended. I am going to talk about shit. Or rather I am going to get to this via a typically circuitous route.

The other day I asked for nominations for the weird. Let´s go big here, well relatively big. Forget the mere restaurant or bar, I hereby nominate Son Serra de Marina as not just the weirdest place in northern Mallorca, but in the whole of Mallorca.

Son Serra is a ghost town even in summer. You can fully imagine tumbleweed rolling along the empty streets, and a toothless old gummer manning a one-pump garage that doubles as a bar (with no drink of course).

Can anyone tell me what the point of Son Serra is? It's as though it was developed as a mini Can Picafort and then someone forgot it was there. Unlike Can Pic, there is nothing save for less than a handful of restaurants and a nautical club that always seems shut.

Well, there is one point to Son Serra. Its beach. I’m not talking the beach where the houses end, which is constantly chocker with sea detritus, I’m talking the one further along where the Germans get their kit off.

And now I start to get to the point. Ok, I admit I have been to this beach too. It’s a very nice beach. But you can be lying there, minding your own business and suddenly be aware of a rumbling. A rumbling of hooves coming ever closer. You look up and there’s this posse of cowboys galloping towards you. It’s the Rancho Grande boys taking dobbin for a spin.

Now there is something extremely liberating and thrilling about riding horseback on a beach. But.

Horses have this tendency to crap when you least expect them to. Indeed horses are remarkable in being able to produce a motion whilst in motion. Humans can only do this trick with the aid of a dodgy curry.

So, my point is, you get these horses coming along and having a dump on the sand. Why is this seemingly ok? Dogs are meant to be banned from beaches as they too are less than decorous and choosy when at their toilet. Maybe it’s because of the volume. At least with a horse you can see only too clearly what it’s produced, and steer an avoiding course. A dog. Bit trickier. So, I suppose that’s the reason why horses can go on beaches and dogs can’t.

Enjoy the beach.


At the same time as a minor oil slick caused beaches around Magalluf to be closed for a short while, word comes of worries among Balearic hoteliers as to the jellyfish problem. Specifically, they are calling for measures to eliminate the pesky little monsters. But to suggest that jellyfish may cause tourists not to come to the islands is probably stretching a point.


Pop Quiz time: Come on down, Mark Draper. “Red Rain” was of course Peter Gabriel. Mark, you get the hour’s point-duty as no-one´s got the Crusaders’ line-up. It was: Joe Sample, Wilton Felder, Wayne Henderson and Stix Hooper.
No prizes for knowing that Peter Gabriel was an original member of Genesis, but which disgraced music entrepreneur was instrumental, as it were, in the development of Genesis’s early career?

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