10:15 Saturday Night

I don’t normally talk about trivial matters such as what I do on a Saturday evening, but for once I will. I was having a curry at New Delhi in Playa de Muro. What a dismal experience. The food was fine, the company was fine. But the restaurant ... Two tables were occupied in the whole of the two-and-a-half hours spent there. Two tables. Last weekend in July. High season.

There are any number of reasons. Lack of spend. All-inclusives. But this part of Playa de Muro looks pretty dismal.

Empty units with for-sale signs. A bar and restaurant - open and running - but both with for-sale signs. The terraces are mostly empty. There is a lack of life, a lack of light even. They have had the life sucked out of them. They have little more to offer. And what they did has been sucked up by the Boulevard DIY centre where the tex-mex is doing ok and there are people at the café. The shop lights shine and welcome the moths of tourists like runaways drawn to the city lights and away from the drabness and ordinariness of provincial life.

But lacking the funds of Boulevard, these other places - caught between the rock of rents and overheads and a hard place of low spend - cannot (apparently) even shine out brightly to attract custom.

And there, on the other side of the road, are the opulent Iberostars, radiant, glowing, temples of exclusive all-inclusivity, tying their worshippers by cocktail and third-rate cabaret.

There is a view that every year is not as good as the one before. Last year was better, the one before was better still, and five years before the streets were ticker-taped with euros being crunched by those wearing diamonds in the soles of their shoes. 

It was always better. Go back ten or twenty years, and there was an alchemy that could turn the mere dross of a Saint Mick and a burger into rivers of gold and the riches of kings.

It is of course questionable that it was ever really THAT good. But if one uses the evidence of one’s eyes, at least when it comes to one part of one resort, one has to ask - was it ever really THIS bad?

Quiz - Last time. Harry Potter, the latest of course. Today’s title? Who?

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