Breaking And Entering

An isolated house in the countryside. Middle of the afternoon. Two youths break in to the house. They pistol-whip a man in his sixties who is there alone. They hightail it with a third person, clutching 300 euros. One hundred each. Just for knocking someone semi-conscious.

Where did this occur? Off the main road between Can Picafort and Santa Margalida. I know the road well. Along it there isn't a great deal. The Santa Eulália rural hotel apart, there is virtually nothing until you get to the Es Turó / S'Alqueria restaurant and then, a kilometre or more further along, come into Santa Margalida. All that you find are one bar and tracks off for a few houses and fincas, isolated, in the country; idyllic in their quietness until, that is, a couple of thugs destroy that idyll. It's ideal, I guess, if you want to do a bit of thieving and burglarising.

An isolated house and maybe an isolated incident. One can but hope. But bad times lead to bad things. And it is not just the villas of the rich that are the targets. When someone had his flat in Puerto Alcúdia burgled, the Guardia remarked that anyone is a target now. There used to be a sort-of Robin Hood code, but not any longer. The Guardia are anticipating that there will be an increase in this sort of crime. It's hardly a surprising, if depressing, conclusion.

One can of course get carried away and start imagining households under siege from non-existent gangs of burglars, but anyone with an image of Mallorca as a place of open doors and exclusively happy-go-lucky people having fun is sadly deluding him or herself. Why do you suppose there is all that security fronting properties that I mentioned yesterday? The island may once have been largely crime-free, but its very success (for which read also wealth), its population increase and its social disparities (to say nothing of drugs) have fomented crime.

When I was speaking the other day with Jim and Ray from the association of British businesses and residents, one thing that came up was policing. Jim is a former policeman, and he was talking about a need for community policing. It is just one approach. Locally, one is aware of the local police doing the rounds in a car a couple of times a day and one also sees them at night. The Guardia also put in a drive-by appearance. I'm not sure how much of a deterrent this all is. Perhaps with the growth in unemployment and a willingness to splash public money, the government and the town halls could create job opportunities for more policing - policing aimed at patrolling the local neighbourhoods.


Alcúdia is apparently aiming to make itself the island's number one "leisure-craft resort" (reports "The Bulletin") and is among the marinas promoted by the Spanish Turespaña marketing body. Good news perhaps, though where they will find the space for more moorings, other than floating ones, I'm not sure. There is also the idea that the redevelopment of the commercial port and the building of the terminal will attract leisure cruisers, something that one considers with a degree of scepticism. But it may happen, and again would be no bad thing.

All this activity, if one can call it such, among the waterworldists comes at a time when a production company is seeking a commission from a UK television network for a drama series, set in a "luxury yachting marina" (again as mentioned by "The Bulletin"). Going under the working title of "Skippers", it would, apparently, feature "racy storylines", glamorous and hunky actresses and actors and be a boon to Mallorca's tourism. The likelihood is that, were it to be made, it would be based in the south. Portals springs to mind. It sounds a bit like "Howards' Way" with more money and sun and Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff chests. One wonders just how representative it would be. A series with the shallower but upper echelons of the expat food chain of the waterworld would, I would suggest, be fairly unrepresentative. There is scope for an altogether grittier drama about real life in Mallorca, but they probably wouldn't make that, preferring instead some reality docuTV about some poor saps for whom it's all gone wrong. And I think they may have done that already.

But a real-life drama, not one of intrigue featuring contemporary-day slimeball Ken Masters's or Charles Freres in waterworld, would be more compelling. They could show how it is, not how it is imagined. It could start with a man in his sixties being pistol-whipped. Now I think of it, wasn't one of the first ever storylines in "Eastenders" about an old man being robbed?


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Prince, but because his stuff is barred from youtube, here is the Simple Minds version (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDTruFjP57s). Today's title - this was a film for which the "lager, lager" people were partly responsible for the soundtrack. Who were they and what was the lager track?

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