Everything's Just Wonderful

I have this idea that there is a secret cadre of mysterious propagandists working on behalf of Mallorca who scour the internet and press with the intention of righting any idea that the island may be somehow less than wonderful. And no more is this the case than with the weather. Yesterday, when talking about golf and winter tourism - again! - it occurred to me, well, why would anyone select Mallorca for a round of 18 and a few gin and tonics afterwards. You can get more challenging courses hacking around the coastline of Scotland in a gale force wind and horizontal rain - and not only in summer. You can also, so I understand, get some decent hotels, respectable nosebag and endless supplies from local distilleries. So what's with Mallorca when you can get drenched and freezing cold on a fairway or two in proximity to the Highlands? The only thing missing might be the chances of being struck by lightning with the same degree of regularity that there is here.

The point is that the weather has been, and is, appalling. Now I know that it isn't like this all the time, but it is also far from exceptional, and herein lies of course the problem. There may well be lunatic golfers who enjoy a soaking and a touch of hypothermia but, for the most part, I fancy they prefer a balmy day with a light breeze, dressed in short-sleeved Pringle shirts, rather than being clad in thermals and foul-weather gear and being rushed into casualty suffering from exposure. In which case, why choose Mallorca when there are more benign conditions to be experienced elsewhere? But this brings me to those propagandists.

Cast an eye over the odd website and forum and when the what's-the-weather-like-in (supply the winter month as applicable) question crops up, which it does with monotonous regularity, chances are that there will come a reply along the lines of oh, well, even if the weather's not that great, it has got to be better than the UK. No it has not. In the UK, you expect - quite rightly - the weather to be rubbish. In Mallorca, you sort of think it will be ok. So when it isn't, like yesterday for example, you are sorely disappointed. You may as well have booked in for a couple of days in Morecambe. And before you ask, I did live in Morecambe for a while, Or rather, barely lived as a consequence of a Morecambe winter. But at least in Morecambe you weren't disappointed to have become frozen to the spot.

And when it carries on being wet, cold, grey and windy, you become seriously hacked off and pine for a Scottish log-fire and a large glass of Glenfiddich, both of which you can get here (well, a Mallorcan log-fire, that is), but that is not why you came. It's no good all this it doesn't matter if the weather's not very good carry-on. It does matter. Because if the weather is as downright malevolent as it is at present, it is worse than the UK, not better. And the reason for this is that the expectation - for good weather - is greater. The propagandists will try and reassure you, which is nice of them, but they can only help to raise frustration when it turns out that they were talking crap. And who are these propagandists? Expats. Expats who, it seems to me, need to be able to justify their existence on Mallorca in terms of the weather. Because that is why most are here. And they're damned if they want those shivering back in the UK to think that they, too, may be dressed in several layers and attempting to ward off frostbite.

Still, it will probably all turn around in a few days. And chances are it will. Two years ago, this was from the entry for Boxing Day: "But the awful weather suddenly, miraculously almost, changed over the night of Christmas Eve. Christmas Day was just perfect. Clear blue skies and warm - a remarkable contrast that has continued today." And it continued for much of the winter thereafter. The week preceding that Christmas had been as lousy as the current bout; worse probably. So, it has got to be better than the UK. I'm one of those propagandists, after all.


SPORTS PERSONALITY
I didn't watch it, I listened to it - the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year show. John Inverdale's chummy good-eggness, allied to a touch of irreverence, makes for an altogther more agreeable host than one cast from a plastic mould - like Gary Lineker.

Inverdale and his pundits got it wrong. They predicted that it would be the swimming girl or the boy racer. It was, of course, a Scotsman on a bike. And because of Chris Hoy's training connection with Mallorca, his elevation to join the ranks of Ian Botham, Bobby Moore and, er, Princess Anne will be the cue for some to see this as a triumph for the island. In personality terms, his cycling team-mate with the comedy name and the Paul Weller Jam-era haircut, Bradley Wiggins, should have got it, and Mallorca could still have had bragging rights. Mind you, just a shame that she didn't win three golds, as Rebecca Romero - half English, half Spanish (indeed half Mallorcan, I believe), trained on the island, Sports Personality - would have meant move over, Agatha, and move over, Rafa. Here would have been the face of the Brits' tourism promotion. And apparently, she's thinking of moving on to windsurfing. Where better? Somewhere warmer probably. Or maybe Morecambe Bay.


THE "CASO CABALLISTAS"
This was, you may recall, a court case involving some horsey social club and various mayors and ex-mayors (1 December: Wild Horses). The court has found them all innocent of the charges of false documentation. On the one hand, this is bad news, as we can't all have another laugh at indiscretion in local public life, but on the other, it is good and a relief that, though they may have been hauled in front of m'lud and had their names dragged through lightly horse-manured dirt, they have come out of it smelling, if not of roses, but then rather better than such a dragging might have created. Scandal it seemed, but scandal it wasn't. Don't perhaps let us get too carried away, after all. Until the next one.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9KaI5T0zRw). Today's title - sort of controversial English female singer who is the daughter of a comic actor.

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