Oh What A Night

The heavy storms that finally came in on Sunday have continued to rage. True to form "The Bulletin" dragged out the headline it uses on these occasions - "What A Night" (or day, use as applicable) - to refer to a burst of storms early on Tuesday morning. The dramatic change in the weather after over four months with barely a drop of rain has been welcome in some respects, but not for the Septemberists - the tourists.

On the forum for the Alcudia Guide, someone asked what there is to do when it rains. The answer is very little. It is the nature of Alcúdia and most of the island that everything occurs outdoors. Go to the old town, go to Albufera, go to the mountains of La Victoria. All well and good but not when the rain is descending with the ferocity of ammo from an AK-47. Take a hire car somewhere. All well and good, always assuming you can get one and aren't asked to pay out an arm, a leg and much of the torso, and always assuming you enjoy driving through rivers along the side roads and even some main roads. At one point over 40 litres per square metre dropped onto Albufera, bringing consequent repercussions for roads abutting it. One of the sadder sights is seeing the crowds at bus stops hoping to get to Alcúdia's market. Though additional buses run when the market is on, they nearly all get filled up by the time they've left Alcúdia Pins. But even if people had got on one on Tuesday morning, they would have got out only to be subject to a further deluge. Good news for the bars maybe, but not for anyone else.

When the weather is rubbish, some of the greatest problems are experienced in the all-inclusive ghettoes. Because they, like everything else, deal in the outdoors, namely the pool sides, the sun dispossessed who have to retreat inside in their hordes find little or nothing to satisfy them. Even were the rain to relent sufficiently for them to actually leave the hotels, many are reluctant to do so because that might mean spending money.

Of course there is always the option of just spending all day in a bar. Or if not all day, then up to some time in the afternoon, like near to five o'clock. The local plod van drew up outside the Alcúdia Suite hotel. Out, with some difficulty, came this chap who had been given the taxi home. One step forward and then three steps back. Careful now. Can you get up the steps to the hotel? Whoooahh. No. Let's just lift you up, sir, shall we. Don't let's give the local plod a bad name. Better to just take chummy back to the hotel to sleep it off. And they were finding it all distinctly funny, as indeed did I. But not chummy's wife.


The letters to "The Bulletin" are often a rich source of oddness. Take one from yesterday in which someone argues that hotels closing early this season is a case of shooting themselves in the foot as holidaymakers do not wish to come and see resorts at least partially shut down. Presented with such a scene, they will go elsewhere, so goes the argument. While true that places closed down can give a rather depressing air, are the hotels expected to stay open, uneconomically, just so those tourists who are around can feel that they are not wandering through ghost towns? Seemingly they are. Perhaps bars and restaurants that close early because there are few tourists about or because those which are about are ensconced in an all-inclusive should likewise stay open. In which case, if tourists' perceptions are so important (and it would be wrong to say they are not), then somebody should be paying the hotels and the bars to stay open. And that is not going to happen.


QUIZ
Today's title - as the headline is so regularly trotted out, it's likely we've had this before, but who said that I can't be lazy, too?

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