Up, Up And Away

I am seriously considering a special blog devoted to Enviro Man. Here is part one:

"We only have five minutes to save the planet, Enviro Man."
"Then I will go and plant a tree and lay some stones."

See Enviro Man recuperate whole areas of wetland! Be amazed as he uses a spade to dig the earth for some new pines! Gasp as he cuts the tape and opens yet another new walkway across threatened dunes!

"Oh, Enviro Man, how can we possibly thank you?"
"There is no need to thank me. It is all in a day's work. But now I must fly, my organically powered jet packs lifting me across the natural environment of Mallorca, enabling me to see, with my recycled X-Ray Specs, villains in the act of natural desecration. Zap! Pow! Take that! Enviro Man will reclaim the land and protect it from greater harm." "Up, up and away!!!"

"Who is the man in the green suit?" asked the people.
"Enviro Man, people of Mallorca, is the environment minister," answered the mayor of Pollensa. "Every moment of every day, he makes our environment better and safer for future generations. See this new stone before you. The first of the second phase of the walkway between Puerto Pollensa and Pollensa. This is the gift of Enviro Man, along with a whole great wedge of some 450,000 euros of government money. In only the last two weeks, he has single-handedly saved Albufereta and laid the inaugural stones of the car parking in La Gola and now, here, by the road to Pollensa town for this pavement. And on each occasion, I have had my photo taken with him. I can tell you that he is an Enviro Man among men, and a fellow member, along with myself, of the Unió Mallorquina."

The people of Pollensa applauded and shouted their hurrahs, and watched as Enviro Man zoomed into the sky, looping and swooping and ready with his spade to plant yet more trees, with his scissors to cut more ribbons, with his ...

No, sod it, I've had enough of this.


Club de Producto náutico
How many organisations devoted to tourism promotion are needed to market an island? The answer is probably one, but that would be far too simple an answer. It's more like 500, at a conservative guess. The town halls, the Council of Mallorca's tourism promotion set-up and own department, the same at the regional government, the central government's ministry and promotional outfit, numerous talking-shops of a general tourism nature and then some more specific bodies. Take, for instance, nautical tourism. This alone has a whole raft (sic) of different groups, associations and whatever - those for diving, for yacht hire, for the various yacht (or nautical, if you must) clubs. Then there are the ports authority, the chamber of commerce and its nautical wing, the yacht clubs themselves ... the list goes on, a flotilla of different organisations bobbing on the water of let's try and grab as much well-minted yachtie and boatie-type tourism that's going.

The tourism ministry has now gone and created something called the "Club de Producto náutico". I think you can probably figure out what this means. This "Club", which is not a physical club of course but an abstract one, comprises many of the above and many not even mentioned, one more being the "Estaciones Náuticas de Baleares", of which Alcúdia is one. And no, I don't know what's happened to that either, despite the blaze of publicity earlier this year.

I suppose if you can get all the groups and associations pulling and veering in the right direction, all going starboard rather than some going to port (or should that be the other way round?), then this may be a good idea, but one does wonder at the sheer number and what they actually all do. We can at least be reassured that the Club is part of the whole marketing plan being developed, apparently, by Ibatur, the regional government's tourism marketing operation. One says reassured as quite how effective the "more than golf" etc message has been and quite how effective the money spent on the Nadal promotions will ever be, who can tell.

I have an aversion to anything that monikers itself "Club" or "Team". Both words are meaningless, bandied about as evidence of either prestige (Club) or of everyone sharing the same goals (Team) when neither is necessarily the case. They are marketing-speak, often a way of giving an impression of something positive being done, when in fact nothing much occurs. Still, maybe this particular Club will work, and it should, as Mallorca does have a lot going for it in terms of nautical tourism. If they could only ever agree on moorings and marina developments and ...


Little Britain's euro giveaways!
Forgot to highlight the Saturday and Wednesday euro specials at Puerto Alcúdia's Little Britain. There was a note on the WHAT'S ON BLOG, but if you missed that, then I shall remind you that there are bargains galore to be had on these days between 10am and 2pm.


John Hirst further
The "Dewsbury Reporter" confirms that Mr. Hirst worked for Allied Dunbar in the 1990s and no more (Hirst was from Dewsbury and a "jovial Yorkshireman", says the Reporter; I'm sure he was). Information about Mr. Hirst should be sent to the SFO.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Condé Nast publishes magazines such as "Vogue" and "Wired". Today's title - had this once before, though not the title as such.

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