Your Swaying Arms: End of season

1 May. Optimism mixed with anxiety. 31 October. Anxiety. And above us only sky. Rains and storms come tumbling from appropriately grey heavens to tail a season which, on its first "working" day (3 May), was topped by floods of biblical proportions, ominous in being a metaphor for what was feared was going to be a wash-out of a summer. Maybe the May rains did some good though and washed away the ash cloud of strangling the season at birth.

Above us only sky. The sun up in the sky. During the summer I littered the HOT! Facebook page with musical references. One, for no particularly good reason, was the "sun ain't gonna shine anymore". It will continue to shine, from up there in the sky, but not for so long nor with as great an intensity. The "warmth of the sun" that wraps you in its swaying arms from the moment of its first vernal embrace and dance turns its lights off as certainly as the "long hot summer" passes us by.

I hate this time of year. Hate it for the taking away of summer. How dare it? Maybe a reason why I don't subscribe to much of the claptrap that is spoken about winter tourism is that it makes no sense. The connection with beach, sea and sun is too powerful to allow for any sense. Remove this connection, break it and you are left with something that isn't Mallorca, just its empty shell smashed by the breakers as the autumn winds whip the sea into a fury of spite caused by its own fading warmth.

November, with the deliciously evil contrivance of its opening days of the dead, is the zomboid month. The white faces of the living dead of summer, all those who slog through six months or so of breakfasts and beers with barely a caress from the sun, stumble around in confusion. This curious life of being here in the sun, but never seeing it or actually living it, and when time comes to be given the opportunity ... the sun has gone or has at least decided to operate on only one engine. The season over, and now what's there to do?

You have to reconcile this. It takes much of November to do so; it is a period of mourning. What you have to conclude is that there are two states - dead and alive Mallorca. Stretching ahead now is the dead time, the dead air of paused life. To fill this dead time, it is necessary to construct an alternative Mallorca. It is not solely the time for planning to do those things which, because it is too damn hot during summer to worry about (such as decorating), are always put off, but planning also the realisation of an alternative Mallorca. Well, it is for me.

Summer, for all its warmth, can be enervating. It saps you not just of energy but also of concentration. It provides an excuse for inaction, but with its passing you can't play that card any longer. October's end may herald a sense of anxiety but it also brings the opportunity for what's to come. And where I'm concerned this means finally beginning to undertake the sorts of projects I have been threatening myself with doing.

One of them has to do with Dolores. Or Dolly, to give her her diminutive. She's diminutive in a different sense, as she's petite. I know what she looks like, having constructed her from the fragmented memory of a dream in which she appeared. The question I still haven't completely answered is what Dolly is. But I think I know. She is a metaphor for Mallorca. She sucks you in, so to speak, but she isn't quite as she seems. She is contradictory, at times infuriatingly superficial but at others mystifyingly intense. She is insular and defensive, and then cosmopolitan and open. By looks, she isn't Mallorcan, she is a hybrid of northern European "mezcla". Rightly so, as the northern European grafts a cultural and physical aspect onto Mallorca in making it a mixture. She is also, of course, summer and winter - warm and cold; outgoing and introspective; loving and obnoxious; optimistic but also anxious.

Dolly's story. Imagine that. Chapter One ...


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.




Index for October 2010
Academia, conferences and tourism - 23 October 2010
Airport charges and air taxes - 17 October 2010
Are you the right man for me? - 24 October 2010
Bad weather, tourism and - 12 October 2010
Bingo and betting - 21 October 2010
Bullfighting and culture - 7 October 2010
Coal transportation in Alcúdia - 15 October 2010
Corruption in the Balearics - 6 October 2010
End of season - 31 October 2010
Expats and multiculturalism - 18 October 2010
Fairs, Mallorca's - 4 October 2010
Felipe and Letizia - 13 October 2010
Fire fair and event publicity - 16 October 2010
Gran Hermano - 20 October 2010
Homelessness and poverty - 26 October 2010
Lidl in Alcúdia - 8 October 2010
Mixed all-inclusive in Santa Ponsa - 27 October 2010
October, the paradox of a Mallorcan - 9 October 2010
Paco de Lucia, flamenco music and - 3 October 2010
Partido Popular and language policy - 10 October 2010
Partido Popular and regionalism - 28 October 2010
Peguera's Oktoberfest - 11 October 2010
Playa de Muro, Costas' demarcation and - 25 October 2010
Ryder Cup - 5 October 2010
Sports tourism - 29 October 2010
Technology future in Mallorca - 14 October 2010
Thomas Cook and its hotel payments' "discount" - 22 October 2010
Tintin in Palma - 1 October 2010
Tourism spend statistics - 30 October 2010
Units under apartments, empty - 19 October 2010
Voting rights, residency and - 2 October 2010