The Sick Man Of Mallorca: Chemists

The chap who runs my local pharmacy, who I suppose I should therefore refer to as the pharmacist, habitually wears a resigned expression. It is one that has been forlornly chiselled from years of what happens over the counter.

This sufferance is at its most patient when he has been on the receiving end of a German interrogation. "They ask so many questions," he once sighed. Observing a German tourist in full chemist-shop inquisition mode confirms what he says. The boxes of creams, pills, sprays are first examined and the leaflet then removed and gone through item by item, a difficult enough process if you can read and speak Spanish but considerably more so if you can't.

Get in a chemist shop queue behind a bunch of Germans and you are most likely to die before it comes to your turn. However, as I pointed out to the pharmacist, his fellow island men and women could test the patience of any saintly Joan, Jaume or Cati the chemist. His resigned expression can swiftly turn to a laugh.

Mallorcans have an unnerving habit of repeating everything you say to them. In the pharmacy, such parrotting results in delays that not even German hypochondriacs could cause (and trust me when I say that Germans are hypochondriacs; it's a consequence of their health system).

Another unnerving Mallorcan habit, one especially among older Mallorcan stock, is to stare blankly at an interlocutor once the exchange has supposedly ended. The blankness demands that the whole exchange is then repeated. Not once more but at least twice more. An ingrained and conditioned compliance with Spanish bureaucracy demands that any encounter is done in triplicate, and the chemist shop encounter is no different.

The British tourist, on the other hand, is unlikely to delay the pharmacist for too long. Indeed, the encounter can be over very swiftly if the Brit tourist senses he or she might not be being understood and so leaves in embarrassment. But actually verbalising symptoms is rarely necessary. Pointing is a universal language, as in pointing at a violent sunburn, at a throbbing head and a green tinge to the gills, at a Vesuvian mosquito eruption.

Ask yourselves this. What is the most important service required by a tourist? A bar, a supermarket, a taxi? No, none of these. It's the chemists. It's why I am full of admiration of my pharmacist, his fellow pharmassistants, and indeed all other pharmacy personnel in Mallorca's tourist areas. Just think what they have to put up with. Next time you see Helga from Hamburg dissecting the meaning of all the "uso de otros medicamentos" etc., then you'll begin to understand why I am sympathetic to their cause.

And this cause is all the greater because they don't get paid what they should get paid.

Publicity that has been given to the rotten state of finances at the tourism ministry has tended to overshadow the fact that IB-Salut, the regional health authority, is also on the critical list. It is IB-Salut that is meant to divvy up to the pharmacies, and it hasn't. For May and June, some 36 million euros remain unpaid. The chemists are threatening to pull down the shutters on 29 July and it is uncertain how long they might keep them down.

There would still be a chemist in a local area that stays open, but the convenience of having five chemists, which, as an example, is the case in Puerto Alcúdia, would go.

Shutting the shop might seem like cutting off the chemist's nose to spite his face, but unlike the pathetic attempt by bars to protest against the effects of the smoking ban by closing for a few hours (a protest only undertaken by a collection of bars in Palma and one that had absolutely no impact), this lockout is potentially far more serious and far more meaningful.

Everything in Mallorca pretty much links in with tourism, and the chemists are no exception. They are, as I suggest, one of the most important tourism services. There is going to be some major inconvenience if the chemists go ahead with their threat and if it is observed with anything like solidarity. Idiot barowners closing for a couple of hours is irrelevant, airport workers striking can be put down to bolshy unions, but chemists effectively going on strike is a very different matter. When people's health comes into the equation, the potential harm to reputation and image is way greater than anything that baggage handlers or air-traffic control can conjure up.

It needs sorting out, and it needs sorting out pretty damn quick.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.