Ozzy Osborne And The Missing Horns

Start the year as you mean to go on. Or finish the year as you have been doing during the year. And the year before. I feel really sorry for the Osborne bull. What's it ever done to anyone? It stands in a field, minding its own business, and what does it get for its trouble? Some berk goes and paints it or commits other atrocities on its noble presence. Now the statue has had its horns lopped off. A kind soul will probably make sure it gets the horns back, just like someone made sure it got its tackle back when it went AWOL, but restoration can't compensate for the distress. Leave it alone.

Whenever some group or other has a political, cultural or gender beef, it heads off in the middle of the night and gives the bull a good dose of Dulux, drapes flags over it, cuts bits off and then glories in the publicity for about as long as it takes for everyone to forget (about a day, if that) or for some other group to come along and subject the bull to further propagandist indignity. The latest lot is a bunch called Arran, the name given to the youth organisation that has succeeded the Maulets. Arran, Maulets, it's the same and it's bloody angry that Catalonia and the Catalan Lands don't have independence. So angry, it has gone and de-horned the Osborne bull.

Arran timed its attack on Ozzy to coincide with the annual demo in Palma that doesn't celebrate Mallorca day. Arran, and others, would prefer that it did celebrate Mallorca day, but as it was decided some years ago that Mallorca day would be the anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Mallorca and not when Jaume I invaded, 31 December isn't Mallorca day. I hope that's cleared that up. Nevertheless, or probably because, there is, every year, this demo, which occasionally gets out of hand. It seems to have passed off without too much incident this year, but probably only because more radical elements were off in the Mallorcan countryside vandalising the statue of a bull.

Arran had staged a grand demo as part of a "platform" that comprised most of the usual Catalanist suspects. Its poster for the demo made it clear that it wasn't only about independence. It was also about socialism and feminism and possibly some other isms that there wasn't space for on the poster. I'm sorry but what has feminism got to do with independence? Indeed, what has socialism got to do with it? It's not as though Artur Mas is a card-carrying Trot or even vaguely red.

Anyway, everyone might well simply forget about the business with the bull were it not for our good friends, the Círculo Balear. For a load of Catalan independentists, be they Arran or Maulet or whoever, to mess around with the bull, protected for its artistic and heritage status (Spanish, that is), is like a red rag to a bull where the Círculo are concerned, and they, or at least their founder and restored president Jorge Campos, have had many a run-in with the Maulets in the past. And these run-ins typically end up with a "denuncia", something in which the Círculo specialises where the Maulets are concerned. The bull is no different. The Círculo has fired off a denuncia to the Guardia. It is all, I'm sorry to have to say, rather predictable. Naughty independentist boys get up to some mischief and no good, and outraged defender of all things Castellano and Spanish, Sr. Campos, drags the law in, and they, the law, must be getting pretty brassed off with being dragged into such puerility - by both sides. I don't know about the Guardia, but personally I wish a plague on both houses; they are as bad as each other.

One does wonder, given the regularity of the vandalism that the bull has to endure, whether it might not get some form of protection. It is pretty vulnerable, stuck in a field on its own, but the field might give a clue as to the security the bull could get. How about half a dozen proper bulls? All of them extremely bloody angry themselves, so that when some angry Arrans or Maulets or whoever other lunatic decides to go on a spot of nocturnal decorating, the miscreants might get rather more than they bargained for. Not a docile, inanimate animal, but some distinctly animate animals with horns that are definitely not for tampering with. Olé.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.