Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days Of Summer

Do you remember the stereogram? It predated the days of the music centre, a massive sideboard type affair with a record deck stuck inside it and, as the name implied, two speakers built into its wooden frame. We had one of these home-entertainment leviathans. It occupied most of one side of the dining-room, somewhere into which no one ventured except at Christmas. The stereogram's contents were a tribute to times prior to and on the cusp of the invention of modern life, i.e. when The Beatles created the new world. Among the parental record collection was Nat King Cole's "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer", the cover of which showed a small, rocky cove and a scene of lazy, hazy and crazy that wasn't particularly any of these things save for the haze of brown that dominated the colours. These were also the days before Photoshop, Lightroom and advanced photographic and production techniques.

On some small, rocky cove in Mallorca one would hope that the island's politicians were being lazy if not hazy or crazy. Sadly, they are not. High summer and the living should be easy and everyone can go into soporific meltdown for a time: myself included. These are not though the days circa 1963 when a Mallorcan politician, such as he was (and it would have been he), would have been neither seen nor heard. They were, politically, lazy days. They were crazy admittedly, but the craziness, in a Mallorca style, owed more to the first pilgrims of the jet age. Small, rocky coves were out. Artificial beaches, vast expenses thereof, were in.

Trust politicians to belatedly discover small coves though. Manacor's have. It was all too easily predictable, and I did predict it. Kick up a fuss about a cove - Cala Varques - look to reduce numbers on this unspoiled beach, start banning cars, draw attention to somewhere otherwise not well known, and bingo: more people than ever descend on it. If it's as wonderful as the politicians were intimating, then it's worth discovering. Did they not realise this in Manacor? Clearly not.

High summer and the politicians should all be "tranquilo", but they can't be when they have so much to prove. They are of the new, new world, the one of political accountability and transparency. Far from allowing a silly season to prevail, they are dashing hither and thither in crazed, unlazy fashion, creating an occasional Brian Rix-farce season instead of the merely silly: I offer Manacor as evidence of this.

At the head of this feverish summertime activity is the tourism dynamo, Biel Barceló. Manacor today, Soller tomorrow, Menorca the next. His four-year mission? To seek out new coves, new resorts. To boldly go where no tourism minister has gone before. So, there's no time like the present to begin the mission. Perhaps it's all an attempt to divert attention from the eco-tax and the high farce of the mooted airport collection scheme.