Un-Weather: Retail and alcohol therapy

In the days, and there were once such days, when I enjoyed a holiday - a summer holiday, of the type which Cliff had invented - there would be this occasional bad dream. Maybe Bomb The Bass were to blame. They had, after all, or rather he had - Tim Simenon - provided the electronic lament "Winter in July". Into the dream would come snow: right around the time when the plane was on the tarmac ready to whisk us away to hot and sunny climes.

Fortunately, it was only a bad dream. Snow in summer never materialised. Climate change hadn't been that dramatic in spinning in a different direction and creating the new Ice Age. But the realisation did occasionally involve precipitation. Rain. And a glowering sky. What a strange word "glower" is. The addition of two letters and a change in pronunciation converts "glow" into the complete opposite. The Germanic branch line of English is to blame for a glowering sky, and the German language is littered with the vocabulary of meteorological foreboding and pragmatism: the frightening "Gewitter" or the explanatory "Unwetter", un-weather, a word of linguistic genius.

Likewise, Spanish has granted us "tormenta": the torment of weather akin to the tormenta of a differing kind - that which the Inquisition engaged itself in. The national meteorological agency tells us, and it is not wrong in this regard, that tormenta in August is not uncommon, but it is knowledge dissemination greeted with little satisfaction. When the sky glowers, when the rains doth fall, what the hell is there to do?

It is the lament of many parts of coastal resort Mallorca that if, only temporarily, one part of the sun-and-beach equation is removed (meaning, in practice, that both are), there is nothing to do. An answer is to get hold of the last available hire car in town and head off in a storm in order to go and get soaked somewhere else. Or to make the pilgrimage of the car-rental sector to the capital, and bring Palma to a standstill in the process. The Cathedral car park, the only one most visitors are familiar with, creates its own traffic jam. The inner lane of the Paseo Marítimo becomes almost impassable because of the queue to get in. If you can get in.

Palma does, though, provide a clue to the bad-weather conundrum as it offers the palliative of retail therapy for the beach-denied. Shops have been reporting that business is up by 40% in some instances. For the retailers, it might as well, as Carole King once observed, rain until September. What is everyone buying? They'll be declaring a crisis in the umbrella market on account of the shortage. Supply, demand, and the price of umbrellas suddenly sky rockets. But if shopping is the principal alternative, then the regional government might pay heed. Its anger at the "aggression" of Madrid and national government's constitutional challenge to local law limiting vast retail centres should be diluted. In the absence of fallback theme park and attraction alternatives in most of Mallorca, there should be vast retail palaces, prepared to admit the beach diaspora a couple of times each high summer.

Were they ever to get round to developing theme parks or at least attractions on any type of scale away from the thematic epicentre of the island's south-west, here's a suggestion. The Noah's Ark theme park. It is surely a better idea than that Christian theme park thing, about which we mercifully no longer hear anything. Animals two by two. A zoo perched above the floods. Perfect for the conversion of old arks which are lying around and rotting in small ports of the Mallorcan coast. There won't, of course, ever be such attractions. For the same reason as there won't be vast retail malls. It's the environment, stupid, the one that is buried under the weight of the car-rental sector when the un-weather rains of August are unleashed in their torment.

The shopping solution, and the impressive sales figures, will presumably reveal a sudden and high upward blip on the tourist spend monitor, and in so doing will contradict a further lament - that of the all-inclusive killing the complementary sector. Yet, it should be acknowledged that not all all-inclusive comes with an economy-class rating. It is here, at the lower end of all-inclusive, where the greatest torment is felt. Receptionists reduced to tears by guests demanding they do something about the weather, demanding that they tell them what to do. Deprived of the yellow thing, even low-grade beer, never tasty anyway, tastes that much less tasty when the sun don't shine. Drink, nonetheless, is an option, and not one that requires hiring a car in order to sit in a queue for a car-parking space. The bars love a good spot of un-weather.