All Bound For La La Land

"He's justified and he's ancient, he drives a Kangoo Van. He's justified and he's ancient, part of the master plan. They called him up in Felanitx and said Balti, stand for president. All bound for La La Land."

Borrowing from the words of Tammy Wynette and the KLF, Balti Picornell is justified as a determined Republican, he is ancient insofar as his appearance is one of having remained at Yasgur's Farm and the Woodstock Festival, while he does indeed drive a van. According to Tammy, the justified and ancient had an ice-cream van, but let's be honest, when was the last time you saw an ice-cream van in Mallorca. The nearest one gets is a lorry with a crane to lift an ice-cream kiosk from space it has occupied for centuries in Puerto Pollensa and at which septuagenarians hurl walking-sticks in protest at the eviction of their dairy goodness heritage.

Balti's van has been newly acquired. We learned this last week. Seemingly, he had a bit of a prang with his ancient Twingo and traded it in for a Kangoo. Does he have shares in Renault? Probably not, but it is most reassuring to learn that the Balearic parliament's president prefers something modest with which he can traverse the island by road, assuming that the roads are actually open.

Such modesty is all part of Balti's endearing charm, as also are his dining habits. We are yet to learn whether Balti does in fact eat Balti - a question I have been asking ever since he was elevated to the parliamentary presidency - but we are at least edging a little closer to knowing the Picornell prandial instincts. And we have to thank fellow Podemosite, Aitor Morrás, for offering the insight, which he did on Twitter last week.

Balti, opined Aitor in fewer than 140 characters, was "great" for having had a "dish of the day" at the Cafeteria Concord while on an official visit to Ibiza. You are probably as unfamiliar with this establishment as I was prior to Aitor's tweet. So I can inform you, courtesy of the gastronomic oracle that is TripAdvisor, that it ranks 127 out of 430 restaurants in Ibiza Town and receives 13 excellent reviews out of 17. "WanMadrid", for example, says that its prices are reasonable, something which is unusual for Ibiza. Moreover, its tortilla is "spectacular".

So was that it? Was tortilla Baltl's dish of the day? Aitor didn't get as far as explaining that. In fact, he removed the tweet. Whatever for? Did Balti not wish to be revealed as a modest diner? We will probably never know.

Still, Balti had his new (secondhand) Kangoo to continue him on his journey to La La Land (as opposed to the KLF's Mu Mu Land), which is where, were he a fellow traveller with Més (which he clearly isn't), he would have encountered Palma's Neus Truyol. In case you need reminding, Neus has, when not single-handedly been saving the city from drought, been pursuing a policy of converting Palma into Europe's recycling central. And pursuant to this, her Emaya municipal services agency staged the world premiere of its new video last week. Well, it went up on YouTube (4,075 views at time of writing).

This epic of awareness-raising, one might have hoped, would be replete with singing rubbish containers. "Please stuff me with your 1.5 litre plastic bottles from Eroski (other supermarkets do also apply)." Something snappy along those lines. Alas no. What we have instead is "La La Land, the Emaya Remix". From now on, all citizens, taking their lead from the video, will dance their way to the nearest containers, and they will wear broad smiles as they deposit the evidence of the previous night's drinking.

In the absence of the singing containers, they could at least have got Neus to do the dancing and singing, accompanied by fellow Mésite, the soon-to-be-mayor Noguera. But no. A PR trick missed, one fancies.

* The video is of the original Justified And Ancient, in case you were wondering as to the reference.