Welcome To Buggy Central

The ability to transport passengers en masse by air begat mass tourism. Transport of all types, not just air, has been fundamental to the movement of humanity in pursuit of holidays, but of these modes of transport, there is none so important, after the jet airplane, as that which makes the smallest members of the human race mobile. Ladies and gentlemen, I humbly submit my theory that mass tourism would not be as mass as it is, were it not for one thing - the baby buggy.

Air transport was indirectly responsible for the baby buggy. By the mid 1960s, cross-Atlantic travel was commonplace when one traveller arrived in the UK from the US with what was then the still awkward and cumbersome conventional pushchair. She was the daughter of Owen Maclaren, a former test pilot and designer of the Spitfire's undercarriage. Maclaren observed the clumsiness of the pushchair and set about revolutionising baby and toddler mobility. It was he who invented the collapsible baby buggy.

While the pushchair was an inconvenience of inflexible non-collapsibility, it was less cumbersome than the perambulator, aka the pram. If you could imagine the kerfuffle trying to get prams onto Ryanair, then you can understand the vital role played by the buggy; there might never have been a Michael O'Leary without it. Moreover, prams invariably came with a nanny attached. Apart from the additional cost of transporting the nanny, were the pram to be with us in any great number on the streets and terraces of Mallorca, we wouldn't have moved on in musical terms but would instead have to suffer karaoke in an oh, gor blimey, cockney Dick Van Dyke style - "it's a jolly 'oliday with Mary", when it would be anything but.

We should, I suppose, be grateful for not having to put up with brigades of Julie Andrews waving umbrellas around, but what we have instead are brigades, nay armies, nay entire Panzer divisions of Kylies blitzkrieging their baby buggies along Mallorcan streets broad or narrow. The summer season is devoted to infant transportation but in the late season it arrives in bulk containers, the streets becoming impassable, terraces inaccessible. The Septemberist tendency takes over and it comes armed to the teeth with baby mobility. Mallorca becomes Buggy Central.

It is my contention that had Maclaren stuck to Spitfires, there would now be far fewer tourists and certainly fewer Septemberists taking advantage of post-August lower prices and the fact that young Jordan is still too young for nursery school. It is the relative convenience of the collapsible baby buggy that has enabled the Kylies and Waynes to opt to go "foreign" in a way that the pram would never have permitted.

In a sense, Mallorca and other tourist destinations owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Maclaren's invention. Without it, Septemberist mobility would be confined to the mobility scooter or the Zimmer four-wheeler. As a consequence of the various means of getting about, the Septemberists diverge dramatically in terms of age group, though they are all defined by modes of transport, some of them eschewing both buggy and mobility scooter in favour of the motor car. Typically, this is a Fiat Panda which moves at extraordinarily low speeds on account of the occupants admiring whatever view happens to be on offer. It is very easily observed, not just because of the sub-40kph speeds but because the occupants, for reasons that escape me, insist on wearing sun hats while inside the car. 

Mallorca can, mainly because it has no choice, boast being buggy-friendly. This contrasts with other parts of Europe. Vienna, for example, where A.A.Gill once observed that the buggy had been deemed a curse on civilised society and where a "waiter looked at the buggy the way a French polisher might regard a lawnmower on a dining table".

Buggy-friendliness results in whole terraces becoming buggy parking lots. As such, they are off-road liabilities, the potential for collisions with erratically steered mobility scooters or out-of control Zimmers on wheels heightened by the sheer weight of personalised transport that manoeuvres itself onto Mallorca's congested terrace space. Tourist forefathers could not have foreseen all this, but their descendants can now see it for themselves. The time has come for streets to have dedicated buggy lanes and for all bars to have dedicated buggy parking spaces. And given the wear and tear to Mallorca's already creaking urban infrastructures, there should be a buggy tax. A euro for every buggy that comes through the airport. It would raise millions, especially in September.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Image Has Gone

National treasures, my own bits of Brit treasury, which remind me that among the tapas and tumbet there is a place that is forever tea and Tunbridge Wells. In the case of A. A. Gill, he occupies, I suspect, no more than my own personal expatriate-in-Mallorca treasury. Not because no one here buys a newspaper more highbrow than “The Daily Mail” (tempted though I might be to suggest that), but because no one, other than me, is mad enough to spend five euros on “The Sunday Times” as a way of assuaging the conscience for having read “The Times” for the rest of the week for free on the internet. The Sunday version occupies a whole week in any event; the following Friday, it must be the Barnsley v. Scunthorpe match report or a return to Gill in order to re-discover something about television programmes I have not seen and will, in all likelihood, never see.

Gill has been to Vienna, to which you may well ask what this has to do with Mallorca. More than you might imagine. Take the ubiquitous croissant, borrowed, one thinks from the French, and a more pointless piece of non-nutritious lump of grease to defile a breakfast table it is hard to conceive of (except the Mallorcan ensaimada). Not French though. Made in Vienna, as was the café, equally ubiquitous and often equally as pointless in terms of its sheer numbers. The Viennese café though is possessed of history, grandeur and intellect. “Cafés,” observes Gill, “are the crucibles of culture; more great thoughts have been had in cafés than in all the world’s universities”. Not in Mallorca though, unless one counts as great thoughts choosing between pig or sheep for the evening meal or between a bucket of sangria or a bucket of lager with which to wash it down. Anything more cerebral is strictly for the Austrians.

The contrariness of Gill is that he can observe one of Europe’s great cities and still find room for the everyday, specifically that lightweight, fold-down facilitator of family mass tourism – the baby buggy. Mallorcan restaurants could yet offer a great service to humanity by creating buggy parking lots. In Vienna, it seems, they have already deemed the buggy a curse on civilised society. “The waiter looked at the double buggy the way a French polisher might regard a lawnmower on a dining table, and suggested ever so politely that he could put it somewhere else.”

It is not really the Panzer divisions of buggies marauding the summer streets. It is the buggy through the camera lens that causes me grief. If it is one’s lot to have to take enticing photographs of sunny terraces with happy tourists, there is a great deal of sympathy for a restaurant owner who on no account wants people in any shot as they “make the place look untidy”. Even the best crafted of terrace shot has the almost inevitable pitfall of an image of a fork exiting a mouth next to which is a lump in the cheek the size of Gibraltar; that or Mr and Mrs Glum, long-faced and longing, one assumes, to be anywhere else other than on holiday with each other. But after several weeks of waiting for good weather and a good crowd on the terrace, the heart leaps with joy at the prospect of a suitable photo. Line it up, frame it, take it … wait a minute. The heart sinks. The baby buggy. Always the baby buggy. And often the baby buggy with an attractive accessory, like a Spar bag hanging from a handle. It may add to a notion of “family friendliness” but for a decent photo it is the kiss of death or the vomit down the bib. Perhaps I should just go to Vienna.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Acker Bilk. Today’s title – the lyric continues “only you and I”. Where is it from?
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