Bend It

Flexibility. This might be a good word; a good word to describe how things are here. Not flexibility in the positive sense so much - as in he/she demonstrated flexibility in his/her thinking - but flexibility in the maybe we'll do what we're told to or maybe we won't sense. And often one fancies it is the latter. Let's take smoking in cafés shall we. Without wishing to puff on an old pipe once more and blow some smoke rings of explanation as to how the law is meant to apply (with the emphasis on the "meant to"), suffice it to say that, in some establishments, there is a no-smoking area and a smoking area. Theoretically, there is meant to be some physical division between the two, but let's not get bogged down in theory, for in practice what you have is a theoretical no-smoking area which is right next to a practical smoking area. In other words, it doesn't make any real difference whether one part of the café is dubbed "no smoking" because the smoke is available to all. How charitable these regulations are. And even in the no-smoking area, the rigidity of that no-smoking command is, yes, flexible. Or to use another word - ignored.

Now, without wishing to finger anywhere or anyone in particular, and given that I happen to like the place and am familiar with its coffees, pastries and baguettes, there is a café in Puerto Alcúdia that is mightily popular with locals and expats alike. It has - or had the other day when I was there - a particularly flexible approach to smoking (or no smoking, as it may be). Right by my head and therefore next to my table was a sign that read "zona no fumadors". I don't think I need to translate. I hadn't appreciated that the zona no fumadors appears to extend to one table alone, as - at the next table - were a trio, two of whom I recognised from a bar which, without wishing to finger anywhere or anyone, is by the grand canal in Puerto Alcúdia, and one of the two was puffing away heartily. At the adjoining table were two "girls", who I didn't recognise, and who were both happily making some serious inroads into a packet of Marlboro.

Flexible. It's not far from bendy, is it. And bendy is not far from bent. And bent is not far from rules. Flexible, that'll be it.


Meantime, rare old sport in the Junior Common Rooms, sometimes known as the local town halls. The only thing that appears to be missing from meetings of the town hall politicos is vast quantities of alcohol, which were deemed a pre-requisite in my day of student politics in the JCRs. Alcohol, though, was not the only requirement. I once chaired a special meeting that was a vote of no confidence in the editors of the college rag. It was packed out, but it didn't stop me having my apple crumble and custard while it was going on. But anyway, where was I? Ah yes, only slightly more relevant than JCR politics is what goes on in the town halls. Always good for a spat is Santa Margalida where the spokesman for the Unió Mallorquina was expelled from a meeting for having the audacity to accuse the mayor (Partido Popular) of high-handedness and something called "indocumentado", which, though it is pretty clear, I'm unsure as to the precise sense in which it is being used, and one needs to be a bit cautious as this all revolves around some 800 grands worth of invoices. Anyway, it all sounds like jolly good fun with accusations being hurled about to do with curbing freedom of expression and all that sort of stuff. There again, 800 grand is on rather a grander scale than debates we used to have about donating 20 quid to the Shrewsbury Three or the Iranian Ninety-One or the M Twenty-Five or the Temperance Seven - whatever cause it happened to be, and it was invariably of a right-on far-left nature and involved endless discussion as to whether payments were "ultra vires". If there is one or rather are two words that describe my university life, they would be ultra and vires, and I still don't know what they mean.

But the Junior Common Room to beat them all is of course that in Pollensa, where mayor Cerdà is under fire for the town's cleaning arrangements. When isn't he under fire? The United Left/Greens, the one-man mayoral destruction unit that is Pepe García, is having a go about the fact that the company that does the cleaning - sort of - has not had a contract for several months. Ah look, just don't worry about it. It'll be an oversight. You know how flexible things can be here.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Beverley Knight (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vobWLTdCzvo). Today's title - the lead singer sadly died recently.

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Don´t Live Here Anymore

The title of the piece for 17 February could just as equally apply to today’s. Changes. Changes to bars and cafés, changes to the personnel. Don’t go somewhere for a few weeks, and – what do you know – there are new people running the gaff. So it is with Café La Sala in the old town of Alcúdia. Trevor and Stuart have gone, taking with them the almost howlin’ wolf Nanouk. When I was dishing out those awards at the start of the new year, there should have been one for “dog of the year”. She would have got it, hands – or paws – down. You don’t get too many dogs with husky genes knocking around Alcúdia. But change is a constant. When was it? Three years back probably. At La Sala one day were Trevor serving, Stuart in the kitchen, and on the terrace would have been Dave and Mel from Oxygen, Ben and Michelle from Jacks, Guy and Jo from Es Cantó. All of them gone. Transient is the word I think. Mallorca is impermanence.

La Sala is one of those cafés blessed by location. Opposite the town hall, it generates good passing trade as well as that from the “ayuntamiento” and local businesses. It also has sufficient terrace space for a double line of tables, something that some of the other cafés do not have. The new owners, Frederick and Emmi, were saying that here there is a security with a café that maybe is absent elsewhere in Alcúdia, The Mile most notably. Like Trevor and Stuart, they are very nice people, and they plan to go more into a bistro line that the guys themselves had been talking about. I wish them well. They’ll do just fine.

Also opposite La Sala is Sa Cisterna, one of Alcúdia’s best shops – if you like local sausages and meats and wines that is. Salvador, who has not changed, is sort of what you expect a purveyor of meats to be like. He has the broad-beamed presence of a butcher, the bib of a meat-handler and a huge knowledge of the produce he is only too happy to impart. We got around to talking about white wines that he stocks in his bodega, my bemoaning the lack of anything that decent in the supermarkets; it will be two to three weeks yet before the 2007 vintage starts to come in. He was talking also about the differences between island and mainland wines and particularly about price. A good bottle, be it white or red, from the mainland will generally always be two to three euros less than an island one. The reason lies, mainly, in costs and capacity of production. Mallorcan land is that much more expensive than that of much of the peninsula’s wine-growing areas where volume (economies of scale I guess) is achievable; much of Mallorca wine production is boutique by comparison, and carries a price tag that reflects this. He showed me a decentish bottle of white from Catalonia. Less than five euros. You would pay that for an uninspiring plonk in the supermarkets.

In parts of the island, it is possible to get wine from the “chap who comes round”. It’s like in England in the days when the Corona man used to turn up every Thursday and you would buy the week’s lemonade and exotic flavours such as cherryade and the Corona “cola”. My very old Mallorcan neighbours have another house in Sineu. Every week they take their flagon or whatever it is and get their “vino negro” (black equals red). Works out about 2 euros a litre they said. Another neighbour tried some. Like vinegar, she reckoned, which was perhaps a tad uncharitable as they had given her a bottle for free. I’ll stick with Salvador.

Café La Sala, C/. Major (opposite the town hall), Alcúdia.
Sa Cisterna, C/. Cisterna 1, (next to the town hall), Alcúdia.


QUIZ
Yesterday – “Help”, The Beatles. Today’s title – one word´s missing, but it was a big hit at the end of the ´70s for?

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Hot Air For A Cool Breeze

Oh, oh, there’s another threat to the winter bar and restaurant business blowing in the wind or rather hanging in the air above bar and restaurant terraces. Euro MEPs are on the climate change trail, and they have stumbled across the patio heater on their rambles. They are expected to suggest to the European Commission that these space heaters are banned, thus – at a stroke – saving the planet.

Patio heaters are of course absurd. The notion of heating air is ridiculous. But for all that they are a completely nuts concept, they have become almost an essential for Mallorcan hostelries. Even if the terrace is shrouded in attractive plastic sheeting, a space heater, with its elongated, mushroom-topped neck, commands the floor space, pumping out some welcome heat. Inside the bar itself, they are not a bad idea either, as some bars just do not have heating. Like many houses that have freezing interiors in winter despite warmth outside, bars are similarly ill-equipped for the perishing internal conditions until the heat really gets its act together again come April or May. The space heater has been a positive boon in staving off frost-bite or chilblains if one tarries too long in a place of hospitality. As I did yesterday. Except there was no space heater. Several hours I spent and several hot chocolates were consumed, all to little effect in warding off the shivers. To make things just a bit cooler, the door was open much of the time to let the smoke out. Don’t for one moment think that there is a particularly stringent approach to smoking in bars here if they are of a certain size.

The hope is that, even with a command from Brussels, it will be ignored. The environment may suffer from the gases pumped out by space heaters, but my extremities also suffer.

And to revive an old theme of this blog. Here is the first Bar Of The Week for the new year. Space heaters there may not be, but Café del Món is an otherwise fine little bar, and it also happens to be the only one open in Playa de Muro apart from the rather dismal Dallas bar.

Where: C/. Juia, just around the corner from the chemists, Playa de Muro (it used to be Robin Hood).

What: Tapas and menu plus breakfasts and pasta specialities. Wi-Fi and sports TV.

When: Every day, normally from around 09:30 unless it was a particularly late night.

Who: Georgi and Martin (that's them above).

Why: Cheery local sort of place but well geared to an international market, and it is a welcome addition to Playa de Muro’s winter all-closed-up scene.

QUIZ
Yesterday – Talking Heads. Today’s title – it comes from an album title song by a very famous band.

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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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You’ve Done Too Much

Café society. You will never go short of a café or bar here. Despite the claims that nothing is open in Alcúdia or Pollensa over winter, the fact is that there is – and quite a lot. For the British tourist, such as he or she might be in winter, there may not be a surfeit of “British” bars, but there are certainly Spanish (Mallorcan) bars.

A writer to “The Bulletin” raised this recently. He was spot-on in his analysis. It comes back to the issue of over-supply. There may be naïve Brits who come and take on bars, but there are also an awful lot of Spaniards who do the same – naïve or not.

The writer was referring specifically to the “locales” that often come with new residential developments. Build some flats and devote the ground floor to “locales” (units if you like), often of a charmless and purely functional appearance. And amongst these units will be a bar or café. The populations of the local towns may be increasing, but not to the degree that they demand ever more bars.

Take one such development. It is by the now closed Hospital d’Alcúdia. Flats and a café. I can’t remember its name, but I have used it occasionally. It is pleasant enough. It is also enormous by comparison to some bars. I wish them well, but was it really needed? Across the road there is a bar of many years standing. Walk up the road a bit to the Charles Square and how many bars are there within short staggering distance? Four, five? Walk a bit further, and there are four or five more. Most of them are always open.

That they may get used is not really the issue. People do go to cafés, they are very much a part of life here. But they go and have a coffee. They go and often spend an inordinately long time – having a coffee. The more cafés there are, the more the numbers – having a coffee – are spread more thinly. This is the point the writer was getting at. So much supply serving questionable demand. The result, the bar is put up for sale or rent.

Too great a supply is an economic killer. The same problem exists with restaurants. A new one opens and one immediately asks why. Does Puerto Alcúdia, for example, need the number of clothes shops it has? It is one thing to serve the local towns, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that Palma is readily accessible and has its own abundance of supply. The estate agent market is another with too much supply; indeed Mallorca gives the impression of drowning under an excess supply of all sorts.

One can extend the discussion to the summer. Clearly, there are far more people around. Greater demand in terms of bodies, but the supply also increases – all those places that do not open through winter. The all-inclusive and the lower spend may have curbed actual demand, but the supply side has kept on growing. It makes no sense. The changes to the summer economic model seem to have been, and are, ignored by many. The all-inclusive may take the brunt of the blame, but when the suppliers complain, they might also take a look at themselves. They are as much, by their very number, a part of the problem.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Joe South. Today’s title – first line from? Some of Coventry’s finest.

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Every Brother Is A Star, Every Sister Is A Star

From Sa Pobla, Lluc, Soller, Petra, Vilafranca de Bonany and Mancor de la Vall - “Els màrtirs del Coll”. Male and female - Brothers and Sisters. They were among those beatified yesterday. They were shot in the Coll district of Barcelona. There were Mallorcan flags in St. Peter’s Square, and Mallorcan relatives.

Today is another day to be celebrated. This is not a religious day, but a political one. 29 October 2007 marks 30 years since a vast demonstration that called for a statute of autonomy for Mallorca (and the Balearics) in the immediate post-Franco era. That statute was granted in 1983.

So much for that Civil War and Franco-period amnesia.


To other matters ... Here’s a surprise. The “Diario” is quoting industry representatives who reckon that the bar/café/restaurant market is reaching saturation point. Well, who would have thought it!? There is a belief that this saturation is being brought about partly by those who open up for the tourist season with the sole intention of making a fast buck, who offer low quality and high prices in pursuit of that goal, and then look to sell on the traspaso having achieved it. Depending on how the figures are arrived at, there has been - at most - an average increase of 7% in the total number of various types of establishment.

There is turnover of bars and restaurants. This is undoubtedly the case, but I am not aware of hordes of fly-by-nights acting in the way suggested, which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. The fact is though that it takes a hefty financial commitment to stump up for a traspaso in the first place. A resultant swift sale is usually more because the place has flopped rather than because a fast buck has been attained. I could give you plenty of examples of this.

Saturation is an issue. I have referred to it several times before. The growth of the all-inclusive (AI) only compounds the problem of saturation - too many places chasing too little demand. The flops are largely the result of the double-whammy of too much competition and too much AI offer. Rather than cynically chasing wads of cash, perhaps it is more a case that people take on establishments without full appreciation of the market and then have to adjust quality (down) and prices (up) because it is the only way to survive until they can sell on the traspaso - and that is becoming quite a big if.


On the Balearic property scene, it is being widely reported that, while the prices of new properties have risen (by around 4%), prices for other properties are down by as much as 10% - and this only over the past few months. There is an adjustment occurring in the market, and mortgage lenders are becoming a lot tighter. Though this may put a block on overall growth, the adjustment is overdue.


And weather ... no, yesterday was a blip. Rain again.


QUIZ
Yesterday - Jethro Tull. Today’s title - who? (I’m not making a statement; like many of the titles, it just came to me.)

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