The German Occupation Of Cala Ratjada

Coffee and cake; wheat beer, wurst and curry sauce; Schlagermusik and Bayern München shirts. Cala Ratjada is the Arenal of the north-east, an annexation through sunbedsraum: Vorsprung durch Touristik. Its alliance with Germany wasn't the result of some grand master plan for the division of Mallorca on nationality grounds. As with other resorts, it just happened because of tour operator concentration. Or, unlike for example Arenal, was there more to it? An association from the past? Possibly there was.

Cala Ratjada is about as far away as you can get from Palma and so was about as far away as seekers after tranquility could get in the first thirty plus years of the last century: seekers after tranquility and refuge. They could number among their ranks the banker Joan March. One of his "palaces" was built in Cala Ratjada. A more modest pile, overlooked by the March palace, was the summer residence of the only Mallorcan to have been Spanish prime minister - Antoni Maura.

March and Maura had established themselves in Cala Ratjada many years before they were to be joined by non-Mallorcan neighbours. Of some 400 inhabitants in the early 1930s, a quarter of them were from overseas. They came from England, Russia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. But most important among them were those who came from Germany and Austria.

Quite why Cala Ratjada became the refuge it did will doubtless be revealed in a book by municipal archivists in Capdepera - Maria Massanet and Gori Rexach - and a Swiss researcher, Gabi Einsele, about the "central European exile" in Cala Ratjada between 1930 and 1936. The rise of the Nazis and the creation of the Second Republic in Spain in 1931 were undoubtedly factors, though a political regime in Spain that was opposed to fascism still doesn't explain how Cala Ratjada came to be a chosen place of refuge.

In contrast to, for instance, Pollensa, where an initial wave of artists was to attract others during the First World War, establishing a starting-point for the benefits of Cala Ratjada is less clear. Nevertheless, soon after the Second Republic had commenced and then especially in 1932 when the Nazis' momentum was great, it became home to German Jews and pacifists, most of them sharing common interests in the arts and literature.

So it was, therefore, that journalist Heinz Kraschutzki came, as did poet and photographer, Konrad Liesegang, as well as Karl Otten (also a journalist), the Austrian writer Franz Blei, the painter Friedrich Kleukens, and someone who was to become an artist, Hugo Cyril Kulp Baruch, much better known as Jack Bilbo.

Of these, Bilbo and Otten are perhaps the most familiar names. Otten had faced being shot when things turned nasty after July 1936, but he escaped with the help of the British and was to go on to be a propagandist with the BBC. Bilbo didn't stay all that long. He arrived in Cala Ratjada in 1932 and left the following year, having sold what was, for the times, a bizarre bar named the Waikiki. With its Hawaiian design, it was for a time the principal meeting-place for the foreigners who had descended on Cala Ratjada and indeed from further afield.

Bilbo was as much an adventurer as he was an artist. Prior to coming to Mallorca, he had been Al Capone's bodyguard. Once he finally ended up in England, he became something of a celebrity: there is very odd British Pathé newsreel footage of him giving his New Year's message in 1947. Though his time in Cala Ratjada was short, his presence - and that of the Waikiki - was perhaps the most significant. When the swastikas started to be raised in Germany, the German population in Mallorca was estimated to have been around 3,000, and many of them would have made a trip to the Waikiki: a focal point for opposition to the Nazis.

But there were of course other Germans, the Nazis themselves, one of whom was Hans Dede. Initially acting consul, in 1933 he became the permanent German consul. The colony in Cala Ratjada naturally attracted his attention. Even before the Civil War, he was hard at it, denouncing the likes of Kraschutzki, who had had his German nationality taken away and was to be arrested at the outbreak of the war. Furthermore, Nazi supporters began to arrive in Cala Ratjada. The Hotel Castellet, the first hotel built in Cala Ratjada, became something of a headquarters for the Nazis. And yet curiously, while all this was going on, the mayor, Miquel Caldentey Ginard, was backing a campaign to develop tourism, seeking both local and foreign investors.

It may be pure coincidence that the resort is now so very German, but Cala Ratjada's history bears a very clear German imprint. Perhaps there is more to the resort's German association after all.

Mallorca And War: The Germans

In the article a couple of days ago about Gertrude Stein's time in Mallorca during the Great War, I mentioned the German ship the "Fangturm". Having been abandoned in Palma's port at the start of the war, work commenced on getting it shipshape when the Verdun battle began, only for the work to later cease. But whatever happened to the ship? After its half and incomplete paint job, it was allowed to rust away even more. In 1919, as part of reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, the Spanish navy seized the ship and handed it over to the care of the French consul. By then it was in such a poor state that it had to be towed to Marseille.

The ship was to be sold in 1921 to a Belgian company. It was renamed the "SS Antverpia" and eventually met its end when it was bombed by German aircraft in Boulogne harbour in 1940. Originally a German cargo ship, albeit one that was built by Swan Hunter, its fate was finally sealed by a German bomb.

The story of the "Fangturm" is one of only a few remnants of the wider story of Mallorca during World War One as told from the German side. Gertrude Stein's account of the ship left out plenty of detail. She implied that some of the crew had "gotten away" to Barcelona. In fact, it seems that they all got away, instructed to report for military service and ferried to Barcelona to start their journey to Germany. The German consul in Mallorca, Alfred Müller, issued an order: "Subjects of the German Reich, who are obliged to undertake military service, must present themselves without delay for this purpose to the Imperial German Consulate in Calle Concepción 82".

Stein had also understated the ship's function (or perhaps she had been sarcastic, and it is more than likely that she had been). Rather than selling pins and needles in the Mediterranean, the "Fangturm" was one of a fleet of large cargo carriers which bore similar names. It had been en route from New York to India when it headed to Palma to seek a safe haven just as war was breaking out. The crew had initially not known what to do. When they were ordered to report for military service, they did know, and so the ship was left behind.

Other Germans of military age were also obliged to leave and join up. The "Ultima Hora" newspaper referred to "our friend", a Herr Schmidt, a local silversmith, who had no choice but to report for service with an infantry battalion. The Germans who remained, those who were too old for service, must, one imagines, have been those who started painting the "Fangturm". It's hard to know who else would have done.

What seems clear is that there was no animosity to nationals on either side of the conflict. Indeed, there was obviously some affection: "our friend, Herr Schmidt". Sides were taken but only in arguments and debates in the cafés of Palma. Neutrality brought with it a ban on any public displays of sympathies for either side, so marches or demonstrations were out, but there was no ban on publications expressing their views or on individuals arguing their case. The two sides divided predominantly along class and occupation lines. Supporters of the Central Powers were the conservatives - the aristocrats, the church, the military and big business. The Allies' supporters were the educated middle class, the new bourgeoisie, teachers, unionists and workers. 

Opinion in Mallorca reflected that across Spain. As I mentioned in a previous article, a reason why Spain remained neutral was because of its own internal tensions. It may even have been the main reason. Mallorca was relatively unaffected at that time, but mainland Spain wasn't. Had Spain gone to war, those tensions would have split the country apart, the aristocratic and Catholic conservatives against the liberals, the anarchists, the Republicans, the Catalans. Just as it was to be some years later.

Though Mallorca and Spain benefited from the war - ships were built in Mallorca and blankets, uniforms, boots, guns and food were exported - the ordinary worker reaped little of the benefit. The cost of living rose but wages didn't. There was also famine in Spain during the war. Politically, there was the rise of Maurism, the movement started by the son of Antoni Maura. Though Maura supported the Allies, he had drifted so far to the right that the movement which took his name can be seen as a precursor to the Falange.

And then, just before the end of the war, came a different threat. The first Mallorcan death as a result of the worldwide flu pandemic was in Sineu on 11 September, 1918. Mallorca and Spain staggered out of the war. Neutrality had bought the island and the country some time. The inevitable was merely delayed.

No Small Beer: Peguera's Oktoberfest

The Oktoberfest is on. Not the one in Munich, the one that is really a Septemberfest, but the one in Peguera, little Germany on the island's south side. 70,000 litres of German beer have crossed the Mediterranean in order to wet the whistle of Germans and others at this mini-me drinks marathon until 20 October. One Spanish report of the beer festival mentioned, almost with alarm, that the beer is not served in any quantity less than half a litre.

Beer for Germans is culture in a way that it is not for the British. It is woven into German society in a far more fundamental manner. Small towns have their breweries. Small towns and villages have their annual fairs - the "Kirchweihfesten" - at the heart of which are trestles to accommodate the beer drinkers. Beer is so much a part of German life that I once watched a television football discussion between Franz Beckenbauer and Paul Breitner. On the table in front of them were two glasses of "Weizen", wheat beer. It's hard to imagine Lineker and Shearer with a couple of pints of Tetley's in the "Match Of The Day" studio.

The Peguera Oktoberfest is an example not just of the transporting of beer to Mallorca but also the bringing of German ways to the island. The relationship between Germany and Mallorca is of a different order to the one between Britain and the island. The Germans and the Brits form the two most important tourist markets (and also form the most populous of European resident groups), but there is a deeper bond between Germany and the island, and not just one reflected in what is almost certainly an urban myth - that some German businessmen once tried to buy Mallorca.

Not so long ago, it was said by a local politician that the British have Mallorca in their "genes". It was an exaggeration. In Germany, on the other hand, Mallorca is a part of the national DNA. In Germany, you can easily buy Mallorca's German newspapers or you can watch a Schlagermusik special, probably from Peguera, or Thomas Gottschalk's "Wetten, dass...?" TV show being beamed from Palma. You can even find the Mallorca weather report on national telly.

So strong is the link that there is an imaginary lebensrauming land and sea bridge from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg that reaches as far as Mallorca. It is no surprise that the Bierfest or Kirchweih should be re-created. But an Oktoberfest or a Gottschalk show might imply that the relationship is frivolous. Not so. The Germans take their Mallorca seriously.

As a people, they are curious and inquisitive as well as acquisitive of knowledge to a degree that the Brits are not. Sometimes it can be intrusive, such as when they are standing at the gate taking photos. But they arm themselves with every guide book imaginable and, being German, follow routes or recommendations to the letter. Every German seems to have actually read George Sand's "Winter In Mallorca", unlike everyone else who may have heard of it but can't be bothered to read it. The Germans will try the language, because they're interested in doing so and are not phased by cocking up, the product probably of the fact that they do foreign languages anyway, which is not the way with the Brits.

Beer, though, is a different matter. The Germans are as capable, if not more so than the British, of putting it away in industrial quantities. As the lovely Lisa and Johanna, two German students at the neighbours' house this summer put it: "there are much very drunken persons in Arenal". They didn't approve. Beer is where Germany really kicks in and Mallorca fades into the background. The Germans take their Mallorca seriously, but not when it comes to beer. They take that just as seriously. For Germans, it is Weizen or helles or dunkel beers that matter, and not a Saint Mick. The Peguera Oktoberfest is a manifestation of Germans' obsessiveness with the Reinheitsgebot purity order of their beer. And they're right to be obsessive; German beer is the best in the world. Which is why cutting along to Peguera isn't such a bad idea before it all runs out. Prost!


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Poles Apart

Recently, one of my main German correspondents took me slightly to task in respect of my generally held view of the German propensity to appear like complete lunatics, notably when stomping the streets of Playa de Muro or Alcúdia with two skiing poles or indeed hanging around the supermarkets with the same pointed sticks: not in a threatening manner as in they are about to hold up the Trabilsa security van, but as in well it's the most normal thing in the world, isn't it? Which it isn't. But therein lies the rub or the "Rübe", a word to which my class was introduced by a German student doing some teaching duties at my old school who claimed that it was slang for penis (it is actually a word for carrot, so if you like ...). The rub, however, is that for many a German it is quite normal. Quite normal, that is, to appear less than normal, as defined from a British perspective.

This all relates to a none-too-rare cultural discussion as to the German trait of conformity and the British one of individuality. My man in Munich (strictly speaking, he isn't in Munich; he's about two hours drive away, but it sounded better in an alliterative way) argues that the great Panzer divisions of Germans yomping, with strength and joy, across the wheat fields and along the "Strassen" of the country are demonstrating an individuality that the cynical Brits simply can't understand. One might say that there is indeed a conformity to be observed in the massed ranks of Nordic walkers marching in an easterly direction towards Poland. And within the boundaries of the Bundesprepublik this may indeed be so, but not when the Nordic art is transported to the likes of Alcúdia. At this point, it becomes an expression of individuality, and I can see the logic of the argument, because - at heart - it is an expression of quite honestly I couldn't give a toss what anyone else thinks of me, especially the British.

This is a not unworthy trait at all. The more one thinks about it, the more the conformity-individuality axis is spun in favour of an axis-power non-conformity. German men, for the most part, have an admirable absence of any dress sense. I know one who wears a pink beret, for example. And no, he's not, in case you were thinking otherwise. It must all stem from a desire to wear strange hats with feathers and tight leather shorts. And trust me, such people do exist. But there goes my British cynicism. I should stop it.

How really can one condemn for lack of individuality a nation populated with men and women who, at the first hint of warm weather, are prone to getting their kit off (just as well, given some of the clothes they wear). This is also admirable, albeit it does rather depend where and which men or women are indulging in some "Freikörperkultur", the abbreviation for which is FKK: only the Germans could have invented a term for nudism that sounds like something else. I daresay that there is a nudist Nordic walking movement somewhere in Germany. Just so long as they don't start doing it along Alcúdia's beach. Especially not with those poles. Ooh er, missus.

And when one thinks of conformity, what greater degree of conformity is there than that of the British male who has wandered off the set of Eastenders? The British male is defined in terms of Phil or Grant Mitchell. Just take a walk along The Mile, and see for yourselves. And they would never, ever be seen with two poles.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Jackson Browne (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bww2prhAWEA). Today's title - it is said that the lyrics were about two of the founder members.

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Find Some Models For Wives

"Find some models for wives." Today's title and therefore quiz question. It's a line from a brilliant song, about pretending, but not everyone pretends. In the other-worldly high-life of Mallorca, there are models for wives, and perhaps even some models for husbands. And that high-life is at its highest around water - that on top of which a luxury yacht bobs - if such tonnage could ever be said to bob - or that which laps gently at the side of the villa pool while an attendant serves the fruit cocktail, having first peeled the grapes. The boat world and the luxury real-estate market.

I'm only guessing but I reckon she was a model for wife. I met this German chap. He had become Bronze-Aged, a mobile hardwood, a mahogany, from which could be cut, moulded, hewn and crafted the finest furniture. There is a breed of German that is unrecognisable as Caucasian, as that term is generally applied and which I suppose is slightly ironic. It is difficult to state for certain what category this particular Germanic tribe falls into, other than that of solar man or woman. So much sun has transformed its members that they, were they plugged into the grid, could generate enough energy to keep northern Mallorca in lights and air-conditioning for a whole season. They are their own solar panels. He, this particular chap, both owned a yacht and ran an estate agency. Two models for wives maybe. The one with him was gorgeous - and a good trio of decades younger. She was blonde, which does not, by itself, preclude transformation into a species from a tropical forest, but she had seemingly eschewed the further profession of sunbed resident.

Germans, in my experience, spend half their lives on their backs smelling of Piña Colada sun lotion and the other half in medical facilities. It was once put to me that they are a nation of hypochondriacs. Much of that has to do with having a wonderful and very available health system, and also paying for it and making damn sure you get a return from it. It's just as well that there is such a good system, given that many of them are walking, talking skin disease. However, they may end up looking like the Ents from "Lord of the Rings", but it doesn't stop them having models for wives.


And the first burst of reasonably warm weather has tempted the early tourists to discard their clothing with a gusto and take to the streets in a display of flesh, huge amounts of it. Notwithstanding the occasional German who could be mistaken for a large and perambulating Cadbury's Flake, most of those stumbling, squint-eyed into the first heat and sun they would have encountered for several months, are Milky Ways - or, in certain cases, the entire chocolate factory. Not, however, that Cadbury or Nestlé have yet to develop the full-fat milky bar with edible tattoos. Or maybe they have.

Now what was it that Clarkson said? "Big, fat ... knuckle-dragging, tattooed, pastry-faced ...". They won't be finding models for wives.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition; oh, and it was Cardinal Fang who fetched the comfy chair (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSe38dzJYkY). Today's title - so, which American band is this?

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Trink, Trink, Brüderlein, Trink

Why are there so few German bars in Alcúdia? I say few, I'm struggling to think of any other than Epcot. But that's not a German bar; it flies a flag of British convenience. Historically, there were, but since Freddy's Kleine Mühle was pulled down to make way for the perimeter of the Coral de Mar, it's hard to point to one; Cockpit isn't there any longer, is it? Whatever, the non-Spanish or non-Spanish-speaking bar is dominated by the Brits; a last vestige of empire in the sun.

It's not as though you don't get German bars in other places which are almost exclusively German by tourism; Cala Ratjada for instance. And it's not as if there is neither a healthy German population in Alcúdia nor a healthy German tourism market. Take away the faux biergartens, and there are no obvious German kneipes that assault you with the sight of lederhosen, the smell of a bratwurst or a "maß" of pilsner. The Brits may have come, probably, to be the largest tourist group in the highly-diverse Alcudia, but the town is not like the shires of England and the glens of Scotland that is Puerto Pollensa. There you can understand the absence of German bars, as the German tourist numbers are significantly lower, and of course have been advised never to set foot in the place again - if you can recall that German newspaper thing of a few months back. In Puerto Pollensa, you can even find, no doubt for the legions of Neighbours-watching Brits, an alleged Australian hostelry; whatever that is. (By the way, if Dick from Australia is reading this, maybe he can enlighten me; he may even have been in it.)

Even among Spanish-owned bars in Alcúdia, the default foreign style is British (or Irish); the so-called biergartens are really restaurants with the name added. Cut along to Playa de Muro, and it's the same. And yet here, the German tourism market is every bit as strong as the British, if not stronger. What do you find? More than half-a-dozen bars that are or profess to be British/Irish. German bars? Zippo; at least as far I'm aware. Only when you get to Can Picafort, which the Germans more or less colonised, and which they still dominate in terms of tourist numbers, do you begin to find something that smacks vaguely of being German. Yet even so, the more obvious bar display is the British pub.

I find this all quite curious. The Germans are, after all, a prolific beer-drinking nation. One might have expected every corner to house a kneipe or a Hansi's Wurst and Weissbier imbiss stand (now I think of it, there is something like that just before the beach at the top of The Mile, or at least there used to be). But the impression is that the Germans have been deserted in terms of readily-identifiable bars. For other nations, notably the Dutch and the Scandinavians, a British bar is often an attraction, assuming those Dutch or Scandinavians are among the drinking classes; they can consume a prodigious volume of cold drink. The Dutch, it might be added, would probably only enter a German bar, were there one, with a gun to their head. The British bar, though, is quite acceptable to other nationalities (even some Germans); perhaps the default foreign style is right, after all, while the Irish bar is a multinational marketing phenomenon, understood by Germans, Dutch and others.

One might be tempted to say that the Germans more easily accept "Spanishness" than do the British and are less interested in having their own bars. One might be tempted, but I personally wouldn't believe it. Out of season, the situation is even more transparent. There are several British/Irish/British-style bars in the port of Alcúdia, all of which are likely to be open for most if not all the winter. German bars for a similar sort of population? Maybe it's just that Germans don't have much interest in running bars; again I find that hard to believe. Nope, I really don't know the answer; it will remain a mystery unless someone can come up with a good reason as to why there is this absence.

It is doubly mysterious when one considers the hold that Mallorca has over the Germans. Someone here, a politician or tourist authority type, said not so long ago that the British have Mallorca in their genes. If that's the case, the Germans were involved in the Mallorcan big bang that came to form those genes. The island is virtually an annexed state of the Bundesrepublik. In Germany, Mallorca features as a specific item in weather reports; German TV even broadcasts some of its truly appalling schlager-musik shows from Mallorca. But something that also occurs to me is that, unlike for the British, there is no daily newspaper for the Germans on the island. Yet the German population, in Mallorca as a whole, is larger than the British. Another curiosity. Oh well, I shall mull this all over while surveying the products in Puerto Alcúdia's Eroski. There I will see various German sausages. How many British sausages will I see? Precisely none. British bars, but German sausages. Don't understand.

And as a sort of footnote to this, and for all of you from all sorts of countries, there is the altogether more amorphous bar state that is the international bar. To that end, Les tells me that the Vamps karaoke system now has all manner of stuff in all manner of languages and it is going down a storm with the league of nations beating a path to the Calle Astoria. Not sure how many German drinking songs are on the system. When our house proudly got a mono record-player, one of the first records we had was one of such songs; there was also an EP of Swedish folk songs. Strange days.


PUERTO POLLENSA - NOW IT'S THE PARKING
Oh, lordy, lordy, here we go. No sooner pedestrianised, than now it's time to get rid of the parking area on Puerto Pollensa's front line. "It's absurd," says the chap responsible for culture at Pollensa town hall (as quoted in the "Diario"), commenting on the parking's existence. I don't quite know what it's got to do with him, but there you go. The impetus for scrapping all or most of the parking area would be to make way for an increase in the number of moorings. Well maybe these are needed, but one cannot escape the impression that little by little the pedestrianisation scheme is unravelling in terms of all that was planned in support of it. How long has the closure of the parking area been on the publicly unstated agenda I wonder? It may be absurd to have this space devoted to parking, but then one has to ask, given the problems of parking in Puerto Pollensa, where are those cars going to park. And if the original extent of the pedestrianisation does indeed come to pass, that will merely exacerbate the problem of parking in the town. Oh well, cue, no doubt, all manner of debate and angst among the good people of the port.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Steve Miller Band (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIHP9o6X6D8). Today's title - not a quiz question but be prepared for tomorrow's youtube, which will show probably why it's just as well there aren't any German bars.

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Hans Plays With Lotte, Lotte Plays With Jane

"The Germans". This was the title of one of the so-few "Fawlty Towers" episodes. It was a title that needed no further explanation. Despite Basil's demands that the war was not to be mentioned, he, of course, succumbed to his own mania and climaxed with the famous silly walk and the finger for a moustache. The Germans. The war or some sense of the war still seems to pervade British attitudes towards the Germans; this and a series of steps that undermined the British claim to superiority, punctuated only too rarely by some British "victory", e.g. 1966. The German post-war economic miracle; German manufacturing and cars; German dominance of a Europe, the Brits were too haughty to join until it was too late; German football (despite 1966 and 5-1 in Munich); and, perhaps most importantly, Germans on holiday. Everywhere the Brit goes, he is reminded of German achievement and has only the sad memory of war with which to fight back.

The convenience of cliché holds that the Germans are arrogant; as if the same could not be said for the British. I once lived among Germans. They are not arrogant; selfish perhaps, rather unaware of things outside themselves, but arrogant? I don't think so. The Germans are also often portrayed as being rude. Again this is a fallacious categorisation; it is largely founded on a more direct style of speech that manifests itself in a general mode of behaviour. But it is not rudeness; no more so than the British can be rude, anyway.

Recently, there was a sort of lifestyle report about the Germans. One of its findings was that Germans are very conformist; going to Mallorca on holiday was one aspect thereof. There is a degree of truth in this. Individualism does not sit easily with Germans. I knew one German chap. Long-haired, he was dubbed the "space cowboy". Yet he worked in a very traditional industry, surrounded by very conformist colleagues. He himself liked to declare that his hair and his style of dress demonstrated his individualism. He clearly was "individual" in that he looked very different, but he still felt the need to state that he was being individual.

Many German males, from a young age, adopt a look of conformity; it can be noticed by the desperate desire to sprout facial hair even when this is of a "fluffy" variety (albeit that there is, according to "Blackadder", no word in German for fluffy). Yet Germans are far from being alone in the desire to conform. God knows, look along The Mile and you will find enough Brit conformity to fit Wembley Stadium; and indeed that would be where many of them might otherwise be found: the close crop, the tattoo, the arms in slightly gorilla or George W. Bush pose and varying degrees of bellydom. Nations and tribes are suffused by conformity; it just differs in its style. Yet the German male shares something in common with his British counterpart - size. It's that bellydom. The German word for big is "gross"; pronounced differently but it has travelled into English with ease, even if the English took the word from the French.

The Brits and the Germans share an awful lot; the English are, after all, basically Germans. But for all there is historical closeness, there is also historical difference and enmity. There is a touch of the I'm not racist but attitude towards the Germans. This translates as oh of course the war was a long time ago and I know some Germans are very nice but. And nowhere is this more in evidence than by the pools or in the hotels or bars of Mallorca.

I am amazed at some comments and questions one reads. People do ask - "what about the Germans?"; they do comment about the Germans at their hotel. Why on Earth are we so obsessed by this? And now we have the ultimate absurdity, that of compensation granted to a British holidaymaker because there were too many Germans and there was too much German language whilst he was in Greece.

"The Sun" and the German paper "Bild" have long engaged in jibes across the Channel. "Bild", responding to the compensation victory, has asked whether German holidaymakers can be recompensed if there are too many Englishmen. Apparently not, and it quotes a representative of one travel firm who says that the best solution is to avoid "well-known English holiday citadels". In Mallorca, it may come as no surprise that Magaluf takes pride of place. But where else does? Yep, sedate, nice, charming old Puerto Pollensa; even a place with a reputation for well-behaved English abroad does not escape the great Germano-British divide. I hope that Pollensa town hall isn't planning on a Ç-based marketing blitz to attract Hans and Helga from Hannover. It would be money ill-spent, now that the German press has branded the resort a no-go area for its citizens.

You know, maybe they should just ban all beach towels.

(N.B. "Bild" references are from "The Times".)


QUIZ
Chain - The "Men Behaving Badly" in-joke was when Tony asked Debs if she'd ever seen "Quadrophenia" with Sting playing the bell-boy. Debs said she hadn't. Leslie Ash starred in "Quadrophenia". And what's Quadrophenia's link with "The Bill"? Yesterday's title - John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, "Summer Nights". Today's title - where's this from?

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