All The Leaves Are Brown

Like the cicadas in their death throes, Playa de Muro falters towards its seasonal end. Whereas the cicadas, sucked of their greenness, hurl themselves pitiably into walls or onto terrace floors, Playa de Muro is still, silent almost in its last staggering moments. It just gives up. There's nothing left, or very little. The life that is left is equally pitiable. A supermarket with lilos that no-one needs, flip-flops flopping forlornly on racks, the Pepsi and soft drinks cabinets shuttered over as the stock had been allowed to run out days ago. The tabacs stopped bothering to order newspapers at the start of the week, the girls are at their busiest in compiling closing-up inventories; no-one is even buying sleeves of cigarettes. The flags on the beach indicate that lifeguards are still on guard, but there are ever fewer for them to watch over as the hotels limp on with their last remaining guests before the whitewash and brown paper are dragged out of the store-rooms and smothered across the insides of the glass facades. Boots of cars are open, revealing suitcases and boxes of small belongings, ready for transportation to who knows where. The apartments are emptying, the season's population moving on and the "for-rent" signs being hung up.

This is how it ends. The season just fades away but not without recriminations - someone's sold off the TV or taken the fridge, so it gets said, someone misunderstands the contract terms and is not entitled to the dole, so it gets said. The season fades away and things fall apart - the centre cannot hold, it has given up trying after the months of managing to hold things together.

The streets become ghostly. At night there is no-one, no-one wandering to or wandering back, no-one shouting or laughing. Gone is the tribute entertainment of the evening that blows on the breeze from the hotels and disturbs a now-forgotten hot night on the villa terrace. During the day, the little train has stopped and been shunted into its winter sidings, the trikes no longer squeak past, their drivers no more shrieking or screaming. The wire fences go up, creating no-go areas of hotel complexes, the pine needles get tossed and pile up against every wall along with sweet wrappers fallen from litter bins and a yellowing page of a newspaper taken on the wind. The garden lawns become a confusion of renewed grass but also brittle, colourless bracts of fallen bougainvillaea, the grey-sand decayed branches of palms, ever more brown pine needles and the similarly brown leaves of this tree and that plant. This is how it ends. Every year the same, and you somehow wonder if it will come back. But it does. Because in spring, this will be how it starts - they arrive and rent their apartments, sign their contracts, sweep the terraces, scrape away the brown paper, wipe away the whitewash, bring out the lilos and the flip-flops, stock the drinks cabinets, the tobacco shelves and the newspaper stands. Every year the same, the same cycle as every year.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - "I Think I'm In Love", Spiritualized, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjRXogjKHLk. Today's title - first line from one of the great songs.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)

October

October. A month with a misleading name. It sounds as if it should be eight (which indeed is what it once was in calendar terms), but it is ten. It's pretend month, pretending it is still summer when it isn't. It is depression month, the month of realising that it has all gone again - the summer that is. However much some will protest that it is their favourite month - for reasons of relative quietness, often fairly pleasant weather, and the prospect of rest after the slog of the season - they doth protest too much, methinks. Take the summer out of Mallorca and one is left with a void of anti-life. Mallorca, despite the claims for all-year tourism, is summer. Mallorca is summer. It is not October, nor any month from now till May. If Mallorca is not summer, then what is the point of it? Despite the mildness and calmness (save when a typhoon lifts roofs), we hanker after the disappearing heat and the vitality of summer because these are purposeful. It, summer, has meaning, which the off-months do not. October, a month that can be blessed by the unoppressive mid-20s, is also the month of retreating daylight, of preparation for winter heating, wood gathering for some, butane-bottle accumulation for others. It is, nevertheless, a month of resurgence, of a peculiar re-birth, of greenness returning to lawns, the consequence of reappeared green shoots, heavy dews, rain and the onset of the damp humidity which is the constant of the winter months. But within these shoots grows also moss and lurk mosquitoes and flies, waken from the slumber of the heat months and themselves invigorated by the storm time.

October is also the month of assessment and appraisal, of how it all was and of how it will all be, and in the latter category there will not be, for a number one fears, any "all be". Not anymore. The hotels have not been subject to the mass early closures that were being predicted. That some will close at the start of the month is earlier than normal, but to close towards the middle of the month is not unusual. Those that stagger on to the going back of the clocks do so in the hope of the last burst of tourism energy, the British half-term. But the hotels and the bars and the rest lay off those without the heat months of employment record and so the incapacity to claim the dole. October is panic month, of wondering about survival, of anxiety and worse.

October is the month of moving, of uprooting, of seeking opportunities on the mainland and in the Canaries, of following the employment afforded by phoney summers that exist in the Costa del Sol and Gran Canaria, but at least phoney summers exist there. Not in Mallorca. From October. The great bacon-frying and terrace-touting diaspora collect their belongings in a suitcase and cause an unseasonal rise in the figures passing through Palma airport. But they are going, not coming.

October is the month of whitewash, newspaper and bin-liner stockpiling. At some point, the glass fronts will be obscured, papered over, washed out, the movable and vulnerable signs and lights secured within bulges of taped-up black plastic, the pick-up will be loaded with chairs and tables, the mattresses will be left outside the entry to reception. And on All Saints, the final rites of pretend summer will be read and it really will be gone again.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Simply Red, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izOdvBmTDh0. Today's title - Irish, as if you didn't know.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)