A Day At The Chemists

I do not need to detain you with the reasons why, and they are not solely to do with the need for medicinal compounds, I am well-versed with chemists in the area. Or pharmacies, to give them their properly and directly translated name.

I like the local pharmacies and pharmacists and their staff (with the exception of one or two, that is). Because of my mysterious need to inhabit these establishments, I know the people concerned pretty well, and knowing them means that they are a rich source of information. If you want to know about national characteristics, go ask a pharmacist; he or she can give you chapter and verse. As in ... The Mallorcans spend hours upon hours requiring explanations for the simplest of drug-taking and then repeat these explanations - several times - in their own unique, shouty, potato-mouth-filled fashion. The Germans spend hours upon hours demanding entire technical specifications and full composition percentages (and still then ask more questions). The British evacuate chemists in embarrassment because of language difficulties and because of anything vaguely to do with private areas. The Russians don't go to chemists to buy drugs but to hand over wads of cash for anything that comes in expensive, designer packaging, like shampoos or cologne washes.

The Russian designer-craving mentality may or may not have something to do with the makeovers that have been occurring to the pharmacies. While I was under the impression that pharmacists were all boracic because the Balearics health service hasn't been handing over what it owes to them, they have been undertaking facelifts that have turned their facades, if not always their interiors, into appearing like designer hotels. Were it not for that green flashing thing outside, you would expect to walk into a pharmacy and book a long weekend of en suite, spa massage and small portions on very large plates that pass for dinner.

This designer impulse is not confined to the pharmacy exterior. Business cards? Works of art in some instances and always a combination of subtle greens (unlike the unsubtle green flashing thing), black and a logo of Adobe Illustrator graphic-design creation. While resort modernisation has concentrated on hotels, the pharmacists have been leading the way. They are über-contemporary, marked and branded with Sans Serif styling but ultimately facades for what generally happens inside. Some paracetamol, please. Yes, that'll be three euros, twenty-five. It will? Oh yes, it most certainly will, unless you are in the know, happen to speak the native or are Mallorcan. Then it will be sixty odd centimos. Same drug, different brands - one generic, the other not. One for locals, the other for tourists.

But then, I don't criticise the chemists or their suppliers for seeking healthier mark-ups. They are businesses after all, though there are some pharmacists in Mallorca who attempt to conceal this business, the president of the Balearics being an example (and I suppose that one should add "allegedly"). That, though, is a different story. The pharmacy represents good business because of necessity, even if the necessity is simply to provide overpriced paracetamol to combat the previous evening's lager and vodka intake.

The pharmacy also represents the most significant point of observation of the tourist class. The pharmacy reveals all tourist and local human life. It is the single most egalitarian come-together point in resorts. Chav or not-chav, Brit, German or Russian, they are all there, and so the pharmacy is the perfect site to witness tourists in their unnatural habitats, tourists of whatever nationality, of whatever background, all seeking creams to treat mosquito bites. The pharmacy should, therefore, demand a position of greater importance in tourism life. It isn't simply a point of sale for suppositories and sunburn lotions. It is the theatre for touristic existence.

In such high regard do I hold the pharmacies, notwithstanding that odd one or two which I don't, so impressed am I with their generally unwavering patience and smiliness that I feel an entire guide should be devoted to them. They should be publicised for the tourist insight that they offer and for their shiny new exteriors. Flogging headache pills for more than is necessary, well, I can forgive them, but, and I know I shouldn't really say this but I will, perhaps such forgiveness also has to do with the white uniforms. And the fact that most of the staff in pharmacies are female and that they look good in those white uniforms. No, I know I shouldn't have said this. Forget it.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Chemists' "strike" faces legal complications

The planned closure of pharmacies in Mallorca as from tomorrow in protest at non-payment by the regional government's health ministry has run into legal complications. It has been made clear that, among other things, pharmacies are obliged to dispense prescriptions and to maintain overnight services. Failure to do so would result in heavy fines.

The Sick Man Of Mallorca: Chemists

The chap who runs my local pharmacy, who I suppose I should therefore refer to as the pharmacist, habitually wears a resigned expression. It is one that has been forlornly chiselled from years of what happens over the counter.

This sufferance is at its most patient when he has been on the receiving end of a German interrogation. "They ask so many questions," he once sighed. Observing a German tourist in full chemist-shop inquisition mode confirms what he says. The boxes of creams, pills, sprays are first examined and the leaflet then removed and gone through item by item, a difficult enough process if you can read and speak Spanish but considerably more so if you can't.

Get in a chemist shop queue behind a bunch of Germans and you are most likely to die before it comes to your turn. However, as I pointed out to the pharmacist, his fellow island men and women could test the patience of any saintly Joan, Jaume or Cati the chemist. His resigned expression can swiftly turn to a laugh.

Mallorcans have an unnerving habit of repeating everything you say to them. In the pharmacy, such parrotting results in delays that not even German hypochondriacs could cause (and trust me when I say that Germans are hypochondriacs; it's a consequence of their health system).

Another unnerving Mallorcan habit, one especially among older Mallorcan stock, is to stare blankly at an interlocutor once the exchange has supposedly ended. The blankness demands that the whole exchange is then repeated. Not once more but at least twice more. An ingrained and conditioned compliance with Spanish bureaucracy demands that any encounter is done in triplicate, and the chemist shop encounter is no different.

The British tourist, on the other hand, is unlikely to delay the pharmacist for too long. Indeed, the encounter can be over very swiftly if the Brit tourist senses he or she might not be being understood and so leaves in embarrassment. But actually verbalising symptoms is rarely necessary. Pointing is a universal language, as in pointing at a violent sunburn, at a throbbing head and a green tinge to the gills, at a Vesuvian mosquito eruption.

Ask yourselves this. What is the most important service required by a tourist? A bar, a supermarket, a taxi? No, none of these. It's the chemists. It's why I am full of admiration of my pharmacist, his fellow pharmassistants, and indeed all other pharmacy personnel in Mallorca's tourist areas. Just think what they have to put up with. Next time you see Helga from Hamburg dissecting the meaning of all the "uso de otros medicamentos" etc., then you'll begin to understand why I am sympathetic to their cause.

And this cause is all the greater because they don't get paid what they should get paid.

Publicity that has been given to the rotten state of finances at the tourism ministry has tended to overshadow the fact that IB-Salut, the regional health authority, is also on the critical list. It is IB-Salut that is meant to divvy up to the pharmacies, and it hasn't. For May and June, some 36 million euros remain unpaid. The chemists are threatening to pull down the shutters on 29 July and it is uncertain how long they might keep them down.

There would still be a chemist in a local area that stays open, but the convenience of having five chemists, which, as an example, is the case in Puerto Alcúdia, would go.

Shutting the shop might seem like cutting off the chemist's nose to spite his face, but unlike the pathetic attempt by bars to protest against the effects of the smoking ban by closing for a few hours (a protest only undertaken by a collection of bars in Palma and one that had absolutely no impact), this lockout is potentially far more serious and far more meaningful.

Everything in Mallorca pretty much links in with tourism, and the chemists are no exception. They are, as I suggest, one of the most important tourism services. There is going to be some major inconvenience if the chemists go ahead with their threat and if it is observed with anything like solidarity. Idiot barowners closing for a couple of hours is irrelevant, airport workers striking can be put down to bolshy unions, but chemists effectively going on strike is a very different matter. When people's health comes into the equation, the potential harm to reputation and image is way greater than anything that baggage handlers or air-traffic control can conjure up.

It needs sorting out, and it needs sorting out pretty damn quick.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.