Growing Old Impatiently

I don't recall which friend it was, but it was said many a long year ago: one of those expressions that has remained with me ever since. "You can grow old waiting ... (insert as applicable)."

I firstly need to offer a qualification. Generally speaking, I am not impatient, but the potential for growing old is great. I thus attribute a good deal of the ageing process to the causes of likely impatience. These are, in no particular order, the bank, the supermarket, the chemist, the newsagent. There are others: the pedestrian crossing, for instance.

One refers to the phenomena that are each of these especially in the summer, though each has its moments at other times of the year as well. The bank can be dispensed with in comparatively short order. There is one key thing to be aware of: under no circumstances whatsoever attempt to get served in a bank on a Monday. If you have tried this forlorn task, you will be familiar with the multitudes who descend on every available bank branch in order to deposit the weekend's takings - mostly all of it in small coins and brought to the bank in a supermarket plastic bag.

Which brings one conveniently to supermarkets and indeed to plastic bags. While other supermarkets are naturally available, Eroski will be delighted to learn that, despite what's coming, they have managed to secure my loyalty for longer than I care to think about. Grown old? You bet.

Perhaps the first thing to take into account is that if you live in a multi-Eroski environment, which is the case in Alcudia, you need to figure out which one is the least bad, as in least likely to leave you queuing at a checkout for sufficient length of time to require the undertaker being called. It isn't, to be fair, entirely their fault. There are only so many notices that can be put up, reminding customers to weigh their fruit and veg and stick the sticky thing on. However, even if customers achieve this, there is always the sticky thing which has been stuck on in sufficiently awkward fashion to make the bar code unscannable.

We then have the service "encounter" moments, none of which is individually that long but which when combined can make the entire encounter last a short lifetime. For example, "do you want a plastic bag?" This presumably comes from the English manual issued to all staff: the only English it contains. Unfortunately, not all non-Spaniards (and even some Spaniards who are asked the very question) understand English. The bafflement conspires to prolong the "encounter", as do, for instance, the dozens of slips of paper disgorged by the till offering the lucky customer ten per cent off his or her next purchase of toilet duck.

Now we move on to the chemist. Oh dear, where to start? Maybe with the resident and so user of the island's health service whose card reveals that he or she is entitled to receive mostly all pharmaceuticals in stock. Hundreds of them are piled high on the counter, awaiting the removal-by-scalpel procedure of the bit of cardboard packaging. Or maybe with the different nationalities and their individual chemist-going foibles. A Mallorcan pharmacist acquaintance once offered his own national characteristic classification. The most difficult, surprisingly enough, aren't the Germans. Yes, they can be difficult and made more so by the mixed blessing of a pharmacist being able to speak German.

A point to remember with the Germans is that they have such an impressive health system that many of them choose to use it even if they have no particular complaint. It's something of ritual, like having coffee and cake at four in the afternoon, and if they don't go to one of the numerous types of clinic available in even the smallest of towns at least once a week, there must be something wrong with them. Allied to an in any event attention to the minutest of detail, this all leads to an intimate knowledge of every conceivable pharmaceutical, its components and side-effects and so therefore an in-depth and longwinded discussion. For brevity's sake, it is best if the chemist feigns ignorance of the German language.

In fact, the lengthiest encounters, according to my source, are with the locals. There is always the far from small talk of how well is your aunt's third cousin and numerous other relatives, but this is nothing compared with the need to explain at least three times to the more elderly of Mallorcans what it is they are actually being given, of which there is of course the equivalent of a truckload.

Finally, we come to the newsagent. Not because of the newspaper but because of the tobacco. Any doubt about tourist spending is quickly (slowly) dispelled in the newsagent. Grown old? I have passed away and been re-born.

Rise To The Occasion: In-store music

Eroski's a strange old shop. Not just one. They all seem to be at it. I mean, when were they transported back in time to the days of ooh, Gary Davies and converted into 1980s' radio stations circa the era of Gary or Bruno or Simon Bates? What will they do next? Have the shoppers weeping in the aisles not because they've run out of stock but because of "Our Tune"?

There aren't actually any what were once called disc jockeys as such (they're now presenters, a job title with far greater gravitas), but you never know. Wasn't Chris Moyles discovered as the in-house DJ at Top Shop in Leeds or something like that? And look what happened to him. What has happened to him?

There has to be some method to the Eroski 1980s music madness, though I am blowed if I know what it is, why it is and who's responsible. What thought process is applied in order to come up with Climie Fisher's "Rise to the Occasion" while one is helpfully trying to explain the intricacies of weighing your own fruit and veg to a disorientated British tourist, rendered even more disconcerted by straining to recall what the song is and so completely incapable of taking instruction. "Look, see that picture. It's an apple. And its number is?" A complete waste of time.

There is, as with most things shopping, a psychology to all this, but what it is in Eroski's case is anyone's guess. I posed myself this very conundrum the other morning when attempting to figure out the point of Tears for Fears' "Advice for the Young at Heart". A pleasant tune, but was it having any discernible influence? Apart from making me tarry longer, simply because it is a pleasant tune and I wanted to listen to it, then no. The same Gouda slices as usual were launched into the bottom of the new, extra-deep, extra-non-customer-friendly trolley thing they've introduced, bouncing off the familiar iceberg lettuce, bunch of green bananas and bottle of moderately priced vino tinto. Was I inclined to draw on the inspiration of the music of the two largest egos known to the history of popular music - Roland and Curt - and indulge in an impulse purchase? Was this the thinking? Well no. Besides, who actually makes impulse buys in supermarkets? Oh, it's Tears for Fears, I must acquire that toaster or half a ton of mangoes.

There again, tarrying may have something to do with it. Find yourself propelled back to a nostalgic time when men turned themselves into wimpish extras from "Star Wars" (as with, for example, A Flock of Seagulls), and you are motivated to lurk and linger (possibly), and the longer the lingering, the greater the embarrassment that you aren't actually buying anything: only listening to the music. Oh well, might as well get some toilet rolls: you can never have too many anyway.

Yes, there is a great deal of psychology, and some of it which isn't total Horlicks (not that Eroski sells this). For example, it has been found that playing classical music can induce a tendency to spend more (this was from a study in a wine store): all to do with an implication of sophistication. Some of it does make sense. No music at all, and the store is unwelcoming. Hence, you would spend less because you want to get out quicker, though not as quick as if thrash metal was being played at high volume.

But while accepting there is this psychology, I still struggle to understand it in the Eroski context. Why 1980s music? Why all English? It has occurred to me that maybe the music is not for the shoppers but is to make shopworkers' lives more agreeable, but then wouldn't they benefit from selections by Enrique Iglesias and other Spanish hitsters? Probably not, as all Spanish hitsters sound exactly like Enrique and only have one song between them.

No, I don't get it and indeed I'm inclined to believe that it has nothing whatsoever to do with shopper behaviour or making workers' days more pleasant than the constant grind of having to ask for "Tarjeta Eroski" and try to flog you an almond cake or deodorant that's on special offer. It's all to do, I suspect, with DJs. Not Gary Davies or Bruno Brookes, but the DJs down the local fiesta, the ones who insist on putting DJ in front of their names just in case you hadn't realised they were DJs. (No self-respecting "producer" with a USB stick and a Mac armed to the hard-drive gunwales with mixing software would pitch up at, say, Magalluf's BH with DJ in front of his name.) No, the fiesta DJs are in thrall to Climie Fisher and the 1980s. It is from them that Eroski has taken the lead. Or is it the other way round?

Law Of Confusion: Opening hours

In 2012 the national government introduced a round of measures designed to liberalise the retail sector and opening hours. An experiment in fourteen cities across Spain, including parts of Palma, that allowed shops to adopt all but unlimited opening hours all year round (to include Sundays and holidays) tested the impact of opening-hours liberalisation in cities with a large tourist presence. According to statistics compiled by the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (open university), liberalisation would add 0.78% to national GDP, which translated as 8,263 million euros and 16,272 jobs.

The system was thus to be extended to what were already known by the acronym ZGAT (zonas de gran afluencia turística - areas with large tourist influx). ZGAT municipalities across Spain (some towns or cities can have more than one such area) were to be able to decide whether or not they wanted to liberalise opening hours by declaring themselves all-year-round ZGATs. This measure was adopted in the Balearics under the region's Commercial Law approved in October 2014. Under this law, opening hours are normally restricted to a maximum of ninety hours a week for all working days (including Saturdays) and a maximum of sixteen days a year of Sunday and holiday opening, but ZGATs, which already had liberalised Sunday/holiday opening hours in the summer, were to be allowed to apply these to the whole year.

In Mallorca there are a number of towns which are not ZGATs, meaning that the potential for all-year liberalisation does not apply to them. In eleven municipalities, Palma being one of them, ZGAT is applicable to only certain parts of the municipality. In nineteen others, ZGAT applies to the whole town, one of these being Alcúdia. It, as with other ZGAT areas, operates opening hours according to two seasons, the summer season starting on 15 March and finishing at the end of October. As a ZGAT, shops in Alcúdia have been able to open much when they like during the summer, a situation which will continue. But only certain types of shop will now be permitted to open on Sundays and holidays during the winter, because Alcúdia town hall has rejected the notion of making the town all-year-round ZGAT.

An immediate impact of the town hall's decision has been, or appears to have been, that the two Eroski supermarkets that had been opening on a Sunday are now closed and will be until March. Notices direct customers to the store in neighbouring Sa Pobla, a town which, rather bafflingly, is a ZGAT and, because its town hall has declared it to be, an all-year-round ZGAT, to boot. Alcúdia's rejection came after small businesses lobbied against liberalisation. With one eye on the next election perhaps, the town hall sided with the small businesses, mayor Coloma Terrasa noting (and tellingly so, one feels) that now was not the time for liberalisation.

Small business associations across the island have been up in arms over ZGAT extension, claiming that it is designed to help only the larger retailers, those with shopfloors of more than 300 square metres. This size limit is a further aspect that has to be considered. There are general exceptions when it comes to Sunday opening restriction, such as with newsagents and, subject to certain provisions, shops under 300 square metres.

The Eroski supermarkets in Alcúdia are an interesting case. One presumes that it is the town hall's rejection of all-year ZGAT that has led to their closure, but then how was it that they used to be open on Sundays in winter? I don't have an answer to that, but the small business association in a different town, Manacor, has claimed that there has been an abuse of ZGAT.

It needs stressing that objections to ZGAT extension are based on competition and not on a notion of keeping Sunday special. Whether larger supermarkets being open on Sundays in winter would make a great deal of competitive difference is a moot point. Whether it is necessary for them to be open at all on Sundays is another. Areas of large tourist influx? In winter? Alcúdia isn't, but it is more likely to have what tourists are around than a town like Sa Pobla. With the best will in the world, it attracts comparatively few tourists in summer, begging a question as to why it has ever been a ZGAT. If Sa Pobla might be an anomaly, then Vilafranca most definitely is. How does it qualify as a ZGAT and an all-year one, its town hall having adopted the measure? If it can be a ZGAT, then why not, for example, Artà?

The law is confusing in application and consequence. One rule for one town, one rule for the next. If it was improved competitiveness that the government was hoping for, then this is no way to achieve it.

* The decision by Alcúdia town hall has now been reversed, so Alcúdia is an all-year ZGAT and the large supermarkets are able to open on Sundays and holidays all-year round.

In The Blink Of An Eye: Pickpocketing

I cannot explain why, but in an Eroski store yesterday I suddenly turned my head. What I saw in that flash was a woman, tall, in a greyish sort of dress. In front of her was a boy, her son, with a cap on. Why had I suddenly looked at them? I don't know. But what I didn't see was the whole picture. A moment or so later, while I was studying the green peppers in the greengrocery section, I heard a wail and a crying. It was the woman. A member of staff came to her. She had been robbed. Her purse had been lifted from her bag.

I have, or try to have, an acute sense of where I am. Especially in supermarkets in summer. As I enter I look at people. As I go along aisles, I am looking at people. Turning and glancing. I know to be aware. I have seen it happen too often. Or have I? There was one time, in front of the same supermarket, I could see it unfolding. The woman approached the two tourists. But I didn't see it. I knew what was happening but I didn't see. Or maybe I did but a momentary sense of disbelief, a suspension of belief had prevented me from seeing. My mouth went temporarily dumb. By the time I shouted and ran up to the two tourists, she had gone. Nowhere. She had evaporated.

There is an article on the BBC website about how pickpockets use not so much sleight of hand but tricks to fool the mind. The article says, among other things, that "our brains come pretty much hard-wired to be tricked, thanks to the vagaries of our attention and perception systems" and that "(pickpocketing) is as much about capturing all of somebody's attention with other movements", "it's complete attentional overload".

The article talks about how specific movements can fool us. Moving the hand in an arc is far better at holding our attention to the end point of the movement than moving the hand in a straight line. This has to do with saccade, the fast movement of the eye. In a straight line, there is a blind period. With an arc, there is no blind period, the eye follows the movement continuously.

I'm not saying that hand movements or other attention-changing means have been adopted by pickpockets at the supermarket and nor am I saying that I had some sixth sense which made me seemingly involuntarily and suddenly turn and look at the woman, but I am saying that even being hyper-alert or aware can be of little use if the brain is tricked. If it fails to see. Something had made me want to look but then, for whatever reason, I didn't see. After the event, I remembered there was someone else.

In this moment of a blink of an eye, of a trick of the mind, of guard going down, of unawareness, a holiday was ruined. The woman, Russian, was in a desperate state. She was still in a desperate state outside the store where she was waiting for her husband. Between her blubs she said that she had been abroad many times and that nothing like this had ever happened.

Her desperation was all the greater because she had been abandoned. I hadn't initially noticed the other child in the buggy. Now I did. The woman looked as though she was pregnant. What could I say to her?  Why, she asked, were there no cameras in the store? Why indeed? And why no security? Or why is not possible for a victim to be given some help by the store? Why is she left outside in the sun, sobbing, waiting for her husband?

It happens all the time of course. Opportunistic pickpocketing, the flower women, the professional gangs, the bumpers-into, the distractors, the total-attention-grabbers, the ones with hand movements. They are all here. It happens all the time. You should have taken greater care, been more aware. Ah yes, more aware. But sometimes even the aware can be tricked.

I discovered later, was told anyway, that literature advising of potential risks such as pickpocketing was not produced because it would create a "bad image". How much bad image do the resorts need which is the product of inaction, inertia and a failure to warn? How much bad image through there being no assistance for a distraught tourist?

I now have a mobile phone number for the tourist police in Alcúdia. But who else has the number? Supermarkets? Bars? And is the number for the SPAT police, the agents unveiled in May who can assist tourists in their own language? One of whom, it might just have been hoped, could have come to the help of a Russian tourist abandoned outside a supermarket.

* http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140629-how-pickpockets-trick-your-mind

From COP To Primark

I'm trying to think of the year. Was it 1964 or 1965? When the Sainsbury in my by-then home town of Camberley ceased to be a sort of High Street deli with porcelain walls that were reminiscent of a public lavatory and became a supermarket. Its modernised upgrading was due entirely to the development of the new town centre. Sainsbury was the first proper supermarket. Tesco followed, as did Presto (for those of you who can remember Presto before it was Safeway-ed).

Supermarkets in Britain were an invention of the 1950s, largely thanks to Jack Cohen, a one-time tailor from the East End, reinventing his pre-war Tesco stores. They were representative of the new consumerist society in much the same way as mass tourism was. And in a similar way to tourism, they operated according to a mass production model adapted for the service sector. And when the mass became so great, urban planning allowed for their relocation to the out-of-town retail park, signalling crisis on the high street. No sooner had Brent Cross Shopping Centre opened than the road to Wembley was abandoned by shopping supporters switching their allegiance to the retail stadia of the North Circular Road.

The story of Mallorca's retail development is not dissimilar. It differs mainly in the development having occurred much later. Recent relaxations of planning regulations have facilitated a further increase in the number of commercial centres, predominantly out-of-town. Primark's arrival in Carrefour's new centre in 2016 will be one further example of this and an example also of an internationalisation of Mallorca's retail sector which had long given the impression of being antagonistic towards foreign investment.

The commercial centres have not all been greeted with open arms. When Media Markt, the German electrical goods giant, opened its Palma store, there was a campaign against it and in favour of small shops in towns out in the sticks. It was a campaign with more than just a slight hint of xenophobia, but it was, nonetheless, an understandable one. Communities, like those which existed along Britain's high streets, were and are threatened by a concentration of commercial centres in the greater Palma conurbation; this threat exacerbated by Mallorca's small size and so ease of transport.

But Mallorca's commercial centres are, again like Britain, an extension of how retail competition evolves and can leave smaller retailers trailing behind, struggling to adapt or out of business. When Sainsbury opened in the new town centre in Camberley, competitors along the high street which didn't adapt were affected. Mac Fisheries, Cullen found the going tough. And the story of competition from larger stores, i.e. supermarkets, in Mallorca is largely the story of one man - Francisco Lavao.

He wasn't from Mallorca originally but from Tetuán, a district in Madrid. He came to Mallorca at the age of ten in 1952. He was to go on to form a chain of supermarkets. Their name was COP. Lavao was the first true supermarket entrepreneur, and his story is a remarkable one. In 1977, the supermarkets having suffered in the wake of the oil crisis, he upped and left Mallorca. He fled to Argentina with a suitcase stuffed full with fourteen million pesetas. Three years later, he was extradited to Spain in order to stand trial on a charge of unlawful bankruptcy that had brought about the collapse of the COP stores. The most astonishing aspect of this story is that Lavao, who seemed genuinely remorseful, picked himself up and started all over again. His new supermarket venture took its name from the words "servicio" "y" "precio". SYP.

If Francisco Lavao was arguably the man who created Mallorca's supermarket sector, it was a businessman from Asturias whose company was to give Mallorca its best-known retailing name, that of the department store El Corte Inglés.

There is a connection between El Corte Inglés and Tesco insofar as the Madrid store was originally a tailor's shop, established in 1895. The Asturian Ramón Areces Rodríguez bought the shop in 1935. It was the start of the creation of a retail empire. Yet, despite the fact that El Corte Inglés is so well-known in Mallorca and that its reputation might suggest that it has been long-established here, the Avenidas' store isn't even twenty years old. It wasn't opened until 20 September, 1995. In the same year, the company bought fifteen commercial centres from Galerias Preciados, one of them having been the Jaume III store. It had taken eleven years for the building and then opening of the Avenidas' store to become a reality. The administrative process to permit it had started in 1984.

Such administrative processes don't now take as long. Permissions for commercial centres are generally easier to obtain. And Primark will be a beneficiary. The latest chapter in the story of the changing face of Mallorca's retailing.

MALLORCA TODAY - New Eroski supermarkets for the Balearics

The Basque Country-based Eroski supermarket chain is planning 60 new stores this year which will include seven new franchises in the Balearics where there are currently 66 supermarkets.

See more: Ultima Hora

Lidl By Lidl

The people of Campos have never known anything quite like it. They've finally got a supermarket, or at least this is the impression one gets. I confess to not being intimate with the details of supermarkets in Campos and its neighbouring Ses Salines, but one shopper was reported as saying that she wouldn't any longer need to trek off to Al Campo.

I do rather suspect that there were already other supermarkets, but what there wasn't, was a Lidl. There now is. And the astonishing thing is that every time a new Lidl store opens in Mallorca, it becomes not just a news event but also an occasion of such magnitude that, as with the opening of Lidl's Alcúdia store in October last year, it is comparable to days of yore when the train first arrived.

The Campos shop is number thirteen in a series of twenty Lidls that will be dotted about the island. Slowly but surely, little by little, Mallorca is succumbing to a process of Lidlisation; Germanic commercial empire-building. Well, it makes a change to the Chinese emporia I suppose.

Lidl has benefited from relaxations to land rules that have permitted greater commercial property development. While the rest of the economy stumbles along, the supermarkets are booming. With their value for money, they are to be welcomed, though their impact in terms of employment is only quite small; the Campos store apparently received 3,000 CVs for the 30 jobs on offer. Mallorca, as I quoted recently in a different context, that of tourism, is getting itself more, but not so many, McJobs.

Despite feeling that Lidl wasn't breaking entirely new ground in propelling Campos into the modern shopping era, the excitement surrounding its arrival does remind one of times past when there certainly weren't such things as supermarkets. I can't speak for Mallorca, but the supermarket first came to town some time in the mid-60s. It was a Sainsbury and it offered a whole new self-service and time-saving mode of shopping for the upwardly mobile housewife that its previous store hadn't.

The old Sainsbury was a place of personal service and lengthy queues. It was also a place that was so outmoded that its walls were decorated with enamel dark-green tiling. If it hadn't been for the cheese, the loose tea and the pound of sausages, it could have been mistaken for a public lavatory.

Back in the day, and prior to the moment the Sainsbury family was good enough to cash in on the new consumerism of the sixties, shopping was distinctly inconvenient but was, courtesy of shops' quirkiness and even smells, infinitely more inclined to leave an impression than the monotony of the modern-day barn.

Just two of these shops in our local village were Underwoods, the ironmongers, a general store packed to the gunwales with all manner of rubbish and which had an alarming and potentially disastrous smell of paraffin and paint-stripper, and the grocers, that owned by Mr. Cutt.

It was Mr. Cutt's misfortune to have a garage that backed onto our garden and my sandpit in particular. It was doubly unfortunate that, rather than brick, it was made of far from substantial wood. The temptation for a seven-year-old hooligan with a nicely sharp-edged spade was way too great. Thus started my vendetta with Mr. Cutt, one that was to take in my stories as to our flopsy, who did mysteriously disappear one day, being served up on his meat counter and to the awful things he actually did with his bacon-slicer.

It was probably as well that we moved not long after but also a shame that I had come to be barred from the shop, as that bacon-slicer was always a point of fascination. And the smell of bacon was what hit you as soon as you entered the place. It was the evocative smells that contributed, pre-supermarkets, to what were old curiosity shops.

The point is that in Mallorca you don't have to ever go into a supermarket. Everything still exists in a way that it did in deepest Surrey in the early 1960s. Some ferreteria are just like Underwoods. Stocked to the rafters, ramshackle and utterly mad. There are delis by the ham loads. And then there are the markets.

Little by little, the Lidls and others take it all away. I'm not complaining. But, inconvenient or not, the individual shops retain the character, the quirkiness and the smells that transport you back decades. Just for one day perhaps, forget the supermarket and do these individual shops in the local towns. But if you see any rabbit ... .


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

White Heat Of Technology: Mallorca's future

There are thirteen new commercial projects in Mallorca, the consequence of the raising of the moratorium on their building. Let's all celebrate. Evidence of recovery, evidence of confidence in Mallorca as a place to invest. If only.

What are these projects? They are ones being undertaken by Mercadona and Lidl. Ever more supermarkets. The others are a commercial centre and a Chinese-bazar hypermarket. Why not add a few more? All McDonald's, and then the picture would be complete and appropriate. "McJob", low-paid employment and short-term construction work on commercial buildings that rise up quickly. The new projects are not evidence of a suddenly reinvigorated economy. They are the opposite: a response to the economic crisis-led demand for lower prices.

The director-general of trade at the Balearic Government's trade and industry ministry believes that these projects represent a "good rhythm" of investment. They are not unwelcome, but equally they are not diversification or wealth-generation. Their arrival has more to do with the ending of the moratorium than with real investment. Moreover, they can be seen in the context of what has been happening to the island's industrial estates. New ones come along, and are under-utilised, while old ones are abandoned by smaller businesses because of high rents or are given over to car showrooms and entertainment centres. Mallorca's industrial, manufacturing and skills base is marginalised in favour of the unnecessary and frivolous.

The trade and industry ministry should be looking for investments beating to an entirely different rhythm to those of groceries and the fish and meat counter. The need for diversification away from the unsustainable tourism-centred economic model of Mallorca is, to be fair to the ministry and to the government, understood. A strategy for innovation and development is reaping some benefit, as evidenced by the number of businesses that have sprung up on Palma's ParcBit technology park. Taken as a whole, they offer new employment opportunities and the prospect of business growth. Mallorca's hopes of becoming a Silicon Valley or a silicon beach are fanciful, but this is not a reason not to follow a technological future.

The quest for an economy in Mallorca not so dangerously dependent upon tourism has been too long in the starting. The seduction of tourism has been understandable, but it has been proven to be built on the sands of shifting tourist demand and international competition. Its dominance has also reinforced the hugely unsatisfactory six-months-on, six-months-off work culture, itself unsustainable. The service model, based on tourism, supermarkets, the plethora of lawyers and architects and any number of unproductive public-sector pen-pushers, is not a solution for the long-term. A far greater mix with technology and industry founded on new technologies has to be the way forward for Mallorca.

To this end, there is some good news. In Inca, a company called Vent Illes is due to start production of wind turbines for the generation of electricity. It will create thirty jobs. Not a huge number, but it's something. It is also indicative of the development of technology founded on local resources and know-how. Wind is very much a resource, but the Vent Illes turbines require very little wind. They are designed with the constraints caused by a limited resource - land - in mind. They are practical for locations where colossal wind farms would be untenable: other islands, for instance. It is the one eye on export possibilities that makes the Vent Illes scheme particularly interesting.

The home market, that in Mallorca, is too limited to offer local technology companies the scope for expansion and for creating significant employment opportunities. They need to be export-driven, just like Mallorca's most successful businesses, its world-class hotel chains, have, irony of ironies, exported tourism know-how to competitor destinations.

The hope is that the incubation of new-technology businesses in ParcBit, together with the likes of Vent Illes, creates a momentum towards the clustering of further businesses, thus establishing a dynamic which, while it will not completely transform the economy, will at least send it down the road to a more diverse future. It will be one predicated on what Mallorca can do well, such as marine technology and its export, and it will mean far more than the few months of tourism employment or being a shelf-stacker at a new commercial project.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

I've Had A Lidl Time

The traffic was unusually heavy. There were balloons and bunting. A grand occasion. Somewhere new was opening. The day that Lidl came to Alcúdia.

It must have been like this when the railway first came to town. Victorian women in Sunday-best bonnets and Victorian gentlemen with top hats and stout canes, an image courtesy of period dramas. Flags hanging along the platform and small children holding their ears against the noise of the steam-engine.

They were holding their ears against the honking of horns by drivers attempting to exit from car parks: Lidl's one side of the main road, conveniently right opposite the longer-established one by the Magic roundabout. The art of traffic planning. It was of course nothing like the arrival of the train, except in there being a mêlée of people (and cars) and in there being the curiosity of a populace, thrilled by the appearance of modernity and some shiny new commerce to confirm that Alcúdia had indeed been connected to the outside world.

Since the colonisation by hotels, there have been only sporadic new arrivals - a civic building here, a swimming-pool there and even the occasional newer hotel. But Lidl is something different, not least because its time has been so long in the expectation and anticipation. Every year for donkey's years the karting was going to disappear and Lidl was going to rise from the tarmac and tyre-enclosed track. So long and so certain had been the coming of Lidl that maps had even started to show it, before it had been approved let alone built.

After years of is it or isn't it, suddenly this summer the ground was being cleared. Telecommunications engineers were among the first on the scene. Discussion in bars centred on the construction itself, the pillars and beams, the prefab sprouting of slab exteriors, the apparent absence of any notice on the wire fence around the building site which might have made clear that it was indeed to be a Lidl. Everyone knew that it was going to be, or thought they knew, but there were competing theories: a hotel or a supermarket from a different chain.

As it did become clear, so then the discussion turned to when. When would it open? "I've heard November." "No, I've heard January." "Can't be. It'll be sooner." Lidls rise up very quickly, and as its shape became more and more apparent and more and more obviously Lidl-esque, the chatter increased in its excitement. "Lidl is coming. Lidl is coming." Only over at Eroski, with four supermarkets in the town, was the excitement probably less palpable.

What finally clinched it was the re-classification of land, the land on which Lidl now stands. No sooner re-classified, no sooner built upon. Lidl has appeared, if not overnight, then over not so many nights. And the grand opening was well heralded. "Nueva apertura" flyer-newspapers filled letter boxes or were stuffed into the persianas of the houses without a "buzón". Mallorcans are never ones to miss out on an inauguration, especially if it requires giving the place the once over of approval or affords the opportunity for a social gathering.

"It'll be ok," someone said. "How do you mean, ok?" "Although it's German, Lidl that is, the land's owned locally." "So if the land hadn't been, then it wouldn't have been ok. For the locals, that is." "Probably not." "That's ridiculous." Except it isn't, when you consider that it is not unheard of for a Mallorcan restaurant to be vetoed if the chef isn't from the right part of Mallorca.

So it was as well for the grand opening that the locals could attend, confident in the knowledge that beneath every German supermarket there is some corner of a former karting track that is forever Alcúdia. The wait had been long, more than just a little time. It was like the arrival of the railway and it was maybe the best next thing. Lidl has been some years in the coming, but the railway has been over 70 years in the building. And it's not still not arrived.


QUIZ -
Milk won't turn sour at Lidl. Substitute "little" for Lidl, and you have one great pop song.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

What A Waste

It has long been something of a mystery quite why the local supermarkets are so liberal with their giving-out of plastic bags. Go to your nearest Eroski and at the check-out you will end up with four or five half or quarter-full bags of groceries when one or two would do the job equally as well. Not for much longer though. Perhaps. Eroski has produced a 20-page booklet all about reducing the number of plastic bags and energy efficiency. There are two "savings" to be made in the form of a "win" for you and a "win" for the environment. The booklet seems to be on recycled paper, which is just as well. The company's director of social responsibility tells us on page five that Eroski is going to make it easy for us all to save the world (well, he doesn't quite use those words, but whatever). For any bag not used, the customer gets a discount of one centimo. That should get everyone rushing to the store.

How do they figure out how many bags you don't use though? As I say it has been common to get several more bags than one actually needs. Do they have some means of calculating - by volume of sales - the resultant discount if one hacks along with a shopping trolley or reusable bag (bags) instead? "No, I think this lot's worth a three centimo discount, not just the one. Come on, hand it over."

This environmentally correct approach is all well and good, but there is also the slight matter of all those plastic bags that are used to gather fruit and veg to which are attached those sticky-backed labels with the bar code and price, assuming you know that this is the procedure. They can't be much cop when it comes to landfill either. Anyway, the huge incentive to not now use the bags at the checkout will probably lead to an increase in the sales of rubbish bags, as the checkout bags, especially when they are doubled up, have long been an alternative to actually buying rubbish bags. But the latter are at least eco-friendly in that they don't give off toxic gases when burned, or something like that.

On leaving Eroski, 20-page booklet stashed inside one of the checkout bags, there was a noticeable pile outside the front doors. A pile of newspapers, bundled and tied up, just left there. How many? Fifty, a hundred maybe? It was a pile of "Euro Weekly's". First time I had seen them at the local Eroski for some fair while. Erratic is the distribution one might say. But more importantly, what was going to happen to them? Who knows? Maybe they get turned into Eroski booklets about the environment.

To a different environmental matter. No sooner has the golf course in Muro seemingly run its course as an eco-cause célèbre than up pops another affront to the town's environment. It is the curious case of the Son Perera finca on which there has been some earth moving in readiness, or so it is being alleged, for a go-karting track. GOB, those noble defenders of Mother Earth, had "denounced" this work to the town hall which has now paralysed it, saying that there is no licence for the development. What is extraordinary about this is quite how anyone can apparently set about converting what is protected land and hope that no-one might notice. A go-karting track is pretty conspicuous, or would be were it to be built.



Alcúdia - Day of the Tourist
Well it must be said that this was a pretty good effort. Hats off to the town hall. A rather attractive Danish girl by the name of Nana who works in one of the local hotels told me that those hotels participating get the teams organised, which did at least settle one of my questions. As to other questions, such as what is the point of all this, I refrained from putting them to the chiefs of the tourism department who were talking with rather concerned expressions into mobile phones like Conservatives during an election-night kicking. Quite why they seemed concerned I was unsure, unless they'd got wind of news that the Michael Jackson tribute lined up for the evening had taken his tribute rather too far.

It was pretty obvious, though, that not all the beachgoers yesterday morning had any idea what was going on, but the music booming from the step and aerobics stage, the footy and volleyball games and all the people wandering around in "Fun 4 U" t-shirts would have given them some idea. I now know what this is all intended as - it is a major promotional campaign for the town hall's tourism website. Not that anyone's told me that, but as all the t-shirts have got the address on, then one would presume that it is at least an element of "the day".

But it was good. And fun, funnily enough.


QUIZ
Today's title - and I'm doin' very well.

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Mother, Mother

On the forum for thealcudiaguide, there was a question about supermarkets and which fiesta days affect their opening hours. I suggested that there were only two, during the main season, that meant they closed for the whole day in Alcúdia - Pedro and Jaime. There are, of course, the other holiday days that you do tend to forget. Like yesterday. Mother of God, it's another fiesta. And that was it. Mare de Déu de la Victoria that is celebrated next to the hermitage in the mountains above the town of Alcúdia. I knew it was the fiesta, but I had never cottoned on to the fact that it affects openings. Oh yes it does - banks closed, chemists closed, some shops and offices closed, supermarkets (the main ones) closing at two in the afternoon. How inconvenient is all this? I only realised all this as I happened to be at the paseo tourist office (which was staying open all day - the others were closed). San Pedro was on Monday; three days later there is another, and hardly anyone knows about it, unless they are truly immersed in the local traditions. I admit, therefore, that I am not, as - Mother of God - I wasn't aware. I am now.

The fiestas are an essential ingredient of the local way of life, they provide colour, spectacle and interest. No-one, least of all myself, is suggesting that they are abandoned. But how sensible is it that they disrupt the normal flow of commerce to the extent that they do? Profound changes have taken place and have impacted upon society and business, and yet, while these changes have occurred, the society itself has refused to change; it is caught in a time-warp. You can argue that the continuation of tradition and of the lack of change to society is an admirable thing in face of voracious commercialism, and you would be right, but there is a dissonance between this maintenance of tradition, this lack of change and the complaints about economic circumstances and all the rest. Now, the fiestas do not fundamentally affect the tourism economy, and so you can also argue that their regularity is at best neutral in terms of productivity, but they are indicative of a psychology that wants everything as it was while keeping all the commercial gains as well. But the poor tourist is inconvenienced. If he has schlepped up from Bellevue to do some economical supermarketing only to find the nearest Eroski shut, he has every right to feel hot, sweaty and more than a bit hacked off. The point is that, in a tourist resort, the tourist should take precedence. It may not be a view that everyone is comfortable with, but it is the tourist who pays for Alcúdia, not a bit of ball de bot by the hermitage.

In the wider context, it would seem that, finally, something is to give where shopping hours in Palma are concerned; it's been a point of debate and criticism for some while that the opening hours are so limited. It's a start I suppose. On top of societal conservatism, one can add the role of unions and Church in opposing change. Some years ago, the Germans, under Gerhard Schröder, attempted a liberalisation; it was burnt down in the flames of Hades by the strength of the religious and union lobbies and quickly dropped. It was a mistake. Of course, you can also argue that the Anglo-Saxon view of market liberalism and the combination of Thatcherite union bashing and religious indifference led to the 24-hour shopping and commerce culture of the UK, and that to view the local situation it is necessary to adopt a different cultural perspective. You would be right in this regard as well. But there should be greater compromise and willingness to change. Last year, as the storms of crisis gathered and there were moans coming from businesses, it was revealing that moaners were happy enough to clear off to Menorca for two to three days to celebrate Sant Joan. Go figure.


QUIZ
Today's title - the first two sung words from one of the greatest songs ever.

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What's The Difference Between?

Two supermarkets, same company, three kilometres apart, same stretch of road, same town - different prices. How does that work, do you suppose?

Let me be more precise. Two Eroski stores, both on the Carretera Artà, the main coast road from Puerto Alcúdia, one store close to the port, the other close to Playa de Muro. Now, would you think the prices would be the same in the two stores? You might think it, but you would be wrong to do so, because they're not. Take, for example, the bakery-provided "pan integral cortado" (smaller pack). 65 centimos down the near-to-Playa de Muro end of the Eroski empire, 67 centimos near to the port. A bottle of bog-standard Rioja, the Siglo - 3.50 in one and 3.66 in the other. A pack of plain-flavour crisps (small family size), a difference of 6 centimos. I daresay that there are other price differentials. I'm not about to check the whole stock. Who or what do you think I am? Watchdog or something? How can it be, though, that two stores in the same chain so close to each other can have different prices? It could just be an aberration in the close-to-the-port store, i.e. a cock-up, though cocking-up more than one price sounds more like policy. In the Pollensa Eroski, the one close to the old town, the prices for the above items are as in the near-to-Playa de Muro one. So, all I can say is that, unless you have to use the one near to the port, I wouldn't bother, because it's cheaper to go to the one down the road. Now, I wonder what the prices are in the one near Hidropark and the one by the Can Picafort roundabout ... .


Shop theme today. Despite its name, Alcúdia Pins - both the area and the hotel - is not in Alcúdia; it is in Playa de Muro, very much in Playa de Muro, almost into Can Picafort very much in Playa de Muro. Alcúdia Pins is not really an area that people would go to, unless they were staying there. At least you wouldn't go there, if you were local and Mallorcan and wanting to go shopping. Not only are there not many shops, what shops there are can be avoided elsewhere. Alcúdia Pins is a hundred per cent tourist zone; it serves no other purpose.

While the eponymously named Alcúdia Pins hotel (or is it that the area is eponymously named?) is very strongly British, the tourist mix in the area is varied. Germans, Scandinavians, the new tourists of eastern Europe, Irish, mainland Spanish. There may well be the odd Catalan speaker knocking about, but not many. And what number there might possibly be would not be as great a number as the other nationalities, even the Irish. Why, therefore, is there a shop selling gifts and clothes with a sign in English and Catalan? Easy, you might say, because we are in Mallorca, and they speak Catalan. Well of course. But who is this shop's market? Tourists. Tourists from places that do not speak Catalan. If you were to choose a second language for that sign, then go for German. You could stick Gaelic up and it would probably be understood by more people.

Now I don't know that this is the case, but it is just possible that the sign is a beneficiary of the linguistic subvention. Which is? The system by which local authorities grant money for the use of Catalan for promotional purposes. And these promotional purposes include shop signs. It doesn't matter that there is no-one there to read it. In other words, they chuck money around in support of the language even when it serves no purpose. I could of course be wrong, and there is no subvention in this particular instance, but the principle behind it might just be deserving of some attention.


Ben's Classic Car Rally link
When this went up yesterday, there was a fault. It was fixed later, so if you tried yesterday and it didn't work, apologies. It's all correct now.


The Can Picafort cyclist accident
A 66-year-old cyclist from Luxembourg was killed in a head-on collision in Can Picafort at eight o'clock yesterday evening. Without wishing to pre-empt the thorough investigation, the report (from "The Diario") says that the cyclist was in the centre of the road and not wearing anything reflective - at eight o'clock it is dark.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Stranglers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy9-epdDw9E). Today's title - you may have noticed I don't go with rap too often, but this was something really good - three willy-holders together.

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

Wherever He Laid His Hat Was His Home

Shopping Trolley gets around. One moment he's in the Magic area, pushing himself past Kroxan, and then he's down by Eroski, lurking under the branches of pines by the Platja d'Or. Not far, in this latter instance, from where Doggo is getting out the ghetto-blaster in the warm early March sun; he'll be bending balloons before we know it. Shopping Trolley must have a good fifteen bags; I underestimated the amount when I mentioned him before. Fifteen, could be more. One of them has a TV in. He was seen watching it once; it had been plugged in to an outside socket. Perhaps he looks for one such when he comes to pitch his tent at night: after all, a chap needs a reliable electricity supply to watch the telly before turning in for the night. The trolley itself has to be pretty sturdy. All those bags. It must take some pushing as well. I once saw him in the old town, just by the church. If he'd ventured up there along the cemetery road that would have been a push and a half - all those bags, some with household electrical goods in them: if only there was a house to hold them.

I used to think that Doggo, the Local Colour, wasn't a Man of Ideas, but I've had to revise that. Last couple of times in Eroski I've seen him handing over coins in return for cans of beer. He is incomprehensible, which is part of the definition of a Man of Ideas. At least the dog seems to know what's going on. I certainly don't. Every time he speaks to me, I haven't a clue. Shopping Trolley though. No, I don't think he has Ideas. I've not seen him with a drink. If he were going to have one, then you'd reckon he'd crack open a can when he was watching the telly, but seemingly not.

A while back there was someone begging by Eroski, someone who had moved in on Doggo's manor. I only saw him once. Maybe there's some honour in this alternative world. Shopping Trolley once took a seat by the sports shop, the one with the Mallorca triathlon beach towel, but that's kind of on the periphery of Doggo's patch. He would have to wait for an invitation to come into Doggo's territory probably, and if he got one it might be by mobile phone. Or maybe Doggo just talks into a phone with no credit. That would seem about right. Not that I wish to do him down. It could be that the phone works, but speaking to an empty mobile with no-one on the other end would be the epitome of Man of Idea-dom. Perhaps Shopping Trolley hasn't got a mobile; put it this way I've not seen him with one. There again, I've not actually seen the TV; I was told about that.

Eroski seems to have got a manager. Well, there's a bloke working there where there used to not be one. A few years back, there used to be another bloke who was obviously in charge, or maybe thought he was. He used to shout after tourist kids who were running in the aisles, and he'd follow men of bellydom to make sure they didn't nick anything. Then he disappeared. No more Mr. Manager; that was in the days when it was still Syp. And for all this time, it has been almost completely female-run. No-one seemingly in charge, a sort of co-operative non-hierarchy that somehow worked; well, usually. But now there's this chap. You might think he would get tough, but appears not to. Doggo was there next to me in the queue yesterday morning, rambling on about something to me, or was it to the checkout girl, or maybe it was to the ceiling. Doggo's dog was sniffing around the checkouts and the café as well. I thought this manager chap would be bound to kick him out; the dog anyway. Said nothing. At least the girls at the checkout don't pick the dog up and give him a cuddle now though.

Maybe I have this all wrong. A few minutes later, Doggo was talking to a chap making a delivery. Maybe he's the manager. No, can't be. And as I drove away, there was Shopping Trolley, sitting. Sitting like he sits all the time, except when he's pushing the trolley. And when he sits, he just stares. Every day, just sitting, the bags of different colours and different sizes mounted on his trolley, tied to each other and to the trolley sides. Just sitting and pushing.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Arcade Fire, "In The Backseat" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpikhegY-Vs). Today's title - one of the great Motown songs, not that the group responsible were that keen on it.

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

It Means Nothing

There have been a number of large figures knocking around these past few days; figures in numerical terms that is. For once, they are not related to the numbers of unemployed or the size of the town halls' debts. They are figures for internet usage - those for websites of the town halls and centrally.

To take the town halls first. The other day, the "Diario" ran an article in which it explained that Alcúdia's site was the most popular on the island (I presume Palma is excluded from these). It has registered an annual number of just shy of 275,000 "entradas". I'm afraid at this point I get confused. What do they mean by an "entrada"? (From what I know, an "entrada", in computing terms, refers only to what I'm doing at the moment - making an entry.) Almost certainly it does not mean "hits", so probably page views. Assuming it is, it's not such a bad number; not brilliant, but not bad. Alcúdia tops the list with Manacor not far behind but Sa Pobla a fairly distant third, and Pollensa back in ninth spot. The article doesn't give a number for Pollensa, but Sa Pobla is some 110,000 behind Alcúdia and is six places above Pollensa.

Quite why Alcúdia should head this list and why Pollensa should lag behind, I am at a loss to explain. It's not as if the towns' populations are that markedly different, and if one takes population into account, then Manacor should come ahead of Alcúdia. Nor is there any clue in these websites being international. Alcúdia's site is in Catalan by default. There is a Castilian link, but it only gives menu items and not text. Pollensa's does not have a Castilian link, though both - eventually - get to their "sister" websites in different languages for tourists (in Pollensa's case, a complete waste of cyberspace). No, can't explain this.

But as in Spanish, so in English, there is the issue of terminology. Maybe someone can enlighten me more as to the application of "entrada", but whatever is used, there is so much confusion when it comes to terms and to statistics. And that brings me to ...

The figures for the town halls pale into cyberspace insignificance against those for the Balearic Government's tourism website - illesbalears.es. According to "The Bulletin", it received - get this - 85,168, 261 enquiries during the first nine months of this year. 85 million? What on earth does that mean? In fact, what are "enquiries"? If it is an accurately-reported figure, it is colossal, but as ever with these statistics it is not what it seems. Hits, and I have to assume that this is what enquiries means, are about the most useless statistic that can be dragged out for website traffic. Though useless, the number does give an indication. The site is obviously popular, and is evidence of how important the internet is, especially for the holidaymaker, though in the case of this site the overwhelming majority of visitors are Spanish - and you can see this for yourselves on Alexa.


GOBBY AGAIN
I thought our friends GOB, the environmental pressure group, had been keeping a low profile in matters Puerto Pollensa. Unusually for them, they seemed to have had little or nothing to say about the pedestrianisation. Maybe because there are enough voices doing it for them, or maybe they're in favour of it and know they'll be on a loser as they'd be placed in the mayoral circle of waggons and find themselves being similarly surrounded. And it would never do to act as the posse for the mayor and the Pollensa administration when there are other enviro controversies with which they can shoot arrows at him. Big-time controversies. Ho-hum. Like the parking area next to La Gola. Does anyone really give a damn, other than GOB? "Unsuitable", they say about the parking, without of course offering any solutions as to where there might be some alternative. I'm afraid I lose my patience with GOB who do, sometimes, make some valuable interventions, such as when they have, in the past, criticised the management of Albufera. It's enough to make you want to drain La Gola and pave it over, just to get up GOB's noses, which are of course immediately above their gobs.

Anyway, there was political support for GOB from the United Left and the Mallorcan socialists at the town hall, but their opposition to the parking was not sufficient to prevent support for it to proceed. Mayor Cerdà, rightly pointing to the need for parking in the area of La Gola, reckons that the "general" plan for the town keeps in mind the other need - that of "natural space" - which GOB claims would be eliminated were the parking area to be constructed. Some might say - what general plan?


A LITTLE BRITAIN CHRISTMAS
No, not that Little Britain, this Little Britain. Our own. Steve and Urbano. And as they're such nice chaps, on the WHAT'S ON BLOG (http://wotzupnorth.blogspot.com) are the Little Britain Christmas specials. The goose may be getting fat, but work your way through that list and it won't be the only one. Chops are being licked even as one reads it.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Adam Adamant. Today's title - Welsh band; not the Manics, the other ones.

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And A Packet of Crisps Please

You can tell when the season is drawing to a close. The Eroski supermarket lets its stock (admittedly limited) of foreign products dwindle. The true state of grocery xenophobia - Spanish and Mallorcan products alone - returns to the supermarket shelf. And no product typifies this more than the crisp. The summer months' variety pack of crisps augments the voluminous but dull array of Spanish crunchy snacks in a bag. The German-sourced Crunchips paprika flavour, a prince amongst the paupers of the local crisp world, packs up its seasonal court and winters in the obscurity of its Lorenz headquarters in Neu-Isenburg, a town notable for having the highest number of restaurants per head of population in Germany - not all of them serving only crisps. The Spanish crisp can't even do paprika, as it can't do most things, flavour-wise.

Despite the voracious snacking habits of the Spanish and the vast amounts of shelf space devoted to the crisp and its off-shoots, the Spanish are ill-served by their local producers. The Lays packs offer an appeal in the uniformly attractive look of their contents, but an obsession with the Iberian ham flavour as a staple results in potato-slice ennui as does the sheer number of the non-flavoured crisp. I have long since failed to see the point of a potato crisp that tastes only of potato. Crisp eating for the Spaniard is an act of habitual indifference as opposed to one of taste sensation and surprise. Worse still are the crisps that provide the equivalent of munching through a brick of Trex. Grease may be an essential ingredient of the crisp, but there's no need to boast about it. The Spanish crisp is all too often the junk of the junk world. Where is the diversity of a Walkers or a Marks and Spencer? Last time I was in England I was introduced to a sweet Thai (or something like that) Walkers. It was crisp heaven, or hell perhaps if one has personally just nosebagged an entire family-sized packet.

The one concession to crisp internationalisation that survives the late-summer stock purge lies with the Pringle, the pretentious wave in a cylinder that can't quite admit to being a crisp and indeed lawyers, for VAT purposes, argued successfully that it was not. However, its very packaging (in addition to it being unquestionably moreish) gives the muncher the pleasure of realising that, even as the contents of the tennis-ball-style container dip well below the halfway mark, there are still many more crisps awaiting than might have been imagined; it's a clever trick of packaging illusion. The Pringle is the Tardis of the crisp universe.

Unfortunately, no such cleverness exists in the world of the Spanish crisp. The one positive of its almost unrelenting awfulness is that offered to the waistline through crisp abstinence. As the Crunchips head for the snow of Germany, so items of clothing will begin to once more gradually become winter-wearables.


ELDERLY TOURISTS
The late-season tourist is a mixture of economy class, small infants and earnest senior citizens, many of whom are readily recognisable from their kit of backpack, khaki shorts and knobbly-knees. These are the walking tourist seniors of autumn, blessed with a hardiness of constitution that defies wild, windy and wet weather - as was the case yesterday. Among the ranks of this older October market is also the ex-colonial who insists on a Panama hat even under a weakening Mallorcan sun. One of the wonders of this Saga-ist invasion is its unfailing courtesy and good manners. The very numbers may make driving a slower than normal procedure owing to the less-than-sprightly tackling of main road crossing points, but stop for a group of oldsters and you will always get an acknowledgement and a smile, after there have been minutes of will-they, won't-they cross as they are unsure as to whether a car that has actually stopped does mean that they can use the crossing rather than be then callously mowed down.

I have great sympathy for this older market and for the at-times downright rudeness that it attracts. It's another Eroski moment. The other day an ex-colonial pair with his 'n' hers matching Panamas were getting into an awful tangle at the checkout. Yes, the store was quite busy, but it was not their fault that the pack of meat didn't have a bar code. "Not possible to pay. No price," chanted the checkout girl, indicating, not that they understood, that they should go and get an alternative pack with a code on. It was also not their fault that they failed to realise the need to weigh and then price their fruit and veg. I've said this on more than one occasion before. If there is no obvious sign - in a language other than Spanish - to advise as to the procedure, or no assistance, what can the store expect. It is especially tough on the elderly who get seriously flustered, as did this couple. Finally when it came to paying, the old boy neither understood the amount nor the coinage, so there was more faffing about and undisguised frustration on the part of the checkout girl. And amidst all this confusion, he had left his wallet down on the counter. This is a store not unknown to suffer petty theft.

The couple went and had a drink at the supermarket bar. I felt I had to talk to them. I explained what had been going on, because they still didn't really get it. I also advised the old boy to take better care of his wallet. I could have seen him being pickpocketed otherwise; he was a walking victim.

Whether it likes it or not, Eroski, a main supermarket chain, is still part of the tourist market. Not all of its staff are rude or unhelpful - some are quite the opposite - but it is unacceptable that polite but uncomprehending elderly tourists can be treated in such a poor fashion. They deserve much better.

And finally on Eroski, the one opposite the Platja d'Or in Alcúdia, that is. It is a year now since I spoke about the hole, the one of the broken bricks as you exit the car parking. Why is it still there?


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Mothers of Invention. As Terence rightly got it - "Frank Zappa's ironic analysis of the 'Laurel Canyon set' ". Today's title - Two whats of what and a packet of crisps. Who was it?

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What Goes Around ...

Faffing around. It is a phrasal verb and an excellent one to boot. Let me conjugate. I faff around. You faff around. The shopper in the Mallorcan supermarket faffs around. You will notice that in the third person the normal he, she or it is replaced. There is a possible alternative which substitutes "supermarket" with "chemist's", but I don't wish to confuse matters.

The supermarket faff is partly the consequence of things like credit cards not quite having registered as a means of payment except among foreigners who attempt to do so minus the requisite identity, the prolonged search for which ... And the queue grows longer. No, cash remains the payment means of choice. But it is not all the fault of the shopper. The supermarket is equally culpable. Go to pay with cash, let's say the amount comes to 28 euros and 36 centimos, and invariably you are asked if you have the 36 or 6 or some eccentric combination of coins and notes. Cue another prolonged search - into the depths of a wallet or purse ... And the queue grows longer and longer. If you're British and unused to the euro and centimo, the queue grows longer, longer and longer. If you're Mallorcan and still operating in pesetas, the queue starts to stretch out the door.

For reasons that still mystify, Eroski has always been the first supermarket off the trolley rank. The Mercadona lobby grows louder by the day, joined by the cries in favour of the Budgen-like Bip and Hiper. (Do they still have Budgens by the way, does anyone know?) It can only be some Eroski inertia groove thing that makes its delightful red exteriors so attracting. Or maybe it is the periodic incentive promotion. Like the current one. Spend X and you get a number of points that go towards some towels. Fabulous. You also need a degree to understand which products qualify for how many points. Pigs' trotters rate the equivalent of a whole bathroom full; a six-pack of Saint Mick not a sausage. And then when you pay, it is you who invariably has to do the asking. "Any points?" you ask, stupidly, as it says so on the receipt. It's not that the checkout girls are pocketing them, they just want you to bugger off, because tearing off the stamps that equate to the points is an arduous task when they forget to perforate them. Mind you, it has its advantage. A measly two points can easily become a whole sheet as it is just so much quicker, as that queue is now down the road.

Having acquired these stamps and stuck them onto your towel-prize grid (those that you can get the back off, otherwise you have to stick on the stamps - "sellos" as they say here - with sellotape; ho, ho), you go to get your towel. 100 stamps plus a centimo shy of a whole five euros for a bath towel. The transaction is performed separately to the main purchase. And the queue is now in Can Picafort. Then it turns out ... Why is there one euro and one centimo change? It should be one centimo. Don't understand. And you drive home past the riot police controlling the queue.

"Wasn't it meant to be a bath towel?" "It is." "No it's not, it's a they - two hand towels, sort of." "Is it? Are they? That'll be why the one euro and one centimo. Know something? I owe them 40 stamps. Two hand towels are 140 stamps." "But why not the bath towel?" "I don't know. It was on the bath towel shelf. If it says bath towel on the shelf, then it should be a bath towel. And it doesn't actually say anything on the packaging." "Yes it does. Laura Ashley Home." "Laura Ashley Home for what? Wayward towels and strays?" "What's that noise?" "That'll be the police opening fire." "On what?" "The queue. Supermarket queue." "Oh." Faffing around.


BATLEY TOWNSWOMEN'S GUILD
Harking back to 22 July, I have been emailed by Alastair who points out that the Batley Townswomen's Guild re-enacted Pearl Harbor and not Agincourt. So much for historical accuracy, albeit one related to old comedy programmes. Now I was aware of the Pearl Harbor angle, but, and it is strange how time, memory and imagination intrude, I was sure that the Guild engaged in a series of battles, Agincourt being one of them. Wrong. I have even checked the whole list of Python sketches. The women of Batley appeared but twice - Pearl Harbor and the first heart transplant operation. I shall go away and do my lines.

Alastair has also discovered a youtube of Pearl Harbor. Brilliant. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqSmiC_xHg.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Jam - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGsyL6DhgPU. Today's title - who?

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Club Tropicana, Drinks Are Free

Well it has started to bite - the lorry drivers' strike and blockades. At the local Eroski, the problem with tourists not knowing how to weigh their fruit and veg is less of an issue as there is less to weigh. The fresh-meat part of the supermarket was closed. Not good. Apart from local folk, those tourists on a self-catering basis are going to start wishing they'd booked all-inclusive, though quite how well the hotels are catering (or not) I'm not sure.

It seems like bad news, bad news and more bad news. And I'm going to add to it. I'm afraid that the scratch-card problem is really starting to be an issue in Alcúdia (if you're not aware, this is a means of getting people to pay for holiday clubs or time share). The other day, I got an email from a gentleman of nearly 40 years coming-to-Alcúdia experience who was complaining bitterly about the constant hassle and, moreover, the abuse and aggression from those who try and entice folk with the cards. His email to me is basically the same as a letter that appeared yesterday in "The Bulletin".

Look, I have no problem with guys trying to earn some money so long as the deal's legit and they're not giving people a load of grief. But there is a problem if the resort gets itself a bad name; Magaluf has suffered for some years. Alcúdia has certainly not been immune; just now it seems to have cranked up a gear or two, and Puerto Pollensa also is a target. I don't really wish to dwell on whether there is permission or not for this to happen or indeed the nature of the actual offer, but my understanding is that any street selling or promotion has to be licensed. The agreement is that PRs and owners can "tout" for business right outside their own bar or restaurant; this they can do. But to go along the street or beach or wherever, you need a licence. That is one side of it, but the complaint of abuse and aggression is quite another matter.

This is a flavour of the email I had and of the letter to The Bulletin:

"We were shocked and dismayed by the number of street touts who made our lives an absolute misery every time we walked out on the street. We were approached several times on each visit to the Port area. The touts were abusive and aggressive when we tried to avoid them and even shouted at us as we walked across the street trying our best to avoid them. In fact they seemed to take pleasure from upsetting visitors with one of their women members shouting abuse after us at the top of her voice."

I'll say no more.


And today would not be complete without at least a passing reference to the fact that Freddy Shepherd seems to fancy taking over Real Mallorca. What was all that stuff about him and the women of Newcastle? Maybe he finds the babes of Mallorca a more enticing prospect.


QUIZ
Chain - Denny Laine, once of The Moody Blues, was in Wings. And how do you get from Wings to Maggie Bell? Yesterday's title - Weather Report. Today's title - so easy, I shouldn't even be asking.

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It Bites

No, not a mosquito. The strike of Spanish lorry drivers. Different country, same public reaction. Put a bit of a scare in front of Jose Public and he'll panic like crazy and take his own tanker to the local petrol station and fill up and then strip the supermarket shelves on the way home for good measure. Not that I am aware of any problem here as such, but maybe I should join the crowds and start panicking. There again, no petrol and it would be a good excuse not to do anything. Lounge around all day in the sun. The only problem being ... The other "it bites" is the grim weather.

The lorry drivers want a minimum price for haulage, but President Zapatero's not about to go along with the demand. Quite what also he can do about the soaring rise in diesel costs I've no idea. It's not as if diesel is the only energy product that's been affected; butane gas is up to over 14 euros a bottle, not far off a ten per-cent rise in a couple of months. The costs of energy have increased significantly over the past few months, so when people bang on about prices here being high or having increased, they might spare a thought for the fact that all businesses need to try and recoup those costs, and that includes bars and restaurants. Everyone is affected.

You now start to get the feeling of a conspiracy against the season. The credit crunch was one thing, then the euro-pound lack of kilter, then the weather (and still the weather) and now the energy crisis and the hauliers on strike. You wonder if it can get much worse; perhaps a plague of locusts. A drought on a biblical scale is unlikely though.


And returning to yesterday's piece. It happened again. Same Eroski supermarket, different tourist, different bunch of bananas. Fortunately someone was on hand. Me. I watched the gentleman concerned as he returned to weigh the bananas. Put them on the scale and then looked at the buttons. What he saw was a series of numbers. Which one do you press? You have to know that the numbers are to be found next to the relevant items. I did it for him. And on leaving, I asked the girl at the checkout, from whose queue the gentleman in question had been rebuffed in his initial attempt at payment, why there was no dirty great sign in English (and German) to make it clear that most items of fruit and veg have first to be weighed and that the button corresponding to the number from where the particular fruit or veg has been taken has then to be pressed in order to print the correct label. She quite agreed. So I suggested she brought it up with the management. And you know what? There's a meeting tomorrow and she will. Maybe. But were this dirty great sign to be placed in hopefully a prominent position, the only problem then would be explaining the fact that there are certain items that don't need to be weighed. Confused? You will be.


QUIZ
Chain - Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes of Buggles were, for a while, part of Yes and Horn produced "Owner of a Lonely Heart". And what connection is there between Yes and The Moody Blues? Yesterday's title - The Band (see this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfyjhtOTy1s). Today's title - what was their one and only hit?

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The Weight

"Can you tell me where I'll find the freshly-baked bread?"

Personally, I don't expect staff in the main, national supermarkets here to speak English. Were I from Madrid, I wouldn't go into the Hemel Hempstead Tesco and anticipate that the checkout girl would be fluent in Castilian. So Puerto Alcúdia is a tourist place; so what? In a tourist supermarket, it might be different, but the so-subtly red-painted Eroskis are "Spanish" supermarkets in which the staff have a tendency to speak Spanish or Mallorquín and only Spanish or Mallorquín. Consequently, launching into a well-constructed question sentence, as the lady who uttered the above did, is likely to induce a look of nonplus.

There are establishments here who I believe have every right to absolve themselves from any duty to be multi-lingual, and the mainstream supermarkets are one such. But this is not to absolve them totally, or to excuse either their mediocrity or the seemingly perverse inability to prevent inconvenience or embarrassment. Take the business of weighing fruit and veg. Now, you might think that a counter in the middle of the greengrocery section with a balance and some buttons might just suggest to the tourist (usually Brit) shopper that there is a point to the counter. But never underestimate the blindness of that shopper. Rather than sticking up a large sign or two in English and/or German that explains the whole procedure, the only advice is that given in Spanish. As a result, the lengthy checkout queues (and let's also mention the lack of checkout staff) get longer while the non-weighed and therefore non-priced apples or potatoes have to make their way back to the greengrocery department. Often it is the bewildered customer who has to make the journey. The British, especially the British, hate social embarrassment. That is why, on more than occasion, the offending customer has returned from a fruitless return journey minus the bananas. I heard one woman mutter to her child that the machine wasn't working. Of course it was working; she just didn't know how to use it. And she didn't know how to use it because rather than spending time finding out she wanted to get out quick and spare herself any more embarrassment. If they would just put up a sign or two ...


And current weather watch. It has gone beyond the joke stage to one where it is now a bit serious. The fifth weekend in succession that has been washed out. It chucked it down again yesterday. Still, maybe a few enterprising supermarkets have been getting in stocks of umbrellas, but I wouldn't bank on it.


QUIZ
Chain - Geoff Downes who was part of Buggles. And what about the Buggles takes us to Yes and "Owner of a Lonely Heart"? Yesterday's title - Harry Nilsson. Today's title - who did this?

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Red Red Wine

I have some favourite expressions. You might recall my using “like shooting fish in a barrel”. There is another – “local colour”. Local colour, for me, is local characters, local oddballs. There is local colour at the Eroski supermarket on the carretera opposite the Campsa garage in Puerto Alcúdia. Some of you might know him. In summer, he bends balloons for the kids, directs cars and accepts euros from the shopping-trolleys. But he is all-year local colour. Hard though I have tried, I cannot make sense of anything he says, and I have given up trying to work out his name. He is a thoroughly nice chap.

Years ago in west London, there was a significant amount of local colour. In addition to the manic street preacher who ranted on one’s route to and from the shopping mall, there were the winos. There was one in particular. He and his colleagues used to frequent a launderette – for the warmth one presumes. A friend overheard him mumbling one day. What he said was this: “I’m not a drinker, I’m a deep thinker.” From this utterance came what were known for many years in that part of London as “men of ideas”. And men of ideas, such as this one chap, always came with an accessory – a dog. His dog used to wear tinsel as its own accessory, for much of the year it wore tinsel. You would see a flash of tinsel haring along the Uxbridge Road, attached to a dog at high speed in full barking mode in pursuit of the 83 or 297 bus. Dogs of ideas.

Our Eroski friend has a dog, well a few actually, or at least a few who accompany him on his daily routine – whatever that is – outside and sometimes inside the supermarket. Recently, two puppies have joined the kennels. Like all puppies, they have taken cute lessons, and like all puppies, they get everywhere, outside and sometimes inside the supermarket. Dogs in the supermarket. Dogs in the arms of the girls working there. The puppy put down, the girl who served me did wipe her hands on some kitchen towel. Am I bothered? Not really. But then I’m a sucker for puppies and a sucker for local colour. I should take to spending my days outside a supermarket. Fresh air, plenty of people to talk to – incomprehensibly admittedly – dogs to play with. I wouldn’t graduate to the Masters level of men of ideas. The chap outside Eroski doesn’t appear to have either. I have never seen him actually drinking, though there is a mate who pops in for the occasional bottle of cheap plonk or sherry.

Perhaps I would were it not for the fact that Eroski have their own idea of local colour. Outside and inside the supermarket, they are painting it … red: the cage over the grocery section, red; the posts by the checkouts, red; the whole of the front of the store, red; even the streetlights, red. Whose idea is that? Could only have been dreamt up by a man of ideas. Red for blood. Red for danger. Red for offensive, meant both as an insult and as in American Football’s “offense”. Local colour.


NATIONAL ANTHEM UPDATE
The Spanish Olympic Committee has dropped the proposed lyrics after all. There was not a "consensus", they say. Hum on.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Ian Dury And The Blockheads. Today’s title – ok, UB40 easy, but who wrote it?

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