The week That Was

The different camps of Magalluf
You are about to read an article about Magalluf. I know, I know, I know. Do feel free to look away now, go to the beach, make a cup of tea, do anything but have to endure more gazing at the filthy, decaying fluff that has nestled deep in the navel of Magallopolis. But these things have to be done, you know, and it is necessary to enlighten you as to the various camps which have formed over the past few days, which have pitched their tents, dug their trenches and formed a circle of wagons on the benighted Ballena battleground. These camps are in no particular order other than alphabetical.

A is for Apologists, who maintain that without drunken, ASBO-case youths the strip and thus Magalluf would face a touristic apocalypse. The Apologists come in different guises. One set genuinely believes this to be the case. Another insists, again quite genuinely and understandably, that there are vastly more serious matters than antics involving an Irish eighteen-year-old and a score and more of dirty boys, such as the prostitutes. Then there is a third. They agree with both of the above, but quite possibly (no, make that probably) have an ulterior motive, that of seeking to divert attention away from their own questionable practices and thus using the prostitutes issue as a form of human shield.

C is for Cynics and/or Conspiracy Theorists. These two camps tend to coalesce around various hypotheses, principal among which is the one that the video is all part of some grand masterplan to make Magalluf go ever further down the drain, drive down property prices and so, Bob's your uncle (assuming that either of the Gabriels or any significant other businessperson has an uncle called Bob), the time would come to clean up when prices hit rock bottom. Alternatively, there is a whole array of interested groups who have been party to some form of touristic engineering in Magalluf. These include the town hall, the regional government, hoteliers, tour operators, certain bar owners and/or bar-crawl organisers, Al-Qaida and Lee Harvey Oswald. This is all, one might say, summed up by the name of a bar in Magalluf. It begins with a B and has eight letters. Or is it?

F is for Faron Youngs, as in four in the morning, which can also be two in the morning or three in the morning. The exact time is largely irrelevant, but it gives a temporal context to all that follows. And by God has there been a lot of it; at least 24 separate articles, at a minimum. The Faron Youngs are inhabitants of the media woodwork, out of which they have crawled and all written the same article about Magalluf and predominantly the strip. Only the words have been altered (vomit for the more discerning Faron, puke for the tabloid Faron) or the names changed. Otherwise, they are the same. Take your pick as to the time. The rest would have tested even the powers of Dante Alighieri to have improved upon.

I is for IMBYs, the in-my-backyard-ists. The IMBYs live and/or work on the strip or nearby. Consequently, they and they alone are qualified to pass opinion. While there is some legitimacy to this claim when confronted by opinion offered by Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells who has never set foot in Magalluf let alone got hammered on the strip, the IMBYs might just consider that NIMBYs (not in the Maga backyard) may also occasionally be slightly more objective.

V is for Veterans. They have been around since before the old queen died or when Nelson was a lad and planning his assault on Magalluf with a few of the other lads. Or they have been around since at least the time in the 1980s when Ivor Biggun was singing about the land of sun, fornication and fun and the girl who swallowed his pina colada (a bit of an '80s variation on a theme therefore). They share the traits of the other camps, except the Farons, but they go further in constantly invoking the past as some summer golden era that isn't materially different, in terms of behaviour, to the present, thus in some way justifying the present, as well as invoking the winter golden era when the streets of Magalluf were paved with riotous OAPs. There are other Veterans who don't see things in quite this way and are mortified by what now happens. But most Veterans, rather like the other camps, tend to style the Magalluf argument through visions of the past and only the past. Few can conceive a future, a different future. Perhaps, just perhaps, Escarrer the Elder, in having documented his vision of the future, might be right. The Cynics will immediately say no, as will others. But none of the camps, if they were being truly honest, dispassionate and disinterested, can surely believe that doing nothing is an option.

Lokaykaser - Joserra's summertime hit
Forget all those summer hits of the past, throw your old Beach Boys 45s in the bin, switch off the Fresh Prince, there's a new dude on the summertime hit trail. Joserra raps. Sort of. August is not here yet and José Ramón, conspicuous by his absence these past couple of weeks, seems to have already gone on holiday. To compensate for his temporary non-existence, a video has been released that is destined to be a smash in the clubs of Majorca. Well, maybe.

The Assemblea de Docents (teachers' assembly) is nothing if not switched on to the use of different media. Having produced a comic strip that featured the president, they have now put out Bauzá, the video. It starts with these words: "Achtung!Warning! Ooooooou! For your own safety, you are warned that the video you are about to see contains images that could hurt your sensibilities or even change the course of your lives". We are then treated to an animated Bauzá in flamenco dress, among other attire, along with the likes of his two favourite fields - the Camps of Joana and the Campos of Jorge, respectively the regional government's headmistress and the president of the fiercely anti-Catalanist Circulo Balear. It is all an excuse to promote some of the president's finest phrases, such as this one from the 2011 election campaign - "We are going to do what we have to do and we will do that which is necessary because we are going to do what we have to do". It could also have this one - "We know what to do and what we do and why we do what we say we are going to do, and we will continue doing what we have to do even though some do not think that we will do what we said we would do" - but that would be getting a bit silly.

Will it be a summertime hit? Doubtful. The tune's rubbish. If you must, you can always see it for yourself. Google #lokaykaser and you'll find it. The hashtag comes from "lo que hacer" and itself is a dig at Bauzá's occasionally mangled pronunciation, the type which once made it seem as though he had referred to farmers as clowns.