Maj 5

 

melos mid morning

close gap square crazy staircase

busses beep by back

air vent commerce round toilets

di lo que quieras pero no negarás

jetplanes without trails

commission over calm and pine

messaging       have you paid

   

    sea  front

open to parks

   men  in  red

blew rhythmically

 in   tubas

trombone elbows

  boys  in  blue

old ladies listened

    pigeons

plummeted  clapping

 their wings

crashing waves

   washed and

   withdrew

gathered  and

   grew  big

 again

all   around

   england 

and it blew

   breeze

 ruffled

coats in the chair

      skirts

stout  shoes

 of the listening ladies

*

  tumbling into sky

boys on the balcony

Corona bottle half full 

   shouting

the hum of the

                night sky

Magaluf      Beach Bars

ye snitch!

    ye faggot!

Both beauties he

sang a love song

so drunk at dawn

with the sensible

                 blonde

talking all night

someone got a

                 neck tat

    on the strip

souvenir

air port   pickup

girls on the balcony

photos with the

    beach behind

all night between bays

swelling sound

bobbing DJ

launched module

Thanks to a lucky late cancellation we were at this unwontedly classy hotel on the bit of high ground where Palma Nova becomes Magaluf. 

Breakfast on the terrace was fabulous. 

The main challenge was our dependence on tea at all other times. There was no kettle in the room, so a lot of flask filling was required, both at breakfast and late at night. The bar staff were amenable. 

I remembered that in the era when we went on lots of package holidays I used to bring a small travelling kettle. I thought about buying one, but the shops in these resorts are all about short stay. Everyone's just passing through. Bottles of water, beach towels, souvenirs, ice-creams, pharmacy, sun-glasses.... Not furniture or electrical goods.

It's a holiday camp, it's not for staying. Yet having been here so often it still felt like an alternative homeland. We looked idly for the hotels where we once stayed in Maj 1, 2 and 4 (Maj 3 was in Alcudia). We couldn't find them. In the intervening twenty years the hotel names had changed. This time we were in Cooks Club Calvia Beach, which the airport transfer ticket revealed was the old Honululu (information only relevant to minibus drivers). Sure enough, back of the iconically Cooks Club frontage, the clean lines of the restaurant terrace and the speedy glass lifts and the gunmetal gym, was evidence of the building's former existence: stolid stairwells of a less modern design, a less pacy set of lifts. 

We were all modern; we the visitors, the music, the businesses... but the resorts also proclaimed the eternal verities of resort life: sun, sand, sea swimming, pedalos, ice-cream and postcards. 

Dusty rain shower, a few minutes that impressively mottled all the parked cars and railings. 

Norfolk Island Hibiscus (Lagunaria patersonia). 

I've never clocked it before, but I imagine it's quite a popular introduction in Mediterranean resorts, both as a hedge component and as a small free-standing tree. Native to Norfolk Island and parts of the Queensland coast. 

The other essential component of our tea dependence. We exhausted the stocks of the local Spar. Vive Soy makes a great point of all its soya being grown in Spain. And it made an excellent cup of tea.

It isn't organic like the soya drink we buy at home, but I'm still living under the impression, which I prefer not to disturb though it's possibly out of date, that EU soya is not GMO.

[This appears to still be true, in 2024. While the EU allows the import of GMO soy beans for food and feed, it does not allow cultivation within the EU itself. 90% of N and S American soybeans are GMO, according to what I've read.]

The names of Magaluf and Palma Nova are known all over Europe. But within the local organisation of Mallorca they are just a part of Ajuntament Calvià. Calvià is the small inland town that administers these massive thronging resorts as well as Santa Ponça and others. 

Lots of ice-creams got eaten. Naturally, as we were in the Balearics (for the first time in nearly twenty years), I tried to eat my way through the extensive range of La Menorquina.

But later, unfolding the crushed wrapper in the airport, I was shocked to discover that my absolute favourite ice-cream of the week was made by Farggi. Whatever, it was heavenly.

But maybe I wasn't such a traitor, because it looks as if Farggi might be a premium brand of La Menorquina anyway. 

(Laura didn't bother with this essentialist nonsense. She stuck to Magnum Classic throughout.)