I’ve lived in a tourist resort - about a mile outside it - for the past 44 years, and it has dramatically changed its stripes. Originally, it was kinda popular in a non hoi polloi sort of way. Those that came weren’t looking for clubs, in fact just the opposite. My wife and I used to sit outside our favourite beachside bar having a drink some evenings, watching the world drift past. She was fascinated by the fashions that walked by - “she’s French, she’s Italian, she’s German and she’s unmistakably English” she’d say, based entirely on the styles, and most of the time she was right. Now, day or night, everybody looks much the same. The place has dumbed down to where, I guess, socio-economic gravity irresistibly pulls it. Which is just as well: I can still live in jeans. The only formal clothing I own is a dark suit, bought in Britain for funerals. I hate it; perhaps I will be able to dispose of it with me inside in the final flames! I must put that down for the kids to note when the time comes. My revenge on tradition!
How did I get there? I thought I was writing about tourism.
Anyway, I was speaking to a couple of local guys about the town this morning, and the conclusion was that the entire island is now just a theme park. It has already been joked in cartoons that native Mallorcans will soon be paid to dress in peasant costume and sit outside fake farmhouses, with signs attached proclaiming their ethnicity as that contemporary curiosity, the rare, native Mallorcan. Even fifteen years ago it became impossible to buy certain kinds of bread, because the required kind of flour is no longer made. I wandered into the local supermarket this morning to buy a freshly roasted leg of chicken to have later on with some salad: impossible. As of today, everything that the busy supermarket kitchen used to cook on the spot has gone, replaced by a fancy new display with all the food now prepared the night before, in distant Manacor, home of Rafa Nadal. Maybe he owns the company. End of another era in my life. And so it rumbles on, step by deadly little step, with the quality of life the casualty of the day.
