Monday, October 15, 2007

Nobody Knows, Yeah Nobody Knows

So there I was yesterday compiling this list of places where you can nose-bag some jamón serrano, and it suddenly hit me. Even I didn’t know some of the bars on the list. The tourist office had supplied the list, but had not added any addresses. I can only but assume that they would have assumed I would know. There is good reason for this.

One might imagine that, in my day-job as all-round good-egg promoter for all things Alcúdia, Can Picafort and Pollensa, I would have intimate knowledge of every bar to be found on the bays of Alcúdia and Pollensa and all points inland. Strange to report, but I don’t.

I did once start this project to actually map all bars and restaurants in northern Mallorca - a sort of life’s work of utterly no consequence. But I gave up when I got bored, or was it because it was raining or because there was something better to do like lying down. I can’t remember exactly.

But, better things to do like having a kip on the sofa notwithstanding, I do get interrupted periodically by the likes of the tourist office who wish to tap into my apparent vast repository of knowledge. If not the sofa, then the beach. I can be lying back, admiring Scandinavian femininity, and the mobile goes off. It’s the Alcudia TO. Do I know where Bar X is? Well, usually I do, and can supply the information that the TO will pass onto some sap who wants to get bladdered with half-a-dozen plus large drinks, thus filling Bar X’s coffers by some 20 euros or more, and for which I get precisely nothing save for a disturbance in my viewing.

Now usually the tourist office would also know, but sometimes it will not, for a similar sort of reason as to why I also wondered about the merit of my great bar census. For, one year Bar X will be Bar X, but then along come, say, Don and Donna from Doncaster and re-name the place - something like “The Dog’s Bollocks” - and the whole thing’s to cock, as it were.

This whole trail of thought does, however, lead me to believe that a rich service can be provided by my creating a different form of bar census: bars no-one has ever heard of. So the search is now on for those who know of unknown bars; a bit of a contradictio in terminis admittedly and very Rumsfeldian (“known unknowns” and all that malarkey). But they must be out there. This is your latest challenge - bars no-one knows of.


QUIZ
Yesterday - pride of place goes to today’s winner, Steve from Little Britain, who, under an email entitled “Puntastic!”, informs me that when he was a schoolkid, there was a joke doing the rounds - “How does Bob Marley like his sandwich? “Wi’ jam in.” “And The Wailers?” “We hope they like jam in too!”. Brilliant, but probably right, Steve, it works best with a Scottish accent.
Today’s title - they’re back; who are they?

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