Friday 22 August 2014

Shop Owners' Outrage at Italian Eyeful

Great headline, wouldn't you agree? I should write for The Sun. Except I know how to use the posessive apostrophe and avoided the temptation of referring to our Mediterranean cousins using racialist WWII slang for the sake of aliteration (I was tempted though). Anyway, less about how great I am; on to the story:

After being treated to the sight of drunken Italian juveniles entering a convenience store wearing nothing but beer goggles and a strategically placed hand to shield their assets, Barcelona residents have finally cracked. Entire neighbourhoods have taken to the streets to protest the kind of low-rent, Club 18-30 (that's IQ) party tourism that keeps the Cerveza-Beer men doing a brisk trade in lager which tastes like a literal interpretation of the term 'piss-weak'. Like Marylin Monroe, your modern Sharon on a two-week bender to Shagaluf wears nothing but her perfume to bed, only today's reality harlot passes out in public wreathed in Eau de vodka Red Bull. 

This situation was clearly inevitable. For years Barcelona has been packaged for the package tourist. Illegal tourist apartments abound and spirits are served in unregulated, liver-coroding quantities for the low low price of... ohhh, about 50p. What did we expect? In its headlong rush to provide ever greener pastures for its cash cows, Barcelona has tripped and fallen and impaled itself on the horns of multiple stag parties. 

One can obviously sympathise with the neighbours. Unless it's Sitges or a Saga holiday the appeal of ridiculously toned, tanned young buttocks wombling free down the high street is evidently limited. To add ire to the fire, those who have done most to encourage things (being those who benefit most) are safely ensconsed in their air-conditioned Pedralbes apartments when the party's getting started in the old town. 
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Tourism presents a dilema however: on the one hand, it keeps the dollars rolling in. There's no doubt that Barcelona has weathered the crisis better than other regions on account of sun, sea and sex-on-the-beach live streamed to the internet. On the other, there's nothing funny about being kept awake by someone else's shout-off (the Spanish prefer to organise their own), and nobody likes to come home to find their doorway being used as a public urinal. 

So I've devised a genius scheme that simultaneously deals with party tourism and unsold realty stock from the construction boom. Let's take all those abandoned developments - the ones which somehow managed to obtain a construction permit despite being slap bang in the middle of a nature reserve and therefore can't now be sold or pulled down - and transform them into holiday resorts. Let's corral Luca, Hans, Dave and their spirits-fuelled high spirits in ring-fenced Butlins-style enclosures patrolled by psychotic quixotic Yul Brener robotics armed with water cannons (if it's good enough for Borris...). Free to go nuts (and get their nuts out) to their hearts content. Centre Parks on Sea if you will. Thrown in the staff needed to run the joint and at one master stroke we could solve the problems of mass unemployment as well.

Now, where do I apply to run for mayor? I hear it's a nice little earner...

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