Saw The Shark at breakfast today.
He was accompanied by his entourage and hangers-on, basically a little old lady who looked like she was his mother but I think she’s his wife. The crowd milling around the buffet table mysteriously parted like the Red Sea as he slowly walked towards them to get his boiled egg and soldiers. Not a word was spoken, just a deferential hush across the dining room until The Shark had sat down. He picked up a buttered soldier, dipped it into his egg and a general hubbub returned along with an edgy feeling of normality.
The psycho toast woman with the mad starin’ eyes is on the next table to us this morning. Her breakfast routine is always frighteningly the same. First she eats a plate of bacon and eggs quite normally but then she goes up and brings back two slices of toast, two cartons of marmalade, two cartons of butter but no plate. She puts the toast on the tablecloth next to the now empty plate of bacon and eggs, opens one of the butter cartons and with her mad starin’ eyes she starts to spread the first piece of toast with butter. No, she doesn’t spread the butter with her mad starin’ eyes, she uses a knife silly.
This toast spreading is a very precise operation. She doesn’t move her head at all and just stares madly with her mad starin’ eyes at the piece of toast while she v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y spreads butter over every square inch of the surface of the toast, right up to the very edges so that every part of the toast is uniformly covered with butter. If there’s a slight butter ridge, this is flattened out and the resulting ripple of butter is flattened and flattened and flattened until the total area of butter is as flat and as level as a piece of glass.
This takes about five minutes and when she’s satisfied with the result, she repeats the exercise with the second piece of toast, her mad starin’ eyes staring madly all the time. Another five minutes or so and she’s ready for the marmalade.
By this time my coffee had gone cold and as I sat there staring madly at her with my mad staring eyes I thought, “Bloody hell, what’s she going to do with the marmalade? Marmalade’s not like butter is it? It’s not so spreadable is it? It’s got bits in it. It can’t be spread to a uniform thickness can it?”
I was beginning to feel nervous.
The mad starin’ eyes had by now focused on the marmalade carton and slowly, with great precision, the woman with the mad starin’ eyes began her deadly work. Ten minutes and the first slice of toast was done. Another ten minutes went by and she was still chasing a small piece of orange peel across the surface of the second piece of toast in an effort to find the right spot for it.
Her mad starin’ eyes were starin’ madder than ever.
“Quick,” I said to Pauline, “she’s going to blow. Get under the table quick.”
Pauline said, “Don’t be stupid,” and left for the pool.
I sat huddled under the table for what seemed hours. In fact it was hours.
When I finally plucked up the courage to peep out from under the tablecloth I heard the comforting cry of Placido the head waiter, “It OK. It OK. We find him. Security. Security.”
It’s special Mallorcan night in the dining room tonight. Let’s hope we get to try some of those typical Mallorcan dishes as recommended in the local guide brochure we picked up the other day, roasted starlings and cabbage followed by spicy pie with vegetables and eel would go down very nicely I think.
As it turned out, the Mallorcan evening was just as much of an anti-climax as all the rest of the so-called special evenings. The big difference was Placido’s outfit actually looked pretty good for a change. It fitted in all the right places and the waitresses all looked pretty in their Mallorcan national dress but there was no atmosphere as usual. No music and no sense of anything out of the ordinary apart from the staff wearing different clothes.
I didn’t see the Pirate Man tonight, not that he’s particularly Mallorcan but it would have been nice to show him that there were no hard feelings wouldn’t it? Apart from that graze on my neck where Emmathethomsonrep grabbed me.
The entertainment tonight is George Pena. Billed as ‘The Showman’, the poster in reception shows a wild and crazy middle-aged man with a sort of Ken Dodd hairstyle and a dumb look. This looks like my kind of act, we’ll have to get a front table for this bloke.
What a disappointment.
He came on in a tatty fat outfit with the Ken Dodd wig on impersonating Pavarotti and went downhill from there on. He was American with some sort of Spanish accent in there somewhere and was not funny or particularly entertaining. He’d had some formal opera training, so he said, and his act reflected this. Switching from so called serious renditions of popular opera classics for people who know nothing about opera to comedy routines based around Tom Jones and his piece de resistance – a routine about how rap music would sound sung by a Yorkshire man. He had the audience in stitches. With feeble jokes and an ingratiating way of mentioning all things British he carried on getting worse and worse but more and more applause. He just went on and on and on. Finally he spent ten minutes or so telling us how he had a video, CD, DVD and cassette available of his performance if we’d like to walk round to the end of the stage and pay him fifteen euros for each one or 25 euros for two.
Christ, we couldn’t sit through a live performance, let alone relive it again and again on DVD. I’m really sorry I dragged you along to this. I had high hopes for this act but it’s let me down again. But the audience didn’t care. That’s the worrying thing. They just didn’t care how bad he was, they just kept applauding and laughing as if it was the best night of their sad little lives.
Judging by some of the women’s outfits it probably was.
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