Giles Brown
I AM currently writing this article on my last day at the villa in the Marbella Hill Club, directly under the air conditioning unit, as the temperature outside seems to indicate that, in a twinning scheme gone badly wrong, Marbella seems to have been twinned with the Sun.
It’s somewhere in the high 30s out on the terrace, which has had the positive effect of drying my washing in nanoseconds, but the negative effect of short circuiting everyone’s brains – what passes for mine included.
Though it is a widely known fact that I normally function on black coffee and impure thoughts – or the other way around… Added to that is the fact that it was a full moon last night and it is no surprise that people have been acting like fruit loops.
My first piece of evidence for that was a video that went viral about the continued goings on in Puerto Banus, as well as a ‘warts and all’ expose on national television.
In the video, an open-topped Porsche, complete with brainless Banus bimbos sitting illegally on the back and pumping out rap music like some bad copy of the Fast and the Furious franchise, pulls up to a red light.
After pausing for a few seconds, the driver of the Porsche decides that the highway code doesn’t apply to him and roars off through the read light, bimbo shrieking in delight as he does so. Two more supercars, presumably also driven by knuckleheads, decide that this is a good idea and also jump the light, with the third car missing a hapless scooter, who crosses legally, by inches.
Meanwhile the TV show went behind the scenes of a night in Puerto Banus, riding shotgun with the Policia Nacional, as well as interviewing Marbella business figures and the owner of a boutique party hotel that has received over 700 complaints in the past two years.
It was the usual catalogue of fast cars, yachts, guns, prostitution, nightclubs, shady figures in gold chains, drugs and rap music.
And then the thought hit me.
Marbella really is missing a trick to get its profile even higher on the world stage.
So I’ve just taken out the patent for the new PlayStation game MarbsMayhem. It’ll give Grand Theft Auto and all the other shoot em up gangsta games a run for their money!!!
My second bit of summer madness involves the Starlite Festival, who seem to have thrown their toys out of the pram in a massive way now that Marbella Town Hall has enforced the Junta de Andalucia law that you can’t run an outdoor nightclub in a mainly residential area until 6am, every morning.
Starlite responded that they were going to sue Marbella for damages, had done wonders for the image of Marbella, and that they were upping sticks after this year and would never darken the town’s door again.
To which my measured response is: “Jog on then, and don’t let the d
oor hit you in the arse on the way out.”
Maybe it was the fact that the ticket prices started at ridiculously high levels, or the fact that the audiences seemed to care more about taking selfies and wandering back and forth to the VIP bar during the performances – Rock God Robert Plant remarked on this very fact when I saw him at Starlite last year – or the fact that the road back down to Marbella was full of drunken pijo teenagers at 7am (and I am not sorry for what happened to the one who tried to flag me down as a taxi by standing in the middle of the road and point a torch at me.
The Tank has handled wild boar without a dent so bouncing a few pissed up teenagers off the side panels is nothing. Plus he learned a valuable life lesson).
What really got me, however, was the slogan ‘todos somos Starlite’ that started to appear on social media. For those of you with memories longer than the average Justin Bieber song, this type of post started to appear after the killings in Paris, especially at the Bataclan, where innocent people were slaughtered by terrorists AT A CONCERT VENUE.
If you truly believe that the fact you can no longer dance to Eurotrash music until 6am is on a par with what happened in Paris then the heat must be getting to you too…
