One Day In Palma

It is quite some years ago that I lived in a village by the moors above Bingley. Access to the village was by a winding and steep road that became treacherous in winter. There was very little in the village. One shop. One pub. And Harvey Smith's stables.

You will know, if only because of the former building society now bank, that Bingley is near to Bradford, which in turn is near to Leeds. It was only a few miles to Leeds, but it was to my astonishment when a woman in the village shop claimed never to have been to Leeds.

Never having been to London I could understand. Turning it around, why would anyone from London go to Leeds, unless they were a Millwall fan? But to have never made the short journey from Eldwick seemed extraordinary. Or was it?

There are degrees of geographical division and of not crossing the divides. A neighbour (Mallorcan) in Playa de Muro once said to me that he hadn't been to Puerto Pollensa for years. Yet it's only in the next bay.

But worlds are small. For all sorts of people. Mallorcan, British, whoever. In part, the smallness of the worlds is founded on inter-town rivalries and jealousies. Why would someone from Alcúdia want to go to Pollensa, or vice versa? This is not my posing the question. It is how the question has been framed by those for whom the twain of the two towns ne'er meets. Back in Yorkshire, it was the same. Bradford and Leeds never met. The only outsiders who went to Bradford were the lads from Keighley on the look out for a good ruck at a weekend.

Inter-city, inter-town, inter-village rivalries and divisions expand into inter-regional rivalries and divisions. North v. south. Rarely east v. west. Always the north-south divide. Bradford/Leeds and London. North of Mallorca and the south of Mallorca, Palma especially.

From the south, from Palma, the north is the north. It isn't the competitiveness of the individual towns. Not the attempts at one-upmanship nor the inference of one place being "better" than the other. Not the east-west divide in the north. The "Eastenders" of the easterly Alcúdia against the "Dynasty" of the westerly Pollensa. "East End boys and West End girls."

From the north, the south is the south. On a warm isle, the north-south divide is not one of climate. Not north, somewhere years ago and cold, nor south, birth to pleasant lands but dry**. But it is south nevertheless.

I was originally from the south (of England) but lived for some years in the north. The southerly origins were partly London's East End but I lived mostly in the West End. And now I am back in the north, but in neither the East nor the West End of the north. Muro is no-point-of-the-compass land. The town's name means wall, and hard though it once would have been to have imagined becoming walled in by the smallness of a world, there is that feeling, especially when the south calls to make it necessary to scale the wall.

Palma is the airport run, the occasional business run, the occasional officialdom run. It's more often than not a nuisance run. A would-rather-not run. But once there... . In the north you can forget that there are things like shop after shop with this and that. The sales are on. You can't really shop in the north. Not at the prices on display in Palma certainly. Not with the variety definitely.

You can forget the bustle of the city, an existence of life and purpose that in winter is all but absent in the north. The north is not somewhere years ago and cold, but for part of the year it is as cold as death.

You can forget the size and scale, forget landscapes dominated not only by sky. And you can forget that away from a northerly uneventfulness, drama is unfolding. So it was that, by chance, I was passing the court buildings in Palma. It was the end of the session. Alemany walked past me. The grey-long-haired Martorell came out, head bowed. I stopped by the gaggle of photographers and the girl from IB3 with a microphone. He smiled weakly but didn't speak. Jaume Matas. He looked shorter than I remembered him. He had just heard that the prosecution was still pressing for eight and a half years.

One day in Palma. And for a brief moment I realised why the south and not the north.

** "Refugees", Van der Graaf Generator.





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