Smalltown Boy

I don't, as a rule, get involved with the world of art, but I met someone the other day who was looking for an outlet for some high-priced yachting paintings. Though not of the local area, the paintings sounded to me to be art investments that fitted with both the local yachting world and the local high-net-worth world. So I rang a gallery. Had I known then quite how much the paintings cost and how much the gallery might have stood to make, I would probably have approached the call differently, but I explained only that they were of high quality, from painters of international renown and that they would fetch a euro or two; well significantly more as it turns out. The response was not quite as I expected. Not only was it negative, it was the basis of the negativity that took me aback. It was as though any excuse would do not to have the paintings. And this was from someone I know well and get on with well; a Mallorcan someone.

The other day I was in a chemists in Alcúdia. It was taking an inordinately long time to get served. The reason for this was that two local ladies were spending an inordinately long time engaged in conversations far removed from the purpose of their visit.

Why should I mention these two cases together? The first struck me as an example, not for the first time here, of tunnel vision; of an inability to consider something outside of the norm. It was, if you like, a demonstration of an absence of entrepreneurialism. The second made me believe that a trip to the local chemists, as much as the café or the supermarket or indeed almost any other place of encounter, is a social event. Then I put them together and came up with the link - small town; small town mentality.

Much is said of the Mallorcan character and indeed I have written about it here, but to what extent is that character, in towns such as Alcúdia or Pollensa, just a reflection of small-townism that would be the same more or less anywhere? For visitors who find the resorts bustling with large numbers of people in summer, it is easy to overlook the fact that neither Alcúdia nor Pollensa can muster 20,000 inhabitants; they are small towns by any definition.

I grew up in small towns; indeed one of them, Bagshot, was really a village. It still is in the way that the place is now "marketed". Yet Bagshot had a railway - to London - from the nineteenth century; the first part of the M3 motorway, to include these towns, was opened in 1971. Alcúdia and Pollensa have a motorway, but only in the last year or so. The point is that, small towns they may have been, but the perspective that infrastructure offered was wider. Unlike much of England, with its transport heritage, the northern Mallorca towns were largely cut off until only relatively recently. The parochialism that this bred still exists, and it can be one that is centred on the individual towns; the rest of the island might as well not exist for some.

I'm not convinced that the art-gallery example is indicative of a wider lack of entrepreneurial vision on the island. One cannot draw a conclusion as to a Mallorcan character in this regard; Palma, as a city, is quite different. You may recall a piece I wrote which referred to education in Puerto Pollensa and how one local woman would much prefer to be living in Palma and exposing her son to the greater commercial influence of the city, rather than the laidback, almost unreal beach focus of the north. But combine a small-town mentality to a Mallorcan sense of superiority - as identified in "Beloved Majorcans" - and one has the potential for lack of advance.

The train may yet come to the north; it will have arrived some 150 years late by comparison with England, but not only England. What industrial revolution there was on mainland Spain at least had a railway network, albeit one that was a missed opportunity in historical terms, from the mid to late nineteenth century. When the train finally does arrive, symbolically it will - perhaps - mark the day when the towns of northern Mallorca begin to shed off their innate small-townism.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Amy Winehouse, "Valerie" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CJzMkvJUno). Today's title - "run away, turn away".

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