The Road To Wigan Pier

George Orwell made famous a landmark that no longer existed. If Iván Ramis is thinking that he might spend some leisure time soaking in local Lancastrian culture, he will be disappointed to know that there is no pier as such in Wigan.

Ramis' cultural indoctrination will probably stretch no further than the DW Stadium, to the inevitable nickname of Ivan The Terrible, which could be because he either is terrible or terrorises forwards, and to the informed (sic) comments of callers to 6-0-6. Welcome, therefore, to Wigan, welcome to the Premier League, this son of Sa Pobla.

The transfer of Ramis has been a curious affair, not because a player being transferred is curious but because of the attention it has received. But then, it isn't every day that a Real Mallorca player is transferred to an English club and even less of an everyday event that a player from Sa Pobla is. Nevertheless, player from average La Liga side moves to average Premier League side hardly ranks as being momentous by the standards of the two respectively puffed-up leagues.

This didn't stop the local television station, IB3, pitching up in Sa Pobla to gather local opinion for what ranks as one of the more important moments in Sa Pobla's history, ones that don't come around that often. They have just celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the arrival of electricity in the town, and one hundred years on from this, there is finally something else to celebrate, if a player being transferred to Wigan can be considered something worthy of celebration.

Apart from the cultural banter that Ramis will now be able to engage in with Wayne Rooney, what awaits him culturally? There is some home from home in that Sa Pobla's greatest claim to fame, the potato, will be available in chipped form, between two slabs of bread and with a ton of ketchup poured onto it. Sa Pobla's other achievements, in the culinary scheme of things, namely eels and rice, will be less available. There are eels in Lancashire, but they don't as a rule do to them what Londoners do, which is to make them doubly stomach-churning by adding jelly. Rice there most certainly is, but not of the paella and arroz brut style, merely the pilau variety of the local curry house.

Cultural culinary references, such as that to the chip butty, universal in the UK though it may well have originated in either Yorkshire or Lancashire, belong to the Eddie Waring School of All Things Northern, and in the case of Wigan to the way that Eddie pronounced it. The Waring Wigan became a leitmotif of Northernness, one impersonated repeatedly and one from which the town has never truly escaped.

The North, as we know, and Ramis might even think that it is, is a place of Danny Boyle's chimneys and dark satanic mills, men with cloth caps and whippets, and pigeon-fanciers. While the British hold to cultural stereotypes for other nations, so they also hold to them for regions of Britain. Wigan is North, which can mean all sorts of things that Wigan may well not and does not actually represent.

Accordingly, Ramis may encounter a man with a whippet who greets him thus: "ey up, Iván".  "Ey up" isn't a Lancashire expression. It may well be spoken in Lancashire, but it certainly didn't originate there. There is, though, a potential Balearics link, or so a good friend of mine from Barcelona has suggested it. This is that the Mallorcan greeting of "uep" is derived from "ey up" and that the derivation was one that the Menorcans initially made when Menorca was under British occupation. Whether there is any basis to this idea or not, and I somewhat suspect there isn't, Iván won't necessarily think he is being greeted in a style similar to that in Mallorca, as "ey up" is not native to Wigan.

Of course, he probably won't set foot in Wigan, other than to play football, and will prefer to be housed and gated somewhere on the Wirral. And from there he'll be able to send his tweets to all those back in Mallorca, saying how much he's enjoying the wonderful Lancashire (Cheshire) climate. It should do wonders for Wigan in promoting the town to the Mallorcans.

Wigan will assume a very much higher profile in Mallorca than it has previously enjoyed, Ramis' exploits will be reported by the Mallorcan media and, who knows, maybe Wigan will enjoy a sudden burst of tourism from the people of Sa Pobla and elsewhere. Not that these tourists will ever find a pier, but might be fooled into thinking they would do - "el camí a moll de Wigan".


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.