Mallorca As Britain

Chris Moyles had been presenting his Radio One breakfast show for over eight years when it came to an end yesterday morning. It's a long time, longer even than I have been providing insights into Mallorcan life that make me the most astute and regarded writer on Mallorcan matters of a generation. (I can, if pushed, be as immodest as Moyles.) Unlike Moyles, these insights were not originally daily. They have only been so five years. Still a long time though.

I'm not about to perform an act of sympathy with Moyles and announce my retirement, if for no other reason than I don't have a successor lined up. There is no "youthful" replacement, a likely Nick Grimshaw to fill my incomparable writing boots and attract a whole new, younger audience, eager to acquire knowledge about Mallorca. It falls to me and the Photo Blog's Klaus to be the ageing imparters of daily awareness. Such is our lot.

The daily exercise of writing about Mallorca brings with it vast knowledge. It can't help but do so. But in the process of acquiring this vast knowledge and then disseminating it, one might think that I have also undergone a process of having gone native, of having forgotten, neglected or distanced myself from aspects of British life and culture. One might think this, but then there is Chris Moyles. Had I undergone this process of nativisation, there would be no daily listening to Moyles nor would there be listening to Five Live or Talk Sport.

Being knowledgeable is not the same thing as being integrated, whatever this means. God knows, I have devoted articles to considering the concept of integration, but I am left to believe that it is, at its most diplomatic, illusory, and at its least diplomatic, a colossal load of old cock. Moreover, I couldn't care in the least bit, when I even think about the subject, whether I am integrated or not. It just doesn't matter.

Or perhaps it matters insofar as not being integrated facilitates the observational process. Observer is how I have tended to describe myself when people ask me what I think I am. I was described recently (by Paul Danks, financial person of the parish of Puerto Pollensa) as a diarist, which is accurate in terms of practice, but I prefer observer. It means looking on, digesting, accumulating but also interpreting. It is a more abstract state of being, and through non-nativisation one is able to retain a capacity for abstraction. Integration, at its fascistic and totalitarian worst, means a loss of objectivity, a being sucked in, a groupthink mentality, a failure to question, a blackening and whitening.  

What happens in reality is that one cherry picks one's cultural alliances and in my case this is cherry-picking of a multitasking type. I can listen to Moyles whilst reading Spanish news websites. It creates a hybrid of appreciation of local society and culture, a quite deep appreciation, that is still suffused with an alien's perspective. Intellectually, one is acutely aware that observation solely through British eyes is wrongheaded. I understand this, but it is the distance that comes from having a strong but not innate appreciation that enables observational objectivity. It's why I challenge so often an insular parochialism in Mallorca. Not because I wish to be deliberately critical but because the conceptualising of issues (tourism, for example) should require a stepping outside of such parochial mentality and the assumption of the onlooker's role.

I'm not sure how Moyles' blokishness fits with any of this. Except for influencing how one perceives aspects of Mallorcan life with chameleonic and multifaceted cultural references from Britain which one can adapt to help explain this Mallorcan life in terms that resonate with an English-speaking (and predominantly British) audience. Moyles is a blokish extreme but it is an undercurrent of how one seeks to convey this life by alluding to football, music, soaps and some slightly less Philistine manifestations of British culture. 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.