The Division Belles

It can't be much fun if you live in Lloret de Vistalegre. No one has heard of you, no one ever talks about you and no one ever visits you. Lloret is "middle" and is not so much in the middle of nowhere as simply nowhere. Middle in Mallorca, to all intents and purposes, doesn't exist. 

It's not dissimilar on the west and east. Though west and east grant some place in the scheme of things thanks to their being compass points, middle has no place. Middle is an explanation rather than a location, its sole purpose being to hold north and south together.

North and south dominate geography. They determine affiliations and structures. England is south, France is north. Only rarely, as on mainland Spain, does middle, i.e. Madrid, get a look in.

North has come to prevail over south or vice versa partly as a quirk of history. Not always, as geography and climate do play a part. Norway is south as no one in their right minds would have ever considered otherwise. But at some point in Mallorca's past, south assumed the upper hand, though in Roman times north and south were pretty much on a par.

The south's dominance in Mallorca is obvious, and it is obvious that it should dominate; concentration of population wouldn't have it any other way. And apropos of this, Frank Leavers' excellent piece ("The Bulletin", 30 March) should hopefully have stirred up some feelings, as it considered both the north-south thing and expat small-town mentality.

One thing I don't quite agree with Frank on is the existence of a Palma-Calvià-Port Andratx triangle; Andratx is stuck on the end of Mallorca and for most people just a solitary place name on the first and utterly confusing road sign on the motorway coming from the airport. Calvià is a different matter, but even Calvià doesn't register outside of Calvià itself and probably not with many in it. It is a collective noun, a "calvià" of tourist resorts.

A Palma-Calvià axis does exist though, and for some in the regions of Mallorca (note regions and not just north) it is one that generates a resentment simply because it does exist. But division is less one of geography, of population concentration or of commercial and media domination. Division is more personal than this.

Small-town mentality breeds a further type of smallness, the small pond in which big fish seek to swim. These are big fish primarily of a self-made variety, their bigness largely one of their own publicity-seeking and of their appearances at the end of a camera lens. Mallorca divides along social lines, one of them represented by a social club for self-proclaimed and self-important celebritism in which the inhabitants talk to each other about each other, and only ever to each other and about each other.

It is the fact that this social club manifests itself almost exclusively within the municipal boundaries of Palma and Calvià which creates the division. The social club may be surprised to know that the great majority of expatriate Brits have not the slightest interest in it, other than to be provoked into expletive expressions, an example of which was communicated to me not from someone in the sticks but from someone in Calvià. Regarding a recent event at which the social club was out in force along with its collective dental treatment, reference was made to his "bollocks" dustbin. Division is one of division belles and their beaus and it causes division regardless of where one lives.

Expats come in all types of guise. They are easy prey for the British press, such as with the story of the shallowness and vacuity of Portals life which the "Daily Mail" once ran and which seemed distinctly plausible, despite its truth being challenged.

There are expats who are charlatans and flimflammers. Others who are dreamers and Mittys. Those who do lunch and very little else. And then there are those who are none of these. They are normal and regular, confronted with normal and regular issues. A bar owner in Magalluf has the same concerns as one in Alcúdia. There is no division other than a seventy kilometre distance; the bar owners are one and the same, and the last thing they are concerned with is what a self-publicised prominent-oscenti is up to.

This normal and regular hoi polloi is united by the everyday. North, south, it doesn't really matter, and those in the north should be grateful for a geographical tradition in which the north is at least acknowledged. As for the middle, forget it.


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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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A Different World: Mallorca's north-south divide

North, south, east or west. Wherever you may live in Mallorca, you will have a view as to where the place you live fits within the general scheme of things. My apologies, by the way, if you live in the middle, but for the purposes of the following, I'm afraid I will need to exclude you. But don't feel put down, because you are not alone. And if you don't live in Mallorca, you will still appreciate that location on the four main points of the compass can have meaning.

You may live in London, or you once used to; London and the south that have been damned for always being the focus of attention. It's the media that's to blame. Usually. But it has always been thus. Greater density of population, the capital city and the financial centre. And for England, read also Mallorca and Palma.

One needs to define what is meant by the south of Mallorca. In purely geographical terms, "the south" isn't strictly accurate. The dominance of what is referred to as the Palma-Calvia axis lies to the south-west, but let's ignore such pedantry.

The dominance is all but total. Everything revolves around the south and Palma in particular. You can judge for yourselves how the hierarchy works beneath Palma. It probably goes, in descending order, something like: Calvia, Manacor, Inca (and see, if you are in the centre, you aren't neglected), Llucmajor, Marratxi, and then it's anyone's guess. If you are unfortunate enough to live right out on the east coast, you will know that, for all intents and purposes, you don't exist.

The hierarchy reflects the degree of attention afforded different parts of Mallorca. It really shouldn't come as much of a surprise that certain places receive less, far less or even no attention. If no one much lives in these places, if nothing much happens, then what can you expect?

Nevertheless, there are genuine antagonisms, and none more so than the north-south divide. Well, the antagonism is felt by those in the north; I would very much doubt that it is reciprocated. And it is an antagonism that crosses nationalities. The natives are as disaffected by Palma-centricity, far more so in fact, as are incomers from other countries.

I'll give an example that is not unrepresentative. The lady in my local newsagents in Playa de Muro lives in Alcúdia. Why, she wanted to know, was there no coverage of the Ironman triathlon in Alcúdia at the weekend. It was an international event which attracted some two thousand athletes. The newspapers, the television; they didn't cover it. Had it taken place in Palma, it would have been a different story. I wasn't inclined to disagree with her.

The triathlon may not, compared with other international sporting events, register that highly, but for Alcúdia, and for Mallorca, it was a pretty important event. To be fair, it wasn't totally ignored. There was mention in sports pages, which is where you might expect it to be mentioned, but the point the lady in the newsagents was making was that there would have been considerably more hullabaloo if Palma (or Calvia) had staged the event.

So why the apparent neglect? The charitable defence of the media is that it is all a resourcing issue, and let's not forget that there are elections looming, with all the coverage they require. Less charitably, one can perceive this as being indicative of a Palma-centric arrogance, aloofness and disinterest in anything outside Palma's boundaries or those of its westerly neighbour.

It isn't only in media circles that the divide exists. It is there in politics as well. For all the publicity given to corruption scandals, they don't have much influence on towns well away from the dominant south. Miguel Llompart, Alcúdia's mayor and likely to still be its mayor after 22 May despite his association with the discredited Unió Mallorquina, once told me that the scandals were all a Palma thing. They were largely irrelevant to what happened within the town.

And you can understand this, because, and it is the same anywhere, people identify most closely with their own communities. Alcúdia, and you can name any number of places in Mallorca, could be in another world compared with Palma. And as far as Palma is concerned, it is in another world.


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North Wind Blew South

The north-south divide. Always the south, never the north. We make this a truism, because of English experience. It is not true elsewhere, Italy for example. In Spain, the north of Madrid and Barcelona may dominate, but it is not that simple. For instance, the south of Cadiz and Seville was a powerhouse in times gone by. In Mallorca though, it is the south, never the north. Despite historical claims by Alcúdia and Artà, it has always been the south - Palma; Palma and now its satellite municipalities, Calvia most obviously, the place of Magaluf, Santa Ponsa and Palmanova.

Population, commerce, power, each has been and is centred on the south. The north is another world, one that does not even have a motorway going all the way. The divide exists, whether for Mallorcans or others; always the south, never the north. And for the Brits, the divide is a vast chasm, one of neglect and sometimes hostility. But it is not difficult to understand why there might be such hostility. The northern zone comprises somewhat more than one-eighth (roughly) of Mallorca's British population, of which over a half lives in Palma or Calvia. Yet, away from the greater south region, this still makes it the second most populous British area on the island. Its problem lies not with the number of people but the 50-odd kilometres that separate it from Palma, the gateway to the south and its appendages of Calvia, Marratxi, Llucmajor and Andratx. And it is this separation that rankles, because it has caused and continues to cause a physical and perceptual disenfranchisement from the representation of the British as a whole.

In the artificial expatriate world, representation is largely not a question of politics or the other main "estates". It is predominantly that of informal networks and of the fourth estate, the press. Where an element of quasi-politics might intrude, it appears not to wish to. Does the British Consul ever visit the north? Maybe he does, but if so he keeps it quiet. Yet it is precisely the absence of established representation that makes a presence via the media that much more important. For without it, there is a lack of connection, a sense of avoidance and of neglect and the fomenting of petty hostility and prejudice.

It falls, or should, to the media to make the connection. But it fails utterly in doing so. It is not entirely its fault. Resources largely determine the breadth of representation, but it is not as though attempts have not been made to form a bridge that stretches for those 50 or so kilometres. They have failed. Why? Resources are one thing. Complacency, lack of interest might be others.

Apart from radio confined by transmission (now a thing of the past anyway), the only "voice", if you want to call it this, for representation is that provided by the press, namely "The Bulletin". Long have been the complaints of the paper's neglect of the north. I have argued in the past that these are not always accurate, that they are mainly a perceptual error, but I may well have been wrong. To take just one edition - yesterday's. It was replete with messages of goodwill, festive events, a fatuous "year-in" feature alongside news. What was there of the north? A couple of reader messages, a note about a market, and that was about it. There were not even any adverts from what I could see. Nothing. Worse still, is an impression of cliquism and vanity that holds no interest for anyone much north of Al Campo. It is unsurprising that there might be a sense of hostility, while bias of content acts to reinforce underlying prejudices. Take a recent letter to the paper. It referred to the elevation of Alcúdia's mayor to the post of tourism minister, dismissing his time as leader of a large tourist resort as grounds for such a promotion. The point was valid in that it may well indeed be insufficient qualification for the role, but the interpretation was that it was the very fact that he was from Alcúdia that might not qualify him. Might the same have been said about a mayor of Calvia?

Accusations of press and media bias along geographical lines are hardly unique to Mallorca. The BBC and the British press still suffer from them. But there is a difference, and this lies in my argument about representation in the absence of other forms of this. Within a specific community, that of the British in Mallorca, to exclude, or for the most part exclude, a not insignificant portion of the whole community is not far from being discriminatory.

One has to be realistic and also accept that relative population densities will inevitably skew balance of coverage. So they should; it would be unrepresentative were it to be otherwise. Nevertheless, in Mallorca, one is left feeling that there are two peoples divided not by a common language but by a 50-kilometre barrier.


Oh, and the north wind is blowing south. Cold, cold, like Britain freezing before Christmas. Six degrees during the day. Snow as low as 400 metres.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Beach Boys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VeHmh2B5nY. Today's title - this was the blog's song of last year.

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