Puzzling out the Isle of Man

It has taken a long time to come to grips with The Isle of Man, which, through no fault of its own looks like something it’s not.  On getting off the ferry in the main town of Douglas you see a magnificent terrace of immaculate cream coloured hotels looking out to sea. The place reminds me of a sleeker and grander version of the run down holiday towns of southern England where I spent time as a girl.  Green hills, with more Victorian terraces,  form a backdrop to Douglas and a purpley mist obscures the horizon way out in the ocean. Seagulls swoop and cry.  There is a lovingly restored Gaiety Theatre and a nostalgic-pony drawn tram that clip clops down the promenade.  On the face of it this is a quintessential holiday town and it is only when we go to the excellent museum and I see old photos of the 1900s with bustling crowds of eager holiday makers that I realize what is odd.  There are hardly any tourists now.

It was the wealthier class of tourist who created the boom towards the end of the nineteenth century when all the beautiful buildings went up.  In fact the Gaiety Theatre was built in 1902 and had a special barrier to separate the well heeled from those less so.  They wealthy had their own entrance too. Until the 1980s (with a little hiccup during the war years) the tourist trade flourished, but then package holidays in distant places with reliable summers siphoned off even the humbler travelers.

 But if so, I wonder why everything is still so nice.  No crumbling ghost town ambience here.  There is an proud museum full of complicated Island history going back to the Bronze Age.

 We share an old fashioned compartment on the Thomas the Tank Engine Steam Train with a young Manx man who dispels some of the mystery.  He is part of the thriving money market that flourishes on the island because of its tax haven status. Twenty five percent of the population are incoming South Africans looking for a safe haven as well as a tax one for themselves.

The word “safe” or “safety” comes up in every conversation we have about what it is like to live on the island.  The kindly gentleman who volunteers out at the lichen nature reserve evaded the question for a bit and talked of seabirds and nature  but then reverted to it “What’s it like living here?  Well its safe”  Our landlady who grew up in the Congo and then tried Italy said the same. “No burglaries”

I suppose there is a point  in every long trip that one feels homesick and one day I did.  Actually Hutchinson Square where we are living was taken over by the British government in the war to be one of several “enemy alien” camps.  There are pictures of unfortunate Jews who’d fled Nazi Germany only to be  interned on the Island.  Many were gifted artists.  They must have been all sorts of homesick.  Because it was wartime there were no tourists so the landladies and landlords must have been quite pleased at having albeit unwilling guests with ration books and an assured income.

I think my difficulty in getting the vibe of this place, simultaneously ancient and old fashioned rather than modern, a tourist destination with next to no tourists, had made me a bit lonely.  Also Grant and I have been forced to sleep in separate beds because the sofa bed is excruciatingly uncomfortable for two. I let him have the nice single bed and in fact I have grown used to the sensation of a cat stepping lightly on the duvet as the sofa springwork shifts spontaneously by laws of its own. And once you think there’s a cat on the bed you can’t help but check.  And then there’s the dawn screaming around 4.30am of seagulls starting their day.  All a bit unsettling, along with the fact that Manx cats are actually poor sufferers of spina bifida brought on by inbreeding.

But that afternoon Grant put an end to my brooding.  He’d come back from scouting for a lemon for our gin and tonics.  He was excited. “You must come to Tesco’s” he said. ”That’s where everybody is”  We went to look and all at once I felt OK.  Gone was the languor of  the seafront esplanade.  People were everywhere bustling and impatient.  Lots of children and their harried and often tattooed parents.  Many tubby old ladies  and handsome men  with round tough Viking faces.  There was a special checkout which said over it “Traa dy lioor” and under that GIVING PEOPLE WITH MEMORY PROBLEMS “ENOUGH TIME TO THINK”.  The checkout person herself was a little slow and that seemed good to me.  I don’t know exactly what “traa dy lioor” means and I don’t suppose any of the Manx do either as their gaelic isn’t spoken now and the bilingual signs are really just for show.  However I am slightly shocked that nobody we’ve asked knows the meaning of the Latin motto that encircles the three legs of the national emblem that’s everwhere “Quocunque jeceris stabit”.

Due to ferry sailings we’ve had to stay here a bit too long.  A friend of Grant’s, Max, has a poster on his toilet door saying something along the lines of “Harbours are the safest places for ships but that’s not what they are built for”

I think I’m ready to sail from the safe Isle of Man.