By HELEN GIBSON Douglas
It may be an offshore tax haven, a center for high finance and home to 60
banks, but the Isle of Man at heart remains a down-to-earth sort of place.
Exile millionaires live quietly and the affluence that pervades the Channel
Islands to the south is less evident in this wind-battered scrap of land
lying equidistant from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. Says John
Cashen, chief financial officer to the Manx Treasury, "We have a northern,
gritty approach to things here."
Gritty realism might prevail, but only up to a point. Manx folk seem to find
nothing surreal about raising a hand ever so slightly and muttering "Hello,
little people," when crossing the "Fairy Bridge" on the main highway between
the airport and Douglas, the capital. It's not even a romantic spot, just a
patch of road, to all appearances. The original bridge lay upstream, and the
only sign of the new one is the name scrawled on two whitewashed stone humps
either side of the road.
This, however, is not some bit of leprechaun folklore designed to impress
the tourists, but local business. In a pub conversation, friends talk of two
of their acquaintances?one who crashed his car and the other who trashed his
bicycle, both soon after crossing the bridge and rashly deciding to give two
fingers to the folk under it. A third story is told of a couple who were
taking friends to the airport, when the wife suddenly realized she had
forgotten her greeting and turned back, despite already being late for the
friends' flight. As a taxi driver put it, "There's probably nothing in it,
but you can't be sure. It's better to be safe."
Of course, a Celtic ancestry can always overwhelm that gritty realism of
which northern English folk are so proud. Indeed, the Isle of Man, which was
settled by Celts and then by Norsemen, does not feel particularly English
anyway. It enjoys being different, in having a Manx Gaelic language and a
near-autonomous, 1,000-year-old system of government left it by the Vikings.
As a British dependency that is not part of the United Kingdom, the island
takes pride in running its own show, other than in matters of defence and
foreign relations. It makes its own laws and sets taxes as it wishes?in this
case, at a considerably lower rate than across the water.
Incidentally, Manx people do not talk of the British mainland because the
island is the mainland. Nor is it commonly referred to as "across the
water", but simply as "across", as in, "What's the weather like across?"
The Isle of Man is a complex, quirky place that has taken its time to adapt
to modern social changes: birching [beating with branches], for crimes of
violence against a person, was still going strong in the early l970s;
homosexuality was not legalized until 1992 and abortion only in the last
five years or so. On the other hand, its citizens enjoy much lower crime
rates than in the U.K. People leave their houses unlocked, children walk to
school without supervision and the mugging of an elderly lady for her
handbag made front-page banner headlines in last week's weekly Isle of Man
Examiner.
This is an island of tailless cats, four-horned sheep and the belief that
driving any longer than 15 minutes to get anywhere is pushing it. Ramsey in
the north is rarely visited by those who live in southern Castletown and
vice versa, even though they are separated by less than 40 km, says Jenny
Foy who came to the island four years ago. She was amazed when real estate
agents refused to show her homes that were in a village or two away as too
distant.
One theory is that the Manx people make every journey an epic simply to
psychologically give themselves more space in a habitat that measures just
58 km from tip to tip. Or maybe they simply know a good thing when they see
it: less time spent in a car equals more time for home and work. Being 15
minutes away from home is beguiling to financial sector workers used to the
endless harassment of travel across.
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