Twin Towns

This item of news registered with me, partly because the council is clearly failing in its duty of care and also because there is a misconception as to my own links with the city. It is one that arose from an explanation in the pages of "The Bulletin" as to how I was to spend last Christmas. I can confirm that I have only once been to Leicester. Quite some years ago, and the visit involved the moving from one pub to another along darkened streets that may or may not have been hiding zombies.

Nevertheless, I do have Leicester associations. These are primarily because of a further misconception - that I live in Alcúdia, when I don't. Being branded with the Leicester association is understandable, given that Alcúdia's expatriate English population comprises only people from Leicester. Or Hull. I have been to Hull only once as well, and how beautifully monochrome the Humber and the mud to both sides of it were.

There is yet another misconception. That Alcúdia is like Blackpool. When everyone should be aware that it is like Leicester or Hull.

Why is it that Majorcan towns and resorts end up being repositories for expats from certain cities or even countries? If you can call Scotland a country. And I suppose you can; indeed, should. Take Puerto Pollensa. It feels as though it should be inhabited by the whole of Eastbourne, but instead it is awash with Jocks.

If you said to me that, rather than Alcúdia being like Blackpool, Puerto Pollensa is like Morecambe, then I'd initially think you were talking rubbish. However, unlike Leicester, I did for a time live in Morecambe. The Scottish fortnight was a phenomenon anticipated with both joy (for the pubs which made more money in two weeks than the whole of the rest of the year) and fear. Anyone with any sense would go into protect-and-survive mode, hide under a table and cover themselves with whitewash, as though they were zombies.

Puerto Pollensa's Jockist tendency isn't of course quite like the Morecambe invasion. It is far more genteel Jockism. All accountants and presbyterian ministers. Getting bladdered on a tank load of McEwan's is not the form, even were McEwan's available; rather, it is getting legless on gallonage G&T's or a box of Blanc de Blancs from the nearest bodega.

Jeremy Clarkson once defined the British expatriate in terms of where he or she had gravitated to. Spain, for example, was the destination for any Brit who had done the blag at the Walthamstow post office. Personally, while I have some history with Walthamstow as well, I have not committed a post office blag either there or indeed anywhere. I rather suspect this is the case for many who reside in Majorca. But not all.

Those who have done such blags now live in Bendinat together with their brown-wrinkly wives who totter on non-sensible heels and topple over under the sheer weight of the bling.

The concentration of people from parts of England and the UK in Majorcan towns made me wonder if there was some sort of twinning going on. Not so. In 2008, a list of UK towns that were twinned with places across the globe was published. There were 2,527 such twinning arrangements. Out of this lot, there are hundreds in France and Germany, but how many in Spain? Fifteen. And not one in Majorca. Far from a twinning agreement having produced those from Leicester or Hull, there are instead towns in Bulgaria, Nicaragua and China that are full of people from Leicester and even one in Sierra Leone that's packed with those from Hull.

There might be a serious conclusion to be drawn from this. Why is no place in Majorca twinned with anywhere in the UK? Were it to be, and were the UK town of any size, then might this not be a useful little exercise in dragging some extra visitors over? Indeed, from what I can find there is no place in Majorca that is twinned with anywhere, other than Petra with a town in Mexico and Palma with eight, including Düsseldorf and Naples.

But maybe this twinning reluctance can be explained by a fear. That of who or what might turn up. You can never tell where the next zombie invasion might come from or where it might occur.

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