There are a few places in the world that have managed to slip through a crack in the space-time continuum, or fallen off the back of the history lorry to lie amnesiac in the road to progress. And l’Isle d’Homme, as Maurice Chevalier might have jocundly called it, is caught permanently in the pork-pie jelly of 1957.
I was only four, but this island is exactly like my first memories of the forgotten decade: pebble dash and bunion pads, grimy shop windows exhibiting one faded thing on a paper doily (or, occasionally, a pyramid of one thing). It has 1950s weather — dreary, purposeless rain that’s just clouds letting themselves go — and it smells of boiled washing, damp wallpaper and fried food. It all came back to me like nasal drip, scraped butter papers and bags of recycled string. I loved it.
“Why are you walking like that?” asked the Blonde. It’s my Start-rite shoes and little lamb’s wool reins, I lisped. Quick, get me to something digital, I’m regressing.
Die Menscheninsel, as Dr Goebbels fondly remembered it, is a tax haven, and follows the international law of tax havens, which is that the collective rich will invariably make for a nastier and more miserable colony than the poor. It’s God’s little joke on the graspingly wealthy that they are forced to live together in places such as Monaco and Bermuda. What is weird about Man is that, even though its main industry is money (laundering, pressing, altering and mending), everyone you actually see is Benny from Crossroads or Benny in drag.
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While we were there, they announced that the island would be having an alarm drill on Sunday. What’s the alarm for, I asked tentatively. “In case we’re invaded.” How terminally bored would a megalomaniac have to be before he got round to invading the Isle of Man? This was a prison camp in the war, and it is still the last seriously draconian wee country left in western Europe. They’re exempt from open borders and EU immigration, their money isn’t good anywhere else, and only reluctantly and recently have they been forced to give up public flogging and hunting homosexuals with dogs.
The theatre in Douglas is showing The Witches of Eastwick, which is bound to be a hit because they think it’s a true story. This is the most pixilated place outside the 16th century. There are bits of road where you have to say “Hello fairies” out loud. I was told of a visiting American financier who refused, on the grounds that it was silly and humiliating. The taxi driver slammed on the brakes and wouldn’t continue. What happened, I asked? “Well, they sat there for an hour.” Then what? “The fairies came and beat the crap out of the American.” I reckon the alarm drill isn’t about invasion at all, it’s in case there’s a mass break-out and they all make a run for the mainland.
I saw a manx cat. I think they must eat the tails, because frankly, there’s not much else. The Isle of Man is BED — Before Elizabeth David. The vegetables on sale were extras from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The butchers wear leather aprons, ice-hockey masks and straw boaters. The fish comes out of the sea ready-kippered — Sellafield is just across the way.
When I asked to be taken to the best restaurant on Uomo, as Giorgio Armani inveterately calls it, I was met with a hollow, toothless laugh and told to stick to deep-fried cat tail and grated turnip. Finally, someone mentioned Ciappelli’s, but only to say I shouldn’t under any circumstances go there.
It’s an odd-shaped room in a hotel on the seafront in Douglas. Every building with a roof on Man is some sort of hotel for the annual pilgrimage of organ donors who come for the ritual human sacrifice and fairy propitiation that are the TT races. There’s a bar with an ostentatious display of novelty brandy and single-malt bottles, which is the design motif of the provincial money, competitive drinking and wife-swapping that makes up rural culture. The menu was short on dishes, but long on ingredients — everything had one thing too many, in order to make the food look sophisticated and to justify the price: £11 for starters, £22 for mains. How much don’t you want to eat smoked goose breast, foie gras mousse, grape chutney and the inevitable emetic of truffle oil?
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I started with pan-seared scallops, crab risotto cake with garlic and chilli butter (so 2001 that I could barely keep the metropolitan smirk from cutting my head in half). And then I had to swallow it — the smirk, that is. The queenies were beguilingly sweet and fresh, the crab risotto sharp and precise. It was a well considered and impressively made dish.
For main course, I had a tranche of turbot, cooked perfectly plain. Turbot is one of the great four royal fish, and on most Fridays, it’s my favourite. But I rarely order it, because it’s so crucifyingly disappointing if it isn’t absolutely in its moment, still wet from the sea. This was the real thing and worth the airfare all on its own. The puddings weren’t up to much, and there was an okay plate of nameless cheese.
There was nobody else in the restaurant for lunch. I expect this is an evening trophy restaurant used for financial showing off, semi-professional first dates and loveless anniversaries. They will make their money from the anaesthetic of the wine list. The staff were sort of 1950s Anglo-Italians, unctuous and chrome-plated. Ciappelli’s, like many other restaurants on the front, is run by the descendants of Italians who were interned here during the war.
When I got home, a deeply liberal friend said, “You didn’t go to the Isle of Man?”, as if it were like supporting the military junta in Burma. “You know there aren’t any blacks on the Isle of Man? None at all,” she added, with exquisite distaste.
Well, of course there aren’t. Why would there be? What black multimillionaire is going to say: “Honey, let’s go into tax exile on the Isle of Man. The weather’s foul, the food’s medieval, it’s covered in suicidal motorists and honky folk who believe in fairies and whip each other?” For God’s sake, they only managed to get the Italians there at gunpoint.
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CIAPPELLI’S
1 Admiral House,
12 Loch Promenade, Douglas,
Isle of Man; 01624 677442
Mon-Fri, lunch, noon-2pm; Mon-Sat, dinner, 7pm-9.30pm