Manx musings Jo Landy The Isle of Man is for me, littered with childhood memories. My maternal grandparents moved there when I was a child. They were part a ghetto of three Jewish retired seniors on Howe Road, Onchan. I recall faded elegance, sodden walks, clambering over rocks by the beach, the Venus fly traps in my grandfather’s conservatory and rockhard Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot were my grandmother’s signature dish but she was not a good cook. We always had to remember to clear the biscuit tin of her previous output when she came to the mainland to visit. Much of the Island feels as though it is stuck in a 1950’s time warp. A sensation strengthened for summer tourists by its Victorian systems of transport: horse drawn and electric trams and a steam railway (this engine was one which inspired Rev W Awdry’s Thomas The Tank Engine stories). We went to the Isle of Man with a Jewish Renaissance group to learn about the internment of enemy aliens in two World Wars. The island has not changed much in 80 year, which makes it easier to look at long rows of hotels and boarding houses and imagine the barbed wire fences that once encircled Sodor lives on them from other parts of Ramsay, Onchan, Douglas, Port Erin and Port St Mary. Especially after reading the words to a song:
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