Good: golf greens; Bad: blue jokes

There are nine golf courses on the Isle of Man. Which, given that only 85,000 people actually live there, must be one of the best residents-to-golf-course ratios in Europe. I picked up this detail during a recent trip to the island for a speaking engagement at a trade association dinner (rather than hearing it from Mr M as part of his quest for yet more golfing opportunities).

I had never previously been to the Isle of Man. I confess I had always thought of it as a rock stuck in the middle of the sea between Ireland and Liverpool; in my teens, when I was briefly a motorcycle aficionado, I knew it for the TT races. When I worked in the financial services industry, I knew it as a hub of offshore capital. And along the way I have learnt that many films are shot there, presumably because of various tax incentives.

But the thing that in future will really stand out in my mind about the Isle of Man is that I was made to sign a document the like of which I have never before been asked to sign. It required me to confirm that I would not use “swearing or profanities” in my speech. As I don’t swear or use profanities in my everyday life, or my column, or even when I take my show to the Edinburgh fringe, I found this a strange request. But the document didn’t stop at swearing: it went on to state that I must also agree that I would not make jokes that were racist, sexist, homophobic or ageist. I don’t do that either (unless you count my fixation with chartered accountants over the age of 50), so I was somewhat bemused by this.

I asked the president of the association who their speaker was last year, expecting her to name someone in the tradition of Bernard Manning. She couldn’t remember, although she thought it might have been Clarissa Dickson Wright. No, she said, on reflection that was at the IOM Fund Management Association. I wonder if CDW had to sign a document promising not to make ageist jokes? (For the record, my predecessor at the trade association dinner was the Evening Standard journalist Anthony Hilton, another unlikely source of ageist or homophobic jokes. Maybe if he had deployed a few, he might have been more memorable.)

I was also struck by how anyone who was anyone seemed to know each other – I could tell this from my limited sample of 190 dinner attendees by the fact that no one seemed to have brought any business cards, presumably because they already knew everyone else. The dinner was held on a Friday – can you imagine a trade association dinner in London on a Friday? Everyone was very glamorous, no one more so than the president. She is a Scot who has lived on the island for more than 20 years, and had met her husband in a nightclub there during her first fortnight. She also mentioned that it was quite dark in the nightclub. I met the husband, who seemed to me to be exactly the kind of husband I too would have picked out of 85,000 people, whatever the standard of lighting.

The newly elected chief minister, Allan Bell, was on my table and so was Tim Craine, director of the Isle of Man Business Development Agency. I was intrigued to hear about the island’s burgeoning space industry (Craine is even on YouTube talking about this). I told them that I had flown myself over for the dinner and, instead of taxiing to the airport’s smart terminal, I had been directed to the Manx Flyers Aero Club, housed in a Portakabin and shut on Fridays. I let myself out though the one-way turnstile and hoped I didn’t need to get back to the aircraft before the office reopened on Saturday morning.

Bell had that day announced his council of ministers, a broad selection including not only the man who had proposed him, Eddie Teare, but also the man who ran against him, Peter Karran. All men, sadly, and nine of them – one for each golf course. It’s a well-organised place, the Isle of Man.

mrsmoneypenny@ft.com

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