When I was at school, I had a Spanish teacher who said he always looked up Gibraltar in the glossary of a book that could be in any way related to Gibraltar. At the time, thinking my hometown was extremely boring and somewhere I very much wanted to get away from, I couldn’t understand why someone would willingly look up information about Gibraltar. With the benefit of maturity and discovering for myself how much I wasn’t taught about Gibraltar’s rich and interesting cultural history, I have found myself doing the same thing. The omission is often understandable. Books on post-colonialism have plenty to write about, without venturing into a Gibraltarian identity politics that deserves a book of its own. That said, there’s a poignant section at the end of Afropean by Johnny Pitts that frames itself in that small stretch of water between Europe and Africa that is wider still in the way it has decided what belongs ‘over there’ and what constitutes being European or Mediterranean. What is baffling is a book like Jeremy Black’s A Brief History of the Mediterranean that spends an entire chapter on a very specific era of seafaring but about two lines on 711AD and subsequent almostmillennium of Moorish rule over most of Iberia. But maybe not so baffling, in relation to, once again, what belongs ‘over there’.

Someone once told me they didn’t know if it was worse to be misrepresented or ignored when it came to representation. Away from books, I find the same question in aspects of my life, when people ask where I am from. I remember the professor of post-colonial studies at my university, who referred to Gibraltar as “England with better weather, red phone boxes and all.” I changed my mind about taking the Post-Colonial Literature module. About two weeks ago someone at work asked if I was Spanish. When I said I was Gibraltarian, she said that was the same thing. I’m sure we’ve all been there before, but the polite rage does not diminish. More amusingly, I had a doctor’s appointment and the receptionist asked if I was Spanish or Italian. I replied that I was Gibraltarian, and she was very apologetic. Which I found touching, as I didn’t find the question offensive related to my surname, and it was possibly the first time anyone had ever not said something along the lines of ‘ah well that’s the same thing really isn’t it.’ She then told me that her friend had been to Gibraltar and told her that ‘the gorillas come down from the mountain and onto the mainland.’ I reassured her our Rock Apes are not gorilla-sized, but she wasn’t convinced by the fact they sometimes go into people’s homes. ‘I wouldn’t be able to live there,’ she said. “I’d be too scared.”

There’s so much to take for granted about Gibraltar’s unique status. As if our language, our border, and the great big hunk of limestone weren’t enough. That interaction made me remember when I used to go to school at Bayside, and once in a while we would have to stop the lesson for a moment to let the noise of a plane departing subside. I can’t say I miss the noise of buzzing motos under my window, but sometimes I night I half-expect to hear the thundering boom of a tanker’s foghorn. When I write fiction about Gibraltar, I often take things out. I feel like one strange fact is enough for a reader to cope with. I haven’t tackled the Rock Apes yet, for example. The journey from Upper Town to the frontier has been challenge enough. Living in London, Gibraltar seeps into everything, whether I’m browsing glossaries or not. My local church has a plaque dedicated to the Sussex Regiment, whose insignia I found out is the Gibraltar flag. We are also often a question on Jeopardy, mostly to do with our geographical location. I talked about the painting hanging in the Guildhall Art Gallery last column, but Governor Eliott gets around. There’s a portrait in the National Gallery, and a statue in the basement of St. Paul’s Cathedral, alongside Napier and his famous nose. Go further yet, and there’s another portrait of Eliott hanging at the Met in New York City. Military aside, there’s the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho too, complete with a hanging bust of a very muscular Hercules giving it all he’s got to get those pillars separated. And when I worked on Strand, I would pass Gibraltar House and the waving flag every morning, giving me a bit of Llanito joy against the grey pavement. My favourite is the one where you tell someone you’re from Gibraltar and they tell you they know someone from Gibraltar. And of course, they tell you who that is, and they ask if you know them and most of the time you do, because that is one myth that is very much true. And if I don’t know them, I will go to the source of all knowledge, the Gibraltarian mother, in order to get a cross-reference, which we all know goes along the lines of “sí chiquillo, el padre del primo de la hermana del abuelo de los vecinos cuando viviamo en el Patio Policía, tu tava en la cuela con el sobrino.”

There is one cultural moment that took the world by the storm that I never expected to have a Gibraltar connection, the infamous ‘hiiieeee!’ When Rupaul’s Drag Race began its huge level of success (I want to say peak, but after fourteen seasons and various spin-offs, I’m not sure we’ve reached a peak), a popular drag queen by the name of Alaska entered the workroom with a “hiiiieeee!”. It became a catchphrase. Then a meme. Then RuPaul adopted it into her own lexicon. Pretty soon, you heard friends greeting each other in pubs, bars, and clubs across the UK and beyond. Years later, and now it has subsided a little in the cultural consciousness, RuPaul interviewed Alaska and asked where it came from. Her reply? It was the catchphrase of two Gibraltarian drag queens popular on YouTube, who were based at the time in Brighton, Isis Mirage and Coco Ferocha. Alaska used it as a covert hello, and the rest is history. The greeting comes across as Valley Girl from California, but walking down Main Street last summer, something struck me. All I kept hearing, albeit not as nasal and with a Llanito accent, was “hiiieee!”. I caught myself doing it too. It seems we all know each other and it’s impossible not to go from one end of Main Street to another without seeing about fifty familiar faces. If we all stopped for a chat, we’d never get anywhere. So, it seems we’ve invented this way of talking that says, “I see you but I’m in a rush and I have to keep going but I am also very sad not to stop so I am going to extend this hi into a very long one.” Whether that was the intention or not, it’s a good story and I’m sticking to it. From Main Street to Drag Race. We are truly the centre of the universe.

‘It seems we all know each other and it’s impossible not to go from one end of Main Street to another without seeing about fifty familiar faces. If we all stopped for a chat, we’d never get anywhere. So, it seems we’ve invented this way of talking that says, “I see you but I’m in a rush and I have to keep going but I am also very sad not to stop so I am going to extend this hi into a very long one.’