Skip to main content

How do you spot a genuine Jerseyman?

My considered answer to this question - having just spent a week in the Channel Islands - is that you don't spot a Jerseyman. He spots you. A mile off.

He then charges you £14 to ride a bike down a promenade for an hour or £18 to park a car while you go on a day trip to France.

Don't get me wrong. It's a nice island with some very beautiful beaches and a fascinating history. But it's not as cheap as Aya Napa. Somehow or other, I always end up going to places on holiday that I can't really afford. That's Mrs W for you. She favours Switzerland as a general rule (see blogs passim) but has a sideline in tax havens and Crown Peculiars.

The Mrs really pushed her luck this time though. On a day trip to Brittany, she knocked a whole load of china off a shelf in a shop in St Malo. I was forced to shell out 43 euros on one of the most hideous china tea sets I've seen in a long time. L'ebay beckons. We have a sneaking suspicion that the miserable proprietor of this knickknack emporium had balanced things on the shelves in such a way as to make an accident likely. There was some wobbly wooden ornament that generated a cascade similar to those that you get in a money-toppling machine on an English pier. Only this time, the jackpot was claimed by the owner.

"C'est la vie, n'est pas?" I quipped as I coughed up on my Mastercard. The little sod just gave me a textbook Gallic shrug.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

When one name isn't enough

You may have heard the news reports about the turmoil in Kingston, Jamaica, resulting from the government's attempts to pin down a notorious drug lord on behalf of the US. I was struck by the number of self-styled monikers this guy has given himself. He is, depending on the channel you listen to, known on the street as 'Dudas', 'The Big Man' and 'The President' - worshipped by many impoverished Kingston residents as a benefactor to slum dwellers. It's his real name that seems most appropriate, however. If you were a drug baron called Christopher Coke, wouldn't you leave it at that? It's certainly not a name to be sniffed at.
Post a Comment
Read more