JERSEY - FROM LOST DRONES TO TOLERABLE NICENESS
Of course anyone with an ounce of common sense fills their car up before driving to the airport, right?
Right?
Two and a half hours on the m25 to crawl 30 miles in gridlock.
I pray to God, please get me to a service station and I’ll never eat bread again
Two hours in check in which only leaves twenty minutes for breakfast. A full plane, with obviously not a mask in sight because covid and other crappy viruses don’t exist any more, right?
Right?
On the Island, at the venue, the wind is phenomenal. Should I take the drone up? Maybe just a little test flight. Half an hour later, my reckless confidence is shattered as the wind takes my little drone and flings it into a tree half a mile away. There ensues a 90-minute hunt through rocks and thorns. I pray once more to God - I promise I’ll stop eating bread AND potato - no easy commitment when you live in England, home of the doughnut, land of the chip, empire of the laxative.
A propos of potatoes, potato is what I see when I halt the search midway to take a corporate client zoom call and switch on my phone camera . Do potatoes sweat? Are they red? If so, I am potato. Miraculously, I finally find the drone on a rocky outcrop with a forty-foot drop. I gingerly tease it back from the edge with a thorny stick, as in some weird reimagining of the end scene of The Italian Job. And it still functions!
Back at the venue, I meet the couple. I had had quite a heated tussle getting payment out of them. But they are lovely and it transpires the bride is recovering from spinal cancer so now I can add guilt to idiocy.
The next morning at breakfast I am astonished at the non-premier-inn-ness of the food. Some years ago , hungover in Berlin Promax I had a breakfast so good I nearly cried. This one is just as good. I eye the pastries forlornly. I can hear God whisper in my ear "this is close enough to bread, fat boy, leave them alone"
In the queue for the sausages a woman tells me she is here for her daughter’s wedding which has been brought forward because the ex-husband is dying. “I’m so sorry”, I exclaim. “Don’t be, I’m not”, she chuckles. Wow, how bad must he have been!? Suddenly I don’t feel like I’m quite the stupidest man on the planet any more
To get to most attractions, one must pass through some pretty dreadful eyesores - the concrete splurge around Ha Long Bay, the rash of industrial blight that rings Florence, the girdle of mean houses and tower blocks encircling Paris.
There are exceptions of course; the virgin forests of the Istrian coast, the scarred bombsite that is Walsall.
And then there is Jersey. Jersey is just nice. All over, inoffensively nice. Bland, generic, vanilla, characterless nice. Predominantly , houses are new build, with only a smattering of the old. St Helier is an homage to Croydon in its plethora of eighties eyesores, but the island as a whole parades it’s generic, magnolia charm with a quiet pride. It’s like a big gym without the weights, but with beaches of white gold sand, palm trees galore, turquoise waters, balmy clime.
“There’s lots to do”, proclaim the locals, in sharp contradiction to the actual absolute zero vacuum of things to do according to google . What things? Offshore banking? Golf? Watching the traffic? Inevitably, local youths sulk, bored to their back teeth. Everyone else seems Prozac-happy in the calm, clean quietness of this almost shopping village without shops.
This is yacht-club-land, Fatface-gilet-and-Boden-slacks-land, private-pension-land, bed-by-nine-land. If Jersey were a fella it would not be the hot guitar-wielding lover on a motorbike, or the rapacious Porsche-driving big-balled sexy bastard in acquisitions and mergers, or the sweaty hunk fireman. If Jersey were a man, it would be your Dad. On a lounger. In crocs. On a Sunday.
I thought I’d despise it. I sort of wanted to despise it. I ought to despise it.
But strangely, it was really nice