Saturday. Saturday. Saturday Saturday. Saturday. Saturday Saturday. Saturday. Saturday night’s all right.
Dunno why I’ve gone all Elton John. But anyway. What follows is my diary entry for Saturday October 1st 2022, a day spent on the Channel Island of Jersey.
Friday had been a day of gluttony and “yay! airports and planes!”. Saturday was supposed to start with Parkrun, and it sort of did. By “sort of” I mean it wasn’t really the first thing that happened. Of more importance, apparently, was the opening up of Ocado’s christmas delivery slots. Helen spent well over an hour on my devices filling the order will turkey, trimmings, and an absolute fuckload of party food. Simultaneously, she tried - at 0730 on our first morning here, solely on the strength of the food, beer, and beach last night - to convince me that we should immediately be booking another holiday to this exact spot. I remained somewhat cynical that we yet had enough evidence to warrant a return trip.
Come 0800 and I got into my running kit, and set off to walk to Jersey Parkrun - there is only one run here - at about ten past. Google maps walking directions told me it was about a 25 minute walk, and very uphill. The route starts by crossing the road and entering Winston Churchill memorial park, just behind the beach car parks.
Within 10 yards or so the route goes vertical. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but still - this park is on a very steep hillside. Which, of course, affords it great views of the bay below.
Up the first flight of stairs and I saw three squirrels. Were they red? I hadn’t done any research into the wildlife of Jersey at all, but these things looked smaller and redder than the grey squirrels back home - but they all scarpered up the tree so quick it was hard to tell.
By the time I reached the exit of the park my heart had been given a proper jump start to the morning and the blood was flowing. As I exited onto the residential streets I got some cheerful greetings from dog walkers. People seem very friendly around here.
Emerging at the big crossroads with the M&S and Waitrose, I’ve only been out of the hotel about 7 or 8 minutes and I’m three quarters of the way to Parkrun. This is considerably too early. I thought about grabbing a diet coke from “Coop locale” but tbh I was already hydrated enough. So instead, I slowed my pace to an uncomfortable rate and descended a path down to the disused railway line. There’s a bar/cafe here called Off The Rails.
And there’s a bunch of yellow signs up because of running. One: a parkrun turnaround point. Two: a warning sign for the Jersey marathon that’s taking place the next day.
Walking ever more slowly to the start, there are hardly any other Parkrunners to be seen until suddenly there are tons of them. I’d read that as well as the start of #parkwalk in October, Jersey was being “taken over” by Macmillan Cancer too, so perhaps the turnout would be bigger than usual.
The start/end point is at Quennevais sports centre, which has tons of pitches and stuff for all kinds of sport. Cycling tracks, football pitch, hockey pitch, pétanque, everything. I found the start and did the self-conscious selfie thing next to the sign, for no reason other than to kill a few moments.
The first timers briefing was very brief, just a description of the route which I already sort of knew. After that I rejoined the throng at the start, listening to a local woman complain loudly about something a “penpusher from the UK” has done wrong. The main briefing for the run was inaudible except for the periodic applause, and then we were away.
It’s not my favourite type of course. You start off doing one and three-quarter laps of the cycling track, then head down to the railway line where you go out 500 metres, back 750 metres, back again to the finish. Quite hard to describe in text. Here’s the map.
The whole thing is considerably less flat than my usual running routes - not much you could legitimately claim as steep, rather a lot of long slow inclines - and there was a proper headwind for large chunks of the route. That, combined with the after-effects of the previous day’s indulgences, meant I was bloody ecstatic to run 29:29.92. It’s not fast fast, but it’s fast for me in the circumstances. I was wrecked.
The volunteers at Jersey are some of the best I’ve ever seen. All of them were extremely friendly, giving loud encouragement everywhere, and individually rather than just “well done everyone”. I even got several “great running today” comments to me as I was leaving the area. Really good stuff.
Walking back to the hotel I was informed by Helen that the breakfast buffet is bloody magnificent. I was missing out, since they only serve between 8-10am: pretty much the exact window I would be outside. Never mind. In return, I informed her that not only had I seen squirrels but I’d confirmed via the Jersey government’s website that they were indeed red. We have red squirrels a two minute walk from the hotel!
Descending back down through Winnie’s park, the waterfall had been turned on and the weather was still looking great.
Helen had by now left the hotel to go sit on the beach. It’s windy, but not cold, and she adores the sound of the sea. There are loads of people out walking their dogs, or surfing, or swimming, or just out for a stroll. It’s great. I go find her, and gurn for a beach selfie, before heading back to the room for a shower.
Clean and dressed, we popped to the shop so I could get a diet coke and a flapjack, and then I showed Helen the location of the red squirrels. She’d brought her decent camera with her as we had intended to go visit a local nature reserve in search of bearded tits; local squirrels were a bonus.
It took much too long to get the pics off the camera, because the stupid Android app basically doesn’t work. I realised much later than I should that a USB-C cable transfer direct to her laptop would be by far the quickest and easiest way to do it. Technology, huh.
Pics done, we headed off for a walk to the island’s capital, St Helier. There’s a bus service from very near the hotel but badly timed for our departure and anyway, it was nice weather and really not too far a walk. Unfortunately it starts with a steep climb up a road without pavements, causing jeopardy we could’ve done without. But at the top we joined a road with pavements, and soon enough took a footpath through woodland down towards St Aubin. We stopped to watch a cheeky black squirrel, and check out the evidence of nearby fairies.
St Aubin is at one end of a frankly enormous bay, with a huge beach.
Helen went for a paddle. Some people were out on jet skis, others were windsurfing. Periodically there were snack shacks, and throughout it all we saw “le petit train” taking pensioners between St Aubin and St Helier.
At one shack we stopped for a drink and to wash sand from our feet. There was a sign saying the beach was going to be closed that afternoon for a motor race event, between two imaginary lines.
As we reached St Helier, our eyes were drawn first to the big castle/fort island just across the way and then towards the … hang on … is that bus about to drive into the sea? Yes. Yes it is. That bus is driving through the sea to the fort. What?
Helen was DESPERATE to take a trip on the bus boat thing. Having watched it enter the water and then lean precariously from side to side, I was somewhat less desperate. Perhaps one for the next day. We were now in St Helier, and had things on our list to visit.
Without knowing at the time of booking, we’d ended up visiting Jersey during the weekend of the Corn Riots festival, a celebration of some civil uprising 251 years ago when the locals got angry that corn was being exported rather than available to feed the islanders. I think that’s the gist anyway. To celebrate it, there were activities throughout the island and especially here in St Helier. Of most immediate interest, after our long walk and especially my lack of calorie intake so far, was the Norman food and drink fair.
There was a band playing, on top of a bus. OK then. Nothing says “friendship between Jersey islanders and Normandy folk” more than a band of white men playing anaemic Bob Marley covers.
We queued up for sausage. They were alright. Nothing special. The bread overpowered the taste of the meat, if anything. There was a beer stall selling draft smoked porter which I was of course interested in sampling, but it would have to wait. Elsewhere in the city, any moment now - about 2.30pm - a parade was meant to be arriving complete with brass band and tractors. So we ventured off to Royal Square where another, much louder, band were playing. Unlike the first place, this one was absolutely bloody teeming with kids. There was no booze on sale, and there was some guy dressed as … Napoleon? And someone was professionally filming everything, but honestly every time we looked towards the cameraman he was blatantly filming us. I felt very uncomfortable. And anyway, where were the bloody tractors?
Looked on instagram for clues. There was a post from the previous day which mentioned the streets of the route, so we wandered away from the square along them - no sign. Finally bored of this, and me being convinced it had been cancelled or something, we stopped for a beer and sat outside.
Five minutes later, the parade turned up. No tractors, pretty much just a brass band.
Quite underwhelming, really. Finishing our beer we set off through some of the pedestrianised streets, past HORDES of little scrotes acting all scrotey. McDonalds had a queue of teenagers stretching round the block. Helen had spotted a marina on a map and led us up some steep steps to a steep hill, despite my protestations that marinas tend to be at sea level.
Before long, we both realised this was perhaps not the way to anything nice. In fact, the more you zoomed in on Google maps the more it revealed that we were heading towards a working dockyard, rather than a millionaire’s playground full of fancy yachts and stuff. Disconsolate, we headed back towards town via the only route seemingly available to us: the tunnel of pollution.
Emerging from here we see, oh, look, there’s a marina full of yachts and stuff. D’oh! We really needn’t have taken such a detour, but never mind.
Next to it is a museum of maritime stuff plus a big tapestry. We didn’t go in. There’s also a skatepark and it was all I could do to not shout DO A KICKFLIP at the kids there. Actually, it was easy to resist because they all seemed to be on scooters not skateboards. Still, though. DO A KICKFLIP.
Next on the list was the only indoor venue I was insisting on visiting in St Helier: the only Untappd verified venue. A brewery/smokehouse/craft beer place called JBs. Getting my bearings wrong on the map, we first did an entire lap of the bus station - hey, now we know where the bus station is - before finding JBs next to a terribly awful looking pool bar. Yay! Beer!
The kitchen wasn’t opening for another 45 minutes, except then it opened early. So I could finally satiate my ravenous hunger with this frankly suicidal burger THAT HAS A MAC AND CHEESE PATTY IN IT. And if that wasn’t enough, I also helped out with more than my fair share of “filthy fries” - chips covered in cheese and a beer sauce.
Second beer was more delicious than the first, but we had to go - the Norman market was closing at 7pm and I hadn’t yet had that smoked porter. It was worth it, and I was glad I still had room for it.
By now it was, I dunno, 1845 or so. The beach was shut until 8pm so we thought maybe we’d be able to see the last of whatever these races where, but there was no sign of it. The weird bus boat thing was, however, parked up for the evening.
We wanted to get a bus back to the hotel but there was an hour or so to wait, so fuck it, let’s go get a cab. The nearest rank was an unreasonably long walk back towards town but there were taxis waiting and soon enough a man was whisking us towards St Brelade’s Bay, full of jovial tales of degenerate gambling, small racist men beating up black men “from the UK”, and how rugby is more about drinking than sport. Well OK then.
At the hotel we had a drink in the bar but were too full to eat, and too knackered to stay up. Unfortunately, back in the room we decided we wanted more to drink but balked at the £5 tray charge - yes, £5 each time they serve anything via room service. Sigh. Guess I’ll head downstairs again then, and again. With all the booze, and all the miles in our legs, neither of us anticipated feeling particularly decent on Sunday morning.