Daffodils at Christmas

As we boarded the turbo-prop plane that took us to Guernsey for Christmas, there beside the door on the fuselage was a notice that informed us that for each passenger it would on take-off inject an average of 10.5 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. This seems an awful lot to me, but evidently it is supposed to be something to be proud of. Anyway we landed on the splendid new runway at Guernsey, which is able to take jets. When they take off one even gets a good whiff of them at our daughter’s house over a mile away; no doubt they deliver plenty more of the dodgy stuff into the atmosphere, but they get the hard-pressed worthies of Guernsey to London ten minutes quicker, and should a chap happen to be making a million a year, time must be rather valuable!

Guernsey is a beautiful island and the weather was a whole lot kinder than in Ireland and the north of England. Going down the sheltered hill into St Peter Port from the south, there were already quite a few daffodils out, before Christmas! There are plenty of sweet and environmentally aware people there, and much talk of ‘a sustainable future’ and so on. Meanwhile there are three cars for every two adults on that small island, many  of them great big gas-guzzlers entirely inappropriate for the narrow roads. No matter, petrol’s not taxed!

‘The States’ is what they call the Government there, duly elected democratically. Funny thing is that any real islander whom I met grumbles about it no end. “How’s it going J….?”  “Fine, still battling the Gestapo!”  He was very fed up about the new marina in St Sampson’s; blokes that used to keep their wee boat on a running mooring there for 70quid a year are now expected to stump up 500 or so for a berth on the pontoons. Another friend mentioned the fancy new police station, court house, gaol, helicopter and flashy cars - “but the policing was much better when you had  a few bobbies doing proper community policing! Some good people get elected, but they don’t seem to be able to change anything. The place is run by the Masons!”

Everyone was complaining about the new Condor ferry ‘Liberation’, which let a lot of people down in the run-up to Christmas because it was not fit to battle the gales. It’s a trimaran but apparently has an awful corkscrewing motion when it gets lively and, like the big catamaran that was withdrawn from the Dun Laoghaire/Holyhead run, has to be regularly inspected by divers for cracks below the waterline. If it does succeed in the end, Condor ferries will reap the profits - but not to worry, the States has underwritten the loan on it. It’s the new whizz form of capitalism that we’ve seen in action so much lately: profits go to the capitalists, liabilities go to the tax-payer.  Bankers love it!

I was asking an old boy about it all, when I fell in with him walking the cliffs. He was one of those lonely old widowers, who made me feel young with his wheezing, but full of stories. He was a few years older than me anyway, and had witnessed the liberation of the island as a small boy. “Well what can you expect, Guernseymen had to scratch a living any way they could. That Saumarez crowd got the best property on the island from Queen Elizabeth I because they were on the ball rescuing a couple of ships laden with gold robbed from the Spaniards, and delivering it to Herself in London.

“The Bailiffs and top men made big money towards the end of the war, exchanging millions of Reichsmarks and gold robbed from Jews (or their corpses) for Pounds Sterling. The Germans actually kept meticulous records, which were taken away by the British after the war, but nothing was heard of it after….”

It’s a proud boast these days that ‘everything is kept within the law’, and lawyers on the island earn a fortune by making sure of it. The place is awash with money that has been kept safely and legally out of the hands of those greedy taxmen. But in spite of that and of all the expenditure on big projects of doubtful benefit, besides the fact that the States are not in debt, I read in the Guernsey Press of ‘a radical new tax plan that would see islanders working until they are 70, an end to family allowances and a cap on how much the States can take in total in taxes and charges.’

Sounds like a Tory Government on steroids! However, according to an old lady from Sark, the battle on that island with the Barclay brothers seems to be winding down. The islanders’ reflexive tactic of wearing them down and frustrating them has apparently reached a point where the Brothers have fallen out and one of them has lost interest. Meanwhile they have four newly refurbished (and empty) hotels on Sark. The Brothers were hoping to bring visitors in from France direct, but this bright idea ran foul of the need for customs officers to supervise it. Not being in the EU evidently does have its disadvantages! To get to Guernsey, that particular retired widow has to stump up the full 30pound fare….

Meanwhile, on the big island to the north, the main battle is warming up. We were quickly reminded of another example of that whizz modern form of capitalism that I mentioned, and its failure, when we took the train from Manchester Airport to Chester; of the three train journeys in Britain that we have made in 2015, this was the second that failed to run smoothly and on time; our connecting train was simply billed as cancelled as we stood on the platform awaiting it! Yet I read that in fact the British Government has spent much the same amount as the French on its railways this year, ‘privatised’ as they may be!

While we were in Guernsey, in memory of Victor Hugo who was exiled there for many years and loved the island, we watched the film of Les Miserables.  It’s fairly true to the original as far as I remember (having read the novel about 50 years ago). It’s a powerful story, but it’s a pity that he muddles the Kingdom of Heaven up with the Revolution, the Democracy or whatnot. One would have thought he had seen enough of the first French Revolution to have learnt that Heaven is always way beyond any such efforts! And yet, neither can it be said that they are completely unrelated; the desire for social justice and the love of truth do sometimes point in the same direction. Indeed, if this Corbyn effort is to get anywhere, it will need all the spiritual energy it can muster; in order to rouse a sufficient majority of the British populace from the torpor of tv, consumerism, cynicism and anxiety, it would help enormously to get that relationship right!

Tra-di-da, and a Happy New Year to ye all!