What I Learned In Jersey

A brief summary of the trials and tribulations of time spent on the largest Channel Island:

1) Senor Spielbergo's house is huge. You could fit my entire flat into his bedroom and his own personal living room (as oppose to the general living room, which is somewhat larger). You could lose my parent's house in his garden, and then squeeze an Olympic swimming pool in there as well. You could also probably insert an adult camel into his TV. Well, not insert, exactly, since the damn thing is wafer thin, but it could certainly display a life-size image of a camel, in high definition and with surround sound.

It would be enough to make me sick if it weren't for SS plying me with free booze all week, and allowing me access to his hot-tub. He has a fucking hot-tub!

2) I already had a taste of this last year in Scotland, but since that was pre-blog, I thought I'd mention that trying to put together a film with your friends whilst on holiday is almost impossible, to say nothing of stressful as Hell. I'd roll out the old cliche of it being like herding cats, except that cats are generally sober, and don't require constant costume changes. And all I was trying to do was put together a 45-second trailer. The logistics for the film written by SS, Kimmy and Tom was an order of magnitude more complicated. Once you have to employ me as Second Unit Director, you know things are getting hairy.

3) One of the less pleasant experiences an entomophobe can experience is to lay prostrate on the ground at night, with a halogen lamp shining on your face to reveal all of the nocturnal arthropods getting jiggy right in front of your face, convinced one of them has shouted "Hang on lads, let's blow this scene and have a party in that bloke's nostrils!".[1] This is an even less enjoyable situation than sitting on a cracked concrete German bunker only to find the occupants of the ant's nest within are irresistibly drawn to the human backside so as to use it as a foraging ground cum discotheque. Since I faced both scenarios in the same week, it is faintly surprising that I am still as sane as I am.

4) Driving an automatic car is an interesting experience. I'm not sure I'd want one, but given how hard I find it to adjust to a new automobile, it was a relatively painless switch. The only problem is that the lack of a clutch means you're tempted to have your left foot on the break, which quickly proves to be a fairly critical mistake since the slightest pressure on both peddles simultaneously causes the car to engage a breaking system that would put a brick wall to shame.

5) After much controversy and academic discussion, it can at last be revealed that my eyes are blue. Other observations have also been recorded but not revealed to the public. According to the perpetrator of this study, "some of them were nice".

6) Jersey is very pretty. It is also rich beyond measure, although Big G and myself both took solace in the fact that no matter how wealthy an island community may be, it still has a high street filled with drunken borderline-hookers on a Friday night.

[1] Having a slavering Manx attempt to chew off your cheek doesn't help much either, but that's another story.