A Genuine Jersey Holiday

It has been a bit quiet here recently.  This is partly due to a general malaise on my part, partly because I have been doing odd little jobs which aren't worth reporting, and most importantly because we have just had a week's holiday in Jersey.  This was our first overseas holiday in almost four years, so it was about time!

Jersey is interesting.  Many buildings are made of granite, and they seem to care more than my local council about the old look of the place, especially away from St Helier.  In consequence, there was a lot of work being done by local builders using granite, although I suspect not with lime mortar.  Actually, since granite is (I think) not porous like limestone, I'm not even sure if lime mortar is as necessary as it is with limestone.  There was also a significant amount of concrete work in evidence, much of it dating from the German occupation in WWII.  They used slave labour to fortify the place against an Allied invasion which must have been a huge drain on their resources; however this was totally wasted as the Allies had not the slightest intention of invading the islands.  One of the still useful legacies is a high sea wall (built to prevent tanks being landed) which goes all the way along the five mile beach at the west of the island.

If you are thinking of going to Jersey (as a tourist rather than occupier!!), I advise you not to go in July or August if you want to drive around.  The roads are small, junctions have poor visibility and parking can be difficult.  I think that the roads and junctions are deliberately never improved as the maximum speed limit is 40mph (and can often be 30 or 20!) and so the road design is effectively a cheap means to regulate traffic; if you have an accident at those speeds, it is probably rare to even injure someone.  The road signs leave something to be desired; they seem to fall between UK and French standards, so often a junction is signed in advance but not at the junction itself.  The parking would have been tiresome in the peak times, but we were able to park quite easily, even in St Helier.  These things were not really a problem in May, but we kept on asking ourselves "what would this be like in August?".

Our visit occurred during the Jersey Food Festival; we spent the only really wet afternoon in a posh hotel watching and tasting cookery demonstrations (and I tasted my first oyster).  A simple food I now love is the boiled Jersey Royal potato - delicious with butter.

One place we visited was Jersey Dairy Ltd - see photo of their new factory right.  They are effectively the only exporter of dairy products from the island.  (My thanks to Eamonn the MD for the tour, the free ice-cream tasting was great!)  One little-known fact is that under current rules the Channel Islands are not protected by labelling regulations, and so if you have a single half breed Jersey cow in your herd anywhere in the UK, you can sell all your milk as "Channel Island milk" or "Jersey milk".  Apparently most supermarkets use this ploy on lots of dairy products to confuse consumers, which seems a bit underhand but is quite legal.  To avoid it you should look for a little logo which says "Genuine Jersey" (and I think there's an equivalent for Guernsey); this logo IS protected and means what it says.  The Jersey cows on the island are registered and protected in order to maintain the purity of the breed, unlike on the mainland here.

By the way, we also visited a farm: the Jersey cows are ever so sweet and friendly!