Keir Royale

A Conversation with Hannah (6)

Hannah – When I die I’m going to come alive again after ten seconds, and it’ll be a happy life. This is my horrid life.
I’ll be a princess, and I’ll live in a mansion, and I’ll have twenty dogs and five horses.
Then I’ll come alive again after I die, and I’ll have a happy life, then a sad life, than a happy life, sad life, happy life, sad life.

Me – Do you know what that’s called?

Hannah – No.

Me – Re-incarnation, and the people who believe in it think that sometimes they come back to life as a beetle or a tiger.

Hannah – Well I won’t, I’ll be a girl every time.

A Conversation with Ben (8)

Ben – (at bedtime) I’ve got a funny feeling in my tummy and I don’t know what it means.

Me – Is it a feeling that says you need a Mummy cuddle?

Ben – I don’t know.

Me – Shall we try it?

Ben – Yes. (we do)
Sometimes when you leave me in bed to go to sleep I feel so sad I want to cry. One time I did cry.

Me – Why didn’t you tell me?

Ben – I did, but not until the morning and there wasn’t much you could do about it then.

Me – Shall I leave the door open so you can call down to me if you start to cry this time? Then I can come back and give you another cuddle.

Ben – Yes

(So I did, and he didn’t call)

In which Blog Fodder goes all misty eyed over his anorak days of yore…

Our son reminded us at breakfast that there are only 32 weeks until Christmas.
I think he’s trying to soften us up to buy him an iPhone.
He’s lusted after one ever since his uncle came to stay and demonstrated its amazing range of gadgetry.

He’ll be lucky.
We’re talking about a boy who’s lost two school jumpers, many pieces of homework, trainers, two Swiss army knives, a watch and a wallet containing ten euros which he was using as a football, in the absence of an actual football.

So no iPhone.
In fact, no phone of any description.
And that’s not the only thing he’ll be missing this Christmas.

For a start there are no open fire places in the house we’re renting, so there’s no way in for the big man in red.

We won’t be going on the annual Santa Special either, as there are no trains in Jersey, let alone steam locomotives.

Which raises another major issue.
Ben won’t be able to indulge, like his Dad, in the delights of train-spotting.

I remember only too vividly the happy days spent after school at Lincoln Central station, praying fervently for a Streak to come whistling through (that’s one of the A4 class of engines to which the record-breaking Mallard belonged).

Instead all we ever got were the old warhorse B1s with exotic names like Wildebeeste and Hartebeeste chugging backwards and forwards.

I was allowed to spent days on the platforms at Retford and Newark railway stations, noting down the numbers of trains as they thundered through on the east coast main line.
All I had for company was my duffel-bag containing sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a bottle of pop.

Oh, and my bible – the Ian Allan compendium of train numbers.
Every train spotted was matched by its number being underlined in the handbook.
Namers – trains with title-plates like “Sir Nigel Gresley” or the “Lancashire Fusilier” - were especially prized.

But best of all were those featured in photographs in the book – spot one of those and you could underline the picture.

My interest waned as the steam age gave way to diesel’s deadly dull uniformity.
Though I may have grown up at roughly the same time!

Even if there were still trains in Jersey I don’t suppose children would be allowed to hang around on railway stations. And 21st century kids have better things to do, mainly involving some form of screen.
I wonder if the software developers have come up with a virtual train-spotting game yet.

In the absence of trains, I’ve come up with a new way to indulge my collecting gene.

The island has a unique number-plate system – do you remember Jim Bergerac’s burgundy red vintage Triumph Roadster with the number J1610?
You’d be hard-pressed to recall the numbers of the cars Inspector Barnaby drives in Midsomer Murders.

Well, I’ve decided to try and spot the number-plates from the island’s first hundred cars, J1 – J100.
It’s not easy.
So far I’ve bagged just five – the pride of place going to one I spotted in a car park near St Malo.

Like their UK counterparts Jersey’s low number plates are highly prized so the chances are that most are still on the road – though probably parked in the drives of the island’s more expensive homes.

There’s no Ian Allen book to help me these days.

Chancing upon a new number is somehow deeply satisfying, but I fear the rest of the family think its yet another symptom of my advancing years, another small madness to be indulged because it’s relatively harmless, and cheap.

Ben, for one, isn’t going to be distracted from his quest for the ultimate number-cruncher, the iPhone.
Although by the time he’s earned enough to buy one, it will have been superseded by something we can’t even begin to imagine.

Nearly a year ago, my beloved son caused me a small financial loss, when he used Amazon’s one-click service to order a book - about quilting.

It was the subject of the book, when it arrived unexpectedly, that alerted me to the possibility that someone had been clicking where they shouldn’t have.

He fessed up, I sent it back and was refunded the cash - minus postage and packing.
I disabled one-click to avoid future mishaps.

Now though, with the wisdom of age, his wanton clicking has managed to sign us up for a service which installed insidiously misleading software on my computer.
A menacing little mole now pops up all the time telling me I owe them £29.99.

A bargain.
Nearly thirty quid for a few ill-advised clicks of the mouse by a nine year old who is too young to have legally signed up for the service in the first place.

When I first noticed the nasty little unremovable icon, I asked him if he’d signed up for something.

“No,” he said, looking a little too innocent for comfort.

As the days passed and the uninstall progamme didn’t work, I asked again.

In the end I made my way, via Platte’s indestructible icon, to a website, and found a phone number.

Before calling what I assumed would be a premium rate service, I asked him again to just tell me if he’d signed up for a film service.

He denied it and denied it and then left the room and shut himself away upstairs while I argued with a man in the British Virgin Islands about his insistent pop-ups.

After I’d spent 12 minutes on the phone - at a cost described by the unflappable Abdul as national rates, although whose national rates he omitted to mention - Ben came into the room crying…

“I did sign up for something Mummy. I just wanted to watch some DVDs. I didn’t say yes to any downloads.”

We’d already had the download discussion. Unfortunately I hadn’t broached the no signing up for things rule.

“And anyway,” he continued, “I couldn’t watch any films. It wouldn’t let me.”

So now he’s said he’s very sorry and I should take the money out of his bank account, which is far healthier than mine.

But I’m loathe to give money to this bunch who’ve been the subject of numerous discussion threads and reports to the OFT and Trading Standards.

I’m not techno-savvy enough to remove the bloody thing, so if my computer is destroyed by the Trojan Horse, I may be away some time…

Jersey apparently has the third highest income per head of population in the world, but Beta Mum and I are doing our bit to redress the balance.

Moving here has thrust us into a comparatively low income bracket, which is not easy in a world without the likes of Tesco or Sainsbury.

For instance:

A report in 2004 looked at comparative food prices in Jersey and the UK.
It found that average meat prices were 22% higher in Jersey, vegetables 15% and fruit 20% higher, a sliced white loaf cost on average 70% more and a pint of milk 60% more.

But fear not.
Jersey’s Have-Nots – and there are plenty of them – do have the advantage of several Pound Shops dotted round the island.
At least they will until next month, when they become £1.03 Shops.

That’s because Jersey is about to introduce its own form of VAT.

It’s called GST (Goods and Services Tax) and will be introduced at a rate of 3%.
The Pound Shops say they can’t absorb the extra cost because their margins are so tight.

The introduction of GST has not gone down well in the island.

No-one wants to pay more tax.
And the politics of taxation means there are always other options that some see as more equitable.

There’s also the lingering fear - based on the UK’s experience - that any kind of economic turmoil will give the government the easy option of raising the 3% to increase tax revenue.

Jersey’s M&S franchise already adds an extra 5% to food prices at the till - just for making the effort to get the stuff across the Channel and onto the shelves while it’s still fresh.

Perhaps the Pound Shop would do well to remind Marks and Spencers of its humble origins on a market stall in Leeds, where Michael Marks’ slogan was -

“Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny.”

Jersey’s 21st century equivalent - “Don’t ask the Price, it’s a Pound and Thruppence” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

In which Blog Fodder buys useless tat… at least it was cheap.

One of the great things about spending the day at home is all those antique programmes you get to watch - Flog It, Bargain Hunt etc.
If only I had the time …

I did manage to do the next best thing though - visit a real auction and try to spend real money.

In Jersey normal standards don’t apply.
Where else can you buy a Porsche for £150? Only 35,000 miles on the clock as well.

Mind you it was more than 30 years old which tells you something about motoring on an island nine miles by five miles, where the maximum speed limit is 40mph.

And how about the upright piano which didn’t find a bidder, even at £5, despite the fact that it was nicely in tune? If only we hadn’t lugged ours with us, all the way across the Channel.
The crazy thing was the matching piano stool made £30.

But bags of potatoes were hitting record prices - £8 a time, despite the fact none of them were Jersey Royals.

I did try to buy a couple of nice prints featuring local scenes, but I was out of luck.
Guess who outbid me. Yup, it was Lovejoy. Though not the Ian McShane version, this was Jersey’s own loveable rogue.

His antique shop in St Aubin’s Bay suffered at the hands of the recent storms, though not quite to the same extent as reported by the local newspaper.

The article said his shop had been overwhelmed by five feet of flood water. Luckily it was only five inches.

Either way, despite the remorseless progress towards metrication it seems that floodwater will always come in Imperial measures, which seems only right for an act of God - although presumably He still uses palms and cubits.

Strictly speaking, if we’re talking liquid measures, the biblical unit is a homer – which, according to the American Biblical Society, is equivalent to 10 baths.

One of the nice things about coming to Jersey is that you can pay for your auction items in nice crisp one pound notes. Though they can give you a false sense of security – they’re easily mistaken for UK fivers, by me, not by canny retailers.

I did manage to part with some of my Jersey notes - not to be confused with the Jersey Pound which according to Wikipedia is

an obsolete unit of mass used on the island from the 14th to the 19th century, and was equivalent to about 7,561 grains

I picked up a bakelite phone which doesn’t work, two scooters that are too small for the children and a gilt-framed mirror which despite its age is distressingly honest.

Not such a success with Beta Mum as last week’s rusty tandem.

Where’s David Dickinson when you need him?
But then again I’m not really interested in the bronze age.