Day Eighteen - Jersey - 20 April

Today the only thing we had planned was to go to the Laundrette at St Aubin which is a five minute walk from the hotel. Up to this point we have been hand washing our limited set of clothes but there comes a time when they need a decent wash. As we walked into St Aubin with our bags of washing we felt like a couple of bag people.

The tide was out in St Aubin Harbour and the three local geese were soaking up the scant sun which came and went during the day. We walked back along the esplanade to have a morning coffee at The Cabin across the road from our hotel. We had an unplanned and enjoyable hour and a half at the beach cafe as the woman who served us originally came from Gayndah. Henk recognised her Australian accent. I didn’t! She also had lived in Charleville and had been a governess on a property outside Tambo. Her two students were on Charleville School of the Air so we had a lot in common. We finally headed into St Helier and went straight to the Jersey Museum and Art Gallery. We didn’t emerge until three thirty as the displays were very good. It covered the history of Jersey from 250,000 years ago to the present day. There was an interesting section on the finances of the island. It only has one percent unemployment, the maximum tax is twenty percent with forty percent not paying any tax at all because of the high tax threshold and there’s no capital gains tax or death duties. Only twenty percent of the island’s income comes from the tourist industry with seventy-five percent from the finance industry.

At the Art Gallery within the museum it was the first day of the display of John Singleton Copley’s famous painting, “The Death of Major Peirson” which shows the Battle of Jersey, a battle which lasted fifteen minutes in 1781. Last night’s local paper devoted two pages to the exhibition. The promotion stated, “This portrayal of the Battle of Jersey is without doubt the most iconic work of art in the hearts and minds of Islanders.” The painting is huge and covers an entire wall. The museum also had a completely restored Victorian Merchant’s House with its period furniture. We caught the bus to St Aubin and picked up our clean washing. It smells so lovely! We settled on Chinese for dinner as we were looking for a change. We each were given a fortune cookie at the end of the meal. We both received similar advice. Henk’s was “Take each failure as a lesson” and mine was “Don’t repeat the same mistakes you’ve made before” We’ll have to bear that in mind!

We strolled back to the hotel at eight thirty and it was just getting dark. The lights which encircle the harbour had just come on and the harbour was looking very pretty.