Liadnan

With the aid of my lovely secretary in Jersey, Condor Ferries, a surprisingly helpful Condor person in Portsmouth, a shockingly cheap taxi driver, and south-west trains, the wheel has turned full circle and I am back at my London desk, and have transported four ridiculously heavy bags and a bike as far as Hampshire. I am also in the High Court on a winder in just over an hour...

I have been up at 5 every day this week. Admittedly last night I went to bed at 9, but still.

... passes and I inch closer to home. I still haven't arranged how, precisely, I intend to reach home.. maybe I should do something about that. Spent most of the weekend working, and sheltering from the howling gales that continue to sweep the island (and the buggers shift, so they do, the wind is always against me when I'm cycling, no matter which way I'm headed). Ringing Frankie to find out if she was back resulted, given that she wasn't, in a half-hour long mildly drunken ramble in the general direction of The Blonde, for which I apologise, other than that the high point of the weekend was Poirot (which seems to be headed in the ludicrous direction ITV have taken the Marples). Somewhat frustratingly I don't at present have a working DVD player (to be more pseudo-geekily accurate, I don't have libdvdcss enabled on my laptop), so the growing pile of cheap DVDs accumulated as I take advantage of the Island's current no-sales tax regime while I may (Howl's Moving Castle, Serenity, and Nine Queens, which I loved when I saw it in the cinema are the current hot favourites, but there are more) is useless until I sort that out.

Ho hum. In my last few weeks here I am suddenly involved in enormously complicated and interesting work. I could wish these things had cropped up earlier.

The Geeklawyer (who writes about things legal much better than I do) points out why he is anonymous. This is why, despite my real name not being a secret as such, I prefer it not to be used: mainly innocuous though my open posts here are I don't really want people googling for me professionally to end up here first...

Lack of internet availability at home (which continues but may be sorted fairly soon) was the main cause of my hiatus, but I'm also going through a phase of feeling I don't have anything to write about. These six months stuck out in the Channel are something of a hiatus in my life generally, and that seems to be carrying over to here.

I don't mind it here most of the time, and there are some real benefits (I think I may hop over to St Malo this weekend), though most of them involve being outside and the weather stinks at the moment. I know now that I did choose the right side of the English legal profession for me though: being a solicitor is really not my forte.

And I've run out of books again, having finished A Feast for Crows in one sitting and also run out of Frankie's care package. Well, almost: I've returned to a re-read of The Once and Future King that I put to one side in August.

I seem to be watching almost no television at all: for the last three weeks it's only been Midsomer Murders and now Jericho (which I find tolerable but not that gripping) on a Sunday evening.

Spent Saturday wandering around Elizabeth Castle in light drizzle (accessible only by boat or, more usually, ex-army Duck at high tide: Jersey has one of the most ridiculously huge tidal flows in the world and imbeciles who don't know what they are doing often find themselves caught, on one notorious relatively recent occasion with horses, which they managed to persuade up a Martello tower). The castle is huge, mostly commissioned when Raleigh was governor (though it incorporates St Helier's alleged early medieval hermitage) but pretty much continuing in use and development up to and during the occupation. The Germans built it into their own ring of massive island fortifications, so you have the vaguely incongruous sight of a seventeenth century gateway next to a searchlight bunker, with sheep grazing on top. Actually this happened all over the island: the Napoleonic-era Martello towers and the medieval castle at Gorey were all re-fortified I think.

Ho hum. Not dead yet, just resting.

ETA: Anne Rice finds God. We will all now pause for boggling. (Link via Katy.)

And while I'm doing links: new Robin Hood. One hopes the last line is a joke. I'm not entirely clear whether "The series will follow ITV's hit 1980s series Robin of Sherwood" (all pause to hum "The Hooded Man") means it will specifically refer back to that (I have a feeling the rights are tied up in an insolvency somehow) or something more general.

...continues fine. And every evening I go and sit on the beach with an ice cream and watch the sun go down: I find this a remarkably civilised way to round off a day in the office. I have various half-finished posts in my head, including a particularly rambling one about class, but am currently too drunk (first time on Jersey, hurrah) to set them down. And tomorrow evening I fly to Gatwick, go into town to pick up my luggage for Greece, return to Gatwick, and catch the 6AM flight out to Athens, so it'll be a while.

When I'm back, the usual diet of half-thought through pontificating on politics, philosophy, history, religion and books, drunken ramblings, and general life-stuff will return with me. In the meantime, if you think of me with a cigarette in one hand, a book in the other, and frappé, retsina or metaxa depending on time of day in, err, the other, either lying on a beach or clambering over some ruin or other, you're most likely pretty accurate. See you on the other side (or on the verandah of Villa Onyro the day after tomorrow if you're Steph or Rob).

Watching Glastonbury footage on television in my hotel room, and feeling mildly nostalgic for, err, a month and a half ago... Isn't it a tad early to be re-showing the footage? Odd to see things from a different perspective, and also to see the things I missed, such as K.T. Tunstall. (I wasn't that interested and she was on the Other Stage, which, to be honest, was pretty much a no go area for me as far as bands were concerned throughout the festival. Even on the last night I remember straying off the track to cut across the back of the arena there was still a mistake: the worst-hit of all the main areas I think.)

It's raining here and there's no Amber Leaf rolling tobacco on the island. Still this hasn't dampened my cheerful, if somewhat shell-shocked and nervous mood. I haven't embarked on scary big things for a while and was missing it more than I realised. I'm more of an adrenalin junkie than I let on: it's one of the reasons I rather like my job.

The island's full of holiday makers at the moment, I imagine it becomes a very different place when the season's over. But I haven't really worked out what kind of place it is now yet.

I took the bus to the place I'll be living when I return from Greece this morning -seems wonderful- and walked back, which took me an hour and a half and involved steep hills (thankfully it was all downhill) and scary winding roads with no pavements and mad drivers. I've spent the rest of the day wandering round St Helier trying to gain some kind of sense of the geography of the place. They seem fixated on the history of the Occupation, which I suppose is understandable, but almost to the exclusion of everything else. Also, in accordance with mother's instructions, paid a call on the parish priest of St Helier (this was not entirely about being a good Catholic: he's been a family friend for many years, long before he came here, and is the one person on the whole island I actually know personally).

Oh, and the food I've had so far has been wonderful. Slightly worried that I haven't managed to locate anywhere that sells coffee beans as yet though: this is far more important than the rolling tobacco. Still, there's a Marks and Sparks, surely one can rely on them?

Oh, they're showing the Brian Wilson set. For all Brian's strangeness, what a fabulous afternoon that was.