We've just returned from a few days in Jersey as Ms Formerly Aldgate was keen to fly but neither of us wanted a long trip - and minimal it was, barely more than half an hour aloft. I was surprised by the quantity of Art Deco buildings around, some of them of proper 1930s vintage, such as the astonishingly monumental garage which now houses the Mansell Collection, or this store in St Helier (just beside a very similar branch of Burton's) ...
... and modern interpretations too. A new block of apartments with sleek curved lines and porthole windows was going up beside the bus route from the airport, and on the clifftop above St Aubin I found the very pleasing house called St Cecilia, with its gate whose metalwork rather appropriately suggests musical notation (not sure that was the intention, though).
The Museum in St Helier includes a reconstructed 19th-century merchant's house and this life-size advertising figure, we concluded taking snuff. However notwithstanding an Iron Age gold torque and a Dark Age skeleton I thought the most moving object was the battered diary of 17th-century Jerseyman Jean Chevalier.
And Grosnez Castle presented its best side to my camera, aided by a beautiful blue sky speckled by assisting cloud.
It was only a slight disappointment to find a) that there is only one holy well apparently surviving on the island and we couldn't get to it, and that b) Grosnez doesn't mean Big Nose Castle as it apparently should, but in fact refers to a 'grey headland'.
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