The news of the latest addition to Marks and Spencer sandwich range really takes the biscuit. From this very day, Islanders will be able to enjoy a strawberry jam sandwich, courtesy of the high street chain.
This is not just any old combination of two slices of white bread, smeared with soft butter and lashings of fruit preserve. This culinary delight was prepared by hand in some sandwich factory in the UK, wrapped in far too much packaging for its own good, driven many miles to the south coast, put on a boat to traverse the English Channel, possibly pausing awhile in St Peter Port before finally arriving safely in Jersey and being disembark-ed for the short journey to King Street.
It may be a simple sandwich, but boy, is it a well travelled one, with a corresponding carbon footprint and an impressive food miles rating. And all for just 75p! Come on . . . Is someone trying to extract excess body fluids?
Apparently this sandwich is being marketed as the ‘perfect quick-fix credit crunch lunch’. But the solution to the credit crunch is for workers of whatever description, collar col-ours and salaries to make packed lunches or club together, buy a couple of loaves of bread, an assortment of fillings and make their own sandwiches. Not only will this save money in hard times, it will also help save the planet by reducing food miles and this tiny island’s ridiculous carbon-guzzling antics.
We bake our own bread, produce our own butter and are spoiled for choices of home-made jams. So it beggars belief that from today we are importing jam sandwiches.
Perhaps our new eco-warrior, renaissance man Deputy Phil Rondel, will add food miles to his hit list, as well as trying to persuade the States to turn off (or at the very least dim) unnecessary lighting. Light pollution is not only the scourge of modern society; it is wasteful, largely unnecessary and annoyingly intrusive.
Moreover, with the ridiculous number of lights left on for ‘security reasons’ in storey after storey of St Helier offices, or in the grounds of swanky country houses, added to the nocturnal floodlighting of the parish churches, then Jersey’s carbon footprint must be as sizeable as that of Disneyworld.
THE sandwich story reminded me of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, who is probably the first example of how out of touch with the people those who live in ivory towers can be. Cosseted in pampered luxury at the Palace of Versailles, she is reputed to have said, on hearing that her people had no bread, that they could eat cake. Not only did she lose her head to Madame Guillotine, she was also misquoted. What the former Austrian prin-cessactually said was ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’. But why let the facts get in the way of a good quote?
LONG before the Earl of Sandwich invented the first fast food, local legend has it that a huge black dog, with eyes as big as saucers, and dragging a broken chain, used to roam the environs of Bouley Bay. This legend is so famous that a pub was named after it. So terrified were the good burghers of Trinity that they kept to the safety of their homes to avoid the beast.
If tabloid tales are to be believed, there is a big scary dog roaming the Beauport headland estate of security-conscious former Formula 1 racing driver Nigel Mansell. In his endeavours to protect his property from trespassers — in a community where there is no law of trespass — Mr Mansell has fenced himself in.
He is now reputed to have bought a highly trained ex-SAS personal body dog — presumably as an alternative to laying a minefield. However, this canine people-scarer is also supposed to be good with children. So unless you are ten or under, it is advisable to avoid Beauport. Or, if you intend to exercise your right to roam, make sure you do so surrounded by a posse of young children. Huge fences, security lighting and guard dogs are a tad over the top in our little island and out of all proportion to our low crime rate.
THREE months into their ride on the gravy train, a coterie of the new inmates of Charlie Chuckle’s Laughter Factory should stop tilting at windmills and get a dose of reality. In the Groundhog Day mindset of our politicians, there comes a time when even the most persistent have to finally admit defeat and accept the democratic process.
Many moons ago, the States agreed, after years of consultation, investigations into alternative technologies, countless residential and public meetings and endless hours of turgid, drawn-out debates, that the new energy-from-waste plant would be built at La Collette. However, from the recent electoral musical chairs emerged new self-styled ‘champions of the people’. And here we go again.
This Island has been crying out for a new waste processing plant for more than ten years, and the existing one is precariously close to grinding to a halt forever. Jersey is not alone in deciding that energy-from-waste plants are the way forward; in the UK and throughout Europe local and national authorities are opting for this technology.
Yet a few new boys, bolstered by the anti-incinerator old guard, have decided that the decision is wrong and must be reversed
And, in an obscene gesture in today’s economic climate, they have burnt money to prove their point.
It is high time that common sense and reality became bywords of our government. Once a decision has been made, we move on.
