A 'Big Night' out on Jersey

About a week before Christmas when we were staying at St Brelades Hotel we had a spare evening together.

Our immediate thoughts were that we had two choices over what to do together.  Choice number one was to stay at the hotel and have dinner downstairs in the dining room.  Choice number two was to stay in the room and have a room service meal.  Both of these choices had their attractions but they also meant we might be missing out on a film in St Hellier or some other diversion. So, I went downstairs to the reception area and found a small leaflet showing what was on during December and gave it to my wife.

‘How far is St Aubin’s from here’ she asked.

‘’About ten minutes by car or by bus.  I stopped off there on the way back from St Hellier earlier this evening’ I replied.

‘Fancy going to a carol service at the church there tonight? Starts at seven thirty’ my wife declared.

I used the word ‘declared’ deliberately.  We have been married for nearly thirty years.  In that time, I have learnt how to interpret the subtleties of her non-verbal communications.  Nuanced cues such as inflexions and emphasis built into words and phrases that are disguises for saying, as in this scenario, ‘I would really like to go to the service’.

‘OK then let’s get a taxi booked, go to the service and then we could have dinner at The Boathouse overlooking the harbour afterwards’ I replied.

The evening was planned and fully commissioned when the taxi delivered us to an almost empty but very dark car park next to a seemingly dormant church.

‘Are you sure this is the right church?’ my wife asked.

I read the sign at the foot of the steps leading up to a porch.

‘St Aubins is what the sign says.’

Then a couple of people walked past us and into the porch.  The doors opened.  Just like one of those Christmas card images of churches where the doors are open casting a yellow light into the night a welcoming yellow light was cast forth and down the steps on to us.  It looked like the taxi had got us to the right church.

Inside it was warm, brightly lit, decorated for Christmas and already quite full of people.  No sooner had we paid our small entrance fee than glasses of wine were thrust into our hands and we were directed to the buffet.

By seven thirty every seat was occupied.  I wondered if this was what it was like on Sundays.  The vicar stood facing his audience and the evening began.

The first carol was ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ and the vicar, well he had a voice and once the audience got into the mood the rafters, stained glass windows, candlesticks and chalices rocked right through to the interval.  Offerings from the buffet and glasses of wine went around.  People had relaxed, were in the spirit of the evening and were having a good time.

Ten days earlier I had been signed off from work with ‘acute stress’ and although the trip to Jersey had been planned well before that diagnosis it seemed to me to be exactly the right thing to do at the right time.  During the interval I suddenly found myself feeling relaxed and happy for the first time for what seemed months.  The happiness was internal and very much in the moment.  I was with my wife.  I was surrounded by people who were strangers but were in some enigmatic way, friends.

When I was with the doctor who diagnosed me, we talked about stress and what had brought it about.  In my case I had suffered flashbacks to a meeting at work. The doctor sympathised with me, counselled me on how to recognise the early signs of stress in the future but most importantly of all he told me to never forget what blessings I had in my life. Not in a religious way but just look at things around and appreciate how very lucky I was.  My wife, our home, our horses and life away from work.

On that Thursday night in December I really did appreciate what I had been blessed with.

Had I found religion?  Had this carol service suddenly removed the scales from my eyes? Had that taxi ride from St Brelades Hotel in the dark to St Aubin’s on the Hill been my own personal road to  a Damascene moment?  The rich irony of my thinking that evening is that I could not stop thinking about what was and still is going on in Syria. If there is an all seeing, all hearing supreme deity who wants us all to have lives free of strife and hunger then why is the war continuing in Syria, so close to the very heart of the world’s major religions?  Or as war is the act of man, the being whose actual hands and fingers are so sensitive they can detect something as fine as a grain of sand on polished surface or create such beauty as Michelangelo’s ‘David’ but can still pull a trigger and release weapons of mass destruction, is that beyond that deity’s control?  Yet there are still natural disasters such as famine which are not acts of man.  Those are the rocky paradoxes where my own personal willingness to believe founders.  

Goodness, it was already nine when the second half got underway.  If the first half had taken ninety minutes and if the second half was going to be just as long we were not going to be away from the church much before ten thirty.  My wife was thinking along the same lines.

‘What shall we do about dinner?’ she asked.

‘Don’t worry, The Boathouse is only a couple of minutes away and I’m sure we can get something there as soon as we finish here’ I answered.

While the audience were settling for the second half we were aware of a group of about twenty ladies who had suddenly arrived.  We didn’t know who they were and actually thought they were newly arrived members of the audience.

The vicar stood up taking centre stage and the newly arrived, like a YouTube flash mob, took up a group position behind him.  He gave them a brief introduction and they began to sing.  A few odd verses from some traditional Christmas carols mashed together to get things moving and then they let rip.  Bill Haley’s ‘One o’clock, two o’clock rock’ followed by Glenn Miller’s ‘Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand’ and then a Beatles number.  All of it a cappella’.

They left the stage, bundled their coats on and bustled out of the church as quickly as they had arrived.  They were of to ‘another gig somewhere else on the island’ according to the vicar.

The penultimate song was the very traditional carol ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night’ but with a twist.  No, not the usual school assembly one of replacing ‘watched’ with ‘washed’ and ‘flocks’ with ‘socks’ but something much more interesting.

When the carol was first written it was meant to be sung to the Yorkshire folk song ‘On Illkla Moor Baht at’ with its punchy rhythm and associations with pubs and rugby clubs.  After the song was originally written and had become popular the authorities of the day decided the tune it went with was too robust and not reverential enough to suit its religious connotations so the combination of words and music was banned and a replacement tune, which is what is sung today, was written.  When I heard this pre-amble, I thought that this was going to be a bit of a disaster but after the first two lines of the first verse it really worked rather well.

The second half of the concert only lasted thirty minutes.  We spent a few minutes saying our goodbyes to the people we had sat next to and those at the door who had made us so welcome.

Through the church doors leaving the light, warmth and companionship behind we stepped into the dark and cold car park.  From there we could see the neon light of ‘The Boathouse’ being speckled by flecks of rain.

At the bar we ordered our drinks and asked about something to eat.

‘Sorry sir, we close the kitchen at nine thirty.’

Our order for drinks was expanded by a bag of crisps and a bag of nuts.  We savoured all of what we had ordered while we looked across the small harbour. My wife enjoyed a coffee while I tried a Laphroaig whisky.  It seemed the right spirit to have at that moment.  It was warming and welcoming much like the church we had left just a few minutes ago.  We watched the reflections of light ricochet off of the agitated water and listened to the tuneless clanging of invisible rigging against aluminium masts.

The taxi we ordered at the same time as our drinks and ‘meal’ arrived and we were on our way back to St Brelades Hotel along a winding and hilly road through the darkness.  Our big evening out on Jersey was over.