I DON’T know about you, dear reader, but I am confused.

For 363 days of the year drivers are bound by law to observe the Island’s speed limits in the interests of public safety. Then, over two days in October, we throw caution and common sense to the wind by allowing the Noisy Motorcycle and Back-Firing Car Club to stage a rally on public roads.

In closing Island highways and byways, householders are trapped in their homes and businesses are deprived of trade.

As I write, the Boulivot enclave resounds to the noise of roaring combustion engines, squealing tyres and back-firing – the perfect backdrop to what could be the last warm Saturday afternoon of the year and terror for Jack Russell numero uno cowering in the kitchen.

Rallying, albeit a minority interest, is a popular sport with devotees who prefer to spend their spare time waiting for a brief glimpse of a car as it races past at high speed than doing something productive.

I would rather paint the fence and watch it dry, but it takes some very strange sorts to make this world. What mystifies me is that rallying is usually an off-road activity, and one that, with rare exceptions, does not take place on public roads elsewhere in the British Isles.

Yet in Jersey the authorities are prepared to close dozens of miles of roads in predominantly residential areas to allow vehicles to drive at excessive speed past private homes. It hardly sets a good example to the boy racers who late at night return to sections of the rally stages to pit their driving skills against their heroes.

Thankfully, I was not a prisoner of the rally, as I reside in a sensible parish, which only permits the rally to take place within its boundaries in alternate years. A similar compromise worked out by the other parishes would satisfy petrol heads, but would not inconvenience the same householders come October.

Compromises are always the best solution, especially in such a small community as Jersey, where there are so many activities to be accommodated in 45 square miles.

THE inmates of Charlie Chuckle’s Laughter Factory thought they had reached the ideal solution of what to do with Boxing Day by agreeing to move it to 28 December. I call it yet another fudge, while Steve Wright, on his Radio 2 afternoon programme, described it as ‘confusion’ when he picked up the story in Friday’s edition of the Jersey Evening Post.
There we go, making the national news for all the wrong reasons.

Correct me if I am wrong, but 2009 is not the first time that Boxing Day has fallen on a Saturday – or come to that, on a Sunday. When it happened in the past, workers were given the next working day off. Ditto with Christmas Day. This has been the common sense compromise for as long as I can recall.

So how come this year we have reached a situation where, in moving Boxing Day to the following Monday, our beloved politicians have created a retail free-for-all by allowing shops to open on 26 December?

I have trouble keeping up with the escapades of our beloved politicians, their appetite for free sandwiches, penchant for ground-level parking spaces and inability to control wayward ring-binders, but if they were going to set a new date for the Feast of St Stephen, why not move it to August, when the weather is better?

Or are there ulterior motives at work behind the scenes in the influential high street chains and global retail giants who dominate the town and who, in the UK, traditionally open on Boxing Day?

Those who earn a living in the retail sector work damn hard in the build-up to Christmas as Islanders strip the shelves of every conceivable consumerable as if enemy invasion was imminent and they needed to stockpile to get through an occupation.

A parish official welcomed the prospect of life in the normally quiet town. I would rather see a ghost town knowing that those who normally only get one day together with loved ones every working week were in the bosom of their families.

Any shopkeeper with no justifiable reason for their staff to work on both Boxing Day and the following Monday and who decides to open on Saturday 26 December doesn’t deserve our business that day or any other.

It is this barmy side of life in Jersey – deciding to relocate Boxing Day and the fate of the Town Park being decided by items of office stationery – that has in the past led me to liken our little rock to the fictitious Craggy Island, the home of Fathers Ted, Dougal and Jack and the bizarre eccentrics who made up their flock in the classic Irish TV sitcom.

AS if I wasn’t already confused about the direction in which our community is going, there is a perplexing collection of milestones that has appeared from West Park to St Aubin that would be equally at home in the fathers’ surreal parish.

A laudable exercise in preserving the age-old custom of marking distances has backfired as the way-markers point in the wrong direction. Rather than indicating the distance to the destination, as we have come to expect such signs to do, they point back to the Royal Square.

Jersey Heritage, who designed the milestones in the traditional Jersey way for Transport and Technical Services to produce, admitted that the information was confusing, but they wanted a design that was sympathetic to the surroundings and more discreet than the cycle route’s more modern signage.

This Island is crying out for discreet signage, but not when it creates confusion.
From my limited understanding of signs, the purpose is to indicate a distance to an end, not back to a beginning, like those the Americans erected on the long road from the Normandy beaches to Berlin.

Well, not in Jersey. The focal point of these milestones – and I assume the centre our little speck in the universe – is a tatty old statue of George II, splattered with pigeon and seagull droppings and, in the fashion of sculptures of the day, sporting two left feet.
That just about sums up the state of Jersey as 2009 draws towards its end.