HERE we are again at the end of that interlude stretching from Christmas until just after the New Year that seems removed from normal time.

Many Islanders are on holiday – as I find whenever I try to phone anyone at their office – but for once the roads aren’t gridlocked or like Brands Hatch.

There’s an air of unreality about this time of year, or the feeling that we all ought to be hibernating, but it’s a welcome pause before the working year creaks into action.

It’s a good time to find useful things to do in the Shed, especially as Herself is in shopping-until-dropping mode. I can’t think of anything worse than going into town at the moment. It’s more enjoyable to stay at home and use the time to reflect on what 2010 might bring.

Crystal ball gazing is also enjoyable, after all. More fun, at least – for me – than the scrimmage of the sales, and a lot cheaper. And it’s a good time for entertaining. In the Shed recently I was joined by a friend who spends a lot of the year in Italy in contact with the business and financial sector there.

What, I asked him, as I refilled our glasses, was the opinion among his Italian friends of Jersey as an offshore finance centre?

He said, curiously, that the general opinion was a contradictory one – on the one hand, that Jersey was perceived as being a den of thieves and that the money we handled here was definitely on the dirty side. And since the Haut de la Garenne fiasco, this prejudice might be supplemented by the description ‘den of nasty and perverted thieves’.

On the other hand, he continued, his Italian mates tended to think that there was so much red tape and bureaucracy and over-regulation in Jersey that the banks based here had no real freedom of action, and consequently keeping money in the Island was hardly the best idea – certainly not the first place Italian bankers would recommend to their wealthier customers.

It is mad, of course, to have two such mutually contradictory opinions about anywhere, and doubtless they have never visited the Island, and for all I know their opinion of Jersey is largely based on ‘Bergeraco’ or whatever the series is called on Italian day-time TV.

But rightly or wrongly, they distrust us, and may not like us – and considering how we are always stressing how good and squeaky-clean we are, the message just isn’t getting through.

It also puts into perspective some of the recent puff about finding new markets in the Far East. There is certainly another story, and it makes me think, in my cheerful way, that whatever we do to convince the OECD and the EU and all the other agencies that we need continually to impress that we are honest, legal, decent, truthful and all the rest of it, we will make little or no impact on this ingrained and pervasive anti-Jersey prejudice.

We are small, we are an anomaly, we like making our own rules – all of which is anathema to the international regulatory authorities. Let’s just hope we can continue to fight our corner – fingers heavily crossed for the New Year.

If you are trying to discern the future, it’s always a good idea to study the past, and during this seasonal hibernation period I have been reading the new book by Colin Platt, A Concise History of Jersey. It’s sub-titled A New Perspective, and that new perspective is an interesting – although a pretty gloomy – one.

He takes as his theme that the main historical factors in the Island’s history result primarily from external sources, and the history of Jersey is really just a reaction to them.

The author says in the postscript to his book: ‘Jersey is a minor player in a huge global market which has no material interest in its survival . . . It is difficult not to feel some concern about the future.

‘The Island has a proud history of survival. But each of its ‘‘revolutions’’, from the sudden death of stocking knitting to the ‘capture of the state’ by the banking interest of today, have been authored from outside, and there have been substantial periods of misery in between.’

So fingers crossed as well that in 2010 we shall not be coming up to another such ‘substantial period’.

And finally, on Christmas Eve, Herself and I visited the Nativity play at the RJAHS, along with around 1,500 others. Whether with such a large number of onlookers this Nativity can justifiably still warrant the description of a ‘community event’ I am not quite certain – if so, it sure was a big community.

As ever, it was the Noel the Turkey Show, another dramatic opportunity for that amiable bird who can always afford to laugh at the prospect of an impending Christmas. He strutted up and down and made loud gobbling noises to compete with the carol singing.

Our avian superstar has been to all sorts of places that you would not normally see a turkey – on several occasions he’s visited the JEP and sat in the news editor’s chair – something which all the journalists present found very funny, with the exception, possibly, of the news editor.

However, the popularity of the Trinity event cannot be put down entirely to the attraction of seeing Noel the Turkey.

David Warr, one of the event organisers, said in an interview for the JEP before the event that so many people made the effort to go to something like this in the middle of the countryside when they could be squeezing in some last-minute shopping instead.

‘There is a obviously still a little bit of Christianity out there somewhere,’ he was quoted as saying – which is perhaps the most optimistic thought I can find for the turn of the year.