Wednesday, St Peter Port, Guernsey. I catch the 4pm boat to Sark. It’s a kind of floating minibus, seating 50 or so on this trip. Smooth enough journey out of the harbour, but as soon as we hit the open Channel, it’s roller coaster time. I think of that old quote about the Channel being Britain’s greatest line of defence, defying Caesar and countless other invasions, and making those D-Day colleagues of Mr Hanks throw up so memorably in the opening of Saving Private Ryan.

I can never remember the best way of dealing with rough crossings. Maybe it’s nothing by the standards of more seasoned sailors, but my idea of rough is any time the horizon just can’t make up its mind where to sit. Some say you have to lie down – not always easy in a minibus arrangement of bench seating. I choose to hold on to the seat, turn on my iPod, close my eyes and imagine I’m playing the music. I am not here, I tell myself. I am not in a boat being thrown about. I am playing this Galaxie 500 track somewhere else. On a stage, say. A stage on a boat… oh, I’ve lost it.

It works well enough at the dentist. There, I imagine my mind is not in the body in the chair, the one at the mercy of the drill. I am floating above, looking down. I am in the next room. I am elsewhere. This attempt at amateur self-hypnosis is actually pretty effective, perhaps because one is already in a reclining position. But not on the Sark boat. I make a mental note to get some bottled anaesthetic – Pino Grigio Nitrous Oxide – for the trip back.

At Sark harbour, I meet Philip and Elizabeth Perree from the hotel I’m staying at, La Sablonnerie. Turns out Elizabeth was in the boat too, in the other seating section behind me. ‘How was that crossing by your standards?’ I ask her. ‘Excellent! Very quick!’

Behind me I watch the boat taking passengers deliveries for the journey back, including lots of grey mail sacks.

For the steep trek up the cliff to the main part of the island, I’m given a lift on a goods trailer pulled by Philip’s tractor, me and Ms P (and her Harrods shopping bag – reused for Guernsey) sit and chat together amongst the suitcases. The scenery is spectacular: it’s wildflower season and the hills are speckled with bluebells at every glance.

The slope levels off at a crossroads, and I’m given a horse-drawn taxi ride to the hotel, the driver Elaine telling me all about the island’s history on the way. How Sark is part of Guernsey in some ways, and not in others. How it uses Guernsey currency, mail service and stamps, how like the other Channel Islands all the place names and nouns are French, but the main language is English with a variety of accents, from RP posh to working class Essex. Just like in ‘Bergerac’, of course. But while Guernsey is in the UK, Sark is actually a self-governing independent state, a feudalist fiefdom from 1565 till last year, when they finally had their first Parliamentary elections. The ruler of the island is still the hereditary Seigneur, but I’m told he ‘helps out’ rather than tells others what to do. And as his son has divorced and remarried, which is frowned on in the Feudal Rulebook, it’s not clear what will happen to the line of Seigneurs.

I’d already read about the recent democratic elections and all the hoo-ha over the Barclay twins. The Barclays are billionaire playboy owners of the Telegraph newspaper and the Ritz Hotel, who live in their newly built castle on nearby Brecqhou Isle, one of the fiefdoms ‘parcels’ of land, and own a number of hotels and shops on Sark. The Barclays controversially kick-started Sark’s democratic reforms, bringing the scrutiny of international human rights to the anachronisms of a feudal system. An unelected Seigneur being King is unfair, they reasoned. But of course, the flipside is in the freer world of democracy, money is power instead. As the world’s press recorded, once their favoured candidates at last year’s election were democratically rejected by the island’s voters, they dramatically closed down all their interests and sacked over a hundred staff (out of a population of 600). Orwell would have loved this one: which do you choose between the power of hereditary barons versus the baron-like power of billionaires? Still, what’s less reported is that the Barclays-owned jobs were quietly reinstated a few weeks later, that the twins continue to help boost the local economy, and Sarkese-Barclay relations are, I’m told by a few locals, more or less back to normal. If a little bruised and wary.

There’s a fascinating Guardian article on the post-election Sark here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/23/sark-democratic-elections

(With the Barclays, I can’t help thinking of the archetype of elderly rich twins in films like The Million Pound Note and Trading Places).

‘I’m re-reading Mr Pye, by Mervyn Peake,’ I tell the horsedrawn cab’s driver, Elaine. The horse is called George.
‘We’re just about to pass the house where he wrote it,’ she says.

And there it is on the right, still occupied by Peake’s daughter. It’s also where he wrote Gormanghast.

The highlight of the journey is La Coupee, the narrow sliver of cliff topped by a thin path – an isthmus – connecting Little Sark, where I’m staying, to Great Sark, where all the other hotels and the main ‘Avenue’ are. ‘Hold tight. I hope you have a head for heights,’ says Elaine as she takes George into a fast trot. It’s like a very small part of the Great Wall of China. A plaque marks how the railings and track surfacing is the work of German POWs during WW2.

It’s a chilly night. But when I get to my room at La Sablonnerie farmhouse hotel, I find a real coal fire burning and two hot water bottles in my bed. It’s fair to say I’ve gotten over the rough crossing.

(Uploaded in Sark’s Island Hall cafe. Laptop battery running out.)