If there was one thing I was certain about regarding this year’s Liberation Day, as I settled into bed the night before, it was that I was going to get drenched.
The rain radar was already showing the storms bubbling up from Brittany, the normally reliable Bailiwick of Jersey ‘Guernsey weather’ page was offering short odds on a downpour, ‘perhaps thundery’, and I was beginning to repent of my haste in registering for my first Liberation 7 road race. Not that I mind running in the rain – I just didn’t want to get soaked on the way to the start line.
Plan A was to cycle to Town, get a bus to Rousse, run the race back to town, cycle home, drive to Beau Sejour, collect my parents’ hampers, take them to my parents, drive home, eat, and set off with the family for an afternoon of escape-room adventure.
But due to ‘the States switching off the system’, as the Stagecoach employee termed it when I spoke to her the previous day, I was unable to establish whether the first part of the plan was possible.
So I cycled to Rousse, forgetting to take a lock, lay my rusted-up and almost worthless bike down against some rocks and set off with 226 other hardy souls towards town in welcome sunshine, happy that the approaching soaking would come at the end of the race, rather than at the beginning.
Perhaps buoyed by sun-flecked euphoria, I set off way too fast, at a pace comfortably inside my more ambitious goal of sub-60 minutes.
After four-and-a-half miles at that pace, with every muscle in my body seemingly begging me to just stop, I reflected on the fact that the winner was probably finished by now (he just about was) and that perhaps fish and chips followed by chocolate brownie and pistachio ice cream hadn’t been the wisest of pre-race-day dinners, and I slowed right down into ‘just get over the line’ mode.
My secondary target was 62:15, which would be within double the world record jointly held by Gilbert Okari and Wesley Kiptoo, both of Kenya. With a bit of a surge at the end – spurred on by many of the 149 runners who finished before me and stayed to roar encouragement to lesser mortals – I got there one second too late according to the clock (my ‘gun time’) but with 12 seconds to spare according to my ‘chip time’, which takes into account that it took me 13 seconds to reach the start line after the starting gun was fired. Happy days! Now nobody can say they could do the run twice as fast as me. Which is something. In my head, anyway.
By the time I’d recovered, devoured my complementary banana and water, and retrieved my bike pannier out of the athletics club van, it was too late to get home to my car and get to Beausie before the 11am deadline, so I set off past one end of the parade inspection and walked stiffly up there via the Blue Mountains – still in blazing sunshine – wondering how I was going to carry the hampers home on foot, and hoping I might bump into someone going my way.
Former deputy Sue Aldwell greeted me at the door, pointed me to the queue for A-D and within minutes I had two packed hampers to take away, which, happily, were in fact eminently portable paper bags with handles.
The two-and-a-half-mile walk home was bathed in stubbornly persistent sunshine. On the way, I called my parents to check they’d be in later, and they said yes, they were just settling down to listen to the service. Coming off the call, I navigated to BBC Sounds, put the service on, and was accompanied through Les Ozouets and Pont Vaillant Lane by the Bailiff, the Lt-Governor and the Dean, emanating from my still-sweaty pocket.
Once home, I managed to make myself a couple of crepes before the cat found the batter and then it was out of the shower, up to my folks, offload the hampers – complete with seed-paper tags, which went down well – back home and off to St Saviour’s Community Centre for Cluemanji.
This was MTG’s latest 3-4 hour puzzle game, where you head off around the island solving clues to determine the next venues. There, helpers guide you toward games from which you collect tokens, before you head to a finale at the Victorian Walled Gardens.
We finished at 4.39pm under increasingly thick clouds, but still no rain.
Offloading one child at a sleepover, we took the other to town, where we enjoyed a slew of local teen bands rocking the Albert Pier stage. By now it was gone 6pm and I hadn’t had a drink yet. If you’d told 26-year-old me that that was my future in 30 years, it would’ve been enough to put me off having kids. But I was keeping a clear head voluntarily, with a view to doing some much needed pre-One Act Play Festival line learning after dark.
That is, until my wife suddenly announced she was happy to drive home if I fancied a beer and I unlocked my earlier, subconscious clocking of a stall selling beers from a brewery I’d not heard of. This turned out to be the revelation of the day – even greater than the Dean’s proselytising about the musical Radio Silence.
I nearly went for a pint of Second Meridian’s vanilla stout, but thankfully asked for a taste first. The vanilla was a bit too much for me. You could’ve made a passable affogato with it. But the bright pale was a thing of divine beauty. I had to go back to the bar and find out where they were visiting from. The guy I spoke to was the head brewer, who revealed his business to be a Guern venture, describing it as ‘a hobby that’s got out of hand’. I undertook to support his efforts by buying several future pints. I’m all heart.
As I supped, I took in the noisy but eupeptic atmosphere – interrupted only by one drunk who shouted incoherent accusations into the crowd, before shuffling off, confused. I was confused too. The only time I’d ever previously spoken to him was a few years ago, when he was telling me that his own very high expectations of excellence were behind his giving my child so much homework.
There was no vegetarian food left on the pier for my wife to savour, so we headed back to Atan’s new outlet at the Round Top Stores, where the spicy beef penang gave me bliss and hiccups.
Later, we joined the throng on the Castle Emplacement to view the annual detonation of low explosives. As we watched the colourful and pulsating pyrotechnics, another display flashed out east, as the long-promised storms slipped by. And still we stayed dry.
Yet for all that, it wasn’t the unexpected beneficence of the weather gods that gave me pause, as I got home and reached for my tattered script.
I stopped and thought about the much better runners than me, like Mike Batiste and James Priest, who drove the van, set up the chip-reading start line and marshalled the runners through traffic.
I thought about the whole team of helpers at Beau Sejour who diligently checked IDs, cross-checked lists and filled hampers. They were full of smiles and, seeing me there with my road-race number on my chest, congratulated me on still being largely upright. I saw some of them about six hours later on Quay St, still fetching and carrying.
I remembered the team who were replenishing the bins on the Crown Pier just as I was looking to offload my penang pot.
And I thought about the riddle-setters, the stall-holders, the beer-pourers, the dice-rollers, the sound engineers and stage managers, the medics and the firework letter-offers.
And I concluded that whether you give them a day off or not, the people of this island will go to all the trouble that could possible be necessary – paid or unpaid – to make sure that Liberation Day puts smiles on faces, rain or shine.
And I asked myself, what will I do next year, by way of voluntary effort?
And yes, I did remember to go back and get my bike.
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