This one I bought from Jersey postal. It had been on my list since the day I first saw it.
Jersey, 2024. Ninety-eight pence. Blue sea, cream foam, a lighthouse on a red rock.
It belongs to a set called Debussy in Jersey, illustrated by the local artist Will Bertram. In the summer of 1904 Claude Debussy came to the island with Emma Bardac, partly to get away from the gossip at home. He liked it. He wrote that the country was a delight and that he was at peace, “which is better still”.
He was working on La Mer at the time. Look closely and you can see a few bars of it, faint, in the sky behind the lighthouse.
The wave is borrowed. It comes from Hokusai’s Great Wave, a print Debussy loved. When La Mer was first published in 1905, that same wave was on the cover.
The lighthouse is La Corbière, on the south-western tip of the island. First lit in 1874, it was the first lighthouse in the British Isles built of concrete. So 2024, the year of this stamp, was its 150th.
But that isn’t the detail I keep coming back to.
Halfway up the steps to the lighthouse there is a small dark figure. One person, climbing.
The wave behind them is enormous. They don’t seem to have noticed. Or they have, and they are carrying on anyway.
At Corbière the causeway goes under at high tide. You walk out when the sea allows it, and you come back before it closes. The timing is not yours to choose.
Yesterday I wrote about rests, and about a long one I am about to take.
I like to think the figure on the steps is not hurrying. There is a light to reach, and the tide will do what it does.
Jersey Post made a short film in which Will Bertram explains how he drew the La Corbière stamp.
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