First impressions count, and my first impression of the Channel Islands was of Haidee being seasick as the catamaran ferry sped past the Casquet Rocks. I was tired, cramped and frustrated. I was in no mood for vomiting. Zander was acting up. I cursed our decision to rent a holiday apartment in Guernsey. In future, I hissed, we’re not going anywhere we can't drive to.

We left Lenzie at 0100 and calculated that we'd need about eight hours to get to Poole. The ferry left at 1600, so we'd have seven hours to kill. We thought we might explore Salisbury a bit and have lunch, or perhaps visit Stonehenge. Instead, and to our astonishment, we arrived at the terminal, fraught and sweating, with only a few minutes to spare.

No one who has not experienced the existential horror of an English Bank Holiday weekend can fully comprehend its Hadean qualities. Every road west of a line running from Bristol to Southampton is choked to a standstill by caravans, big buses and suicidal motorcyclists. Literally suicidal in the case of the one who killed himself a few seconds ahead of us near Salisbury, producing a tailback it took us nearly three hours to escape from. In the end, only a dazzling act of ex tempore map reading by Haidee, taking us swinging and swerving through green country lanes, gave us any chance at all of reaching Poole harbour in time. We sped on to Dorset, bladders stretched to bursting point, parked the car, and managed to drag our luggage up to the departures desk with a full ten minutes in hand.

The ferry to Guernsey had been unavoidably delayed for forty minutes.

So when the Condor Express finally tied up at the RoRo slip in St Peter Port, we had been travelling for sixteen hours. We were tired. We stank. Zander was bored, Haidee was ill and I was seething; the traditional way to start a holiday.

Our first sight of the town cheered us up immediately.

It was not what I had expected. It was a lot bigger, for a start. I had expected a large village - a bit like a fishing port in the West of Scotland - but St Peter Port is not only a busy commercial harbour, it is (of course) a teeming financial centre and has a population of nearly 20000. It is also very, very pretty - a slightly frenchified, slightly restrained seaside town that was spared the fanaticisms of the 1960s planners. Its medieval layout is still intact; the streets are tall, narrow and everywhere hung with the flag of the Bailiwick of Guernsey; the buildings are largely Victorian, though many examples of poised Regency architecture survive – largely in the hands of discrete offshore banks and fund managers - and everywhere pedestrians predominate. Public and private areas are immaculate.

St Peter Port is also very rich. It's the capital of an extremely exclusive tax haven in which a significant section of the population work in the financial services. Lexuses, smart restaurants and to-die-for bespoke jewellers abound. We even discovered a walk-in cosmetic surgery shop. There is however, nothing trashy about St Peter Port. In fact, the ambience of the town is, despite the mobile phones and internet cafes, rather nostalgic. Quaint, even.

My first task was to get money. In our rush we had no chance to get to an autoteller, and we’d gone hungry on the ferry for want of cash. Banks are, of course, part of Guernsey’s reason for existence, and I quickly found the Royal Bank of Scotland International. Like Jersey (and Scotland), Guernsey prints its own banknotes – they’re Sterling, but with a unique design – and, with a fistful of these we were ready to get a taxi and, at last, finish our trip.

Our accommodation was on Vazon Bay - a large C-shape bight on the west of the island. We had a large two-storey apartment ideally situated with a swimming pool to the front and a pub to the rear. Beyond the pub was the beach, a sweep of smooth sand three miles long. If this beach were in Europe it would be concealed under hundreds of thousands of big scarlet bodies. Instead, it was entirely deserted. We had the whole beach to ourselves for half an hour, until another family arrived. During the whole morning we probably didn't see more than a dozen people.

Zander set off with clench-jawed determination down the ramp from the sea wall onto the sand, and headed off in a straight line towards the sea. He toddled grimly to the water's edge (a long way at low tide) then stood, looking down at the sea. He considered it coolly for a long, long moment then, satisfied, turned abruptly about-face and stomped off towards the rock pools. He never evinced any interest in the sea thereafter.

We travelled everywhere on Guernsey by bus. It’s a good way to see things, and the trip to anywhere can never be more than about half an hour. Most surprising to me was the Hebridean appearance of much of the coastline. We frequently saw white stone cottages of exactly the same size and design as one sees along the whole western seaboard of Scotland, set amongst tussocky grass in front of white beaches. Elsewhere we saw interwar suburban houses of the type I associate with the English Midlands, Welsh cottages and Georgian townhouses. The whole of Britain is squashed onto an island of 24 square miles.

Guernsey must be the most militarised place in the world. There is barely a headland or small rise that does not sport either a Napoleonic-era fortress or a Nazi watchtower. The French never came, but evidence of the German Occupation is everywhere, and the islanders are pretty much stuck with it: millions of gallons of concrete were poured by the Germans to defend and subjugate the tiny, symbolically British, island (so much, in fact, that a shortage was produced in other theatres), so that the effort and expense needed to get rid of it is too great to consider. One suspects that even dynamite would be pretty useless for clearing structures intended to withstand the 16 inch guns of the Royal Navy.

The occupation was not a happy episode. It's true that the islanders did not suffer as much as, say, the Poles or Czechs, but one feels a surge of icy fury when reading the proclamations of the German governor, full of Prussian bombast, or perusing the grotesque holiday snapshots of the garrison troops. A couple of items in the Occupation Museum particularly caught my eye. One was a photograph of an officer posing with his horse outside a fine manor house. A more perfect illustration of narcissistic Teutonic Romanticism could not be contrived. The second was a carved wooden bowl bearing the heraldic lions of Guernsey. However, the bowl had been carved by a soldier of the occupation force, and the style he had chosen was Nazi Medieval Gothic. The end effect was quite obscene. A desecration. The occupation continued until May 9th 1945 when the Royal Navy arrived to liberate the island. Even then, the German governor had sufficient insolence to request terms. (He didn't get any.)

The war was topical again. Our stay coincided with the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and ocean liners carrying veterans and history-tourists sat in the bay at St Peter Port, stopping off for tax-free shopping on the way up the coast for the Big Day. The QE2 was there, but we missed the new Queen Mary.

On our final full day we took the ferry across to Herm, an Enid Blyton idyll of empty beaches, cows in pastures and tall cliffs overlooking azure seas. It is breathtakingly, heartbreakingly, tearjerkingly beautiful in the sun, a magical glimpse of an unspoiled Britain, an imaginary country just around the corner of memory. We vowed to return as soon as possible, if only to find out why an island of ten resident families has three pubs.

I suppose that the first reaction of visitors to Guernsey is ‘how do I get to stay here?’ On Jersey the secret is to have money, but on Guernsey, even money isn’t enough. Hopeful economic migrants need to have a licence from the States of Guernsey, and there’s a very limited number every year. And a licence only allows one to stay; if one wants something to stay in, ordinary three bedroom semis start at £450K, and estate agents’ windows are full of nice-but-nothing-special houses in the £1M range.

So, like many others have done before us, we left Guernsey plotting a way to return and stay. Maybe financial sector jobs in Guernsey really do pay well enough to support a half-million pound mortgage, but I bet software development ones don’t. I’m checking out JobServe, all the same.

A final note. We were entertained by the Coastguard on the return voyage. They did landing practice on the ferry, bringing their huge Sea King helicopter alongside (not above, alongside) at one point, so that we could wave to the winch-man from the ship’s dining room without looking up!