The first thing you notice about Jersey is the quiet; the hush of money. In my experience, money may talk but it prefers to murmur; it's the haunts of the poor at pleasure that blare with noise at night and day. And everywhere the Quiet Men; the bankers, suited and booted darkly, in the restaurants and bars and even on St Brelade's Bay beach, heads together, drinking mineral water, speaking very softly into mobile phones - a world away from our own brash, insecure City boys. This is serious money, tightly held, not some game with a deck of cards. They are horribly sexy.

"Imagine 50 of them, queuing up to have sex with you," I said dreamily to my friend Laura. "Still wearing their suits and those Church's shoes. Imagine making them lose their cool."

"I'd rather not," she said, primly. "And I don't think you should either."

I watched them walk away down the massive golden expanse of St Brelade's, and past the megalithic remains. They were very nice megalithic remains. And, as Laura pointed out, it was nice that, for once, there was something around older than we were. The joke was getting a bit thin by now, because she'd said the same thing the night before, after the most glorious dinner we'd ever had the privilege to put away, when Pedro the manager brought over a bottle of 150-year-old Grand Marnier to show us. We hoped he might leave it on the table but, as there was only about four inches of it left, he poured us each a glass and removed the rest to a place of safety.

I don't know how to describe 150-year-old Grand Marnier, except to say it doesn't a bit taste like it's past its sell-by-date. It tastes like all your Christmases at once. Oranges and brandy and log fires and getting off with your mother-in-law while your spouse is stuffing the turkey. It makes you feel like, at least once in your life, you must have done something really good, or you wouldn't be allowed to have it. But even so, it was pretty much par for the course at Longueville Manor.

I could never picture myself at a country house hotel. Most of my best times have been had in rooms rented by the hour, or at the other end of the scale in the filthy-rich International White Trash watering holes of London. But country house hotels... a bit wussy, don't you think? Probably catering to the sort of people who find china shepherdesses sexually arousing and blow their noses on broderie Anglaise doilies. Even worse, the country-house hotel has become the preferred wedding venue of every educationally subnormal ball-kicker and breast-flasher who graces the pages of OK magazine; walking in, you expect to see Hyacinth Bucket trying to blag her way into a Spice Girl's marquee.

Perhaps because it's off the beaten path, Longueville Manor was nothing like this. It was the smoothness of the whole trip, after too much long-haul hell and jet-lag jaggedness, which sticks in the mind. An hour-and-a-half after leaving a grey Gatwick, we were sitting by the pool, under a blazing sun (Jersey is a hundred miles from England, but only 14 miles from France), eating a bookmaker's sandwich - an unspeakably tender steak concoction. The flight itself had taken only 45 minutes.

It was then that I saw her, stealing someone's savouries. Topsy, the most beautiful boxer dog in Christendom, who, with her sister Bellini and mother Ebony (who tragically wore a collar saying "Please Do Not Feed Me: I Have A Heart Condition. Laura sniggered that she was getting me one of those for Christmas), is one of the beauteous barkers that gives Longueville Manor the edge. Yes, here the city-dwellers' most fervid fantasy can be fulfilled, and its nothing to do with sex, but owning a really big fuck-off dog.

From the moment she licked her genitalia, fixed her soft eyes on mine and put her dirty great paw on my knee, I was ready to do anything for Topsy, even though all she wanted was my sandwich. But, as Laura reminded me, all of my relationships started this way, and look what happened to them.

Topsy went everywhere with me: she sat by the pool as I swam; walked the bridle path with me in the morning when I went to feed the horses (sparking a particularly vicious fight with a Shetland pony over an apple); trotted beside me as I meandered through the huge kitchen garden feeling like Helena Bonham-Carter (only smart, attractive and successful); and was the first face I saw in the morning as I sat outside my garden suite watching the incredible horizon and hearing Jersey roll out of bed after sleeping the sleep of the self-righteous and start murmuring to itself as it went to wash up: "Hey, we're looking good today. Let's go to work!"

But the one place Topsy couldn't follow us was into the dining room; holder of three Michelin turrets and one star, this was where Longueville's serious business took place. We ate scallops and lobster and salmon and crab so fresh that it made the allegedly "fresh" seafood we were used to in Brighton look as though it had died of old age; the scallops, especially, were exquisite beyond the call of duty or beauty, seeming to be made of white chocolate. When we squealed and squirmed this at Pedro, he laughed and said they probably tasted that way because the young chef, Andrew Baird, had dived for them this morning. We went all quiet. There was something ridiculously sexy and hunter-gatherery about this, and probably went a good way towards explaining why eating at Longueville Manor suddenly made my experiences at the Caprice, the Ivy and the River Café, sweet as they are, seem about as exciting as eating a Pot Noodle with a plastic fork at a bus stop in the pouring rain, washed down with a half a can of warm Fanta.

I'm not normally a foodie, as such - I'm fat, but it was the gin what did it - but Jersey could convert the most po-faced ascetic. Whether luncheon at the Jersey Potteries (a plush greenhouse that resembles Frederick's of Islington before the Blairites got in and sucked the oxygen out of it), or dining at Suma's, the fresh and funky younger sister of Longueville Manor (sort of Françoise Dorleac to Longueville's Catherine Deneuve), it is the sheer Technicolor of the food that stuns you after a lifetime of monochrome scoff. It's not just that the bread, butter and milk in Jersey actually is a different colour, it tastes a different colour, too. This is Fantasia food; like the creatures in that film, it mutates and morphs and gambols in your mouth, refusing to go quietly. (This isn't actually as alarming a prospect as it sounds). Most food is quickly rumbled as a fraud and then agrees to go quietly; Jersey food runs amok, in the nicest possible way.

The food, the weather, the perfume, the women - 80% of Jersey women seem to have been air hostesses in a former life, and I mean that as a compliment. Blonde tanned, groomed to within an inch of their lives, they have an unnerving tendency to be called things straight out of a James Bond book - the first two girls I met there were called Samantha Le Maistre and Sorel Morganti. Yet when they talk, they sound like some Surrey sportif who forever holds a corner of John Betjeman's heart.

It is the combination of food, weather and people that makes Jersey seem like the most perfect experiment in gerrymandering: a France with all the French bussed out and 85,000 English bussed in. Laura, who comes from Cornwall, said that it had the beauty of Cornwall but with none of the darkness and deprivation.

There is a darkness to Jersey, but it is the darkness of affluence, and not the more understandable and excusable darkness of poverty. You should be able to look, in the dictionary under the word "selfish" and find "Jersey" as a definition. There is no unemployment benefit, the unemployed must go in person to one of the parish councils and plead their case. "Which stops the system being abused - and mostly, of course, they bring it on themselves," one beautiful, sunny girl told me, without a dash of compassion. Until last year there was no abortion whatsoever, and tax is 25% for everyone, from the most purring millionaire to the most exploited Portuguese guest worker. (The Portugese have been imported over the past five years as the Jersoisie have grown too affluent to countenance most catering and domestic work.) You cannot immigrate to Jersey without £3 million in the bank - a piece of information inevitably delivered with the mantra, "We're a small island, and we've got to keep people out somehow." Especially those oiks with only £2 million, presumably.

Jersey has no MP and is not affiliated to the EC, only calling on the mainland with a defence pact. Jersoisie cannot vote for political parties, but for individuals to represent the 12 parishes. If Tony Blair had his way, all of Britain would be like Jersey: sobriety, social conservatism and deference walking hand in hand with raw capitalism. But the bottom line is that it does work for them, and it is a very small island indeed - nine miles by five. Clichés about things not being broke and not being fixed spring to mind.

I t is a rather surreal place, though. While seeming to be the Lost Tribe of the Home Counties, it is odd when they suddenly refer to "the English". "Don't you feel English?" I asked one charming girl. "Oh no! I feel Jersey. If anything, I feel more French than English." There's that strange floating identity that always comes from being too keen on capitalism, but they are very devoted to their island, in a very moderate kind of way. It's as if Sunningdale just suddenly upped and declared UDI, and Lynda Snell came back a Balliwick.

Jersey is smug because it knows it can pick and choose, and to have been born there and to be able to return whenever life on the mainland gets too wearing is to have been born with a golden ticket in the lottery of British Isles life; even the animals in Gerald Durrell's famous zoo here look happy. But it's not Stepford, by any means. It has a history of being on the frontline in conflicts between Britain and the rest of Europe, as the Martello towers behind every beach testify. During the last world war, Germans occupied Jersey and, not finding the warm welcome they had expected, offered the usual Nazi greeting of starvation, slave labour and a concentration camp. The Occupation Tapestry, which took 300 Islanders more than 30,000 hours to make between 1991 and 1993, can be seen in Liberation Square.

You can forgive them for being a trifle smug, then - they've earned it, In more ways than one. Sitting on the golden beaches and swooning in the sea - which is so different from our own because it is warmed by Gulf streams and is innocent of untreated sewage - you notice that the sands shelve very steeply and that Australian lifeguards have been imported to deal with the treacherous currents around St Clement's Bay. You wonder if you might use this as a cheap metaphor for the way Jersey's natural beauty - like that of the Bahamas, Cayman Islands and Switzerland - is a decoy from all manner of dark machinations. But the sun is so shameless, and the beaches so blameless, you'd rather just lay back and enjoy it. Jersey, where the amuse-geules is king, will always be an enigmatic anomaly. Frankly, I couldn't like it more.

The practicals

By air: British Airways (0345 222 111) has flights starting at £48 plus taxes. Jersey European (08705 676676). Gatwick flights cast £59.80 inc tax and KLM (0990 074 074) has flights from Stansted from £49 plus tax. By sea: Condor Ferries (01305 761 551) sail from Weymouth and Poole, from £47 for foot passengers. A double room at Longueville Manor costs £200 a night. Jersey Tourist Board: 020 7630 8787.