AS I walked into the pub the other evening, one of the old lads in our corner was saying that he thought he remembered a cartoon or boy’s comic character called Wonder Boy.

He added that if he had his way, ‘this bloke would be called Blunder Boy’ because of the way he traipsed from one disaster to another.

I took my seat next to one of my mates, who turned and said there’d be no prizes for guessing who they were talking about.

I was about to say that I’d have a stab at it with a small calvados as a bet when he laughed and looked at me, eyeing that day’s paper on the table.

The story I had glanced at was the one about the Island’s Italian community taking umbrage at Deputy Guy de Faye’s silly comment that ‘at the first whiff of gunsmoke and the first sign of panic’ he had thought he was a member of the Italian army.

The fact that he said it at all will surprise very few people, for Blunder Boy’s lips seem to move while his brain remainsin horizontal sleeping mode. Unfortunately for him, while that might well be a reason, it’s certainly not an excuse.
Apart from telling jokes about the donkeys who occupy the colonies in the other Bailiwick – which I consider to be every crapaud’s birthright, just as it’s theirs to do the same to us – I learned years ago that you are better off letting Irish people tell Irish jokes, Liverpudlians do the same about Scousers, and so on.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that, as the Transport Minister might well be slowly discovering, although I don’t hold my breath on this one, some people (in this case quite rightly, in my view) take exception to references of this nature.

The second reason is that, to put it simply, self-deprecating jokes are inevitably much funnier. As I said, I learned that years ago, and it was from a middle-aged Israeli lady – on holiday over here, as it happens – who in her native Jerusalem was a travel courier.

She said that she used to get fed up with garrulous tourists telling Jewish jokes, and the reason she found it tiresome was that in the main the jokes weren’t very good. ‘Very early in the tour I used to say that I was going to tell them the only Jewish joke they were going to hear that day and made it clear that after that the subject was taboo,’ she told me. ‘I always told the same one, and it was about the American businessman who was on a quick visit to Jerusalem.

‘On his way to the airport in his taxi he wanted to see the Wailing Wall but had forgotten what it was called so he asked the driver to take him to the place where all the Jewish people cried. The taxi driver took him to the tax office.’
I laughed when she told me, and since then I have heard very many examples of the best jokes coming from those closest to the subject. It was a lesson to me and, if he bothers to read this, it might well prove to be a lesson to Blunder Boy also.

His remarks were no doubt learned at an adult’s knee, for he is not old enough – in every sense of the expression – to have any first-hand knowledge of the performance of any army in the Second World War. My father served in that war. He was fortunate – an expression he used frequently when referring to his service – in that he saw no action, nor fired a gun other than in target practice.

Circumstances decreed that he was a long, long way away from anything that could be described as the front line. Indeed, he always said that he was more frightened in England’s big cities because of the danger of being bombed than at any other time in his life.

Does that make him any less of a serviceman than others not so fortunate? And in that I include those of our then enemies who served under precisely the same conditions. It really is time you buttoned it, Guy. You are no longer funny.

THE news that Flybe will not be cutting their services to and from the Island will come as no surprise to anyone. After all, would an outfit which has just bucked the trend by upping profits by a record 14 per cent want to commit commercial suicide by voluntarily getting off their gravy plane?

I know that I am not the only media outlet which has criticised Flybe, and even Herself got on the bandwagon the other day when, while playing on her infernal computer and the internet while trying to organise yet another shopping expedition to parts foreign with her mate. She told me that it now costs eight quid less a penny (I’m not into this £7.99 nonsense) to put one piece of luggage in the hold for each leg of the journey.

To a simple country boy like me, that means that a family of four with three suitcases between them – not unreasonable, I’d have thought – will be charged, in addition to the cost of their fares and punitive so-much-a-leg credit card charges, as near to fifty quid as makes no difference simply to take their luggage on holiday with them and bring it home again. No wonder Flybe’s profits are up.

AND finally . . . I bet the Royal Bank of Scotland are regretting their decision to agree the sale of Condor to an Aussie outfit. Now that HD Ferries seem to be out of the frame, owning Condor must be close to owning the Thomas de la Rue print works – one of the few places actually allowed to print money.