AFTER reading the exchange of e-mails between Geoff Southern and the Maçon family, you really don’t know whether to laugh, cry or hop on the next boat for St Peter Port and beg them for political asylum.

What on earth is this place coming to when three alleged adults, two of whom are elected members of the Big House and the third a parent, indulge in the sort of exchanges this lot have?

I am bound to say that not one of them emerges with much in the way of credit. And if the content of these exchanges is typical of the way in which our elected representatives (not to mention their mothers and, for all we know, everyone on the Christmas card lists) think that important government decisions should be made, then heaven help us all.

I reckon that many residents of the St Saviour district Jeremy Maçon now represents must be wondering what on earth they have done and, more importantly, who is going to make the decisions that are going to affect all our lives in the next three years – the boy or his mother Nellie.

It wasn’t that long ago that I singled out the lad to applaud his decision to get into politics and held him up as an example to those young people still in education who just couldn’t be bothered to get off their backsides to attend a hustings meeting.

What I didn’t realise was that a few months later, young Mr Maçon would have given a lot of people the impression that his mum will take him everywhere, ensuring all the while that his hair is properly brushed, he’s got clean underwear on in case he’s run into by one of those cycling morons who thinks the Square is a velodrome, and he hasn’t forgotten either his lunchbox or his homework – and in the case of the latter, that means all the bits and pieces he will need in order to come to proper and informed decisions on the important matters set down for debate.

That could, of course, include matters which, for the moment at least, it might well not be in the wider interest of the public at large to disclose to those ‘outside the loop’ – as one self-important Deputy described it when canvassing (unsuccessfully, as it happens) for my vote several years ago.

I don’t know what is sent to that lot in the Big House by way of official documents and the like, but common sense tells me that the odds are heavily on some of the material being confidential. To a simple country boy like me, that means that it must not be discussed with anyone but those who have had similar documents sent to them.

I served on a jury once and remember the Bailiff of the day – it was that long ago that it was either Lord Coutanche or Cecil Harrison – warning all 24 (as it was then) of us at the end of each session that we must not discuss the case with anyone other than ourselves.

For all I know, Mrs Maçon may well be the soul of discretion, and her reading of and replying to e-mail messages sent to her son by an elected politician was just a momentary slip which, with the benefit of hindsight, she has hopefully come to regret – a lesson learned in the hardest and perhaps cruellest of ways.

However, as Herself explained to me about an hour ago, it’s the easiest thing in the world to send an e-mail message to the wrong recipient, or indeed to a whole host of unintended recipients, none of whom can be guaranteed not to forward them on to everyone on their Christmas card lists.

Remember the boy Shenton who, as I recall, put in an e-mail which I presume he thought would go no further than the intended recipient that his wife called the former deputy chief of the States police ‘Lenny Henry’?

As my old granny used to say, there’s no such thing as a secret unless only two people know and one of them is dead. Or, put another way, a problem shared is a problem spread right around the Island, as many of us have found to our cost.

Surely there is a lesson to be learned here – although I have very slim hopes indeed of anyone in or around the Big House grasping that. It is that our elected representatives (and their mothers, where that applies) must learn to be a good deal more discreet than appears to have been the case here.

To paraphrase what someone once said, if that happens then they will have learned no end of a lesson and it will have done them no end of good.

I DON’T know whether anyone else felt the same emotion, but on hearing that the States had spent just five hours deciding where and how some £650 million of our money would be spent, I felt a trifle cheated.

At something of the order of a shade over a couple of million for every minute they were in the Big House, I felt that it was all a little hasty and not quite how it was when Cyril Le Marquand used to warn us all against borrowing and Clarrie Farley – as the first Member speaking after him and dubbed, as I recall, the Shadow Chancellor – used to take the opposite view.

AND finally . . . The disturbing disclosure that our hospitality is being abused yet again – this time by so-called health tourists – makes me wonder whether, because it concerns visitors to our shores and the spectre of accusations of bigotry and racism that our PC brigade live by, anyone has been deterred from making this public before it became a virtual epidemic.