PEOPLE much cleverer than this simple country boy sometimes say that there is no such thing as a coincidence.

Perhaps so, but how about the following for what the experts might well describe as a non-coincidence?

On Wednesday last week I was feeling characteristically confident – what angler doesn’t on a fine fishing day? – and emerged from The Shed with all the gear, intending to sling a weight, float and baited hook over the back wall of St Catherine’s Breakwater.

As I piled all this into the passion wagon I half-jokingly said to Herself that she didn’t need to worry about our evening meal because it was my intention to catch a nice few mackerel to have with the Jersey Royals I’d bought from the farm up the road that morning.

Talk about the best-laid plans. I got one bite early on and about five minutes later landed one so small that I walked half the length of the breakwater and put it gently back into the sea from the slipway. It swam away as if it hadn’t a care in the world, but after that there was absolutely nothing for the better part of two hours until I called it a day.

There was nothing else for it when I got home but to shell out a few bob and take Herself out for fish and chips. However, there was time before that to read the paper in which I noted, among other things, a comment by my fellow columnist Meridian about new depths of bad behaviour.

As the columnist observed, the world has become a ruder and less considerate place. He went on to refer to the proposal by St John Deputy Philip Rondel that a system of fining that lot in the Big House for their transgressions in this respect should be introduced.

We went to Gorey Village, I purchased the necessary and then drove back to the coast, parking in front of what used to be the Welcome Inn. It was a fine evening and we ate while sitting on the sea wall, from where I noticed a nice two-masted yacht flying the French flag approaching Gorey Harbour.

I may well be wrong, but it seemed to me that the crew were looking either for a visitor’s mooring or somewhere to anchor. Whatever they were doing, they were going about it slowly and carefully.

The next thing I head was a noise like a motorbike and saw this bloke on one of those jet-ski contraptions bombing out from the nearby slipway in the direction of the yacht. He made what I would call a couple of close passes to the vessel – close enough for me to see the effect his wake had on it – before careering around the bay as only these things can do.

Hands up, I don’t like these high-speed marine hand-carts but generally take the view that if their riders want to go to hell and back in them then there’s precious little I can do about it, although I did think that the speed they’re allowed to do within so many yards of the shore is limited.

That apart, the rider’s behaviour towards the yacht and its crew left a lot to be desired – a fact noted also by another couple sitting nearby, one of whom remarked: ‘Well, that’s a nice welcome to Jersey. I wouldn’t blame the yacht’s crew if they turned around and headed back from whence they came.’

As it happened, they didn’t and they eventually anchored in deeper water off the pier. I just hope that they enjoyed their trip and didn’t return to France thinking that all Jersey residents who use these waters are some sort of marine hooligans.

BY the time this is published, the 64th anniversary of Liberation Day will have come and gone and I suppose the compromise about trading which allowed shops to open almost as normal yesterday was about the best those of us to whom the day is so special could have expected.

Personally, I don’t buy the nonsensical excuse that retailers can’t afford to close on 9 May. In an age where every business worth its salt budgets for public holidays and all manner of other eventualities, to suggest that Liberation Day falls on a normal trading day is total rubbish.

I don’t really care what happens in relation to shops on 10 May. The important thing is that no precedent for large scale opening on the 9th has been set. Hopefully, that will please my old friend Bob Le Sueur as much as it pleases me.

I think it particularly pleasing that the German Ambassador to the United Kingdom will be attending the Liberation Day celebrations. I’m almost sure that my old granny, who served three months in the Newgate Street slammer for listening to Alvar Liddell on the wireless in the Occupation, would have approved. Perhaps she’d have needed her customary tot of Dubonnet topped up with a slug or three of cognac to say so, but as this now old lad who was once a young miscreant knows better than most, she had a huge capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation, as all of us should have.

And finally … This Island is getting to find more black holes than has the Hubble telescope which hurtles around space. The latest is ‘worth’ £60 million which, in language those spendthrifts in the Big House (not forgetting the hired help) understand, is not much if you say it quickly.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at ‘Chancellor’ Philip Ozouf’s assertion that States departments are going to have to tighten belts. The pigs are fuelled and ready to fly.