WELL it was a long time coming – 30 years or so, by my reckoning, perhaps even longer – but the Waterworks Company have finally got round to reading the Guthrie report on water resources, and as a result we’re all going to have this essential commodity metered.

While they’re at it, they are also going to consider more than doubling the size of Val de la Mare reservoir, reducing leaks in their water mains by 25 per cent, sinking more boreholes along the Five Mile Road and educating Island residents on how to use less water.

Now, where have I heard all that before? Oh yes, it was in the aforementioned Guthrie report – a document so far-sighted that it probably frightened the living daylights out of some of those charged with deciding if its recommendations should be adopted or whether, in political and civil service parlance, it should be shoved on a shelf in some obscure filing room, there to gather dust for ever and a day.

There are those, like me, who still bemoan the appalling decision to flood Queen’s Valley and we would probably still contend that if the measures announced last week had been introduced all those decades ago to service a population a third less than we have today, we would still be able to walk through that valley.

No doubt some of my critics will tell me that walking around the valley’s reservoir is wonderful – a veritable haven of peace and tranquillity away from the speed and the greed. And of course they’re right, it is a lovely walk in a lovely setting.

However, given the millions it cost to construct, not to mention the public-sector time and money expended on countless debates, law drafting and all the other paraphernalia that went on until Jim Bergerac’s original cottage home was finally bulldozed, I reckon I could create something just as lovely at a fraction of the cost.

In saying all this, I am in no way criticising the Waterworks Company. They now, just as they did in the 1970s, have a public duty to provide usable water to the consumers who want to buy it and they are simply bringing to our attention their view on how that can be achieved.

What was missing all those years ago was the political will to force them into considering the sort of measures that they announced last week. Better late than flooding yet another valley, I suppose.

I SEE that our colony cousins in Guernsey are considering exporting their rubbish here so our all-singing, all-dancing new incinerator can deal with it. Nothing new in that, I don’t suppose.

That lot in the colonies have been sending rubbish to Jersey since the days when they used to have two policemen at the foot of the gangway when the mailboat berthed in St Peter Port Harbour telling those looking for work – or the life of Riley financed principally by crime – that there was none over there but plenty here.

According to what I read the other day, Public Services’ boss Mike Jackson – I use that departmental term because they change it so frequently (Main Roads, then Public Works, then Public Services) that I lose count, but The Reader knows what I mean – is apparently happy to process their waste and is just waiting for a call.

If what my mate in Guernsey tells me is true about how their Big House inhabitants make decisions, I would strongly advice the minister to tread very warily indeed in any dealings he has with the donkeys.

The States of Guernsey, by rescinding their decision to build an incinerator, as well as a previous decision to do likewise, have spent the better part of £10 million by effectively reneging on agreements with contractors, the last of which is an outfit called Suez which is now apparently considering its position.

In non-business speak, that to a simple country boy like me means that they are waiting for a big fact cheque – something of the order of £3.2 million, so my mate told me – as recompense for not getting a sizeable building contract.

The decision to rescind the previously approved agreement was made by their States the other week, and for some perverse reason members of their planning committee – a majority of whom were in favour of going ahead with the deal – were told not to vote because it would prejudice the decision they’d later have to make as planners.

Had that not happened, the rescindment proposal would have failed and they wouldn’t be talking about sending their rubbish here.

It’s all well and good for Mike Jackson to say that he’s all for a collegiate approach that consigns historic rivalry to the sporting arena, and in some respects I agree with him, having advocated similar moves myself.

But, and it’s a very big but and I say it with an appropriate measure of respect to Guernsey people, a few of whom – so I’m told – are nice people, given their elected representatives’ track record in respect of doing deals and then having second, third or even fourth thoughts about them, I would hope that lot in our Big House would insist on a sizeable slice of the financial action up front, so to speak.

It’s no good us building facilities to handle the importation of waste by ship if ten minutes later the donkeys have a touch of the seconds and decide that Alphonse from the Normandy port of Dielette has offered them a better deal and a couple of cases of calvados thrown in.

AND finally … reading the report on the inquest into the death of Christopher Lakeman made me even sadder. There was a man who found the time to sit and listen to every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a problem, yet was unable to find someone to do that for him.