WELL, whether our cousins across the water in Guernsey read my recent comments about their farcical vote on a new incinerator, or simply had a couple of pints of Pony and a sniff at a calvados cork I know not, but no sooner had their Bailiff put his pen back in his top pocket after counting who was pour, contre or had been told to abstain than up one of them pops calling for a recount.

If it wasn’t so expensively serious you really would have to laugh at their antics. Judging by my mate over there’s view they are soon going to need both hands and at least one foot to count how many times they seem to have debated lobbing out the better part of £100 million on burning their rubbish – so far they’ve actually shelled out 10 per cent of that because of reneging on deals and they’ve got absolutely nothing to show for it – and he’s in no doubt that this particular pantomime is set to run and run.

Even if the next vote is identical to the one the other week – which kicked out the idea of an incinerator – they’re going to have to hold a whole series of debates because those proposing the about turn didn’t appear to think about anything to replace it. Meanwhile my mate says that the mountain of rubbish just keeps rising higher and higher – so high, he claims, that in the late afternoons it will cast a shadow over Mont Orgueil Castle. I think he’s exaggerating a bit but I certainly get the drift.

Yet I read the other day that Transport and Technical Services minister Mike Jackson is still saying that his door is open and he’s hoping to hear from them about a possible deal.

Listen pal, you are either extremely naive or, well, let’s leave it at naive, shall we, because mark my words you will rue the day you ever even thought about getting into bed with a bunch of vote-catching opportunists who in decision making terms don’t seem able to walk ten yards without wanting to do a U-turn, depending on the views of the last person they spoke to.

I criticise that lot in our Big House often enough, I know, but we really don’t know how lucky we are when compared to those in the sister isle. That’s always assuming, of course, that we tell them to get lost when they come knocking on our door asking for a box of matches and a day and a half a week playing with our incinerator. That’s what we ought to do, that’s for sure.

I’ve just read the online comments (at thisisjersey.com) about the Waterworks Company’s plan to install water meters at all premises they supply with mains water and quite frankly some of them beggar belief.

One bloke wrote in saying that he presumes that lot in the Big House won’t take the idea of raising the level of Val de la Mare Reservoir by nine metres very lightly.

Leaving aside the notion that if our politicians’ knowledge of Jersey is measured by some of the things they come out with it’s unlikely that some of them have any idea where that particular pool of water is, the chap then came out with one of the most ridiculous of all the very many comments made.

He bemoaned the fact that if the water level is raised then it ‘will cover popular walking and running paths and will mean another simple pleasure taken from us’. Oh dear, diddums. In case you’re not au fait with what that big puddle on the border of St Peter and St Ouen is, let me enlighten you.

It is a reservoir – a water storage facility – the purpose of which is to provide potable water to Waterworks Company customers. It is not an attractive backdrop to a damned athletics track, for heaven’s sake. Perhaps he should take up politics – he’s certainly got the cerebral wherewithal.

I agree totally with the comment published elsewhere in this newspaper about the perverse sense of priorities in last week’s States sitting, where our elected representatives spent the better part of two days discussing making crash hats for cyclists a matter of law yet managed to dispose of a black hole swallowing our cash at the rate of over a million quid a week in a matter of minutes.

While acknowledging that there are occasions when the state – nanny or otherwise – should intervene (and seat belts and drink drive limits are examples) it’s always struck me as ironic that when it comes to helmets for cyclists, you frequently see families cycling with the children wearing the protective headgear but the parents going without.

That is why, for this simple country boy at least, the sitting was doubly perverse. Children learn from seeing what their parents do – the good, the bad and the indifferent – and it strikes me as strange in the extreme that the States voted in favour of the compulsory wearing of helmets, but only for those of 18 or younger. I can almost hear the teenagers now – can’t wait until I’m 18, then I’ll be able to go in pubs and ditch my crash hat.

I have to say also that without seeking to minimise in any way at all what Deputy Andrew Green and his family have gone through since his young lad sustained a serious head injury as a cyclist, I am never too comfortable when States Members bring to the Assembly issues that have affected them and theirs in a traumatic way.
Far better, surely, for him to have persuaded one of his 52 colleagues and perhaps spoken in support of the idea.

And finally, there is a presumption against development in the countryside – the gist of the Island Plan. There is a presumption of openness – the gist of the freedom of information guidelines. So why was there secrecy about the bloke at the Treasury then?