GENERALLY speaking, I have little sympathy with those who break the law, but having read last week that about 50 motorists had been fined for failing to heed a No Entry sign near Marks & Spencer in St Clement – nice little earner, Mr Constable, which should help keep the rates down and ensure re-election – I seriously question the attitude of parish officials in this particular case.

I know nothing other than what I read. I readily admit that I haven’t been to look for myself, but that would add nothing to the point I make. It seems to me that warning some drivers way back in November and then taking a nice few quid off some others (who’s to say those fined had previously been warned?) the following month hardly qualifies for a principal function of policing, which is preventing offences being committed.

When they saw that there was clearly a problem at the junction and that some drivers were either not seeing the No Entry sign or ignoring it – enough of a problem to warrant having an honorary police officer on duty warning drivers – why on earth didn’t the parish give some publicity to what was going on and warn people that future breaches of the law would render drivers liable to having seventy-five quid legally lifted from their wallets?

A simple press release to all the Island’s media outlets would have taken about ten minutes to prepare and send out, and would have saved a lot of people unwittingly (it seems to me) breaking the law.

As it is, the parish is up to £3,750 to the good in exchange for a lot of disgruntled people. Hardly likely to get the community onside, I’d have thought.

IT was interesting to read of the appointment of the Channel Islands’ ‘man in Europe’ – Steve Williams, currently the British Ambassador to Bulgaria – and not only for the fact that at long last this place and Guernsey have actually agreed to do something together, other of course than start a fight in the car park after every Muratti.

What pleased me was that he said that he has a lot to learn about the two bailiwicks he will be representing in Brussels.

What a pleasant change from the attitude of others we have recruited from elsewhere who, in deed if not in word (although some make no secret of the fact) seem to think that their principal function once here is to tell us how much better it’s all done in the place whence they came.

With Herself’s valuable technical assistance (I’m learning, but at my age it’s a very slow process), I looked on the internet at an interview Mr Williams gave to a newspaper in Bulgaria in which he said that when he met that country’s Prime Minister, they conversed in Bulgarian.

I’m not too sure what use that will be if Mr Williams is ever called upon to outline his task in a talk at St Ouen’s Parish Hall, or even at the Trinity one, always assuming that by then they’ll have the electric out there so he’ll be able to see his notes if the candle blows out, but it does display an encouraging attitude towards his job.

I rather fancy that all his undoubted skills as a diplomat – he has worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for almost 30 years which, by the look of his picture, is probably all his working life – will be devoted to getting this place and Guernsey to sing from the same hymn sheet, because without that prerequisite he is wasting his time and our money.

I wish him all the luck in the world. He is going to need every bit of it.

I CAN’T say that I was greatly surprised by a majority of that lot in the Big House deciding that if anyone’s seat goes – and the better part of the nine hundred notes a week in a little brown envelope dished out every Friday lunchtime that goes with it – it shouldn’t be those elected by a couple of handfuls of names on a nomination paper or, at best, a few hundred votes in a parish or district election.
Indeed, some of those at the forefront of the ‘Not my seat but theirs over there’ campaign have been firmly rejected by the voters in the election for Senators, but turkeys are hardly likely to vote for Christmas, are they?

Apart from the fact that the usual suspects can’t have their two bites at the cherry now – get my name in the paper a dozen times doing the rounds of the parish halls and I’ll be well known enough to land a seat in an apathetic district – what seems ironic to me is that some of them have got the nerve to accuse others of self-interest.

In all the years I’ve been reading about and listening to happenings in the Big House, I doubt very much that I’ve seen a more blatant expression of self-interest than that witnessed in this debate.

Come the revolution I’ll be standing for Home Secretary and there will be very few sentences commuted to life imprisonment, that’s for sure.

I LIKED the recent letter to this newspaper from Roger Bale about putting a casino out at Elizabeth Castle, or even where it was originally suggested when the idea was first mooted almost half a century ago, at Fort Regent.
The trouble is, Mr Bale, that even if the biscuit tin under Philip Ozouf’s bed was down to its last few quid, the ‘We know what’s good for you’ brigade would stop it.

AND finally … I was saddened to read of the death of Bob Tilling. There can be very few people who contributed so much, and so willingly and enthusiastically, to the arts in its broadest sense in this community than he did. Even when talking with philistines like me, he sought always to persuade rather than dictate, and always did everything with a smile.