SITTING in The Shed the other afternoon, having just read that there are no nasties at the old abattoir site (I haven’t yet visited what has replaced it, so I’m not too sure how to describe it), my mind wondered to how Rhianna Hughes, who gave that comforting news, can be usefully employed in the future.

Then I read the piece again and established that Ms Hughes wasn’t paid for what she did. As one of the online commentators put it, she really missed a trick there because she could have slapped a six-figure consultancy fee in to that lot in the Big House.

After all, if the sum is less than a million, it seems that these days all the authorisation such an amount needs are the signatures of two cleaning ladies, a traffic warden and the paw mark of the office cat on the claim form and it would have been paid without question.

Of course, those to whom my somewhat wild comments actually matter will probably get the hump again and tell me that they are all doing their best and I shouldn’t keep knocking them.

Quite so, quite so, but instead of walking up and down the corridors of power on Tuesday mornings complaining about what they read in the previous day’s JEP, they should use part of their morning tea break to think seriously about why people like me write what we do.

Just to get their brains from first to second gear – on the basis that for some of them I suspect that morning tea breaks are a bit early in the day to get them to think seriously about anything – might I suggest that they step back a mite from their close involvement in matters of government and reflect upon how their actions, statements and decisions are viewed by the great unwashed who actually foot the bills.

If they carry out this exercise properly, some of them will come to realise that the collective standing in the eyes of the community at large of virtually the whole of the public sector, both elected and appointed (which means States Members and their hired help), has never been lower in my lifetime.

I know that there are good and sincere (and hard-working) people in both groups, but my goodness there are some time wasters also. As to Ms Hughes’s talents and how best they can be used, might I suggest that she sits in the public gallery of the Big House for a few sessions, scrunches up her herbs in her hands and sprinkles them from the cocktail shelf on to the seemingly rudderless crew down below.

Whether she’ll come to the same conclusion she came to at the former abattoir – ‘There’s nothing bad down there’ – is open to debate, but heaven knows, with the mess they are in, that lot in there could do with all the help they can get.

IT’S nice to know that our globe-trotting Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf – he’s got more stamps in his passport than I’ve got empty calvados bottles in The Shed – had enough time on his hands to persuade the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, one Sheik Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nayhan (who’s probably got a bank balance to match his important-sounding titles) that competing against St Ouen, Trinity and St Brelade in the Battle of Flowers might just be the sort of thing to foster good relations with the citizens of, er, St Ouen, Trinity and St Brelade.

I admit to having a sinking feeling when I read that we seem to be contemplating doing a bit of business with any less than fully democratic (as we know it) country in that neck of the woods, but as we all ought to know by now, our elected representatives tell us that they know what they are doing – to the point, it seems, of getting the bus to India, via the Le Vesconte Memorial in Trinity, no doubt, and finding out when they get there that not everyone has the same hymn sheet from which to sing and that therefore choir practice is cancelled for this week.

However, we do have the comforting thought with regard to foreign entries in the Battle of Flowers that there is a precedent. In the 1960s – I’m already humming Volare and O Sole Mio – the Italian town of San Remo took part, and their entry was well received.

Mind you, even with the minor local difficulties that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi finds himself in from time to time, it’s an awfully long way between Italy and Abu Dhabi in terms of who we get into bed with, so to speak, and all the other things that are important in these matters.

We should tread very carefully indeed and not always be tempted to worship at the golden altar of money.

WHILE I agree with the decision to scrutinise the board nominees of the all-singing, all-dancing Jersey Development Company – a new quango to replace an older one, it seems to me – I am intrigued that a number of that lot in the Big House said that they had ‘serious concerns’ about the appointments but
refused to disclose why.

Those Members remind me of the spineless individuals who tell you that they’ve heard all sorts of nasty things about you but then refuse to tell you what they are and who said them.

I don’t know what powers these Scrutiny committees have, but if I were a member of the one looking at this issue, I would insist on calling all those who expressed those ‘serious concerns’ and demand some totally honest answers to some very straight questions.

AND finally …. Many thanks to Mac for his online comment that last week I had said Joseph Salk
produced the polio vaccine when it was Jonas Salk. As to the ‘slurring’ bit, I was sober enough to recall who opened the nurses’ home, and when!