GIVEN the wonders of the internet, where I’m slowly learning that you can key in a couple of words about a problem, press a button and lo and behold, as happened to me the other day, you get a couple of million answers to your problem in, as the machine told me, precisely 0.8 seconds flat.

The trouble is that among those two million responses you will get views so diverse and statistics so contradictory that you’d probably have been better informed by hopping on a bus, going into the metropolis and spending a worthwhile hour or two at the Public Library.

Of course, if you’ve got a particular axe to grind, or even just a hobby-horse, the internet is like manna from heaven. As sure as little green apples grow on trees and man was given the wit to turn them into a useful commodity such as calvados, you are certain to find among your two million responses some information and/or statistics that dovetail very neatly with your point of view.

Indeed, although I’ve not looked, you may well find some pretty convincing arguments in relation to, for example, the view that the earth is flat or that the television pictures showing Neil Armstrong having a walk on the Moon in June 1969 were actually taken in a desert in the United States or the Australian outback.

One for whom the wealth of information available on the internet is useful may well be long-time anti-seat-belt campaigner Paul Tomlinson, who has been a steadfast and vociferous critic of the compulsory wearing of seat belts since he was in short trousers, although whether that dates back to his days as a schoolboy or those as a football referee only he knows.

Mr Tomlinson said in a recent letter that whiplash was a major problem in accidents and ‘is usually caused by the belt stopping forward motion and then jerking the restrained person backwards’.

I’m no expert on these matters, but I probably wouldn’t argue with that comment, insofar as it goes. However, what Mr Tomlinson fails to tell us is what sort of injuries might be incurred if the seat belt didn’t stop the forward motion, but instead the person continued going forward.

In this simple country boy’s view, that forward motion would be likely to continue until something other than the restraining influence of a belt stopped it. There are no prizes for guessing that in some cases the stopping agent would either be the steering wheel or the windscreen.

In those cases, a whiplash injury, serious as it might be, could well be the far lesser of two evils.

In the past year or so there have been a number of extremely serious road accidents involving some equally serious injuries. I make no reference to any in particular, and have no wish to cause further distress to the injured or their families, but it would be interesting if, in the fullness of time and at appropriate hearings, the authorities disclosed whether seat belts were being worn in any of these cases.

I started wearing a seat belt on every single journey after reading of the tragic death of a young person who was not wearing a seat belt, whereas his front-seat passenger – who was belted up – survived with relatively minor injuries.
That evidence was enough to convince me and would also, I strongly suspect, convince many others.

I still find it difficult to believe that in order for those people (not me, that’s for sure) who find themselves wanting a taxi at the Weighbridge on Friday and Saturday nights to queue in relative safety, someone has to get out a begging bowl for the marshal scheme to continue to be financed.

Indeed, I could be forgiven for thinking that the safety of the public at large in a well-lit area of this Island’s capital is now dependent upon charity, because that’s certainly what it looks like from where I sit in The Shed.

I read the other week that the service costs about £22,000 a year, and those non-government entities who have agreed to finance it for the rest of this year deserve the community’s thanks for their generosity.

But what amazed me was that St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft now intends to take the hat around asking his 11 parochial colleagues to chip in to cover precisely one quarter of the total cost – a stonking great one hundred and five quid a week, not each, but between the 12 parishes.

Averaged out, and including a ten per cent tip, that’s less than a tenner a week for each parish to contribute towards their parishioners being able to get a taxi home on Friday and Saturday evenings.

I’d have thought that there’s enough in the slush funds in every parish hall to finance the whole scheme on a permanent basis.

Of course, there is an alternative, and it could also involve all the parishes. What’s wrong with using the honorary police? After all, having a presence in an area known for public disorder is a policing matter, and there would be nothing wrong with officers from the 12 honorary police forces being appointed on a rota basis, with those with the largest populations providing most of them. That really would be community policing.

People of my generation – and others too, in all probability – just find it terribly sad that we and those we elect to represent us blithely accept that such dangerous disorder exists in St Helier and everyone seems satisfied, yet again, to attack the symptoms rather than the cause.

AND finally . . . That was a nice, sensible letter from Dick Turpin, suggesting that parents should take responsibility for ensuring that their brats are given milk each day. The trouble is, where are the usual suspects in the Big House going to find an equally vote-catching hobby horse?