Letters from Emile get right to the point
NEIL ROSS’S brilliant Letters from Emile are such a tonic. Right to the point, wrapped in gentle satire. I don’t know about ‘bloney hallucinations’ though, Neil, more like ‘bloney dystopian nightmares’. My sister and I both thought, good job we’ll be dead before any more ‘folies de grandeur’ materialise. I really don’t understand some newcomers to the island. They check us out, presumably, and are nothing but complimentary about our beautiful island. A gem of the sea they’re proud to live on.
The next thing we know, they are promulgating yet more building, on our already built up island.
Do they get bored, or wish they were back home with all the attendant facilities and amenities? We can’t be all things to all men, we’ve only got finite space. If it suited people to relocate, why change it? Maybe we should go the whole hog and start building vertically? We could build a replica of the Burj (Dubai), or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? That would bring the tourists in. Oh sorry – they can’t get in when they want to, can they? Strange that the powers that be can flog off Guernsey’s prime coastline, but they can’t show a degree of empathy to our own, and his little daughter, to enhance his own property.Well, it started with Fort George many moons ago didn’t it, plus ca change... My last vote was on the referendum, but I won’t be voting again.
Like me, some of our honest, trusted and democratically elected Assembly representatives seem to have had enough too, and who can blame them? I’m sure we won’t be in a minority. IWV isn’t going to solve anything, anybody with any ‘nous’ can see that.
It will just be another layer of (costly) bureaucracy, the mixture as before, only with a plethora of disparate ‘wannabes’, an ‘embarrassment of electoral choices’.
Luckily we aren’t as green as we’re cabbage-looking.
We can suss out the empire builders, the blue eyed boys, and the visionaries (not) and deplore the splits, IAs, 20/20s, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. It will be the same old, same old – only worse.
JILL MARTEL
8, Courtil Jacques
Burnt Lane
St Martin’s