Doom-mongers would prefer the island to return to its past

What has caused this great consternation, you may well ask?

The intended proposal to raise the population of this island by approximately 300 people to be able to offer the services the island needs.

After all we have a situation where

there are almost 3,000 vacancies and

less than 200 people to fill the positions

available.

To raise the level of the population will lead to it becoming a Channel version of Hong Kong. Perhaps we will become part of the Chinese mainland as well.

I would imagine that the doom-mongers would prefer the island to return to its glorious and noble past.

All transport to revert to animal power, horses, oxen and donkeys. Removing cars and vans from the roads will cut down on pollution.

Perhaps we could return to travelling from St Peter Port to St Sampson’s by tram, which should not cost too much as some of the lines are still beneath the tarmac, and the added plus is that trams can be run by nuclear power provided from France.

I wonder if the German Occupation Museum has the plans for the lines of the railways which were constructed between 1940-1944?

We could rebuild this form of travel, cutting the amount of traffic clogging up the roads.

Animal-powered transport would also give us a large quantity of manure which could be used to grow wattle, thereby allowing the building industry to construct the time-honoured wattle and daub buildings which Guernsey must have been covered in, in times past.

Having said all this, some things have to change. DIY appendectomy is not a very sterile task, and pulling out teeth in the home environment with pliers only seems to happen within deprived areas of the UK.

And while if a shop closes down due to a lack of staff we can resort to online purchasing, there are some situations which need the human touch. I can cite one example at the Post Office counter in a well-known supermarket in the Rohais when the staff consisted of a young man not long out of his teens having to deal with some complex issue with a line of people waiting.

As that old prophetess of doom Senna the Soothsayer in Up Pompeii! was want to say, ‘Woe, woe and thrice woe, the time has come, the end is here’.

JON RIVEN