Guernsey has got a cheek just thinking about the idea of taking our Occupation guns

In many respects, Senator Terry Le Main and the Guernsey donkeys are similar in that very often their public utterances and activities lend themselves – perhaps ‘do little to avoid’ might be a better way of putting it – to the sort of observations others occasionally make about them.

Enough has been said about the longest-serving States Member and his reaction to criticism of when he takes his holidays, but there has been precious little reaction to the dastardly plot being hatched in the colonies to swipe a couple of our guns.

Usually, this bolshie little crapaud treats our Guernsey cousins with a measure of indulgence, a bit like families do with the uncle who likes a wet and treats birthday and Christmas gatherings as an opportunity to play footsie under the meal table with increasingly red-faced (but sometimes grateful, I suspect) female family members.

Occasionally I highlight some of the quirkier aspects of life in Guernland – like ending conversations with an infuriating ‘cheerie’, an apparent inability to pronounce words like love and dove properly, making them sound like rove or drove, an almost insatiable urge to spend at least some time each week watching the bacon slicer at the Co-op for a bit of excitement, and of course not believing that their education is complete unless they have attended Highlands College for a crash course on negotiating revolving doors and getting on and off escalators.

In addition, it’s always easy to spot them in big cities in the UK – they’re the ones who leave their hotel in the morning, look up at a misty sky and then ask the first person they come across if the papers are in.

Now, it appears, in addition to trying to get their grubby little mitts on every piece of sporting silverware they can, they want some idiot in the British armed forces to lend them a Chinook helicopter (as you do) to hoist two rusting guns from the foot of the cliffs at Grosnez (our Grosnez rather than their somewhat inferior model, I hasten to add), where they’ve lain undisturbed other than by nature’s formidable power since 1946, for heaven’s sake, and spirit them across the water to the land of the donkeys.

Setting aside for a minute that what I’ve read and heard about military equipment recently suggests that the forces have a more pressing need for such bits of kit (and besides, the only extra-curricular duties they can be used for is picking up one’s bit of stuff for a bit of skite if one’s daddy owns a big London cricket ground and nine-tenths of Cornwall and one’s granny is the Queen), I reckon they’ve got a cheek just thinking about the idea.

I was impressed by the letter from the Jersey Rock Climbing Club which alerted us to this act of aggression, which while perhaps falling just a trifle short of an invasion, would certainly warrant calling out the Militia if it were not for the fact that some of those brave souls in our Territorial Army unit are, as I understand it, up to their eyes in muck and bullets in Afghanistan – an observation which, despite the arguably light-hearted tone of the remainder of this column I make with sincere admiration, respect and thanks in equal measures.

According to the rock climbers, it appears that the Guernsey crowd are interested because allegedly two of the guns are claimed to be theirs. This is a dubious assertion given that most of the Guerns I know have a job remembering where they live after just two sniffs of a calvados cork, never mind actually drinking a drop. So how on earth any of them can remember dropping a couple of large guns as long ago as 64 years next month really does take some believing.

Personally, I’d make them prove ownership before letting any of them get off the mailboat. An authenticated certificate of receipt from the Guernsey authorities to the Germans at the end of the Occupation is the sort of thing I’ve got in mind.

I MOVE from one ancient relic to another, and focus on the news that those trapped in a Neolithic time warp – otherwise known as the hierarchy of what used to be the eminently realistic and sensible Transport and General Workers Union – are saying that some of their members are absolutely distraught at government plans to cut spending.

They argue that the plans to knock a million quid a week off public spending by 2012 will lead to ‘massive job cuts in the public sector’.

Can I be the only person whose reaction might be summed up by ‘too damned right, pal’?

A monkey on a stick could make a case for not cutting manpower or services in certain areas, but surely no one – not even Unite’s Nick Corbel – has the nerve to suggest that everyone in the States workforce is fully and productively employed all the time because even members of that workforce admit privately that it’s not true.

I can remember watching Lord Liron of Fauvic leading a couple of marches about certain important issues. Hold one today, Mr Corbel, and it will be called walking with dinosaurs.

AND finally . . . for those who weren’t here or don’t know anyone who was, Liberation Day was 9 May 1945. I am old enough to remember it and I don’t need a day off to do so, certainly not an ‘extra’ day just because the ninth of May happens to fall on a certain day of the week.