Bolshire little crapauds like me would like classes on a sort of GCSE course on Jersey

Much the same can be said about at least one of that lot in the Big House – perhaps the less said about him and his mum the better – although the way I hear some of them behaving when I listen in on the wireless I could be forgiven for thinking I was tuned in to an unsupervised nursery school.

However, it jolted me a bit – not enough to make me choke on the Calvados but it wasn’t far off – last weekend when I saw the picture of the new occupants of the guest house on St Saviour’s Hill. With no disrespect to previous incumbents of Government House, the last half dozen or so of whom have made many of us realise how good the selection procedure seems to be, this bloke and his version of Herself look like the children of some of the earlier ones I can remember.

But, like I said last week when it dawned on me that although she looked positively ancient to me at the time, my old granny was considerably younger in my earliest memories of her than I am now.

Sir John and Lady McColl move in to the guest house next week and if what he had to say when interviewed is anything to go by, he seems like a decent enough bloke. The one thing I liked about what he said is that someone has clearly told him that when referring to Jersey, you don’t live on it, you live ‘in’ it, in exactly the same way as if you live in Melbourne you live ‘in’ Australia.

If we could turn the clock back to those halcyon days when we had money coming out of our ears, bolshie little crapauds like me would wholeheartedly support a publicly funded series of evening classes to induct newcomers – and particularly those in the upper echelons of people employed by that lot in the Big House and in the finance industry – in a sort of GCSE course on Jersey.

We’re not beans – that’s a derogatory term invented by imports in the construction industry – we’re crapauds and, as I keep repeating, we live in the place, not on it! I remember the last time I referred to ‘beans’ and this bloke wrote in saying that it had become part and parcel of the language and old fools like me should learn to accept it.

Not long after that happened, I had a conversation with a young man who during our chat asked me a veritable barrel full of questions. After each and every response, he said ‘cool’ and clearly didn’t discern that it was irritating me to a considerable degree. In the end I asked him why he was doing it and he gave me roughly the same reply as the bloke writing in about ‘bean’.

In that case, I replied, if it is now an integral part of the English language, why is it that you never see it in print or hear it when people are being interviewed on television or the wireless? As the aforementioned old granny used to say when she stumped me in a similar fashion all those years ago, ‘no answer’ was the stern reply.

Anyhow, all that said, I hope Sir John and Lady McColl have an enjoyable term of office during the next five years and leave the guest house and its garden in reasonable nick so that it can be enjoyed by their successors. Blimey, I’ve just realised that they haven’t even moved in yet.

I took Herself for a stroll the other afternoon along Rozel Harbour and most enjoyable it was too. While we were down there I looked for a waste bin in which to put a sweet wrapper and couldn’t for the life of me understand why she was sitting on a bollard pointing and laughing her head off at me.

After a swift check to ensure that all buttons and zips were in their proper places I realised that she was pointing not at me but at a notice on the toilet wall which, by way of explaining why I couldn’t find a receptacle for my sweet wrapper, urged me and everyone else to take our litter home.

To be honest, I had a quick look around, if the truth is known to find evidence that in this day and age such a policy was pointless but, to a combination of chagrin that my theory didn’t hold water and delight to be wrong, there wasn’t a sign of litter anywhere.

The notice emanated from the Harbour Department and full marks to whoever there adopted such a policy. Mind you, what works in the tranquil surroundings of that delightful little north coast harbour may not be so successful elsewhere, and particularly closer to the metropolis, where mindless morons wonder aimlessly looking for nothing more than making squalid nuisances of themselves.

Before I close, a tale to please every red-blooded (and, thinking of the Muratti, shirted) crapaud. When the row blew up over zero-10 tax, my mate in Guernsey bet me a tenner that we were wasting our time fighting our corner over here because the donkeys had made the right decision in scrapping that tax over there.

Suffice to say that the other evening he all but grovelled on the phone.

And finally,

Rarely have I seen a more sensible and well constructed argument as that put in the letter from Kim Hanson and Lyndsey Evans on the issue of working mums being blamed for child obesity. Without wishing to sound patronising – and I am certainly not that – every single thing they said was precisely to the point.