THE VIEW FROM HERETHE council is setting a fine example in austerity, with cost-cutting exercises all the rage at County Hall. The coffee and tea budget has been slashed.
There will be no chairman’s party during Cowes Week. The expensive black car used on swanky occasions has been replaced by — no, forget that one.
Anyway, expensive black cars notwithstanding, the council is doing extremely well and should certainly be commended on its economy celebration after the recent annual meeting.
Normally, the inauguration of a chairman and all the accompanying frippery, not to mention the presence of such excitingly grand people as the Island’s Lord Lieutenant and High Sheriff, is cause for mountains of canapes to be wheeled out, with no expense spared on sausage rolls, asparagus titbits and those nice little eggy sandwiches.
The meeting itself showed the council to be well in control of recycling. Normally, a new chairman is elected each year but this time they just recycled the old one and dusted Cllr Arthur Taylor down for another stint. With frugality thus the order of the day, maybe the post-meeting bash would be scrapped?
Not entirely. I suspect it was ultimately thought unwise, after subjecting the guests to two hours of council minutiae, to boot them out without some sustenance. A mass collapse of IW grandees suffering from terminal boredom, unrelieved by even a glug of plonk, would not have looked good.
Thrifty measures, however, had been put in place. There was wine, although this may have been for remedial purposes only.
But the centrepiece of the buffet table were quantities of Twix bars, arranged really quite artistically and definitely making a statement.
"We Twix Bars" they seemed to say, "are the symbolic new face of the council. Neatly packaged, crisp and cheerful and jolly cheap. OK, we haven’t the faintest idea how to run the Island’s schools but most people still quite like us."
We must all keep an eye on the Twix. It is obviously the council’s current economic benchmark in the same way the price of a Mars Bar correlates directly with the value of the pound. But a Mars Bar is slightly more expensive than Twix, which further demonstrates the council’s prudence in these recessionary times.
Asparagus is definitely out but we still can’t risk a Mars Bar.
If the Ferrero Rocher appear at the next council bash, we’ll know they’ve got on top of their budget and we can all breathe easier.
But if you spot the chairman being chauffeured down to the sweetie shop for 50gms of midget gems, there will be nothing to look forward to except swingeing rises in our council tax.
Preferred to just what, exactly?
IT started off as a niggle. Now I am obsessed. When I first saw the advertisement by the coffee shop in Tesco’s, it struck me as odd. "Seven out of ten coffee lovers prefer Costa."
We know what Costa want us to think. Offered a choice of coffee, most people would plump for theirs. But the wording is ambiguous, begging the question, "What was the choice?"
What exactly were these coffee lovers asked? "Would you rather have a cup of Costa or a cup of wallpaper paste?"
"Would you prefer Costa or a punch in the nose?"
Allowing for glue addicts and masochists, it seems very likely the results will prove that seven out of ten coffee lovers prefer Costa.
In my search for the truth, I may be unable to resist defacing the Costa advertisement by writing "To what?" underneath it.
Marketeers should always beware of equivocation. One campaign proudly advertised "Eight out of ten people write with a Biro."
Their message was ruined when some wit added: "What do the other two do with it?"