The Cat with No Tail

There’s a blue sunny sky out there and the sun is bouncing off the water which is surprisingly calm after the hooley that blew most of the night. There’s a warship in the bay – it’s been there for a couple of days and this usually means that royalty is dropping in – perhaps the Duke of York for a ‘game of golf’.

The Isle of Man still has the Queen as it’s head of state but the island has it’s own Prime Minister and it’s own government – the longest surviving democratic government in the world (1,000 years of continuous parliament.) We listen to the English laws and if we don’t like them we don’t have them. We make our own laws. For instance, there’s no speed limit on roads in the countryside…bit of a daft rule it seems to me but lots of visitors come over every year during TT to race motorbikes at ridiculous speeds around normal roads. There are 70,000 inhabitants and this doubles during the TT fortnight – the place roars!

We don’t depend on Tourism any more to put coffers in the bank – we only get visitors really during the race weeks. The island runs a balanced budget and actually has a bit of a surplus built up. We have a triple A rating from Standard & Poors and this means that the Government here doesn’t tax us very much either. Our Ministers are spending all the time – we have a brand new hospital, laptops in nursery schools, and even the latest waste disposal system so apart from the weather which is usually wet and windy and the inconvenience of having to always take that extra flight to get anywhere warm and the fact that shopping is non-existent, it’s not a bad place to be. We were not born here so are not considered to be ‘Manx’ but as we’ve been here for longer than 10 years we are considered to be ‘stop overs’. ‘Left-overs’ is what you get in the shops…..

Must run as I have a massage arranged for this morning and then I’m off to get some of these long locks chopped off!