Laughing All the Way to the Euro

As time does not allow, I shall not be able to blog as I would wish today. Not wanting to leave the day's spot empty, however, I shall yield the space to a rib-tickling corker appearing in letter pages of The Times today. Like Victor J. de Bono, whose impertinence has so angered the internee fan club, Paul Sant Cassia lives in England, or in Cambridge to be exact. He has the temerity to poke fun at the Maltese from his English perch, where he is probably studying Gay Studies, or something similarly immoral and unChristian. Sadly for him, the United Kingdom has not adopted the Euro, so his currency-based wit must be shamefully unused in those parts. Gratefully, he has generously obliged to endow the men and fishwives of Malta with his ribald largesse:

Here are my tongue-in-cheek suggestions for the euro designs, which may not make me very popular:

¤ The Erica decorating the Brittany coast

¤ A white taxi crawling along on the inner lane

¤ A Pisanello-type relief of a bus driver

¤ The recently resurfaced road to Castille as a contemporary cart-rut

¤ The Sliema Front as a World Heritage Site for our contribution to world architecture

¤ A slim child to represent that we have the greatest percentage of obese children in Europe

¤ The fish farms that mysteriously never make it on to the tourist brochures conceived by the ever-changing Malta Tourism Authority

¤ The Dockyards as an example of our contribution to European research investment

¤ Some elegantly attired youths in Paceville gazing philosophically at some auto-generated effluent on the ground

Readers will have their own suggestions. We have a rich repertoire to draw upon, and we should not be ashamed to propose them.

Chortle, chortle.