AS FAR as I can see, every week brings us a new racket, and the unfortunate auditor general is constantly being overworked.

It would be a waste of time for me to deal with all the details. Nonetheless, when I read that payments totalling $26 million were made to a company for pre-fabricated panels which were never put into operation, it is quite baffling to understand how something like that could happen.

It is also disclosed that the employment of 69 persons was authorised, but nearly 135 people were in fact taken on. There are dozens of examples of this kind, but one or two in particular really bugged me. The Ministry of National Security and Justice owes over $42 million for 1998-1999 telephone charges. I simply fail to understand how any group of people could fit in that number of telephone calls in one year.

The biggest problem of all, however, is Air Jamaica's non-payment of stamp duty to the Government totalling $400 million. I assume that the other airlines owe similar amounts. As I wouldn't like my friend 'Butch' to come to any harm, would it not be possible to just lock up two other directors until the bills are paid? One need not be harsh. Surely just a brief and gentle applied incarceration would be enough to produce the needed stamp duties.

This brings me to another matter which, for the moment, does not specially concern the auditor general. This concerns the huge amount of money constantly owed as a result of GCT. The money owing here is a duty owed on goods, and therefore the property of the Government and not of individual merchants. For this reason I am of the opinion that when merchants owe GCT, they are using other peoples' money improperly and I can't help feeling that this amounts, in effect, to stolen goods. I think it will do a lot of people a lot of good if they were regularly locked up until their payments were made. The amount of irregularities seems to be crying out for some very rigid penalties.

Doctors and quacks

The very heading of this column can cause some pretty quarrels. You can contrast doctors with quacks, or you can talk of orthodox pharmaceuticals vs alternative medicines. There is no end to the rows people can have over "genuine" drugs and herbs.

Working class English women have for long used the old adage "a little of what you fancy does you good". I regard this as one of the great truths of the world. The fact is that whichever way one turns, one is faced with the reality that "a little bit of what you fancy" can range in curative value from the most potent pharmaceuticals to herbs to faith healing and even to not very respectable obeah.

We are currently disturbing ourselves over wide discussions as to the effectiveness of everything that you can think of that can come under the heading of alternative medicine; of staring at somebody fixedly with the eyes, or rubbing one's feet, or the miracles of Lourdes. And today in America there is even a highly scientific discussion going on about the effectiveness of placebos (harmless mixtures of sugar and water) as cures.

Two things only seem reasonably certain. One is the enormous natural healing power of human and other organisms; the "vis medicatrix naturae". The other is the undoubted curative effects of modern surgical interventions. Surgical interventions can mean countless things from the mending of a broken leg to the removal of a vermiform appendix about to rupture. Of these there is no room for doubt. For the rest, it comes back to the charwomen's adage concerning "a little bit of what you fancy".

The current brouhaha concerning quacks and doctors can therefore be seen as largely a sham fight. Do orthodox medicines, or herbs, or alternatives including faith and placebos really "work"? With the exception of the two factors that I have mentioned above, the only proper answer is, it "depends". They all do, sometimes.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Another minor fuss is that concerning the religious group known as Jehovah's Witnesses. Very many years ago in Jamaica, a small group of Jehovah's Witnesses kept me and many others supplied with a little machine, (so remote in time), called a gramophone. It tracked a revolving disc with a thing called the gramophone needle, now so deep in the past as to be virtually forgotten.

The disc revolved by clockwork, briefly wound up before it ran down. It revealed the rather cracked voice of one Judge Rutterford, a noted prophet much in demand from the faithful.

Every now and again the Witnesses would appear at my home to play to me these prophesies. These were usually very detailed and over the years the worthy Judge would predict the end of the world with great precision. Alas, he was wrong at least on three occasions which involved necessary revision.

This used to delight me. So much so that I wrote quite a long satire concerning the Witnesses which my old friend the late Teddy Fairclough published in the magazine Public Opinion, both of which are now as out of date as gramophone needles.

A strange thing happened. The Jehovah's Witnesses, mistaking satire for praise, had no less than 400 copies of Public Opinion reprinted for distribution to the faithful much to Mr. Fairclough's amusement. We had both mistaken Armageddon for serious business.

I don't know whether the good Judge Rutterford or his successors are still prophesying the end of the world with such splendid precision. We may, however, be sure that sooner or later his prophesy will come true, even though we may have to wait many millions of years for the sun to cool, and for every gramophone needle in the world to wear itself away.

Incidentally, talking of things long departed, it was my friend Mr. Fairclough who first encouraged my belief in socialism and induced me to write my first column for Public Opinion under the heading of "Through the looking glass", a caption which, I regret to say, a colleague of mine subsequently pinched.

Gramophones and socialism have now long been replaced by computers and the Internet, both of which I find increasingly obscure. I suppose the truth is that with increasing age gramophone needles as well as the Internet will both in their time have worn away to be replaced by new technologies which passeth all understanding.