At last, a volunteer! Your post’s normally been filled by a lightweight with obscure credentials, whom nobody knew what to do with, placed where what he did didn’t really matter. What a contrast with Classical Athens, where beauty and the arts were held in high esteem. Myriads of paintings adorned the walls of buildings and interiors were filled with beautiful craftwork. There was plenty of business for artists and performers, as well as jewellers, metalworkers, potters and other artisans – rather than sellers of consumer dross.

Your only problem will be deciding where to start – although separating religion and culture might be a good place. Our great festivals were dedicated to the gods but that’s where the religious stuff started and ended. They were honoured by original works, not pale imitations of dances from other times and other places, and free of religiosity. Aristophanes’ plays are full of satirical comments on current affairs and the great tragedians wrote of great human struggles and emotions.

Instead, we hear of nothing but ancestral values. How insensitive is that towards the large chunk of the population that was torn from its roots? State money’s poured into religious observances, encouraging sectarianism and national disunity. Besides, one of the most beautiful aspects of the recent pilgrimage is how families and friends join together to feed and water passing pilgrims – at their own expense. If the government wants to spend money on the past, it could show respect for people’s forebears by maintaining all the islands’ cemeteries, so full of history. But presumably there’s little chance of that – as the residents have long been disenfranchised.

Hopefully, your first priorities will be to restore the Plaza and Port-Louis theatres, disgracefully neglected for so long. Obscure forces don’t seem to have noticed that their narrow rear-view mirrors are full of several blind spots. As for other beautiful old buildings, large and small, they need preserving now – for the sake of future generations, not to mention hordes of tourists.

Of course, you also need to build an outdoor stadium for plays and concerts. You might do worse than stroll around Epidavros, where plays are still performed more than 2,000 years after the theatre was built. It might inspire you to think of other ways to support artists, like buying works to display in public offices here and abroad. The brilliant thinking of your predecessor was limited to insectariums and segatoriums. How about a dinosaurium instead? Lots of suggestions would be forthcoming for the exhibits – including half your staff.

You could retain five of them to sit on the latest incarnation of an Arts Council – although the chances of it operating impartially are as great as snails becoming Britain’s national dish. By the way, why do top functionaries get paid extra to sit on boards in office time? They’d do better to retrieve the Creative Mauritius White Paper from the loo. Meanwhile, you might wield a French policeman’s truncheon up the MBC’s backside as there’s masses they could do, if there were any imagination at the top. They’ll probably stick to soap operas instead, full of internecine warfare. How much better if they were to commission Aristophanes to write some new plays. He’s already finished The Duck of New York, a 140-word farce, and is now working on Don’t Badine with me, a tragi-comedy – rather short so far as the protagonist fainted at the beginning of Act I.

Yours sincerely,

Epi PHRON