Get off those chairs and clean up Galle’s glorious gentle giant

What does it take the authorities to employ a few hedge cutters to clean up Galle Fort?

I wish to support Mr. Fernando’s (The Sunday Times, 4.2.07) call to restore the Fort’s unique and magnificent heritage. Anyone who has spent a few days here cannot but fall in love with this sleepy, gentle giant that kept even the ferocious Tsunami at bay. And all this easily achieved if only the chair-warmers can be moved to acton. Cut the weeds, chop off the unwanted coconut trees near the gents’ sea-bath, ban heavy vehicles inside the fort thus saving the innovative drainage system and also eliminating mosquitoes. No cycles or mobikes on the ramparts and hey presto the glory days will be here!

Can we please have the Army release that stretch of the ramparts it now occupies. For a fraction of the cost that various officials are spending doing and re-doing the Galle Face Green and Independence Square for the chosen people of Colombo, the Army here can be provided with an Ammo dump elsewhere in Galle.

Those glory days? Men and women, young and old taking leisurely walks, schoolchildren and tiny tots flitting about accompanied by lissom lasses (the Abbots as we called them) and ogled by us young men, the sea flushing that drain twice a day and not a mosquito in sight, the dungeons for us to puff our first cigarettes furtively in and play cowboys and crooks too, night time gossip by the elders on the numerous steps and benches on the ramparts and if wishes were horses the roads washed twice a day which my uncle swears to.

By L.M. Marzook, Galle.