The time for quiet diplomacy has passed.

I am not referring to Zimbabwe but to the Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group, or more particularly their website.

When I resumed activity with the Grads a couple of years ago I looked at their site and found it insipid, devoid of interesting content and seldom bang up to date. Look at it today and plus ça change.

Last winter there was some discussion of what improvements might be made to the site. To his credit much of this discussion was initiated by the webmaster. A number of ideas were put forward and I volunteered to take the thing over (him being a busy man and all that) or at the least to lend a hand.

Since then polite reminders from time to time have failed to produce progress despite the webmaster’s declaration that he lacked neither time nor inclination to maintain the site nor has he made it possible for me (or anyone else) to take on maintenance and development.

Again plus ça change, and I had reconciled myself to taking the matter up again on my return to Edinburgh in October. But the straw which has broken this camel’s back, incensed it into a spitting fury and really given it the hump is the discovery a few days ago of this text on the opening page.

“There are currently no plays on our list at the moment. Please try again later.”

Text put there by a man who was at the same time holding auditions for a production of Twelfth Night which he is directing in October. A webmaster who has so little interest in his website or belief that it can do anything for him that he can’t even be bothered to use it to recruit for or publicise his own show. C’est du jamais vu!

You may wonder that someone who can use “currently” and “at the moment” in the same sentence in this way should be entrusted with a Shakespearean text but that’s a different can of worms.

Anyway in the course of a few hours on Friday morning I set up the beginnings of a replacement website and have asked the committee to take steps to at the very least establish a link to it from the existing site.

Our website is our shop window. The display should entice people in, either as bums on seats or as participants in our activities. If you see an empty shop window do you bother coming back in the hopes of seeing a display later when there are other shops in the same street selling the same product and whose windows are bung full of goodies?

I rest my case.