I'M getting a bit fed up of being ignored.

Not only was I completely overlooked in the New Year's Honours List, again, passed over in the short list for a Pulitzer Prize, but this week I find I have not even been appointed to the board of the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Development Agency (RDA).

According to its latest jargon-dominated newsletter, grandly entitled 'A Shared Vision for Yorkshire and Humberside,' this latest addition to the plethora of grey-suited Quangos is to transform the two counties into a leading European region.

Pretty good stuff. More jobs, higher pay and brilliant education are on the way for Yorkshire and Humberside all courtesy of the RDA.

Among the problems needing to be addressed, says the newsletter, is the fact that 'Parts of the region are exceptionally rural.'

I could have come up with that one for a suitable stipend and I don't even have a GSCE in the patently obvious.

Apparently, the RDA board met for the first time before Christmas and made several 'key' decisions which included the setting up of sub-regional offices. I can hardly contain my excitement.

Not only do we have the RDA board and sub-regional offices they are also involved with the Rural Development Commission, Training and Enterprise Councils and five new 'Commissions' are to be created in spring.

As an exercise in job creation for men and women in grey suits, the RDA seems already to be snowballing and within a few years there will be millions of committees, agencies, commissions and boards all over the area like a rash, each spouting unintelligible 'business-speak' and slapping each other on the back.

On further examination of the newsletter I found that 'History was in the making.'

Turning excitedly to the article I discovered that members of the Board had actually decided something.

Was it how to create jobs, how to pay everyone higher wages or how to eliminate pockets of poverty and deprivation in the region I wondered heart in mouth.

Well no, surprisingly.

This particularly momentous decision was, brace yourselves, where the RDA should be based.

Most of the 170-strong (see how many jobs have been created already) RDA workforce will be based in Leeds, apparently ending months of speculation and uncertainty.

I know like me the whole population of Yorkshire and Humberside has been on the edge of their seats wondering where the RDA will be based.

In the true spirit of Quango efficiency, the RDA board have decided to choose an office which is not large enough for all of its staff so other offices in the region will have to be rented - guess whose paying for all this?

Yes, that's right you and me and all the other mugs.

They haven't decided where the offices will be yet but I suspect if they did that, there would be nothing else to do at the umpteen board meetings the RDA will be holding in the future.

We wouldn't want all those important people sat around twiddling their thumbs would we?

Because of my dismal failure to be awarded anything, ever, I have come to the conclusion that high office and glittering prizes have little to do with merit alone.

I think a spot of blackmail might do the trick. Unless I am quickly appointed to a RDA commission, board, chamber or committee or whatever with a 15-year two-day-a-week contract at £40,000-a-year, I shall denounce the whole RDA as a futile waste of tax-payers' money consisting of people who can't speak three sentences without confusing everyone listening and destined to improve the economic prospects of no-one but its own overpaid bureaucrats.

If I am appointed to the RDA I shall immediately pen an article announcing how excited I am to be joining a ground-breaking, rip-roaring, history-making catalyst for economic regeneration at the leading-edge of the high-tech creative innovation stake-holding, globalising, value-added blah-de-blah, blah-de-blah, blah-de-blah, blah-de-blah.................

l The views in this column are those of the author and not neccesarily the

newspaper.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.