Pre-tax profits of nearly Lm38 million for 2005 were registered by HSBC. That does not just sound like a chunk of good news; it is good news - for the bank, for the government, which receives 35 per cent of that in tax, for investment, for investors, for loan-seekers. Deposits were up by six per cent and nudged an incredible Lm1.4 billion. Tie all this up with the fact that performance across the banking sector has been buoyant and we have just cause for being optimistic even as we allow some pessimistic thought to surface.
Advances and loans, which one assumes are negotiated after careful consideration by the bank, touched Lm1.02 billion, of which Lm344 million were loans on home purchases, an increase of 24 per cent on 2004. Are these home loans a form of financial crucifixion for those who take them out? Are they made in a context that allows the parties taking out those loans enough income to breathe reasonably freely when it comes to the management of other financial commitments? Or does payback haunt the debtor, in this case a home-owner with a roof and a price over his head?
Home or property ownership is three-quarters of the battle for the survival of democracy. The larger the size of the property-owning class the less chance there is of a government trampling on its people, of inroads being made by governments minded to shackle democratic rights. There is, however a flip side.
House owners need to beware the pitfall of falling victims not to a government but, to put it at its crudest, moneylenders. Useless, or pretty well useless, to own a property that hangs like a millstone round one's neck. Once it starts to descend a millstone has a tendency to drag other things down in its wake, like a home-life that cannot take the strain of a marriage stressed by payback instalments. Wise counsel by a responsible creditor to an about-to-be debtor must prevail by taking into account the ratio of the monthly instalments to the income of the borrower.
An older generation tended to err on the cautious side when it came to preparing the hearth. More often than not, couples thinking of establishing a home did not furnish every corner of it before they got married. Rather, they built it up slowly as and when their finances permitted. It gave them time and caused no financial stress on top of the other strains that are part and parcel of a marriage. I can see younger readers rolling their eyes heavenwards and asking if I'm for real. Well, yes, actually.
Education, education, education
This has been one of Mr Blair's swansongs. It is up to the British to decide whether he has delivered. He has not much time left. Our education minister has. If there can be no doubting his dedication it does no harm to ask ourselves a few questions about the standards that are being achieved or not being achieved.
We do not know the answers in any detail. The infrastructure of the schools themselves has been receiving tremendous attention, turning sometimes shabby buildings into pleasant ones. Some schools are being built from scratch, their construction light years ahead of what schools were like 30, 40 years ago. They are being made, overused as the expression may be, user friendly for students and teachers. The structural problem is, of course, never licked. There is always something to be done, a lick of paint here a lick of paint there, windows to repair, doors to maintain, lavatories to keep in good and hygienic order - all this in order to keep places of learning attractive.
But how well are we doing with the pupils who attend these centres of primary and secondary learning? As relevant, how well are the pupils doing? At the end of the various stages of education from kindergarten all the way to Sixth Form, how educated are the thousands of children on whom scores of millions of liri are spent in the hope that they can wrestle with the future? How well prepared? We rarely get to know.
Schools do not publish their O-level results for us to learn whether pupils from the Zejtun state school or the state school in any of the districts have performed adequately, inadequately, poorly or brilliantly. We have no idea of performance. We cannot gauge whether all that money has been wisely invested, whether the country is getting a suitable return, whether the standard of teaching is low, high or indifferent.
There is something of the closed shop about the system and it should not be like this at all. As taxpayers we are entitled to know more about the performance of teachers and pupils, where both lag behind, what their strengths and weaknesses are, what the success and failure ratios are.
I write all this because I come across young people who have finished their schooling, who have clearly done nothing of the sort, who are in employment and whose standard of communication, never mind articulation, is dreadful to experience. It is clear they left school untouched by the experience of an education at its most basic, never mind at its more meaningful definition and I wonder just how widespread this lacuna is.
I wonder, too, whether throughout their entire careers teachers are sent abroad to improve their methods of instruction, for example, whether they are re-skilled in the subjects they teach, whether they remain in the same school all their working lives? How bright or dull are they? How inspirational to the owners sitting at those desks, eyes glazed? How looked up to or looked down upon are they? How effective are the guardians of our young boys and girls? How professionally trained are they for their task? Bring back the Teachers' Training College.
One could agree with the cynic who wrote that "the chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught", but it will not take one far. Far better to agree with President John F. Kennedy, when in a message to Congress in 1961 he said: "Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education... The human mind is our fundamental resource". That must mean the human mind of the teacher and of the pupil - and the interaction between them.
Tyranny of death (1)
Reading through an essay on The Death of a Christian by the theologian Fr Schillebeeckx, one is struck by the profundity of his approach to the absurdity of death viewed in purely human terms, an absurdity that "never did exist in its own right, but only as drawn into the victory of Christ who overcame it". Biologically, he argues, death is an accident but in Christian faith 'we know that death is not a blind accident, or rather we know that this senseless accident is providentially caught up into God's plan of salvation'.
Recently I was privileged to attend at the Eucharistic Mass for the death of a Christian, my sister. The experience of her dying and the Mass was edifying; not so the tyranny that followed, a tyranny to which Schillebeeckx also makes reference in the concluding paragraph of his essay. Writing about the need for a funeral "to be a serenely solemn farewell to a loved one" he insists that "generous, genuine Christian manners are demanded" and adds: "True enough, one cannot brush aside all at once the tyrannous protocol of death imposed by the undertakers"; he calls for its "alteration".
There is a certain obscenity about what follows the priest's final prayers at the graveside in Malta, an obscenity that it is in our power to eliminate by a radical transformation of the way in which gravediggers fail to carry out their role. This role, it need hardly be added, directly affects the bereaved and the dignity of the dead person. It is all very well for the Mass to be conducted with due serene solemnity; the burial, too, requires a sacral approach during the final moments.
It is not the first time that I have made mention of the descent of the coffin, the manner of its descent in the hands of gravediggers who have no idea of what is expected of them and whose reactions when, as is often the case, a problem arises are nothing less than an insult to those assisting at the deposition.
In 2006 we have uniforms for postmen, bank clerks and higher grades, receptionists, occasionally even a glimpse of a uniform for some of our refuse collectors, but not for gravediggers. What they wear currently is an excuse for one, a grey jersey, no jacket and metres of rope to juggle, that is the precise word I think, the coffin through the grave's aperture. This operation is accompanied by much grunting and, inevitably the entire crew giving out directions.
Gravediggers in the pay of the government enjoy a monopoly in Malta. Nobody can be buried except through their services. There is a very strong case to be made for competition between the present lot, who do not deliver, and anybody minded to provide the service at a cost. It is alarming that in the 21st century the modus operandi at the grave remains firmly based in methods employed in the 19th.
What is to be done? If the ministry responsible for the proper conduct of a burial service has not the wit or the wherewithal to provide this, open the burial ceremony to the private sector so that those who do not wish to experience the tyrannies that characterise the present masquerade may avail themselves of such a service. But the proper answer should be to improve the present system radically or come up with a different system that dignifies the dead and edifies the living.
The tyranny of death (2)
There is another tyranny. Some may think it a worse one. I refer to what passes for a mortuary at St Luke's. It is the experience of everybody who wishes to visit the dead that he visits dozens at a time. They are laid out on slabs like carcasses waiting for inspection when in fact their no longer functioning body remains precious to the visitor who wishes to pay his or her last respects. It is as if someone at St Luke's has taken it upon himself to give a new definition to Our Lord's injunction to "let the dead bury the dead". And once there is a dead congregation unable to decry its revolting condition, incapable of reporting those responsible for their indignity to their minister or shadow minister, what does it matter?
I understand it will not be the same when the new hospital is opened. This means, of course, that the department knows the present set-up is an insult to the dead and will do nothing to improve the situation. How coarse can one be? How deadly unimaginative to go along with a disgusting parade of dead bodies that are, I suggest, in need of privacy more now, in that state than when they were living ones.
Is the department so creatively disadvantaged that it cannot think of a curtained cubicle for each of the dead with the identity of the latter displayed along curtains separating one cubicle from another? Or having the dead person on a mobile stretcher, similarly curtained off from the rest, and wheeled to a private viewing room when a visitor asks to spend a few moments in prayer or recollection? Something akin to what is being prepared at the new hospital, where presumably morticians will be employed to 'touch up' the dead can surely be mimicked at St Luke's pro mortuum commoditate and the edification vivorum? If the dead cannot be respected in a hospital where can they be?
Health Minister Dr Deguara understandably has his eyes on the new hospital. What is not understandable is that his eyes fail to notice this blemish in the old. A touch of the old wrinkle-remover is all that is needed.
Weather forecast, anybody?
Have recently endured the boring spectacle provided on Channel 4 where we learn what the day may be like, how cold or warm that day will be, whether we are to expect showers or sunshine or a bit of both.
Forget the accuracy of the forecast. It is sometimes inaccurate. But how do you explain Paris these last few weeks? Day after day, night after night, that city has been shown at below freezing point when in fact it hovered above zero. I suspect a Baldrickian plot. Channel 4 wishes to strike at the French tourism industry. Over to you, ambassador.
Quote, unquote
Some 480 years before Christ rose from the dead, the Greek poet Euripides mused on the perennial subject of Life and Death.
Who knoweth if the thing that we call death
Be Life, and our Life dying - who knoweth?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those foregone
Not sick, nor touched with evil any more.