I.M. Beck - quote unquote

Doctor Alfred Sant, as I had occasion to remark last week, has gone into election mode, even though this event is many, many months away and our sails are now set fair for a season or two of feeding fodder to the terminally gullible.

Incidentally, I refer to Doctor Alfred Sant as Doctor Alfred Sant in mild parody of the way Super One News always refer to him as Doctor Alfred Sant and just as Doctor Alfred Sant is mildly obsessive about always starting his weekly column in this august rag with a word starting with a P and an R, equally I have become mildly obsessive about referring to him as Doctor Alfred Sant.

Which I suppose is marginally irritating, though this is not something that worries me more than marginally. I think I'll stop here with the presumptuously precocious preening.

Getting back to the thrust of this segment, which is a rumination on the extent of Doctor Alfred Sant's nerve (as in, what a nerve he has, exclamation mark, which I won't write as a "!" because using that particular punctuation mark is a sign of a poor writer), I was inspired to muse on this attribute of the Special One by a headline on, I believe it was, Di-ve.com a couple of days ago.

Said header blared out that Doctor Alfred Sant was warning the PM off of falling for the temptation to produce a fictitious budget in a couple of weeks time, when the latter stands up to tell us how he and his government are going to spend our hard earned spondoolicks, or at least such of them that the Revenue has prised out of our sweaty grasp.

Considering that all that Doctor Alfred Sant and his merry men will be doing from now on, right up to the dawn of the last possible day during which they can campaign, is producing pretty fictions with which to beguile the voters and bamboozle them (the voters) into scribbling a "1" against a name with a torch next to it, I thought that this foray into the warning against fiction game was a touch rich and then some.

To be fair, all politicians go in for a bit of fiction writing when it's time for us to do our democratic duty every five years or so, but for Doctor Alfred Sant, of all people, the architect, I'll have you remember, of such Times Fiction Best-Seller List toppers as "I'll remove VAT at a Stroke (or How to Change Two Initials and Win the Poll)" and "Swaziland in the Mediterranean", to come up with this as a slogan really does make people like me sit up and take notice.

Itch-a-sketch

OK, so the title of this portion of your cornflakes accompaniment doesn't even start to give you even the slightest hint of what it's all about, and I don't blame you.

The MLP has a penchant for reacting to everything the same way many of us react to an itch - they scratch at it with vim and vigour, oblivious of the potential for self-harm that too vigorous a scratching may constitute.

They did this little thing just a few days ago, when they lashed out at Maurice Tanti Burlò's cartoon which had Doctor Alfred Sant and Jason Micallef, two stalwarts of the jolly old workers' movement, depicted in what they (and very few others) thought was an unfairly uncomplimentary light. Or should that have been a fairly uncomplimentary light? Sometimes, Bessie England's mother-tongue trips up even me.

Whatever, and less of the shouts of "pompous oaf" from the cheap seats, if you please, by getting all hot and bothered about what was, at the end of the day, a cartoon, a bit of fun, a mild jest, all that was achieved by the spouters of the party line was to demonstrate that they are little more than sanctimonious twerps who sorely lack anything even remotely approaching a sense of humour.

For Heaven's sake, if these people can't even take a small poke of a cartoonist's stick, what chance have they in the rough and tumble of world diplomacy? Are these the people who think they can govern the country, people who scream and whine and stamp their little feet because someone took the mickey out of them?

I've long had a sneaking suspicion that this country lacks the ability to laugh at itself and the MLP has been and gone and proved it to me. Again to be fair, it's not only them - the Institute of Journalists also seems to have taken a Worthiness Pill of the largest kind, because instead of asking the MLP to get a life, and fast, the IoJ thought it should promote the cause of libel lawyers everywhere.

Far be it from me to decry any initiative that makes work for legal beagles, but was this really necessary?

Courting disaster

If you were to read only the Nationalist press, you'd think that the government had got nothing but fulsome praise from the assembled worthies who congregated in the Criminal Court last Monday to see in the new Legal Year.

The truth of the matter is that the PN spinners got their hands on the speeches delivered by the Chief Justice and the President of the Chamber of Advocates and thereby spared the Junior Minister's blushes, at least insofar as the party faithful were concerned.

The reality of it was, as anyone who read the reports in the independent papers noticed, that the dear chap came in for a bit of stick.

Well, what did he expect, antagonising the two groups of people who are least in need of his grace and favour?

Blaming only lawyers for the delays in court is almost (though not quite) like blaming the meteorological service for the disgusting humidity of the last few days and the not exactly awe-inspiring conditions of work and employment of the Republic's Judiciary are not themselves calculated to make the Robed Ones look fondly on the Administration.

Oh well, compared to the attempted excesses wrought on the independence of the Bar and Judiciary in days gone by, these minor vicissitudes are as nothing, but this excuse is starting to wear more than a little thin, so it's about time someone, somewhere, did something about the state of the Palais de Justice, and pronto.

Desmond on Desmond

I've never met Desmond Zammit Marmara, to the best of my knowledge, but he seems to be a bloke with a bent towards the hyperbolic.

You see, the gentleman concerned writes pretty regularly in these hallowed columns and his pronouncements sometimes take on aspects of a harbinger of the portents of doom, which latter phrase might, for all I know, be an exemplar of profound preposterousness, but so help me, it sure sounded good.

According to our hero, then, if the Nationalist Party were to be elected to government the next time we go to the polls on a national, rather than on a village pump, basis, this would be "the sum of all fears".

Precisely what it is that so terrifies the hirsute one escapes me but to characterise a party that brought the country back from the brink of economic, social and political disaster not that many years ago as "the sum of all fears", for all the world as if Saddam Hussein himself will be riding into Castille Place, bereft as it will be, horror of horrors, of trees, on a chariot drawn by the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, is a touch melodramatic.

The dear fellow needs to get out more, I suspect.

Nosh and stuff

Space is rapidly running out this week, so we'll have to have a bit of a gallop through the social and personal side of my literary masterpiece.

Lunch, when in town, should often be had at Harry's, which should now properly be known as Cesco's, since the latter, the fruit of the former's loins, has taken over, most skilfully. Whenever I go there, broad hints are chucked at me, so this week I thought I'd comply - not that the place needs it, since it's always bursting.

Food for the soul was provided in musical form on Thursday, when the National Orchestra, under the baton of Brian Schembri, filled the Hilton's rather good performance space with the music of Shostakovich (thank Gates for spell-check). Good one, guys, the soloists, Maria Blanco and Sigmund Mifsud, included.

More food, but you'll have to wait to next summer to try it out for yourselves, since it's only open when the sun is horrid, was had at the Gunpost Bar on almost the Northern-most tip of Valletta. Michelin Starred it ain't, but the view is spectacular and the omelette and chips as good as anywhere else I've had 'em.

A question for you: is it time for it to be accepted that Maltese audiences will not be abiding by the unwritten law that you don't applaud between movements? Kenneth Zammit Tabona had a good gripe about it last week, along with a number of other moans and groans, all of which were more than justified, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that trying to stop people from clapping when they shouldn't is a lost war.

And in closing, an announcement that a small star is born, just as Pluto becomes a non-planet. A Boston Marriage, which was on at St James, had a young woman by the name of Rachel Darmanin Demajo playing what was a small part, compared to the other two, but she made it her own, holding her accent and her timing beautifully.