Quote unquote

With reference to Dr Lorraine Schembri Orland's scathing and incisive put-down of yours truly, I declare that I humbly prostrate myself in grovelling misery before the awesome might of the magnificent one's intellectual and forensic capabilities, nagged only by the same doubts that prompted Hamlet's mommy, Queen Gertrude, to intone the immortal line "The lady doth protest too much, methinks".

They're Shakespeare's words, not mine, but they fit, I submit with all due respect.

Which is the phrase legal beagles use when they want to be rude to each other.

With dignity

Switching professions and subjects, I couldn't help but notice a story concerning one of the more tuneful of gentlemen of the medical profession to grace these shores.

The medicine man of whom I discourse is Alex (I don't know whether he should be called Dr, Mr, Prof. or what, so I left it at Alex - he's my age, so I can) Manchè, who is reported to have taken a significant cut in salary in order to be allowed the privilege of carrying on working in our state-funded medical system.

It is necessary, it has been decreed from on high up Brussels way, that all who toil should be treated the same way and Manchè's colleagues seem to have been using him as a benchmark against which to measure their own pecuniary aspirations. Now I'm no expert on anything, as Dr Schembri Orland has pointed out in no uncertain terms, but I do know a bit and what the law mandates when it comes to the vulgar subject of money is that people who perform work of equal value for their employers are allowed to expect reasonably similar treatment from said employers.

The key phrase is "equal value" and while from where I'm sitting all doctors are equally valuable members of society (and I'm not really kidding too much, they're good chaps overall although they keep telling us to stop smoking, eating, drinking and generally having fun) I suspect an argument could have been made against levelling up and in favour of recognising merit and dedication.

Or something like that, though I'd not be silly enough to make the call myself, being as I'm rapidly coming up to the age which requires technical adeptness to keep me on my feet. And anyway it would be a bit like trying to distinguish between Beckham and Drogba.

No, wait, that would be easy - let's say it would be as difficult as trying to distinguish between Drogba and Lampard and Shevcenko and... well, you get the point.

Anyway, the point about this bit is not to tell the world how great a doctor Manchè is, or how equally great the others may or may not be, it is just to underline the dignity with which he handled what many others would have turned into a contretemps or an excuse to stamp a dainty foot. No judicial protests, no letters to the editor, no posturing - that was the hand that was dealt and it was played quietly, without any fuss.

Proboscis preens

I don't know the plural of proboscis (probosces mayhap?) but, in any event, there's only one nose in this story, so the point is moot.

Doctor Alfred Sant has now bored all of us to tears asking for Dr Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici to resign because the latter didn't have the nose to smell out the gaffe that was committed at the law courts when a company very closely associated with a particularly nasal convict was given a contract to clean the place up.

Though it will no doubt annoy Dr Schembri Orland no end, since she seems to think that failure to criticise the jolly old Parliamentary Secretary is tantamount to treason, I do think that this whole silly affair is more damaging to Doctor Alfred Sant than to Dr CMB, because it is evidence of the former's predilection for making cheap political points and ignoring the big picture.

Frankly, who cares that a silly little contract was given to that company? Sure, it was a stupid mistake, but was it the end of the world, as Doctor Alfred Sant seems to want to give us the impression it was? Instead of addressing the relevant aspects of Dr Mifsud Bonnici's performance, Doctor Alfred Sant's concentration on the trivial simply diverts attention from issues that are way more important than who is pushing a mop around the public areas of the law courts.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that Doctor Alfred Sant, in not addressing genuinely controversial questions that have been raised by the way justice is being administered (not meted out, administered) by Dr Mifsud Bonnici, he (Sant) is risking being found guilty of dereliction of duty.

Plenty of people have found plenty with which to find fault in the way things are being done and in the way slash and burn has been adopted as a method of amending the various laws that litter the statute books, but Doctor Alfred Sant seems to prefer to pronounce his proclamations on the subject of the housekeeping service.

Of walloped cods

I was given a short, sharp history lesson last week. Apparently, codswallop is nothing to do with piscatorial creatures - it was a bloke by the name of Codd who had the nifty idea of bottling some beverage that was known as "wallop" (can't remember the details and I've not the energy to dig through the e-mails in my inbox).

The two words came together to bamboozle yours truly, as do "judgement" and "judgment", the latter being the correct one while the former is also used by many. You see, I am a mere mortal, not fit to write the language used by such luminaries as Dr Schembri Orland who, quite rightly, exhorted me last week to take up knitting.

Or something of the sort, anyway.

To the streets

The country is quaking in its collective boots and a pregnant hush permeates the environment, because the massed ranks of Malta's finest, the hunters and trappers, have threatened to take to the streets. What it is the bird-killers are whinging about is not something about which I will comment, simply because a) I don't know what it is they are whinging about and b) I don't care what it is they are whinging about.

To a very limited degree, I tend to have this suspicion that if push came to shove, I would come down on the side of their being allowed to kill living creatures, for a limited time of the year and not using high powered speedboats and sub-machine guns to achieve their avicidal aims.

What am I saying? Of course they shouldn't be allowed to hunt anymore, just as the Spanish shouldn't be allowed to torture bulls, the Italians to go after deer and boar and the English to use dogs to kill foxes.

And if these characters think they are going to gain public sympathy by trooping out into the highways and byways of the Republic in protest against something or other, whatever it is, then I suspect they might have another thing coming to them.

It is to be hoped that the political parties, now that election season is over the horizon, will not fall victim to the temptation to pander to the whims of the hunting lobby.

Given Doctor Alfred Sant's record of trying to be all things to all men, and the PN's eagerness to copy Labour in all things, I wouldn't bet on it.

That novel again

OK, so anyone with even an ounce of understanding of the political scene will have twigged my puerile attempts at disguising my take on the goings-on at the MLP Glass Palace as the plot for a novel.

Yes, I was hinting that maybe what was really going on was a bit of a power struggle at the top, with the Leader positioning himself to be able to point fingers at the immediately subordinate echelon.

One really fanciful theory I had heard, and tried to dress up with a dash of intrigue, was that Doctor Alfred Sant was not all that displeased with the story that had leaked and with the identity of the alleged leaker, because when the MLP fails to get into government next time around, he'd be able to blame the deputy leaders, who were both involved in the story, and hang on for yet another five years after losing a general election.

As I say, it's a fanciful story at best, given the lie by the truce that seems to have been brought into effect down Mile End way.

After all, there were those who had whispered into my shell-likes that the female of the species who had been likened to a serpent was to get her come-uppance at about 8.30 in the evening of the Friday before last and nothing of great pith and moment, publicly at least, has actually happened.

Perhaps that is why Doctor Alfred Sant was snapped having a jolly good laugh with Dr Gonzi in that other newspaper in English. What price Labour's tag-line about Dr Gonzi laughing at everyone now, incidentally, with their own Leader virtually splitting his sides?

imbocca@gmail.com