I.M. Beck - quote unquote

You can tell it's local council election time - Doctor Alfred Sant rouses himself from his usually languid pose and starts schlepping around the country, marking local councils out of a hundred, presumably because he thinks that this galvanises Labour's voters into going out to fill in the boxes.

Did you receive, while on the subject of Doctor Alfred Sant's languid poses, that rather endearing snap of the dear fellow that's doing the e-mail rounds? It shows him deep in slumber while attending a school kids' meeting of some sort or another. I rather envy him the ability to nod off and snatch some no doubt sorely-needed rest, the travails of running the Republic's Loyal Opposition being what they are. I'm morally convinced that parliamentary debates are so absorbing and electrifying that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that he would be allowed to drop off and it's a mark of how comfortable Doctor Alfred Sant was in the company of the younger generation that he was able to let the Sandman take him out.

The expression on the girl to his left is a picture worth a thousand or so in itself.

Getting back to the point, as one must, lest the headmasterly amongst my detractors pulls himself up to the full height of his majestic intellect and pours scorn on my hapless pate, it's that time of the year again, when, wonder of wonders, Labour-led local councils get something in the region of 75 or 83 or some other stratospheric mark out of 100, while, again mirabile dictu, Nationalist-led councils are counted amongst the miserable failures, getting a report card that bears the immortal words "Must do better".

Words, incidentally, with which I am not unfamiliar.

Thus it came to pass that while he was tripping daintily around Luqa, a village whose patron saint is most elegantly named, Doctor Alfred Sant did some trumpet blowing on the part of the bearers of his standard in said village, boasting on their behalf that they had invested some Lm60,000 (that's sixty grand in words rather than numbers - something in the order of €162,000, though to be UnFair, I doubt I have the rate of exchange right) in road works.

Now that is an impressive investment in anyone's money but the catch is that it's not anyone's money that they were investing, it's yours and mine, that's whose it is. It's all very well for Doctor Alfred Sant to preen and prattle about this investment, but the only achievement on the part of the council was that they spent what they were given to spend. If they had drummed up the dosh themselves, that would have been something to shout about, but as it is, I think I speak on behalf of all non-Luqians when I say that my admiration for their council is not exactly without limit.

The way things are done

I started reading Dr Michael Falzon's piece elsewhere last Wednesday, which bore the headline The Way We Do Things, with quite a bit of interest. I'd just finished reading the fifth book of my life (according to that Sammut person), a political novel by Michael Dobbs (not an author of the galactic standing of Mr Sammut, of course, but he has the merit of being sufficiently simple for idiots like me to follow) and I thought I'd be getting another dose of political skulduggery and intrigue.

I was, sadly, to be disappointed. This was not an account of some night of the long knives, of smoke-filled rooms and men speaking with men out of the sides of their mouths. No femmes fatale were to be seen lounging provocatively in their baby dolls (that's what rude mechanicals call peignoirs) and we were regaled with no accounts of whispered conversations among the back tables of the Jubilee Café or Cordina's.

No, what we got instead was an anodyne recitation of the work carried out in the councils, assemblies, committees and sub-committees that constitute the Malta Labour Party, the way that position papers were drawn up, discussed, dissected, re-drawn and drafted and finally approved democratically. All really exciting stuff, of course, the real bones of politics, guaranteed to put you to sleep even faster than a good dose of Valium.

Oh well, I suppose New Labour has to show itself to be a thoroughly modern party, able to bore with the best of them - it's less likely to lose them votes than performances such as that put on by Dr Wenzu Mintoff and his attacks on the media.

Hilarious

Mr Frans Sammut, who will, no doubt, treat me to a further dose of mildly insulting, consistently impertinent and slightly annoying e-mails after this (and just so he won't think I'm backing down, let it be known by all that I will not be answering him directly any more - there are limits to the time I have to waste) wrote about me.

Did you spot his erudite letter last Tuesday?

In case you missed this most elegant of elegant put-downs, I shall quote it in its entirety: "I.M. Beck quoting Shakespeare! Big joke". This masterful and powerful epistle came from one who, in his e-mailed rants to me, had boasted that one of his literary works had been turned into a movie (or something on those lines) and that he had been invited by the producers to the premiere at the Eden (or, again, something on those lines). One trusts that Mr Sammut's oeuvre had been somewhat lengthier and less inelegant than the letter which my esteemed ed. has seen fit to publish, because the movie out of which it was crafted would have been a bit on the short, and crude, side otherwise.

Among Mr Sammut's other boasts to me was that he has been a teacher for many years and a headmaster for 10. Now this sort of proud preening tends to elicit from the less charitable such as I unfair and uncalled-for wisecracks such as "those who can, do and those who can't..." (I shan't finish it for fear of offending the many good teachers I know - I am one myself, after all) but let's leave that temptation aside and merely muse out loud that we hope that, in his dealings with the tender young minds under his charge, Mr Sammut eschewed to temptation to demonstrate the sort of oozing sarcasm he displays when discoursing with intellects such as mine.

In other words, just in case he's missed the point, I hope he wasn't as overbearing and insulting with his students as he tried to be with me.

Let's tanga

Magistrate Dr Antonio Mizzi aborted the case against those delectable exemplars of the female species with an alacrity that - had it been a real abortion - would have had the pro-lifers jumping up and down in a right tizzy. In a rare example of judicial dumping from on high, the magistrate poured quite a decent helping of scorn over the heads of the boys in blue, making it known to all and sundry that he thought that the prosecution of the merry band of lap dancers that had been hauled in front of him was, not to put too fine a point on it, rubbish.

There are few occasions in connection with which I am envious of the legal beagles who ply their trade at the Criminal Bar, but according to the papers, when the "not guilty" verdict was pronounced, there was much kissing and cuddling of said beagles by the formerly-clad-in-tangas. As a fully-paid up representative of the over-the-hill club, I am tempted to take up criminal law, which seems to be very much the only way I'm going to get jumped on by a cute blonde or 10.

Worrying

I spotted an item which let it be known that the Maltese language movie Qerq (it very loosely translates as "Fraud") was breaking local box office records. This was interesting, since movie-making is not exactly paramount among our artistic attributes, so I surfed over to Google's page to check out what was being said on the net about the film.

The reviews I managed to find were unanimous: The thing was blessed with, to put it charitably, an amateurish air. In other words, Oscar-winning material it is not, not by the longest of long chalks.

Yet, it is dragging in the crowds and for this there can really only be two reasons. Either people are intrigued by the fact that the Maltese can put together a real movie, so they're flocking to see it in the same way people used to flock to see a dog standing on its hind legs, for the novelty value, or they're going because, finally, there's a movie they can understand because it's in Maltese.

The first reason is hardly likely to be the real one: Curiosity will only attract so many people. Which leaves the second reason: People are going because it's understandable to them, which means, presumably, they can't understand English.

If that isn't worrying, please write in and tell me what it is.

imbocca@gmail.com