St Gorg, St Valentine's Day blues and Fort Cambridge

As predicted, the Pope approved the miracle that was wrought through the intercession of the Blessed Dun Gorg Preca that will lead to his canonisation; a great event that made front page news last Thursday in the aftermath of one of the dullest St Valentine's Days I remember. Apart from almost missing a wonderful orchestral concert at the Manoel Theatre on the 13th because the management decided to call it a St Valentine's Day concert, which I griped enough about in my review that appeared in the last Weekender, some anonymous SMSs and a spate of spam on my computer, nothing exciting happened in Malta.

The acquittal of the 31 lap dancers by Magistrate Antonio Mizzi did tickle my fancy immensely. However, once the police may appeal, it has become frustratingly impossible for me, or anyone else, to comment about it, much as we are all itching to.

What really made my day was that the acquittal report was placed next to an advert for Astroglide personal lubricant that promised that "sex will never be the same again". That proves that even on the ultra-artificial St Valentine's Day it is still possible to retain a sense of humour and all is not lost!

So, while I wait for the moment when the appeal is heard and a judgment is given, I will concentrate on another aspect of our lives other than questionable Radamanthine morality.

The Fort Cambridge project in Qui-Si-Sana has the residents of the area up in arms once more. For many decades Qui-Si-Sana and Tignè were quiet residential areas. That is how I remember them throughout my childhood and youth. I lived within a stone's throw of the place in Ghar-id-Dud Street most of my life and still have close relatives living in the area. Turning off Sliema's main artery, busy Tower Road when younger, immediately took one to a more tranquil area of Sliema where many friends met up and played hopscotch and hide and seek in the "garden" of Qui-Si-Sana Place.

The largest building, Mc Iver Flats, was considered to be most impressive while Tignè Mansions no less so. Just a stone's throw away were the army barracks totally verboten to us locals, the lovely old Union Club building off Tignè Street, set in its gardens adjacent to the elegant Villa Drago, confined the area from the bustle of Sliema while as soon as one slid down the steep St Anthony Street one was in yet another sleepy residential area. This has all gone with the wind.

One by one the gracious houses fell victim to the developers. Tignè Street feels like being in the narrowest part of the Grand Canyon, so high and close are the buildings on either side. Then it became like an epidemic and the residential area that once was, full of turn-of-the-century houses became a hotchpotch of 1970s, 1980s and 1990s architectural nonentities all following the cardinal architectural rule of utilising space to the utter limit without taking the environment into consideration.

Qui-Si-Sana changed out of all recognition and, finally, the residents blew up. The car park project, the continual inconvenience of the MIDI project and other little pinpricks, not to mention the building of at least three large blocks of luxury apartments on the seafront in the last couple of years, have transformed the residents of this once quiet place into a swarm of angry hornets.

Their latest crusade is the protest against this Fort Cambridge project, which will replace the former Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza with 12-storey apartment blocks consisting of 400 apartments, which when realised will make the peninsula the most densely populated area in Malta; a glorified slum. The residents are appealing to the European Parliament by gathering signatures electronically to the EU's Committee for Petitions. They have obviously given up on Mepa and other authorities among which are the Ministry of the Environment, AD and the opposition, and having lost their Patri Pawl to the Curia Arcivescovile, have decided to go to the very top.

I hope they manage to get somewhere but I am indeed most sceptical for as we all know money talks and the Qui-Si-Sana situation is repeated, clone-like, all over Malta and Gozo. Till every little scrap of land right up to the waters' edge is built up, till any Malta landscape is merely a memory and countryside a pretty picture in edition number 10 of Nicholas de Piro's International Dictionary of Artists who painted Malta, we will, like the unquiet beings that we are, continue to eke out millions of liri in money that is as ephemeral as the water that surrounds us, and administer a long, slow and tortured death to the goose that for a few years during the boom laid some people some golden eggs; that was till Malta and his wife jumped on the bandwagon, all wanting to make a fast buck.

So now we are in a situation that Qui-Si-Sana's Patri Pawl, now Archbishop of Malta, is quizzed by frustrated young people about the rising rates of inflation, the prohibitive cost of property and the fact that the Church owns a bank and still owns a choice property or two despite its controversial offloading onto the famous Joint Office a couple of decades ago. The youngsters who asked these questions, which have nothing to do with Christianity or spirituality, must have asked Mgr Cremona these questions as they know that the opinion of the man in the street today counts for nothing and that politicos and regulative organisations, to say nothing of the courts and the judiciary, all are idols with feet of a very malleable clay. People of all walks of life have reached out to the new Archbishop like drowning men clutching at straws. He is their only hope. It is so unfair of us as a nation to depend on an Archbishop to intercede when all else has failed but this is a stark reality in today's Malta which amply illustrates to what a sorry state we have sunk.

So while the residents of Qui-Si-Sana battle on in Brussels, the build up towards the canonisation of Malta's first saint will give all the established and aspirant politicos splendiferous photo opportunities to appear with the great and the good of Malta in a PR exercise of which we had a mere glimpse during the installation of Mgr Cremona a month ago! Just wait for it. What a wonderful spectacle to distract the people from rising prices, rising taxes, crippling surcharges and all the other hidden costs necessary to keep Malta within the straight and narrow national financial requirements of the EU.

The Prime Minister has already asked Pope Benedict to depart from tradition and celebrate the canonisation here in Malta and not at the Vatican. From Notte Bianca to Notte Magica to Notte Santa, the panis et circensis, I must say, becomes more professionally-organised as time goes by which is, admittedly, a plus point not to be sneezed at. One wonders what will happen next?