Missing appointments

It's what comes from taking holidays at the wrong time of the year, I suppose. The things you usually do at that time get mucked around a bit and getting to my venerable age doesn't help, either.

So it came to pass that Judge Giovanni Bonello produced yet another of his masterly works about the less travelled alleys of our history and the event went by without my noting it for you. By now, I suspect that the book will have been snapped up, as it deserves to be - when I went to obtain my copy, no one having thought to give it to me for my birthday or for Christmas (got ties, instead) it was already looking a bit like hen's teeth on the shelves of Sapienza's, which is about the only place to go for books.

What can I say that I haven't said before about the book? Nothing, except to reprise the refrain (does one reprise a refrain? Or is that what you actually do do with a refrain?) that this is erudition watered with wit, such as to make you look back a few paragraphs every so often, doing a literary double-take, as it were, as if to ensure that you had got the joke.

And just to reprise another refrain - now that the judicial and judicious one is at something of a loose end, his term of office in Strasbourg coming to a close as it is, would he kindly do the decent thing and write his own history?

Enough, already

From the scholarly and enjoyable to the popular and excruciating is but a small jump, just over the sub-head you've just read - last Saturday's morning (and early afternoon) coffee at the estimable watering-hole that is Cordina was ruined to the point I was seriously contemplating assaulting the mayor of Valletta (whose fault it was not).

What ruined (well, to be accurate, almost ruined) the rather splendid morning in the sun among convivial companions was the horrendous racket spewing forth from the Palace Square, where a fluorescent behemoth was parked as part of the carnival festivities. It appears that some bright spark has come to the conclusion that visual awfulness is not enough, we need aural horridness too, so loud thumping was put abroad for our delectation, without a discernable tune or even a nod towards having anything approaching a pleasant background.

I've nothing against modern music of any description, I even like listening to rap, but this was just mechanical banging, coming out of a sound-system that clearly puts decibel level above sound quality.

Carnival gave me the opportunity to hear one of the most vacuous comments ever to hit the airwaves, too. The commentator covering the dance competition that unfolds in Freedom Square (I hate that neo-Mintoffian name) was whining about how people in Malta find it so difficult to render a decent round of applause, this in the context of the rather sparse clapping that was being heard whenever the prancing came to an end.

Just as an aside - for this we charge tourists? I shudder to think what they were thinking about it all - the milling about, the same-oh-same O costumes, the weird titles of the floats, the look of utter boredom on the prancers (I was going to write dancers but the will failed me).

Anyway, Ms Montesin, for it was she who was doing the honours, made the remark reported above, that we Maltese are pretty miserly when it comes to applause and what a shame this was. It doesn't appear to have occurred to the dear lady that people sometimes don't applaud because, to quote Homer (Simpson not the other one) "duh" there's nothing to applaud - in fact, in this instance, there was quite a bit to boo.

Eager beavering

So there I was, moderately late for a work-related date, when one of Valletta's favourite sons (he knows who he is) waylaid me to have a bit of a moan. I brushed the chap aside initially as, as I said, I was late, but on dealing with whatever bit of business I had, I stopped at the establishment run by the dear fellow to see what it was he wanted.

Leaving his commercial empire in the capable hands of a minion, my interlocutor took me off t'ards St John's, there to show me his chariot, parked in a loading bay, with a ticket adorning its windscreen.

Apparently, he had left the vehicle there while unloading it (as one does when one owns a shop) and in the five minutes or so that this operation had taken, one of the republic's wannabe finest had punched whatever numbers they punch to issue the flimsy bit of paper that stings you for a tenner or so.

The thing is, the space wherein the car was parked was one reserved for unloading for a brief period of time in the ante-meridian and it doesn't seem to have occurred to the twerp with the ticket machine that you can, forsooth, unload a car as well as a van - especially if the car is equipped with a rear door that facilitates this sort of thing.

Why is it that whenever certain types of personality are given even a modicum of power, they go berserk?

To be fair, not all wardens play silly all the time - there have been occasions when I've had my own car parked less than perfectly and a swift nod at the warden heaving into view, indicating that I was just leaving, thanks very much, ensured that I don't have to pay up.

The question why reasonableness can't prevail all the time is one that one is tempted to ask, though one hardly imagines one will get an answer.

Tripping daintily

Doctor Alfred Sant is still tripping daintily through the highways and byways of this fair land, handing out percentage points to each and every Labour-led local council, while pouring scorn, opprobrium and all manner of epithet over the PN-led ones.

A local council, coincidentally a PN-led one, is the subject of a scandal that is threatening to eclipse Watergate, dwarf Irangate and put Penderplacegate in the shade. Actually, I wrote that this is a PN-led council, but I'm not all that sure that Munxar, for it is that locale about which we presently discourse, is PN-led, because such are the schisms, fissures and cracks that have bedecked the MLP façade of late that, for all I know, they're having a spot of internecine bother.

Well, the scandal relates to a concrete path or other that has been laid down by the council. Fingers are being pointed and disgruntled noises being made by Doctor Alfred Sant and his favourite sons, this concrete path being something of an eyesore, I'm told.

The thing is, running parallel to this blot on the landscape is another pustule on Mother Nature's face, but no one is having a wail and a whinge about it, because, wonder of wonders, it was put there by the previous council, which wasn't a PN-led council.

I might be wrong about all this, of course, as I often am, but you have to admit it's a cute story for all the world as if it had come out of the Little Valley of the Po. Can you imagine the number of such shock-horror stories we're going to be regaled with the closer the Big Kids' election comes?

A reader asks

A reader from the States asked whether when one vindicates oneself with the trees and animals of a neighbour, one is being romantic with beings other than human. The question was prompted by a piece in di-ve.com, which puzzled the Yank.

I had to explain that it was just di-ve's little way with words, the translation thereof, and the derivation of the word from the vernacular for revenge.

News of great joy

I bring you tidings of great and unfettered joy. A new Indian restaurant has opened in Paceville, Shiva's, just where one used to be near the gate to the Dragonara. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, an excellent exemplar of the art of cooking as practised in the sub-continent and the service is up to the same very high standard as the cooking.

Go there and enjoy - that is not a suggestion.

And when in Valletta at lunch time, you could do worse than try out Bocconci, next door to Casa Rocca Piccola. You might not find a table, as it is popular in the extreme, but persist - it was good enough last Saturday to reverse, completely and utterly, the deep depths (deep depths?) of depression (deep depths of depression? Talk about exaggerated hyperbole - surely that revered linguistic expert Sammut will have something to say about that) to which we were plunged by the carnival bedlam that was spewing out (see above).

imbocca@gmail.com