Roamer's column

One thing did not surprise me; two did. The one that did not was the silly caterwauling by French Socialists moaning about the fact that the President-elect of France (come next Wednesday) travelled to Malta on a friend's jet and was hosted here on his friend's yacht. The sin of envy is a difficult one for Socialists to resist; in fact, to it they too often succumb with manic bliss.

The first that did surprise me was, unsurprisingly, Mr Sarkozy's unannounced but soon discovered visit here; the second, the fact that he felt he had to defend his decision to get away from the glare and gloire of France after an exhausting election campaign. The man is plain mister until the 16th, so what the hell. Oh, and it just crossed my mind. I must add another surprise. How on earth did he have the energy to go jogging at all while he was in Malta? Bless you, Nicky. You are clearly in good heart and even if your contours do not begin to compete with Segolene's, in good shape, too.

At around this time 12 years ago I was in Paris. Jacques Chirac had just made it to the top. There were huge crowds along the Champs Elysée from the Arc de Triomphe all the way to the Place de la Concorde and they were doing exactly what we do in Malta after an election, shouting and cheering and blaring horns into the wee hours.

It was rather moving and there seemed to be something in the air, an expectation that Mr Chirac was the answer to France's prayers. Twelve years on we know he was not. What, I wonder, will Mr Sarkozy's reputation as the leader of France be like, a decade in the future? Will he have turned the country round or will the passion that rules, or rather, overrules France when the going gets tough ultimately do for him?

There is a strange paradox about a country that can show the rest of the world a nasty thing or two (I am indulging in euphemism) about revolutions, yet balk at common and garden reform. It is more than a perception we outsiders have of the French that for them, cutting off their king's head was easy meat, so to speak, compared with cutting back on expenditure. And destroying an entire class, almost, was child's play compared with attempting to cap CAP.

It sometimes appears, no, that is being wet. It is crystal clear that Paris can be besieged by demonstrators and rioters if the price of a truffe were to be lowered by administrative decree, or if the interests of the grape industry were soured by some decree from on high (then the streets of France risk being covered in blood-red wine), or if the working hours of truck drivers were trifled with (then the streets from Paris all the way to the Channel ports would be blocked) or if farmers felt that Government was about to come on strongly on the business of subsidised over-production (then cabbages and cauliflowers, potatoes and tomatoes would be scattered throughout France's rural roads, if necessary outside the Elysée). Reform is too revolutionary a concept even for the descendants of revolutionaries to stomach. Strange.

But presumably these challenges are what make President tick, or come to think of it, not tick at all. Presumably it was what brought Nicolas Sarkozy out of the land of Hungary into a land that was not exactly flowing with honey. But it attracted him and, to judge from his attitude, it is to make France flow with milk and honey that he has taken on the job. I hope his rest in Malta, which he found "fascinating", helped a little.

That remark and his presence here, has no doubt placed us on the French map, where previously Malta hardly existed in the minds of most of his countrymen. I know he made a bit of a boo-boo once by not including us in some grouping or other, but come back Nicolas Sarkozy when you have settled down. All is forgiven.

It's not all in the mind because there is nothing but empty space in some. I imagine it took quite a number of headless bipeds to hack down 3,000 pine saplings planted a few years ago at some expense beneath the Red Tower in Mellieha. Nothing but a skull connects the ears of the intrepid heroes who thought they would enter legend by so doing.

For all that, law enforcers should not rest, much, until they have tracked down the hackers. In this instance, the point is that 3,000 saplings could not have been destroyed by one or two men - at a sapling a minute, and to achieve that rate would require some pretty nippy foot- and hand-work - the job would have taken one man more than two days (I think), ten men five hours, 20 men two and a half hours with no rest in between felling one sapling and the next. Can 20 men remain undetected while they do this? I would have thought not, even had the exercise been conducted with military precision.

What is to be done, as Lenin once asked about a line of action to be taken over an altogether more serious and far-reaching problem than this one? The first line of defence in the war against crime is, of course, the citizen. He is more likely to see something being done than policemen who cannot be everywhere at the same time. On the whole, however, he tends not to see things happening, so a caveat is necessary.

The police cannot be ubiquitous, thank God, but a round-the-clock system of effective mobile patrols organised to visit vulnerable sites at irregular intervals must surely be a tool the Police Commissioner needs to consider if there is to be any hope that this sort of mindless crime, or any crime for that matter, will be prevented. Go for it, Mr Rizzo, and if it needs an extra million Maltese liri for 100 additional vehicles to carry out lightning 'strikes', procure them yesterday.

...and talking of strikes, most of us must be finding it difficult to understand what the hawkers and secretary general of the Union Haddiema Maghqudin are going on about. Merchants Street needs to be revamped. The hawkers have pitched their tents in Merchants Street. They must leave Merchants Street for the work to be carried out and if, after that, they need to be relocated further down the road, an idea that seems to have got their goat, they are still in a prime shopping area. St James Ditch is not to their liking. They prefer Freedom Square. I am not sure the presence of a 'market' would not actually enhance that ugly square, but what one wants is not necessarily always what one gets.

"We want work", they chanted as they took hours off to demonstrate in Valletta and outside Castille and the UHM has filed a judicial protest against the government claiming damages for lost revenue. That sounds a bit rich. The normally reasonable Gejtu Vella told hawkers that sympathy strikes were not ruled out and the union would 'use all its might' (so the report put it) to support them.

Yesterday he was reported as having warned the government that it was prepared to call on workers in "sensitive places" to resort to industrial action in sympathy with the hawkers. That sounds familiar, but the voice that usually uses that sort of threat belongs to the secretary general of the General Workers Union. Incidentally, do hawkers pay a rental for using Merchants Street or wherever to sell their wares? If they do, how much?

And what on earth happened the other day when the cruise liner MSC Sinfonia was welcomed by containers blocking the gangway down which its passengers could not descend for an hour or so? We have the future President of France flying out to Malta for a jog and a swim - setting an example to millions of his countrymen who may feel inclined to follow in his jet-steps - and the port operators, Valletta Gateway Terminal, preventing 1,600 passengers from setting foot on the island. They claimed safety led them to take the action they did.

Well, the blessed thing docked safely anyway, so it was difficult to understand why containers were rolled out to prevent passengers, for an irritating while, from taking a peep at Malta and a shot at buying this or that. I bet the owners of Sinfonia were euphoric.

Commitment and non-commitment

In a contribution that appeared in The Times, last Friday, the point of churchgoing was missed by what I thought was a dangerous margin. Of course it is important, as the Archbishop was said to have remarked at a seminar last month, for people to establish the kind of relationship they wanted to have with God. He did add that a person who went to church once or twice a year was not really committed.

"Not committed" - one would think to churchgoing - the writer remarked, "but not necessarily uncommitted to one's relationship with God'. This is all right as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough in the context in which it was made.

Commitment for the Christian, the Catholic, demands, I would have thought, the sort of relationship demanded by Christ. We can only seek and find God's face, which we must go on trying to do until the day we die, because of the Christ who showed us that face and continues to show it in the Eucharist. Central to that relationship, then, is the Eucharist and participation in the sacrifice of the Mass, which is a Eucharistic offering. It is this that makes church attendance, not necessarily only on Sunday, a vital an element in a Christian's life.

The issue is indeed to commit oneself to a proper relationship with God, Christ-God in this context. Once Christ puts in an appearance much else is brought into that commitment - churchgoing, the sacramental life (worship, therefore), union and unity (which requires a shared bodily presence, communion, I imagine). The value of externalising our relationship with God by church attendance lies precisely in the unity-through-communion that this creates, or ought to create. If the world is what Pope Benedict has called an 'outward sign' of the 'inward reality' of God's love, we know this only because Christ came down on earth and expressed that love on the Cross and left us the Eucharist for communal worship and many other things besides.

Whether church attendance can be a 'mere' habit or a 'show' is another matter altogether.

Be safe, Madeleine

We have all heard or read about Madeleine McCann, whose fourth birthday, which she could not attend, was yesterday. It is as ugly a story as any author of fiction can create. It is now nearly a fortnight since she was kidnapped in Praia da Luiz, in Portugal; kidnapped while she slept and her twin siblings slept and her parents were having dinner 40 metres away; kidnapped it is reported by 'a blonde woman and two men'. The whole ghastly business, deliberately planned, puts nightmares in the shade.

The implications are horrifying and, for the parents, soul-destroying. Up to the time I write this, the Portuguese police have given the impression that they are all at sea and I find myself wondering whether they are very close to finding the beautiful four-year-old even and wish to give her captors a false sense of security. The story is too hideous to have anything but a happy ending, or so her parents and the rest of us must be hoping on this day, the 90th anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady at Fatima. The authors of some modern novels, Ian McEwan comes to mind, disabuse us of such sentiments. Life is not like that and often enough this is indeed the case. So we have to hang on to the hope that truth will not turn out to be as strange and repellent as some fiction.

Last Friday, the Telegraph carried a story about a reward being offered for Madeleine McCann's safe return. Stephen Winyard, who owns the Stobo Castle spa in Scotland, was offering £1 million to her kidnappers. "When I saw (her parents') faces," he was reported as saying, "I felt frustrated that no one else had yet come forward offering a substantial reward", so he felt compelled to do so himself.

Let's hope that if the police fail to track down the evil ménage à trois, this offer will work its way into their satanic minds.

Quote...

While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was the end of a long and stern light, a night of vigil, not unvisited by stars. He stood with his hand lifted, as in so many statues and pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was the break of day - St Francis of Assisi, by G.K. Chesterton.