Very interesting indeed

So there we all were, all us erudite commentators, assuming that just as the machine got Dr CMJ Muscat appointed to the leadership of the MLP, it would get his choices elected to the deputyships.

Oops - or even - buzz - wrong answer. We reckoned without the contrariness of the delegates, who seem to have said to themselves: Well, there you are, we've been good little delegates and obeyed the machine in getting ourselves a new leader, now it's time to do our own thing.

And so it came to pass that Drs Angelo Farrugia and Toni Abela found themselves deputy leaders of the Labour Party, I suspect as much to their own surprise as to ours.

I'm not someone who believes that facial expressions are the window to the soul, so I wouldn't want to hazard that Dr Muscat's bonhomic smile slipped a bit when, while live and in full colour on Xarabank, he was given the news that he was blessed with those two.

Nor would I bet the farm on his having been ecstatically overjoyed, though.

I mean, think on it: on one side of the throne there's Angelo Farrugia, who, it can safely be said, appeals to the more rigid side of the party. For an examination of what makes the man tick, you can google him and check out his website, which says way more than I can and much more eloquently.

On the other side, there's Toni Abela, who talks more than somewhat and a bit. You can also check him out on the net, though you'll have to do it by means of his blog. It seems he's come on in leaps and bounds from not so long ago, when he seems to have been a fully paid-up member of the Society of Luddites.

It's lucky for the Labour Party that it's summer and things in this country go into slow mode: with CMJ Muscat apparently bent on spending his summer in Brussels, these two are, theoretically, going to be running the party, along with the new general secretary, whoever he or she is going to be.

The prospect is daunting: Will I have enough space, in the new, slim-line Beck necessitated by the pretty new face of The Times to write about all these riches?

Vroom vroom

While he's in Brussels, winding down his European Union activities, Dr CMJ might perhaps wish to do some research into the matter of motor vehicles and the taxing thereof.

I'm not completely au fait with the way the various Ministers of Finance around the EU get their hands on the dosh whenever their citizens get their own hands on a shiny new car but I'm pretty sure ours gets more of his on the folding stuff than his counterparts do in many other places.

It seems that one of the ways this is going to happen in the future is for licence fees to be bumped to compensate the public purse for the shortfall when the adjustment to registration tax kicks in. Or something like that; anyway, the technicalities are less than vital to the point I'm trying to make.

One of the only reasons why the government can loot our wallets is that it's easy for the various manifestations of officialdom to spot an out-of-country vehicle.

This aspect of the exercise is easy in every other country, to be sure, since all countries have their own licence plates, but, surely, and I'm sure someone will enlighten me, cars that drive over the border from France to Italy to France to Spain to Germany and so on and so forth don't attract the beady-eyed stare of their equivalent of ADT officials?

Is it just the fact that we have a few kilometres of water between us and the mainland that makes it so all-fired important for cars to be registered here, as opposed to being transient?

I'm not exactly lucid on this, I know, but I think my point is clear: Why do we have to pay so darn much for our cars?

Munching

A couple of new places for you to check out, folks, since, because of Hallmark Cards Marketing Day, we didn't head north for a change.

Chez Cyrille in Old Theatre Street, Valletta is run by a couple of French ladies, one to cook the stuff and the other to plonk it onto the punters' plates.

Superb, with an "e" on the end, is pretty much the right word for it. It's like adding an "e" to Cyril, I suppose, with the advantage that this refers to the food.

There's a new place in Rabat that serves up pretty good wine and, on occasion, song: Town House 5. Give it a try, up on the hill it's cooler at this time of the year, anyway.

imbocca@gmail.com, www.timesofmalta.com/blogs