Looking at the comments that live under this column (and virtually every other piece, for that matter) you'd be forgiven that some people labour (pun intended) that opinion columns are some sort of democratically-engineered phenomenon.

To be sure, the freedom to write and publish opinion pieces is one of the underpinnings of democracy, as anyone who lived through the 1970s and 1980s will know. And before some Lil'Elf draws herself up to her full height and upbraids me for harking back to the past all the time, let me just point out that many of Labour's finest are continually doing that little thing, so stop two-weight and measuring, if you're capable of it.

But because I'm free to disseminate my opinion, I'm free to write exactly what I like and about what I like and if this annoys some Lil'Elf who thinks that his or her personal agenda is so all-fired important that I have to, firstly, guess what is of such earth-shattering pith and moment that it is imperative that I write about it and, secondly, work out that the (sometimes limited) brain-power of multifarious Lil'Elves has been sufficient to comprehend the enormity of the issue, well tough.

And if that last paragraph was too convoluted for your average Lil'Elf, well, tough again.

So it came to pass that last week I didn't - as distinguished from many other opinion purveyors - lay down the law about the Enemalta contract. Quite frankly, the fact that the Auditor General didn't find any evidence of corruption didn't strike me as being so vitally important that I should dedicate myself to writing about it. Of course, the ladies and gentlemen of Lil'Elfdom disagree, and many of their heroines in the print media pandered to them with such smug glee that my stomach - were it not for the fact that it is quite robust - would have turned.

The thing is, so eager is everyone to assume that his or her take on any given subject is the correct one that even if the Auditor General had come out and said that the episode he had examined was evidence only of the fact that Enemalta's directors should be canonised and Minister Austin Gatt elevated to the Papacy, there would still have been howls of derision from the Labour side and equally strident howls of triumph from the other.

As it is, no evidence of corruption was found and everyone was happy - except for the Lil'Elves who thought I should have written about it and joined the chorus of the ill-informed and low-browed.

Which would have made me as vacuous and facile as certain members of the media in England who, as I write this, are having paroxysms because Gordon Brown dared to say, in the privacy of his own car, that some bigoted old lady was, in fact, a bigoted old lady. I've never been much of a fan of New Labour, especially in its Blairite manifestation, but the sheer hypocrisy of certain bits of the media is rapidly turning me on to the idea that Mr Brown would be a safer pair of hands than the two pretty boys that the Whigs and the Tories have put up.

This (Malta, I mean) is a funny old country sometimes. You get the impression, as you scan the papers and websites, that people don't actually take any notice of what's going on around them, preferring their own perception to anything else, even reality.

You get people, in this context, writing to praise that Trevisan bloke's ideas for City Gate, for all the world as if the debate was still on. Read my lips, people, the decision has been taken, now shut up and concentrate on something else. And that something else is not, incidentally, the Tignè Peninsula, which is now done and dusted and there's an end to it.

Before anyone accuses me of a vested interest or something like that, let me point out that I don't own a property there, I haven't made the pilgrimage to the shopping mall and I'm unmoved by the whole thing except to point out that between a low-end housing estate and a high-end development, I'm not going to be giving out any prizes for guessing which one I prefer.

The prize for persistent nagging and going on and on about a lost cause, though, must go to the pro-hunting lobby. Instead of shutting up and admitting that the criminal elements (and I'll concede that they're a very small minority) among the hunters have ruined it once and for all for the rest of them, they carry on trying to persuade the rest of us that black is white and bad is good, just because they say so.

Even people who should be leading by example and trying to appear reasonable carry on denying the facts in the face of the evidence and then they're surprised that the rest of us dismiss them as nothing less than a bad joke.

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