I've just spent what seems to have been the whole day watching events in Egypt and appreciating just how lucky we are ... and were.

We are lucky because we live in a country where, since 1987, demonstrations can take place and all manner of opinions expressed without riot police and tear gas being deployed. I know people whine and bitch about how if you don't stick up for the Nationalists you're down-trodden and generally treated like the stuff you don't like stepping on, but that is just so much bitterness, generally, from people who had become used to being lavished with rewards that their qualities and attributes simply did not merit.

We were lucky because the streets of Valletta could, without much of an effort, have become like the streets of Cairo are now. I will be accused of exaggerating, so let me list just a few episodes I witnessed personally.

I saw students, amongst whom good friends, being set upon and beaten in the course of arrest by the police of the regime, simply because they were part of a demonstration protesting against the assault by Mintoff's government on the Medical School and education in general.

I saw a Salesian Brother viciously beaten in the course of being arrested, simply because he was photographing the cordon of police protecting Castille during the protests linked to a later assault on education by the Labour Government. What from they were protecting Castille is beyond me, but such was the paranoia of the Mintoff/KMB regime. During the same protest, I was amongst a group chased down the street by the police, and hit by what was clearly a Nationalist sympathiser, because he softened the blow.

I was next to a good friend when he was beaten to the ground by a known, armed, pro-Labour thug, under the eyes of the Police, who saw and did nothing, in the corridor below the Rector's Office at Tal-Qroqq. My friend's Black Belt was not effective in the face of a pistol-butt.

Those were just a few of the incidents of violence to which I was close. There was Tal-Barrani, there was Rabat, there was the shooting of Raymond Caruana and there were many, many other horrors, one of which led to the conviction and imprisonment of the then-Police Commissioner, obviously after the Government changed and he lost his protection.

Indeed, there but for the Grace of God go us.