Two years and €150 million to dig a tunnel under the sea between Malta and Gozo? Rubbish! Total complete and utter balderdash!
Listen: my cousin, who farms just outside Nadur, would dig that tunnel – single handed – and have traffic whizzing through in a six-lane highway in six months or less, for a total cost – not counting subsidised tea breaks – of €1,200,no sweat.
No, really. I’m telling you… give cousin Rita a shovel and a time schedule and she’d deliver an undersea tunnel that would rival the Channel between the UK and France… and at a fraction of the proposed cost.
Truly, I have seen that woman dig a hole large enough to bury the whole of the Nadur carnival defilé (oh, and don’t some of us sometimes wish that she would) in less time than it takes to do the bus journey from Victoria to the Mġarr sea terminal. Although perhaps that’s not such a good example; say the journey by bike between Mġarr and Għajnsielem. What that old broad can’t do with a shovel isn’t worth dredging.
I have seen with my own eyes cousin Rita, with her trusty spade, go through nine inches of pre-stressed concrete. She was actually supposed to be digging up the vegetable patch next to it, but nomatter… she did it.
So what I want to say to the government today is: if you are really serious about tunneling your way beneath the Gozo channel, to provide a land-link between the two islands, Rita’s your man – in a manner of speaking.
I realise that the main tunnel is not the only bit of digging to be done; there also has to be a narrow auxiliary tunnel to allow for tunnel maintenance, the placing of buckets in the main tunnel to catch any leaks and so on, but that won’t pose any problem for Rita.
In fact I reckon she would dig an auxiliary tunnel in her lunch hour if she was promised a few euros extra. I have also thought about the disposal problem. How to dispose of all the undersea soil that cousin Rita will have shifted. Just send for Rita’s sister Gracie.
While Gracie doesn’t quite have her sister’s strength and stamina, she’s a dab hand with a wheelbarrow. Believe me, with Gracie standing by with a shovel and a barrow – albeit a slightly larger one than she usually uses – she’ll have that surplus soil out of there before you can say ‘Iċ-Ċaqnu’!
Then once the tunnel is dug, it will need tiling. Enter Uncle Ninu, Rita and Gracie’s papà.
Recently retired from a lifetime of leisure as a public works employee, he has moonlighted as a tiler for most of his adult life. And a bloody good one he is too. He did a splendid job on our bathroom at home.
OK, sure, he ran out of beige tiles three quarters of the way through and had to finish the job with pale green jobbies, but it’s not his fault if the Public Works Department got their order wrong, now is it? I shall certainly be putting his name forward to tile the walls of the Gozo Channel tunnel. Keep it in the family, I say. And it will also keep the costs down.
We shall of course have to get an outside contractor in to lay the tarmac and to draw the white lines to indicate the traffic lanes. On the other hand, I’ll have a word with Uncle Ninu and see if he can persuade some of his old mates at the PWD to allow a few trucks of asphalt to go, ahem, missing.
If we start early enough I’m pretty damn sure that within a few months we’d have more than enough to cover the floor of the brand new Gozo Channel tunnel.
Total cost €1,200! And they say it will cost €150,000,000?
Oh purleeeze!