One foot in the grave

The older I become the more in synch I feel I am with Victor Meldrew of One Foot in the Grave fame. The amount of times I am either on the verge of or actually do exclaim “I don’t believe it” increases as the toil of everyday living resembles a game of Snakes & Ladders more and more each year.

Something in this weird and wonderful world of ours has to give

Far from attaining tranquillity, early middle age and beyond exposes chasms that, were I 20 years younger, would have been dismissed in ‘it can never happen to me’ fashion but it has and it does... and it will.

These frailties and pitfalls do not come without a soupcon of compensation. At this stage in life, one can regard the curious goings-on in the world around you with a sense of amused detachment that in one’s younger years would have been unthinkable.

I wonder if it is because one finally gives up on things ever adding up or making sense. To see grown men in Parliament for instance hurling invective (a great Times of Malta 1960s expression) at each other, not to mention diametrically opposed facts and statistics, reduce us, the people who placed them there, to hapless spectators in a bewildering Nastase vs McEnroe (remember them?) tennis match.

The present Enemalta BWSC debates have seemingly degenerated into this while we, the people, merely receive those terrifying green-edged statements that are liable to send us into states of extremely low or extremely high blood pressure.

At the end of the day, the man in the street couldn’t care who and what provides electricity as long as it is, one, provided without hitches and, two, is affordable.

When the decision whether or not to switch on an air conditioner becomes life threatening then, yes, we, the people, do have a very serious problem.

Yes, the older one becomes, the frustration one feels at the fact that one has been on earth for 50 something years and nothing much has changed is huge. By change I refer to the human psyche as, in everything else, change has been radical and pretty amazing.

People will remain what they are and unless, like me, they can take refuge in a form of creativity that completely removes you, just like a Deus ex macchina, from the daily drudge, life can be most soul-destroying unless it is tempered with a strong sense of humour.

Last week, a magistrate threw out a case concerning a woman whose bra straps came undone in a bar for grown-ups called Steam on the premise that the people who frequented this sort of places, gentlemen of a certain age, “knew what to expect”. In other words, they knew that places like this were full of curvaceous and voluptuous women with faulty bra straps!

That brings us to the ‘laptop’ (sic) dancers saga. Remember them? I could not help recalling the mass arrest a couple of years back of a number of women caught in flagrante in some other place in the act of ‘laptop’ dancing!

I cannot for the life of me remember how that ended up but I am truly torn between urging the police to continue in their endeavours for our greater delectation or else telling them to stop wasting taxpayers’ money on such rubbish.

You see, the reportage is too amusing to forego while, yes, arresting women (and not the men) for wearing defective brassieres is too idiotic for words, especially in an age when a touch of a button on one’s Iphone can reveal all that and more.

Now, if these women had paraded their wares in the street, thereby frightening the horses, then that would have been another matter altogether.

But then what can one expect in a world when the nationality of Justin Beiber’s monkey becomes the subject of international speculation and the result of the Eurovision Song Contest becomes the subject of conspiracy theories and not just by Malta but Russia too? The Germans, by the way, are blaming Chancellor Angela Merkel for their abysmal result!

Go on!

To further prove my point, Pope Francis is reported to have performed an exorcism on St Peter’s Square while praying over a young man (obviously possessed). What is so special about that?

The entire raison d’être of the Roman Catholic religion is to free us from evil for eternity, therefore the Pope was merely exercising his duty.

The speculation as to whether the devil exists and whether spirits, whether evil or good, exist is another matter. I happen to believe that they do and I have had visual and aural evidence that convinced me as such. Therefore, I am in no way impressed that on the feast of Pentecost the spiritual head of the Church, God’s representative on earth, can do and did what he did.

It is more the suicide in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the ‘political horror show’ demo, where a man appealed to the Pope to help end Italy’s embarrassing political situation by scaling the dome of St Peter’s basilica, that concern me. These are acts of desperation which His Holiness cannot do much about unless he exhorts the leaders of the world to change their ways in order to make the distribution of wealth more equitable. You may be sure that this will fall on deaf ears.

We have reached a stage in the civilised world which avid readers of history would recognise as a dangerous one that presages some almighty convulsion like the French Revolution or World War I.

The image of the bankers in Wall Street drinking champagne and laughing in scorn at the people who were demonstrating in the street was one that reminded me of the poor maligned Marie Antoinette who never did say anything about bread or cake but who will remain forever associated with it.

Something in this weird and wonderful world of ours has to give. May it happen slowly and without too many cataclysms so that, somehow, we will manage to survive it without too much damage.