For reasons that concern only my family and friends, I've been a bit out of it, so apologies for not having anything new up for your seasonal cheer.

You'd think that someone who had got through law exams, run a law practise, got elevated to the bench, got shunted to the Kosovo bench and got back on the Maltese bench would have the most basic of nous to flipping well stop digging when he finds himself in a hole.

Magistrate Peralta seems to lack this attribute.

His behaviour over the years, from many accounts, has not been such that he would find his image amongst those in a gallery of "those who have adorned the Bench." Some of his judicial dicta, obiter and not, have left much to be desired, too.

When during a working day he thought it would be a good wheeze to transform his court into a low dive of the traditional sort, no-one was particularly surprised, though his defence of "been there, done that" was itself moderately surprising, since in my thirty-odd years at the Bar, I certainly had not come across revels in the Halls, ever.

But compounding his idiocy by rudely accosting the journalist sent to satisfy his editor's curiosity was dumbness in the extreme, as were dumb the rozzers who didn't even bother to ask how high when Peralta said jump.

Even at that point, Seasonal excess might have been brought to bear and a veil of discretion dragged over the debacle, but no, some little devil seems to have insinuated itself into Peralta's psyche, prodding him into appearing to thumb his nose at all and sundry, imperiously letting it be known that a) he wasn't going to resign and b) the whole world was wrong and c) the law needs to be changed and not in the direction of making it more liberal, either.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this throwback has to go.

If he doesn't do that little thing voluntarily and quickly, he has to be pointed in the right direction and given a swift kick in the rear to facilitate the transition.