This is one of those weeks, such as have afflicted me since I was Beck, when the awesomeness of my persuasive powers is recognised and I am constrained to forebear from writing about matters political because you, dear reader, would rush out and vote the way I told you.

It used to be once every five years or so that you had to forego the pleasure of me getting at politicians, then it started to be once every couple of years, what with local council elections, then we had a referendum or two chucked in and now we’ve got the MEP elections.

It’s getting to be that your jobbing political commentator finds it difficult to find a spare weekend to ply his trade.

Sad, I know, but hard is the law, the law it remains (in Latin it sounds better) so about matters political, at least insofar as those within these shores are concerned, I shall not write.

I shall, of course, exhort you to go out and do your democratic duty by voting for the candidates you think will best represent the country in the European Parliament. In the interests of level playing fields, I shall, at the same time, exhort you not to vote if you are of the belief that not voting is an adequate expression of your political will.

In other words, do what you will, your will is supreme.

Sometimes the poachers win, sometimes the gamekeepers win

After that introduction as to why I’m not rabbiting on in my usual vein, allow me a personal note and a salute to an old friend.

Due to having dropped my bike and pulled a thigh muscle, making it difficult to drive (I’m fine now, thank you for asking) I wasn’t able to come back to Malta for George Cutajar’s funeral.

Instead of seeing him off that way, then, I thought I’d be a bit more public and commend George to your memory as one of the good guys.

There have been a few tributes already on various areas of the media and blogosphere and the common trend is that our friend was one who will be recalled fondly, with a wry smile, generally.

George was the epitome of a man to whom the description ‘larger than life’ could be given without fear of contradiction.

Less euphemistically, you could call him a noisy, sometimes annoying, pain in the nether regions and he, for one, certainly wouldn’t contradict you. In fact, you’d hear a loud laugh and a rejoinder in the same spirit and, at the same time, you’d be bought a coffee or a drink, depending on the time of day.

What you certainly couldn’t call him was underhand or anything less than up-front, a characteristic that perhaps made those unable to comprehend integrity and honesty uncomfortable but which made dealing with him relatively straightforward for the rest of us.

He was enthusiastic in all that he did and this story is just to illustrate the extent to which George threw himself into whatever it was he was doing, heart and soul, and, in this case, hair and all.

I think it was about 1988 and he’d taken to getting himself fit in some way or other and, for some reason, and don’t ask why, I’ve tried to check it out but no one can recall the details, this required that his hair take on a hue that was closest, if I was forced to describe it, to rather lurid orange.

The word around the Chamber of Lawyers was: “Have you seen George recently, what the heck has he done to his hair?” To which the answer was generally eyebrows heading heavenwards. It went back to a normal shade pretty soon after.

He will be missed, if you’ll excuse the platitude, by his family and his many friends and our small world is the poorer for his absence.

There is a world beyond our shores, though you wouldn’t think so some-times, and, in this world, the media also takes up causes and makes noises, sometimes ludicrously.

One of my favourite telly shows, surprise, surprise, is Top Gear, where middle-aged men in jeans burn fuel and make inappropriate remarks, often in the worst possible taste, but great fun unless you suffer from terminal po-facedness, a word which doesn’t exist according to my word-app but which is less offensive than constipation.

The undisputed star of the show is one Clarkson, Jeremy of that ilk, who is about as politically correct as – well – Jeremy Clarkson.

His name has become a byword for WMYism, or White Male Yobbism, and the feminists and tree-huggers, the ones who prefer to drive a clapped-out old VW Camper belching fumes into the atmosphere than a modern car that is actually as ecologically sound as their tyre-sole sandals, love to hate him.

It came to pass that during filming an episode of the show, which reaches, for many of us, Shakespearian levels of poetry (in motion, mainly) Clarkson started reciting the ditty that used to trip daintily off our tongues when we were kids, the one that goes “eeny, meeny, miney mo, catch a...” shock, horror, stop right there, don’t even think about using that word that starts with “n” and rhymes with Pooh Bear’s friend, the one with tiger-stripes but pronounced with a double “gg”.

Clarkson didn’t quite stop, he sort of fluffed and flubbed and made a peculiar noise, presumably because he noticed that he was about to commit a heinous crime of the sort that the racist scum deny took place in the early 1940s.

The sky fell in, the world stopped turning, the sun darkened and the universe shifted on its axis, not because Clarkson actually said the n-word on the air but because he almost, but not quite, allowed it to be recorded.

Honestly, even if he had spoken the rhyme the way it used to be chanted before we all became slaves to faux propriety, hostages to the (imagined) sensibilities of people who, in truth, know better than to be offended by such trivialities, it wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing. Quite apart from anything else, the word pronounced with a “-gahh” is used by a specific class of guys, so why should the word pronounced slightly differently give (usually white) folk conniptions?

Happily, good sense (more precisely, economic priorities) prevailed and the matter blew over, though not before a DJ who, quite in error, let a so-called racially-offensive song, one recorded in ancient times, go out was made to fall on his sword, obviously because his show wasn’t a worldwide smash hit.

The Brit media also gets all hot under the collar on occasion when some big company or fat (pluto)c(r)at manages to find a way around the labyrinthine tax laws that the Chancellor has concocted, as if it isn’t the Chancellor’s own silly fault in the first place that he has such complex structures in place that they just invite wise-guy lawyers and accountants to play fast and loose with them.

On a par with the apoplectic rage when they spot someone who has managed to get away with is the smarmy glee with which people whose fancy schemes have fallen through are greeted.

Sometimes the poachers win, sometimes the gamekeepers win but from the way the rags react, you’d think the editors’ own mothers were being held hostage, their virtue in peril.

Food recommendations of the week: Oleander in Xagħra, home cooking of the fun kind, and The Harbour Club on the Valletta waterfront, Quarry Wharf, I think, just as you come out of Victoria Gate. We went there after visiting the Malta Design Week at St Elmo’s, which closes on the Saturday this sees the light of day and which is worth a look.

imbocca@gmail.com

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20

Jeremy Clarkson’s name has become a byword for WMYism, or White Male Yobbism. Photo: Reuters/Neil Hall

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