The year is 2064. I am 88 years old. Silver-haired, with a tinge of a blue rinse. I could have laser-zapped my hair into any colour I wanted really, but I figured that one has to show one’s age at some point or other.

I would love to be pottering about in my little house, clapping my hands at the little teapot gadget which brews the perfect cup at my every order. Instead, I still have two more years to get to pension age – which has been raised up to 90.

So, here I am writing about Independence Day. We spent the day on the trail of Queen Kate, 83, here to celebrate the centenary anniversary.

“I wanted to come for the 50th anniversary but I was told it was so humid that my hair would have all frizzed up, which is worse than morning sickness. I’m glad I made it this time – I finally got to take a photo standing next to Żieme,” she said.

Her brother-in-law Harry, is here too. He lives in Malta these days, in a luxury apartment at White Rocks Super Luxury (it finally opened five years ago).

“In 2014, Buckingham Palace security thought Iraq was safer than an ambush by Maltese girls, so they did not deem it safe for me to come. I still ended up marrying a Maltese girl though,” he said. He met the girl, a doctor, on one of his remote charity trips to Timbuktu – as we know there’s a Maltese in every corner of the planet.

Incidentally, his wife was a member of the medical team which invented a bathroom lavatory gadget to pick up strange DNA sequence. Thanks to this, cancer has become an incidental day-to-day living, treated in hours, not the months it took 50 years ago.

We’ve been through hardships: 25 years ago we were about to completely run out of anything to eat. We had no choice but to become dramatically less wasteful and start respecting the land again. Even hunters packed their guns and took up binoculars instead.

Even hunters packed their guns and took up binoculars instead

Malta is a cleaner place now. It changed since the idea of owning streets came about. Each one of us has to buy a share of our street. Since that happened, everyone started cleaning and neighbour spying and, in general, hassling everyone who dared dirty the streets.

It did get a bit tense when some insisted on leaving their shoes and their prized porcelain dogs out in the street, but when the (indestructible) robot wardens swept everything away, everyone saw sense.

We are not only able to buy street space, but airspace too; as we speak, floating pods are being built in the sky above me by Caqnu. Our cars double up as helicopters and boats.

In fact, incidentally: no more Gozo Channel. On their last day of operation, a Gozo channel employee said: “One thing I’m happy about: we won’t have to dread calls from some minster to turn back when we’re half way through, used to make me real seasick those mid-sea U-turns.”

Not that we can go to Gozo much these days. Twenty years ago, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to take it over as their retirement island. The sum they paid all Gozitans to leave the island has not been disclosed but, somehow, they all seemed rather willing to come and live in Malta without a whimper.

Of course, this solved the tunnel-bridge saga, which had been in its 33rd feasibility study. Luckily, Prime Minister Anya Losco – daughter of Eurovision winner singer Ira (who led the third party to win an election for the first time) has now declared the matter closed once and for all.

It’s funny how now that Parliament is made up of 60 per cent women MPs, things are getting done in an impressively efficient manner: our transport system called Transport Malta in the Sky – is finally sleek smooth and free. Joseph Calleja, still a national treasure, sang at the official inauguration of the new bus system. We all watched it on television. We still watch television.

Remember when TV arrived and they said it would be the end of radio? And when the internet arrived, they said it would mean the beginning of something else?

Well, we are still gathering around the television on Friday nights to watch Joe Azzopardi, on Xarabank frowning at us, chewing his palm and barking at his guests to keep it ‘fil-qosor’ at the tender age of 99.

There, I’ve reached my word count. Unlike 50 years ago, the activity formerly known as typing, no longer exists.

Instead, I hold a pen-like device on my temple and my thoughts are immediately filed on the iLife, and you will all automatically receive this in your brains. Happy feast.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti