It’s a strange experience, living in Malta in the year 2014. It’s as if we’ve been transported, lock, stock and smoking barrel, into the land of milk and honey, where all is serene and blissful and the populace mooches about with a satisfied grin on its collective face, content and satiated. There are even rumours of lambs gambolling and fair maidens cutting capers but I have not verified them for myself.

You might ask what brought about my flight into fanciful, quasi-bucolic, fantasy, reaching heights to which William Morris and similar Utopians could only aspire.

Well, to start with, we have it on the authority of no less a master of the darkest of dark arts, Alastair Campbell, that the (Malta) Labour Party has learnt its lessons well from Bambi Blair’s “New Labour”. Given that Joseph Muscat, current leader of the Labour Party, clearly takes his inspiration from Tony Blair, then on hearing that the governing party has learnt its lessons well from that gentleman, it follows that we are living in Heaven on Earth.

Because everyone knows that the (still) United Kingdom was nothing short of paradise not yet lost when Blair was in power, compared to these dark days of Whig-accompliced Toryism, when top-hatted plutocrats, hell bent on driving the world into war to fatten their wallets even more, rule the roost with an iron hand.

The irony that Labour under Blair’s heir, the Milliband boy, is virtually unelectable in the UK as things stand (though, given that the Scots saw sense, they have a chance) and the further irony that Muscat seems to hold David Cameron in high regard, for all his Grand Tory Airs, are not lost on me.

But it’s not only from Campbell that we are able to glean that Malta in 2014 is a great place, even if in the image-projection stakes, his report card entry reads “could do better”.

This obsession with image and spin is something that Muscat seems to have contracted, incidentally.

No, we can arrive at the same conclusion by taking a look at the headlines and reading between them. For instance, it has come to pass that the COLA (and that’s not the drink that refreshes) this year is to be the princely sum of €1.16 per week. That totals up to €60.32 per year.

That, folks, is the sum of the pay rise you’ll be getting next year, enough to withstand, what, three more power cuts, taking Konrad Mizzi’s valuation of a bag of groceries at face value.

Joseph Muscat comes up with this paltry amount and the reaction is a general purring of contentment

I’m no economist, in fact as I’ve had cause to remark before, numbers make my teeth itch and my brain hurt, giving retrospective vindication of the attributes my economics master, one ‘Jock’ Stewart used to award me (‘thick as a short plank’, once you ask).

I am unable, therefore, to argue whether €1.16 per week is a fair increase or not: for all I know, in strict economic terms it is fantastically generous, a magnanimous gesture of such splendour that even the Minister of Finance and Peanuts will feel that his stipend is now fair.

The thing is, though, that I happen to be in possession of faculties that do not depend on a grasp of financial or economic minutiae, such as a memory.

I remember, for instance, as if it were yesterday, that every time the Budget rolled around in the five years of GonziPN, oh horrid, horrid specimens, government, up would pipe assorted pipsqueaks to whine and whinge about income tax not being cut, for all the world as if the world had not in the meantime plunged into a depression the likes of which hadn’t been glimpsed for decades.

That we were managing to keep our heads above the water was of no consequence whatsoever to aforementioned pipsqueaks, it need hardly be said; “we want a tax cut and we want it now” was their battle cry.

Within that context, then, can you imagine the cacophony of howls and “Issa daqshekks” (enough is enough) that would have greeted the announcement that, for the next year, €1.16 would be all that the rude mechanicals would be getting extra in their pay packets?

The noise and posturing would have been wondrous to hear and see, Chicken Licken and all the little chicks would have been rushing around in a panic because the sky was falling.

Muscat comes up with this paltry amount and the reaction is, well, exactly what anyone with eyes that see and ears that hear has come to expect: a general purring of contentment, much on a par with Her Majesty when she heard that Alexander Salmond’s fool notion of leaving the UK had been kicked into touch.

That the representatives of the capitalist side of the equation were well pleased with the idea of having to bump up pay packets by a(n) euro and a smidgen is hardly surprising but that the unions, representatives of the poor workers, have also spread their legs to have their tummies tickled leaves me more than slightly unimpressed.

They could, at the very least, have had the decency to keep quiet.

And for the benefit of Labour’s lil’elves, who will find themselves in duty bound to pipe up and gainsay me, no doubt pointing out that the workers are benefitting from a sound economy and such-like spinnery, in true Campbell fashion, might I be permitted to remind them that if we have a decent economy, it’s due in no small measure to GonziPN?

It’s not as if Muscat and Edward ‘Peanut’ Scicluna had put into train any significant project, apart from flogging our passports, which I hear isn’t going as well as What’s Their Names and Whoever had dreamt.

Oh well, it’s not as if we should be surprised that the country holds Labour to a much lower standard than it held the Nationalists.

The deafening silence from the usual suspects about the rape of the environment, the abysmal public transport system and raging nepotism, to mention but three issues, that have become the order of the day, should have preconditioned me to expect it.

As I mentioned last week, we’re thankfully back, so I can take up the onerous task again of making humble suggestions as to where you can stop off and have a bite or two, nourishing the inner man, so to speak, after having nourished the mind by reading this.

Last Friday we had dinner at Ġużeppi’s in Mellieħa, where we hadn’t been for some time.

Picture me hanging my head in shame at that admission because it was terribly good, though this is hardly a surprising finding on my part.

If you go there and they have it, try the Mediterranean Sole.

I haven’t been, as crowded venues are contra-indicated at the moment, but I was asked to put in a plug for the Voices concert, which I am more than happy to do. It’s probably useless, to be honest, because the shows are always a sell-out but if you come across a ticket or so going begging, snap them up. Or just make a donation, it’s not obligatory to go to the show to do that little thing.

Finally, while on the shameless plugging gig, I suppose I would be being remiss in the husbandly duties area if I didn’t point you in the general direction of St James’ Cavalier, where She Who Must has an exhibition of her paintings.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20