I’m writing this in India, at the end of a rather decent week or so touring the Golden Triangle and I’m tempted, almost but not quite, to extend a hand of friendship towards Joseph “I used to say there was Oil” Mizzi, because our traffic problems are on the lines of the line to use the loo in a kindergarten playground when compared to Indian cities.

But then, these cities have millions upon millions vying for the same couple of square metres, whereas we don’t, for all that we mutter about being one of the world’s most densely-populated countries. We might be, but until you’ve moved – more accurately, failed to move – through Agra’s traffic, you don’t know what the weight of humanity means.

You don’t know what filth, squalor and poverty mean, either: we live in paradise compared to the vast majority of Indians and it’s up to us not to drag ourselves down. A happy geographical accident, and nothing more, located us in Europe. We can’t kick that gift horse in the mouth by becoming a Third World country governed by people for whom turning a fast buck has become a religion.

Being in hotels that were bereft of decent wifi, to say nothing of a mobile network that is patchy at best, and four and half time zones away from Europe, meant that we were cut off by a couple of hours from the news, though the tragedy in Paris naturally came up on our radar pretty quickly.

As did the spluttering incoherencies of the idiotic xenophobes for whom the fact that one of the terrorist thugs was carrying a Syrian passport meant that the horrors were a direct result of the migration flows towards Europe.

The whole thing seems to have been a colossal waste of time and a pain in the neck for quite a few. CHOGM, heaven help us, is looking like being more of the same

Honestly, how ridiculous can somepeople be? Do they really believe that a terrorist organisation needs the cover of wretched immigrants to be able to infiltrate European cities? Yes, fine, if it’s convenient, they might use that channel, along with the same channels used by the criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and 7/7, to mention but two atrocities. In fact, BBC World is reporting that the mastermind behind the Paris attacks was born in Brussels, something of a far cry from being a refugee last summer.

I have no idea how the world is going to face the evolving situation, but it’s certainly not going to be by making the lives of the really poor even worse by pushing them back at the borders, however much the core voters of the people who keep evoking the notion of “push back” would dearly love it to be the case.

It was so unlucky for Premier Joe, the timing of the attacks, wasn’t it? All his hype and pomp and monuments to success, erected before the summit had even started, were blown off the front pages: off the news cycle altogether, actually, since he hardly made the front pages.

The futility of the elephant straining to give birth to a less than €2 billion mouse, that could have been confected by the stroke of a pen in Brussels, was brought into stark relief, as was the ineptitude of his Tagħna Lkoll minions, who seemed to be unable to organise a transport pool, let alone a whole conference.

All in all, the whole thing seems to have been a colossal waste of time and a pain in the neck for quite a few. CHOGM, heaven help us, is looking like being more of the same, and even more of a waste of time, given that the Commonwealth, while being a decent enough conduit for human relations, especially on the cultural side, is pretty much an anachronism.

Oh well, as long as Premier Joe can hob-nob with the Great and the Good, that’s all right then, though it would be difficult to wipe all the egg off his face if Her Maj is told not to attend by her security advisers.

But then, Her Maj’s ship Bulwark is going to be here, evoking shades of centuries past, to ‘beef up security’. The rumbling sound you hear from below are Dom and Lorry rolling in their graves, highly agitated at the thought of a foreign force sullying our shores again.

Amidst the big stories popped up the less big ones, such as the one about the accident in Paceville which so concerned Premier Joe, to the extent that he said something has to be done. His Minister responsible for the Catering Corps was perhaps less forthcoming, preferring to wait for the result of the investigations.

That’s a very reasonable line to take, in an ideal world, but in the current climate, it makes you wonder whether Carmelo Abela wasn’t being overcautious lest he stepped on toes that might be protected within the Tree of Governance. You can’t blame him, he can’t know the name of every possible Tagħna Lkoll supporter, so he has to err on the side of caution, not to risk annoying the party machine.

Less clear was the reason why the media that is not in thrall to the Labour Party was quite slow in coming out with the name of the club. Because of the time difference and communication problems you encounter on the sub-continent, I’m not entirely clear on when the name of the club where people were injured badly made it on to the bulletins, but I’ve seen quite a few comments about the media taking their own sweet time to publish.

Fair enough, they don’t want to be damned by spitting out the name too quickly, on the chance that they mightbe wrong, but was it so difficult to take a hike into Paceville and see where things were happening?

While on the subject of the media, was that Azzopardi person, the one responsible for Xarabank and its contribution to the dumbing-down (anaesthesia?) of the nation in general reported correctly? Did he really say that popular programmes should be funded (reading between the lines, at the expense of quality programming) because you lose money putting on television shows?

The logic, apparently, was that since people (obviously) want to watch popular programmes, and since people (such as Where’s Everybody) lose money putting them on, it is government’s duty to fund things like Xarabank, because that’s what people want to watch.

Seriously? If you’re losing money, get out of the business. No one believes you’re doing it for the love of show business, anyway.

And does anyone really believe that Azzopardi’s Xarabank, which has been going on for years and years and years, is a money-losing machine?

Come on mate, pull the other one.