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Junior News

They say that people who eavesdrop rarely hear good spoken about themselves, and that the key to good eavesdropping is not getting caught.

This last fortnight appears to have been particularly propitious in the eavesdropping department for me - I accidentally overheard several conversations (none of which involved me) and the people concerned did not even realise they were broadcasting live to the four winds.

I do not drive - and despite the fact that Fleur de Lys is within walking distance of Birkirkara, Hamrun, Qormi, and Marsa, there are times when I do have to catch the bus.

I was trying to finish Ray Bradbury's Medicine for Melancholy when a television producer and someone who was obviously (racially prejudiced radar at work?) a foreigner, boarded the bus and as luck would have it, sat down right behind me. I only know her to say hello to - and she did not even see me. I cringed, because the body language of the Maltese person showed she was angry and ill at ease, and she was not paying attention to her surroundings, but it would have drawn her attention to me if I changed my place, and made me late if I got off at the next bus stop.

This person was trying to explain the niceties of what goes on in the local television scene, with names being dropped like hot bricks throughout the conversation. Of course, I know most of the people whom she mentioned - and I know for a fact that whereas some of the things she said were true, others were, shall we say exaggerations.

The foreigner, in the supercilious, scornful tone some non-Maltese adopt when talking to us natives, was taking her for a ride (despite the fact that she had paid for their tickets), and egging her on, and she did not even notice, so intent was she on making an impression. In the end, he said some really nasty things, and it was all I could do not to turn round and give him an earful

. Thankfully, they got off before I did - so (unless she is reading this), she does not even realise I heard a good part of her harangue.

There was also the occasion when I phoned Mater Dei hospital to fix an appointment for one of my children. I happened to catch the person to whom I was directed, in mid-conversation. She said that I was supposed to speak to someone else, in another part of the building, and said she would direct me.

Yet it was obvious that my needs were not important enough to curtail her conversation. So she merely placed the receiver on the desk, and went on sniping at someone who was not there, with a colleague, calling out names of patients and the clinics to which they had been allocated, greeting staff as they came in, passing sotto voce comments about patients, and generically being nasty.

This went on for about five minutes (I was doing other things with the telephone receiver jammed between my shoulder-blade and my ear)... and suddenly, the line went dead. Social activities are not really my scene, but I do attend a few. I was sitting down, people-watching (something I am inclined to do when I am at these gatherings), when I pricked my ears because amidst the hubbub, I singled out the voice of a person to whom I wished to talk. Just as I swung my legs off the bar stool, a newly-married couple sat down on the next two.

She was accusing him of flirting with so-and-so and he said it was all part of the game because he needed something "for them" from her.

She spat out that buttering people up the way he did went way over the usual fawning attitude of people, and he said that she was still green in the business. He then said that the evening before (i.e. when he had taken his laptop onto the roof of their house, while she visited her parents), had been pleasanter.

I downed my glass of fizzy water and felt nauseated, and I'm sure it was not the carbonation that made me so. It was nearly 1.00am, and my cellular telephone rang. I don't slay get calls at that hour, but since I was still awake, chasing a deadline, I decided to answer it. In vain did I say "hello" about a dozen times.

The person whose name appeared on the monitor was having a (probably drunken) conversation with someone else - she had activated my number without realising it. If she had to ask me, I can tell her exactly what starter she had, what type of fish she ate, and what wine she drank, and what she had for dessert, and, most importantly, what she said to her escort about a couple of our mutual friends. Somehow, I don't think she will ask, though. The idiom insists that "walls have ears".

The media qualifies this by saying "treat every microphone as live and every camera as taking you". I wish people would remember these words of wisdom. Always.