GROWL GROWL

So I'm in a great freakin' mood this evening: I twisted my ankle on one of the lousy pavements that infest Valletta (Piano Project? Flamin' ‘ell, we can't even get pavements right) I've been stuck in a meeting that led nowhere by way of oblivion ending up right where we started and I dragged my carcase back from Gozo early to spend about three constructive minutes doing what I do in real life, a feat which could have easily been put off for a couple of months when it is less disgustingly hot in town.

And I'm still on this blasted diet which doesn't even let me get my face around something warm, comforting and cheesy, also known as a pizza.

Followed by chocolate cake with chocolate chip cookie-dough ice-cream.

Moan, moan, gripe, grouch.

Leaving aside all the aforementioned reasons for being in a lousy mood, the general timbre of the world is also such as to render me morose in the extreme. The pall of ignorance that seems to lie over everything turns the world from a vibrant colourful place, guaranteed to spread good cheer, into a grey, depressing landscape inhabited by bitter and twisted gnomes.

Let me give you a fr'instance. No sooner had the news (news? news is something you don't expect) broken that H1N1 or whatever it is swine-flu is called hit our shores broken than the assorted genii who infest the virtual world were bent over their keyboards, tapping out byte after byte of unadulterated idiocy.

One such paragon of the intellectual arts advised us all not to eat frozen pork. Precisely why this gentleman thought it appropriate to dispense this particular pearl of wisdom is lost in the fog of his inadequacy: apparently, if you dare, just dare, to question the stupidity of this bon mot, you are a man who cares not a single jot for his family. I suspect I've told you about this before, either in these hallowed lines or in my Saturday piece, but I'm so impressed that someone who appears to have the wit to switch a computer on actually is so detached from reality that he believes that you get swine flu from eating frozen pig meat.

Actually, what's even more worrying, when you think on it, is that this specimen doesn't even have the intellectual self-confidence to question what he's just said or to muse, if only for a second, that there has been absolutely not a single media story that has even remotely implicated pork with contracting swine-flu.

And then we wonder why so many people are in a flat spin about something which is only distinguished from normal (if there is such a thing) flu by the fact that someone called it "swine flu". To be fair, the great uncritical get their facts from SKY NEWS, which has to fill in twenty four hours a day (between inane advertising) with only enough news to fill about thirty minutes, so you can't really blame them.

From the macrocosmic of panic about piggy runny noses to the microcosmic of a few Valletta residents being unable to comprehend that re-arranging parking spaces in their street does not mean that the total number of parking places has been reduced, the fog of despair keeps pressing down on us. The trial to which I refer here is the one being suffered by photographer and gallery-owner Alexandra Pace, who asked the Valletta Local Council to adjust (not reduce, just adjust) parking spaces around her gallery to allow a space in front of the gallery door, raising the completely misplaced ire of her neighbours.

And these are the sort of people who go around trumpeting the fact that they have something that everyone else has and, darn it, they're going to use it.

Before your imagination runs away with you, that's an opinion I'm talking about, and that's an opinion about the Piano Project that they have, and so help me, everyone is going to give it to us.

The opinion, I mean, not swine flu.

Have a nice rest of the week.