TOO DEPRESSING

Time flies when you're having fun: I was enjoying the spectacle of the Lil'Elves rising to the bait of my jibe about their lousy command of English (and the woolly thinking that this betrays) that I totally didn't notice that a week and more had passed from the last time I put a few words of wisdom together.

This weekend must have made depressing reading for the Grand Panjandrums of the Nationalist Party, always assuming that they take any notice of the papers and of the opinions expressed therein. The PM does, I'm sure, but he's off in the US of A, hobnobbing with the great and the good, as one has to when one is PM, so perhaps he's a bit cut off. There's nothing like a dose of foreign travel to allow you a bit of perspective, which is why I think it should be made a matter of law that you have to leave Malta for a while.

Actually, there are some people who should be made to leave Malta permanently, but that's just my take on it.

Opening the papers this morning, a PN sympathiser would have seen the Times' headline about Marisa Micallef, formerly a strong, and lucid, columnist with significantly anti-Labour views, having joined the effort to turn the Labour Party from an unelectable bunch (her words) to an electable one. One of the mainstays of a democracy is the existence of an electable opposition, which we haven't had for a heck of a time (and which is why the PN powers that are don't tend to pay much attention to public opinion) so Ms Micallef's move is nothing more (or less) than a strengthening of the democratic process, when you think about it.

It's also evidence that the country has grown up, since in the good old days, anyone of her ilk setting foot in Labour's camp would have been doing so at material risk to her well-being. As it is, I've heard rumblings from the general direction of Labour that not everyone is well-pleased with the idea - they needn't worry, this isn't a Baldrickish cunning plan to get a fifth columnist into the Glass House.

Then there's the great big hoo-ha about the Fairmount contract that seems to have kicked the shipyards even further into the red: charges about who was to blame and who should resign are being traded with the gay abandon that characterises such things, but is anyone really surprised? The shipyards have been an albatross round our necks for so many, many years, with the Spanish Practices imposed on the place by the union and with the bone-chilling fear of political reprisal that dogged attempts at restructuring, that no-one is really surprised that the place is costing us money, again.

A minor comment by Dr Helena Dalli struck me, while we're on the subject of the Fairmount - she asked why the British consultant who had negotiated the contract had been "allowed to leave Malta" six months into his contract. Maybe it's because we have certain freedoms in this country, Dr Dalli, and we don't subscribe to notions like taking delinquent managers out and shooting them if they mess up, that's why.

To cap a rather depressing weekend of papers, the Independent ran a rather clever story about a number of Nationalist MPs who seem to have had something better to do with their time than attend the Independence Day Mass Meeting. I don't blame them (the absent MPs, I mean) because to my mind, in the latter end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there are many better things to do than attend a Mass Meeting, such as watching paint dry, scratching one's behind, listening to finger-nails being scraped down a blackboard and following a teleserial on Super 101, but I suppose people's expectations being what they are, the MPs concerned should have given some thought to the way they looked.

But does anyone really care? I doubt it.

Depression came into the news in a different way, towards the end of last week. The Federation of Conservationist Bird-Shooters and Trappers demonstrated a grasp of polished public relations that with any other group of people would have had the people responsible fired on the spot. Since hunters are concerned, they probably got a round of applause, but that's par for the course.

Someone speaking for the FKNK, believe it or not, said that, given that four hunters had committed suicide last year because of the restrictions on hunting, it was unacceptable that people should lose their lives because of the anti-hunting lobby.

To invoke the sadness of suicide in such a way, to trivialise the pain that these poor souls' families must be going through, making such crassly opportunistic use of tragedy, shows that these people should not be given even the time of day any more.