Ever since I was a little nipper, I have harboured a healthy dislike for carnival. Those four or five days of forced jollity have never held any attraction for me. Maybe in the depths of my memory it was the month and a half of misery that was to follow that precipitated my aversion to all that sanitised ‘merry-making’.

I don’t know, but what I do know is that this healthy loathing of all things carnival has stayed with me all my life – so far… and I don’t see a change of attitude any time soon.

As a child one of my aunts happened to be something of a whizz with costume making. In this capacity she was in constant demand by various drama companies. And I can remember her offering to make me a costume for carnival on more than a few occasions: “What would you like to go as? Forsi a cowboy or a pirate. I could make you a lovely clown costume, or… ” No thank you, I would say and mean. She never understood my Ba humbug attitude to all things mardi gras.

She at first ignored my protestations and went ahead and made me a kiddy cowboy costume, complete with gun and holster. The fact that it immediately got consigned to the attic and was never worn must have got through to her and she eventually desisted.

This same aunt absolutely loved carnival and would frequently bore the pants off me and anyone else in earshot, relating ad nauseum tales of “Wonderful carnival balls at the Phoenicia, where we danced all night in our carnival costumes.” For me that represented a vision of nothing short of hell.

However, in 2017 I feel that, with all the other attractions available to us, carnival is fast becoming something of an irrelevance. Tempus fugit and all that. I am no expert but even I notice considerably less enthusiasm for these pre-Lenten low jinks than I did as a child. Possibly the recent reintroduction of political satire to the floats will go some way to resurrecting the jollification.

My only real brush with carnival as an adult came in my early 20s

My only real brush with carnival as an adult came in my early 20s. A friend from my village approached me to help paint some costume additions, outsize chess pieces as I recall. I agreed and turned up at the village band club one evening to do a bit of painting. However, when I got there I was immediately accosted by a slimline 40-something gent with a comb over and an extremely limp wrist.

He gushed: “Lovely to see you erm… and here’s your dance partner Angele.” My what? He then produced a somewhat lumpen female who was – I kid you not – an absolute dead ringer for the footballer Wayne Rooney… in drag. I can tell you I was out of there and down the road in a flat-out sprint before he’d uttered another word. It cost me a friendship, but it was worth it.

Probably the saddest and certainly the most bizarre carnivalesque experience I have ever witnessed took place in a small West Midlands town in England a few years back.

While over there on holiday, we happened to be passing through on a fairly typical cold damp Saturday afternoon in August when a bedraggled display of bunting dangling across the main street announced that on that very day the town carnival was taking place.

To my untutored gaze this appeared to comprise a mini parade led by the town band, followed by about 25 or 30 at most, middle-aged townsfolk dressed as everything from Madonna (the singer) to Charlie Chaplin… God help us. And all the participants seemed to be of the female persuasion; yes even the Chaplins – and most were graveyard side of 60; the men had obviously very sensibly chickened out.

And the ‘fun’ didn’t end on the main drag, when we visited a super-market we noted that all, or most of the staff, were dressed as Snow White and the 17 or so dwarves. And yes it was a truly gruesome sight.

So no, you won’t see me out in Valletta for the pre-Lenten jollies, either this year or indeed ever. But if you happen to be a devotee of all that is carnival please don’t let me spoil your enjoyment. Ba humbug!