Two years after the departure of John Micallef (better known as Roamer in The Sunday Times of Malta), the second conference on G. K. Chesterton, sponsored by the Farsons and Strickland Foundations, was held last Tuesday to a packed audience at the Erin Serracino Hall of the University.

With the participation of US G. K. Chesterton Institute speakers Fr Ian Boyd and Dermot Quinn and organised by a newly-formed Maltese G. K. Chesterton committee, it turned out to be a great success and promise for the future.

I write this because I would like to show my appreciation to Klaus Vella Bardon’s hard work for making John’s dream come true.

He and Peter Vassallo (also John’s friend and now committee chairman) did all they could to make it turn out into a successful venture.

For those who perhaps never knew John, I would just like to mention, as I did in my tribute to him at the first conference held four months after his death, that G. K. Chesterton had become a constant friend for John, who knew all his books and seemed to have adopted him as a soul mate.

In his column on Sundays, he quoted him almost incessantly. It was as if together they wanted to transmit their God to the world outside.

John had worked very hard to bring the first G. K. Chesterton conference to Malta and it was heart-breaking for me to watch him lose his race to achieve this goal of his, with a devouring and devastating cancer constantly battling against him.

And so sadly as John reached the limits of all that he could do for Malta with his writings, something made him reach out desperately to G. K. Chesterton’s noted great common sense for added help. And somehow somewhere in my mind and in my heart, I now know that G. K. Chesterton had reached out too, by accepting to take over the job slowly but surely.

He helped him then, but more so now, where he has very obviously taken Roamer firmly into his own big and strong grasp.