What a brilliant idea! Three carnivals a year – and why not? In fact, why not more?

What’s wrong with 52 carnivals a year, one a week?

I personally never could, nor ever will, endure the facile, forced jollity of our pre-Lenten jamboree. I cannot be alone in spending a childhood and adolescence being told by parents and grandparents what fun it all was... back in their day. But no, sorry... not for me.

Still, hey! I’m no spoilsport... if the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary for ‘kalca’ (sic) thinks this country can take mega carnival overkill... I say go for it.

Despite my antipathy towards all things carnival, I have to confess I did once – I emphasise once – way back in my mid-teens participate... sort of. What happened was this: An acquaintance – and carnival enthusiast, suggested it just might be an effective way of meeting... girls. And – although I was as keen as the next kid in getting up close and personal with the opposite sex – I had grave reservations about doing so in the context of something I abhorred.

However, said acquaintance persuaded me to help out with his carnival company – not by taking part in the thing itself – but by painting some giant cardboard butterfly wings, which were to be worn by their dancers. All I had to do was turn up at the place where they were rehearsing and get my instructions from the head of the carnival company.

He turned out to be a somewhat testerone-challenged geezer of indeterminate years, who greeted me with: “Lovely to meet you, your dance partner is the gorgeous Simone and she’s just over here.” I have to confess I never actually met Simone – gorgeous or otherwise – I think I gulped once and fled, never to return.

The powers-that-be have tried to convince us that carnival is yet another string to our vast (or otherwise) panoply of tourism attractions. I beg to disagree.

The sobering sight of several dozen heavily overweight, grim-faced post-pubertic brats hobbling around a piazza in Valletta, terminally out of time with the music, is not what I would call an attraction.

If the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary for Culture thinks this country can take mega carnival overkill... I say go for it

Far better, in my opinion, to get the national festivities committee... whatever, to put on a series of dance shows populated by competent dancers from some of our burgeoning dance academies. Chuck in the odd stand-up comedian or three and you’ve got a show that – at the very least – would embarrass us far less than wall-to-wall karnival.

A few years back I was persuaded – albeit kicking and screaming – to take some foreign guests (at their request) to the Sunday session of Carnival.

Bad idea.

To begin with, we happened to be seated in a section of the crowd peopled by spectators with little or no knowledge of how to talk to one another without resorting to an eardrum-shattering bellow – and who spent the entire afternoon (when not yelling and screaming at one another) filling their faces with everything from pastizzi to huge wedges of timpana.

The dance programme itself was everything I feared it would be... and more.

Each ‘dance’ was more embarrassing or screamingly hilarious (unintentionally, of course) than the one preceding it. We went from outsize chickens, staggering around the floor in cartoon heads and – what looked like – feathered leggings, whose only purpose appeared to be to hobble the wearers and make collisions and tumbles inevitable, via Inca priests and priestesses in shiny silver and blue skirts and boots, who honestly appeared to be trying to cripple one another with spears and clubs, (I wonder how many were obliged to show up at the Mater Dei Accident and Emergency later in the evening), to 1920s flappers in ill-fitting wigs and impossibly high heels who tried – and for the most part succeeded – in giving an atonal and totally inept impersonation of quadroplegic ostriches in the last stages of their death throes.

It was excruciating.

And the Hon. P.S. wants at least three of these a year? Quite frankly, I’d rather take tourists to the visitors’ gallery in Parliament, to watch a debate.

Now that’s what I call Karnival.