I am sure I am very far from being the only person whose recurrent nightmare is living through an earthquake. Even the slightest shake strikes terror simply because one knows instinctively that the force that has been momentarily unleashed by that tremor is utterly immense and uncontrollable. All that we have achieved after millennia of study, research and scholarship along with all their physical attributes and manifestations can, and will be obliterated in a mere couple of minutes.

Friends will attest that the Sunday before last I was feeling out of sorts. I almost blamed it on the piggy flu injection and, yet, I did confide in one friend that I had had recurrent nightmare visions and feelings about an earthquake and, no matter what I was doing, I simply could not get the sound of splitting masonry out of my head along with the noise of crashing porcelain vases out of all things.

This horridly upsetting mindset lasted three days till I woke up on Wednesday feeling relieved, little knowing that half the world away Haiti was being shaken and stirred and thousands were undergoing the reality of a Force 7 quake with tremendous loss of life and property. To date, while the world scrambles to bring relief to the survivors, we do not as yet know the extent of the horror that was unleashed on this poor beleaguered island with its sorry history under dictatorships that were a byword for cruelty and repression.

Before the forces of nature we tend to act like the frog in the Aesop fable trying to be as big as a cow and bursting asunder in the attempt.

Each New Year seems to bring some new natural disaster along with it that reminds us, whether we like it or not, that there is absolutely nothing we can do. Nature is a force that cannot ever be controlled but can only be respected; something that, despite the continual reminders, man has singularly failed to do. Just look at the recent shameful failure to reach a solution no matter how tentative about climate change and global warming in Copenhagen. Can we, after that, doubt for even a minute that Mother Nature has had it up to there?

Has anyone ever thought that the constant extraction of a million trillion barrels of oil a day from the bowels of the earth may be damaging it? And I am only mentioning one abuse and cannot even start to enumerate all the foulnesses that we human beings let fly in the winds, which, we hope, they will take somewhere else only to have them return like the proverbial egg on one's face! What a bunch of short-sighted idiots we must be.

My premonitions of earthquakes are nothing new. I have often felt uneasy about something inexplicable but never before have I actually had visions of death and destruction being forced on me so vividly and persistently.

The only thing that kept me from breaking down was closely observing my cat as I had read somewhere that animals sense earthquakes like seismographs.

I do not think that Malta has experienced a serious earthquake in its recent history. The last one, which destroyed the old Romanesque cathedral in Mdina, was in the late 17th century. However, according to the University seismograph, which is online, there have been little tremors between Malta and Tunisia as recently as January 5!

We are not immune, yet life has to go on and we simply cannot get our knickers in a twist about it, like the famous Donne di San Gennaro who shriek and scream insults and imprecations at the patron saint of Naples should he dare to procrastinate in performing the miracle that liquefies his blood. The superstition is that, should it not liquefy, Naples will be annihilated by Vesuvius. Believe it or not the belief seems to have held water... or blood, so far, at least. Should Vesuvius blow after so many years of being dormant, unlike the continually active Etna, they say that the deadly pyroclastic flow will reach even not so sunny Malta and Tunisia. So we are all sitting on a time-bomb and we need no dire Mayan predictions to know that we could cease to exist before we knew it.

As I write, rain is pelting down and the wind is howling. Despite that we have mercifully been spared the extreme weather experienced by Europe these past weeks. One of the bidding prayers a couple of Sundays ago was for timely rain, so I hope that the next two weeks, which, according to my latest iPhone application, will be extremely wet, will fulfil that particular request to the Almighty so that, in the spring, our ful (green beans) and qaqoċċ (artichokes) will be up to scratch.

Oh dear, I hear you say, pull the other one! Can one really believe for even a fleeting second that the deity who looks after our ful and qaqoċċ is the same one who unleashed the earthquake in Haiti?

For goodness's sake, no... and, again, no; unless there is something to the liquefaction of St Januarius's blood after all.

kzt@onvol.net