With all the madness going on in this country nothing beats a good lottery or a spot of gambling to get us all back to reality and away from politics and petty tricks.

Brace yourself for some hot news: If I win the Lotterija Indipendenza organised by the PN I will be the proud owner of a flaming red car. How patriotic of the organisers to use our national colours I hear some diehard PN supporters say (bar Kate and Lawrence are there any left of that breed?). Or are the Nationalists changing their favourite colour too? Sort of what Joseph and his band can do we can do better. If Joseph turned blue why don't we too change our hue? Politics, after all, as some wit must have quipped, is the art of noble finesse and disconcerting moves.

And it could also be that they—the PN spinners—want to be seen as super-hip and inclusive and want to include, in their fold, anyone out there who is still interested in being tainted red. Back in the day when we were ruled by the dodgy socialists—and the Dom ruled the roost— an oft-cited quip, both here and abroad, was 'better dead than red'.

How things change, how times evolve. Remember the bad old days when you knew a true Mintoffjan from the clothes they wore? All unsuited and untied but with fancy jackets and big bulky buckles? It was quite intriguing to see Dom in a suit. This was while he was waiting in state to be dispatched to eternity. I thought that once they made the grievous mistake of having a ceremonial mass for him the least they could have done to compensate was to have him buried in his lovely, and chic, horse-shoe buckle. The great luck it could have bestowed could have stood him in good stead when he was working, with the original Salvatur's Father in heaven, to wrangle the best conditions for his entrance into heaven.

Back to our colours. Now in complete contrast to what used to happen when Dom dominated our life and our politics, his successors and their acolytes all wear their blue or grey suits with accompanying ties and unseen buckles. They wear this stuff even if it is to inaugurate or visit a pig farm in a backyard of Bubaqra.

Even the yellows have mellowed in their attire and attitude. From craggy hairy beatniks the yellow Greens have changed their outer attire and now wear good old-fashioned pinstriped suits and white shirts. Where is the hippie in them? The tree-hugger stuff?

If this present bunch is a sorry sight I sometimes yearn for the politics of old: where parties had a boundary wall around them and all knew who was who and what was what and who was suited and who thought suits were just for funerals. Now, especially with all the somersaults and changes in allegiance, party politics is starting to resemble a freak show of blandness and sameness with a boring bluish grey background.

Let's get back to red and choice of cars. With the silliness of saying better dead than red, the Nationalists of old inflicted on us all a bit of fun when looking at colours and politics. Joseph and Co, who have tried learning from their past mistakes and now ape all that was good in the old PN, have caught on and realised that red is bad. So off with red, in with blue and to hell with old traits and damn ideals.

Labour is now the party of the middle ground. Nowadays the party stalwarts do not even refer to the working class at all—has that class stopped working? All we hear is a middle-class mantra.

In fact one thing Labour, or the Movement, has learnt, and is doing grandly, is that the less you talk about policies the less you gaffe away. So we never hear much about how they are going to rule the roost. I tried looking at what Joseph had to say to the business sector a few weeks ago—and the main siren call there was: "We are not ogres, we will let business work." It's a rather worrying admission that your party has to put minds at rest that you are going to let businesses work. After all is there an alternative to businesses working? Can it be envisaged that shops and computer companies will just shut down and that all restaurants and hotels will turn into ghost establishments? But no worries—the cars carcading round the isle will be in nice placid blue not aflame in red with burning torches.

I'll surely buy a ticket or a hundred of them. Then once Joseph is in power I will race up to his office in my spanking red car and tell him I'm a true lover of all things red and especially of all things connected to independence. A Maltese man speeding round this great, but slightly crazy, isle is one good spectacle for any sore eyes.

The world here in Malta is going going gone barmy. We do live in a wonderful wonderland—just like Alice's but ours is real—where all is not what it seems and all can be less real than what is perceived.

Thank God for lunacy, lies and topsy-turviness—makes normal life ever so boring.