It’s a coolish Sunday afternoon in Gozo, with the rain threatening on and off and I’m missing the MLP National Manifestation.

Oh, the shame.

Precisely what it is the dear chaps are manifesting about escapes me, just at the moment. No-one likes paying taxes or having to fork out hard-earned dosh for electricity and fuel, but does anyone really think that having a stroll down wherever they’re having a stroll down actually means anything?

I suppose, when you think about it, some people must think that. The same sort of people who answered the timesofmalta.com survey saying that the budget measures were not what the country needed, presumably.

They’re right, of course, what the country does need is to find oil in great and copious amounts, and for someone to give us a refinery all nicely set up and ready to mint some of the folding stuff, turning us into a country that is totally independent from the vagaries of the world’s economic turbulence.

Then we won’t have to pay taxes, our public facilities will become the best in the world and all our troubles will be over.

In the meantime, however, someone’s going to have to run the country and impose measures that a very high percentage of people will find annoying. When this high percentage makes its opinion felt, for what it’s worth, a Lil’Elf will then seize on this fact and make what he imagines is a pithy and erudite comment.

You can click on the previous edition of this blog and check out what I’m saying.

Of course, what everyone forgets, including me when I fill out my tax return or open that flipping envelope that seems to come from the Water Services Corporation every other day, is that these measures are the best we’ve got, mainly because no-one else has proposed anything which is any better.

Oh, sorry, I forgot, Joe Muscat and his merry men have proposed something: they’ve proposed that we get up our courage and demonstrate. Why these poor deluded souls think we need courage is a question to which I don’t really have much of an answer.

Joe Muscat himself certainly is too young to remember the way demonstrations were treated in the good old days when Labour (mis-)ruled, though Toni Abela and Anglu Farrugia are, on the other hand, old enough to remember what was done to people who dared take a position that was different to the government’s.

The thing is, Toni Abela, as far as I recall, could only ever have had third-hand experience of demonstrating, since he wasn’t on the side of the protesters, while Anglu Farrugia was, admittedly, closer to the action. Way closer. He was in the police force then.

So, calling Sunday’s protest – oh, sorry, manifestation – a thing of courage is twaddle and twittery of the first water, I’m afraid, demonstrating, or should that be manifesting (!?) that the MLP haven’t the first idea of how things should be done.

They remind me, so help me, of the way we used to mess about when we were students, before things got serious and we had to man the barricades against the regime (not sure if Anglu was around then – he was a cop, but I don’t remember seeing him on the other side of the lines)

Back then, we’d footle around, issuing press releases condemning the Shah of Persia and the Nabob of Watusiland and the Satan in the White House for doing something heinous, for all the world as if our press release was the only thing that was needed to provoke the masses into an uprising, sweeping away the horrid ones for all time.

The words that spring to mind now are “ineffectual”, “impotent” and “irrelevant”, and with hindsight, these descriptions are entirely justified. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the manifestation of pluck and valour that’s going down as I write these words, then, but you’ll forgive me if I have a yawn.

There’s only so much I can write about this torpor-inducing topic, so I’ll switch subjects now and muse about a reference to mortal sin I saw in one of the only two local papers I buy on Sundays nowadays.

Apparently, according to the bloke who wrote the bit I read, the PM is in something of a quandary. As a good Catholic lad, he’s got to make up his mind between allowing divorce to be introduced and remaining a communicant.

What utter rubbish. This piece of claptrap is almost as downright insulting to anyone with half a brain as another item that appeared on Sunday, though I don’t remember if it was in the same paper.

The second gem to appear suggested that a referendum should be held on whether or not divorce should become part of the law.

Referenda are held to decide on issues of national importance, issues that affect the populace as a whole. Divorce is an issue that affects individuals and the great unwashed has absolutely no right to interfere in what I choose to do or not to do in my personal relationships. And don’t give me any guff about family values and similarly nebulous concepts being the concern of society as a whole, either.

There’s no ruddy difference between a separated couple the individual constituents of which are merrily having it off with each other’s former best friend and a divorced couple doing the same thing.

The former is hypocrisy at its best, a real manifestation of the “Christian Morality” practised by so many people over the years, while the latter at least has the virtue (ironic use of the word, there) of some residual honesty.

“We want divorce and we want it now” is what I imagine Joe Muscat’s boys and girls are chanting as I prepare to click on the send button. Or perhaps not.