2007 enters into history in two days' time, the latest year in a series of billions; that, at least, is what we are told by scientists whose confident measurement of time has always baffled me. Precision is another thing. I particularly fancy assertions of the type that such-and-such happened 70 to 90 million years ago, as if 20 million years of pre-history were a minor variation in time-keeping. In human terms and using 15 years as a generational tick-tock, it is the colossal equivalent of 1,333,332 generations.

A year, as any 10-year-old will tell you if you ask, is an eternity. He realises there are six, seven years to go before he can ditch school, another seven before he does the same to tertiary education and omigod that is forever. So he watches time crawl until suddenly, or so it will seem to him when he gets there, he is sixty and no sooner is it mid-winter than it is mid-summer. Stop, thief! But time does nothing of the sort; instead, that impatient winged chariot positively accelerates.

With three decades in the bag, less ahead, you start to read health literature. This encourages you to discover, so you are led to believe, how you can de-gunk your arteries, repair damage to aching joints, make cholesterol disappear and leads you to join those earnest, grim walkers on the Sliema Promenade because walking is good for your blood pressure, for a healthier prostate, even as you are demoralised by the ease with which younger walkers flash past you. The biscuit is taken when some four-score body flashes past, in a manner of speaking.

But it is not only in your childhood phase that time hangs like a ton over you. There are periods when it feels like that during adulthood, when you are Beckham, for example, and wonder whether the Italian England coach will include you in the England side. DB has been making brown-nosing noises in the direction of Fabio Cappello; ditto Rooney.

And hangs heaviest when tragedy strikes and we have no idea how long the effects will be, only an eternity of time for a day to pass and for matters to crawl back to some normalcy.

In cosmic terms, of course, a lifetime of a hundred years (I make that 31,533,600,000 seconds or five billion regular breaths in and out, four and a half million regular heartbeats - truth be told, I'm quite lost) - in cosmic terms they are less than a blink, but goodness me what a lot happens during that less-than-a flicker of eternity's eyelid, what triumphs, what accomplishments, what defeats, what failures, what political victories, what political upsets, what joys, what sorrows, what miseries, what highs, what lows.

At the political level, last year's 31-and-a-half billion seconds saw a great deal happening in Malta, a few billion spent in speech-making and debating, a few others used by Lawrence Gonzi to fashion out his steady vision for Malta-by-2015 and preparing his party for the general election when 2007 becomes the past and 2008 the start of Malta's future, a few other billions still, at least on the part of Guido de Marco, spent writing memoirs so that henceforth his version of life's story filters into the future on the strength of the written word.

Time future

Here we are, eight years into the third millennium (hey, didn't that start yesterday?) and approaching the moment when political parties come under starter's orders for the race to the next Parliament. The media have, for the most part, been at their least inventive. In November some aped the British, who had justly concluded that Mr Gordon Brown had fluffed it by not calling an autumn election and transposed Mr Brown's non-decision on to the local scene.

Dr Gonzi, it was the sonorous opinion of some, had missed out by not calling a December election, though quite why he had missed out was not made clear. In a sense it was an essay in plagiarism. They lifted the situation in Britain and draped it around the political shoulders of Malta when it was clear that, like this mixed metaphor, a different political kettle of fish was thrashing around these islands. He will regret that he failed to recognise a defining moment, they barked. We were not made privy to quite what was so defining about the moment.

When Dr Gonzi does go to the country, he will do so in the knowledge that he has achieved the objectives he set himself and is profoundly clear about where he wishes to take Malta during the next five years. He is right to adopt this approach but let his advisers and campaign staff beware. Clarity is not to be confused with complacency. The accusation of complacency has already been made. It has to be refuted by facts, figures and achievements.

This is his first go at leading the party into an election. His personal track record augurs well. The mild-mannered Speaker, who rarely if ever put a foot wrong in his supervision and control of the proceedings of the House, had the backbone to fight his personal way into Parliament in a very difficult district in 1996. Since then, Dr Gonzi quietly, intelligently, firmly established himself within the party so that by 2004, after Eddie Fenech Adami relinquished his leadership of the country and the party - having seen Malta into the European Union, which is why we are where we are now - he was in a position to take over the party and the premiership.

That he has the measure of his opponents we have witnessed on a number of occasions; that he is not above criticism he is the first to admit; that he has the mental and moral fibre to continue with his leadership of the country he has demonstrated over and over again; that he is a man of integrity is plain; that he is a man of vision he has made amply clear during the past three years and clearer still as he projects the islands' course into a new era; that in being a man of vision he is building seamlessly on the achievements of his predecessors, Dr Borg Olivier and Dr Fenech Adami, becomes daily more apparent. Fr Peter Serracino Inglott captured this progression accurately in his Perspective last Sunday.

The first, he reminded readers, brought Malta into the international sphere in its own right as a sovereign nation in 1964. The second took her into the EU and 'a more precise recognition of our specific role in the world picture', stimulating the Union into understanding that 'the seas over which its member states had jurisdiction are as important as its territory on land'. And now Dr Gonzi is holding out the vision of Malta as a centre of excellence in the domain occupied by 'the electronic revolution... Fulfilment of this ambition', Fr Peter wrote, 'promises even more prosperous results for ourselves as well as for many others than the preceding two steps.'

Twenty years ago the Labour party regarded information technology as an enemy to be kept away from our shores lest its introduction wrought havoc on employment. The opposite has been the case. The recent launch of The Smart Island ICT strategy with its 180 ambitious objectives will place Malta among the top 10 countries in the World ICT league. The implementation phase has already started, This qualitative leap did not come from the blue. The governments and the vision of Ġorġ Borg Olivier, Dr Fenech Adami and Dr Gonzi made it happen.

Bad ending... bad start

Surgery required by Alfred Sant last Thursday meant that 2007 did not end well for him and, indeed, for the party he leads. Nor does it make for a great start to 2008. If everybody was pleased to hear he was in a stable condition after the successful intervention carried out, the total absence of information that preceded and followed the operation was less satisfactory. The health and well-being of a public figure are not a matter for prurient or ghoulish curiosity, but they are of general public interest and should not be the subject of reticence. The latter often leads to whisperings and unsubstantiated rumour for the spreading of which, as we all know, human beings have an unhealthy penchant.

The Leader of the Opposition is no more the property of the party he leads than the Prime Minister is of his. Both belong, in different capacities, to the nation. That this is the case was amply borne out by official, public and private reaction to the news that Dr Sant had been admitted to hospital, where he is now undergoing post-operative care and, happily, making good progress.

The same cannot be said for Benazir Bhutto. She is no longer with us to be wished anything and becomes the latest in a grim line of fatalities that have befallen her family: a father hanged, two brothers murdered, a husband jailed (with good reason, one must add), herself imprisoned followed by exile and return (twice) and now assassination. This brought to an alarming end her determination to regain the premiership in a country where politics are as volatile as pyrotechnics in Malta.

Her enduring legacy will be two-fold: first, the magnificent heroism that led her back to Pakistan in the full knowledge that the safety dice was loaded against; and second, the fact that she was the first Muslim woman to reach the top of the greasy political pole. As things turned out, a contract was out on her the moment she arrived. She escaped unharmed, but nearly 150 people were killed when an attempt on her life failed soon after her return.

The second was an extraordinary achievement to secure in an Islamic state. That she managed it says much about her determination to overcome not only the gender inequality that is a hallmark of most of the Muslim world. Since she returned to Pakistan, she railed against militants and terrorist groups, home-bred and foreign. What her assassination means for the people of Pakistan is already unfolding. The possibility of a return to martial law, with all that that entails, of a civil war with all that that entails, or, the western world's greatest nightmare, a rise in Islamic fundamentalism Benazzir Bhutto had hoped to tame, is there.

Hard choices face Pervez Musharraf. His best, I imagine, is to channel the sense of outrage created by Ms Bhutto's assassination against the extremist forces that are suspected of perpetrating it.

2008 kicks off to a terribly bad start as all eyes now turn to Iowa.