And, the poet goes on, "the good if oft interred with their bones". For Senator Ted Kennedy, who is on the verge of attaining secular sainthood in America, this does not seem to be the case. So, let's play around with the poet's sequence.

"Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognised - the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old." And, "when history looks back to this era it should recognise this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfil its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception." - Really?

By 1987 Senator Kennedy had almost single-handedly defeated Ronald Reagan's pro-life nominee for the Supreme Court. In 1996 he was one of only a handful of senators who voted against the federal Defence of Marriage Act, which Barack Obama intends to repeal. He registered a 100 per cent pro-abortion voting record as the Massachusetts senator and has been lionised as a leading force of liberalism in America by his many admirers.

I wonder, then, how many of these remember the man who got slung out of Harvard for cheating, or the name of the girl he left trapped in his car at Chappaquiddick after he went over a bridge and scarpered. It took him nine hours to report the matter to the police. All he received was a suspended two-year sentence.

There was also that business with the IRA. As Ed West put it in his blog in The Daily Telegraph last Wednesday, "For years Kennedy was the bang-drummer-in-chief for brainless Irish-American IRA sympathisers, dimwits who shouted 'troops out of Dublin!' and sang maudlin songs from the comfort of Boston and New York, giving money for strangers 3,000 miles away to murder their neighbours."

The eulogies, led by Obama, outweighed all that. These expressed unadulterated admiration for a man who has had, to quote Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, "a monumental impact on his country", not least his work on behalf of non-European immigrants. Men and women spoke of his ability to negotiate with his political enemies, even, on occasion, to side with them, them including President George W. Bush. They tell of his political skill and his work at the Senate, where he fought, with might and main, as they say, for healthcare reform. He has been called the greatest senator in American history; that is for Americans to decide.

Many arrive at this conclusion on a crest of crestfallen Kennediana with memories of what they believe was a golden and tragic age for pre-Vietnam America; golden because John Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jackie re-created Camelot; tragic because he was assassinated, as was his brother Robert, five years later. After which, Ted botched his attempt to gain his brother's crown, losing of all people to Jimmy Carter. But, mightily, he found his métier in the Senate and Obama's fated healthcare programme may, ironically, receive a boost from Ted Kennedy's death.

The one that did not get away

Considerable improvement was reported some time ago in the fine-or-fudge-the-fumer game; all of one bus was discovered to be fuming all over the place and its owner fined.

Well, last week, a day from hell, the heat continued to press down on this tiny island and so did trapped exhaust fumes from errant vehicles. At St Anne's street in Floriana, five buses delighted in sharing their grey-dark emissions with anyone around. At Pietà and Msida, many more were performing right royally. The air was heavy with the smell of flouted law. This carcinogenic pastime has us in thrall.

Only one way to stop such brash contempt for our health. Forget the ADT. Increase the number of traffic police by 200 per cent, their primary, their sole reason for existence to hound air-foulers off our roads. Raise the level of fines to €1,000 for the first offence; withdraw car/bus/truck/crane licence for the second. As one dragon - or was it a dragoon? - said to another, only draconian measures will do. Anything less is fiddling around.

Black is back

Slowly to start with but with gathering pace, more cars are emerging dressed in black and very handsome they are. Most new models have also done away with front and rear bumpers, the latter employed by drivers to gauge when they have hit the car in front of which they wish to park. Now, that not so formidable protection from impact is being absorbed into the chassis; makes for sleekness, but you still have to park and any miscalculation invites scratched paintwork where the projecting bumper used to be; a bonanza for spray painters.

Recession regardless, I also see more and more expensive cars on the road, be they of the get-out-of-my-way variety, the look-and-don't touch type, or smaller upmarket cousins. On Sundays, thousands of these and every other shape and marque are to be seen travelling along the snarled up coast road, or on weekdays doing their inter-town, inter-village vroom-vroom. The price of fuel is clearly not high enough.

From Basic Instinct...

...to Our Lady of Guadeloupe is a strange journey for a screenwriter upon which to embark. Joe Eszterhas, who wrote the screenplay for Basic Instinct, Flashdance, Jagged Edge, to name but three, is about to complete it. He has surprised fans and foes by putting his PC to the story of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, to make a movie of what has long been regarded as an extraordinary story. It has its genesis in 1531 when a "lady" appeared to a young peasant, Juan Diego, at Tepeyac. She asked for a church to be built on the site.

He relayed her request to the bishop who, Thomas-like, asked for a sign. He received it in the shape of a bunch of roses the "lady" asked Juan Diego to gather from a hill in mid-December. More remarkable was the image she left of herself on Diego's tilma, a cloth that has a shelf life of 20, 30 years and in this case shows no sign of decay 500 years on.

What possessed Eszterhaus to take on such an unlikely project? Eight years ago, the heavy smoker and no less light drinker developed a life-threatening throat cancer. Last September, he wrote an article in The Washington Post. In it he confessed that he had "cried and begged God to help (him)...I hadn't prayed since I was a boy. I had made fun of God and those who loved God in my writings. And now, through my sobs, I heard myself asking God to help me... and from the moment I asked, He did."

Coming as an experience recalled by a member of the Legion of Mary, the tale would probably have been snidely remarked upon by cynics; from Eszterhas it is a different story (thus the world). His life, he says, has been turned inside out. "I have stopped my excesses and replaced them with prayer and long walks... And I have written a book - Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith - as a thank you to God. Not just for saving my life, but for saving me."

In parenthesis, why does the otherwise efficient Agenda Bookshop provide books about dozens of minor and major celebs and not more of the Eszterhas variety? Sean Penn, Sarah Sarendon, every last inch of each of the Beatles, Madonna - of course - even the illiterate Rooney, dear God; and now, I suppose, shelves of Michael Jackson, but not Eszterhas.

One wonders how critics will take the film once it is completed. Eszterhas is calling it "a labour of love" and a labour it must certainly be; not so much in the making but in the re-creation of a story in a manner that will wow audiences with its authenticity and integrity. One thing is certain. Scores of millions will learn the story of a "Lady from Heaven" patroness of the unborn, whose shrine is visited by 18 to 20 million pilgrims every year, who has been honoured by more than a score of popes and in her honour December 12 declared as a Liturgical Holy Day for the Americas.

The suspicious bishop who asked for a sign in 1531 must be pleased with what he sees.

Quote...

From the open mind of Newsweek magazine: "OK, we still have the highest divorce rate in the world. But that's the problem. We divorce, re-partner, and remarry faster than people in any other country, says Andrew Cherlin, a John Hopkins sociologist...

"Because many of the people racking up multiple marriages are also parents, American kids are more likely than those in other developed countries to live in a household with a revolving cast of parents, step-parents, and live-in partners moving in and out of their lives.

"As Cherlin puts it, 'Many of the problems faced by America's children stem not from parents marrying too little but rather too often.'"