He and his talk were well worth waiting for; I am referring to Sir Paul Coleridge, a great, great, great nephew, he delighted in telling us, of the poet, who visited Malta in 1804 and who stayed here for 16 months.

Mr Justice Coleridge was appointed judge at the High Court of England and Wales and assigned to Family Division in 2000 and Family Division Liaison Judge for Western Circuit two years later. You could say his business is the family, which was why, yesterday week, as a guest of Proġettimpenn, he addressed a national conference at the Phoenicia hotel on family breakdown in Britain. Gozo Bishop Mario Grech also contributed a characteristically erudite "reflection" to which I will come back another time.

Can the current turmoil in Britain, Mr Justice Coleridge asked, be turned from a level so catastrophic that a think-tank in the UK led by Iain Duncan Smith concluded in a policy paper it drew up for the Conservative party that Britain's was a "broken society"? Those who attended his talk were impressed - and depressed - by the evidence; some who did not, were free and easy, shallow and disparaging, with their remarks.

As a man daily confronted with his "English experience" of that "broken society", Mr Justice Coleridge remarked that here in Malta we may not have a problem on the same scale; if that were the case, he warned, "you need, I suggest, to be aware of where you might end up if you do not anticipate and prepare for the worst". Britain's experience was not unique.

He stressed the point that "for as long as history has recorded these things, stable family life has been co-extensive and co-terminous with a stable and balanced society". Family life in Britain was today "completely unrecognisable" as such and there are "parents (whether married or not) providing no consistent parental influence or authority over their children's daily lives and separating as a matter of course..." He spoke of a "wholesale breakdown of ordinary family life in the households of our land".

Family cases dominate the courts. "Thousands of families are trooping through hundreds of courts... Thousands upon thousands of children are involved... a never ending carnival of misery." Judges, he remarked, are accused of living in ivory towers, but he insisted "it is the general public, the media and governments throughout the past 20 years" who have occupied those ivory towers... unable or unwilling to face up to the sad and awful truth".

Not merely unwilling, but as the social fracas continues to burgeon you get Katherine Drake, head of the government-funded Family and Parenting Institute under Labour, discouraging politicians from attempting to encourage "traditional families". Mr Justice Coleridge's challenge to what he calls the social evolution envisaged by Drake's vision of a free for all is formidable in reason and in logic and it came in the form of a question. "If (the post modern view of family) is so successful a model, so happy and fulfilled, why are the statistics for separation of all kinds so appallingly large and at record levels?"

And later: "What is certain is that almost all society's social ills can be traced directly to the collapse of family life." He made the point that one of the key answers to that collapse is to address the behaviour of individuals and sexual behaviour that underwent such a sea change with the advent of the contraceptive pill. "It is only changes in behaviour which can make a radical difference and ease the burden of services."

In parenthesis and before mention of the contraceptive pill brings on seizures, let me bring in that sex icon of the 1970s, Raquel Welch. In a column for CNN, she recently admitted that contraceptives played quite an important part in shattering marriage. A contraceptive mentality has promoted "a lack of sexual inhibitions", she went on, and brought about a free sex ethos that has wreaked havoc on marriage and family life.

Nor is the break-up of a parental relationship the private matter it is claimed to be. Family breakdown is costing Britain £24 billion a year according to one think tank, nearer £42 billion according to research carried out by a Christian organisation, the Jubilee Centre.

Mr Justice Coleridge called for marriage to be recognised as the gold standard "statistically it has proved to be the most enduring and, statistically, the children of such relationships perform the best. The evidence... is now incontrovertible". Supporting marriage "is not only a matter of morality or religious persuasion but it makes pragmatic sense and it is demonstrably in the public interest". Government and society, take note.

On top of the world

Three of our countrymen, Gregory Attard, Marco Cremona and Robert Gatt, climb Mount Everest and the media generally treats this feat as though it were the outcome of a tiddly-winks championship, or a gentle walk along the Sliema Promenade.

You would have expected every newspaper to splash the news across five columns with a headline as bold as Robin Hood and full front-and back-page coverage, text peppered with visuals; you would have wondered how a strident bi-ped called Grace Borg fulminating against Thea Garrett could attract more column inches than our intrepid heroes; you would have thought leader writers would have been inspired to great heights in their appreciation of our climbers' achievement; it must have crossed your mind that the ascent would be the first news item on any radio or TV broadcast; could be you thought these gutsy guys, from a small island where the highest point is 2,000ft, going forth and up to over 29,000ft in hazardous foreign climes, would have merited a victory carcade even before they returned. None of this.

There was heavy traffic going up and coming down the mountain that day; still, there was not a single reference to the Maltese climbers in the international press, on BBC, CNN, Sky News. It all gave the impression of a conspiracy of silence. Hundreds of climbers have reached the top since Edmund Hillary in 1952; there are hundreds who never made it, or who made it the top and did not return. There is no climb like the one to the roof of the world and we should be in awe of those who get there.

Having said that, I must admit to a je ne sais pas moment or two, a curiosity as to why the sponsors' sense of public relations failed to provide our summiteers on top of Everest with high-tech thingamajigs to give visual substance to that moment; failed to provide communications for us to hear the first words they uttered - "tiny footsteps on the way up, but a giant step for Malta as we gaze down upon the world"; something like that; failed to show the Maltese flag a-top the world.

Run for shelter

If you think Greece is the worst thing that happened since Attila the Hun, you are in most people's company; I have news for you. A recent analysis of an analysis by the International Monetary Fund came near to concluding that you may run but you will not be able to hide from the impending catastrophe.

Despite the fact that stock markets were, up to 10 days ago, brazenly showing signs that the worst was over with bears running for cover and bulls only just short of imitating cows jumping over the moon, big disaster looms round the corner - the corner estimated to be five years away. Some think Armageddon is nearer, 2012; Moody's 2013. There is something bloodcurdling about the unfolding drama.

Over much of the world hangs a deficit of nearly $4 trillion - 4,000,000,000,000,000 if you want that otherwise innocuous figure fleshed out. The most disturbing feature within those harrowing zeros is the sombre projection that by 2015 the United States' national debt, based on the current financial fiscal plans of can-we-change-Barack Obama, will exceed 100 per cent of GDP. Cassandras, hopefully they are Cassandras, are making great woe of all this. Whatever happened to making it safely out of recession?

If you want me to pile on the misery, Britain currently has one of the largest deficits in the world - thank you, Gordon Brown. It ill-behoves people like Norman Tebbit and other doomsters of the euro to throw Greece at the EU as an example of the currency's inbuilt failure to cope with just such a crisis. It ill-behoves them but it remains true that sterling and the dollar provide Britain and the United States with more flexibility in the way they can manipulate their currency than, say, Germany now that its currency is no longer the deutschmark but a euro simultaneously serving strong economies and weak ones within an endangered eurozone. Experts are predicting the fall of the euro, the dollar, with the pound not far behind. Ah, woe is me and you and all of us together.

Now if there are all these enormous debts slurping about, there must be a number of economies running enormous surpluses. China, with its immoderately under-valued currency, comes instantly to mind. Yet it cannot be in her interest to see the rest of the world drown in debt. Meanwhile, the country is digging for gold like its future depends on it and becoming in the process the largest producer of the world's most precious currency. That ex-railway porter, George Soros, is reported to be investing in the stuff.

What will the flight into gold do to the dollar, the euro and the pound sterling? Perhaps a competent and qualified economist can take up this gloomy story from here. Can't bear it.