This is going to be a bit of a ramble.
A characteristic, one among many, of newspapers is a consummate ability to make predictions one day only to swallow them back the next, perhaps; listen to the rugged tone adopted on the front-page of last week's Sunday Mirror - 'The Germans have trashed our boys with a violent verbal blitz; today they will eat their words.' Thus Tommy; alas, that vigorous assertion was not to be; it fell to the Daily Mail or the Express the following day to record the 4-1 disaster (thus Fritz) on its front page with a withering if witty take on Churchill's 'bravest hour' speech: "If the few had defended Britain as badly as our team, we would all be speaking German today" - ouch! That was Sunday-Monday.
Thursday's newspapers went for the £17-million-a-year player, Cristiano Ronaldo. I lay no claim to any in-depth knowledge in such esoteric matters as to who the best footballer in the world is - I am informed it's Lionel Messi and am still waiting for him to live up to this reputation; but I have known for some time that there is about Ronaldo a precious narcissism that should preclude him from being a functioning member of a national team, Portugal, in his case. There was as much sparkle about him during this World Cup as there is in the little silver I own, unpolished now for 12 months going on 13.
That £17 million business may be just what is wrong with a game where human beings perform well below their pay grade. England, which never even made it to the beaches, so to speak, fielded a team the players in which have an accumulated transfer price well in excess of £200 million. Were they worth that in South Africa? As a shareholding quoted on the stock market, they would have seen their value plunge by 50 per cent at least; and their Moody rating hovering around the junk level.
As for the TV agreement that prevented thousands of people in Malta from watching that match, the whole situation is nothing short of scandalous. As for PBS selling its exclusive right to Melita to air the thing - belief is beggared and not enriched by the fact that the EBU also had a messy finger in this sticky pie.
Now I understand that the public's access to TV football is further threatened by Melita's rights to the Champions League next year and Go's to broadcast the English Premiership and Italian Serie A. As matters stand, fans will have to subscribe to both providers.
The whole caboodles ended up in front of the House Social Affairs Committee, whose chairman Edwin Vassallo accused Melita and Go of being "a cartel undefined"; clearly, the situation demands resolution in favour of the viewer. Both companies should get a grip on themselves and stop acting as defendants and plaintiffs at the same time; and the Consumer and Competition Division should get in on the act on behalf of the consumer, which is why it exists at all.
David Agius, the government's parliamentary whip and parliamentary assistant at Foreign Affairs, sounds confident that a level playing field providing fair competition and consumer protection can be hewn out of a shambles where the consumer's interest has been placed last, last and last.
And while I am at it, let me resurrect a matter I raised a few months ago and which Go has ignored; the matter of an update to the telephone directory.
Go and Melita owe it to subscribers to provide a spanking new directory. Malta must be the only country in the world without one. Thousands of phone numbers have come to market that were not around in 2004. Go has a directory enquiry service and charges you around 23 cents every time you ask for a number that is not in the directory. Complain and you are told you can use the internet - but thousands do not know how to do this; thousands do not have a computer.
Go plc and Melita owe it to consumers to provide that directory; the Malta Communi-cations Authority, the Consumer and Competition Division and the Consumer NGO agency should step in and sort that duopoly out.
Smiley's back
The game is different, though; to start with, there is no Berlin Wall over which, in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Alex Leamas had to pull Liz to bring her to West Berlin when, "Suddenly the whole world seemed to break into flame; from everywhere, from above and beside them, massive lights converged, bursting upon them with savage accuracy"; as were the shots that killed her; and Leamas, prompted by Smiley to jump to safety, "quite slowly (he) climbed down the same rungs, until he was standing beside her. She was dead." and, "Finally they shot him... As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the window".
That was vintage Le Carré 47 years ago, after which he went on to write a score of novels in a genre this consummate spy-writer raised to its apogee. Could the arrest of 11 spies on Russia's pay book - one got away in Cyprus after being granted bail, probably by slipping into the Turkish portion of the island, stumbling on to a beach under cover of darkness and signalling his presence to a waiting Russian vessel - tempt Smiley (in a new incarnation) in from the cold?
Strangely enough this Russian spy story had more of The Stepford Wives about it than Le Carré's The Looking Glass War, A Small Town in Germany, or take your pick from a dozen others; and something almost comical about these Russian agents. Americanised to their fingertips and down to sultry Anna Chapman's manicured toenails, never mind their partiality for Jack Daniels, they achieved precious little after nearly two decades of post-Cold War integration. They were moles all right but for what, quite, were they beavering away?
The plot plays out so absurdly one is tempted to think that there has to be more to it than meets the eye, for in truth very little meets the eye. So you have to think conspiracy; what has been discovered about them by bugging bedrooms and bathrooms, telephones and offices, chan-deliers inevitably, is in effect a clever decoy leading the FBI away from their real purpose.
For the agency's decision to splash the story a few days after the American and Russian Presidents were photographed munching burgers (cool, man) and exhibiting a spirit of détente not felt for some time, begs the question. Why did the agency so act?
Let Le Carré hazard an in-formed guess; Mr Putin, Russian Prime Minister, is determined to take the Presidency he foisted on Dmitry Medvedev when it comes up for grabs in a year or two; did he plant these spies on American soil when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were up to their neck in glasnost and perestroika? Was this an opportune moment to 'out' Medvedev, who probably did not know a thing about the spies, embarrass him with his burger host, hang the Russian President out to dry? The ex-KGB man has kept a quiet profile.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
As the day approaches for Pope Benedict's state visit to the UK, so does the date for the canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman. The pre-parations have not been without hitches; in truth, the organisation attracted much criticism because of a growing awareness that whoever was in charge was not on top of the job; so they finally called in Lord Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong who handed over that territory to China as the 20th century was drawing to a close.
In a way it is a pity that the visit is not a pastoral one, with the emphasis on matters of conversion, that slow, often painful process - as Newman's was in the fourth decade of the 19th century and of his life - by which a person moves from one state of being to a higher one. It was in Littlemore, near Oxford, in stables converted into living quarters for him and some of his friends as they wrestled with God's will, that a rain-soaked Italian priest tracked Newman down on the night of October 8, 1845.
The story is a dramatic one. The leading light of the controversial 'Oxford Movement' is said to have "strode swiftly into the room and cast himself at the feet" of Fr Dominic Barbieri and begged him to be received into "the one true Fold of the Redeemer" and asked him to hear his confession there and then.
The confession of this holy man continued the following day. On the 10th, at the age of 44, he made his first Holy Communion and went on to be prepared for the priesthood in Rome, a life that would not be without painful controversies - and a Cardinal's hat.
Apposite to end this, there will be more, with the first stanza of that moving composition of his:
'Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene - one step enough for me.'