I suppose I should start with an apology for not scribbling something for quite a bit of time. OK, sorry - in my defence, I had two new toys to play with (apart from it having been too darn hot to do anything) Just to satisfy your curiosity, said toys are an iPad and a motorbike.
The iPad is an amazing piece of kit. I have no idea as to what productive use I can put it, but it's such enormous fun to use that it doesn't matter that there's little point to it. I mean to say, when you stroke the cartoon cat's tummy and he purrs, who needs a fully-functioning word-processor with spell-check?
The bike, on the other hand, has many uses. It gets me places quickly and with much less of an impact on the environment. I can park it in Valletta and not have one of those wannabe cops sticking tickets under its wiper (mainly because it doesn't have one) and that flipping camera can wink at me all it likes, it's not going to cost me money.
Of course, there's absolutely nothing to the scurrilous rumours that I have succumbed to assorted post-mid-life crises - it's not a Harley and I haven't grown a pony-tail. I used to ride a bike back in the day, and had sold it so as not to tempt the son and heir - it didn't work, since he bought one and tempted me back onto two wheels.
But I suppose it was mainly the heat last week that ground me down and forced me to do only that which was essential and it is in the nature of blogging that it is not the only point of one's existence.
Said heat broke a little as the weekend approached, which was blessed relief to all and brought down the homicidal-tendency statistics back to civilised levels, but it meant that Joseph Calleja's open-air concert had to be postponed because of the threat that the wind that was forecast would disrupt proceedings unacceptably.
When the news broke on Friday that a Force 6/7 was predicted, the Met Office boys came in for a little derision, being as Friday was the stillest of still nights but they were right and then some. By the time I'd biked up to Malta and back to the civilised end of the Republic on Saturday (to pick up the his'n'hers i|Pads which had just been delivered by the s&h - who says I'm not a kid?) the breeze had picked up to a blinking gale.
As the vernacular has it, take every fever with a bit of good (kull deni hudu b'gid - a loose translation if ever there was one) and the concert being postponed meant that we could have a full weekend up North without having to schlep up and down again, and we still have the concert to look forward to on Thursday.
Which is nice.
Predictably, the weather-induced postponement was the spur for the anti-Piano brigade to crawl back out in full force to whinge and whine about "that project".
How boring and how childish.
A star of Calleja's magnitude can only perform this sort of concert out-doors in Malta and the fact that the concert was put off because of weather is no justification at all to start the whole futile debate again.
Obviously, it would be marvellous to have a fully-fledged, many-thousand seater, state-of-the-art concert venue, for all that it would be filled perhaps, what, three times a year? Most times, most venues where you'd expect the punters to pack the place have quite a few rows empty and they're never the most expensive of shows in the first place. Can you imagine what a large venue would be like, especially if the pricing was dictated by the cost of building and running it? How many whingers would put their hands in their pocket and drag out the Platinum Card, ay?
Again obviously, it would be marvellous if the State could subsidise the arts and make available the best for little dosh, but we have to get our feet back down on to the ground (and stop stamping them): this is a country that is really not much bigger than a small town and you don't get venues like the ones some people are dreaming about in small towns.
Denizens of small towns in Europe are luckier than us, of course, because they only need take a train or drive a couple of hours to get to a big town, but that's the luck of the geographical draw and there's an end to it.
The battle-cry of the massed ranks of objectors was "We (think we) want an Opera House, and this is not an Opera House, so we hate it". The whiners and moaners are guilty of the cardinal sin of debate: they want "x" and only "x", and since the Piano Project isn't "x", it is bad, it is horrible, it is below contempt.
The thing is, the Piano Project was never meant to be the "x" the whiners wanted, it was, and remains, a completely different kettle of herrings. It is the re-development of a space into a different type of space, with various uses amongst which is the availability of an open area for performances. It was not, and is not, meant to be a replacement for the Opera House that used to stand there and it is not to the exclusion of anything else, it is simply a bold architectural statement, standing alone.
If anything, it is not bold enough, but it remains an interesting project for all that. It is not an all-weather concert venue, but then, it was never meant to be one. It is only the single-issue fanatics that took the debate there and unfortunately, there was no-one with the public-affairs nous to drag it back.
And so every time it rains on someone's parade, the tired old refrain is struck up again "see what happens when you have an outdoor venue, Piano's ideas are an abomination". Once and for all, people, the conclusion does not follow the premise, if you bother to think it through before reaching for your megaphones.
Will that have persuaded anyone, do you think? Of course not, I will again be characterised as a running-dog lackey and eviscerated by the intellectuals, who by so doing will demonstrate again that they are failing the basic test of civilised debate: be logical in your arguments and eschew shallowness.