This week I finally learnt the lesson of a lifetime. As a child, my parents tried in vain to teach me this valuable fact of life, but it was only this week that I’ve come to see the true value of it all.

You see, ever since I could talk, I’ve been getting into trouble for not being able to keep my opinions to myself....for having a big mouth or a long tongue as they say in Maltese. My parents tried to explain the worth of silence and composed reactions, but I just never grasped the full significance of what they were trying to tell me... until now.

In the past, Christmas lunch used to be particularly painful, because no matter how hard I tried, I could never eat all the food on my plate. Like most families, mine throws everything but the kitchen sink into the Christmas meal, and it is therefore expected that everyone polishes their plate clean. But as a child I never could.

So as soon as everyone had finished stuffing themselves, the attention would invariably turn to me...and my plate... still full of food. The usual argument ensued - ‘eat your food because there are starving children in other parts of the world’, they’d say. In turn, I would ask how eating my food was going to help those poor starving children, and in the spirit of Christmas I even offered to pack it up and mail it to them. Exasperated, after failing to come up with a plausible answer to my question, the grownups would lose their wits, and the argument always ended with my TV viewing privileges being revoked for days.

Sometimes when they couldn’t get me to shut up, they’d tell me that when I grew up it will all come back to haunt me, and that I would pay for being so disobedient and argumentative by having children who would do the same to me. I quickly concluded that if this theory was at all true, then my parents must have been disobedient and argumentative children too, and that according to their own logic, I was their punishment. I shall not bore you with the consequences faced for voicing this genuine reasoning, but you can imagine.

To me these were genuine queries to which I expected some form of explanation. Hand on heart I was not being cocky or purposefully audacious. Au contraire, I just wanted to figure out what other life rules existed. I thought that maybe there were exceptions and some flukes of nature which could explain the illogical arguments that I was being presented with, but unfortunately no clarifications were ever forthcoming, and all I ever got was that all familiar deadly look - an unequivocal warning to stop or else....! Of course I never did.

Now jump and leap a couple of decades later, fast forward into to last week, and lo and behold, I finally get it.

My parents were right all along, and I finally understand that silence is truly golden...in fact it’s worth around €600 a week.

Whilst Malta suffered a national aneurism as it learnt about the €600 a week salary raise that our very altruistic parliamentarians awarded themselves, and whilst I, together with many other columnists, journalists and members of the public, wrote thousands of words about the matter, and whilst the PL took the opportunity to flog its PR horse to death, the PN remained snugly silent, as if someone pressed their mute button.

Gonzi was attacked and slandered, and yet he remained mum. The parliamentarians who decided to accept the raise did the same, and those, who like me felt disgusted with their decision, were left with nothing to react to. They did not fuel the argument, and instead just let it be, so, in a few weeks’ time, people will forget about it, and they, our dear leaders, would have got €600 a week extra without further pomp.

This tactic is so effective that even I almost let the whole thing go. Though against my nature, I almost decided to embrace the life lesson that took me 35 years to learn, and to argue no more, but then came Christmas eve, and with it came Lawrence Gonzi’s tear jerking Christmas speech, who after awarding himself and his colleagues a nauseating raise that could feed the nation for years, had the nerve to address us, with glistening tears in his eyes, and say ‘everyone has to work to improve the country to ensure a fair and kind society.’

Fair?

Kind?

Isn't his a pure case of fake sincerity delivered through a halo of pretence?

Seriously... who writes these speeches for him, and where have they been in the past few days? Planet Hypocrisy?