Right up to the feast of San Lawrenz we roasted like martyrs until the northwest wind brought relief.
It was in a different city when pavements “hotter than a match head” made their way into a hit song – that searing New York summer of 1966. It was the year of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City.
This anthem to urban summer days and nights, set to traffic noise and jack hammers, raises familiar sensations of life in a hot town with the line: “...back of my neck getting dirty and gritty”.
The raw lyrics ring true across the conglomerate of sardine towns as we try to stuff more development into this tin can of an island.
That old C&D (construction and development) demon has us incarcerated behind closed windows. Caught between limestone dust and fumes from diggers, bulldozers and cranes.
The Spoonful’s ditty has been playing in my head all summer long as fans blew hot air and heat-tortured Alaskan malamuts jumped off searing rooftops.
The tail end of the infernal ‘Lucifer’ heatwave, which blow-torched southeastern Europe, was felt across Malta.
Deafening fireworks are the antithesis of tact. Suffering them in silence borders on omertà
Not for half a century have we seen such a string of hot days in the high thirties. There have been higher temperatures above 40C, but never like this – 10 days without respite.
Like pepper added to chili sauce, the 10-day inferno was sprinkled with festa bangs.
Now there’s nothing more pleasant than the distant thunder of a village festa ringing in the saints as they cavort through our summer... as long as it’s a good few kilometres away, so that the unseasonal rumble trickles past our ears like the sound of a far off war.
Yes, we all love the psychedelic colour bursts and pop our daily dose of thyroxin pills resignedly in the name of culture. (Just google: fireworks and thyroid problems).
If it isn’t age then it must be a vile streak of conservatism that has me hankering for the days when the last bang was on the stroke of 11pm. After that, everyone just packed off to bed and we were happy with it in the sense that all good things do eventually come to an end, children.
But no, the bangs go on in celebration of sonic martyrdom. Closing the windows hardly lessens the din. We resolve to stay up reading until they seem to have stopped and it’s safe to go to sleep without risking a coronary.
Exhaustion overpowers strategy as blissful unconsciousness sets in. Then to be shocked awake, sometime after midnight, by another volley of industrial-grade maroons (originally used as a warning device by railwaymen.)
Instinctively leaping out of bed bewildered, arms fly up protectively to protect one’s head. But it was only a final crescendo of those pestilent petards, not the start of World War III, as registered by our besieged brains.
Reportedly, an influential section of Maltese society – those dreadful elites and liberals, “...the chattering classes, the commentariat...” – has sinned against the common firework. They claim it is a source of noise and chemical pollution. (Victor P. Borg, Let the fireworks be, July 2).
Well, if our cultural heritage must ooze “rivalry, exuberance and boisterousness” let this manifest in the zeal of local fireworks committees to compete for a more humane expression of the above.
Deafening fireworks are the antithesis of tact. Suffering them in silence borders on omertà. Compassion chances to rest on the organisers’ choice between trikki-trakki (firecrackers) and the insanely loud maroons.
Meantime, people take what solace they can find at the water’s edge, in this hot and exuberant town.