It’s well known that dogs tend to look and act like their owners. Or maybe it’s the other way round, but the lopsidedness of the relationship suggests that ‘canine mini-me’ is the more likely formula.
Not so well known is that storms are like dogs. A storm tends to look and act like the people it plagues. To make my argument I shall list, in no particular order, eight characteristics of last Sunday’s example. I’m confident I’ll manage to convince readers that storms are a kind of ‘weather mini-us’.
First, the storm did serious damage to many farmers. It left them deflated and generally demoralised. Understandably so, too. The first wet winter in many years held much promise of good harvest. Until last Sunday, that is. A potato farmer told a journalist the other day he had been looking forward to bumper exports; now, it was a matter of making ends meet, just about.
Which is exactly what farmers have had to put up with for a long time. Agriculture has been systematically devalued by cheap imports and Byzantine regulations, among other things. The lateral thinkers invested in trucks and season tickets to Sicily and joined what they could never beat. The rest were left to cultivate their low spirits.
Second, the storm felled a depressing number of trees. Roadside pines and cypresses were particularly badly hit. A case in point was the Rabat road, which lost three or four of its finest stalwarts. Perfectly consonant, then, with the man-made work-in-progress in the tree destruction department. As it happens, the Rabat road is set to lose 30 or 40 mature trees.
Third, the storm turned the sea along the east coast a milky white. Part of the reason was runoff water, the rest down to bottom sediment churned up by great waves. It will take a week or two for things to blue back to a more familiar-looking Mediterranean.
It will take much, much longer than that for the sea to heal, once the trucks run out of quarries where to dump construction waste. A week or two of murky sea will seem like a wink – but then I did say that this was a lopsided formula.
Fourth, a great big ficus tree (there we go again) was partially uprooted in Tarxien. As I write, it could give way any minute and come crashing down on Villa Barbaro, a historic lived-in home. The owner of the house is beside himself, and who can blame him?
Doubly beside himself actually, because his house is threatened, also as I write, by encroaching development that would bury it. His despair is not exceptional. The lives of a thousand home owners in Malta are likewise overshadowed. Some cases concern historic houses, as in Villa Zammitello in Pietà. Less patrician perhaps, but the rest are all home to the people who live in them.
The Rabat road lost three or four of its finest stalwarts. Perfectly consonant with the man-made work-in-progress in the tree destruction department
Fifth, the storm said a big No to the Malta Marathon. Reason enough for those who did not run not to get their medals, one would have thought. But no. Bizarrely, the non-runners were invited to collect their medals from a place in Qormi. Nor were they required to run to Qormi, since there was ample and convenient parking at collection point.
Here too, like owner like dog. The thing with awards in Malta is that there are enough to go round for everyone, and then some. Take the journalism awards. Some who have been multiply honoured could not write a proper sentence if it was that or herpes. The storm model suggests that they would get an award even if they didn’t write at all.
Sixth, the storm did a considerable number of fish a disservice – a sacrifice made unworthy by the slight detail that half-dead fish pumped with antibiotics do not a nourishing supper make.
No matter, because that’s the way it has been all along. Fish farming routinely does fish, and sea creatures generally, a tremendous disservice. Excess feed, fish poop, and heaven knows what else seeps out of the cages and devastates the sea.
As for tuna of the metaphorically poisoned kind, let’s not go there.
Seventh, the storm got all political. Roberta Metsola, we were told, “took things in her own hands” (a big blue umbrella, actually) and “headed straight to the European Commission” to demand special funding for Malta. I don’t wish to be unkind, but never has a tailwind seemed more timely.
Not one to be outdanced, the Prime Minister has spent the best part of the week congratulating himself-by-proxy on the outstanding excellence and resilience of the nation’s infrastructure. The other day he even hosted a reception at Castille (fish off the menu) to honour the hundreds who braved the storm.
As he put it, “I wanted to show the people that this was all thanks to you, because you showed that this country has well-functioning systems in place.”
Read: “I wanted to show the people that this was all thanks to you, because it was really all thanks to me.”
Eighth, and finally, the storm set a new record (to do with wind gusts or something). That’s one to add, then, to the world’s longest garlic baguette and biggest ever raviolo, both set in Qormi a couple of years ago, the world’s longest stretch of raw Maltese sausage downed in one sitting by one man (I kid you not), and the world’s largest wine glass.
And, of course, to that greatest record of all, that mother of all whirlwinds of change and promise: L-Aqwa Żmien.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece