Thoughts and happenings from a life on Malta

At the end of October of last year, Christmas decorations were already being put up on roundabouts along the arterial roads (see post: Merry Christmas). I was heading to the beach for an afternoon swim when I saw them adorning the perimeter of one of the Xemxija twin roundabouts (doesn’t have the same ring to it as “twin towers” but that’s what this country can afford). Holly and candle shapes and a Merry Christmas sign – all waiting for the night to fall and the electricity to flow, to flash these out-of-season greetings. Eventually, plastic dolls representing holy families, sons of god and wise men mushroomed in the turf and camped for a few months in the maelstrom of fumes and horns, screeching tyres and irate drivers. How the mighty have fallen!

Now it’s St Valentine who’s impatient to make his entrance – and an elevated one at that. A billboard is already up on the way to St Julians (the town, named after the man who slaughtered his parents) advertising teddy bears as an ideal gift for the 14th February. What exactly does this furry soft toy say to your romantic partner on the day? “You’re ever so huggable darling” or “Isn’t it time you got an all-over epilation done?”. What I’m really looking forward to are the restaurants’ special menus – essentially bog-standard meals but with over-the-top prices – that will soon make an appearance in the newspapers. You know the sort: a tomato soup starter is renamed Romeo’s Bleeding Heart; a main of chicken breast with chips becomes Juliet’s Welcoming Bosom; for dessert, Arouse My Passion,  two scoops of ice-cream with a strikingly erect wafer tube.

A Christmas gift from my aunt, I started this book on the 24th December 2011 and finished it on the 31st December. It is the biography of Louis Zamperini, a 1936 Olympic athlete and considered to have the potential to break the then mythical 4-minute mile. The war against Japan in the Pacific thrashed that dream, and also his body and spirit. His weeks-long survival on a life raft  following the crash of his bomber and the months-long abuse at the hands of the brutish Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a POW camp corporal, read more like a work of fiction than fact.

Unbroken is unputdownable.

The paralysing influence that the dictatorial North Korean leadership has on its people and country also extends to the  Malta-Korea Friendship Association. For the evidence, just take a look at the “activities” page of its website and you’ll see that the most recent update is way back in June 2007; the one before that is May 2006. Morbidly enough, these two “activities” are in fact obituaries. More of the North Korean joie de vivre rubbing off here?