The Ice Bucket tidal wave shows no sign of abating.

It has caught the imagination of young and old alike, the known and the unknowns.

There used to be a time when all vied to go to l-Istrina and donate and so have their second of fame on national television with the President.

This Ice Bucket thing has gone one better: it offers anybody and everybody their moment of fame on Facebook and maybe too on YouTube.

We have seen innumerable back gardens, roofs, sometimes even the street itself, and of course so many many swimming pools.

Maybe a few dared be cynical about the whole thing pointing out this was a waste of valuable water which so many peoples around the world still lack (and which we use up so much electricity to generate it just to live in the illusion that water is freely available). Others asked if it was true that people were, as they said, donating.

From a country where no one seemed to have heard of ASL, the debilitating sickness, we have now become all so knowledgeable about it. There have been some sane voices which said all this money is going to a foreign NGO, however worthy, while Maltese NGOs languish in penury.

But what, at least in our eyes, takes the cake is the gadarene rush by so many VIPs to do the Ice Bucket thing.

Let us start at the top: the President lost no time in getting dunked, Maybe people thought, in the skewed way many think, the President was being a ‘sport’, not a ‘wet blanket’. But let’s look outside Malta: did we see President Napolitano doing it? Or Queen Elizabeth? Or even President Hollande? At least, it was done in a rather simple, touching way.

Where we object to is to see the President of the House of Representatives, a barefoot Speaker slumming and doing it in the middle of the Palace courtyard, surrounded by flunkies, with the flag of Malta in the background (and tourists looking in).

The two leaders of the country did it in their own way. Joseph Muscat did it around the same time that Matteo Renzi did it. (The similarity between these two grows day after day). Simon Busuttil first sat on the fence, then nominated the journalist he likes most, then finally turned around and did it.

These two apart, officialdom finds a way to render anything ludicrously solemn, such as the Commissioner of Police yesterday.

There exist videos of the Ice Bucket jape going terribly wrong, but nothing of the sort seems to have happened here so far. Let us hope that people did donate what they promised and that at least some sort of awareness has crept in about a sickness for which so far no remedy has been found. And that people found a way of turning the hot, very hot, days of the end of summer into a game where they can nominate those people they would like to see getting a bucket of ice on their heads.

It was all fun while it lasted.