From Mr A. A. Camilleri

After reading Daphne Caruana Galizia’s insipid article “Malta – Where homes are always cold” (TMIS, 12 December), I would like to ask her some questions:

1. Was the article about Malta, Alaska or Siberia?

2. How did you conclude that high-income Maltese families keep their homes heated throughout the day and night for four months of the year?

3. Are you suggesting that we should go back to the bad old Mintoffian days and use paraffin heaters instead of air-conditioners, so that there will be no overloading at Enemalta and we will have no power cuts?

4. How did you arrive at the fantastic figure of Lm75/Lm100 a month spent by the average Maltese family to heat their home, (and that’s before the recently announced paraffin increases)?

5. Why do we have a low standard of living? Because you say so? We don’t see heating of homes as a luxury, dear Daphne. We just feel, with good reason I suggest, that our mild, almost warm winters, hardly require us to heat our homes to the extent you are suggesting, except perhaps for a couple of weeks, three at most, every year. Incidentally, I seem to recall, some years back, your contending in another context, that it was ludicrous for women in Malta to wear fur coats in the relatively warm climate of Malta. These were not your exact words, of course, but you said or wrote something to that effect.

6. Isn’t it unfortunate that in your visits to homes, you only meet people who, in spite of their warm, chunky clothes, still shiver in their “unbearably cold” Maltese homes? As for me, I have never come across entire families in their homes, dressed up as though they were going to emigrate to the North Pole.

7. How did you decide that “in more civilised parts of the world” people don’t turn off the heating before they go out to work or when they go to sleep (on TV, films, personal observation) it does not appear to be so?

8. Besides visiting homes where people are freezing to death, meeting pensioners every week and in the process worrying about their paraffin bill, calling on and interviewing paraffin vendors, bakers and what not and of course writing columns for the press, how else do you occupy what’s left of your time?

9. How did you conclude that bakers make meagre profits? From what one observes, bakers normally end up building catering empires rather than go out of business.

10. Finally, do you not feel that the illegitimate use (or abuse) of paraffin in buses, trucks, etc, to the detriment of our health and the environment, should be controlled?

Alfredo A. Camilleri

SLIEMA