There hasn’t been such a bad feeling in the country since Alfred Sant was Prime Minister in 1997/1998, and his government was splitting apart at the seams. I can’t even begin to describe it. It’s not just economic gloom and doom, but goes beyond that – a profound ennui like the dead, still air before a thunderstorm cracks. People are nervous and fed up. They’re sick of each other and they’re even sick of themselves. They’re feeling stuck and trapped. It’s a negative zeitgeist, and I have no doubt that the general unhappiness in the air is a contributing factor to private unhappiness and the collapse like skittles of marriage after marriage. You would have to be completely insensitive not to pick it up. It’s the kind of mood that, several decades ago, would have propelled a country into war to snap the stalemate.

***

People don’t fear change, they actually crave it. What they fear is change that will put their security at risk, but they do want change for the better. Right now, the feeling is that of treading water to the point of exhaustion, wondering when the lifeboat will come.

***

The government tries to persuade the populace to the contrary, by quoting employment figures and claiming that more jobs are created than are lost. But that doesn’t help the ones who have been made redundant, and who don’t fit the required profile for the new jobs that are created. It doesn’t help those who wonder whether tomorrow will be the day they are called into the manager’s office for a regretful chat. It doesn’t help the new entrants to the job market, who can’t find employment unless they wish to work on a building site or in carpentry, in accounts or in information technology. I’ve been keeping track of the ‘situations vacant’ adverts in the newspapers, just to see what’s what. They’re always a good indicator of the economy, and they make depressing reading. Yes, I do know that the best jobs are not advertised but are filled through direct recruitment among friends and acquaintances and an extended network. But what of those with no network – what do they do?

***

A question occurs to me: what happens if you’re 23 and have just graduated from university? One of my former lecturers had the answer in conversation the other day. “Oh, the ones with initiative are applying for jobs overseas and leaving,” he told me. Wonderful, I thought, and I meant it. Unlike the emigranti (emigrants) of yesteryear, they are actually chafing at the bit, dying to speed off. They don’t have the ‘insib gopp’ (to find a job) mentality of earlier generations, but are thinking in terms of career, fun, excitement, a good salary, and even a more exciting selection of members of the opposite sex (let’s be frank, it’s an issue – there’s not exactly an extensive choice of prospective mates here).

Lucky them – if only I were 23 and could do the same. I wouldn’t even stop for five minutes to think about it. But of course, all that this means is that the best young people are once again waving goodbye to their homeland with a reverse victory salute, as they did in various stages of our history, and leaving us with the almost-rans.

***

“They’ll come back,” said a friend, demonstrating the returned immigrant mentality. “Not a chance,” I said. “Why on earth would they? The people leaving now are not exactly being shipped out in steerage to Australia, to cut sugar cane and save every cent until it’s time to go back home. They’re heading off for interesting careers and a fun city life, and if they don’t meet a romantic partner there, they’re certainly not going to meet one hanging out on a Saturday night at a Paceville bar.” As my outspoken friend said, in a recent rant against the armies of grumbling Maltese women who are now forced to pick their way through other people’s present or past husbands and men who prefer other men, they should just pack up and leave. Finding a decent man who would make a good husband was seen as a worthwhile objective in the past, and it remains a worthwhile objective today, no matter what some may have one think. Easier said than done, however – they’ll just have to go on hoping that one day it really will start raining men, and they won’t be married or gay.

***

A single woman in her 20s is definitely going to be better off with a good career in a European city than she would here, with nothing more to look forward to than hacking it in an office for Lm7000 a year, and sitting in the same old bars every weekend, getting older and more cynical, and seeing the same old men she’s probably known since they were kids. Some people like that kind of life – or rather, they’re too scared to try anything new. The others are buzzing off.

***

I bumped into a beautiful 22-year-old acquaintance the other day. She’s living out of a suitcase in London, moving from flat-share to flat-share and job to job. “Good for you,” I said. If you don’t do that kind of thing at 22, when do you do it? At 40, I want my own shower and the reassurance of knowing that I won’t wake up for breakfast to find someone else’s boyfriend stalking naked round the kitchen. I can’t shake off the sneaking feeling that so many of my contemporaries are mucking up their lives now because they never got certain things out of their system at the proper age to do it.

The reasoning of my beautiful acquaintance was spot on: if her life is going to be spent in offices, bars, restaurants and parties, then they might as well be offices, bars, restaurants and parties in London, instead of offices in a Maltese industrial estate and bars in Paceville.

***

I e-mailed another friend who is safely ensconced far from our shores, to update him on the current foetus frenzy (IVF! Abortion! When life begins!), and he e-mailed back to say that he is having a little bit of a foetus frenzy of his own, because there’s a baby on the way. “Don’t even remind me how things are down there,” he wrote. And then, in capital letters, “I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.” I know the feeling – but I have to know, whether I like it or not.

***

This business about entrenching the illegality of abortion in the Constitution is nothing but so much displacement activity, of course. When there are a lot of pressing problems, the tendency is to go off and do something else. You know how it is: you have a deadline you don’t want to meet, and you suddenly feel an urge to sort out your sock drawer instead. That’s why I always tell people that working from home is a very bad idea; there’s too much scope for displacement activity. In an office, the most you can do is make another trip to the water-cooler or the kettle.

I don’t suppose that the Minister for Home Affairs realises why his prompt accommodation of Paul Vincenti and the mysteriously-funded Gift for Life has irritated so very many people. He’s sorting out the sock drawer while the problems and the deadlines pile up. As he separates the Argyll from the brown checked wool and hands them over to Mr Vincenti to fold into neat little bundles, we sit here and seethe, and wonder where we’ll be this time next year. Those big, expensive billboards that tell us when life begins really bear no relationship at all to our life. The question of whether or not to abort a foetus is academic to most of us; there are far more pressing matters that we have to be getting on with. The sock drawer can wait.

***

It bears repeating that no amount of entrenchment of abortion in the Constitution is going to change the status quo. Thousands of Maltese have had abortions in London, Rome and Catania over the years, and they’ll just carry on doing so. And I don’t suppose even Paul Vincenti and his Gift of Life are going to suggest mandatory pregnancy tests for women leaving Malta, and mandatory pregnancy tests on their return. What a pointless waste of time it all is. At least they’ll have well-matched socks at the end of it.

***

The problem, of course, is that we have no wonderful alternative to look forward to. “Maybe they’ll get rid of Sant,” a PollyAnna-type friend (always looking on the bright side of life) remarked, chirpily. I stared at her, bug-eyed. Such naivety at 40 is truly reprehensible. And besides, the Labour leadership alternatives to Dr Sant are even more destabilising to the morale. I have received unsolicited missives in my mailbox from two of his erstwhile rivals. One of them is a piece of rubbish written in pidgin English by a policeman-turned-criminal-lawyer. The other is a leaflet that looks like something an American preacher might send out, in an attempt at drumming up larger numbers of worshippers. There are several photographs of the politician in question: celebrating his second marriage on board a cruise ship, relaxing with his daughter and the household cat, and a big smiley picture of him at ease in an up-market version of the shell suits that inner city rappers used to wear. It would have put the frighteners on me had I not known him to be rather a benign sort. I stuck it to my refrigerator with a Bart Simpson magnet, to cheer me up over the breakfast cereal. Then I took it down again. Surprise visitors might have missed the irony, and mistaken me for a fan. That would be too embarrassing for words. Prime minister material? Come on. Just when you think it can’t get much worse than this, you’ll find that it can indeed.

***

The reaction of the Labour Party’s general secretary, Jason Micallef, to Anna Mallia and her Popular Labour Movement, can best be described as ungracious. Whatever he may think or say in private about Dr Mallia, in public there are rules to be observed and ditching them only makes Mr Micallef look uncouth. When journalists called him for his reaction to the fledgling political movement, his words were: “She is a reject who has never found her place in life (qatt ma’ sabet kenn imkien). She doesn’t worry us. She doesn’t interest us. She doesn’t affect us. This was the joke of Sette Giugno.” That’s as may be – though those words don’t reflect badly on Dr Mallia, but on Mr Micallef. What he should have told journalists, of course, is this: “We wish Dr Mallia the best of luck with her new initiative. It will serve to make political life in Malta more interesting.” Perhaps somebody could dream up a crash course in basic good manners, including the handling with charm and ease of potentially awkward situations, for our politicians. Many of them, from all three parties, are embarrassingly clodhopping and

consummately lacking in sophistication. You can almost hear them clanging and clunking through public life. They seem hell-bent on behaving like many of their constituents, rather than leading by example.

***

My friend the photographer was in Sicily a couple of weeks ago, on an assignment that involved visiting various food producers with their marketing representative. In a desperate attempt at making conversation during the long drive to Palermo, she told him in her broken Italian: “Today is a feast day in Malta.” “Really?” he asked. “What feast would that be?” “Err…Sette Giugno,” she replied. He burst out laughing and told her “Well, it’s the 7th of June in Palermo, too, you know.”