It's odd how people are not embarrassed to admit in public that they are supporters of the troll with the walking stick. I suppose that if they are the kind to think him admirable, or if they lack the psychological insight to see him for what he really is, then they are not going to think that supporting him is something that reflects badly on their own character and personality.

One of the troll's grovelling fans wrote a letter to a newspaper some days ago, a letter that was published without the prominence that, because of its curiosity value, was due to it. He told how he, the troll, and the troll's other acolytes hold weekly barbecues at what they call their “sacred place”. It sounds like one of those male bonding camps that take place in the American backwoods, except that the natural environment is a lot less dramatic here, and instead of talking about what they would like to do to women, they talk about what they would like to do to “the black coal” that, if not drowned, washes up on our shores from time to time. First they watch the sun go down, then they set a fire, cook their meat and drink some wine. “We enjoy ourselves like one big family,” he wrote. Yes, a dysfunctional family, if ever there was one.

While communing with nature, the sunset, wine and each other, they “express concern about this planned invasion by these so-called refugees” because they have “every right to safeguard our country.” It sounds like a real fun night out. My goodness, what I'm missing. The prospect of stumbling across a hobbit gathering, presided over by a troll, roasting meat on an open fire and discussing what they probably call “niggers”, while out on an evening stroll, is preoccupying. Thank heavens I never bother with exercise.

* * *

It doesn’t seem to occur to the troll and his hobbits that people like me find them more alien and certainly more disturbing than the prospect of any Muslim or African living next door, or 'taking our jobs'. The fact that the troll and his hobbits are Maltese, like we are, does not give us anything in common. Shared nationality only serves to magnify the huge and insurmountable differences between us. Just as they ask “Would you want your daughter to go out with a Muslim or a black man?” we ask, “Would you want your daughter to go out with the troll or one of his hobbits?” and the reaction is one of real horror.

People like the sunset-barbecuing-black-bashers are ignorant enough to believe that divisions are drawn between people on the basis of race, colour and creed. They are not. The real divisions in this world, between nations, peoples, societies and families, are drawn between the unenlightened, the enlightened, and the barely so, between those with good manners and those without, between the decent and the indecent, between the civilised and those for whom civilisation is but a veneer.

The troll with the walking stick may appeal to hundreds, even thousands of Maltese, but to far greater numbers he is either ridiculous or downright disgusting.

* * *

There is a seething panic about the predicted influenza pandemic, and absolutely no information campaign to calm people's fears and give them practical advice. So far, all we have had are media discussions about whether there will be enough vaccinations available, whether the government has ordered the medication and preventatives in time, and whether the ordinary anti-influenza shot is of any use at all in guarding against this new strain that is likely to hit us in the winter.

I have received countless e-mail reminders from family and friends telling me to book my vaccine now. Every day I hear fresh rumours about vaccine waiting-lists and new gossipy statistics about how many will die and how the hospital corridors will be crowded with the ill and the fading-away. It all sounds oddly reminiscent of the year 2000 doom-sayers, who built us up to expect worldwide black-outs, collapsing stock markets, and a Mad Max nightmare scenario as all the computer systems collapsed. Then midnight struck on 31 December 1999 and nothing happened. I tend to concur a little with the cynic who muttered, just the other day, that no marketing strategist could have hoped for better. The bigger the panic, the more vaccines and branded medications are sold.

The Health Department has a public affairs responsibility here: to spell out to people (and not just through the newspapers, because thousands don’t read them) what to do and what not to do; what will help and what will not help. Who should take a vaccine, which vaccine, and will it help, if at all? Then there are the simple precautions that out of sheer selfishness or ignorance, many do not take. They don’t wash their hands frequently when they have a cold or a cough. They go to work when feverish and with the beginnings of influenza, stuffed to the gills with aspirin and paracetamol. They send their children to school when they are ill, sometimes with medicine in a little paper-bag. Then the rest of the class goes down, like skittles.

The combination of sick people and air-conditioning is dreadful. The same air, complete with viruses and bacteria, is forced around and around. The worst possible combination is a crowded room, in which several people are sniffling and snuffling, others are smoking, and there’s air-conditioning.

The only place for a sick person is bed or the sofa in front of the television. I can’t understand why so many people seem to wish to make martyrs of themselves, behaving as though the home, the family or the office will fall apart if they spend a week (just five working days, for heaven's sake) in giant socks, a scraggy track-suit and greasy hair, camped out in the living-room with ample supplies of books, magazines, DVDs, snacks and drinks. To me, that seems like heaven. Instead, they go to work with a fever, blowing their nose constantly, not washing their hands, and touching things that others will touch, spreading their horrible germs. I am often teased because I won't place my hands on the rails of escalators, and where possible I push public doors open rather than touching the handles. I'm squeamish about virtually nothing, but to me, those are germ repositories.

I say all this with justifiable grouchiness, as the victim of a persistent cough brought home by a member of the household from a workplace where “everyone is coughing, sneezing and running a temperature, but they still go to work just to show how keen they are.” It shows the opposite, of course; it shows how irresponsible they are. One goes to work when ill, and mucks things up for everyone else, including the employer, who finds himself short of far more staff than just the original ill one.

* * *

In the panic-mongering, comparisons are being made to the Spanish influenza pandemic which killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide, though how that number was calculated is anybody's guess. Very little mention is made of the fact that this pandemic struck in 1918, when circumstances were wholly different to what they are now. The population of Europe was desperately weakened by the privations of the terrible war that was still being fought, but which was close to ending: four years of hunger, cold, disease, lack of medical care, and the blow to the immune system that follows intense grief or sorrow at the loss of several members of one's family.

Medical care 100 years ago was nowhere near the standard of today, and to make matters worse, a significant percentage of European and American doctors were busy elsewhere: involved in the campaign, running field hospitals, tending to the dying and the injured. Many thousands of doctors had been killed in the fighting. The resources in hospitals “back home” in Britain, mainland Europe and North America were depleted by the mauled and the maimed who had been shipped back home off the battlefields. It was in that scenario that the Spanish influenza struck, so it is no cause for wonderment that it infected so many millions. Nor is it surprising that the mortality rate was so high. This may not have been due to the disease itself so much as to the quality of medical care, or its absence.

In many American and European hospitals, with the doctors called up for service (or having volunteered, that being a different age to the one in which we live now), only the medical students were left to care for the ill and the dying, with little or no medication and very basic facilities and equipment. The emergency influenza hospitals of the time were like military field hospitals, large tents in fields. They were little more than holding sites for the sick, who had to be kept isolated, rather than treatment sites. Nurses were in extremely short supply, like doctors, because of the demands of war, and the Red Cross, which was much taken up with its war duties, was forced to call for inexperienced and untrained volunteers to staff hospitals for influenza patients. It was a far cry from the situation today. Many of those people succumbed through suffocation, because they couldn't breathe and there was no oxygen apparatus available.

There was just one thing to the advantage of those whose job it was to control the spread of Spanish flu in 1918 and 1919. The populations which had just endured the Great War were amenable to government authority and to the implementation of strictures and restrictions. They did not protest that these went against their human rights or their liberty of expression and association. Large gatherings were banned, shops were not allowed to hold sales, only those with “clear” certificates were allowed to travel by rail, weddings were brief and funerals even briefer. At the worst of it, people were ordered not to go out at all. Try doing that now.