The Sea Malta workers who have been let down by the General Workers Union are going to hold a protest march in Paola on Thursday. So what does Tony Zarb do in a desperate attempt at protecting No 1? He announces that the union is going to hold a counter protest, also in Paola, on the same day. This is too much. It’s bad enough that he bungled the negotiations so badly, leaving so many people out of a job. Now he is going to try to eclipse their protest march too, confusing people who will hear that there are two marches in Paola, one against Tony and the other in support of Tony. His behaviour is truly beneath contempt. He doesn’t just look like the baby on the old Maltova packets. He behaves like that, too.

Clutching at straws as he drowns, Mr Zarb tried to blame the government for seeking to privatise Sea Malta, taking great pains not to mention that these jobs would not have been lost in the privatisation process, had he not stuck in his two cents’ worth and messed the whole thing up – by means of a fax from Brussels, if you please, because he didn’t want to miss his union meeting jaunt, even though there was so much trouble here.

“The GWU believes that the government and the media which support it are using the Sea Malta issue to alienate the people from the hardships the government is bringing about... Those siding with the Nationalist Party are blaming the union so that the government need not feel morally responsible for the Sea Malta workers. It was not the GWU that closed down Sea Malta,” Mr Zarb’s communications machine announced (by fax). The workers themselves see it rather differently, which is why they plan to march against bungling Tony on Thursday. “The union had our jobs in its hands and lost them... Now we have had enough. The union chose to engage in a dangerous game on behalf of a few militant seamen who were only interested in personal financial gain. The result of this game was that we lost our jobs a few days before Christmas. Instead of being our shield, the union has damned us,” the angry workers said.

Perhaps when he is doing the rounds of the Christmas drinks parties, Tony Zarb might spare these people a thought.

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The Pope has told us that to be good is not necessarily to be boring. “We suspect that a person who does not sin is a boring person, and that something is missing from his life: the dramatic dimension of being free,” he said on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. He’s right, of course. Some of the most boring people I know are those whose behaviour would have them described, in religious terms, as serial sinners. Not that I would use religious terms – to me, they’re just boring people, with empty lives driven mainly by getting laid, doing drugs, keeping up with the Joneses, and with a little light cheating on the side. Also, sinners tend to move in a crowd, making them even more boring in their striking lack of originality. They sin to copy others. They sin because they think it’s fun, and then they wonder why it isn’t – and why, by the time they are 40, they have the face of a 50-year-old and look all wasted and washed up (ah, but then they can get Botox – in groups – and go to therapy, also in groups).

When you’re 18 or 28, you might think these people are exciting and even glamorous; by the time you’re 40, you only have to spend five minutes in their company to turn paralytic. You find yourself avoiding certain places just to avoid them. They even bore each other. The outer circle of hell is a party packed solid with sinners, all braying at each other in very loud voices, the women wearing very small and inelegant pieces of Lycra, and the men behaving in a way their sons, if they could see them, would describe as ‘really sad and embarrassing’. You have to be very young, or very sheltered, to define these people as interesting or exciting. Sinners are, ultimately, very boring because, by definition, they are only interested in themselves, and they are generally entirely lacking in imagination. When was the last time you had an interesting conversation with a sinner? Far more interesting conversations are to be had with people in supermarket queues.

Good people can be very boring, too, of course, and often are. But this is only when, like sinners, they lack imagination. In fact, it is sometimes because they lack the imagination required to sin in some ways that they are good, by default. The best people are well-balanced: a little bit naughty now and again, but with plenty of good things going on in their lives.

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The wife of a friend was at the general hospital some days ago when she came across a woman with a newborn baby, and expressed the usual pleasantries (“How sweet!” “How much does she weigh?” “What are you going to call her?”). The answer left her reeling: “Chogem”. If this is true, and not apocryphal, then perhaps it is time the public registry employs the same strict set of rules used by a few European countries, including France and Sweden. There, certain names are proscribed altogether, and other non-standard names, like those from another culture or no culture at all, must be put forward for official approval or denial. That is why the French and the Swedish all have proper French and Swedish names, like Jean Michel and Ulrike, rather than being named for the surname of their father’s favourite footballer, or their mother’s preferred Desperate Housewife. I remember a fuss breaking out in Paris some years ago when the parents who wanted to name their daughter Keiko were refused permission to do so because the authorities decided that a French child should not be burdened with a Japanese name.

In our struggle to give our children original names that will make them stand out from the crowd (for all the wrong reasons, it has to be said), we Maltese are at one with the British and the Americans – which is perhaps not surprising at all, given that they remain our main influence, unlike the Italians and the North Africans next door, who make a point of using Italian and Arabic names. Using a Christian name in another language is acceptable, because it bears a direct relation to our culture – but how on earth do you connect Russian culture to Malta, for example? Why name your son after a footballer who will be forgotten by the time the boy grows up? Why name your daughter after a pop-song? Britain is battling a wave of girls called Chardonnay – named not after the wine, but after one of the characters in the television series Footballers’ Wives. Boys are being called Porsche, Gucci and even Christian Dior, as their (usually single) mothers attempt to give them an air of quality by association with prestigious brand names. Instead, names like this handicap a child for life, or until the child grows up and can change it. They are seriously downmarket, but try explaining to these mothers that what is prestigious for a handbag is the very opposite for a baby.

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I received this e-mail message from Michael Falzon, the former Minister of Education, in response to my column last Sunday: “Please don’t think that the press or basic courtesy have anything to do with the fact that anonymous adverts for jobs vacancies have disappeared from the local newspapers. Regulations about adverts on job vacancies were made by legal notice when I was minister of education and human resources. First of all, regulations allowing for the registration and licensing of private employment agencies were issued (previously, they were thought to be in competition with the Employment and Training Agency!). Then regulations banning adverts for job vacancies made by unknown prospective employers were banned – except for those made by a registered bona fide employment agency. Otherwise, if somebody wanted to ‘go it alone’, and advertise anonymously, he would have to get a special permit from the Department of Labour, and the newspaper would be bound to print the number of the permit with the advert. I know that bureaucracy is heavy and suffocating, but this was the only way that abuses could be controlled – and it worked. Previously, there were so many complaints about people acting as ‘illegal’ employment agencies, who used to put out fake advertisements, with no real job on offer, just to build up a data base of unemployed people. Others used to ask for photos of applicants – usually young girls looking for a job – with obvious possibility for abuse. The regulations now stipulate that when prospective employers ask for photographs from job applicants, they cannot use them for other purposes.”

So there we have it. Now the next step is regulating against those advertisements that call, anonymously, for people to write in with details of their art collections and jewellery for sale.

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The Integra Foundation is organising a march against hatred and discrimination, starting from the statue of Christ the King near the Phoenicia Hotel in Floriana, at 5.30pm tomorrow, Monday. Log on to www.integrafoundation.org to find out more.