I am so very sorry that I missed Lino Cassar’s party. It had been postponed and then I went away and returned to an avalanche of post, e-mails and work. I had opened his second invitation but did not put it in my diary or note the date, although I did register that it was sometime at the end of April. When I could breathe again, a couple of weeks ago, I called him and asked him when his party was going to take place as by then I had mislaid the invitation and found it easier to call and ask and have a chat with him instead of looking for it under the various piles of papers and magazines on my desks. To my utter mortification, Lino told me that in fact his party had taken place the day before. So that was that. However, I shall run some photos of it in First which will be circulated with our Sunday paper on 20th May.

I’ve known Lino for a long time, since my early 20s when censorship, particularly in films, was an everyday fact. On a number of occasions he would arrange for me and the late Cecil Satariano who was then a prize-winning Super 8 film maker, to go and see those films which the local censors had cut drastically. One of them, I recall very well, was Darling with Laurence Harvey and Dirk Bogarde, for which Julie Christie won an Oscar. We had a Censorship Reform Group then and were fighting censorship of films, books and even newspapers with letters in the press, exhibitions and goodness knows what else. And back in 1965 we all wanted to see Darling which was very much a film of the moment. Lino, of course knew about every frame in every film and was a fountain of information and also wit.

I didn’t read much Maltese but once I came to know him I began buying Ix-Xewka which improved my reading of Maltese no end. So, I am so very sorry that I missed his party because of circumstances and the way things happened. May he go on writing for a long time yet.

A couple of people running successful factories called me about some advert which encourages those working in factories to leave and take up a course in IT instead. “Id-decidejt!” the protagonist of the advert says. The callers both objected in their different ways to this advert, which, I must confess, I never managed to see on television – and this only because I watch so little television beyond the Super One and PBS news. They feel that such an advert depreciates work in factories. One of them turned around the work in his factory and instead of making large quantities of lingerie which can easily be made in one of the Eastern European countries, to making very specialised top-of-the-range pieces, each item of which, to put it in his own words “costs as much as half a computer.” This is exclusive wear and those who make it are highly skilled. This turnaround, he pointed out to me, has not been easy and it is only through determination and hard work that orders keep on coming in. “Why make working in a factory sound as if it is the lowest job possible?” another told me. “We train these people and now that they are skilled, with such an advert which makes IT sound so much more enticing, they may decide to leave, after we have spent time and energy training them to be really skilled workers. Not to mention the very laborious task of bringing in regular orders to keep all of us in a job. There are plenty of people and especially school leavers without a job. Why not train these? That advert should be scrapped because it is not a fair advert.” I sometimes wonder, and I am not the only one, who is responsible for some of the advertising produced by government entities. This sort of specialized business should be left in the hands of those who know what they are doing and have the expertise which is necessary in the sophisticated world of advertising.

It is frightening the way that gambling companies whether online or not are being given permits to set up shop in Malta when they have been banned in places like the USA. Let the rich gamble their riches away if that is what they want but we all know very well that the victims of all this online gambling and even slot machines are not the rich but those who are not well off and who hope that with one win they will be able to pay their bills and perhaps even their long-standing debts. They hope that maybe gambling will solve their financial difficulties. Going online is also so much more anonymous than going to a slot machine or to a casino. Online no one will know what you are doing. If they become addicted to it they will go back and gamble some more, whether they win or lose. And here we are taking an absurd stand on divorce and yet allowing all these foreign companies to come and make millions out of badly paid people, whether in Malta or elsewhere, if it is online gambling. We already have a very big drug problem, far bigger than the authorities will admit. We also have a huge problem with young people and alcohol and now Sedqa has already set up a helpline because gambling is already a problem here. What an absurd situation this is! Creating work by allowing online companies which have been turned away elsewhere for very valid reasons to come and operate here. We are fast becoming the Las Vegas of the Med, even if this is only a virtual Las Vegas. I fail to see why we don’t go and chain ourselves at the railings of Castille in protest.

Well, Lou Bondì hasn’t yet chained himself to the railings of Castille or anywhere else yet, over the Bondìminus business. He is far too smooth an operator for that. We apparently had Programme II on Verbum Dei, or whatever the new hospital is called. Between fleetingly listening to a variety of religious programmes on the radio and those butter-doesn’t-melt-in-their-mouth sanctimonious voices on the various stations and the beatification of Dun Gorg ad nauseam, my vocabulary is going haywire.

We all hope that the new hospital is going to be a roaring success of course, but is it necessary to have Bondì running two programme on it and pay him some absurd sum of money to add to the cost of the hospital? Are you trying to tell me that the PBS staff could not have taken care of such an exercise at a quarter of the cost or even less? There is quite clearly an enormous tussle between at least two camps in the Nationalist party over these PBS programmes but they are so good at spinning and hiding the truth. Most people trust their instincts and it is best not to underestimate their intelligence. Go on pulling those ropes Lou and you’re going to need to network more than ever before to win this one.