According to the BBC News, “the parents of missing Madeleine McCann are taking their search for their daughter to Berlin and Amsterdam. Kate and Gerry McCann flew to the German capital on a private jet on Tuesday night to appeal for help.” Many of us have been following the fortunes of the McCann’s who have now become a household name. They have our sympathy and compassion and a thank you in advance to St Anthony for finding their little girl. We have also noted that they were lucky and were able to get an audience with the Pope in a matter of days while these events in our lives usually take months of preparation.

Some £350,000 have been donated to the Find Madeleine Fund. In all this those of us who have a job cannot help wondering how her father can stop working for all this time and travel around Europe with his wife. Most of us in similar circumstances would have had to go back to our desks sooner rather than later. Heartbreak cannot interfere with work.

Every year some 70,000 children are reported missing in the U.K. alone. In fact, Child Rescue Alert was launched last year to save abducted children from being murdered. There are other campaigns of course but this is the most recent one. Children are also abducted by their own parents or go off to live with someone else. But how many of these parents can afford the time or money to jet around to find their children? Thankfully there are some success stories of children found.

Had Madeleine been a child from some little village anywhere and her parents had gone out for a quick drink you can be certain that they would have been charged with child abuse and dragged to prison.

It is a world of two weights and two measures and you had better believe it.

And as to St Anthony. His holy picture on my computer needs replacing badly. I asked a friend who went to Rome ‘for you know what’ to get me one from one of the myriad shops at the Vatican. What do you know, he sent me a message to say that he couldn’t find one as St Anthony is no longer fashionable. I shall refrain from passing any remarks but shall go to St Paul’s street one of these Saturdays and I am certain to find boxes of them there.

From a friend in Britain: ‘Life goes on here as disgracefully as I can manage! I had a geriatric birthday in January. Marie, I am an antique 80 now. As a geriatric present to myself I took myself on a Caribbean cruise. I loved seeing the islands again – although I did not visit the islands where my late husband and I worked – but did not like the cruising part of the holiday... so many pretentious people, so many hugely fat people eating their way round the islands and bores as well but the crew were wonderful and I got taken under the wing of the young staff in the Health and Beauty Section, and the young, personable, Fitness Instructor took me drinking ashore and I had a ball.

I have just returned from a two week holiday in The Gambia in West Africa. I went with the friends you are acquainted with and we had a great time. We ‘went native’ staying in the compound of an Englishman and his Senegalese wife. He had set up two charities, one of which was to sponsor children at school and I was lucky enough to be taken round a nursery school and was then asked to take part in a teacher training session for a day. I did a demo lesson, treating the headteachers as if they were five-year-olds and had them drawing on their hands and repeating ridiculous rhymes. It was hugely successful and we all lunched together and I got an offer of marriage from one of the headteachers but, as I didn’t know what my status of wife would be – they are allowed four – I declined the offer but it was a great boost to be thought of as a status symbol. Actually, I had three offers of marriage and one elder was anxious to give me a donkey!

I go up to the Outer Hebrides next week to stay with my sister and have another session hand spinning on the old fashioned wheel. I fly Gatwick-Glasgow-Benbecula and return via the island of Barra as the aircraft lands and takes off on the beach... at low tide only, obviously. We may then go up to see the prehistoric circles on Harris and Lewis.

Nothing more is planned but, as they say in the West Indies, if God spare life, I hope to return to The Gambia at the end of the rainy season and do some more sessions in the schools and with the headteachers. The friends I travelled with have bought a plot of African bush there but that is another story.

And that brings you up to date with my news. I got my hair Rasta braided and beaded in Africa but have taken it out as the beads were falling off. My contemporaries are horrified by the hairdo and pretend it doesn’t exist.

All for now... take heart there is life in Geriatricland!”

I love my ‘old’ friends who don’t sit around and mope but keep going.

I have at last managed to go to Volksbank’s Spring party where some 250 people were invited. Most of them turned up, I am told. There was thankfully soft music played by Austrian damsels in Tyrolean costumes, a lovely wrought iron barbeque from where you could help yourself from mounds of sausages, accompanied by lovely potato salad and other goodies, plenty of wine and beer and a delicious fruit salad. A couple of Austrian beauties in costume and small barrels handed us Snapps a gogo, so that at the end of the party one had to feel happy and lighthearted. I am glad I made it this year.

I could not escape the Nationalist Party’s general conference as it was reported everywhere including One TV which gave us excerpts of its proceedings. It came across as a Kim Il Sung era cum Reign of Terror type of junket with fawning comrades bowing and kowtowing to The Leader and gushing out praise, with an idyllic ‘green’ poster as a backdrop. This was before the admission by archaeologists, which appeared in today’s press, that they were not asked for an EIA on Ramla.

(The greening of the Nationalists continues unabated. Sliema residents received two copies of the same tract, on consecutive days, from George Pullicino starting with ‘Ahbar importanti…’ ‘Il-Ftuh ta’ Park ta’ Natura u Storja fil-majjistral ta’Malta’. He’s be wearing gumboots next.) The virtual reality continues, especially when it comes to the environment.

But back to the Kim Il-Sung junket. Mrs Gonzi, sat there with not a hair out of place, looking composed and manadarin-like but, I would say, totally embarrassed. She is a woman with a conscience and knows that the sort of language which Smartcity wallah, Austin Gatt, jowls wobbling with fury, and words-fail-me Joe Saliba used regarding the opposition, its leader and Jason Azzopardi who was invited and sitting in the front pews, were unacceptable to an educated and civilized society, as ours purports to be. John Dalli, in scintillating form from not having had to deal with government finances for a number of years, brought them all down to earth. Will someone with psychic abilities, please sit down, gaze at their crystal ball for a few hours and produce a cosmic chart for the forthcoming elections? Will there be glad tidings for this lot I wonder?