There was a newspaper story some days ago about the removal of the railings around the prime minister’s office. It was illustrated with a press photograph taken 30 years ago, when Dom Mintoff closed the doctors’ school and medical students chained themselves to those railings. Oh dear, I thought – what a relic from a by-gone age.

Three things strike me about that picture from the dark days of life under Mintoff. The first is that all the students are men. The second is how nerdy they look, like boys whose mothers had pressed their trousers before allowing them to leave the house (‘hekk se tohrog?’) –hair combed, shirts properly tucked in, and the one closest to the camera had even buffed his shoes with Kiwi polish, if not his hair too.

They look like an outing of zghazagh from the parish youth centre, who had had an unpleasant encounter with a busload of bondage freaks. They had even chained themselves to the railings in a neat row, sitting up straight and with their legs politely pressed together, mindful of the fact that mother might be watching. There was no wild hair, no wild clothes and no wild behaviour. This must have been the first protest in Maltese history that looked like a meeting of tal-muzew in chains. I’m glad I wasn’t yet in the market for a boyfriend in those days, or I might have run away. Did they all look like that? Good God.

The third thing that struck me was the placards placed with surgical precision on each of their laps. These read ‘I want to study in Malta.’ I can’t imagine anyone saying that nowadays. When I was their age I would have given anything to be able to catch the first plane out of here and never come back. It was awful – the whole of Europe was booming and here we were, locked behind the iron curtain. Fast forward 20 years and the plaintive wail of the medical students of 1977 had been reversed. Now students were champing at the bit for an EU passport. Their cry was “I want to study abroad”. Yes, they’re free as birds and those flying fastest are graduates of the medical school, who are leaving in droves. How times change.

Looking back, Mintoff’s rabid approach to education was the best thing that happened to those medical students in 1977, though it didn’t seem so at the time and it was rotten all round for Malta. Let’s face it, though – they were the lucky ones, the ones who got away, who were spared another 10 years of life on the whacky rollercoaster, spared even the miserable salary and working conditions at rundown St Luke’s Hospital and the polyclinics. It was only considered catastrophic because leaving home, hearth, country and mummy’s cooking, washing and ironing was a great big deal in those days. It isn’t that way any more.

Those students were brave in their way, more so because they look like obedient St Aloysius boys who had never stepped out of line and were programmed to be subservient to authority. That photograph looks like something from The Revenge of the Nerds, but then I wouldn’t know, because I can’t recognise any of them. They would all be rather large and bald by now, I imagine, and living in the UK, and might no longer be wearing nylon shirts tucked into high-waist trousers. They were brave because times were rough and anyone who protested against the mad jackals in government got worked over. Policemen cut through the chains with metal cutters and whisked 23 of them to the dreaded black hole of their Floriana headquarters. Another three were hospitalised. Those were the times we lived in. Thank heavens they’re gone.

Now the railings are gone, too. A placard declaring that the bearer wants to study in Malta would be pointless, because anyone can do that – as long as they have learned by rote what passes for Maltese literature and have regurgitated it to the satisfaction of the national language Taliban. Anybody who wants to leave can do so, too, and study, live or work anywhere else in the rest of Europe. No 20-year-old would be seen dead these days looking as though he’s been washed and pressed by mama and chained to a railing.

There’s a whole world of difference between being a 20-year-old now and a 20-year-old then, and I’m not in the least bit of doubt as to which bunch are insuperably better off than the others. Twenty-year-olds in 1977 had a rubbish life when compared to 20-year-olds today, and when they feel nostalgia about it, it’s almost certainly misplaced.

Some people didn’t want those railings removed, because they have nostalgic feelings about them. I’m of the opposite view: that the less I have to remind me of those dark days, the better. Let’s move on.

* * *

I’ve noticed that the do-gooders have stopped campaigning against topless bathing and have turned their worthy attentions to homosexuals instead. Well, good luck to them. One thing’s for sure: they’re outnumbered. There are far more gay people around than there are heterosexuals who care what they get up to in the bedroom and whether the parish priest would approve or not.

Trying to control the sexuality of homosexual men gives these people some respite from their efforts at trying to control the sexuality of straight women. Homosexual men and straight women are the favourite targets of Holy Joe and Sanctimonious Sally. Nobody ever tries to control the sexuality of straight men, though half the world’s problems seem to be caused by it, and certainly most unhappy marriages, all of the world’s paedophilia, prostitution and white slavery. Only yesterday I read about a middle-aged man in France who kidnapped and raped a five-year-old boy after taking Viagra. He had just been released from prison. The police caught him in his garage with his pants down – literally. Last night I read a magazine article about another man in France who spent years kidnapping girls, raping and killing them, to feed his ‘rape and kill a virgin’ fantasies. In our cinemas right now there’s a ghastly film about men buying three kidnapped young women at auction and torturing them.

Do Sanctimonious Sally and Holy Joe ever write to the newspapers to warn against the dangers of heterosexual men with their testosterone out of control and sex on their minds 24 hours a day? Not a bit of it. They’re too busy ranting on about the temptations that women pose, and of course, it’s always the woman’s fault. Next thing we know, they’ll be accusing toddlers of tempting paedophiles. We’re not far off from it. What about that awful woman who told the court, some months ago, that her husband hadn’t made the first move on the five-year-old girls they had adopted from Romania? They were the ones who threw themselves at him, and he couldn’t help himself, she said. That’s why he had sex with them night after night. I’ve lost count of the number of women who tell me that when they hear about things like this, they have to fight down the urge not to recoil from men in

general.

At the start of the sunbathing season, one Holy Joe wrote to the newspaper to point out that “thankfully”, most people are taking notice of the beach-signs that ban topless bathing. I don’t think it’s the beach signs, Holy Joe – I think it’s the cancer scares. Ah, but he had noticed there is need for another ban – one “regarding the back lower part of the body”. He couldn’t even bring himself to say bottom, you see, or to explain that the offending item of clothing is a G-string. Apparently, “many girls and some women have undertaken to exhibit” this back lower part of the body, causing our Holy Joe great distress instead of interesting entertainment. Perhaps he had to struggle against the urge to pounce on the girls and twang their G-strings. How unfair. Now that he’s finally got them to keep their tops on, they’ve uncovered their bottoms.

“The situation warrants immediate action by the appropriate authorities before the practice flourishes further,” he wrote. I was beset by visions of the appropriate authorities patrolling the beaches with their little whips, giving a good haranguing to all those girls with the back lower parts of their bodies exposed – their punishment for allowing Holy Joe no peace on his sun-bed and a greater-than-usual need for a picnic cooler.

There are some people for whom this sort of thing is so important that they would rather see the police and wardens wasting time on it then stopping crime and keeping us safe. As far as I know, no one has ever been mugged by a G-string, nor run over by a drunken tanga. But you never know; there’s always a first time. And I’m sure we’ll hear about it in the correspondence pages of the

newspapers.