A niece e-mailed me with her news. “Went to Perugia for the chocolate festival. I went with very good intentions… I mean....how tempting could the chocolate really be I said to myself? I’m stronger than that! I arrived and was completely surrounded by stands selling chocolates in all kinds of shapes. Why, I even saw a Kamasutra chocolate set. And all sizes too and chocolate candy floss, chocolate pasta, chocolate salami and chocolate popcorn, bananas and apples… the works! The shoe shops had shoes made of chocolate in their windows… it was pretty much our family's idea of heaven… so you can imagine how easily I was tempted… it was the doughnuts oozing with rich fine chocolate that were the cause of my downfall. Talk about giving into temptation! And now I can't even think of the word chocolate. It was really far too much! I am cured but for how long?”

I have no tales of dining out this week. First keeps me at the grindstone with little respite. However I do have an invitation from Perugina for next week – a lovely chocolately looking invitation to the launch of Nero Perugina with promises that Champagne will also be served. And I don’t propose to miss that event. So there will be stories from those quarters in next week’s edition.

I was late for the Painting Valletta Pink rally organised a week ago by the Action for Breast Cancer Foundation (ABCF) which started at City Gate. But I caught up with them and had a coffee and pastizzi with two of the women who participated in the rally, one of them a recent but very brave victim of this disease. Betty Hanley-Lee (who at the age of ten lost her mother to breast cancer) and Helen Muscat are founder members and my friend Phyllis Muscat in a pink boa and who is so active – her brother, an artist, told me in an interview, not so long ago: ‘nothing would happen without Phyllis.’ Phyllis’ business is totally demanding and yet she finds time for others.

Informative pamphlets and pink ribbons and chocolate muffins with pink icing were distributed. Helen pointed out that one line in the Budget 2008 dedicated to breast screening ‘is simply not enough.’ And at the time she did not know that the cancer supremo, Stephen Brincat had not even been consulted about this initiative. A national breast screening programme would of course be a huge and very expensive undertaking. Moreover when I hear the words ‘national breast screening programme’ I have a Proustian moment of déjà vu. I don’t keep cuttings but I distinctly remember some 18 to 20 years ago that this subject had cropped up in Parliament when the Nationalists were already in power – gosh! we’ve had them all that time except for an all too short break of 18 months of Labour – and all those years ago there was talk of such a programme. I had written an article in The Sunday Times stating that I doubted the government would take on such a programme because of the expense involved. Moreover the British had started with a pilot project, in Manchester I recall, and the young woman doctor who was responsible for the pilot project had herself died of breast cancer. So there had been much correspondence in the British papers about the sagacity of having a national screening programme.

Dr Frank Portelli, then a member of Parliament had said that I was being too pessimistic and that yes, there would be a national breast screening programme in due course. And here we are, resuscitating this old project again. Apparenzi, apparenzi! I am not impressed. Maybe it will all come to pass in 2015 which has become a date now etched in stone. This will be just another project to add to a long list which Dr Sant produced in Parliament which I have named ‘The Project that Never Was’. The Mediterr-anean Academy of Music will be yet another Project that Never Was. There will be one more huge musical event before the elections no doubt which will cost a small fortune, for how many can afford to buy such expensive tickets and patronize these events unless they are given complimentary tickets? These events will never pay for themselves especially where classical music is involved. But the Academy as such as a project will not take off. There will be more press conferences and more hype, another event or two and that will be that for a long time.

People keep on asking how is the Labour Party, if it is elected, going to finance some of the projects that the Leader of the Opposition has spoken about in Parliament and at the press conference which followed? Well, to me it seems quite simple. On my desk I have two documents, One is the Familji fis-Sod document which we all received at home. A document of some 32 pages in technicolour with lots of pretty pictures of the current Prime Minister playing with the children of some Nationalist family who posed for the photos. The rest of this expensive brochure lists the achievements of the present government. How many people have waded through it all? Most of the material in it has been discussed ad nauseaum over radio and television and by Nationalist columnists in one paper or another. But how many actually sat down to read it? It cost thousands to print and distribute and it is now gradually finding its way to some skip or another. What a waste of money! The other document is the thick Insahhu s-success Flimkien: Xoghol, Edukazzjoni, Ambjent. Another expensive piece of propaganda with pictures of pansies and beautiful schools (no mention of the illiteracy figures, among the lowest in Europe however) and so on, another document which will soon find its way with other skart.

This is but the beginning of the sort of waste for which the current government is responsible. We have not even begun touching on the huge sums of money spent by government on consultancies, authorities, circuses in the shape of popular singers to keep people distracted, travel and hotels by parliamentarians, bills for mobile phones of those who do not have to pay for them and so on. If all this and much more were added up there would be huge savings and efficiency would not suffer and the money would be spent on more constructive projects. So yes, I understand what the Labour Party means as a friend of mine keeps on repeating ‘It is not rocket science’.

Call me superficial if you like but I don’t want to hear the word Caravaggio again for a long time. Thank goodness I shall not be around when the 500th anniversary will be celebrated. I don’t want to see another knight, another beheading of anyone let alone St John the Baptist. I don’t want to see a St Francis in ecstacy or otherwise. I am tired of it all even before I have seen either exhibition or attended a talk. Yes, call me superficial if you like but there is such a thing as over-exposure and Caravaggio is overexposed. Thank God for Beryl Cook. She is much more fun.