I’m glad to see that at least one police officer will be prosecuted for beating an African immigrant in Paceville earlier this summer. I do know that the Police Force took the accusations very seriously and rang all the eyewitnesses quoted in newspaper reports, asking them to go to Police Headquarters to give a written statement. These eyewitnesses weren’t treated or spoken to challengingly or in a hostile manner, but quite the opposite. The officer asking the questions appeared to have a genuine desire to find out what actually happened. This is not something we were able to take for granted in the not-so-distant past.

So now the question arises: how does this affect the prosecution of the man who was beaten? He was given a suspended sentence and fined for attacking the police, when it seems that the opposite was true and that the police attacked him. A reporter asked him about it, and he says that he just wants to put the whole thing behind him. He was raised in a country where people are conditioned to expect their human rights to be trampled upon. It’s sad to see that kind of behaviour here once more.

Let the prosecution of this police officer send a message to all those who posted comments beneath the on-line report of the beating, claiming that the African man got what he deserved for “resisting arrest”.

* * *

Now four prison guards are going to be prosecuted, too, for the beating of a Dutch prisoner who tried to escape from custody last Saturday. He’s a drug trafficker serving a 15-year sentence. One of his arms and some of his ribs were broken. He claims that he was beaten when he was hauled back inside the prison.

The Dutchman had been granted an hour’s absence from prison to visit his mother – why couldn’t she have visited him in prison in the normal manner? – and had then tried to escape from the police van when it stopped outside the prison door. He raced to Paola Square and was dragged back, then claims he was hit around and locked in solitary confinement with his broken bones, only taken to hospital two days later.

Being Dutch, not African, and coming from a culture that is very much aware of civil rights, this man, somehow communicated information about his condition to his family, who filed reports with various authorities. When he arrived at the hospital, he found an official from the Embassy of The Netherlands waiting for him, with the chairman of the prison board.

I trust that this beating will be taken as seriously as that other one. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a society where the violent abuse of the vulnerable by those in positions of authority is taken for granted as a fact of life, and where we adopt the po-faced attitude: “So what? He deserved it.” Much as I despise those who make their living by selling hard drugs, and the wives who live the high life off those earnings while parading around in society while their husbands are in jail, come si non fosse, I prefer to stick to civilised behaviour. The punishment meted out by the State in which we live is a prison sentence. It is not a prison sentence with ancillary beatings.

* * *

I read with pleasure that the Labour MP Karl Chircop’s condition is slightly improved, though he remains in a coma. The other day, I skimmed through an interview with the mother of a 1980s British beauty queen, who ended up married to one of the wealthiest men in the world. “You never know how life is going to turn out,” she said. I sometimes think that way in moments of quietude, when I look back at all the people I grew up with, went clubbing with, sat for hours on the beach with, and thought we would all live forever with. Rather too many of the familiar faces of those days have already died of cancer, of drug overdoses, in car accidents, leaving trauma in their wake. Sometimes a face comes suddenly to my mind, when I am thinking of something else entirely, and I can’t believe that I will never see that person again. I can’t believe how it all turned out.

Exactly 23 years ago, Karl Chircop was a guest at my wedding, sitting in one of the front pews with my best friend, who he was dating at the time. I pulled out the photographs the other day, and saw a fresh-faced 20-year-old with his whole life ahead of him, who went on to become a doctor, to marry somebody else entirely, to have four children and enter politics – with a political party we were all busy opposing at the time. And now, this. We really never know how life is going to turn out, or if and when the trajectory will be brutally interrupted by tragedy and disaster. If we think of what might lie ahead, we will walk around with a cold, iron fist of dread and fear clenched permanently round our heart. It’s so much better to live in the moment.

When we complain and think that life is boring/ dreadful/depressing, we only have to bear a single thing in mind: that when something truly terrible happens to sever us completely from the life we knew with the people we loved, we will look back with aching longing at the boring/dreadful/ depressing life we had before the unhappiness began, and think only of how happy we were then.

The parents of the boy who died at Ghadira will know exactly what I mean.