Is it possible to write a doctoral thesis without being able to grasp simple, basic concepts and when one is partially innumerate?

Apparently so, because Doctor-Joseph-Muscat, who has taken over in Super One’s tripartite name stakes from Doctor-Alfred-Sant, has had published in yesterday’s The Times a ‘talking point’ article called A New Decade Has Dawned.

The only talking point about it is the fact that the would-be prime minister believes that 10 is the first number of a decade rather than the last. He will argue, no doubt, that it all depends on where you begin counting, but then he is probably one of those who believes that 2000 was the first year of a new millennium rather than the last year of the old one. Presumably, when asked by, for example, a supermarket assistant to count out 10 euros, he counts from one to 10 and not from nought to nine. But quite frankly, one never knows.

The deteriorating quality of Labour leaders is a source of amusement until general election day draws closer, and then it becomes cause for concern. Here is a man who is unable to fully understand the concept of nought, yet who presumes to hector the finance minister about the national budget. I don’t know what you think about it, but a man who counts to 10 by starting from nought and ending with nine inspires me with something less than confidence in his ability to run the country.

Joseph Muscat worked for a brief spell as an investment adviser. I shudder to think of the sort of investment advice he dispensed.

They’re giving away PhDs rather cheaply these days, it seems.

* * *

More than 30 per cent of births in Malta are now to unmarried women or to women who are married to somebody other than the baby’s father, so it was particularly symbolic, I suppose, that the first birth of the new year, habitually featured in the news media, was to a young, unmarried woman. The father was present and proud – but still, you get the picture.

This is how it is now. The gulf between real life and political talk about traditional Maltese family values grows wider every day.

The family values are there, for what they are worth, but tradition has long since flown out of the window.

* * *

Only two babies were born on New Year’s Day. That’s another indication of the way things are going, even if we didn’t have the low birth rate statistics to tell us. How long before there are no New Year babies at all for that standard ‘dullest news day of the year’ filler?

It won’t be long now before the New Year’s Day babies filmed and photographed by the media are the sort who greatly upset Norman Lowell and his followers, on the one side of the spectrum, and ultra-conservative Catholics on the other.

* * *

The Christmas whirligig befuddles the mind. Parliamentary secretary Joe Cassar congratulated the new parents and told them that their children will be the youngest of the class.

Reporters dutifully took this down and reported it back to us. But of course, under the current system, which has been in place for years, children born on 1 January are the oldest in the class, while children born on 31 December are the youngest.

The ad hoc system used by Church schools in the days when I went to school has long since been dispatched to the afterlife, and it didn’t guarantee that January babies were the youngest in the class, anyway. The youngest girl in my class was born in May.

I trust Joe Cassar doesn’t think, too, that this is the first year of the new decade, for then I shall truly abandon all hope.

* * *

The sort of Christmas spirit that comes in a bottle, coupled with a surfeit of gatherings, escalates the risk of tactless remarks and words let slip that cause offence and provoke feuds among those primed already for combustion.

It doesn’t help that some people seem unable to understand just how much the choice of a single word or the phrasing of a sentence can give away about their true feelings or opinions, even if they are trying to keep these concealed.

And so it was with Kurt Sansone in The Times, who described the custom of the President exchanging New Year greetings with dignitaries at his palace as a “chore”.

Worse still, he put this word in a former president’s mouth, even though I am quite sure that Ugo Mifsud Bonnici would never have called the exchange of greetings by that name – a duty at most, a chore never. “Shaking Dr Abela’s hand at the traditional New Year’s greetings at the palace in Valletta yesterday,” Sansone wrote, “President Emeritus Ugo Mifsud Bonnici started the discussion, recalling how he had gone through the chores of the New Year’s greetings every year since 1966.”

Washing the floor is a chore. Doing the laundry is another. Going to The Palace for a glass of champagne and a few civil words is not in the same category as doing the dishes. A former president would have to be boorish indeed to describe it as such, and any reporter who does so lacks manners, a dictionary or both.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com