I could hardly believe my ears. Speaking at some village club where bouncer-like officials make it easy for him to avoid having to give comments to persistent TV interviewers, the Prime Minister bombastically announced that one way you could see how much Malta has changed is by simply looking down from a descending aircraft.

From that high perspective, he told his mesmerised little audience of old codgers and party activists, you can see that even during the hot summer months Malta no longer looks like a piece of brown, parched desert.

I was intrigued, because the last time I flew over the islands in summertime, not too long ago really, I had seen that same yellow-brown terrain, not exactly ugly but obviously crying out for some benevolent rain, coming up at me and the other passengers.

But at a time when the Prime Minister wants to give the impression that we have somehow, possibly miraculously, “turned the corner” economically, financially and morally, he inexplicably veers to flowers to emphasise it. Saying it with flowers is, perhaps given the actual condition of the state of Denmark, a lot more convincing than a mere declaration captured in a slogan claiming that “we’re on track”.

Why? Because if you take into consideration the excessive

number of roundabouts we have – the number of them per square kilometre set against our territorial size – we probably have more such traffic-confounding little islands than anywhere else in Europe. Experts from overseas had once suggested the use of traffic lights to eliminate some or most of them; but while traffic lights have indeed sprouted up all over the place (they must be a good source of commission-making), roundabouts still continue to stand out as the boring common denominator in the Maltese road network.

Not so the reasoning with regard to the economy and people’s pockets. The old ploy of resorting to statistics for some temporary respite does not work anymore. And in the aftermath of the current Greek tragedy, even EU statistics have lost much of their credibility. Many are in fact still rightly incredulous as to how the EU experts and data-gatherers could, over a good number of years, have been hoodwinked so blatantly by the previous government of arch conservatives in Athens, who have since conveniently removed themselves from power. Let’s keep our fingers crossed the same story has not been allowed to happen in our case. Our economy is just too minuscule, too fragile, to withstand the impact of such an eventuality.

People will only believe you when a so-called recovery is translated into new benefits and a less heinous method of taxation, and in the case of our present incumbents such moves are only possible on the eve of elections. The queues of angry men and women who have lately been going to the utilities company offices to somehow agree on a time-table for payment of their water and electricity bills is confirmation enough that, sorry, flowers and flowery talk cannot do the trick.

It is said that when a man brings his wife flowers for no reason, he’d better have one. Is the “flowering roundabouts” tactic meant to follow this maxim? I mean what would one prefer, a desert island and fewer taxes, or the cute little flowerbeds at odd corners and bustling roundabouts while the present excessively high cost of living persists?

I dare insist that saying it with flowers is one way of admitting defeat. We are all for a blooming countryside, but we have just seen the very essence of our environmentalists loudly protesting in the rain-soaked streets of Valletta against the government’s intransigence and the accompanying joke that goes by the abbreviated name of Mepa.

We are also very fond of our urban environment, but one only has to take a walk in Sliema and other built-up places all over the island to witness the Bremen Bombing effect that is being caused by zealous developers with political friends in Castille and their cohorts monopolising so-called popular television programmes, who seem to be throwing concrete blocks from the air, certainly not flowers.

If not backed by a reasonable assurance of credibility, hastily-called press conferences to announce economic “breakthroughs” have the lasting energy of a bruised flower. No politician can expect his listeners to join in the celebration unless the claim is followed up by action to alleviate the pain of reality. And that reality is the fact that too many people are currently finding it absolutely impossible to cope with their ever-inflating bills.

Talking about flowers and aerial views at this time of family hardship and national discontent is an insult to the average citizen. As they grimly face their daily problems, the law-abiding men and women of this land could do with less arrogance and political buffoonery – the result, after all, of the incompetence, the effrontery and corruption of those who now want them to go round in circles to view those beautiful things on the ever-changing surfaces of Maltese roundabouts.

A single rose for the living is better than a costly wreath on the grave. That’s easy to understand. A true injection of confidence into people’s pockets would help a lot more than a thousand flowering roundabouts. That is even easier. But it has to come from an administration that has not dug itself into a deep quarry at the edge of which prowl the hungry wolves waiting for their share of what is left at its very bottom.

Ask the Greeks. Even better, ask the new Greek government as it gasps on bended knees.