More than €13,000 were collected by the Xaghra feast committee before it was announced that the money wasn’t necessarily going to the families of those who died, but was open to claims for compensation from anyone who had suffered material damages – fireworks delivery vans and lorries which were blown up, for instance.

I’ll bet the people who gave that money were pretty teed off at the thought that they might be paying for somebody’s van. But they shouldn’t have given any money in the first place. Those weren’t Pakistani flood victims made homeless by a natural disaster. They were people who blew themselves up – not deliberately, it’s true, but they knew the risks and they played along. You’ve got to have a death wish to be in that line of business in Malta, where people seem to be so very cavalier about life and death.

The collection of money in the immediate aftermath of the explosion reminded me of a passage in Jay McInerney’s novel, Brightness Falls. There’s a party at some rich man’s house in The Hamptons. Suddenly, there’s a commotion. A whale has beached itself and lies dying. Nobody knows what to do about the whale. There’s a flurry and a panic. A man picks up a champagne bucket, chucks out the ice, and begins hustling his fellow guests for donations “for the whale”. Yes, but what are you actually going to do with the money, a woman asks. The whale will be dead soon, she says. The man is nonplussed. He hadn’t thought about that.

Our do-something reaction in times of crisis is to start a collection. But it’s not much use, is it? And in this case, it is certainly not deserved. I’m astonished that the Bishop and the parish priest have gone along with it instead of giving all involved the stiffest talking-to of their lives. We get lectures about the value of life and then when we blow ourselves up and leave widows and orphans and human wreckage, we get treated like heroes. It’s not right.

It’s not only those who make fireworks who need that kind of hectoring. It’s also many of the staff in the newsrooms of English-language newspapers. I don’t think it’s my imagination when I notice that there is more and more literal translation from Maltese to English – and when the Maltese is utterly hopeless to start with, that just makes things worse. Take this sentence from The Times’ report on the Xaghra feast fund, for instance: “ ‘The fund will be used to cover the victims’ families and other objects,’ Xagħra archpriest Fr Carmel Refalo kept saying, refusing to elaborate what else the money would go for.”

Families and other objects? Surely they meant objectives, but even then it’s wrong because a family is not an objective either, no more than it is an object. Kept saying? I imagine they meant ‘repeated’ or ‘insisted’. Refusing to elaborate what else the money would go for? I will exhaust myself, and you, explaining just how much there is wrong with that, so I won’t.

I’m beginning to find reading the newspapers really painful, and the frightening thing is that they are just about the only English most Maltese people read, so this way of speaking and writing becomes the ‘correct’ form when it so plainly is not.

Blow up the heir and leave two spare

Maybe it’s because I don’t come from a family where people routinely had 20 children on the understanding that some of them would die so they would have plenty left over, but I was taken aback at the words of fireworks chemical importer Charles Briffa (a rival to the Muscat family business) to Malta Today.

He had warned Nenu Farrugia, he said, not to employ his entire family in his fireworks workshop – you know, just in case it blew up and he lost the lot of them. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and don’t put all your children in your fireworks workshop. What is the thinking here – employ just one son so that if he’s blown up you’ll still have a couple left over to change your nappies when you succumb to dementia?

And how do you choose the one to put at risk, anyway – eenie meenie miney mo, or do you just pick the one you like least and shove him in there among the explosives? “Oh bother, Johnny’s dead.” “Never mind, we’ve still got Tony and Salvu. They’ll do.” Primitive Maltese pragmatism: it’s so brutal that you just can’t beat it.

Then Briffa moved from the utilitarian view of life and parenthood to sheer inanity. “Airplanes fall all the time around the world” – another literal translation from Maltese, heaven help us – “but in Malta, instead of airplane accidents, we have fireworks accidents and it looks a lot worse than it should because we are a small country. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing that people die from the blasts” – yet another piece of Maltese idiom which just doesn’t translate into English without making the person quoted sound like a total nut-job – “but it’s part of the danger of working in this area.”

Oh, really? Then why bother trying to get our ‘accidental explosion’ rate down to what it is where fireworks are made in a civilised way? We’re not talking about accidental explosions here. We’re talking about unexplained explosions, which are completely different. And I hate to be the one to break it to Charles Briffa, because after all he’s making pots of money from selling the stuff and is understandably concerned about any future direction that legislative change may take (not that there will be any, what with all the vested interests) – but it doesn’t merely look bad because Malta is a small country. It is bad.

So many explosions in such a small place with such a small population and over such a short period – it can only be because, to crib the L’Oreal strap-line, we’re not worth it. If one of our leading fireworks chemicals importers thinks he is wise and sensible to advise his clients to risk blowing up only one son rather than three, and boasts in the newspapers about his sagacity, that just about sums up the way we look at life. Majtezwel put a rocket under the lot of them. It seems to be what they want.

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