May the PN ever more grow in strength and grandeur in the forlorn hope that one day it will match in dimension Manuel Delia’s ego.

In the meantime, with one eye trained on that printed interview, primarily the pictorial area, and the other gracing a wall-to-wall ceiling mirror, as the man himself waxes in self-admiration, no doubt what follows will amount to nothing less than a futile attempt to pin-prick an inflated ego.

In the months and weeks leading up to the introduction of Arriva, the man was hogging the air waves to saturation point, at times (it seemed) in different places simultaneously, hurling brick-bats at an intelligence that seemed to him to be found only in a low-life form, exhibited by the listeners with the temerity to phone-in and voice their concerns about the scale of the problems the new transport system he had ham-handedly crafted would be throwing up for, and at, them.

What still resounds in the inner ear of many are his famous last words, until that interview that paper granted him two Sundays ago, uttered on Radio 101 during a live link while on one of the buses a couple of hours into the new service on that fateful  morning of July last year:

“All is ship-shape and plain sailing here, but for one snag: the A/C. A handful of passengers on this summer morning are complaining that the temperature’s too low.”

As the enormity of the debacle he sired began to emerge in the days and months that followed, the man took a powder, took a dive and took to the hills. So ensconced was he in the inner sanctum of the Ministry, that tracking him down was like trying to find a needle with (sic) a haystack.

He shunned the media like the plague, and a plague it is that he has brought to visit on so many of us for so long.

What had happened to his appetite for hogging the air waves? His hogging the air waves that turned out to be a self-serving exercise in his quest to pull off a PR coup for next year’s general elections.

The unmitigated disaster that the new system became had him going underground. Listeners to phone-in radio programmes, those listeners he had regarded with ill-disguised disdain, were now clamouring for him to step up to the mike or step down from his post.

The man had turned himself into became Public (Transport ) Enemy Number One.

So calamitous was his gaffe, that the system underwent nothing fewer than half-a-dozen major structural changes in less than a year of operation. On a network of routes barely the size of a large London borough.

In a sense his luck held out in that his boss, Augustine, will not be running for Parliament next year. Had he intended to, then no doubt, as a damage-limiting exercise, he would have consigned his cloned side-kick to a spell of community work for his consummate skill in wreaking such havoc on such a scale on the average citizen’s daily routine.

His community work would have consisted in a round-the-clock tour-of -duty giving, at overcrowded bus stops, piggy-back rides.

And now this man with the barrelling bazooka of an ego has resurfaced to stand his ground, fend off the jibes and trample on festering wounds.

Haven’t we been there before?

The self-professed political animal that he is, he will no doubt, eh well, hog the air waves again as he goes on the stump for a Parliamentary seat.

Never mind that public transport has gone the whole hog to the hogs, eh, dogs.

Having translated this interview, and run off several hundred copies at 2c, I am now left with a conundrum: Whom should I offer the copies to?

To the Labour candidates contesting the next elections in his district for them to pass out on their home visits?  The same district which turned out to be the worst hit region by these changes. Now doesn’t that take a monster ego, on the scale of Orwell’s Napoleon, to find the gall to invite oneself to the constituents’ “kitchen table”?

But on second thoughts, were I to make the offer to his fellow PN candidates on his district, would I find them even more receptive?

All the foregoing will merely glance off the man’s towering ,armour-plated, ego, leaving neither dent nor scratch.

Unfazed in his steely resolve, at times rooting out a feeble excuse, in the main he will press on heedless to the general distress he is so answerable for.

Unfazed in his steely resolve, in his big-headedness and in his hog- , eh, pig-headedness….

Joseph Genovese

Birkirkara