It really comes as quite a shock to watch a relatively young and prominent politician speaking an ideological language that belongs to fast-fading decades ago. It’s as if he’s been held captive or lost somewhere in a jumanji jungle where he’s only just been found and released to a world he has not known for so long.

It is this knee-jerk reaction one gets from reading or listening to what Simon Busuttil, so far a pretty hapless Opposition leader, has been saying all along since the ground-breaking energy deal reached between Malta and China. For who, in this day and age of globalisation, would voluntarily – if clumsily – come up with such comments as “having a Chinese finger on our energy switch” and then ask: “What would the Maltese Labour government’s position be in the event of a Europe-China showdown?”

While Busuttil persists in his quixotic attitude to the whole issue, the rest of Europe’s nations – EU members in particular – continue to seek to win, some even with their tongues sticking out Mick Jagger-style, whatever number of truckloads they can secure of Chinese investment as a way of injecting new life into their weak economies. Recent positive signs in the Greek economy, for example, have been attributed to increased Chinese investment. While they play Russian roulette with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italians have been sending one Marco Polo after another in search of a Chinese commitment to their no less ailing economy. Chinese billionaires are buying British football clubs by the dozen, let alone the factories and sundry industries. Even the incredibly curious American government shutdown has been described as a global threat, since it could hit massive Chinese financial interests there.

But, yeah, what happens if Europe and China fall foul of each other, asks the bewildered jungleman straight out of the rain forests of Borneo. If that was meant to stun Prime Minister Joseph Muscat into some form of hesitation, it worked as effectively as when Busuttil assured his party printing employees of his trust and commitment to them before he had many of them bundled out into oblivion and unemployment.

If such a scenario ever occurs, things come to a head and the world inexplicably switches back to the Cold War tactics and rhetoric of the 1950s and 60s, Joseph Muscat can be safely interpreted as having replied that the Maltese government would take a markedly resolute stand in the interests of – you’ve guessed it – Malta! Very much the same national-interest-first thinking, after all, that he encounters when meeting and mixing with other European leaders in the corridors of Brussels and elsewhere within and outside the EU.

You begin to wonder who is feeding Busuttil this mothballed reds-under-the-bed mentality and for what precise purpose. He is being shown as isolated – not only within the restricted confines of the Maltese Islands but also all over Europe. At a time of economic crisis anywhere, the last thing one expects to hear is the spent language of conservative negativity and harsh austerity. Cash-strapped Europe badly needs foreign investment from wherever and whoever it can get it, as the only alternative for the achievement of real growth and more jobs.

***

The demise of the camper van

The news that the Volkswagen camper van, which carried hippies through the 1960s, hauled surfers in search of waves and still served as a workhorse across the developing world will, at the end of the year, no longer be produced by the one Brazilian company that has persisted in producing it, must have provoked a pang or two of sadness among even the local baby-boomer generation.

So many of us, either as groupies or players, were driven on it to beat group concerts in places like the old Polytechnic, the Phoenicia and Regina hotels, the Hollywood theatre in Hamrun and the Palace in Paola. The VW camper van was also often used to take us to football games, literary evenings and political meetings. One particular model I remember from my Kalkara days changed its psychedelic colours so often that we had to check each time if we knew the driver before boarding. Truth be told, spilled beer and some other slippery things inside did not make for a comfortable ride, but it always got us there in time and in one piece.

So it felt quite ironic to learn that VW had decided it could not change production to meet new Brazilian laws being imposed which meant that all new vehicles must, as from 2014, have air bags and anti-lock braking systems!

***

Florida doesn’t like Gores

Only a couple of weeks back, 49-year-old Marshall Gore was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison where he had spent an incredible 23 years on death row. A former escort service owner, he was convicted of killing two women in the 1980s and, as if life and death were a mere game of Snakes & Ladders, his execution had been scheduled to take place on three previous occasions.

Like some other US states, Florida sadly still persists in dishing out capital punishment sentences regardless of the fact the murder rate there has never shown a distinct sign of some decline.

But it seems that Florida doesn’t like Gores. In 2000, it had ordered and carried out the political execution of Al Gore who had garnered more votes than George W. Bush in that year’s presidential election...

***

Some papers are like some people

The callous way in which the UK Daily Mail has tried to score political points against Labour leader Ed Miliband by intruding into family funerals and deplorably smearing the memory of his father shows that some papers, like some people, never change. They thrive in the gutter.

Unfortunately it is a trait we are not too unfamiliar with here, and by “here” I do not mean this newspaper even if, like the rest of us, it too has had its ugly past.

***

All colours, really

This year’s so-called Notte Bianca in Valletta was a huge success, but it was anything but white. You had all the colours and all the sounds and noises that people enjoy on a warm autumn evening in a capital city still trying to come to terms with the monstrous development at its entrance.

What a misnomer of a title for a national and cultural event.