I had an interesting discussion with a friend who’s much younger than I am, though you can hardly call him a young man. He claims ideological belief is no longer important in politics.

Activists from the centre-right and from the centre-left give importance and priorities to the same issues. Mostly, their aim is to be the first to discover the technical solutions relevant to contemporary circumstances. To attain such an aim, they are quite prepared to accept the support of whoever can be of support, generally from among the most power social forces in the country.

“So is that why so manypeople are ending up voting populist?”

My intention was to rattle him with the question. He was unruffled. In his view, populists form part of the same pattern. They have concluded that in “technical” terms, to achieve power, they need to tap the support of those who have become the underdogs in today’s situation. In reality, we shall find – so he says – that when populists gain power, for a while on the surface, there’ll be some changes, but then everything will revert to the former status quo.

Have you forgotten Tsipras in Greece?  That’s how my friend signed off. 

***

Dimitri's

That Valletta is changing and for the better cannot be doubted. Still when I get to discuss this change, I feel a nostalgia for the past – especially regarding the popular hubbub that all cities develop in their main streets.

Valletta’s crowds as of now have become quite prosperous, well settled and busy, floating on the currents of visiting tourists.

The hubbub that I remember from days gone by was different, more noisy, less well fed. To shelter from it for a while, you would seek small coffee shops, like Dimitri’s in today’s Republic Street: they no longer exist. There, you could sip a thick coffee laced with milk, while sampling hot pastizzi, very small in size and fresh, like you do not find any more in today’s coffee shops.

Dimitri’s – resembling a narrow corridor — would have crammed around its tables people young and old, as they snacked hurriedly before going back to join the crowds that packed yesterday’s Kingsway.

***

Letter to Trump

Since Donald Trump won the American presidential election, I have been most impressed by an article in the Los Angeles Times. It featured an open letter to the President-elect written by a young woman of Mexican origin whose parents were irregular migrants to the US.

In it, she explains how she graduated at the same time as Trump’s daughter and from the same exclusive secondary school, on the basis of a scholarship she had been awarded. Thereafter, she completed her University studies, always on the back of scholarship awards.Although her parents did their best to provide her with the best opportunities in life, they were of modest means. However, they did all they could to back her educational prospects.

Now that she was close to the outcome that she and her parents had aimed for, here is Trump as President determined to follow a programme that would devalue all they had striven for. So, with no apologies to offer, she was promising him that she would use the skills and proficiencies that her education had provided her with, to combat the aim that he had set.