Anyone would think the heat and the summer holidays have swept our minds clean from any serious thinking and anything but shade, a cool drink and some entertainment come the evening is far from our collective minds.

But you would be very wrong to think that. Behind the stillness of the afternoon, broken only by the chirping of crickets, in a searing heat that numbs thinking, the war is still going on – not just between Labour and PN but now also between the factions inside the split PN.

Of course, you would not find any mention of this on television news reports, and only sporadically on the news websites, but latch on the one or two political stories on them and then read them though including the comments. Hatred oozes out from most of the comments. You have to ask yourself what is preferable – to shut down all comments and become illiberal or to grin and bear it.

Writing an opinion on the media exposes one to attacks of any sort and this is healthy of course, unless one aims to become infallible. And moderating comments becomes a dreary exercise because one either bins most comments or else, in the name of freedom of speech, allows through all sorts of inanities or worse.

Just focus, if you are in the mood, to dip your toe in the black murky waters of Maltese hatred, on just two items in the news of the past two days. Nickie Vella de Fremaux, wife of PN leader Adrian Delia on the pain her young son, and by extension the whole family, suffered when he found himself excluded from his best friend’s party for no reason he could understand; and Gozo minister Justyne Caruana replying to Kristina Chetcuti, the partner of former PN Leader Simon Busuttil who wrote about the complaint aired by Michelle Muscat, wife of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, on how her children were treated since the Egrant claim was made public.

One would have a lot to say about these two articles or items. But for the real stomach-churning stuff, turn to the comments reacting to the news items. Hatred oozes from most of them. This country, so apparently peaceful, floats on top of a black lake of hatred and bile.

Those who know their Maltese history know this has been a constant through the years – Strickland, Nerik Mizzi, Terinu, Mintoff, Karen Grech, Raymond Caruana, Tal-Barrani, Daphne Caruana Galizia, Egrant, and so on and so forth.

Delia’s children and Muscat’s children are the latest pawns in this war of hatred that has been going on for decades. I don’t know about Michelle Muscat but when Nickie was a girl there were children some two years above or below her who suffered because of the political choices of their parents – Nickie had no share in this, for this I can vouch – I was there.

We call this politics but there is nothing political in it. As the two mothers have said, this exclusion and the pain it causes impinge on the small brains of the children. Later on, with careful nurturing, the pain may ease and the children may learn to take it in their stride, as Kristina and Justyne maybe were trying to say.

Meanwhile, out there, the people are still engaged in a war of hatred, remembering past hurts and maybe believing the worst of the other side. This war has been going for so long that we have got used to it and we don’t think it’s strange to live like this.

Deep down, I still believe, there is a yearning for peace, the real peace, but then all of us, we the media first of all, as I am incessantly reminded, must play our part.

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