Legends are possibly historic fake news. Nero fiddled while Rome burnt then blamed the Christians for setting fire to the Eternal City. Who knows what is true and what is a quibble? But do we really care?

The world, including Malta and Gozo, is in a terrible state. People are sadly dying and a huge number of businesses folding.

In the midst of all this horror and nightmare, you would have thought attitudes would change.

Pandemics are so horrid, so singularly dystopian, that you would think we would transform ourselves into better, more rational and caring beings. That we would appreciate the world around us and what harm we are inflicting on it.

Fear of an unknown, a miniscule virus which is causing countries, organisations, and commercial behemoths to face extinction, should make us rethink reality and embrace a less material view of life.

Nero played the fiddle. All the big guys who decide what happens in Malta have decided to fiddle us out of our well-being.

While all the world is in full, or partial, lockdown, and while everyone is totally rivetted to news about the Coronavirus, Malta goes on building and dishing out building permits as if there is no tomorrow.

If we go on in this vein, what Covid-19 won’t have destroyed our building mania will. You’d think that we’d have questioned our old way of life, our old way of doing things, our formerly vibrant economic model and how we had achieved it.

I imagined the new prime minister would go on all TV stations to declare a moratorium on all things built, being built and being planned.

My dream was that he would have called his planners – are there any on this over-developed land? - and told them to dramatically change course. He would have announced that now, unlike any other time in recent history, we need to take stock, re-evaluate, re-think and re-assess all our previous pathways.

To also look into why cars and tarmac were, together with unsightly cranes, taking over our landscape.

I imagined the new premier would question the rape, of this country, seek ways to stop the maddening congestion and air-pollution we had before the Covid-19 hit us.

Instead we have more shocks to the system. Applications, and new development sprees, are being bandied about like our lifeblood depends on them. Even permits for towers have been issued.

The Malta Developers’ Association, that puppet-master of politicians, runs to a most attentive Prime Minister and asks for handouts to save their industry. Leading the MDA is a former PN spokesperson for the environment.

If that isn’t absurd enough there is more. While the world faces problems of biblical magnitude, the environment minister has decreed that, owing to a lack of dumping sites for construction waste, dumping such waste at sea was one of the options on the table.

When asked if this is legal, he said that the PN government did the same thing and that it was legal.  

I thought the horrendous PN had been dumped into the rubbish heap of history so that a new, Labour-led government would cleanse all their wrongdoings, whether it was according to the law or not.

Instead of going to the minister responsible for roads, tarmac, flyovers, tree chopping, arable-land-spoliation, he accommodates his request to dump waste on the seabed. Because it’s been done by villains before, so what’s to stop the environmental saviours from doing it?

While all this absurdity was being set in motion, we had the same environment minister saying:

“The silver lining of COVID-19 has been a 40 per cent drop in nitrogen oxide levels registered across the six air monitoring stations of the Maltese islands as a result of the decline in car usage in the last month. My wish is that we do not revert to the pre-COVID practices. We will roll out incentives for people to keep working from home to keep pollution levels down.”

During this pandemic I had a dream.

Actually, I thought it was a pan-national dream, not so far-fetched. It just meant a few people, especially those in power and leaders in top organisations, realised that our life was teetering on the edge of the precipice and that the virus was a wake-up call to rethink and change route.

Then I was woken up to the sound of a jigger turning our country, even now in this time of Covid-19, into a living nightmare. My brain, my whole body, was shaken to the core.

I realised that we have learnt nothing. Understood zilch and bloody nada.

And we are now back to what we love doing, destroying all we have or could have and we carry on turning what could have been a gem into a dump. The nightmare of the virus will hopefully end, only to find us back to the normal nightmare we all seem to love.