The latest attack on what we had come to see as our normal happened in midweek when the popular beer festival was twice interrupted by a power cut.
Many took to social media to vent their anger until someone pointed out that the organisers should have had a Plan B standing by, a generator.
It's not as if this was a family enjoying a barbeque by the sea. A stand-by generator is today a standard in places where the security of the provision of electricity is unsure, usually third world countries with rudimentary infrastructure.
If we thought we were any different, now was the time to get real. This is what we are now – a third world country that believes it is world class.
Over the past century and a half we are have always been taught we were exceptional – Malta is ‘fior del mondo’, the Nationalists argued in the years before World War II. And in Helsinki in the 1970s Dom Mintoff tried to stop the world. There was always the same mantra – Malta was indeed small but it could compete with the big boys.
When 60 years ago Malta became independent the myth of the small David fighting with the giants was further hard-wired in the national psyche.
Then the only way to persuade the Maltese to accept to join the European Union was to promise them huge amounts of funds. Which came and were mostly spent on contractors creating mostly useless new roads in the North of Malta.
Talk of contractors taking over public policy. This is not something post-2013 and fourth floor. It had been there many years before.
Then, when Joseph Muscat was elected in 2013 with no serious economic plan in place except growth and more growth, he had no other alternative except to get more and more Third Country Nationals at starvation wages to get more growth. This was music to the contractors’ ears who then bankrolled Labour in the 2017 election.
Which brings us to today. The TCN wave has now become a tsunami. This tsunami has mostly created a sub-proletariat which helped erect high structures like in Dubai without the Dubai economic growth.
The infrastructure has not matched the expanding total population – neither in hospitals and healthcare, nor in roads nor in other equally impossible areas.
The tsunami/flood is now irreversible – think of any areas where TCNs now proliferate and ask yourself whether the Maltese can come back and dominate as they used to do in the past – can they run hospitals, collect rubbish, serve in restaurants as they used to do?
And this holds also in an opposite dimension, the political one. The Maltese still believe they and only they should run their affairs and all the others living in this congested island and drinking their water and getting cured in their hospitals, etc do not have any say into what decisions are taken. They are not represented in Parliament, they are not wooed at election time.
Speaking a language which only they know, the Maltese live in a bubble, pampered with European funds, allowed to infringe European rules and kill as many birds as they like. They are even allowed to flout the Rule of Law and get away with it.
Until we come to the point when we cannot go any further. And we have now come to that point. Europe did not have to punish Malta for non-compliance.
The whole Vitals case, taking over three principal hospitals and doing nothing about them is a case in point. It is the whole point.
So too is the seeming inability of Robert Abela of finding people to take up European posts – a sure sign he is now isolated not just from the country as a whole but also from the party, from Cabinet too.
Like what seems to have happened with Anton Refalo and the marking stone – he is not even up to a Cabinet reshuffle or enforcing the law.
And so the whole country grinds to a halt. It’s not just a beer festival that’s gone wrong but an entire country.
Meanwhile the unelected Governor of the Central Bank refuses to take the logical and the political consequence of his court saga forcing the prime minister to take the ultimate decision or let Malta’s name suffer internationally.
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