During the dark hours of the night it's as if the sea outside the Grand Harbour is a rather wide river and those lights across the water are not what we know as the Hurd's Bank and the ships at anchor there, outside Malta's jurisdiction, but just the other side of the river.
Then it gets light and what I've been calling the other side of the river simply fades away. That's how this motley collection of ships appears to us.
It's not a case of out of sight out of mind, however, as we saw over the past days. The multitude of small craft continually crossing at all hours of the day and of the night speak to us of mysterious activities going on about which we do not know anything.
But if we are in total ignorance of what's going on right on our doorstep someone else knows.
One moment we are at peace in our ignorance and the next moment we find ourselves plunged (well, that may be exaggerating) at the centre of a world war.
It shows, if anything, how we don't know what's happening under own feet.
The thing is: how do others know what we don't know about ourselves?
We realise how much we have let information about ourselves get to others while we forgot all about it.
Knowledge is power and by dispersing knowledge about ourselves we have willingly forsaken what little power we had.
This is not the first time this happened. When a man was killed in front of a Sliema hotel we did not know who he was and that he was the head of the forerunner of Hamas, but the organisation which sent the gunman here and which spirited the killer away, knew.
Earlier today (Thursday) I watched as dawn broke and a ship ablaze with lights came slowly in. (The best views of dawn are these over the breakwater).
I had long gazed at this scene and asked myself would the world and its troubles catch up with us at some point?
There had been some trouble in connection with Russia and ships allegedly breaking the sanctions. Now the other world war, the Middle East one, seems to have caught up with us.
The futility of our position is only now catching up with many of us. What's the point of being neutral and non-aligned when other nations involve us in their wars whether we like it or not?
The prime minister has met his opposite number. Whatever they said to each other will not replace what they will not have said - their joint apology for having left Malta and its people so defenceless, that it wouldn't know if it got hit.
From the President of the European Council, Antonio Costa in an interview with La Repubblica today: "Peace without defence is an illusion".
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