A friend who like me also carries the load of many years on his back said: I don't understand why they make all the fuss that has become so widespread, about how hot the weather has become. I always remember the Maltese summer like this. When I was a kid and we had to take the bus to Valletta, we'd arive there dripping sweat and the same when going back home. You learned not to walk in the sunlight unless there was no alternative. During all of July and August, whenever you touched something that was out in the open, you'd find it was baking hot. This claim that the climate is getting too hot is just a fairy story.

Another friend whose teenage years have long gone by, expressed a different view: The hot weather that's become so frequent these days is just too devastating. When we were young, it wasn't like so, yes, summers were hot, but you could endure them even when you felt like butter with the sweat and the lethargy. Not today. The heat just kills you. Those who are warning us that we need do something radical to contain climate warming are right. Otherwise, we'll all end up dying in a frier.

In the words of a Maltese proverb, For every one hundred persons, there'll be one hundred opinions. Or perhaps better let's say, one hundred memories...

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PASSPORTS

Although I was never in favour of the scheme by which Maltese citizenship would be given to whoever brought sizable funds into the country, neither did I like how the scheme had to be revoked. The Court of Justice of the European Union applied a substantial dose of political double think in the judgement it issued about whether the Maltese citizenship scheme was compatible with EU law, apart from the fact that in this case, it simply ignored sovereignty issues.

In the whole process, one could recognize a typical European hypocritical mindset. What gets deployed in a critical assessment of one country, is ignored when other countries are being examined. For instance, regarding abuses in the granting of passports by other EU member states. Spain has a citizenship programme by which individuals who can prove descent from Jewish families banished from Spain in the early Renaissance period, are accorded Spanish nationality. In Israel, a small industry of professionals exists who for a good fee, know how to show that you are descended from a family that hundreds of years ago was exiled from Spain.

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CAPITAL MARKETS

It's not the first time I referred to it in this blog. The project for a European capital markets union (capital markets being the centres where shares in European and other companies are issued and traded) has continued to stall. It was going to be a crucial element in the implementation of a European system where investment and savings funds could be held more flexibily continent-wide to enable their deployment in the trading of productive investments via easy and effective channels.

Delays and postponements have continued to plague the project. Always the real reason for this was that member states, from the largest to the smallest, did not want to give up the legacy procedures by which on a national basis, they ran their national markets. When they came close to even the smallest serious step towards the implementation of a capital markets union, member states just kept hesitating. Two years ago, the then European Commissioner responsible for the sector told me: For the necessary decisions to be taken, another crisis like the euro crisis of the years 2008-2012 needs to erupt. She was spot on.