They didn’t go all the way

The Sunday Times has had a dramatic revamp in terms of design and lay-out (and so has The Times), to keep in step with contemporary attitudes and expectations.

It needed it. The newspaper had become an extremely irritating hotch-potch jigsaw puzzle of pointless items pressed in among the adverts. Young people never picked it up and older people found it exhausting. The new look is much more pick-me-up-and-read-me attractive, but the all-important front page still needs more work if The Sunday Times is to become the newspaper we pick up first, rather than the one we pick up last, where those who buy all three English-language Sundays are concerned.

It’s a pity that The Sunday Times revamp didn’t involve dumping that relic of a bygone age, Roamer and his column. Even my parents – though admittedly they are younger than he is – dismiss him as a relic from the 1960s, with stuffy views expressed in archaic language in a style that he tries to model on that of The Spectator, while failing miserably. At two generations younger than he is, I can’t even begin to relate to that way of thinking and have never been able to. And because I actually read The Spectator, I find his laboured language extremely tedious. To my sons, three generations younger but who belong to the all-important new generation of newspaper readers, he might as well have landed from a planet of aliens.

The days of anonymous newspaper columnists are long gone, in any case. The London broadsheets, which began – centuries ago – the tradition of a newspaper column that used the same pseudonym as a by-line while the writers who wrote it changed from time to time, now spell out the writer’s name clearly beneath the column-pseudonym. So, for example, beneath the name of a traditional column called, say, Witch Hunter or Beachcomber or House Snoop, you’ll see the writer’s name, John Whitehouse or Mary Jones or Tom Rawlins.

Knowing the identity of a column-writer is important because the medium is the message, or at least part of it. The days when it was considered all right for writers to shout things out minn wara l-persjani are over. When exactly the same thing is said by a man and a woman, on gender issues for example, the implications are obviously different. When Marlene Pullicino pronounces herself against divorce on the grounds that she is a Catholic, even though she is married to one man but living with another one, her statement has to be considered in the context of her actions. Isn’t that obvious? Apparently not, because not even the person who interviewed her and elicited that answer saw fit to challenge her pronouncement.

And so it is with Roamer. For years we have been treated to his Sunday sermons on God, religion, Catholicism, abortion, children, gay rights, the family, the sanctity and desirability of marriage, the horror of divorce, and the stupidity of Daphne’s arguments – except that, as when speaking of the devil, he never mentions me by name lest he invokes me accidentally. Well, he’s invoked me now because I have had more than enough of him.

I have often felt like writing John Micallef a personal note (because I know exactly who he is), advising him of the wisdom of staying out of subjects about which he knows absolutely nothing, particularly when his pronouncements have this great air of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy about them. They simply don’t chime with what are called, nowadays, his lifestyle choices.

When John ‘Roamer’ Micallef pronounces himself on marriage, children and the family, he should make it clear to his readers that he has reached the age of nearly 80 while carefully avoiding marriage and fatherhood yet maintaining an (albeit decorous) relationship with the same widowed woman for almost half his time on earth. That’s his prerogative, of course, but it does raise plenty of questions about the dichotomy between his Sunday sermons on marriage and religion and his own personal choices.

And while he’s about it, this-Sunday-I’m-going-to-preach-against-divorce-again Roamer might wish to inform the remnants of his readership that some of his best friends are divorced (elsewhere, because they were able to) and even remarried, and that to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t tell them across the bridge-table that their choices are wrong and evil and that they run contrary to the will of the Mother Church. There is no hell-fire for John Micallef and his divorced-and-remarried friends, only for Roamer’s readers.

Enough of this ridiculous ‘hear what I say, don’t see what I do’ hypocrisy. At this rate, Malta will have become the new Sodom and Gomorrah and still we will be talking about the evils of divorce and how Catholic we are, while doing something else entirely.