[Daphne – Oh God forbid we should still have to live like that.]

[Daphne – The real problem is that they never see the beam in their own eye.]

“She never showed me any love, she beat me and kicked me until I was on the floor and bleeding,” he said. “I felt so weak and humiliated. I never got a kiss from her or even a hug although I tried very hard to please her. The only thing she did with me was go to church.
guardian.co.uk

“She beat me and kicked me until I was lying on the floor bleeding. I had a horrible fear from her. She kept insulting me and told me I was a Satan, a criminal, a no-good.”

But you sure as hell are one dominating father. Poor kids!

Incidentalment, “Muad’dib” xi tfisser?

[Daphne – Errrrm, Grace? Whoever works and lets others do the housework? They’re working, remember. Now if you had said ‘whoever spends all day having coffee and visiting the hairdresser while others do the housework’, that would have made sense – and even so, I don’t believe anyone should do housework if they can pay others to do it. This was excellent advice given to me by two much older ladies, one who would now be in her 60s and another who would now be in her 80s: however little money you have, cut down on something and pay someone else to do the cleaning and ironing. Then you can concentrate on doing other more useful things, and even if you don’t do anything more useful than read a book, your family won’t come home to a fed-up and angry person who’s been having highly uninteresting close encounters with dusters and mops all day. Bloody good advice. I find it very strange that people like this woman we’re discussing place such a high premium on doing their own cleaning – the most unskilled job on the books. The window-cleaners sent round by the company I use are always teenage boys who left school with no qualifications, and household cleaners are invariably women with no other marketable skills or qualifications, and that just about says it all: it doesn’t take much to wash a floor.]

One of the children ended up with severe OCD ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive-compulsive_disorder ) when well into his adulthood. The other child ended up with severe psychological problems well into his adulthood too: abusing one girlfriend after another, trying to control them, being violent, threatening them; even attempting suicide a few times.

To the outside world, nothing was wrong with any of them; to those who knew them well, things were very different.

You may eventually realise the harm you’ve caused your children, Muad’dib, but by then it may be too late.

[Daphne – Il-Mexxej tal-Oppozizzjoni, ovvja.]

This weekend there was a knife fight and the PN media reported that one of the persons arrested was the son of the Cospicua mayor Joe Scerri.

The parliamentary secretary and the mayor are both public figures and the former is not responsible for the actions of his brothers. whilst the latter is not responsible for the actions of his son. Strangely enough it seems that the operators of the Labour media understand this whilst those of the PN media don’t.

[Daphne – Listen, buster – you stick to your field and don’t try to teach me about mine. Anything that’s worth reporting should be reported, unless the perpetrator is under 18. To fail to report that the men charged with gang-rape are the brothers of a parliamentary secretary is a serious dereliction of editorial duty – it is, in effect, hoodwinking or deceiving your readers: “I know, but I’m not going to tell you.”]