McDonalds!

Why wouldn’t I know it? It’s not as if I have never travelled, my love. I’ll have you know that I’ve just come back from a very long round trip. I saw this phenomenon in two places, one in Germany and one in France, at two privately run sperm banks which are part of two very exclusive private clinics.

Needless to say, I wasn’t asked to be part of the programme, being as far from Adolf’s ideal Aryan as fish and chips is removed from a nice Fiorentina. I will say that my kids are good looking kids, who have a handsome, and as your (expert in eugenics) sister would say, good gene-pool mother.

“And healthy but otherwise poor Adonises have become a regular feature at sperm banks.”

And how would YOU know that?!

My god Daphne … how did you not get that the “he” meant Dr. Gonzi. My least favourite person in the world. Anyways …

[Daphne – It’s because you wrote ‘the government’ and not ‘the prime minister’.]

Yes, interventions from the government came at a huge cost to the taxpayer but banks were saved, jobs were saved and productivity. I also would like to add that unemployed people still come at a cost to the taxpayer in job-seekers’ allowances and such benefits.

[Daphne – Just like in Malta, where – though you may not have heard – the Labour Party and its supporters are hauling the government over the coals because of the burgeoning deficit. At least you know that job-saving measures come at a cost to the taxpayer – immediately or eventually.]

With regards to your saying that we never had it so good and the euphoria of 1987 … at the time I couldn’t care less, Daphne, I was 3.

[Daphne – Yes, I had worked out that you are the same age as my children because your perspective on events is truncated. The difference is that they don’t think the world began when they were born, and that what happened before they came into the world has no bearing on the present. Nor would they describe anyone as ‘my least favourite person in the world’. But anyway, each to his own.]

But I remember 1994-1999 which actually spanned across two governments and life was brilliant. We used to live on one wage at home.

[Daphne – Herbs, there are so many holes in that statement that I don’t know where to begin. 1. If life was so brilliant in 1994 to 1996, why did your people (I assume you are under their influence) vote out the government? 2. If life was so brilliant in 1996 to 1998, why did electors charge out in force to vote out the government after just 22 months, with a majority of around 9,000? 3. Wages are paid by the week. Anyone who is paid by the week does not earn very much. So I assume you lived off one salary and not one wage. How much was it, how many of you were there in the household, did you go to fee-paying schools, how many mobile phones and cars did you run, how many holidays did you take, how big was your wardrobe and how many times did you go to restaurants, bars, cinemas and so on, what sort of food did you eat, when you wanted a book were you bought it – so many questions? 4. If you were three in 1987, then you were 12 to 15 in 1996 to 1999, and I would strongly suspect that this, and not the government or life off one wage, is why life was brilliant. I too thought life was brilliant when I was 12 – but it was 1977 and commonsense tells me it wasn’t.]

Then 1999/2000 life started getting a bit more difficult. Everyone had to work … and that’s when things started going wrong.

[Daphne – You mean you came of age, childhood was over, and you had to leave the Garden of Eden and face reality in the world of work. Tough. What can I say? It happens to all of us, even to women like Marisa Micallef, who grew up in families with no money or business but who were raised with the expectation that they would marry money and so they “never expected to have to support myself financially”, as she put it in an interview. Fortunately, I wasn’t raised with any such similarly silly notions about the myriad joys of living off others, despite having been born in a family with money and businesses, and it has served me in immeasurably good stead. It is character-forming, for one thing.]

Your argument about post-war baby boom, moods and such is a bit thin and runny.

[Daphne – Actually, it’s factual. I’m talking about my own age cohort, remember. These are people I know and speak to, whose mentality and psychology I am all too familiar with.]

The real issue was the fact that cost of living went through the roof and now everyone has to work … oh oh, what are we going to do? What will be our one and only salvation?

[Daphne – You cannot be serious. You live in a country where even members of the royal family are expected to work, even if it is not for a salary, and you have expectations of living off somebody else – that somebody should fund your existence while you run around and play? What are you – a perennial girl who was schooled at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, St Julian’s, Malta in the 1950s? Be real. The amazing irony in your statement of regret that ‘now everyone has to work!’ is that it expresses the archaic sentiment of the one-time Tory-voting landed gentry forced into a real world of making ends meet and proving themselves useful. It’s not a progressive, left-wing or Labour view at all, I’m afraid.]

EFA had come up with the solution way before the GET OUT OF JAIL card was needed … he’s the cleverest person I’ve seen in my life … the EU.

[Daphne – If you like him, don’t call him EFA. That’s what the nasty people do.]

And nowadays I look at my family and I struggle to remember the last time I have seen us having dinner together at the table. Everyone works, everyone has a part-time job and I had to leave so as not to be left looking for scraps under the table. I wonder what goes through the minds of adults my age that had it so good in the 1990s and now struggle to cope with everyday life cause their minimum wage is not enough.

[Daphne – I must remember to email my sons and ask them whether they feel about my working throughout their lives in the same way that you do about your mother. If everyone works in your household, then it’s because you’re old enough to do so. If you’re old enough to work, then your mother clearly has nothing to do all day except the odd bit of tidying up. Let’s say this mysterious household which you call ‘all of us’ is made up of your parents, yourself (aged around 25) and your two siblings who are also in their 20s. Do you honestly mean to say that you expect four able-bodied adults of sound mind to fool around while dispatching the fifth adult to bring in the money to support all five of you? Where was it written that men got married to become work-horses for others? I assume that with a name like Herbs you are a man. How would you feel if you got married to somebody who refuses to contribute to the family income, whips you to bring in money so that she doesn’t have to, while your lazy 20-something offspring refused to look for a job because the government should make it possible for five adults to live off one salary? Also, the expenses of a household with three small children are not the same as those of a household with three ‘children’ in their 20s – so obviously, those in their 20s have to work if they are not in full-time education, not just to buy their own stuff and help out a little in the shared home, but – and here’s the clincher – because it’s good for their moral fibre and their psychological development. Work is not a punishment. It gives us purpose and direction in life.]

That’s why people want change. Cause the first 10 years of this play that started in 1987 were all about happiness and enjoyment, but now that the plot changed to one of misery and hard work no one likes it anymore.

[Daphne – I get it. Vote Joseph Muscat so that you can sit around and live off….what, or who, exactly?]

But now it’s too late. Now we blame Mintoff for the burden of social services, blame Sant for not letting us become a member of the EU beforehand and blame the economic meltdown but never the government’s policies. He [Daphne – There you go again: ‘he’.] promised us that the sacrifice was about to end but the deficit went up. [Daphne – Refer to the beginning of your comment, and my point about the deficit.] He promised us that the finanzi were fis-sod. He promised us a lot but he never delivered any of them. He just chose to point fingers like a five-year-old does when asked to tell who broke the vase.

Could pose a challenge to turnout that.

Non-lawyers! In Malta! Ha!

Ah, now we are complaining that at Mater Dei Hospital you have to pay for your private entertainment. And this when it is being provided by a private company which won the tender, helping alleviate the high cost of running a public hospital. You are free not to use the service – after all, you can still receive calls without paying.

And after watching today’s news – 800 new trading licences for this year, same number as for last year – it does not seem that people are afraid to invest. On the contrary, they are being innovative and creative in finding new trading opportunities.

This is exactly like the provebial dog with the bone in his mouth, who looks inside a well and goes for the seemingly bigger bone in the other dog’s mouth, losing everything.

The economy here is a mess. But it doesn’t matter really – the fact is that since the recession started the government has helped us by reducing VAT, interest rates went down (how come in Malta banks decided not to follow the ECB cuts?), house prices went down drastically (houses in my area went down 50-60k in a year, I was one who reaped the benefits of this ).

[Daphne – My goodness, Herbs, you really have to get on top of things here. Falling house prices are not a good thing, but a terrible one. It is not just a consequence of people losing their jobs en masse and being unable to repay their mortgages (the fall in prices is caused by too much repossessed property coming onto the market at once, coupled with very poor demand that is the result of people having no income) but also a further cause of the crisis. As property prices plummet, people who are paying mortgages on houses bought at boom-level prices find that are left with negativity equity: paying, with interest, for a capital asset that is worth much less than when they took out the mortgage. I never cease to be astonished when I hear people clamour for a fall in property prices, as it demonstrates their ignorance of how falling property prices are quite unlike falling prices of coats, shoes and cars in terms of the economic causes and consequences.]

An example of how good the government here has supported the public and the industry is the cash in your car and get a new one for £2000 less. Gas prices went down, petrol prices went down and here they are not even regulated by the government. The fact is that Malta’s situation is different because the government has done nothing to help. First he said that the economy in Malta wasn’t going to be effected then when it started to bite he blamed everything on the economic meltdown.

[Daphne – Governments are not ‘he’. They are ‘it’. Or at least ‘they’. The prime minister is ‘he’, but the prime minister is not the government. I have always been curious about the way Maltese people call the government ‘he’, in both English and Maltese. Is it the lingering effect of centuries of ‘is-sultan’ – from overlord to grandmaster to governor? As for the rest of your paragraph, I hope you understand that those measures come with a huge cost. If you read the London broadsheets regularly, you would know that that they were preceded with a huge debate about the cost to the taxpayer, which will run into billions with payment deferred until the crisis is over. In other words, the savings you are making now will be paid for in higher taxes in a few years’ time. Again, it is very Maltese to think that governments have secret goldmines or money-trees, and that the money comes like magic. I see you have exported this idea with you.]

In Malta everything gets taxed for some reason or another. Portugal is cheaper, Spain is cheaper, Greece is cheaper … our main competitors in the tourism sector.

If the PL gets into government nothing much is going to change but leaving power in the hands of the PN is even worse, in my opinion. I think we’re back to the 1960s. A lot of youngsters are trying their luck somewhere else just because there’s not enough going on in Malta at present.

[Daphne – They’re going away because they can, Herbs, and not because they have to. They’re going away to explore, to see how far they can grow, and to work and socialise in a wider, more interesting environment. In the 1960s, people – usually men – emigrated with 10 shillings in their pocket and nothing else, no job to go to, and walked the streets of Portsmouth, London, Sydney and Detroit looking for manual work – not much different from the African immigrants we see around us today, except that they did it legally. You certainly can’t compare the situations. In the 1960s people went to survive. Today, they go to grow. All talk of growth is a luxury that you can afford only when all your survival needs are taken care of. Another point you miss is that unlike their grandparents’ generation in the 1960s, they don’t have to emigrate, cutting their ties permanently with Malta. They pick up their EU passport and cross borders to live and work as they please, free to move back or elsewhere as and when they need to or want to, without any problems or any permanent decisions having to be made. Take Marisa Micallef, for example: yesterday London, today Naxxar – flight ta’ Air Malta imur fin-nofs, biss.]

Things don’t look good, Daphne, and you should be the first one to admit that we’ve seen much better times, independent of the global recession.

[Daphne – On the contrary, I happen to believe that we have never had it so good. I am the perfect person to ask, actually, because I track these things. People’s standard of living is now at its best ever, right across the board. There has also been a huge social shift, with the children of manual labourers rightly making the most of aspirational opportunities and living lives their parents and grandparents associated, only a generation ago, with ‘il-puliti’. I think you are confusing – and it happens to lots of people – the trappings of comfort and security with the general mood. I see that lots of people look back at the post-1987 years and think what good times they were, how much better than today (hence the 1992 election result) – but look at the hard facts. People earned much less then, the standard of living was low compared to today, many things we take for granted were unaffordable or exceptional luxuries. So what was different, and why is it our perception that things were better for us then than they are today? The short and simple, but correct, answer is: our mood. Post-1987, the country was in a state of euphoria and excitement – change, change, change, catching up, shaking off chains and shackles, everybody was caught up in it. Now, we’re bored, suffering from an existential crisis, and looking for trouble. To my mind, it is no coincidence that those who are mainly responsible for throwing a big wet blanket over the country right now are in the 40 to 60 age group. The social and political mood coincides with their personal mood – the grumpy questioning and ‘is this all there is to life?’ negativity that affects so many people in that age group. They are projecting their personal unhappiness onto the public sphere, and because there are so many of them (these are Malta’s baby-boom generation, when post war the birth rate shot up and infant mortality plummeted) – I should say us, but I don’t feel that way and am grateful for every blessing including life itself – theirs is the predominant sentiment. It is also the reason why so many marriages are cracking up in that age group. Everything is interlinked, make no mistake. I have noticed that when people in this age group grumble negatively non-stop about the government and the need for change, there is almost always something profoundly wrong in their home or business life. Unable to change those things, they project their misery and disillusionment – their wish for change in their personal or business life, in other words – onto something they think they can change with their vote. It gives them the feeling of some measure of control.]

I am much much older than Daphne, and I can assure you if they choose to accept the way of life we had their financial problems would disappear.