I have been waiting for more than a year to get permission to make minor amendments to a room in Valletta. The application is still pending.

Half the people that I spoke to (friends and family, not contacts!) invariably tell me ‘you should have used Musumeci as your architect’ or ‘you should have never applied and just made the changes’.

I disagreed and wanted to do things the right way. The result is I have been proven wrong and still cannot move into my house!

In other words, through experience, I think that speaking to MEPA in car parks might be a solution to a problem which is MEPA and it’s inaccessibility.

In my application for instance, I am open to suggestions and prepared to amend my plans to address MEPAs concerns. For this to happen, some form of discussion would need to take place. If this is permitted as part of the process it would speed up resolution of applications (and we would be able to do away with the car park). If I am not mistaken, you only get the chance to speak in the reconsideration phase and getting to that point in my case took over a year.

It’s Silvio Meli
http://www2.justice.gov.mt/kawzi/ccm_case.asp?FrmCM=234012&lng=ENG

Perfectly fair comment if you ask me.

Daphne in that case it would be ‘martu’ not ‘zewgu’. Martu and zewgha. Then there’s zewgt (not to be confused with zewg) which means ‘two’, ex. zewgt itfal.

[Daphne – Martu is from mara, so same difference. What I’m pointing out here is that in Arabic spouse is ‘zewg’ just as it is supposed to be in Maltese (hence ‘zwieg’ and ‘zewgi’). But somewhere along the line, probably as a result of there being more unions that were not marriages than unions which were – among ordinary people at least – ‘my woman’ and ‘my man’ became synonyms for ‘my husband’ and ‘my wife’, when clearly they were not because they described different realities. ‘My woman’ is what a man would have used for a woman who was NOT his wife.]

David, I quite like the name “The Old Boiler”. So I will rephrase your questions. And who is presiding the case? Would it be The Old Boiler by any chance?

Perits? Bil-munqar? Hi x’inhi l-gazzetti t-tnejn juzawhom ghall-istess raguni.

Yes, I know. Looks like it is a case of 2 Perits and 1 parrot.

[Daphne – ‘Perits’. I groan inwardly.]

Il-kelma “mara” mhix preciza hawn. Le le, miniex nghid xarabank minn wara. Imma mara tfisser dik li hu mizzewweg lilha.

Dan hu kaz differenti.

Il-kelma tibda bil-“p”.

[Daphne – Ghandek zball. Colloquial Maltese uses the words ‘mara’ and ‘ragel’ – literally woman and man – to signify spouse but the real word is ‘zewg’, as it is in Arabic. The fact that ‘my man’ and ‘my woman’ passed into the official language as a substitute for spouse indicates that marriage wasn’t really as widespread as we like to think it was. Magistrate Herrera is actually il-mara ta’ Musumeci, but she’s not zewgu.]

Silvio Meli
http://www2.justice.gov.mt/kawzi/ccm_case.asp?FrmCM=234012&lng=ENG