Anthony,

Please find something better to do with your life than to troll around on a blog. If I had to wager a guess as to who is deprived of something in this conversation, I’d hazard to say that it is you.

I can assure you that “black” people are more modest and polite. In Rome we are swamped with black people but nothing of the sort ever happens – more likely it does with “white” people who could learn a lot from the so-called blacks!

It’s been doing the rounds and probably all newspapers knew about it.

Daphne you said that you think that ‘south’ is another word for urban working class. Isn’t that tautological? Aren’t rural working class people called farmers/peasants and wouldn’t that make them an entirely different social group?

[Daphne – I used urban as distinct from village. There are working-class people in villages who are not peasants, because those villages have grown. The real urban working-class are those concentrated round the Grand Harbour area – the original ‘hamallli’, literally, in the original meaning of the word.]

The north/south classification is ridiculous on a pebble as minuscule as this country and it is quite true that the harbour conglomerate cannot be divided by the compass. But I find “tas-south” much less offensive than the now-forgotten “tan-naha l-ohra” which was current in Sliema up to some years ago.

I guess the “sceneggiata” could easily come from a Neapolitan play by Eduardo De Filippo. The husband seems to have learnt by bitter experience to remain impartial. Maybe he feared a Sicilian tragedy in the style of Verga ending with some fatal stabbing as in Cavalleria Rusticana: Hanno ammazzato compare Turiddu, end the opera… The driver takes it all in his stride too. Is this sort of thing at all fequent? I miss riding buses on which, in my youth, I’ve read some of the best modern classics of English and American literature: Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Faulkner, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye etc etc et

The Nordic couple sitting in front seem half amused. I guess they thought this is what passes for Latin or Mediterranean hot blood.

You mean yob model.

It is good, enlighting and entertaining to see how different people define the north and the south here. It is very much like the definition of “afternoon” and “evening”, I think.