Saviour Balzan, never presume to know what goes on between people who don’t talk to you

I never bothered much with a very unattractive young man called Saviour Balzan, burning in the sun at Exiles in 1983 or thereabouts. Now, I must occasionally bother because of what he writes – which is why, I strongly suspect and so do several of our contemporaries, he does it in the first place.

But let’s leave that, shall we?

I don’t generally dignify his fact-twisting and his insults with a response, but when others are involved, I feel for their sake that I must. So here goes.

In his opinion piece in Malta Today yesterday, Saviour Balzan wrote:

Certainly they cannot forget what Cachia Caruana’s close friend and blogger had to say when Guido’s funeral was taking place.

He included this among various other untruths and insults in his discussion of the de Marco family’s reaction to Labour’s release of an illicitly recorded, years old and very private conversation, and its slanderous conclusions.

When Professor de Marco’s funeral was taking place, Saviour, I was on holiday with little or no access to the internet and received the news by telephone (from my mother, if you must know).

Even if I had access to the internet, I would have written nothing. Whatever is said and done in life has got to be forgotten with death.

My sole reaction was in thinking that when I returned home I would write to Mario de Marco, a friend from another era of my life and a contemporary of more than 30 years’ standing, express my condolences and regrets and ask him to please extend them to the rest of his family.

And that is exactly what I did.

Unfortunately for him, Balzan has surrounded himself with neurotically obsessive individuals who develop lifelong fixations on their grudges and the wrongs they believe have been done to them. He no longer knows what normal behaviour is.

It is, of course, absolutely none of Balzan’s business, but given that he has taken to discussing, in public, matters about which he knows nothing, drawing in third parties and seeking to paint a bad picture where none exists, I have to put the record straight on this one.