a) The Heading In… Taghna – PN’s newspaper could not use in-nazzjon taghna.

b) A student and Mintoff’s daughter speaking about a water bowser – someone young would say what are they on about but we remember that in the glorious days of Mintoffian economics and the days when the bright sparks ran our water and electricity production it was very normal to have no water for days on end (not a couple of hours) andso people had to queue up with buckets and bottles to get some water (third world country style)

c) Another person is pleading that he had been waiting for a telephone 4 years – yes 4 YEARS (not days or weeks) – if these were the glory days…

d) Yana Mintoff writes to tell off a nationalist who was grumbling. She says she is a true socialist who believes in rights not privileges. A true socialist would have been slamming the government for reducing the population to begging for water.

And yet so many are trying to re-write history. This is the real face of Mintoffianeconomics.

You should have said “dirty” or stinking past

It’s a shame you couldn’t get hold of Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, tablets and smart boards in the 80s. Tort tal-Lejber, mhux ghax kien ghadhom ma jezistux.

Days without flushing the toilet, washing with well water (for those who had the luxury), and long hours without electricity.

One Christmas Eve we had a power cut from 5pm till 10am the following day, and we had to throw everything we had in the fridge. One reason why we cannot forget that Christmas Day.

Golden days indeed.

Insejt il-fax machines. Biex ikollok wahda trid thallas Lm600 licenzja fis-sena.

In the 1960’s, under a Nationalist government, we did not even have water tanks on our roofs because we always had a supply of water in our taps so they were not needed.

When the Labour party was in government after 1971, water supply in our homes became more and more scarce.

Sometimes we did not have water in our taps for a whole 2 weeks. We used to leave a tap open at night with a bucket underneath with the hope that the few drops which come out would fill the bucket by morning. At this stage, everyone was placing water tanks on the roofs.

However, even when there was some water in the pipes, the pressure used to be so low that it failed to reach the roofs and fill the tanks. So water bowsers used to go round the houses to fill the tanks on the roofs.

When a PN government was elected in 1987, reverse osmosis plants were built and the water problem was gradually solved.