1+1=3 without a condom.

At least I’m never libellous, Daphne. There are acquaintances and there are friends. Stop shooting from the hip.

[Daphne – I’m not either, Kevin. I have no doubt your wife isn’t into that kind of thing. She doesn’t strike me as the sort. As for some of the people she hangs around with and is photographed with, that’s another story entirely. None of us can be blamed for our friends’ (or acquaintances’) habits, but then again…]

There went Lynne Zahra’s stand against the tide of racism. Sounds like she was whopper-whipped to back down.

Well I’m glad someone agrees with me.

The problem with Maltese columnists is that they are uninteresting people leading uninteresting lives, who’ve lived and worked in malta all their lives. So they write about uninteresting things.

Columnists should give us new insight. The handful who do write about stuff outside Malta don’t quite cut it.

So you write that we “should do something about Syria”. Tell me what should be done, by whom, when, where. Tell me who’s fighting whom, give me the lie of the land. Run me through different scenarios. What if we de invade? What if we don’t. And that sort of thing.

Again, you write the EU should “something about the economic crisis”? What, exactly? How? What caused the crisis? What is the endgame?

It’s either that, or writing at the microcosm level, in an engaging way. Find some debauched chap who’s been around and give him a weekly column. But no Maltese paper will ever have its Sebastian Horsley.

We need one of two things: experts or interesting people, both writing in an engaging manner.

I remember when Matthew Muscat Inglott had a few pieces in The Times. He’d been through P Company before he went to 4 Para, and had written about it. Damned fine stuff. Interesting. New. First-person. Engaging and all that.

It’s wall to wall Malta. Maltese politics. Maltese society. Malta Malta Malta. Southern Italian morality and Catholic hand-wringing everywhere. “We should do something about Syria / the economy / handicapped people / birds / horses / children / battered women / our youth / the education system.” But it’s never something interesting, or out of the ordinary. Or radical. Something that makes interesting reading.

I’m actually surprised that any of Malta’s papers kept Daphne. Is there a niche market for her sort of writing? Or is there a wider market, whose existence the editors just won’t admit?

I have to disagree with Baxxter on ‘the bleeding obvious’ writers. We should all realise by now just how many people in Malta require the bleeding obvious to be spelt out for them.

[Daphne – You are confusing issues. Everybody is free to voice an opinion, but writing a newspaper column is a job. Therefore it has to be done professionally, viz. write well and engagingly, and know what you are talking about. Mr Zammit Tabona is not voicing his opinion around the dinner-table here.]

The legalisation of drugs is complex, and cannot be seen in a national context only. If one country legalise drugs, it may import other countries’ problems. If legalisation is to work (and I am not sure it would), there would have to be an international arrangement to do so in place.

From the comments under your article it seems that a lot of people would be happier if KZT stopped writing. I would suggest that they stop reading him instead if he annoys them so much.

[Daphne – Again, you confuse issues. It is not Kenneth Zammit Tabona’s politics which annoy readers so much as his amateur approach to writing that column. Much better is expected of a columnist for a national newspaper, who is paid for his services.]

Erm, in calculus 1+1 can be anything but 2.

Next week, Kenneth tries his hand at the constitution and proposes a transcript of the British one.

Thought I’d lost u for a moment Baxx. Agree with your reply ;-)

I had tried to, Daphne, remember? The above explains why I will not bother again.

You are doing a huge disservice to society as it is, don’t add to the misery caused by the ‘war on drugs’. Let Kenneth do his bit. After all, everyone knows you despise him and everyone knows WHY.

[Daphne – I don’t despise him at all. I would be the first to help him if he needed it. We go back a long way. You don’t know ‘everyone’ so you can’t possibly know what everyone knows.

‘You are doing a huge disservice to society’ – that was actually you and your wife Sharon, trying to deny us all an EU passport and EU membership, something that it is impossible to either forgive or forget, and you still persist in error. If you think heroin and cocaine are so great, why don’t you encourage your sons to take them? Or take them yourself? Your wife’s friends need no such encouragement for the latter.]