Monday at 5.30pm: tea at Magistrate Herrera and Robert Musumeci for 40 members of the Evil Click and their camp-followers

At lunchtime today, Magistrate Consuelo Herrera was sitting at Charles Grech with Marisa Schembri, who sells advertising for The Sunday Circle magazine. Without bothering to look around them to see who might be within earshot, they ploughed right in to discussing me.

I got the conversation in real time, as it was happening, but I was working on a photo-shoot and couldn’t upload it immediately.

“Does she still write about you?” Marisa Schembri asked.

“No,” Magistrate Herrera replied (ahem), “but about an hour ago she wrote this really horrible thing about Silvio Debono and how he got to know Joseph Muscat and (interruption here) through me and my brother.”

More interruption and then Marisa Schembri says to Magistrate Herrera: “I call her L-Indjana ghax qisa Indjana.” This may or may not have been a reference to me; I do look Indian or Iranian.

Then they launched into tearing a supposed friend (very tall, very thin, very effervescent) to shreds. “She’s SO superficial,” Magistrate Herrera said. “She’s always going on about how much she travels and all these authors she meets.”

“Maaaaa, I know,” Marisa Schembri says. “Do you know what she did to me? I was invited to Peter Dacoutros and I took Helena with me, and she came up to me and said that if I want to invite people to parties I should have my own and not take them to other people’s because it’s rude to do that. Who does she think she is.”

I’ll blank the rest of the envious sniping; it’s too much to think that this is a magistrate.

So they got onto the subject of parties and Magistrate Herrera said that she and Robert (Musumeci) are having a tea party for 40 people at their house on Monday at 5.30pm “for St Paul’s feast”.

Tea for 40, half an hour away from the cocktail hour. It takes all sorts, I suppose. And that just about describes the people going. “So who’s coming?” Marisa Schembri asks Magistrate Herrera. Blankety-blankety-blank, I’m afraid, but some of the names are of the people in that photograph with my earlier Silvio Debono post.

They paid and left, and five minutes later Robert Musumeci came in with another man, looking around.

The sort of ‘interestingly connected’ people who turn up to tea at the home of a magistrate and a government-appointed planning authority adviser constitute a legitimate news story. If I ran a newspaper I would have a camera in the street outside. People will soon discover who the real Evil Click are.