It is a time-honoured Maltese practice to use the cliffs to get rid of an inconvenience
Erin Tanti with the drama coaching group Masquerade: Lisa Zahra’s contemporaries say that he met her there when she was much younger and ‘followed’ her to St Michael’s School.
From my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday today:
It occurred to me suddenly as I was writing this, and reviewing what was said in court over the last few days, that we have an exact parallel for what Erin Tanti did or hoped to do to Miss Zahra in a more mundane aspect of life in Malta. When people here got sick and tired of their dogs (they loved them but then they couldn’t cope etc…), they routinely chucked them off the cliffs.
It probably still happens rather a lot. It’s just that you’d never find a dog thrown off Dingli Cliffs in the way you would find one shot in Wied il-Ghasel and left behind, or half-buried while still alive. Using the cliffs to get rid of an inconvenience is a time-honoured Maltese practice: stolen cars, unwanted pets, even a wife or two have been thrown off cliffs.
Erin Tanti desperately wanted to be seen as a cut above the rest. In the end, he proved himself no better than the sort of lowbrow individual who ties his dog up in a sack and flings it off Dingli Cliffs, and because his victim (whether he pushed her or she jumped, he still took her there to do it) was a girl, it makes him so very much worse.
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http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-04-13/opinions/love-what-we-are-seeing-here-is-contempt-4610588672/
Jeez, he really is a dwarf.
Dear Harry Purdie, you must be over 6 feet tall I believe. Anyway, let me give you one advice. Do not judge a person by looking at him from the outside. It is what lies in the inside that counts. A book is not to be judged by its cover but by its contents.
Problem is there’s nothing on the inside, that’s why the outside’s crap.
A book is judged by its blurb. On the cover.
Reading your commentary about this case makes me sick. It’s not because you are being ‘ħadra’ as your detractors say; it’s because you are spot on.
My daughter is 12, and I am shocked by the number of boys of 16 and some even older who pester her online for dates.
And no, she doesn’t post pics of herself in scanty clothes or pouting poses and she does not look older than her age.
I know for sure because I have access to her accounts and passwords to her mobile and computer.
She’s sensible enough to ward them off and warn her friends about them, but it’s still worrying especially when she starts wanting to go out.
What’s even more shocking is that when I express my worries, people tell to stop being so tight about it or ‘are you living on another planet? Dik ir-realta ta.’
On another note, has anybody else noticed that really short men stand with their legs wide part?
[Daphne – It was always like that. It was like that when I was 12 and 13 and 14 too, and that was in the late 1970s. Except back then, they would follow you in the street, and pester you while out, because there was no internet. It was so ‘normal’ that we took it for granted – we were going to be groped, lunged at, followed, looked up and down openly and salaciously, have to contend with cat calls of ‘hawn gisem’ and ‘hawn saks’ and worse, and so on. Women and girls were treated like objects in those days.
The solution is for the girls to learn how to deal with it, and not for their parents to shelter them from any situation where it might occur. Back in the late 1970s, our parents didn’t stop us going out on our own or with friends during the day or on weekends just because there were lots of oddballs about – and I think I can safely say that there were a lot more oddballs about then and it was certainly more dangerous because society was more primitive, there was more repression and consequently more and not fewer perverts and weirdos.
Yes, really short men do stand with their feet planted far apart. This is a subconscious way of maximising the space they take up.]
Teach your daughter the difference between right and wrong and above all of else to respect herself as a woman and let her be. Honestly rebellious teenagers and young adults always have smothering parents and not vice versa as is commonly thought.
What story did Times of Malta try to feed us with its first pictures of ‘young’ Erin Tanti?
Did the news editor think that a story of two young lovers is more sensational than the fact of a teacher running off with his pupil?
The newspaper is not a novel but it’s for hard facts, and daily updates, otherwise it has no purpose.
Everything is becoming distorted here.
That photo is a publicity shot of the cast of Festen, the Masquerade play Tanti was appearing in at the time Lisa Maria Zahra died.
Who is the woman next to him?
I too grew up in the 70s, lived in Rabat and socialised in Sliema.
When I was as young as 12 and 13 walking to and from school, I was permanently pestered by grown up men in cars, speaking obscene language and some of them even had the gall to expose their genitals.
Walking the dog or cycling was another nightmare with some jerk following in a car permanently harassing.
I don’t see it anymore, not with me of course, because I’m not so young now, but that incessant pestering on the streets has somehow diminished due to the internet.