Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando must be kicking himself about that four-year ‘cooling off period’ he put into the divorce bill
Paul Boffa’s grand-daughter
Joseph Orlando Smith’s (Guze Orlando’s) grandson
I walked into the garden centre a little way below my home early this afternoon and chanced upon the chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology buying compost and plant food all domestically with his personal assistant Lara Boffa. Then they left together in his car.
This August he will have been married to Carmen Ciantar for two years but it will be less than 10 months since she walked out on him for cheating, leaving him with another three years and two months before he can file for divorce.
And Lara Boffa, who is in her mid-30s, has no children and has never been married, would be nuts to clutch at this as her last chance because, as the vernacular has it, tispicca fil-frisk.
She can do a lot better than that. She’s a good-looking woman and not particularly bright, which is just how most men like it, so her chances are good even if they have failed her up until now.
I have a fair amount of insight into her beau’s mindset, and I can tell her that the main attraction is the fact that she is Paul Boffa’s grand-daughter, even though she never knew him. It’s not her looks or her brain – Carmen is beautiful and intelligent, after all (but then he can’t cope with the ‘intelligent’ bit).
Pullicino Orlando defines himself psychologically as Joseph Orlando Smith’s (Guze Orlando’s) grandson – even though, like his current girlfriend, he never knew his grandfather. That is why he tacks his mother’s surname Orlando to his father’s surname Pullicino, even though it is not his legal surname and his siblings are plain and simple Pullicino.
And that is why, too, he petitioned the Courts of Justice to have his legal surname Pullicino changed to Pullicino Orlando Smith (it appears he was not successful in this).
The way his mind works, Jeffrey Pullicino (Orlando Smith) will be looking at his relationship with Lara Boffa as a dynastic alliance between the grandchildren of two big names of the pre-WWII Labour Party: party leader Paul Boffa and party secretary-general Joseph Orlando Smith.
And while that sort of fellow-feeling would ordinarily make for a good starting-point for a relationship, it would not be enough to build anything even if Pullicino were a sound and stable sort of person.
Jeffrey Pullicino once tried to claim loyalty from me – when things were going badly belly up – on the basis that his grandfather and mine were friends in the 1930s and 1940s (mine was an active supporter of and campaigner for Lord Strickland’s party at the time).
However, unlike Jeffrey Pullicino and Lara Boffa, I did know my grandfather, who died not before I was born but when I was married with two children in 1988, and rather than being merely a well-known name or a photograph on a desk, he was my actual grandpa. Therefore I know exactly what he would have thought of Jeffrey Pullicino and his behaviour, and it would not have been much different from what I think. He would probably have been more severe, because he was far more civilised than I am, and would have been horrified and disbelieving whereas I am just disgusted and not disillusioned at all because I expect nothing better from somebody like that.
If the dynastic adulterous union of Joseph Orlando Smith’s grandson and Paul Boffa’s grand-daughter tells us anything at all, other than that the former has a misplaced sense of inherited greatness and that the latter is very foolish, it is that decency does not come through nature in the form of genes but through nurture by example.
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OUCH. That must have hurt.
“If the dynastic adulterous union of Joseph Orlando Smith’s grandson and Paul Boffa’s grand-daughter tells us anything at all, other than that the former has a misplaced sense of inherited greatness and that the latter is very foolish, it is that decency does not come through nature in the form of genes but through nurture by example.”
I think it is also symbolic of how Malta and politics in Malta has fallen from grace. This is what the efforts and reputations of great people have come to: cards for their grandchildren to play to get away with bad behaviour.
In a country that encourages ignorance, this is an obvious result. Pullicino would not do this if he knew people would see right through it (because they are educated) and disapprove.
He does it precisely because he knows people are ignorant and would go along with it. How depressing.
Incidentally, I believe Cyrus Engerer is also guilty of this, going on about his grandfather being part of the efforts to get Malta’s independence. Riding the coat tails of family members may be fine in some way, but ruining their good reputation by not honouring them just shows that they are immature attention-seeking social climbers.
Anyone who comes from a prominent family, and who is not an ignorant sap, would feel their family’s reputation to be added moral parameters in which they would have to live because they would feel that when they do something bad it is automatically worse.
Cyrus has no respect for his family or his family’s role in Malta’s history.
When Malcolm Macdonald, the Secretary of State for the Colonies visited Malta officially in 1938, he interviewed both Paul Boffa and Joseph Orlando Smith.
Governor Bonham-Carter in his memoirs records how unimpressed Macdonald was with both. He described Boffa as “lightweight but courageous”, while he dismissed Orlando Smith as merely “very lightweight”.
Though Orlando Smith officially militated in the Labour Party,
for Bonham-Carter, Orlando Smith was simply Strickland’s stooge. He says so in as many words.
“Lightweight” genes on both sides of the equation.
But Pawlu Boffa never resembled Anthony Quinn?
[Daphne – Lara Boffa looks like her mother. The Anthony Quinn effect is incidental.]
Ah, so her mother looked like Anthony Quinn.
It makes perfect sense now.
Was Judas short?
He must have been. Carob trees don’t grow to any great height, and yet he was short enough to hang himself from one. Dan Brown missed this bit.
That one was on a rocky outcrop.
On the left, one cross each.
I voted for him twice – shame on me.
Or shame on him for betraying us who trusted him all the way even when he had the Mistra debacle.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140517/local/european-elections-bishops-list-principles-including-the-natural-family-which-voters-should-heed.519345
The moment the Church speaks, its ideas result uncalled for interference in society. Veteran elves prompt in shutting it up ‘as it should have done in the sixties’.
Blackmail or what. Reconciliation fails when everyone else has to renegotiate what they stand for. Delegitimisation of anything outside Labour remains true to their founding fathers’ cardinal principle.
Because that is what these gut reactions mean; the implicit idea to latch onto where they had left up to those golden years.
If Labour was out in the wild for ‘twenty five years’, it’s because of what they did, and how this destroyed anything they supposedly represented.
When they’ll condemn and preempt others and what these stand for, I’m afraid nothing changed.
Haven’t been to Maltatoday, but one can guess which strain of ‘humanistic’ denigration will be registered as comments on that one.
I take it all the secular crusaders are comfortable with the opposite of respect for the environment, the right to work and decent pay, humane treatment of immigrants and solidarity and subsidiarity in society.
The utter hypocrisy is expecting a religious institution, this one being the Catholic church to boot, to refrain from its natural propensity to a social model. Why this place has to be infested with this nauseating spite may have to be understood if we have to move forward.
Unless Cyrus Engerer’s boyfriend again wants to invite all three bishops to see for themselves how the natural family exists today.
In other words, why is it that when I write the above, I’m a hatemonger, but when they say it it’s a legitimate, anzi essential social thesis?
The Curia missed one essential principle in that list, spiritual aversion to vulgarity. No need to speculate whether Mr.Bawzer Hara’s will be the sickest vomit.
Perhaps the birdwatchers sitting on the fence don’t mind aligning themselves to that. Not that they can do otherwise, when the mission is to eradicate thought or remove the challenge, Dawkins style, the parallel little garden path beckons.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10778564/Our-Christian-beliefs-are-under-attack-from-influential-and-militant-atheists.html
We instead, have Muscat’s Labour.
Shouldn’t the Catholic Church be warning us against doing business with dictatorships or have they fallen prey to the trade equals freedom lie?
They’re busy with condoms and civil unions.
Can a journalist worth his salt ask JPO if he is giving No.1 to Alfred Sant next Saturday. Than the journalist should go to Alfred Sant and ask him if he has any regrets calling JPO corrupt in 2008.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-05-17/news/ep-elections-message-bishops-say-fundamental-principles-should-be-safeguarded-5040701440/
The Bishops reiteration of fundamental principles prior to European Parliament elections is welcome but do not go far enough.
They should have reiterated values which are essential for any society namely respect for the rule of law, respect for the truth and the ability to choose right from wrong.
With Joseph Muscat as PM, these values are notable for their absence in some government decisions and statements.
I would say the same.
Stronger please. More forthright.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140518/local/government-pl-still-using-illegal-boards.519536
Another example of government’s disregard of the law. Mintoff once said “nigi nitnejjek mil-kostituzzjoni.” Some time soon Joseph Muscat will be saying “nigi nitnejjek mill-ligi”.
He has not said it in words yet but he certainly has said it by his actions.
http://maltarightnow.com/news/2014/05/17/titkecca-aec-tal-pl-wara-li-tqassmu-fuljetti-ta-charlon-gouder-waqt-il-votazzjoni-fid-dar-tal-anzjani-tal-mellieha/
‘Why do you call JPO(S)’s 4-year wait as a ‘cooling-off’ period? To me – and so many others, I’m sure – the time since Carmen Ciantar dropped him looks more like a ‘warming-up’ one.
He definitely appears to enjoy it – in preparation for his next tryst when his present admirer too decides she has had far more than enough of him.
Sir Paul Boffa would never have accepted someone who was condemned by a court to be treated as a hero by the party he was leader of.
He lost a vote in Parliament by refusing to approve that someone who did not deserve a job in Gozo be given the job.
His sense of justice, fairness and integrity put to shame his successors Mintoff and Muscat.
He must have green fingers.
Women who desperately need a man, strike me as weak, insecure and without character.
Women who’d desperately do anything to get a man, even if he has a lot of baggage and comes from a shady past, strike me as hopeless.