The only thing that bothers me is how most the Maltese, educated or not, view the medical profession. As for the rest, despite all its faults, I love Malta.

You claim to have fallen out of love with your homeland and yet you stalk it still.

Well, as long as you don’t drunk-dial it…

Absolutely, why shouldn’t I?

Malta remains my homeland and I’m interested in the local news +/- comments.

What’s the relevance of your statement to the topic discussed.

Those who are newly starting out, who will be the new professionals, who weren’t directly touched by Labour’s depravities last time round and who wouldn’t have any direct recollection or even interest in knowing about it.

The strategy is to mark out and support certain individuals amongst them who are already – wait for it – “allocated” across the several professional fields.

What I think is totally unfair, is for these students here to be feted and exploited, when the end flavour planned is actually quite different.

Again, it’s the same party trick as a one-night stand.

My goodness, your head is really stuck in the sand, isn’t it? You speak like a 20-something who thinks that he really knows it all. It’s embarrassing.

To use the prime minister’s favoured maxim, “wake up and smell the coffee”. You’re going to be shocked to an extreme when you leave the protected confines of the University of Malta for the world outside.

Queens, by the way, is an august institution in Hamrun, the owners of which consider me a brother (from another mother, of course).

I think even my brothers in Hamrun spell it with an apostrophe, though.

It’s got nothing to do with a colonial mindset. It can’t have, because I never lived in a colony.

It’s got to do with simple strategy: the ones who stand out for the right reasons are the ones who are remembered and the ones who get the jobs, and the grants, and the scholarships and much else more besides.

When you’re faced with a choice between a perfectly spoken person with graceful manners and an awkward person with limited vocabulary who finds it hard to communicate, both of whom have the exact same academic qualifications, you choose the first.

This is a fact of life.

The individual in question is more than capable of communicating effectively in conferences and publications and has done so successfully both locally and abroad.

Your colonial mentality is abundantly evident in your obsession with English, England and its institutions. Granted, adding an extra ‘s’ to the name of the 4th-highest ranking university in the UK for Medicine is an unfortunate mistake, but by no means is it fair to conclude that a student will have a “problem” (there are many kinds of problems in the world – were you implying that they will not make a good doctor?) just by doing so.

So again I ask: what form did the consultation take place? Did you present them with details of the project and ask them what they thought? How could you have done that if you did not have the details?

“The value of such an investment” – by value, do you mean amount of money or actual value in terms of benefit to students of the Malta Medical School, to Maltese patients and to doctors and nurses who work in the hospital?

If you mean value in terms of amount of money spent on the hospital, where did you get the figure, how much were you told would be spent, and did the government give you details of who would be spending the money?

I ask because there is a lot of conflicting information out there. Queen Mary University has told its students that it is the government of Malta which will be investing in facilities which they can use.

The government of Malta has told the press that it has 200 million euros of investment, but then said that it still has to issue a call for expressions of interest.

And I know for a fact that the government has already made arrangements for the Gozo hospital with a private investment firm in Singapore that has nothing to do with hospital management or medical care but will merely be putting in the money, which means it will want to recoup it.

Have you asked Chris Fearne how it will recoup the money? You need to know that, as does the Maltese taxpayer.

And a medical student who doesn’t know the name of one of London’s best universities has got a problem too.

This is not a criticism of ‘typos’. This is advice from somebody who has been in the world for roughly twice as long as you have and who can tell you for a fact that a doctor who can’t spell is going to have issues with credibility.

The four most formidable weapons in life are good looks, a good brain, good grammar and good manners. If you are born without the first and/or second,developing the third and fourth will put you at a massive advantage over those with only the first and/or second.

Good looks and a good brain are not within your control. Good grammar and good manners are.

If you plan on getting anywhere outside Malta, you will have to understand that. You will have to know how to address people properly, and how to write sophisticated sentences with no spelling mistakes.

If you don’t understand the importance of that, the minute you step outside Malta you will have it forcibly demonstrated to you.

Very few doctors actually save lives, so spare me the drama. Most doctors spend their entire lives tending to the influenza symptoms of children and old people, stitching up cuts and checking the symptoms of committed hypochondriacs and attention-seekers.

This is merely a statement of fact, and not a value judgement.