I’ll make no bones about it: I told you so

The practice of taking a book with you to read while waiting (or flying) is so alien to Maltese society that when corrupt accountant Joe Sammut walked into court carrying one, all the newspapers were agog about ‘the message in the title’.

It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that maybe his wife had just sent him a book along with the soap and clean underwear, to while away the time while he was held for questioning over a maximum 48-hour period. But that’s exactly what it looked like to me. And then when he was arraigned under arrest, he did the obvious thing and took the book with him.

As somebody who won’t go anywhere without a book when I know there are going to be ‘dead’ periods, it didn’t occur to me that Sammut’s book was anything other than the means of deflecting tedium. The man had a book with him because – and this is perhaps his sole redeeming feature – he can’t stand doing that Maltese thing of staring into space for hours on end and maybe, like me, wonders how on earth people can stand it.

Only unlike me, Joe Sammut doesn’t carry a handbag to put his books in.

Now look at this screen-shot from his daughter’s Facebook Timeline (which a reader kindly sent in), which shows her book-haul last month, and listen to me say, with just the slightest hint of smugness: I TOLD YOU SO.