This is a resignation letter. It should read like one. The quality of the language is secondary.

First he asks after the president’s health and that of her family (not done), then he says he leaving because he had a good time overseas but isn’t having such a good time in Malta.

And you dissect his syntax.

Forsi kien xurban. Ma kienx ikun l-ewwel darba.

Ma naqbilx. L-artikli hziena kompletament.

What then sometimes happens is that people like Peralta, when obliged to communicate in the national language with people like Coleiro Preca, try to use that so-called “Malti tal-massa”, it doesn’t work and it comes out stilted and artificial.

Or they do something worse, which is to communicate niceties in Maltese that simply don’t exist in the language – like ‘I hope that you and yours are well’, which has no place in a resignation or retirement letter in the first place.

Michael Falzon from BoV springs to mind. Although a different case entirely, MF ‘retired early’ but is able to return to the bank without having to pay back his golden handshake — so, in fact, he has not retired at all.