UPDATED WITH VIDEO/The usual lousy manners and lack of grace towards women in general

I hadn’t watched this on television, because rest assured that the failure of those typical Maltese H.A.M.A.L.L.I. United boors to take the cloth and remove the weight of those books from a woman’s hands – the fact that she is a head of state is incidental here, but only serves to make it worse – would have struck me immediately, and I would have rushed to this website to give them hell about it.

You just have to wonder how they grew up – in an environment where women are workhorses treated like dirt, perhaps? In homes where women took the heavy loads off men, rather than the other way round, as in civilised societies?

The manners of Maltese men towards women are in general completely ghastly, and this spans the social spectrum. But the further down you go, the worse they are, and you end up with a situation where a nonagenarian is standing around obviously look for somebody to take a cloth from her, and then a heavy stack of books, and it occurs to NOT ONE MAN THERE to do so. No, it doesn’t even come naturally to them. That’s how bad it is. We’re not even talking social graces here. We’re talking second-nature observation of, and appropriate reaction to, another person’s discomfort.