H.A.M.A.L.L.I. United: watch Malta’s Number One fanfaron

Sandro Chetcuti, president of the Malta Developers Association, wrests the mike off that scrawny Super One Kalamita show-host in the horrid ‘jecket’ and proceeds to boast and jiffanfarunja alongside the increasingly inane and pointless Spouse of the President.

Then the inane and pointless Spouse of the President proves himself to be yet another ghastly hamallu with no sense of office or occasion – could it be otherwise, given who he married? – by wrapping his arms round the President of the Malta Developers Association and jumping up and down with him in celebration because that bunch of robber-barons and destroyers of the environment gave a little bit of their spare change to ‘cherity’.

Yet another bunch of ugly, uncouth and graceless hamalli tal-flus u l-poter shoving at each other in the limelight while throwing their weight around at the top of their ‘shout across the harbour’ voices: for how much longer can we stand it.

Hamalli, hamalli, hamalli – they are such, such hamalli. It’s unbearable.

And can they be more lousily dressed and shabby than they are? Mr Kalamita in his loud checks looks like he should be hosting a tacky burlesque at a British holiday camp in 1960. Mr Merileweez looks as though he’s popping out to pick up the groceries. And Sandro Chetcuti should be shot at dawn for wearing a dark suit with a black, glossy, button-down-collar open-necked shirt.

And they think nothing of behaving as though they’re jumping around the bar with their mates, a pint of beer in their hand, when their favourite team scores a goal.

Excuse me while I say it out loud: HAMALLI. QABDA HAMALLI.

Imma kemm tifilhu tkunu hamalli. How hard is it to learn? You don’t learn because you think you’re fine as you are, right? Well, if that’s the case, just dispense with the forks and knives and go back to putting your hands in your plate and wiping your nose on your sleeve.

When these people are leading by example, there is truly no hope for Maltese society.

Some lessons for secondary school teachers to take to class next week:

1. why appropriate clothes should be worn for all occasions;

2. why the man married to the head of state should not jump around while embracing the president of the Malta Developers Association;

3. why a charity run by the head of state should not accept donations from a real estate developers’ lobby pushing for more development in Outside Development Zones;

4. why with charitable donations, as with everything else in life, context is all and €103,000 donated by Malta’s most powerful and richest lobby group is not even remotely generous but rather extremely stingy (ref famous parable in the New Testament);

5. why boasting is considered to be completely beyond the pale and extremely vulgar, contemptible and offensive in all civilised cultures outside the United States of America;

6. why hamalli are not merely different but less socially evolved than those who are not hamalli, and why it is therefore important to know that money and power should be the means to self-improvement, without which there is no real success.