The lesser of two evils

I had a fairly long telephone conversation with an old friend last week. Let’s call him Mario – after all it is his name – and he asked me a very apposite question.

We spoke on the old fashioned type phone; I don’t do Skype or any of those other apps that show the participants on screen. Two reasons: one: Not even my mother, bless her, would call me telegenic and two: I really don’t have enough classic books – or even an outsize dildo – (as seen behind one UK female journalist during the first lockdown) – to display on the shelves behind me.

Anyway, back to the plot. Mario wanted to know: What, in my opinion, was doing the greater harm to our country, the Covid19 pandemic or the multifarious shenanigans of Keet and friends?

Now anyone, even vaguely acquainted with me, knows that I am to politics what Louis Hamilton is to a mobility scooter. I am the eternal optimist and floating voter. After the last election Mario (a committed PN voter) scolded me for “wasting my vote”. Yes, I voted Alternattiva. So I threw his question back at him, I knew he’d have an opinion… several – and I was fairly sure I knew what they would be.

He harrumphed down the phone line, then replied: “First off I’d build a brand new highsecurity cell block at Kordin, which… those bastards would be made to pay for, from all their ill-gotten gains. Then I’d bang the lot of them… “Keet”, Tonna, Hillman, Cini, old uncle Vince Buhagiar and all… up in it for the rest of their miserable lives.”

So no forgive and forget then Ma’. He really does have it in for the lot of them, with particularly special treatment reserved for Keet. He seemed surprised I’d even suggest forgiveness: “After what they’ve done? Not a chance. I’m afraid I prevaricated further. So you are not for the maxim; innocent until proven guilty? He continued: “Believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg and there will be plenty more joining them in Kordin, just you wait and see.

So you can take it that my old friend believes that, yes… Keet and Co have been far worse for our islands than the pandemic, without a shadow of a doubt.

I, like a good many other folk, am getting a little tired of all the prevarication and lies being spun around, what has obviously become a chronic shortage of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

I have long given up on hearing anything constructive or even anything at all from Charmaine. But I did have hope that maybe Dr Fearne would come clean; it seems I was wrong. It now appears that quite a large tranche of elderly people are missing out on getting vaccinated. We are told that there is a shortage of vaccine… having originally been assured that our “far-seeing” government guaranteed that “more than enough” vaccine had been obtained to immunise the entire population of the Maltese Islands.

One old guy of my acquaintance told me the other day: “If they really are withholding vaccines from our demographic in order to kill us off, the least they could do is come clean about it.” What, this lot come clean? Do me a favour.