11 Wishes

1. Exercise
   
2. Write
   
3. Insiders
   
4. Coach
   
5. Learn
   
6. Travel
   
7. Love
   
8. Heal
   
9. Connect
   
10. Strength
    
11. Go 
    

Christmas is for kids

We had a sleepover for Christmas. My 4 year-old niece, Scarlett, stayed over, so her parents could get find time this morning to clean up the house after the Christmas Eve party.

At 6.15, there was the first fragment of conversation from the kids' room. Santa had delivered, Jacob was tearing into the contents of the sack on his bed, and Scarlett was screeching at the Barbie and the pink fake make up kit. There's little you can do except surface from what's left of the alcohol stupour of the night before and mumble instructions about toilet doors, clothes, tripping over spiral stairways, breakfast soon on the way.

You grasp your first mug of hot coffee, look at the exhausted face of the mother of your child, and hope the caffeine will somehow carry you through the day.  

And the day swims by.  We get to my brother's in a heap for lunch, spend four hours eating too much turkey and Jamie Oliver stuff, watch an old Muppets Christmas Special, drowned in the sound of squabbling kids and adults sneaking the occasional slurred cat nap.  Two girls aged 4 and 5 gang up on my son aged 6 and scream they both want to marry him, and he doesn't know where to look.  The presents arrive late, my father is tired and has more wrinkles than last year and there are not enough bags around for the booty we have to carry back home.

And then I find out that Pinter has died.  

Christmas is about kids.  It's about waiting for the next present, the next kiss, the next distant relative to plant a smacker on your nose and ruffle your hair until you are well and truly exhausted and can finally crawl back to your bed and start counting the presents in your head.  

There is no other day in the calendar which makes me more aware of time slipping through my fingers and the resourceful networks of family than Christmas day.

The Whistler and the last tambourine man

Tommy Camilleri spent the first seven years of his working life opening blocked drains.  Then he got fed up inhaling fumes and he got a job as a road sweeper in Naxxar.    “It’s good work if you want to get to know everyone in Naxxar,” he shrugs. 

Tommy is the last tambourine player of Malta. The tanbur is the poor man’s tambourine:  the frame is made from beech wood and sheep skin, often with some decorative tberfil painting on the skin.  A wooden loop (cirku) slides over the frame like a belt clasping the skin.  The jingles (plattini) were traditionally made from the lids of food preservative cans.  

Tommy played with some of the finest folk musicians of his generation - Toni Cachia ‘Il-Ħammarun’, Ganni il-Ħawli.   They played in hotels for tourists, in Carnivals, during Christmas, at weddings and for anyone who would pay.  Like all tambourine men, Tommy was the front man for the band, with his own well-rehearsed act.  Then, in the second half of the last century, Maltese folk music went into terminal decline.   And now the people Tommy used to play with are all dead.

He turns up for our appointment on a Tuesday morning in his finery:  cap, black waistcoat, matching pin-striped trousers, white shirt, black sandals.  He refuses a glass of wine at the Mqabba Band Club because he says he is recovering from a heavy night.  Behind his thick glasses, I could make out watery eyes.  Tommy is 78 going on to 98.  He’s tiny and quiet and weaves his hands nervously on his lap. 

Just as the acrid black coffee kicks in, we are joined by a beaming Guzi Sciberras, also known as ‘Il-Mija’.   Il-Mija is 57, and clearly still relishing early retirement from the Dockyard, where he was a Charge Man.  He now makes the flejguta, the Maltese end-blown cane flute.  It’s his idea that we should talk in his field ‘next to the Torri Vincenti’.  “It’s where I find my space and peace and quiet.  I’ve been spending all my spare time there since 1967,” he says. 

The glue between the tambourine man and the flute maker is Ruben Zahra, the freelance composer who often uses folk material within his contemporary works.  Ruben is in a race to save traditional instruments from extinction.  “Together with Guzi Gatt, I’ve listened to hours of 1960s recordings of Maltese folk music.  All the core Maltese traditional instruments - the żaqq, the Maltese bagpipe, the tanbur, and the flejguta – have stopped being made, for more than a generation.  In the case of the flejguta, we could not even find one.   But we knew the sound it made.  We decided to try and make these instruments before we lose them forever.  Our research led us to the makers of traditional bird whistles.  Enter il-Mija.’ 

Il-Mija’s piece of solace is a tongue of soil and a stone hut right by the perimeter fence of the airport.   In the middle of the patch is a beehive with an open door.    I immediately think of bird traps and sense that this place was a killing  fields of sorts, at some stage. “We used to bait the guys from the RAF for some morsels, through the fence, when we were kids,” grins il-Mija.  “Don’t worry about the bees,” he adds, as one zooms past my left ear.

Il-Mija opens a box over-spilling with pluvieri, the Maltese bird whistles.  He’s like a kid with the cookie jar.  The names of birds roll off his tongue as he goes through a demonstration of the sound each whistle makes.  “This one is Il-birwina – listen carefully!  This is the tellerita.  This is the gurlin.”   It is difficult not to get intoxicated by the childish delight of a man who has spent 40 years making whistles.  And as for the sound – if you close your eyes, you could believe that you were in the midst of bird song that most people in Malta can only imagine.

Maltese traditional instruments were made from locally-sourced material:  ashwood, cane, string, animal skins and cow horns.  Il-Mija is both an artisan and a recycling man.  In the true spirit of the Maltese, nothing is wasted.  He showed us whistles made from the bone of a horse’s leg, a piece of walnut, and the tubing from an old car tyre.  “You cannot make one of these things unless you are a whistler yourself.  The cane needs to be firm, dry and straight – but most of all you need to understand tone.  If you are going to fake a bird into thinking another bird is calling, you have to master this with precision.  There is no margin for error.” 

We ask him about his tools.  He laughs and shows us another box:  a hand drill, a vice, a scalpel, a chisel. “I’m not interested in TV.   I have made 89 whistles till now.”  Making the flejguta is just another challenge.  The air is directed against the sharp edge of a hole cut in the cane just below the mouth piece.  Six finger holes along the length of the flute produce different tones and distinguish the flejguta from the simple whistle.

Ruben thinks it’s time to get to the music, unfurls the zaqq from his bag and coaxes Tommy into playing a tune, right there, against the wall.  Coming face to face with  Iz-zaqq is a bit of a shock – half goat, complete with tail, half whistle; the weirdest of instruments.    Its bag is made from goat skin, its chanter from two cane tubes and a horn that projects its drones. 

When Tommy plays, he is like one of those Wallis & Gromit  Plastecene men, moving in slow-motion.    The tambourine is in perpetual motion, and the man seems stuck to the tambourine.  One moment it’s under his leg, then against his knee, then it hits an elbow, then it’s under the crescent of his darting fingers.  And the music is familiar, Moorish, raw and sad rolled into one.  I am told later that Il-Hammarun played the same melody on the zaqq all his life.

When they finish, I don’t know whether to clap or just relish the moment.  Instead, Matthew’s camera moves and snaps the moment.  I ask Tommy what he thought of the new tambur Ruben is producing, as he cradles it on his lap.  “I like its voice,” he whispers.  “Remember that the first sounds that Christ heard were iz-zaqq and the tanbur.  These are instruments of the shepherd.”   He cocks his head like a thoughtful dog when il-Mija announces that we cannot leave before we share a drink with him.

I watch the jet planes take off and ask Tommy about playing abroad.  “I’ve never been on a plane,” he says.   “I’m scared of heights .  Even going up in a lift is not good for me. ”

The two men have different ideas about legacy.  Tommy has five children, il-Mija has two, none of them are musicians.  Tommy says one of his granddaughters has promise.  Il-Mija boasts:  ‘My craft will die with me.  Besides, if I teach someone, will they attribute credit where credit is due?’  He etches his ‘100’ mark on the back of all his whistles.  Somehow, there are different egos at play here. 

“Malta is the only European country which does not provide folk instruments as a cultural product on a retail basis,” says Ruben.  “We’re trying to do something about that, before we lose this cultural heritage for ever.”  With a mix of determination and entrepreneurship, the new Maltese tanbur is being made in Spain.  I guess you have to start from somewhere to reclaim your past.

On a humid morning in Mqabba, the bees buzzed, the jet engines screeched and the zaqq droned and flirted with the tambur.   And our heads were filled with folk music, Il-Mija’s excellent J&B and the indelible passage of time.

Change yourself

Obama managed to energise a nation and most of the western world into believing that change was possible, against a background of collapsing markets, war, strife, bigotry and overall disillusionment with the way the US came to be perceived after 8 years of George Bush.

Seth Godin is about to change the lives of some lucky people.  Very soon.  The details are here.  

Even just applying for this is enough of a paradigm shift, for most people.

January is round the corner.   New York City, for some people, is going to become the promised land.

New year and new directions beckon like no other year.

The tooth fairy

My son lost his first tooth this morning. I woke up to find him with his nose pressed against the mosquito net. In the half dark, I could just make out his open mouth.

"It just came off!" he sobbed, his hand cradling a tiny tooth.

I tried to comfort him as best as I could. I cracked jokes about pirates. I hugged him, and for a moment could remember all the teeth I had lost, before dentists could get their pointed instruments on their eventual replacements.

Then I remembered the tooth fairy.

We didn't get as far as a tooth under a pillow this evening. Instead, it nestles on a saucer, on his bookcase, waiting to be whisked to a place where everthing is available for barter. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

And by tomorrow morning, there will be three euros, in place of Jacob's tooth, to buy another Roald Dahl book, and another story to spin.

The beautiful elbow

Elbow are finally being recognised as the great band they are.

Visualising It

You watch Usain Bolt smash his own 100m world record in 9.69 and start to celebrate 10m from the end.

You watch Michael Phelps collect his seventh gold medal and know he is just going to get his eighth tomorrow.

Then you see the glint in Bolt's eye as he poses in front of the Jamaican fans, and hear Phelps say 'I don't believe anything is impossible, if you really want it.'

Visualise it. Execute it. Just like Philippe Petit did, in August 1974, when he walked the tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in NYC.

These guys truly walk on air.

I'm reading Stephen Covey's The 8th Habit, about finding your inner voice. It's compelling reading. Then I came across this video, and it made me realise how much I wish I had learnt a musical instrument, and how to use my hands.

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Randy Pausch is gone

Randy Pausch died on July 25th, from pancreatic cancer. He was 47. In the US, he became a phenomenon in the last year of his life. Just in case you've never heard of Randy, this is a link to his home page and his story. Just google his name. He is up there with the greats when it comes to You Tube hits.

Randy lived his dreams. Even more so when he got news of the dreaded 'C' and knew that the ticking clock was for real.

We all need a wake up call, sometimes. To get us out of our comfort zone. And follow our passions, maximise our talents, and listen to our heart.

I'm 47 tomorrow.

Boy Grows Up

Sons bring you gifts from the heart. Drooping dandelions. Half-eaten bags of potato chips. Saveloys. Plastic daffodils. Pop- eyed plaster pug dogs. Cans of lager. Strange scent. Second-hand books – tatty or antique. Hugs.
Pam Brown, b. 1928.

Sometime in 1977, in the full flush of testosterone rebellion, I shared my theory of parental responsibility with my late mother. ‘I don’t owe you guys anything,” I chortled, from my perch on the battered kitchen cupboard. “I never asked to be brought to this planet. If I ever decide to make a child, the same rule will apply to me. I won’t expect anything in return from my child. In fact, I’ll owe my child everything. That’s how the world goes.’ And my mother’s eyes watered and she bit her lip: ‘You’ll only understand something about your life if you find someone unfortunate enough to give you a child.’

Men will eternally fret about this parenthood business. Two weeks ago in Rome, I was collected by a short taxi driver called Fabrizio who blurted out that he had just found his girlfriend was pregnant. I spontaneously launched into a checklist of scans, communications strategy (don’t tell anyone, till 3 months have gone), pre-natal holidays and the real costs of baby gear (say yes to hand-me downs). I exited the cab leaving the guy looking more bewildered than grateful.

My son Jacob is nearly six. I’m past the terror stage with parenthood. My life has morphed seamlessly from three year-old tantrums to a maze of cartoons, puppets, teachers, egos, giggles, homework, parties, wizards, waiting, rushing, mid-air hugs, a story every night at bed time.

I’m like millions of other men: running to keep up with the constant change. Most times, I’m just left playing catch up. I have no idea how he worked out how to use a mouse, let alone a Playstation console. In one week, he went from staccato reading to something close to writing his own poetry. At this age, a child’s brain is a sponge while your middle-aged version stutters and loses hundreds of neurons a day.

Sons bring exclamation marks into your life. They hang out of the back window of your car, repeat your expletives in front of strangers, see things you have forgotten to notice. Don’t you still wish you could still feel the wind on your face, making soup of your hair, caressing you like you didn’t have a care in the world?

Nobody can touch my Saturday mornings. Rain or shine, most times we’re walking from Manoel Island to Sliema for our breakfast and cornettos. The timeshare touts and the harbour cruise guys look at his hair and try and sell us stuff on the way. Jacob has taken to saying ‘Jiena patrijott Malti’ to facilitate our passage. It doesn’t help that he likes collecting brochures for his scrapbook

Kids this age want to belong. So you struggle with haircuts, clothing, anything that they think differentiates them from the world they roam in. You still get tears. Pickles the bear gets spun in the washing machine when nobody is looking.

Young kids don’t lie. Well, not much. “How come you have such a big, fat belly?” screamed Amber, at a portly executive Dad at a kids’ party. “How come you’ve lost your pants?” retorted her cousin at the edge of the pool. Truth is brutal and harmless, slices through the crap we concoct as adults to keep things under wraps, get on with people and survive the day to day.

Some things are being figured out. “Is it possible for grown ups not to work in an office and do work they like? I’d rather paint pictures and have people pay me for that!” There is a growing sense of what is right and wrong. The worst thing you can do, to a child, is accuse him of a misdemeanour he has not done.

Sex kicks in early. They are suddenly aware of their bodies and private parts. Changing on the beach is becoming a bit of a shenanigans. The girls on the playground already have older boyfriends. The boys slam into each other, play Power Rangers. Jacob watches his cousin Scarlett doing her ballerina pirouettes with a mix of affection and bewilderment.

Imagination runs riot. I need to write down his tales of Oink the Pig, the Bully Beef Butcher out to get Oink’s bacon and Dr Snitch the wily rat trying to make sure he doesn’t. I keep the first poem he wrote in my laptop case.

I still can’t do discipline. Where do you draw the line when a child turns up his nose at tomatoes with a summer looming of only tomatoes to buy and eat? I watch his fork hovering over his plate and remember my terror of anything remotely green or orange. Though his phobia is red.

Kids magnify your own inadequacies. I was never good at making kites. I don’t understand the big deal about knights and sieges, or goldfish who speak to him at night. I worry about him spending too much time with adults, and whether an only child invariably grows earnest and distant and bookish. Then I watch him in a scrum with some school friends and I heave a sigh of relief.

The older he gets, the more questions I have. What’s the difference between assertiveness and arrogance? Standing on his own feet and not standing on someone else’s toes? How can I help him grow the thick skin I’ve never had? At what time do children realise that you are not ‘Mr know it all’; that you are vulnerable, like they are; that on a bad day, because of the life baggage we have, we can be far from role models and be total scum bags? How can we just not give them baggage, period?

He now understands that death is the end of life. Ants die, cats die, people in his book on famous people die. I take him through some scanned pictures of my mother. He wants to know why hospitals could not save her.

Sometimes I blink, and see networks of my family tree over his shoulder. I look at his flat feet and despair at the genetic legacy I have bequeathed him. There are nights when my fear of loss are the trigger for nightmares that every parent experiences; sometimes I close my eyes and think of his goofy face to keep out the dark stuff.

I know the connected, virtual, online world he is inhabiting is far removed from my safe, island childhood. And that’s OK. Because we are finally raising citizens of the world, not little islanders.

Everybody wants something for their child. I want to give mine a trampoline for his life and his dreams. I want to find time and space for him – away from the baying attention of phones, computers, the need to make a living. Hopefully, I will remember something about my own growing up pains and not pass them on to him. When the time comes, I hope I will not make a total ass of myself. And just let go.

All I want is for my child to know that I continue to muddle in this parenthood business in good faith. And that every time I think of him, wherever I am, or see his face on my mobile, I smile and know that at least I got one thing right in my life.

I do owe my child. Everything.

Lost in Transition

When I was a child, Luqa Airport was the crumbling gateway to holidays, real chocolate and escape. Things change. You grow up, your hair thins, you join a generation of suits with red eyes whose working life keeps them on the move. Until you find yourself in another airport and you stop.

Everyone has an airport story to tell. 300 cancelled flights and a mountain of 28,000 bags over 5 days means a lot of people will shiver at the mere mention of London Heathrow’s new £4.5bn Terminal 5. Somewhere, in Milan or Memphis, lies the unreturned luggage of a passenger who died on a BA flight from Hong Kong to Heathrow on 2 April. “To lose the luggage of a dead person is unforgivable," said his son.

There is something mildly surreal about airports. There are silent airports, electric ones, sad ones, others crackling with life. In most, design has gone riot. Spider-like structures morph out of steel tubes, concrete. Everything seems to be vacuum-wrapped in plastic. The wavy roof at Barajas Airport is supposed to be calming.

Once you arrive, you are sucked into a conveyor-belt of queues. It’s like being back in primary school. There are lines for check-in, then passport check, then security, then the gate, then your seat on the aircraft and then baggage reclaim, immigration and customs checks at the other end. Whether you’re the Pope or Paris Hilton, at some stage, you’re just going to have to queue.

Sandwiched, between the queues, is so-called consumer heaven. Airports are the new plazas, the new town squares. Brands elbow each other for space and your attention. The familiar has made way for the more exotic Giraffes, Wagamamas, and Victoria’s Secrets. There is food for the mind and for the soul. Mountains of pastries, fine leathers, silk ties, smoked salmon, designer trainers, sunglasses, ice cubes, gadgetry. The new colour for luggage is lime. I purchase my guilt offering to a five year-old who doesn’t quite understand why I have to be away.

This is a good place to go numb. To remember that you forgot to take the suit to the dry cleaners. That Dad’s birthday is round the corner. You are lulled to stupor by security ding dongs. Do not leave anything unattended. The fire alarm is just a test, do not be alarmed. The flight announcements at Sofia Airport are made by a girl who is into James Bond movies.

So you ease yourself into a rich tapestry of people watching. A carousel of rabbis, happy shoppers, modern gunslingers, window cleaners with yellow stripes silhouetted against a backdrop of buses and snow-capped mountains. Women with golden handbags and gentlemen with leather holsters. ID Tags. A rose tattoo quivers on the wrist of a waitress with jet-black hair. People hang on to kids, the kids struggle out of the leashes of their comfort zones. Awkward teenagers rub shoulders with silver surfers with men in crumpled suits with nervous blackberries. Deals on the run. Newspapers with Cyrillic lettering. Shields. Feet. Clacking heels. Phones that refuse to stop bleeping. You drum out text messages to people you love, to people you hardly know. Pot bellies, hairy bellies, pregnant bellies. Pouts. A Pekinese lady in a cat suit purrs in the ear of the guy with a bullet head in front of gate B3 at 07.17.

There is humour where you least expect it. The Zurich Airport shuttle has a soundtrack of mooing cows and tinkling bells. “We’ll soon have you naked,” winks the Customs girl in Gatwick, as I studiously remove my belt, my watch, my shoes, my jacket and place it in the plastic box. A granny sets off the alarm system and watches sheepishly as a stranger fiddles with her bra strap. A friend missed a plane and sleeps at a gate at Rome airport next to an attractive girl from Serbia. They raided the Duty free for hams and cheese once they realised the restaurants had closed.

Things go wrong. The checkout girl fixes her makeup and cannot be bothered to check if your bag can be checked straight home. Suitcases break. Suitcases go missing. You arrive in a heap in Vienna from Sofia to find the Air Malta flight is doing a little detour back east to Budapest. A 5am flight to Rome via Reggio is delayed by an hour because Reggio Airport does not open in time to greet the Air Malta flight.

Perfectly rational people turn to gibbering wrecks within a matter of seconds. Anxiety mounts as the bags roll off the carousel. You look in envy at jolly fellow passengers with red suitcases and redder arms. In a noisy toilet it is possible to experience soaring resentment. I start feeling a sense of brotherhood with people who vandalise toilet flushings and write cryptic graffiti on the doors.

Who are these people, who piss on the floor, refuse to flush, spill cartons of coffee and stuff half-eaten burgers into the folds of pseudo-leather seats?
You tune into conversations. “I cannot just live on love and air! Either they pay me my share or I make sure the contract dies! She had keyhole surgery in March. We’re waiting. And this is how you pop your ears. Stop pulling your tongue at that old man. What do you mean, he winked at you?”

Do we need to be dragging all this luggage, all these designer tags? How many of us will still be here, in a year’s time? You eye up the size of your fellow-passengers’ hand luggage and just hope that seat 6D is not next to the Jehovah Witness with a loose bladder.

I close my eyes and try and drift for lift off. An airport is a Faustian farce, full of ants rushing to make it to the top of the ant-hill. We are all cattle now, herded from one check point to the next. Perhaps that is why airports have terminals and gates. We are here to be bounced by a pin-ball machine from one holding point to the next. One day someone will see the business opportunity in running therapy courses for air travellers.

Then the plane starts to board and I am on my feet to join the shuffle before I know it. We are all going somewhere. We all have other lives. We are all nomads now.

71

"I just sing in the bathroom these days. I sing some of the tunes I used to perform with a sense of nostalgia. It's frustrating, that I cannot project my voice the way I used to. But I have to accept that my strength is no longer there, even though the voice is. The voice is the last thing that dies. Because, when we're about to leave the world, we just sigh and let go."

Paul Asciak, aged 85, former tenor and first tutor of Joseph Calleja, Malta's finest tenor.


Tomorrow my father is 71. Quite a milestone for him, and for us. I cannot remember celebrating my parents' birthdays, when I was a child. After all, life revolved around us kids, not grown-ups.

I guess all that changed, once I had my own child.

What also changed is that I live in perpetual fear of losing people I love.

Doesn't everyone?

So this evening I embed this little, twisted black video here, to chase away my fears. And in honour of my father - who has lived his life, his way, despite more than his share of deaths and misfortunes.

Since cheating death is not a viable option, there is much to learn from my father. In his winter years, he has became adept at living for the day, for the moment, for the 90-minutes duration of a Milan match and a beer with his friends. My father just refuses to grow up. So when I see him with my five year-old, it's not difficult to know which one of the kids is the wiser. Or the merrier.

Happy birthday Dad.