Outside In

Blog move

2011-08-03T22:09:00.001+02:00

The blog has moved to alexgrech.posterous.com.

Gil Scott-Heron's comeback

2010-02-04T22:58:00.001+01:00

Welcome to a masterpiece.

Time-travelling

2009-11-25T14:36:00.003+01:00

When Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen were in full pomp, and a generation of kids was in awe of the Muppets.

Thirty four years later, it seems like nothing's changed much.

Lennon and the social web

2009-11-06T19:38:00.004+01:00

Yesterday, I gave a talk on how social media can be used within a business environment. It was fun, and exhausting. And apparently I still wave my hands too much and cover my face when I'm trying to make a point. The joys of how others see us.

And today, I came across this clip on Yoko Okono's site. And I thought: can you imagine what John Lennon would have done if he'd had access to the social web, like we have today?

Put the right tools at the disposal of creatives, dreamers, heretics and doers. And watch the world change.

WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) from Yoko Ono on Vimeo.

The Cat Piano

2009-09-10T16:42:00.002+02:00

When my family is away, I am reacquainted with the needs and aberrations of our 12 year-old cat. It's always a timely reminder of how interesting all things feline can be.

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

48 going 100

2009-08-02T19:42:00.004+02:00

It's the end of a week when I have gone back to studying, lost a friend and turned 48. I'm still learning to join the dots, do the best I can for the ones I love, and find a tribe where I can be comfortable in my own skin.

Someday, I want to go and watch the Cure.

For Dennis Vella

2009-07-29T14:08:00.011+02:00

If you wanted to be pedantic, Dennis Vella and I would not have been considered to be 'close friends'. Not in the sense that we met regularly every week. But we were friends over a long period of time. And when we did meet, often bumping into each other in Valletta, or at some concert, it was difficult not to get engrossed in some conversation on art, food, love, music and the movers and shakers in Malta who would occasionally rudely interrupt Dennis's world.

For a short period of time, when I was setting up Heritage Malta, I was technically his boss. He was patiently waiting for some bureaucratic mountain to be moved so he could finally do what he was born to do: get people to understand that modern art in Malta deserved a museum and that artists deserved a voice, a friend, a scholar to put what they did into context.

Everyone has a personal picture of Dennis. Mine is goggle specs, a book on Sciortino seemingly permanently tucked under his arm, even in the middle of a drunken party. Vague, smiling, wispy, gentle, anarchic, elegant, even dapper, sometimes. A fine chef. Owner of a Pandora's treasure chest of art at his house - many of them artists he had discovered, encouraged, sponsored. He bought my brother Shaun's piece called 'Three White Scum' for the museum just as racism started to rear its ugly head in this country.

A brave guy, easy to forget, particularly if he came to stay with you - because he could bury himself in a book or spend hours admiring something in your house that you had forgotten you owned. Never ever boring. He once cooked this incredible lamb casserole, and being the only single guy at the lunch party, kept a spare seat for a Russian icon he had just bought from some antiquarian in London.

Now he's gone, at 56, I just hope someone will have the grace to see his lifetime project to its conclusion. And set up a Museum of Modern Art in Malta, in his memory.

So many of us have lost a person that in some way, contributed to making our lives more interesting - and this country, that much more bearable.

Yesterday, as I was preparing to leave my office, my eye caught a Norbert Attard print I have hanging on the wall. It's an old present from Dennis, to coincide with my return to Malta, all those years ago. It's called 'Intelligence of the Heart.'

I'm just so glad I bumped into you, Dennis, over the past 30 years.

Three men and Everest

2009-07-12T10:35:00.002+02:00

Marco Cremona, Dr Greg Attard and Robert Gatt plan to climb the sixth highest mountain, Cho Oyu (8,201metres) this September, and Mount Everest in May 2010 in their challenge8000 expedition. This is their story. But there are also others in on their adventure: Victor Saunders, their guide; and the three women who live with them.

Marco Cremona, 40, is a man in a hurry. A wiry man in perpetual motion, he speaks quickly. The conversation veers from green issues - at the core of his business as a mechanical engineer and environmental consultant - to the mountain boots he has just bought online for Euros 690 from a US specialist store. At an altitude of 8,000 metres and in minus 40 degrees, size 40 feet need size 45 boots to accommodate thick socks and swelling.

Dr Greg Attard is next to show up. At 32, he’s a cross between a rugby player and a 1960s’ Rock Hudson. He lets Marco do the talking. A query about whether Maltese climbing mountains is akin to Jamaicans doing bobsleigh at the Olympics is met with a shrug.

The answer comes later in an email from Robert Gatt, the third man in the challenge8000 team. “We’ve lots of good quality rock climbing in Malta. From rock climbing in Malta, it’s a natural progression to other climbing disciplines and bigger challenges.” Climbing is also a natural way for Robert to live. “Whether it’s a sun drenched rock wall in Malta, fell running on a wet English day in the Lake District, climbing up a frozen waterfall in Italy, an Alpine gully in Chamonix or a Himalayan peak in Nepal, it’s my passion,” he says.

The three did not discover mountains at the same time. Greg was always an all-action type; a Scout, in love with the outdoors. By 17, he’d started to travel. In the summer vacations on his medical course, he’d go for an elective exchange and spend two months a year climbing in eastern Europe and Greece. Marco got the mountain bug when he decided to join the Kilimanjaro One project. “After that climb I was hooked. I met Greg when I went to Etna for training. Robert I knew socially.” Marco is the glue among the men, and the expeditions.

The three were consistently climbing higher mountains; raising the bar by 500 metres with each climb. This September, the team plans to tackle Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain. At 8,201m, it is the standard preparatory trail for Everest. The technicality of both mountains is similar – oxygen is required, and the expedition can take anywhere between eight and 10 weeks. The Everest expedition is scheduled for May 2010 and will entail climbing and camping in inhospitable terrain and unforgiving, cold to reach the summit at 8,848metres.

Climbing is a logistical challenge: the team needs the support of a specialist organisation to take care of equipment, flights, porters (two sherpas for each climber), food, water, visas, transport and equipment. The missing piece in the jigsaw is Victor Saunders, the guide, who has climbed Everest four times in the last five years. Victor calls himself a cautious coward. He was chosen on the basis of reputation, which is basically measured on the number of people he has got safely up and down the mountain. He’s known as a warm, level-headed, Scotsman, and is an architect by profession.

Training can be gruelling as you need a good cardio-vascular background. Greg runs and cycles. Marco says he’s lucky that he’s lightweight, but admits to doing aerobic exercise running up and down 60 degree clay slopes. “You have to train your mind too. Mountaineers are hard-headed and everyone involved has an opinion,” he says.

Timing is everything and often make or break of a climb. There’s only a short season, pre- monsoon, in which to climb the mountain and this can result in a kind of ‘people jam’ on the ascent routes, with up to 200 people all having a go at the same time. “I hate crowded mountains. You can have one to yourself,” Greg mumbles.

Climbers have eight hours on oxygen going up, and another eight coming down. In minus 25, sweating, they’re pushing it and running out of time and energy. Hypothermia can start to kick in. “If you don’t make summit before 2pm, you need to turn back. Till now, we’ve never failed a peak. I don’t know how I would react to failure,” says Greg. It’s no surprise that 30 per cent of attempts to climb Everest end up in failure.

What makes a good team? The team’s roles seem well-defined: Marco is the logistics person and more of a trekker; Greg is more a mountaineer; Robert is ‘very technical’ and more a climber. Male-bonding is inevitable; if you are going to spend ten weeks in a tent together, you have to get on. “The mountain brings out the worst and best in each of us,” smiles Greg. “You’re dealing with fatigue and bruised egos. Saying we’re all hard-headed is an understatement”. Marco says he finds it relaxing. He can get away from the day to day and the mundane and just concentrate on the task at hand.

We skirt around the subject of danger, but it’s something they are reluctant to discuss. “Climbing is dangerous and even more so at high altitudes where the ability to make decisions is hindered by hypoxia and extreme mental and physical exhaustion. Danger is a challenge to be managed both individually and as a team. We’re not madmen. We’re taking a calculated risk. People engage in extreme sports because they are so demanding, mentally and physically, that you live for the ‘now’,” says Marco.

If you collapse on a mountain over 8,000 metres, the chances are that you will stay there. They’ve seen a couple of bodies on previous climbs. They’re too heavy, with all that kit, to retrieve without risking other lives. Knowing your limits is key to survival, and that’s where a good guide comes in. He has to know how to push a climber to his maximum capability, but not let him get beyond that. He has to look for tell-tale signs – people getting out of breath for instance. The guide can turns things around if necessary.

What makes a man contemplate bad food, no sleep, no sex for 10 weeks, pain, danger, fractures, falls, frostbite, hypothermia, altitude-related injuries, disorders or possible brain damage? The answer seems to be one word: the summit. It’s a loaded word and keeps cropping up in the conversation. It’s as powerful a driver as the purely nationalistic one - to be the first Maltese to climb Everest. There is a sense of history being made. But the real motivation is personal; it’s part dream; part challenging yourself to get out of the comfort zone; and all about ‘pushing yourself to the point where you never thought it was possible to be, mentally and physically.’ They hope that their forthcoming expeditions will inspire people to dream and have a go at turning those dreams into reality.

There is nothing as painful as summit day. Their longest climb to a summit to date was 17 hours. “Half way during summit day, you think, this is the last time I am doing this. Once you get to a summit, you have to calculate the energy reserves you have to get back. You may get summit fever. You get intoxicated. That’s the risk. People judge if you are successful if you have got to the summit. Ten metres away doesn’t count. It’s a very cruel thing,” says Greg.

What happens when you’ve climbed a mountain? Marco says on the way down he dreams of beer, junk food, and a good shower. Greg says he’d be happy to stay on the peak, and that he gets ‘post-performance depression’ when he gets home. Both men say the mountain is a drug. “We read about mountains every day. We may live here, but we live the mountain each day”.

I wonder what it’s like to live with these men. They grin and say the heroes are the women who see them risk their lives, and spend a long time away from home and large sums of money on their lonely passions. Marco says the mountains came after his relationship, and that his wife knows he is cautious, but it’s tough not being able to communicate for long periods of time. He has been away climbing a mountain for one month a year in the past years. Greg says his girlfriend knew that ‘the package involved the mountain. ’ Robert, they tell me, lives for the mountain. I ask them what happens after Everest. Marco squirms. He says he’s agreed to have one shot at Everest and then that’s it. He’s 40 and this is his last big climb. Greg says that he will find some gentler peaks to go for, and perhaps take his girlfriend with him.

There are perhaps other limitations on their expeditions though. So far, they’ve been funding themselves, but the big two climbs coming up need funds from corporate sponsors. “Climbing is expensive, so that means I have to work harder when not climbing, “says Robert. Hopefully, corporate sponsors won’t be long in coming since the team’s effort is all in a good cause. Challenge8000 has pledged that throughout the next year it will be promoting awareness of asthma and better air quality in Malta through its association with the Society of Maltese Asthmatics and the ‘Stop the Dust!’ campaign.

As they leave, Greg jokes about the frostbite from his last climb and that his big toe is still stuck. Marco says they will be linking up on Etna over the weekend. When they leave, I switch off my laptop, and wonder if I’m any closer to understanding these two complex, gifted men, intoxicated by a summit on the other side of the world.

Simulating a storm

2009-06-20T18:16:00.002+02:00

As summer takes hold and the air thins, others are simulating storms.

Man of his time

2009-06-07T09:52:00.002+02:00

I think I will always be able to listen to this man. Master history story-teller. Wonderful and deeply moving to listen to. And doing whatever he can to swim against the tide of stereotypes.

Breaking the rules

2009-05-25T16:17:00.000+02:00

| Get your Presentation Pack

Mr Blue Sky

2009-02-20T21:51:00.004+01:00

What do you do, when you get blue for no reason? Or for a thousand reasons? Maybe it's because Jacob woke up with a fever and never made it to the school Carnival party in his wizard's costume. Or maybe it's because I'm tired of winter, and credit crunches. Maybe I'm just tired.

Then I remembered this song. I guess I'll always be in search of Mr Blue Sky.

Obamame

2009-01-20T21:10:00.004+01:00

The best velvet glove 18-minute speech I've heard for a long time.

Whatever this man will achieve, he has already changed the lexicon of politics for ever.

Even managed to silence a six year-old. Jacob knew it was history, all right.

And for a day, thanks to this, even you can bask in the great man's glory.

11 Wishes

2008-12-31T15:33:00.015+01:00

Exercise
Write
Insiders
Coach
Learn
Travel
Love
Heal
Connect
Strength
Go

Christmas is for kids

2008-12-25T11:56:00.005+01:00

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

2008-12-06T18:52:00.002+01:00

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

2008-12-04T12:41:00.006+01:00

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

2008-11-28T21:48:00.003+01:00

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

2008-09-10T01:18:00.001+02:00

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

Visualising It

2008-08-16T22:58:00.004+02:00

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.

2008-08-03T22:44:00.003+02:00

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

2008-07-30T09:27:00.006+02:00

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

2008-07-18T09:33:00.003+02:00

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

2008-05-10T23:12:00.002+02:00

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

2008-02-04T23:04:00.000+01:00

"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.

Coda

2007-12-31T21:41:00.000+01:00

1. What is it about New Year's Eve, that makes you stop and take stock and wait for something to happen and then realise that it isn't going to, unless you really go out of your way and rock the boat and do something dangerous, impulsive. Or downright calculated.

2. I've written 10 new year resolutions. Some are scary. I read somewhere you should print and tape them to your desk so you cannot run away from them. I'll store mine on my laptop.

3. What am I scared of? Phone calls in the night. The inevitable.

4. I love being a father. My son is still at an age where he asks me questions and waits for an answer. He is already a better dancer and wordsmith than I can ever be.

5. If I find a cartoonist, I will finally get the story we've called 'Oink the Pig' actually written. Instead of just woven in our heads, in laughter, on the way to school, each morning.

6. How to learn from mistakes, grow a skin, move forward without listening to all the voices clamouring for attention.

7. How to move forward. Period.

8. If you have words, you can wriggle out of trouble as much as you can land yourself in it.

9. You do not have to be next to me for me to think the world of you.

10. Count your blessings. We're still standing. Here comes the new year.

Digging into Facebook

2007-12-30T15:09:00.000+01:00

There are nearly 14,000 Maltese who have a Facebook account. Five weeks ago, when I started thinking about this snippet, there were 8,000.

Facebook is the Internet site of 2007. In October, Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6% equity stake, valuing the company at a whopping $15 billion. With 34.5 billion page views in September, according to comScore Media Metrix, Facebook is now www.strategywothe fourth most highly trafficked Web property worldwide. Together, with the iPhone, Facebook was the Internet story of the year.

What nobody can say for sure is whether Facebook will be as popular in 2008. Such is the fickle nature of social networking sites that the next big thing may be round the corner: Google recently announced its Open Social network.

I wanted to understand why the Maltese are taking to Facebook in their droves, when they can pick a phone and meet a mate in 30 minutes for a drink and a chat. And why people keep sharing the most mundane and (sometimes) intimate details of their lives with online ‘friends’.

So I asked six questions to 13 friends within my Facebook network. I spread the mix, to make sure there was nothing much in common (except that I knew them all). 12 Maltese, 1 Canadian in Gozo, from all walks of life: sales & marketing executives to businessmen, students, a technologist and a published poet. This is some of the chatter that came back:

Joining Facebook tends to be a collective of peer pressure, curiosity, professional obligation and boredom. Facebook helps people rediscover old friends and keep tabs on those living overseas. Or those anywhere else with an Internet connection and time on their hands.

Facebook is an addiction, a guilt trip, a time-waster, a laugh, a glorified Hi5 for adults. We find ourselves trapped in our need to communicate: we check our email continuously; we get mad if we forget our mobile; and, now, there’s Facebook. Many use it like SMS or Twitter, with fingers rattling on a keyboard to keep up with hundreds of ‘friends’ from all walks of life. It's an incredibly powerful virus which motivates people to infect their friends and colleagues.

Voyeurism and narcissism appear to be key drivers. Girls inevitably change their profile picture on a more regular basis than the boys. We are an ego-centric, nosey nation, and now have a licence to pry quietly into other people’s lives and what makes them tick. Exhibitionism is a major characteristic of contemporary life. Except that on Facebook, you're only exposing yourself to the people you choose, as opposed to the entire web.

You can also lose yourself in your kind of crowd. Join’ Michael Mifsud for President’ (869 members and growing). Or groups managed by restaurateurs, rock bands, politicians, journalists, socialites and lonely hearts. Throw a virtual sheep, send a zombie kiss, order an electronic ice cream or play Scrabulous with your grandmother.

Concerns about privacy are growing. Employers use Facebook to search and measure up current and prospective employees. Some may already be paying the price in terms of lost employee productivity without knowing it. And others have been quick to see the branding opportunities. Paraphrasing Shakespeare… all the world’s a stage, so potentially anyone and everyone is your audience. Act with caution.

Not everyone is convinced that all is what it seems to be. Who’s a friend? Are friends counted in numbers or shoulders to cry on? Are the ‘friends’ on your list simply contacts, or merely trophies? This is one facet of the internet: trying to personalise, even embody, contacts that could well be anonymous. Facebook can also stand for currently bored, lustful, socially unfulfilled or generally avoiding real life.

Yet surely there’s no easier device around to help you organise a party, share your videos and pictures, market your talents, illustrate your life, let people know your every mood swing. I found out about the lovely Café Brasil concert at MITP because ‘Indri Mangu’ set up a Facebook Group for the occasion. New friends to Facebook are regularly greeted by older ones with the rousing ‘what took you so long to get here?’ There must be a reason for being here, surely?

The Facebook backlash has started. Credit information group Equifax said members of sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook may be putting too many details about themselves online, and putting themselves at risk of identity fraud. Fraudsters could use these details to steal someone's identity and apply for credits and benefits. About 80,000 people in the UK were victims of identity theft last year, at a cost to the economy of £1.5bn. Facebook’s own new Beacon Advertising Service added to concerns about privacy issues. On 6th December, Mark Zuckenger, the Facebook founder ate humble pie and apologised for the way Beacon had been launched. People simply don’t want their personal data used for commercial purposes without their permission – even if the company using it is as familiar a travelling companion as Facebook.

Despite its success, nobody is quite sure if Facebook is here to stay. While many profess an inability to live without it, the same people think that like all technologies, Facebook will eventually be surpassed. It's the latest in a long line of social networks, starting from Friendster and, most recently, MySpace. Like all trends, the 'cool kids' will move on to the next big thing, and the masses will follow. Such is the fickle, transient nature that something deemed indispensible this year may well be old hat next. Just like the bar that was impossible to get into last summer and is not quite in vogue this year.

It’s as if our life cycles just got accelerated.

Maybe Facebook is just another indicator that being Maltese simply means being part of a global goldfish bowl. We use social networks like everyone else does. We will always run in herds to the next best thing, a time-poor, utility generation. Or maybe we’ve run to Facebook because the ‘cosy’ Maltese parochial life is long gone, as we spend more time in front of laptops, speak to fewer people in the flesh, pry over their shoulder online and gauge our social life success in terms of numbers of online friends. We long to feel connected in an age when one inevitably feels disconnected. There is a lot of talk, but much of it is mundane, and not of all of it may be true. We may be creating virtual online selves to make up for other things that we find lacking in our real lives.

Or maybe, we’re just smart, on the ball, and live full lives. Like millions of others, we are now connected, but on our own terms. The new glue for our social networks is online conversations. We’ve just become as good as anyone else in making our voice heard, assuming someone is really listening.

I suspect this conversation will keep going for a while longer.

More Facebook conversations here.

Saudade do Rio

2007-12-02T12:13:00.000+01:00

It's been a while, since I posted anything here. Blame it on life, living, and a growing sense of what Talking Heads used to growl about. Say something once.. why say it again?

I was dragged out of hibernation by Lily, who edits Manic, a magazine for the Independent. This piece appeared there a week ago. It gave me an opportunity to get out of my current skin. And be in a place I am now linked to, that I need to go visit, again. Because it is a place that serves as a mirror to the canvas of my life.

When the rains come, I long to escape. A year ago, I succumbed to a growing sense that time was running out for doing things on impulse - and escaped to Rio for the year end.

Rio. The word alone triggers a chain of postcard clichés. That Duran Duran video. Jesus on Corcovado with his arms sweeping over Sugar Loaf mountain. Carnaval. The land of samba, the tanga, verde e amarelo, beautiful football, beautiful people and all night parties. Then the other Rio... the dark underbelly of violent crime, drug culture, corrupt police, Central Station and City of God.

Everything about Rio is a contradiction. It’s all black or white. You will either love it or run away fast, murmured the Sicilian seated next to me, as the Varig flight touched down at Tom Jobim Airport. He was in Rio for his 15th visit.

Rio is a full frontal assault to the senses. You wake up suddenly to the sound of bird song or a street vendor selling water melons. You leave an Alexander Calder exhibition downtown, walk round one block and find a cow tied to some railings. Everything is cheek by jowl. The ocean and the sand and the great curves of the beaches with the elegant high-rise hotels and apartments. And glued, on the hills, at the edge of the forest, in full view of the privileged, is the scar of the favelas.

You have to quickly get into the swing of things. Especially, if like me, you only have 14 days to burn. I was told to leave my watch and credit card at home and to dress ‘poor’. We’re lucky – we tan quickly and blend in.

But we’re not Cariocas. To understand them, you have to first understand something about their music. And then, start tuning to the rhythm of their conversations. And finally, you will notice the way they hold themselves, the way they walk. And how they dance.

Music is ageless. I watched the legendary Caetano Veloso play under a yellow moon in a cauldron called the Circo Voador. At times he was pure nectar, sometimes his backing band made Nine Inch Nails seem tame. At Trapiche Gamboa, kids aged 15 to 70 sang and danced the night away to the uplifting samba of Galo Canto’ and several litres of Chopp. The next morning, Alexandre, dentist cum samba connoisseur, turned up with a boxful of CDs because I’d said I really wanted to get into mu’sica brasileira.

Rhythm is everywhere. Someone is always tapping away on a table, waiting for a coffee, humming a tune. Women have hips, and use them to killer effect during a samba. In Laranjeiras, every Saturday afternoon, musicians meet up in the little square and play for hours, in return for a drink, or two.

Sometimes, things get weird. An impromptu trip to an exhibition of graffiti art led us past the market and the saffron shops and men in string vests and the black mamacita smoking a big joint in an alley. That was when I realised the exhibition venue was the Hotel Nicacio, and that ‘Sex Art’ was a project by local artists to paint the walls of a thriving brothel.

You need to watch your back. Car journeys are planned to reduce the number of potential red light stops, and the risk of car-jackings. One Sunday, en route to the amazing La Plancha, a kid not older than 7 ran in front of our car as we cruised to a red light stop in broad daylight. He took one look at us and raised his t-shirt over his head for a second. Then he juggled three red balls high above his head. Leo lowered the window a hairline crack and handed two reais to the kid, who flashed a white grin and scampered to the side as the lights turned green. “What was that all about?” I said. “That’s to show us he didn’t have a gun,” said Brunno, as another Tom Jobim number purred. It was only later that Leo told me his mother’s Toyota was bullet-proof.

Eating and drinking is great value. Think fruit, juice, fish, rice and beans, finger food, real Brazilian coffee. Nothing quenches your thirst quite like agua de coco. Or a Guarana’. Or a cachaca. Or a chopp.

Rio is a beautiful, colourful mess, with Cariocas as its glue. Skimpy lycra bikins and havaianas jostle for space with nail parlours and cosmetic surgeons. Hedonism is institutionalised - on every beach, on every paved sidewalk. From Copacabana to Ipanema to Barra. On an apartment on the 21st floor, you look over Lagoa, and wonder if you are in a dream. Because even favelas twinkle in the dark.

Sometimes, when I am stuck in a jam, I close my eyes and succumb to a saudade for Rio. A longing for what is now gone, but which might return in a distant future.

Pencil in 2014, when the beautiful game goes to Brazil.

Go to Rio.

Before you lose the urge to do things on impulse.

My top 10 things to do in Rio

Before you get to Rio: befriend a local. Find someone on Facebook. That way you stay safe, don’t get hassled by street vendors and live like a carioca.

1. Get a snapshot with your own Personal Jesus at Corcovado. Pinch yourself when you do your slow 360 degrees.

2. Settle down for the evening at the Academia da Cachaça in Leblon. Try the cachaça with honey. And then the 30 other variants. Try the feijoada. Watch the laughter.

3. Go body watching on a beach. The best beaches are further away. The best bodies tend to stay central.

4. Cross the bridge to Niteroi. Feast your eyes on Niemeyer’s MAC, the most beautiful museum on the planet. Drive to the top of the mountain and face the city across the bay. Be brave, tag on to a hang-glider buddy and jump over the edge.

5. Watch the posers and rollerbladers at Avenida Atlantica on a Sunday. Follow up with a detox breakfast of juice and pancakes at Ipanema. Or head straight to Boteco Belmonte in Flamengo for pasteis and empadas.

6. Take the rattling trolley at Santa Teresa. Have lunch at Sobrenatural. Go back in the evening for some ice-cold Chopp at Bar do Gomez. Hug strangers.

7. Roam downtown. Buy saffron in the market. Find some peace in the Royal Portuguese Reading Cabinet. Peek into the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. Sip tea in the elegant Colombo café.

8. Hire a car and in two hours you are in Buzios on the Costa do Sol. Stay at the Pousada dos Gravata’s in Geriba’. Open the door to your room, and you’re on a sandy beach.

9. Go and dance with the multitudes at Trapiche Gamboa. Watch a samba school rehearse. Do your funky chicken.

10. Spend your last night watching the sunset at Ipanema. Make a wish. Life is beautiful.

Why Rufus is good for your soul

2007-06-05T12:21:00.000+02:00

The Old Vic is not normally the venue for an eight-piece band and four nights of sell out concerts – you only have to look up at the gods and the massive crystal chandelier and wonder whether the insurance applies to a wall of sound. But there is nothing normal about Rufus Wainwright (or ROOOOOFUUUUUUS) as the burly guys in the boxes insisted on screaming.

You have to experience a Rufus concert to understand how sublime, funny, outrageous, clever, unique an artist this man is. Gifted with a voice to make any mortal’s heart shiver, Wainwright’s music is a mix of jazz, pomp, ballad, soul, rock, blues. He is also the campest, funniest of performers. Someone who is in your face, takes incredible risks with the patter patter and the heavy breathing down the microphone and then dives into a sublime piano solo.

Five minutes into the show, Rufus gets up from his piano stool and grimaces. ‘Gee, I have sweat running down my buttocks’ he frowns, patting his striped posterior. ‘At least, it feels like sweat. I hope it is.’ The gays in the stalls whistled, everyone else hooted. This was a bastion of regal English theatre, for heaven's sake! 'Let's do some rock and roll. At the Old Vic... just don't break anything'. He does a costume change after six songs, and comes back in lederhosen. As everyone shrieks he shakes his head and says 'I know. Just before they ran off to the mountains. Oh, by the way.. it definitely WAS just sweat.'

No, Rufus is not Liberace for the 21st century. He does hover dangerously close to pastiche, sometimes. But there's always the music and the complex orchestration and that voice. Rufus at the Old Vic is one of those rare moments, when you watch an artist realising that the peak they aspire to is just there, within their reach. And Rufus reached out. Cappella singing without a microphone. On-stage cross-dressing to emerge as Judy Garland crooning a foggy day in London town. Laughter, pathos, fun, wickedness rolled into one.

Anything I write will sound like a pastiche. You cannot write about or picture where music can take you to. I just know that last Friday, for two hours plus, I was transported to a place where nothing else matters.

Mumbling

2007-05-25T17:26:00.000+02:00

I don't quite know where I'm heading to.

So here's a list of where I've been.

1. On Wednesday night, I joined about 600 others at the AC Milan club to watch my team triumph (probably undeservedly, on the night) over the old nemesis of Istambul. Several highlights - the obvious one, watching Inzaghi's second goal crawl over the goal line and ending up with my neighbour's arm pit in my face. The best one was probably Gejtu the Club's secretary's announcement before the game: sic 'Friends! WHEN we score.. for fuck's sake... make sure you don't throw bottles at the screens! We rented them this time and they cost us a bomb!'

2. I'm setting up a startup called Muovo. Startups are normally the fodder of young guys in a garage in Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv, no? No, they're not. So the rollercoaster of creating something out of nothing has started. I've done this before. I've made a lot of money for other people. This time, it's me and two other illuminated souls. If we fail, we will do it gloriously, no doubt.

3. My ISP has been losing emails for the past two weeks. I finally lost my sense of diplomacy and sent a rude email to the technical director. He received it nearly 20 hours after I sent it.

4. Yesterday, at 17.14, a tiny sparrow, not more than a couple of weeks old, flapped against the window of my room. I stopped, blinked. Then a paw came out of nowhere and the sparrow screamed. And I charged out to see Smudge the cat, aged 10, run off with the bird in its mouth. By the time we had prised its jaw open, the bird was a goner. Seriously upset. Smudge looked smug for an entire hour.

5. Darren munched some pastizzi with me at Cafe Cordina and told me about BarCamps. Wicked ideas spinning in our heads.

6. I spent the best part of three days driving around Malta with a key associate for Muovo - a Bulgarian man who had never visited the island and confessed to liking Geneva. George liked Malta. A lot. I hadn't been to Mdina at night, for a while. The place just looks lovely. Palazzo Falzon is stunning, the lighting is subtle, and you still get a view from Fontanella. We've finally got a city we can be proud of.

7. I started one of those 'take a picture of yourself for 365 days and watch yourself age' projects. Mercifully, my memory card screwed up and wiped out an entire week's supply of mug shots. Project canned.

8. I washed my car, after a couple of months. Now I can see all the bumps and scratches.

9. Liz wants to build a room over our bedroom to 'improve the quality of our family life' and 'increase the value of our property'. No, there is no ulterior agenda.

10. Jacob has taken to calling himself 'Is-sur Jacob'. Primarily to irritate his mother, who cannot speak Maltese, I suspect. Then again, neither can he. Still, a near five year-old who aspires to becoming a chef might have a better game plan than a 45 year-old in a start-up.

Next week, I'm off to London to watch Zoot Woman, Rufus Wainwright and Cheek by Jowl's new production of Cymbeline. And to lose myself in crowds, think of new things, recharge the old grey cells, look up an old friend. And try and find some more answers.

Walking the plank

2007-04-10T13:01:00.000+02:00

Things are quite finely poised, right now. Between what was and what may be. Between 45 and wrinkles and 46 and more wrinkles. One moment I can see the church spire in Siggiewi, the next a developer buys the two-room house next door and tries to turn the village core into penthouse heaven. Two days ago I had my voice, today I cannot croak two words without diving for the Kleenex.

Isn't this the time when people my age do a 360 degrees, and take up fish farming or shave their head or get an inky tattoo or enrol as a trappist monk or pick up a Harley and head towards the Mojave Desert?

Mercifully , the play has faded fast. Some people loved it and emailed and texted to say so..., some confessed to 'just not getting it' and others hated it with a passion. Which was kind of amusing. Because we always knew it would be like that. Or maybe we were just crap.

Whatever it was, it's all over and as the lawyer turned reviewer suggested.. 'the actors have gone back to their day jobs'.

Well, some did.

I'm up for new things now.

I'm clearing my office. I'm looking at getting involved with another start-up. At the end of the month I will go to a start up conference in London and see what's changed since the heady, pre dot-bust days.

I need to go back to networking, though I have never been terrific at that. Or branding myself.

Sometimes all I want is the company of a book and music in my ears or the chattering of my son, spinning another story in the garden, about pirates with hooks and cackles and people in trouble walking the plank.

These are strange, soul-searching times.

But I've been here before.

Life repeated

2007-03-07T16:28:00.000+01:00

I'm doing some theatre, after an absence of two years. Yasmina's Reza's Life x 3 is a seminal piece on marriage, parenthood, ambition and disappointment - a real mid-life sliding doors of a piece. It comes at a good time for me - when I am again stopping to take stock of where I am, and where I want to go.

It's also a real challenge. It's just four of us, on stage for most of the 100 minutes or so of the performance.

We've got just over three weeks' of rehearsals to go, and then we're on for three nights at the Manoel. That's the normal deal in Malta - quick rehearsals, quick runs. I don't mind. The process is intense. It makes life that much more interesting and dangerous.

Gila

2007-02-17T15:58:00.000+01:00

AC Milan is my drug, part of my DNA, the link to a childhood when things weren’t quite so complicated. One of my earliest memories is hanging out of my father’s Fiat 600 on a carcade to Valletta, on May 26th 1969, when Milan beat Ajax 4-1 in the old European Cup. Even then, I remember thinking – wow, this is cool.

You can divide football fans by their colours, their choruses, their propensity for spontaneous hooliganism and heavy drinking. But the one thing all football fans do have in common and in abundance is blind, irrational passion. The love for your team is in many instances better, purer and even, dare I say, more durable than the love for your woman or whoever you choose to share your life with. Football is our excuse to get away from the day to day – to a simple world of winning and losing, where the framework of life, for once, is clear. There is no chance of living in shades of grey when you are in front of a TV screen or shivering for ninety minutes on the terraces.

Most of the fun with Milan being around has been us. The Maltese. The head cases who checked themselves into the hotel for a week in the cope of sharing a croissant with Inzaghi over breakfast. The guy at the Milan Club who lost his job because he forgot to show up for work for three consecutive days. A mass of faces, digital cameras, arms and limbs in the SAS Radisson restaurant. The outstretched hands with Milan memorabilia lined up outside the hotel, waiting for the team bus, in the hope of a signature, a handshake, something to immortalise the moment. And make us bask in reflected glory.

And I’m like them. While I waited in the lobby of the SAS Golden Sands, I gibbered, grinned like a Cheshire cat, took clips on my camera as my team filed past me on their way to lunch. I texted everyone I knew. I was an embarrassment. I was a fan.

Gilardino came in with PR minder and another guy who looked familiar, and who transpired later to be Daniele Bonera, the full back. The PR guy said I had five minutes; the recorder was clicked on and Gilardino sat down for the photo shoot.

My first thought was that the guy was young enough to be my son. My second was a general sense of wonder at Italian football’s propensity to serve up pin-up boys as their icons. And my third was that I had to coax stuff out of the guy, because he was clearly well-versed in PR.

We kicked off by talking about the obvious…

On Serie A this season

It’s been a strange summer, for sure. No Juve to play against. No proper summer break. Yes, I would have gone to play for Milan if we had been demoted to Serie B, no questions asked. I am in the team that I always wanted to join, the team that is right for me. There are a lot of clichés about Milan being a family, but I cannot describe it any other way. I am very attached to these colours, to this family. When I came here, Milan wanted me at all costs. I do not forget that kind of commitment.

It’s been tough seeing Inter race away from us this season. We have no chance of catching them in the League. But wouldn’t it be great to trip them up in the Champions League?

On Winning

I have won nothing for my club yet. I know people keep talking about how a footballer can find the motivation to get better, after winning the World Cup. But I still have to deliver something for my club.

On Training in Malta

We don’t get to see much, but it seems to be a lovely island. Our routine has really been from here, to the training ground and back. I knew very little about Malta before I came. But it’s been great for us. We’re here for nearly two weeks – so it’s inevitable that close bonds are made between the players and the group gets stronger. And we’ve also had time to train hard and work on the technical and physical aspects of our game.

On the Maltese fans

Outside of Milan, I have ever seen such warmth as here – it really has been an explosion of joy around the team. Sure, when you travel, as a Milan player, you are recognised by fans all over the world - you do your bit of signing autographs. But Malta is just something else. All of us were completely bowled over by the reception when we arrived at the airport. And the level of support, of good humour, has remained the same, day after day. The Maltese have been great, polite, and good-natured – it really has been fantastic to be made to feel at home like this.

On life in the fast lane

From 12 years old you are aware that your future is likely to be different from that of other kids. By the time you are 17 and if you’re as lucky as I was, already close to playing in Serie A, you are earning much more than your contemporaries in other walks of life. You’ve got to be careful that it does not mess up your head. You need to retain the same mentality, the same values you had before you got into the football world. Your family have to help sort you out, and keep your feet on the ground. I’m very lucky. My parents were there for me.

On tough opponents

I don’t mind playing against defenders who play with passion. People like Gattuso are tough, but always fair. They’re not out there to injure you, they’re trying to win the ball. True, then there are people like Poulsen, who are there to wind you up.

If you want to make it in football, you have to be tough - not just physically, but mentally.

On Mind Games

When things go wrong, when you cannot score, or you’re injured, you have to get back to doing the simple things well. You train hard. You need the affection of people who you know really care for you – your family, your team mates. You look for your inner calm. You have to dig in and cultivate that element of self-belief to take you through the bad times. I went through a barren spell earlier this season. All attackers do, at some stage in their career. I never gave up, thinking I could get out of the tunnel.

No matter what anyone else tells you, you have to regroup, and keep working hard. 50% of a great player is the head.

On the Violin

People keep on asking me what happened to that one… getting down on a knee and pretending to play a violin after a goal. It is something I started at Parma and carried on with the National Team – I think the last time was the goal against the USA in Germany. I really have no idea why I have never celebrated a Milan goal in that way. Maybe I’m waiting for that special goal at San Siro. San Siro’s a pretty special place.

On Music

I can listen to most stuff. Especially on the team bus. Oasis, U2, Ramazzotti. But for true music talent, you’d have to listen to Seedorf, because he’s a great singer.

On Food

I’m a traditionalist. Give me pasta, give me anything Italian.

On Holidays

My best holiday is the one I still have to take. I want to drive across the US, coast to coast, with my girlfriend. Something I always dreamt of.

On Childhood

If you are a successful footballer, it is inevitable that you lose a bit of your childhood. I left Biella when I was still a kid. So, yes, you do grow up in a strange world, very much apart from other kids. That’s the price you pay.

On being recognised

Milan is a very liveable city, even if it is a metropolis. People leave you on your own, whether you go to a restaurant or go to a club. They are used to having stars around there.

On being a role model

If you want role models, look at Maldini, Gattuso, Pirlo. Football is full of senators. It is still a bit too early for my generation – me and Kaka – to be the flag bearers for this club.

I am not quite the Milan flag, right now… more like just the stick (Non mi sento una bandiera… forse a questo momento sono soltanto l’asta). But we’ll get there.

On life after football

Give me some time to think about that one! I’m 24. Honestly, it’s too early to say. I always wanted to be a footballer. I am living my dream.

At the end of the interview, we realised that the minder had drifted out of the room, and was admiring Golden Bay from the terrace outside. Gilardino patiently signed a memento for my father ‘A William,’ he mouthed, and then disappeared to promptly return with a digital camera.

“Hey”, he grinned, as he snapped away, “I might be back here on holiday, after all. MY girlfriend would love this room. How long does it take to get here by boat?”

I launched into the virtues of Virtu’ Ferries’ 90 minute crossing from Pozzallo before I realised that a multi-millionaire was likely to come over in some other more comfortable form of transport. I swear, he just kept nodding as I reeled off timetables and weather forecasts.

Gila’s a good guy. Even my mother would have liked him. She always had a soft spot for a well brought-up, pin-up boy.

The Limbo Rock

2006-12-08T12:58:00.000+01:00

Children who die without being baptised go to limbo, where they don't enjoy God, but don't suffer either, because whilst carrying the original sin... they don't deserve paradise but neither do they deserve hell or purgatory.
Pope Pius X, 1905.

I’m at an age where many of my favourite people are dead. I can close my eyes and rapidly find myself in a movie of faces and shadows and snippets of lost conversations. My mother has found one hour for herself and is sewing a dress for my sister on her old Singer. The trumpet-playing skinhead Nannu Karm is reciting an episode from his handwritten autobiography Suldat Qalbien jaf evita' l-Gwerra (The Brave Soldier knows how to avoid the War). Nannu Manoel is frying golden chips and stealing a swig of Johnny Walker from the hidden cupboard and blowing raspberries so I can scream at the giant moles on his cheek. Paola is sunbathing alone on the terrace of her apartment in Mosta.

Sometimes my dead people clamour for attention, as I see something unravel I know I have seen before. Other times they are so close they are almost in my rear view mirror, whispering stuff I know is for my own good.

None of my dead people would have gone to Limbo, of course. But the news that the Vatican is ‘reviewing the state of Limbo’ and that Cardinal Ratzinger a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI believes that Limbo is a mere ‘hypothesis’ has thrown my safe topography of the afterlife into disarray.

To get a handle on this: until 6th October 2006, once you snuffed it, you were on a well-documented elevator ride to the afterlife. Press 1 for Penthouse Heaven for the good, beatified, exemplary members of society. Press -1 for Basement Hell and eternal damnation for the bad eggs who will fry to kebabs. And there, just beyond the revolving doors, suspended in time, grey or beige leather or whatever your favourite murky material, press 0 for LIMBO.

Limbo. The temporary status of the souls of good persons who died but did not go to Heaven. For many years, the word alone made me shiver. Even more than Hell, because I come from a generation that believed that Hell harbours most of our rock icons and some of the most interesting people we met.

Limbo is for the almost-rans, trapped in a perpetual waiting room, without any assurance that they can get to the ultimate destination. Limbo is for those who didn't quite make the grade. Too good to be bad, not quite good enough to make it straight to the good afterlife. Lost souls in a perpetual state of disappointment.

I was brought up in perpetual terror of Limbo. My mother threatened me with Limbo if I did not eat any vegetables, refused to wash my ears, take my cough medicine or threw darts at my sister. Limbo was for children who were never to see the face of God and His choirs of angels. For some reason, my mother took poetic licence with the Church's dictat that Limbo only existed for dead kids who did not make it to baptism, and extended it to include a raft of misdemeanours. My four year-old brain had to take daily decisions on what was allowable during play time, in case of a premature death leading to a one-way ticket to Limbo.

It was an odd approach to child-rearing. I guess my mother was sly and kind enough to realise that Limbo was the perfect deterrent for young children to stay healthy and safe. Maybe she got her Limbo and Purgatory all mixed up. Whatever it was, for a while, it worked. I was determined that the one place I was not going to end up in, in perpetutity, was Limbo. I cannot determine the damage it did to my sanity or my outlook of life in the future.

Limbo is part of our vernacular. Management gurus have made a career of reminding us that in life things are never in black and white, and always some shade of grey. Think of U2’s ‘Stuck in a moment’, any status where a person or a project is held up, and nothing can be done until something else happens or lurches into life. Think of a girl who has left you hanging on a phone and may or just about may not get back. Limbo has extended as far as a programming language for writing distributed systems and has a place in legal jargon. It is found in poetry, theatre, comic books and anti-submarine weapons systems.

As I grew up, I embraced Limbo. We discovered the Limbo dance in puberty. We coaxed unsuspecting girls to sway their chests under a home-made limbo stick in the basement of somebody's birthday party, waiting for the proverbial moment when the last contestant grazed the stick or hit the floor. In the 1970s and early 80s, the term 'Limbo Rock' became synonymous with the Malta we loved to hate. We were trapped in a place we never made, with escape the only option to a better life with an unlimited choice of toothpastes, foreign imports and freedoms to embrace. Limbo is now for middle age. When you are too old not to know your limits, too young to actually start to believe that most of what you wanted to get done will never happen, and that you have to let go of the superflous. And make your life simple again, like it used to be, when you were a child.

On 2nd October at 3.30pm, my son Jacob decided to put a piece of toy into his ear, while his mother was preparing his tea. It was, admittedly, the first day at his new school – a traumatic experience that can excuse momentary acts of madness in any four year-old. But by the 3rd October, several attempts by competent doctors to extract the bug’s eye from the right ear proved unsuccessful. So at precisely 13.10, on my wife’s birthday, I found myself at a St Luke’s operating theatre, dressed in those frightening green gowns, to ‘help calm down’ my only offspring while he was anaesthesised. And as my son struggled in sheer terror in my arms while four people tried to put a plastic mask on his face and told him to breathe out to make the orange balloon fill with air, my mind tried to cope with my own terror in slow-motion by spinning elsewhere.

How have we lived with stuff about original sin for millenia?

How many grieving parents have had to deal with idiots telling them their newborn are in a place called Limbo?

How have we continued to believe that real life bureaucracy is extended to the afterlife, that not having a child's passport stamped with baptism in this life means you've lost your child's insurance policy to a better life in the next?

How do you explain Limbo in a world where six million children die of malnutrition every year and where the much-maligned Muslims believe that children go straight to heaven without passing any test?

What kind of religion makes you believe children go to Limbo?

Then Jacob stopped screaming and went limp in my arms. And a kind lady with blonde streaks in her hair tapped me on the shoulder and led me out of the door. And I wept, like I have not done, for 22 years.

And then on the 6th October, the Pope goes and banishes Limbo.

It made me feel like Jacob putting the eye of a plastic bug into his ear had some kind of purpose in it. Thousands of distraught parents have one less pain to think about. And my mother is grinning somewhere, knowing she prevented me from having more fillings than I now actually have by reminding me of Limbo as I prepared to bite into another chocolate burbon biscuit, smuggled under the bed sheets.

Now Limbo’s no more, I kind of miss it. There is now no buffer. No Chinese walls. No waiting room. You’re either up, or down. Good or Bad. I thought of writing a story called ‘I want my Limbo back’. I wonder if the term will fade out of common use. And one night, I dreamt of my mother and father at the Sliema Chalet under the moonlight in a fifties evening dancing the Limbo Rock again.

Every limbo boy and girl
All around the limbo world
Gonna do the limbo rock
All around the limbo clock
Jack be limbo
Jack be quick
Jack go unda limbo stick
All around the limbo clock
Hey, let's do the limbo rock

Chubby Checker, Limbo Rock.

The unbearable lightness of summer

2006-09-24T21:18:00.000+02:00

There is something as inevitable about the tail end of summer as the drop of water that splats on your windscreen as you are about to exit the Santa Venera tunnel.

We’re tired.

Summer in Malta is when the brain fries and time stands still. Same as it ever was, splutters David Byrne in my car, in the middle of a hazy Monday morning traffic jam.

Summer is the sickly-sweet smell of diesel as you skip over the bubble gum at City Gate and meet a pseudo-Peruvian band next to McDonalds. Summer is sea salt on your lips as you watch Gozo recede into the distance from an August ferry. Summer is half days for some and grumpy service all the time and sweat snaking its way down your back and turning your shirt into your own branded map.

Something stirs the parts not yet ravaged by cynicism and 45 summers.

Surprise me, my old rock. Show me there is still a pulse in the scorched earth.

Summer is Babel. MTV TRL Generation X has long moved on from beer festivals. DJs germinate out of billboards at the same rate as ants crawl out of August kitchen cupboards. Tribute bands at the Splash and Fun rub shoulders with memories of the real thing at Luxol. Renzo and N’faly Kouyate’ bring world music to the Verdala Palace.

Everything is bigger and louder. The BBQ sets on the beach get 21st century. We have gone from weekend village festas to one-week events brimming with local ‘talent’ on sets in front of the parish. Big Bangs outgun throaty bells, rattling window panes, scaring the very old and the very young. A rogue petard catches a kid’s clothing on fire. We celebrate our own unique blend of festa junk in village squares – the nougat, the broken beer bottles, the holy confetti. Empty vessels.

Ash. Flaked skin. Sun-burnt tourists in string vests, visible G-strings. Tattooed backs. Perhaps the ink will cope with another twenty more summers.

Oh you pretty things. The English language girls get chatted up by the testosteroned Maltese boys in pigeon English. Birgu Waterfront is accosted by pretty designers and nouveau speculators. Locals watch bemused and reverse their vehicles to avoid head-on collision on a one-way, two-way road in front of the table tops with the muted lamps.

Cranes pepper the skylines. Nothing will stand in the way of progress and urban development. The huddled trees outside Castille shudder and whisper to convince responsive politicians to extend the Development boundaries. Today a town house in Sliema, a washroom that is really a penthouse, tomorrow Ta’ Cenc. The devastation will be felt long after this generation of decision-makers have stopped feeling anything.

Who pays for this? A girl collapses in a doorway in Paceville in the early hours and dies. Somebody’s daughter; somebody else’s responsibility.

Go home, they scream, at what remains of the boat, as the Africans try to make it to shore.

St Paul would have a rough time getting shipwrecked here these days.

Roger Waters does not trust the Government. In the break before the Dark Side of the Moon, the giant screen snaps politicians in the complementary seats engrossed in animated conversations with the business community in the expensive seats. For a moment, spontaneous boos and laughter startle the men with the pot bellies.

Hilarity. Nearly forty years after the Prisoner, I discover I am not a number, but a Brand. We drive next to taxpayers’ billboards and the dirt, over the pot holes, diverted round another MEPA-blessed supermarket.

It’s about the product, stupid. It’s about wanting to do something about it, instead of raping it. It’s about education and customer service instead of treating our environment like a toilet and fleecing others. If we go for mascots again to show our true face, let’s go for the guy with the hard hat or the loadsamoney plasterer.

The cicadas are hoarse. A wasps’ nest takes residence outside my son’s balcony. In a designer office with muted lights, the drains get blocked every week. Tourism dips, chairmen resign, two trawlers are sunk in the presence of dignitaries. The fish are puzzled, but divers and hoteliers hope they will congregate for the party all the same.

The first shots ring out on September 1st. We can shoot them in the air, we can shoot them on the water, we will never surrender to a bird’s right to fly over the Archipelago of Malta. The GWU shifts uncomfortably as the port workers go their own way.

Love Lost. On a Sunday afternoon, Shevchenko races to the crowd at Stamford Bridge and kisses a blue shirt on prime time TV. Down at the Milan Club in Qormi, the die-hard rossoneri burn posters of the mercenary No. 7. The Juve fans prepare for life in Serie B. The World Cup plastic flags must have made it to skip land by now. Football will be strange, this winter.

Give me some space. Teenagers who cannot find it on land, find it online on MySpace. From the hum of her PC in B’Kara, MaltaChick1 competes with Geriatric27 in Slough for the attention of a global online audience. The Maltese discover reality TV. The Annual Awards ceremonies have replaced the Annual Rabbit shows. Air-conditioners hum, the lights twinkle in the courtyard, despite the surcharge.

So we sail. Watch the twin keel of the catamaran slice through the morning. Hug the first beer of the day, watch the light hit the bastions. Laugh, like a four year-old.

Doesn’t Malta look manageable from the sea?

Maybe summer is about waiting.

We wait for Smart City to make us smarter. To get rid of our inferiority complexes that make us feign superiority, reward mediocrity, resist change, recycle the same faces. We shall prevail despite our disastrous placing in Eurovision, the lack of FDI, the kids moving to Continental addresses. The Opera House will be used again. We will stop pissing against walls, stop chucking our rubbish in our neighbours’ back yard, stop worrying about everybody else’s business and plant some greenery outside our doors. We shall travel on a low-cost airline to a regional city with access to a train network. We shall read more, talk less, make great music, make love to those we love. We are all connected: by blood, by football ties, by You Tubes, by curiosity and index fingers pointed at the sky. We will realise someone moved our cheese, and that we have to race to find some more in different places.

Fingers rattle a keyboard.

As the moist clouds start to build over Siggiewi hill, you can almost touch the regret at the passing of another summer.

Tricolore

2006-07-09T13:00:00.000+02:00

Yesterday there was a hilarious Tanti Burlo' cartoon in the Times . Its subtlety will be lost on anybody who does not live on this island. Suffice to say that a) Malta has a well-publicised problem with 'illegal' migrants that has revealed the fascist / insular underbelly of a supposedly Catholic culture b) Malta has a well-publicised problem with bird hunting, which is the vice of 10,000 washed and unwashed, who regularly hold various Governments to ransom c) tonight is World Cup night and half the nation will watch with bathed breath while the other half will disguise itself as francais or feign disdain and d) someone entrepreneurial has made a killing in silly plastic flags fixed to vehicles of all shapes and sizes.

I am old enough to remember 1982, the last time an azzurri team made it to a World Cup Final with any real chance of winning, and the mesh of tangled bodies in Chris's parents' living room. And the night of tricolori flags on the Sliema front and bemused tourists toting large cameras, wondering if they had been transplanted for a moment to Circo Massimo.

Nothing much has changed, in the football-fried frenzy of the populace.

And in the meantime, the sun savages and wrinkles skin, runs lines across the hasiras, keeps the ACs screeching next to to the solar panels, dries up all sources of natural water and greenery.

And soon, I will be 45 and striking another year off the tree of life. And pretending the mirror lies.

From Technology to Dust

2006-06-28T17:20:00.000+02:00

You know things have really changed for ever when you take them for granted.

Three weeks ago, my team of super geeks realised that we were going to miss the afternoon matches in Germany unless 'we did something about it'. We work in one of those buildings designed to serve a designer's ego (doors that don't look like doors, wash hand basins that look like concrete slabs, a kitchen not wide enough to swing a cat around.... you know what I mean). And signficantly, no TV in the space-age boardroom.

I called my friend at the Cable TV company and persuaded him to give me a Sports Channel feed and send an installer with a set top box. The installer was slightly surprised to find he was setting up his kit in a server room.

Giselle then remembered that she had an old TV at home. The geeks founds some space for it among the servers. But definitely not enough space for six men to pay homage to Totti, Beckham & Co.

Two days later, the head of geeks turned up with some software.

So fast forward to yesterday.

I was on the tail end of my '404' - a daily conference over VoIP with a bunch of people in Malta and the UK. Brasil are starting to get to grips with Ghana

My friend in Rio is on Skype, watching the game in Germany via Satellite, chattering to me about Ronaldo's 90kgs.

Ronaldo does his bit of magic.

CALL ME NOW!!! shouts the message on Google Talk.

I click a mouse without thinking, as Ronaldo's gap tooth smile fills my laptop screen.

"Can you hear them?" screams my friend through my headset, above the rattle of firecrackers in a street somewhere in Rio de Janeiro.

"We certainly wouldn't have been doing this a year ago!" I shouted back, muting the sound on my VoIP call, as someone in the UK rumbled on about statistics and return on investment, blissfully unaware of what was going on in Malta, Germany, Rio......

I didn't even know you, a year ago, I thought, driving back home later. Until we bumped into each other on Flickr and ended up in online conversations on life, the universe, and Ronaldinho Gaucho.

Nobody is spared, from the onslaught of the new over the old. Not even my three year-old. We are currently working on a project together... a story that has taken a life of its own, as I drive him to kindergarten in the morning. We had got to a stage in the narrative where he needed to buy a present for someone on another planet, fast. "Where are you going to get a suitable present, Jacob?" I asked, taking my foot off the accelerator as the next speed camera appeared, thinking of the toy shop that has just closed down to make space for another wine bar. "Don't be silly, Daddy," he chuckled, "On the Internet, of course! Mummy even got me these shorts on the Internet. Look!"

I laughed, thought of how his world is nothing like mine was, how he is already accelerating past me while I struggle with my daily dose of You Tube , Lifehacker , Boing Boing and TechCrunch .

Then, just as my brain was spiralling to morbid thoughts of leaving him behind and dust to dust, I came across this.

Which kind of puts things into perspective.

We live in wonderful times.

Americans don't get it

2006-06-25T20:02:00.000+02:00

OK, so the World Cup hasn't been all that brilliant till now. There have been a couple of bravado goals (sic. Fernandez yesterday against Mexico, Frings in that first Game for the Germans), and the fans have been cool with telegenic painted faces (except for that stand-off between Germans and drunken Brits in Stuttgart (beer still served while plastic chairs flew from one end of the square to the other).

But nothing, nothing justifies this!

This from a gun-toting nation that thinks a ball is oval, 'soccer' can only be war (sic. Mr Bruce Arena before Italy v USA), and expects any sport event to be interrupted every 30 seconds by a commercial for flatulence (I know... 21st Century attention span keeps diminishing, and the US does have its share of flatulent people.) In 1984, on holiday in Florida, I drove round six blocks in desperate search of a sports bar showing the World Cup Final. I returned to my hotel room to find that Brasil v Italy was being transmitted, after all - but the commercials had eaten into everything up to the kick off.

I know. I need to rant at something. Someone. Anyone.

The USA will do for now.

Maybe it's the time of the year

2006-06-24T00:06:00.000+02:00

Everything and everyone is frying. From the air-conditioners to the bandsmen playing their brass outside the electric parish of St Nicholas. The World Cup rumbles on, Italian football is on the verge of collapse. Max watches Shevchenko score a penalty for Ukraine, and cannot find it in him to forgive the Chelsea-bound mercenary, despite the 173 goals scored for AC Milan, or the hundreds of times the Ukranian gave grown men a rush of blood to the head.

Or maybe it's the way middle age infiltrates the old grey cells and whispers Stop wasting time doing stuff you don't want to do. If you want to get something done that Jacob will be proud of, you have to do it your way... your way...

It's true. Ever since Shevchenko fidgeted his way through that press conference and said he just had to leave Milan to learn decent English and bond with his family in Knightsbridge, nothing's quite been the same.

Max scratches his head and contemplates ten fingers, waiting to claw a keyboard.

Get a life, says the radio voice in the head, full of forty-five year-old static.

Don't get into trouble, whispers his soulmate.

Let's go and watch Xtruppaw next weekend, says Shaun

All revved up and no place to go

2006-05-14T12:46:00.000+02:00

Things have a habit of happening when you're out of the way on holiday, blissfully incommunicado with no email or internet. In September last year, while I was contemplating a five-course feast in Chiaramonte Gulfi in Sicily, the Depeche Mode concert in Milan sold out in five minutes. A second date was added the next day, and that sold out in just over half an hour.

I tried to convince myself this was fate. I mean, I wasn’t really into Depeche Mode. I only woke up to their blend of electronic music once Dave Gahan nearly died of a heroin overdose and got most of his torso tattooed. My brother Shaun’s band Syrup had done a mean cover of Enjoy the Silence. I bought a couple of CDs, loved the dark stuff. But that was about all I had noted of Depeche Mode for the best part of two decades.

But one morning last November I got out of bed early, spent two hours on eBay and bought a ticket for the Milan concert from a woman called Valentina - for a lot of money. Then I thought, sod it, I’m middle-aged, I can afford to stay in a couple of decent hotels. So I booked those too - one in Milan, and another in Rome – because a working man deserved a week’s break to play and travel in style. By breakfast, Depeche Mode was starting to look like an expensive exercise in impulsiveness.

Fast-forward to five minutes trying to browse through Zara’s men spring collection while my three year-old wrestled with a red-faced kid with the neck of an ox. There, among the rails and hangers, I had a chance encounter with a flaming red t-shirt with the nostalgic reprise…..‘NOW is the time to relive the WONDERFUL EIGHTIES.’

My generation came of age in that twilight zone, squashed somewhere between the late seventies and early eighties. We were starved of most things essential for the body or soul: a credible University; toothpaste; foreign imports; dangerous films; and jobs without a patron. My friend Pierre licked stamps for six months at the Philatelic Bureau while on a student-worker placement. A girlfriend’s claim to fame was refusing to give up some of her UK chocolate stock to a Customs Officer at Luqa, and then proceeding to eat all ten Cadbury’s Milk Tray boxes in front of the ‘Nothing to declare’ channel.

Between 1978 and the early eighties, we were four testosterone-fuelled guys in the back of Godfrey’s father’s blue Polo, howling to Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell and trying to figure out why punk had never made it to Malta. Paceville was a sleepy place with Casablanca and Crow's Nest offering neon lit ‘poola’ and the greatest juke box. The best chicken and chips was at Grotty Pub, as long as you could bear being press-ganged into Eddie’s sing-along on a Thursday night. The best value hamburger was the Mexican burger at Sunrise Inn. In our pre-cholesterol days, we saved up for tortellini at Borsalino, and licked the cream off the plate. When we were broke, we stopped for early morning burgers from Golden 7, or huddled in conversations on Kafka and politics in Rabat, around 10c coffee in a glass and a mountain of pastizzi at the Crystal Palace.

Music was our release from what was outside our door. Chris had the best hi-fi and VHS system on the island in his parents’ flat in Parallel Street. Saturday night was video night. Chris made great toasted sandwiches. We curled up on the sofa and watched whatever few films were available in VHS format.

We never pulled any women.

But we listened to some great sounds. King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, the Floyd, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Joni Mitchell – and whatever still resonated from the sixties. David Bowie’s God status with his Berlin trilogy was consolidated with Scary Monsters. What we did not own, we taped.

Then the eighties kicked in, and everything went belly up. We rapidly went from platforms to ankle boots. Women discovered shoulder pads, t-shirt dresses, big hair, and named their daughters Kylie and Sue Ellen. Bono got a mullet. I went from an unsuccessful DIY perm to a trimmed beard and blue Spandau Ballet baggy pants with elastic. For a while, I thought orange leg warmers and a burgundy boiler suit were cool. The only one who resisted the fashion tide of change was Chris. His pièce de résistance, a netted blue t-shirt and a stained pair of shorts, became a pornographic piece with the years.

Music got crap, big time. Even Bowie got crap. Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul, Adam Ant, Culture Club, Bucks Fizz, the New Romantics.... the names still send shivers down the old rock ‘n roll spine. The Riffs said it all with their anthem Dance music for the eighties depression. For one night, we witnessed a near riot at the Ambassador in Valletta, when rows of cinema chairs collapsed like dominoes.

We stumbled into theatre, into a make-believe world away from the beatings and the school protests. For a brief period I bailed out of my accountancy articles then realised I would starve being a jobbing actor and chickened back to my dull text books.

Some things started to change. My sister got her friends along, and Chris improved his repertoire of closed toasts. The dating started in earnest as one or two of us got lucky and stumbled into the awkward, groping world of sex. Except the girls wanted to neck in more secluded places than in front of Chris’s VHS, and we really had to get serious about earning some money.

I used my first pay cheque to buy gleaming silver hi-fi and spent three years paying it back on instalments. My second purchase, a Yamaha DT 125, was regularly stripped of its mirrors and mud-guard because Japanese spare parts could no longer be imported. So you had to go and buy your bike’s body parts back from the shady guy at the Monti on Sunday. I seemed to go about life either soaked or bruised. There were moments of respite from the groundhog crises – Italy accidentally won the World Cup in 1982. A Dylanesque songwriter called Grimaud inspired us to hold lighters in the dark before the rest of the world caught on. But generally, we were in silent freefall. As a generation with no aspirations other than to survive, and hope we got lucky - somewhere, somehow - our horizons shrunk back into the clenched fist of the archipelago.

Then on 1st June 1984, my indestructible mother succumbed to cancer and I realised life had to be seized by the scruff of the neck. The next year, I got a one-way ticket to London and bailed out.

Gradually, all my friends did. Two were already on to Sea Malta contracts and travelled, others got on the timeshare sales' bandwagon in Lanzarote, while the doctors were out on a limb in Saudi or the UK. We became the nomad generation.

And then, for some reason, in the nineties, we started to drift back, quietly. Some of us made kids, late. A few joined the establishment. Most of us woke up to thinner hair, bags under our eyes and proper love-handles. Chris now wears a suit but still needs a style challenge. Sometimes I circle showrooms with gleaming bikes. Except the speed cameras would nail you screaming through the tunnels. You cannot really get a child seat on the back of a Honda Fireblade.

On the 18th February 2006, I joined 20,000 kindred souls to scream songs about angst, drugs, emptiness and the fragility of life. And I realised that instead of travelling backwards, to the eighties, we had gone full tilt, fast forward. Just like Dave Gahan, the front-man with the tattoos, we were not looking over our shoulders or hanging on to memorabilia T-shirts. We were experienced, hard-nosed, dangerous, heart on your sleeve, 21st century online, kids now.

Maybe the night was about that heady place where life meets the powerful memory bank of music. Music, our first love, that like our basic sense of smell, can roll the clock back - but also carry you somewhere else. To that place where for a second, restlessness and doubts and regret are pushed aside and you live for the moment.

And you realise, that somehow not only have you survived the eighties soundtrack to your life. But that you've finally arrived for the second half of your life.

Intact.

The white water

2006-01-29T20:25:00.000+01:00

Max is always in hibernation at this time of the year. And this winter, the island has decided to go down the low-energy route, sapping him of humour and drive. Perhaps it's just the rain or the lack of warm light - whatever it is, Max is dug in for winter, under layers of fleeces and wrinkles.

This morning the weekend decided to provide a diversion in the form of a bright morning, and Max went down to Exiles to watch the waves. He waited for thirty minutes, to try and find something to photograph on the horizon. When none appeared, Max remembered that this was how he used to be, when he was 18 and restless and wondered if he would remain island-bound for the rest of his life.

Perhaps life always goes full circle.

The Year End Stock Take

2005-12-06T21:44:00.000+01:00

“I just don’t get you,” she says.

"You have everything a man your age could desire. And yet you behave like life is elsewhere. Can’t you just be comfortable in your own skin? It’s year end. Take stock. The promised land is actually here, outside your door, on this tiny island".

He takes a sip of Glenfiddich, closes his eyes and curls his toes. The malt whisky kindles the coldest parts. Limestone makes the house shiver.

The nation turns its back on the Aladdin paraffin heater. Some take to bed with an old green hot water bottle.

Recycle. Solar panels are no longer space-like. The island’s version of space mountain smoulders toxic waste. What little land is left turns green this time of the year. The environmentally-friendly, the unleaded, a compost heap. The eroding national Heritage.

A nation obsessed with colour. “Do you think God could be black”, asks the nine year-old Johnnie? What if Pope Benedict had Afro hair instead of neatly-combed silver?

A quick guide to starting a cult. Get a suit, rattle a cane, get patriotic, write hate mail in the Times, rally bored kids on street corners, scare parents into believing their safe way of life is under threat.

Shame we’re not born colour-blind.

Rebirth. The bulldozers finally move on to the Jumbo Lido. Grandad takes off his dentures. Jenny stares at a plastic teacup. It’s separation (not divorce), IVF (in a London clinic), a new child born to parents with no hope of help in Catholic Malta.

There’s no such thing as new news. Road deaths, hospital beds, fuel hikes, bird ‘flu, public deficit, a vaccination for all your ills. Wipers battle with the rain, Qormi floods again, a new pot hole opens in the middle of a new road built to meticulous EU standards. The Maltese football team draws two games on the trot. Croatians cause collateral damage. A fireworks factory explodes, rubble walls tumble. Hunters with big boats and sniffer dogs. Nodding Dogs. Public Sector Chairmen. Swings and roundabouts. Check who’s in, who’s out, yesterday’s breakfast, today’s toast.

Politicians jostle for attention on the usual side shows. Never mind the airport taxes, says the Prime Minister. Other nations need to get away for a holiday. Here, you drive to Golden Bay and see a perfect orange sunset in winter for free.

Terror TV never had it so good. An earthquake in Pakistan, a landslide in Guatemala, a bombing in Amman. Weekly beheadings, regular suicide bombings, a red double-decker explodes on daytime TV in Tavistock Square. On the crowded London Tube, a space is made around Ahmed and his ghetto blaster. Newspapers. Shields. Al Qaeda is recruiting in a shopping complex near you.

Embrace the new economy. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the rest compile spreadsheets on residual income. The young read the signs and learn to vote with their feet. Greed. Property hikes. Fish Farms. Big Fish. Small Fish. Jason gets fired on Christmas Eve on the last day of probation. Posturing. Heads of Government occasionally lose their head. Two kids take 30 seconds to remove four hub caps and leg it to a waiting Range Rover.

The comeback kids are back. Madonna has a new dance routine, Britney has a new baby, Kate Bush has a new CD, Bowie has a heart attack. Grown men weep over a football match in Istanbul. George Best is finally home and dry.

Welcome to digital convergence. A twelve year-old has a Webcam, the new Fascists have a website, Lisa wants the flip top Motorola for her birthday. Pod casts, pod pants, downloads, Bluetooth. The mother of all toothaches.

We can talk on Skype or Gtalk, chat on MSN, share pictures on Flickr, upload content via RSS.

How can you be so lonely, how can you be so disconnected?

It’s that Christmas feeling. Every village has a church spire, every skyline has a crane, every village hall has crib. The Three Wise Men go electric. There’s business for all, for the good and the bad, from the fenek bar to the lounge bar of the five star. The party girl mixes her drinks and throws up on his lap. The quiet guy lands a punch on his boss’s nose. She scratches her name on the bonnet of a gum-metal GTI. Scuffles. Group hugs. A stolen kiss in the car-park. Old friends embrace under the Christmas lights and laugh about the new wrinkles. Christmas carols in the rain. Marathon telethons. Red eyes. There is enough food left to feed a starving village. Cats attack garbage bags. Lightning rips the sky into two white sectors.

Pantomimes, balloons and loud loneliness.

Enjoy the silence.

Dad is too old to dance the funky chicken. Tom closes his eyes to keep out the rain and dreams of a kite and running and running.

Resolutions. For weight-loss, hair-gain, delivery from all forms of nicotine and alcohol addiction. Delivery from betrayals, love lost and found, tears in a cul de sac, the unbearable desire to feel eighteen again for one last time.

Longing. Adults long to be kids, teenagers long to be adults, children long for presents and a hug from Santa.

This is not a mid-life crisis, is it?

A hug still costs nothing.

In Andy’s wish list, Malta has a freeway that stretches far out into the horizon, and is available for anybody with a sense of adventure. As long as you walk with your hands in your pocket.

The smell of salty sea air.

Walk.

Then the bells in Siggiewi suddenly find their voice. In the house across the garden, the countdown’s started, the champagne is flowing, grown men sing in drunken voice.

She is looking at him, waiting.

“I am ready”, he says. “Let’s go to what’s next”.

God punched a hole through the sky

2005-11-24T12:05:00.000+01:00

Max likes Brighton. Because it is electric, hip, sad, windy.. is a home for dysfunctional people... and has a restless sea. And, in November, the sky changes mood and hues by the time you go for your camera.

If Max is to leave his constipated island, he will probably head for Brighton.

Closer

2005-10-22T21:29:00.000+02:00

Max has been lost for words for weeks.

He has entered a new world of office life, desks, morning school shuttle, office politics. He is still trying to get used to the vernacular.

At times like this, Max clings to what makes him stronger.

Transit

2005-08-28T19:42:00.000+02:00

Max is in the waiting room.

Last week, he sold his much maligned 10 year-old Hyundai Accent. There was no time to say goodbye, only to sign log books.

Sometime at the end of September, Max takes delivery of a Ford Focus. The reviews say 'value for money, family hatchback with conservative looks'. Max really wanted to buy a Golf GTI or a four-wheeler to ride the potholes. Max thinks his next car will have soul.

Tomorrow, Max and his brood take the hydrofoil to Pozzallo for an 11-day break to Sicily.

In October there is a long-term contract to grapple with. It will be the first time in six years that Max has to adjust to a routine and go to an office.

In February, Max wants to go to Milan to watch Depeche Mode with some new friends.

Sometime, Max will pick up a copy of the Times, and feel that he can connect with what is going on outside his door. A cursory review of the letters pages, or a chance overheard conversation between three men in a bar proposing their own Orwellian solution to Malta's 'illegal immigrants' problem is enough to send Max scuttling to a bottle of wine.

Max wonders why he can never quite get a grasp of the present.

Saturdays

2005-08-13T21:50:00.000+02:00

OK, so this is a photo without any artistic merit. It’s just a snapshot of a middle-aged geek who found fatherhood late. But it means something to me. This is what Jacob and I do every Saturday morning. We drive to Sliema, a seaside town. I get tangled in my iPod. Jacob runs, chatters about his week, occasionally hops up to listen to a track if he sees that I have not answered him immediately. And then we go to the Café Oasis for our croissants, and me for my cappuccino.

This is us this morning. When we bumped into Pierre, and Charlotte and Scarlett and Pierre snapped what we never see. Depeche Mode on my headphones. The sparkle of the sea. Jacob contemplating his ‘3’ badge, frowning into the sun and feeling more grown-up than yesterday.

And then we moved on.

The desert

2005-08-12T21:38:00.000+02:00

August slows down the brain. Air-conditioners hum 24/7, traffic jams get longer, mothers get irritable with their young, fathers shrug their shoulders and secretly lust over the language school babes in their skimpy holiday gear. Trade Unions mired in the past threaten national strikes in sympathy of workers sacked from Interprint. Public transport chiefs call a work to rule because they want state subsidy increased. And the President of the Republic is on a private visit, overseas, to escape the heat.

And in the space that it took the Brits to build the M25, and entire sections of the M40, the Maltese contractors continue to build the road linking Siggiewi to the outside world. The sign promising new roads for a better life is covered with snow dust. Minister Mullet's PR visits to the brave new roads has, to date, excluded the Siggiewi road. Cars navigate down different goat tracks every day, as different sections of a road not longer than 1,000 metres get closed on a daily basis to accommodate diggers straight out of Bob the Builder, falling debris, and men walking slowly. Only on weekends and feast days does the route remain unchanged, when the men in string vests and cowboy hats go away and do what the rest of the nation does.

It's a summer that has to date included: bouts of work, bouts of lethargy, a friend's wife dying in the middle of divorce proceedings, other friends contemplating break ups, new daily routines to drive Jacob to summer school, parties that never quite took off, snatched fixes of poetry books, red wine instead of white, conversatons that go nowhere, cicadas screaming a constant, mad razor.

At night, Max dreams of driving an red Mustang across the Mojave desert.

Max is woken up by Jacob announcing it is almost time to celebrate his third birthday.

44

2005-07-30T23:18:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow, 31st July, in about 30 minutes, I will be 44.

Bob Hope once famously said that middle age is when you start to show your age around your middle.

To celebrate official middle age, I have compiled my 44 list. The 44 things I have learnt in 44 years of life.

There’s no order in the numbering, no point to be made. Other than to establish a sense of order that tends to be absent in my real life.

44 Lessons

1. 23 is a good age to break free from your roots. At 23, I ran away to London, just as people in Malta started to believe that tear-gas and police beatings were something to be managed in the daily course of life. I gravitated from a dump in Holloway to a flatlet in Upper Street Islington to a garden flat in Willesden which was up and coming but never quite came to leafy Buckinghamshire with the smell of wood smoke. Anybody aged 23 in Malta should pack and go and get a taste for something larger. And acquire some degree of perspective and humility.

2. I do not go for stereotypes in women, as evidenced by two marriages to beautiful, intelligent, foreign and remarkable women. The first - a small, curvy brunette, full of Greek passion, an artist, aromatherapist, aspiring singer, shopaholic maniac non–stop chatter box; the second - tall, lean, blonde, cool Britannia, gardener, writer, perfectionist, industrious DIY expert. I seduced both with words - money and good looks not being readily-available at the time. Both eventually took pity and cooked him beautiful meals.

3. Kids don’t make sense until you make your own. When you do, you realise they’re just like you. I have contributed to the creation of a beautiful child. Sometimes, I can remember exactly the night it happened. Sometimes, I wonder how it happened.

4. Football is poetry. At the age of 12, I scored a hat-trick in 10 minutes on the De La Salle football track, reserved for the more marginalised of footballers. When I scored the third goal and turned to celebrate, my ankle caught the edge of the boulder cum goalpost, and my ankle ballooned on impact. For a moment, with the adrenalin rush, I felt no pain.

5. Football is cruelty. AC Milan v Liverpool, Champions League, Istanbul. A six minute sequence that still sends shivers down my crooked spine.

6. Mentors tend to arrive in the early years. My mentor was my cousin Mario, now a Professor of Economics at Pretoria University. Mario shaved his head when everyone had perms, introduced me to dangerous books, alternative religions, women with bangles and hairy armpits, Jim Morrison, Wagner, Talking Heads and a bunch of fellow badly-shaven dropouts. He also housed me when I ran away from home at 17, for all of six weeks. All the way from San Gwann to Mosta. I have never been a mentor to anyone.

7. Theatre is a home for dreamers, exhibitionists and misfits. I have done some theatre work he is proud of. At least, it proved you can be shy and still beat your fears by doing what you fear most. Standing above another’s head.

8. Blood can run thicker than water. I am proud of my siblings. Especially of my 28 year-old brother Shaun, a pure, idealistic, talented guitarist, artist and semi-permanent student. Shaun always sees through me.

9. Beauty is all about the senses. The sound of the sea at Ghajn Tuffieha as you gently fall sleep on the stomach of someone you love. Your child’s first cry. The smell of the nape of your lover’s neck. The smell of freshly ground coffee. A swim under moonlight. The first time you touched. The cliché’s all work because they are the result of millennia of passion and sensuality and humanity.

10. The best way of seeing Rome is on the back of a lambretta, preferably holding on to a girl in a mini-skirt called Francesca.

11. There’s a lifetime to worry about things you can do nothing about: love-handles, lovelessness, receding hairlines, lost careers, cancer, loss, scoliosis, getting older, not making it to NYC with Jacob, women walking by and looking through you, cars to replace, bills to pay, years rolling by, Malta going to the dogs, the unbearable lightness of being.

12. Nothing much good ever comes out of nostalgia. Especially nostalgia for an imaginary island. Or as Bennato used to croon… ‘l’isola che non c’e’. All those migrants out there, in grey weather, thinking of sparkling blue sea and bobz biz-zejt, please take note.

13. When people are cornered, they are capable of the vilest of acts. In Malta, the cocktail party system inevitably closes ranks to protect its own.

14. Small places breed small minds. Living on a small island requires a thick skin, a sense of humour and a boat.

15. Paid work, in many cases, brings out the worst in people. You always have to serve someone…Bob Dylan got that one right.

16. Young women and older men will always be chemically attracted to each other.

17. Nothing beats the company of a beautiful, intelligent woman for an evening. Assuming you are a male heterosexual.

18. When in doubt, travel. Despite the Maltese Government’s best efforts to stifle any inclination in its citizens to do so. Treat the departure taxes with contempt.

19. A quick introduction to Maltese environmental values should start with a visit to any street to watch a Maltese housewife wash the front door of her house. Sneak a look at the spick and span of the house behind her. Watch her sweep the dirty water down the road, for it to nest in front of a neighbour’s door.

20. Women are as treacherous as men in sex and love. They just know how to dispense their treachery silently, with a smile and superior style.

21. Old friends get old. Old friends get to be part of the system, write letters in the papers, take fewer risks, tell me to keep my mouth shut. Sometimes you need new friends.

22. Time takes its toll on any relationship, no matter how beautiful, intense and well meaning. The difficulty is to acknowledge this, and learn how to manage expectations after the realisation. And grasp the moments.

23. The Maltese hate returned migrants almost as much as they hate illegal ones.

24. You can’t always get what you want. I still struggle to accept this. It doesn’t help that most times I don't know what I want.

25. It is possible, for a period of time, to love more than one person at the same time. There is always a price to pay for addictive relationships. They are also the ones most likely to remember on one’s deathbed.

26. A little rage is good, sometimes. A little rage all the time is bad for the heart, and the people you live with.

27. Shiny happy people are not always happy. Silent, sullen types are not always depressed.

28. The Internet has saved lives and broken others. Like all brilliant inventions, it needs to be treated with respect.

29. It is never too late unless you persuade yourself it is. Or someone has died.

30. Short skirts are dangerous, if worn by women who understand the danger.

31. A little alcohol can do wonders to free your tongue in conversation with strangers.

32. Contact lenses were one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century.

33. We are always scared. We come to this world alone, we leave it alone. In the interim, we make a little heat between the sky and the earth.

34. Men are as vain and complicated as women.

35. The liars, cheats, and cads do get away with it. All that stuff we learn at school and teach our children does not prepare us for the real world.

36. Music, good music, can still reach your darkest soul. Whether it is Rufus Wainwright on your iPod or a Peter Gabriel concert.

37. Greed is all around us. The unhappiest people I have met were millionaires. They were certainly not the most talented. They were always the ones who counted their pennies.

38. You are going to die. Every other fear should pale into insignificance.

39. Religions have a lot to answer for.

40. Chartered Accountants are rarely sexy people.

41. At 44, you realise there are things you wanted to do at 23 which you may never be able to do. If you still can, go out and do them. Now. Unless you don’t want to do them any more.

42. As you get older, birthdays become sources of some mirth.

43. At the end of the day, you just have to do it (with apologies to Nike).

44. At 44, you realise you know nothing. And that it is time to start to learn something.

This is it.

All that jazz

2005-07-18T09:44:00.000+02:00

Max spent most of the weekend at the Malta Jazz Festival. Since its inception in 1991, Max has only missed one edition, which featured the fabulous Al di Meola set - because he happened to be in the wrong part of the world at the time. Otherwise, it's been an annual pilgrimage to listen to the great and annointed and occasionally to the young, dangerous and on the rise.

The audience has grown up with the Festival. It is now older, balder, fatter, pushes buggies, spends more time next to the beer stand at the back. The Jazz Festival is an excuse to meet old acquaintances, exchange pleasantries, promise to make phone calls, and go manwatching. Or if you're a man, look out for the latest in bra straps and summer sex gear on some fading beauty.

There was something odd about this year. Perhaps it was the lack of big names. Government, the whole nation, is bust - so there is probably no money to lure back Mike Stern, Al di Meola, Chick Corea... or go for Pat Metheny or Ry Cooder.

The trouble with this year was that it lacked passion. Even danger. No Hiram Bullock getting off the stage and playing among the crowds. Nor the late, great Michel Petrucciani, all four feet of power, telling the audience that his band was 'drug-free' before launching into an explosive set.

It was all very staid. With the possible exception of Dino Saluzzi, who brought some warmth and passion. Certainly not the appalling John Zorn, who refused to come back for an encore, but was heard laughing 'fuck you' as the audience politely bayed for more (Max really wondered why...)

Or perhaps it was the audience. It knows what to expect, but secretly hopes it will be surprised. Last year, Jonathan, an English friend of Max and a very competent musician, and long fan of the festival, dared to write in a local rag that some of the fire was going out of the event. He was greeted by a particularly vicious diatribe from organisers and Maltese patriots.

This year, Jonathan stayed away.

For Max, the highlight of this year was his father. The erstwhile Willie, kicking 69, managed to sneak in to the musicians area, with a friend of his. "I'm telling you, the next act will be great," he beamed to Max. "Her name is Rosa Passos and she's from Brazil. I told her I was a great AC Milan fan. I asked her if she knows Kaka'. She nodded. Really nice lady."

Max left the festival half way through her set, the gentle, sad, bossa nova slowly fading as he realised another year had gone by, and that he had little to show for it.

Steel

2005-07-09T13:49:00.000+02:00

Bombing London is not the same as bombing New York. This is a city that has had to live with the threat of terrorist attacks since time immemorial. Some people have actually been through more than one bomb attack in their lives.' The Brits have perfected the art of the stiff upper lip against adversity. Partly it's the legacy of the Second World War and having to deal with bad weather and the daily unexpected. Like the rest of the world, glued to a TV set, Max watched the lack of panic as people who had been within seconds of losing their lives walked away from nightmare sites that had just been bombed.

There's something intrinsically British that Max admires deeply. It's the reason why Max married a British woman maddeningly different to him, why he took up British citizenship when he could, why he still regrets finally giving up on the grey and leaving the UK for good.

It's that element of cool. The one which says 'you can get this close to me, but beyond that, it's my territory.' It's about being civilized. It's about having a system to make sure things work. Sometimes at the expense of warmth and Latin tactile. Sometimes it can seem heartless.

It's about British steel.

Al-Qaeda can try and bomb the UK to bits. It will never manage to intimidate anybody. It will never get to the core of what makes Britain tick.

And Jacob and Liz, in the meantime, are bunkered in the relative safety of Alton Hampshire, among the lawns and the village pubs and afternoon teas and the tick tock of grandfather clocks in spotless, silent halls.

Max feels very alone.

Man and Boy

2005-06-30T10:39:00.001+02:00

This piece was published in M Magazine last Sunday, on 26th June 2005, accompanied by a picture I had taken of me and Jacob (linked to this blog).
____________________

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

From ‘This Be the Verse’ by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

I became a father because of 9/11, and a conviction that a man’s sperm count ebbed after the age of 40.

Until 2001, kids never featured on my life agenda. Most of my friends did not have them. Those who did belonged to a club of red eyes who worried about schooling, discipline, child-friendly restaurants – and always left a party early. And I had read the famous Philip Larkin piece early on in life, ending seminally: “… and don’t have kids yourself.”

When 9/11 happened, something deep inside my belief system changed.

And I kept on thinking…. 'If something like that happened to me…. Who would I call?'

I could count the number of people on one hand.

I was convinced that the world as I knew it was coming to an end.

By the end of September 2001, I was in a rush to leave my biological paw print on the planet. I really wanted to have a child.

With hindsight, in the general Richter scale of emotions, this was a totally illogical, selfish way of dealing with an existential crisis. But I talked my wife into believing that there was no harm in ‘trying’ as the chances of ‘success’ were remote. We were both middle-aged, stressed out and probably past our sell-by date.

In typical fashion, six weeks later, my wife announced she was pregnant and I hit the return key on my keyboard in the middle of a Word document. That moment started the rollercoaster I will ride till I die.

The reality of something ‘big’ about to happen clicked with the second scan, when I was pointed to a cursor on the monitor and told ‘That’s the baby’s heart.’ That is how I fell in love with Jacob, as a cursor on a screen. He got his name from Dylan’s son, his fair hair from his mother, and he arrived on 13th August 2002 in the middle of a sultry night. And for the first time in my life, I cried tears of joy and could not stop.

Fatherhood is the scariest, funniest, most primitive and perhaps the only meaningful experience of my 43 years of life. Someone once told me that when you become a father, it’s as if someone switches the light on, and you go into another room of your life.

I make no claim to being a good father. For the first six months of Jacob’s life, I struggled with the lack of sleep, and sometimes chickened out to crash out in the spare room. It took me ages to find the nerve to give the child a bath on my own. I had never changed a light bulb, let alone a nappy – so, initially, there were mishaps. I could not get the buggy to unfold out of the car boot. I scoured parenting websites and constantly hit low scores for ‘New Dad’ and ‘Emotional Crutch’. The scariest book by far is Gina Ford’s ‘The Contented Little Baby Book’, which drills a merciless regime for both child and parents to follow, 24/7. I tried to adjust to a new vernacular: bottle-sterilising, nappy-changing, teething, burping, colic. Sometimes I found myself peripheral.

But I muddled through it. I realised that the little guy was actually sturdier than I thought. And his desire for independence was clear from day one. I wanted to spend more time with him not because of some macho ‘pride in my next of kin’, but because it was a privilege to be close to a beautiful creature that was totally innocent, in a hurry to learn and see the world with totally new eyes.

Like millions of men before me, I cheered the first word, step and nursery rhyme, sweated my way through the first bout of ‘flu, drove on two wheels so he could have his first butterfly stitches.

Things change

I've lost my living room floor space to a mountain of train sets, play dough, flash cards and colouring books. You sit on a sofa cushion at your own risk. My CD collection sits nervously, waiting for the next crash.

Smudge the cat regularly retreats to the chair in the garden.

I cannot remember the last time I overslept. Nothing beats ‘Daddy, are you awake?’ for a thunderbolt 6.30 am wake up call.

I worry

He shows no interest in AC Milan.

His favourite word is ‘Why?’

He has watched Thomas the Tank Engine 127 times.

He insists on trying to teach English to Pickles, his teddy bear. He has got as far as ‘P’ is for ‘Pickles’.

His love of trucks and diggers is inversely proportional to my dislike for the permanent building site of this island.

He makes me laugh

Potty training took a different turn the morning he confided in me that ‘Mummy's willy had fallen off’.

My first attempt at sex education, during one of our walks, hit a wall.

‘Jacob, you were once in Mummy’s belly,’ I announced, thinking of Jonah and the whale.

‘How did I come out?’ came the quick-fire question

‘With a big push,’ I replied, latching on to a moment of inspiration.

Two days later:

‘Daddy, how did I get into mummy’s belly?’

I thought of telling him ‘with an even bigger push’… but changed the subject.

I wonder if I’ve changed

I am learning how to share. One iPod headphone for each of us. But I still get to choose the music.

His life is more important than mine. He is the only person I love unconditionally.

I refuse to judge those who choose not to have children. I was one of them. Parenthood is a personal choice. I am allergic to the starry-eyed, Mother Earth approach to raising a child.

This much I know

I cannot be his role model. I just hope he will remember me kindly.

And before that happens, I would like us both to walk down to Greenwich in Manhattan and hit the 55 Bar at 10pm, just as the jazz kicks in.

Because part of him belongs there, with me, in the city that never sleeps, in the metropolis of ash, bone and re-birth.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams

From ‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)

Why boys will be boys

2005-06-23T15:04:00.000+02:00

Max is off to Gozo, to get away from the Siggiewi Festa and try and find some head space. In the absence of anything worthy of note, here is a piece that Max wrote a couple of months ago for a magazine edited by his brother.

“The gender gap isn't just cultural brainwashing. Men and women have different hardwired psychologies, so it's normal for them to want to do different things and to do the same things in different ways”.

Prof. Nigel Nicholson, London Business School

Last week, I had one of my regular panic attacks about my two and a half year-old son being an only child and destined to a lifetime of boredom with ageing, neurotic adults at home. Lost in conversation as we paid homage to our Saturday croissant, I informed Jacob that his cousin Scarlett, aged six months, would soon be old enough to play with.

Jacob frowned, and then said ‘Will she become a boy?’

My first life memory, aged three, on my sister’s arrival, was one of sheer terror. When my mother introduced me to my ‘new beautiful baby sister’ at the back of our white Fiat 600, I kept on thinking: Why did it have to be a girl?

My friend’s son Oliver, aged 4, once famously pronounced: ‘I don’t like girls. They wear hair-bands.’

This is not a treatise about the gender gap, though there is plenty of available material to keep you happy, from the ghastly ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ to PhD dissertations.

This is simply an observation that, try as we like to bridge the sexual divide, we are still falling short in the 21st Century. Testimony to this is the feverish exchange of Internet jokes on the behavioural and cultural differences between the sexes. This week one email actually encouraged the recipient to be forwarded to ‘a few good men who need a laugh and to the select few women who can handle the truth’.

Here are some truths from this week’s selection:

Scientists have discovered a food that diminishes a woman's sex drive by 90%. It's called a Wedding Cake.

The statistic may be hard to prove but there can be no argument about the Cake.

Women have the ‘Oh dear, the toilet paper is on its last sheet: must replace it immediately’ gene. This is entirely absent in men who have the ‘Oh shit! Can you pass me a toilet roll, love?’ gene.

The toilet is the one place where all men, irrespective of their socio-economic backgrounds, find peace, repose and occasionally poetry and literature. Toilet-paper is always a coda, and is totally bereft of poetry.

Men drive to a party, women drive back.

On one New Year’s Eve, I was carried over a wobbly bridge by a woman-driver wearing a small black dress and heels. Women generally have a better sense of balance and style and no fear of heights

Women prefer 30 - 45 minutes of foreplay. Men prefer 30 - 45 seconds of foreplay. Men consider driving back to her place as part of the foreplay.

Men have always excelled at time-management.

Women have two weapons: cosmetics and tears.

The most power-crazy person I have ever come across is an overweight ‘professional’ woman who regularly burst into tears, powdered her nose in public and once left a meeting threatening to jump out of a balcony. She spent her spare time weaving an intricate web of plots and back-stabbing that led to further career-development.

Men have no opinions about curtains.

It’s all about priorities. The curtains can wait.

Men appreciate the importance of a 42 inch plasma screen. Women do not.

The plasma screen cannot wait. A plasma screen hides blemishes in Maltese plastering and comes with a large manual.

Women can use sex to get what they want. Men cannot, as sex is what they want.

Men always know what they want, even if they have no control over it.

Single-tasking men do one thing well at a time: e.g. drink a cup of coffee. In the same time a multi-tasking women can make breakfast, make the children's sandwiches, organise the window cleaner, phone the office, dress the children, write a shopping list, iron a shirt and de-flea the cat. Women have not yet realised this is an evolutionary disadvantage.

In the end, it all seems to boil down to evolution and multi-tasking. Scientists decoding the human genome have recently discovered that just 78 genes separate men from women. There is a whole world of mystery nesting in those genes.

Our physical differences extend to our brains. Women have four times as many brain cells (neurons) connecting the right and left side of their brain. Men rely easily and more heavily on their left brain to solve one problem one step at a time. Women have more efficient access to both sides of their brain and therefore greater use of their right brain.

What this translates into is that no amount of logic and social development can quite enable us to get away from the stereotype of our differences. And that when the old stereotypes do rear their head, we go back to our respective caves, sheds, garages, kitchens or wherever it is we go to and live our parallel lives.

Take football. I tried to explain to my wife, who found me lying prostrate on the floor one Sunday afternoon, that Inzaghi had just hit the post on his comeback match and I was not feeling well and that my heart palpitations meant that middle-age had finally crept into my cardio-vascular system and that my child would soon become fatherless. “Why don’t you just stop watching football?” she said. “Or just support another team?”

How do you explain to a woman that the love for your team is an indelible tattoo, that it is the only common bond between male members of a family, that marriages have been wrecked because one partner could not understand the sheer brotherhood of shouting, burping, swearing, head-banging, flinging of objects at inanimate TV’s… that football allows you not to grow up.

We are destined to live a life of contradictions.

We are obsessed with what makes us different, yet we cannot do without each other.

But the world would be infinitely less interesting if we were all the same.

I leave the final word to my 75 year-old father-in-law, a former pilot and keen blogger, on reaching the milestone of his golden wedding anniversary:

“The secret to a successful marriage is that one of the partners should spend considerable periods of time away from home; and the other partner should ideally be slightly deaf”.

Lost

2005-06-15T18:47:00.000+02:00

Summer is here but Max is elsewhere. It is not a happy place.

For seven weeks, Max worked on a project with a deadline at a client's office, in what was the equivalent of a bunker. By the last two weeks, Max was working an average of 16 hours a day. In the last three days of the project, he slept a total of six hours. The project paid well, but at the end of it, Max went back home, with an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The feeling refused to go away. This afternoon, the doctor humm'd and umm'd and prescribed some expensive medication 'to prevent the situation developing into a stomach ulcer.'

To survive, Max has been using Flickr (www.flickr.com) as a therapy vehicle. An outlet for creativity. A means of connecting with likeminded people. And out of it hatched the beginning of a collaboration project, between Max the writer and a photographer.

Over the last week, the project blew up. And Max realised that in the world of the Internet, not everything is what it seems. And in the process, a friendship was burnt and Max dug in and went to wherever men go to, to lick their wounds.

He is still there.

Strange Days

2005-05-20T12:19:00.000+02:00

When friends drop down dead at 46, it is inevitable that you dig deep. You try and find some answers, some logic, some comfort.

Max has found none. Like most of the people who yesterday went to pay their last respects to Julian Manduca - Choppy to all and sundry.

We all huddled under the cypress trees, uncomfortable in our suits and heels. Julian's brother read something. We could not hear. A girl threw up. A slight commotion, the crowd parted and the four undertakers walked past. The girl sitting on the floor shuddered. That's how we knew that Julian had been buried. Irene, my friend, Julian's wife, read something else. We lost the words to the wind. And then the crowd starting the long walk back.

And Irene saw Max in the crowd and whisphered in his ears 'I can't believe it... I still can't believe it.'

Max knows that like everyone else, he will seek the comfort of routine, family, work, loved ones, strangers.

Max knows he has to leave something worthwhile behind, before his time runs out.

Even if it is only two fingers, pointed at the sky, in a mock salute to our existence.

We just don't understand.

2005-05-18T07:58:00.000+02:00

For Julian. Gone too soon.

2005-04-16T21:08:00.000+02:00

Earlier in the week, Jacob crashed into the garden table and cut his eye. Max freaked out. Jacob thinks that the plaster is a style statement

2005-04-16T21:04:00.001+02:00

One week away from opening night. Not sleeping very well.

The Odd Couple

2005-04-07T00:53:00.001+02:00

I have been roped into Neil Simon's classic, The Odd Couple. I'm playing Felix, the neurotic divorcee, who ends up staying with his best friend Oscar, the slob, also recently divorced.

Almost two weeks away from the opening night, and the cast is still struggling with lines and cues. The props still have to show up. There is a general air of concern. It is a play with 'a lot of business' and one-liners.

Trying not to think of the clock ticking away.

But I cannot get the reams of lines into my head. Even Jacob seems to be doing better - he is starting to provide me with unsolicited prompts when he sees the script flashed in front of his breakfast yoghurt.

And to think that I got into this because he wanted to escape from the daily grind.

I last performed at the Manoel Theatre in 1983.

I'm finally old enough to play Felix.

Though there is no age-limit to being neurotic.

2005-04-03T13:09:00.000+02:00

Boy teaches bear to speak over breakfast

Jacob is trying to get Pickles, his teddy bear, to learn English. He has got as far as 'P', for Pickles. He thinks he may have better luck with numbers.

2005-04-02T21:04:00.000+02:00

Spring is here

Republic Day

2005-03-31T23:59:00.000+02:00

For some time, Max has been thinking of bowing out of this blog.

Max does not lead an interesting life. He lives on a small island. He has a small life. He has long ceased to be a member of an Air Miles Club.

And yet, on another level, there's plenty afoot.

For a start, a journey home now takes twice as long as all the roads leading to Siggiewi are dug up. The main access is now via what's best described as a goat track through what's left of an old valley. By the time Max gets home, he feels like lying down or getting a prize.

Max has also joined the iPod millions. No surprise that Max now takes his iPod to bed, and on the Saturday visits to the swings with Jacob. On most days, Max can be seen trying to untangle himself from the coil of his headphones.

Then, there was something that Julian told Max. He said that he had found it very difficult to figure out his father. Julian figures that Max is writing a blog to make Jacob understand his father.

And Max has been coerced into another play. More about that, on some other day.

This afternoon, a comment from somebody called Chris urged Max to remove one of his postings. It warned Max that he was making enemies by making snide remarks on politicians, corporates and those who hide behind them.

Max looked at his screen, sipped his camomille tea, then, almost without thinking, pressed the delete button on the post, and watched it vapourise into cyberspace.

Max was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of remorse.

Max remembers that when he was a child, he used to think that the cult TV series The Prisoner was shot in Malta. He used to go to bed with pictures of the large, inflatable white baloon chasing him to his bedroom.

In the late seventies and eighties, the baloon in Malta took shape, and the island wa s overcome by a spate of dictatorship, violence, teargas and fear. Max did what a many of his generation did - he sold his bike, bought a plane ticket, and lost himself in a large metropolis. London offered him anonymity, space, and a chance to start again. Max found his voice, got himself a career, travelled the world and made some money and real friendships.

It was only the grey that made him return to the island, ten years later. That, and the desire to own a house, with a courtyard and a cat, and to look at the waves. And some new-found sense of optimism, that the rock had changed its spots, that the place had somehow mellowed and grown up.

In 2005, there is much to point that Max had made yet another mistake.

But Max is grateful to Mr Chris. He has made him remember that there is a blog to write. And that the power of the Internet was never in the hands of the corporates, or the politicians, or those who serve them, and climb up the greasy career pole by selling their soul. Or those who continue to serve the system, silently, in fear, or in cocktail parties, because this is a small place and everybody knows everybody's business.

The fact that this blog is being written on Malta's Republic Day makes Max cackle.

Max may have deleted the post, but not the evidence.

Because Max never lies.

2005-02-15T23:49:00.000+01:00

And for a moment, Max needed nothing else

2005-02-15T23:47:00.000+01:00

The empty beach at Sandy Mouth

2005-02-15T23:46:00.000+01:00

Wild is the wind

2005-02-15T01:03:00.000+01:00

The Mill House in Coombe, Cornwall

2005-02-15T01:01:00.000+01:00

Jacob at Duck Pool, Cornwall, January 2005

Body bags

2005-01-08T21:19:00.000+01:00

The New Year is a body count.

The New Year is rows of white bags and tags, heaps of dog eared passports with fading colour pictures, orphaned children, eyeless parents, piles of rubbish and jagged tree trunks.

The New Year is investigative journalism at its worst, the living prying after the dead, trying to find some moral meaning out of the tragedy.

In the aftermath of the carnage, I have retreated to my head space. In the absence of any clarity or notion of where to head towards, in the future, away from the island, I am waiting to go to Cornwall later in the month, with Jacob and Liz. Somehow I am hoping that a couple of days holed up in a Landmark Trust cottage can help him step out of the moment he is stuck in, and find a way of moving on.

Right now, I cannot get away from the futility of the day to day, when millions of lives have been destroyed with what happened the day after Christmas.

I have no right to speak of my life, right now.

On the verge of the New Year

2004-12-31T16:51:00.000+01:00

Or more like 'at the foot of the cliff'.. or 'on the edge of the chasm'.

The body count in Asia is more like 110,000 people and counting, though we'll never know. And more than a million people have had their lives shattered by what happened.

Max has got lost in the tragedy of numbers and stopped watching TV. He logs on to the BBC site, watches the body count, switches to a Football site, reads about millionaires being lined up for transfers in the January transfer window, shops for food essentials, thinks, tries not to think. Liz has gone down with a bad bout of gastric 'flu and threw up in the garden. Jacob runs around like a clockwork orange, oblivioius of his mother's illness. In the end, Max gives up and administers the only drug at hand, the new Pinocchio DVD. Jacob is now perched on his blue potty, glued to the 1940's classic.

Elsewhere, the remnants of Max's friends will gather for their usual piss up and singalong. Max's sister has bought herself a furry top. Max's Dad has been roped in as babysitter. And the new year will be seen in to the traditional flurry of merry-making.

Max cannot stop thinking of mass graves and bodies caked up, like bits of plaster in an unsound structure.

Jonathan Head of the BBC in Banda Aceh, Indonesia: Water is the most critical problem here. The entire water supply has been contaminated - you can't imagine how they could clean it up as the number of bodies is just overwhelming.

I've just come from Thailand where it was pretty shocking but nothing compares to the health problems presented here by the thousands and thousands of bodies and the inability of the authorities and the survivors to deal with it. They are digging mass graves now but the number littered around is just staggering.

The entire town - where it hasn't been levelled - is covered in a sea of filthy mud with bodies and bits of rubble stuck in it. I think the authorities are going to have to think about moving people out because it's just uninhabitable.

There aren't the resources to clean up a mess this staggeringly big - the place looks as though a giant has picked it up, shaken it, torn it to pieces and then thrown this layer of mud, rubble and bodies across it.

All the people I've spoken to here say there is no more Banda Aceh. They're packing their bags and leaving whatever way they can.

On another day, another planet, this space would have been filled by lines of hope. Max, instead, thinks that the only appropriate blog, right now, is silence. And some stoic resolve.

To survive. Into the new year.

The real tsunami

2004-12-30T14:21:00.000+01:00

Welcome to an entirely new vernacular.

Today's word is 'tsunami'. It used to stand for a shrill Manic Street Preachers song from some forgettable album.

Now it stands for total destruction, for paradise lost, for possibly one hundred thousand souls drowned or battered in a flood that some religious freak will one day associate with the apocalypse.

Tsunamis after Christmas, before the close of the year, before people really had time to make a wish, hug their loved ones, and get inebriated in some loud, lonely party.

This year, Max has decided to pass on traditional New Year's Eve parties, or dinner parties with friends. Max will stay home, drink a glass of wine with Liz, and plan the future.

With a vengeance.

After the flood

2004-12-27T16:28:00.000+01:00

Max cannot think of anything appropriate to write when disasters like this happen.

Christmas is served

2004-12-24T19:23:00.000+01:00

There is a slight chance there will be snow in London, but no hope of that in Malta. Instead, the temperature has dropped to 15 degrees, but it feels like zero because stone houses are not made for winter. People with paraffin heaters make financial computations in their head to ration usage. The fat cats with fat cars cruise by Cafe Oasis and overfeed their designer children. Gift wrapping is a national obession.

Max has bought Jacob a plastic digger, three Percy the Park-keeper books, and Pinocchio and Lion King DVDs. Max has bought Liz a blender and Jamie Oliver's latest. Max has bought himself a string on DVDs which he will probably never watch, but which look great, still sealed in Play.com packaging.

Tonight, Liz will leave a glass of wine and a mince pie, to solicit Santa's visit, to fill socks, kiss sleeping angels and bring good luck to a household that needs it like millions of others. And for Max's friend Maurizio, living the darkest of Christmases... may he find a way out of the abyss, and realise that things come in cycles, and there there is only one way to go.

Up.

Check up

2004-12-16T21:51:00.000+01:00

This afternoon Max went for a heart check up. He arrived at the Capua Hospital in the usual heap, having spent nearly two hours in a meeting on a potential start up that ground gradually to a halt. By the time he was whisked away to the 'Executive Screening' Nurse, Max was prepared for any kind of bad news.

Max's two-hour stint involved:

(1) Being weighed (74 kilos - Max wondered how much of the weight could be blamed on winter clothing)

(2) Being measured (height unknown, Max told the nurse he was cheating as he was still wearing his shoes)

(3) Pissing in small beaker (not a problem, having consumed several coffees in the futile start-up meeting; urine surprisingly warm and golden coloured, which made Max think of the Indian premier who used to drink his own piss for good fortune)

(4) Blowing in a hollow tube and watching an electronic meter (the nurse cooed approvingly)

(5) Getting a chest x-ray (the x-ray man was more impressed by Max's twisted scoliosis spine than Max's heart - long sigh as the x-ray was mounted on to the flourescent screen on the wall

(6) Answering plenty of questions on family illnesses, pneumonias, diets

(7) Getting startled when the doctor said that he knew most of Max's family - Dr Montfort had even looked after Max's mother, while she was dying of Hogkins' disease in 1984. Dr Montfort said that if his mother had contracted Hogkins' now, most probably she would have been saved.

(8) Getting startled when the doctor said that his cholesterol level was high, even for a 43 year-old. Max was asked if he drank alcohol - Max confessed to a glass of wine and several cups of coffee. Max was told to cut on the caffeine.

(9) Getting part of his chest shaved for a cardio-vascular test on the treadmill.

(10) Puffing his way through a series of inclines on the treadmill.

(11) Getting told that he had a perfect bill of health, except for the high cholesterol, which would mean another check up in six months' time.

(12) Getting severe palpitations when he was given the bill for the exercise.

This evening, Max passed on the option of pasta with broccoli and gorgonzola, and went for pasta with broccoli, anchovies and pine nuts. Plus one glass of wine.

Max wonders how many people would be saved if they got sick twenty years later than they actually did.

Max's chest is itching from the shaving.

Max is going to spend some time searching for 'cholesterol' and 'wine', hoping there is no obvious linkage.

Max is listening to a tribute show for the late John Peel, who also died of heart failure. But not before championing some of the most exciting, dangerous, obscure and life-changing music of the twentieth century.

Crossing one's legs

2004-12-09T21:41:00.000+01:00

Max can now go back to his usual life.

The ten-day marathon work session of non-stop work is over. Max is not quite sure what all of it will lead to. But at least he can go back to whatever it is that Max used to do before he got locked into a never-ending cycle of reports, presentations, brainstorming, e-business, online learning, team-building, budgeting, PowerPointing, bad food eating, male-bonding, waking up after four hours sleep of more of the same.

Max surfaces to see that the important things in life are still intact. Jacob still remembers his father. Smudge is still fat.And men round the world are faced with a new threat. Just as well that there is probably no longer a need for his reproductive prowess in years to come. And anyway, his Sony Vaio's battery died more than two years ago.

Max wonders whether he could justify buying himself a new laptop for Christmas.

Lost Souls

2004-12-06T22:10:00.000+01:00

Max has been away from this blog.

For the past 10 days or so, Max has been in front of this PC, working away at an e-business Strategic Plan. The Plan was delivered this afternoon.
In the meantime, outside his room, beyond the spikes of the Yucca, the usual shit was happening. Margaret Hassan was shot in the head. “Mother” was voted the favourite word from a poll of thousands in non English-speaking countries. A lost soul went sailing over the rails of the Empire State Building.The price of kerosene was doubled to the price of diesel because the Prime Minister claimed the nation was cheating the Government out of taxes on fuel. And Max’s friend Mr. Silver, now in Virgina BC, emailed Max with some advice. Here it is:

“Max, you really are a talented s.o.b. Would you be offended, if I offer you some advice? If so, read no further.

If not, let me first suggest to you that you should not keep a diary, notwithstanding that it can be seen to be very amusing. The problem is, it serves to reinforce any depression you are feeling. What I have done and, from time to time when I can find the discipline to do it, is write a fantasy. Develop a super hero - something completely different from your day to day life experience. The hero, being a hero, will serve to bring up your own mood and, if you can hit a winning formula, could be the next SpiderMan. A good outlet for your writing talents.”

Max has thought about this, but is not sure that he will take Mr Silver’s advice. Not through any disrespect to Mr Silver, a man whose advice and intellect Max has long admired. Max is just not sure that he is depressed. Max knows that he is in a bubble that he needs to burst so he can get to the next room. He can see the room, it is in a calmer place, and it does not very different to his own, with Jacob lying on the red sofa, watching Shrek, asking Max to do his ‘Goolie Bird’ impression. He just needs to get to it.

For the record, Max managed to recover from three hours sleep to deliver a decent presentation on e-business and English Language Schools. Max’s client clapped, and told him it was a great presentation, even though Max looked like shit.

Max’s favourite word has always been the four-letter expletive – nothing quite like the violence of the trapped air exploding through clenched teeth graving over parched lips.

Max wonders if he will have to mutate into a super-hero to get out of the bubble. Or whether he will do what he always does in the end: graft, drive, wriggle out. To a better place.

The empty house

2004-11-24T13:28:00.000+01:00

When Jacob is away, the house gets sullen. The clock finds its voice. The hum of the PCs is louder. Toys are limp, the garden looks windswept and ruffled, piles of dirty plates pile in the sink.

Max cannot quite remember what it was like before Jacob arrived.

For sure, he had more time to think, more time to spend with Liz, just more time.

Max tries to think of what he did with all the time he had.

Max hears Jacob rush in downstairs, with his carer Joyce a few paces behind, in full chase.

Max doesn't have to think any more.

End of the roller coaster?

2004-11-18T13:19:00.000+01:00

Max is trying to work. He is in the middle of drafting an e-business strategy for an English Language School. It is a difficult time, work is not plentiful and Max is running late. Worse, Max is experiencing writer's block. He is spending an inappropriate amount of time reading other people's blogs and day-dreaming.

And this morning, Liz decided to get Joe, the Siggiewi handyman, to do building work on the garden.

Max scrambled the Internet to look for good news. He may have found it in The Times' snippet on the Siggiewi road. To say that the track to Siggiewi is a disgrace is an understatement. Max has lost hub caps, had a door damaged by a piece of flying rock and probably dislocated a couple of discs in his twisted spine in return for the pleasure of driving through the moon craters. Now Government appears to have a change of heart and is planning to sort out the 2.5km track from the Zebbug roundabout to Max's home.

Max remembers there was a time in his life when he didn't worry about road surfaces, when he used to drive decent cars and didn't drive every day in fear of his life.

Max tries to remember that he returned to Malta for the 'quality of life'.

Yesterday Max met a lawyer who deals with 'high value individuals who occasionally wish to use Malta for fiscal purposes.' The lawyer said that he only ever fllies in his clients on private jet and preferably at night 'so they don't see the dump I've landed them in.'

Max thinks that the high value individuals could do worse than land on Malta's most significant man-made asset.Here it is...

You are what you eat

2004-11-15T09:14:00.000+01:00

Monday morning under a watery sun. It's suddenly got cold. Max is still running barefoot in his room, but his toes are curling up.

Max has just made himself an early grey tea and half a toasted baguette with Mexican cheese.

Max is getting a pot belly. He derives some comfort in an article in the Observer on French women's eating habits . Max thinks that if it works for French babes, it should work for middle-aged, angsted Maltese blokes.

Max is trying to finish off a piece of work, but his mind, like always, on Mondays, is elsewhere.

Max has been in touch with an old friend from his London days. Colin Cumming has morphed from an IT specialist into a full-time farmer in New Zealand. In Colin's words... "I am currently a gentleman farmer having hung up my Air Miles boots."

Max thinks he would have like to have spent his life investigating the eating habits of attractive young women around the world. Though how this would not have led to an increase in waist-line in lonely drinks in the hotel bar is another thing...

Max thinks he needs to get a life.

2004-11-13T12:17:00.000+01:00

Dinner wasn't so bad after all...

Man quits work

2004-11-12T16:17:00.000+01:00

Max tuned into BBC 6 Music and heard a guy call in to say that he had just quit work because he couldn't be bothered any more.

Today is a time for burials. Arafat's body was buried in the usual chaos of Ramallah, and John Peel got the star treatment in Bury, St.Edmonds in Suffolk.

The US are still pounding Falluja. And a six year-old in Miami was shot by police with a sten gun because he had locked himself in his principal's room and was starting to cut himself with a shard of glass.

Liz has spent the afternoon optimising pictures of Jacob on PhotoShop to get some prints for her room.

Max sometimes thinks it is better to remain holed up in Siggiewi than face the outside world.

Sleep Walking

2004-11-10T15:07:00.000+01:00

The play is fading fast from the memory banks. The space it occupied is being replaced by a mesh of panic and rational thoughts about mid-life crises and being equipped for a rainy day.

The rainy day is here.

All around Max, Malta seems to be rushing to a job, a business deal or a hobby.

Max knows this is just a phase. He has no idea how long it will last, but he will come out of it. He always does.

Max escaped his office for a couple of hours in the morning, using the 'need to deposit a cheque' as an excuse to get away from the racket of breakfast and Jacob resisting porridge. Max bumped into his brother, the journalist. Herman's mobile kept on ringing. Herman is chasing a story about illegal migrants being used by Maltese building contractors as slave labour. Herman paid for the cappuccino.

Max is listening to a Radio 1 special on 'the worst songs ever'. Celine Dion has her rightful place in the hall of shame, together with Mr Blobby... Somehow, all the songs made it to Number 1 at some stage.

Max always knew that the world has no taste when it comes to recognising talent.

2004-11-08T14:56:00.000+01:00

A snapshot of Dinner

Mondays

2004-11-08T11:14:00.000+01:00

Mondays trigger all sorts of crises for Max.

This particular Monday, he has to turn his back on the escape offered by theatre, and go back to facing his old demons.

Where will the next piece of work come from? Will he need to relocate? Can he finish off the long-standing project or is he just too tired or bored to continue? Why does he always end up alone? Where does the money one pays on insurances actually go to? Why was he born on a Monday? Why does nothing last?

Max takes a deep breath, walks around his room and tries to think of an empty beach.

Closing Time

2004-11-07T11:55:00.000+01:00

Max was woken up at 5am by Jacob asking for his train set.

By the time Max ventured to go downstairs at 8am, Max had worked his way through several dreams that involved Lars preparing to wear his white shirt for the last time.

The first crit of Dinner surfaced in the Sunday Times, and it was not great. Nobody escaped retribution, with the exception of Irene, whom Max thinks the 70 year-old critic actually fancies.

The critic said that many of Max's lines were lost because of a lack of projection.

Liz is having problems dealing with Jacob. This morning he has uprooted plants, spilled tea on Pickles the bear, followed her up a ladder as she was trying to trim an overgrown shrub, skidded, fallen, put raw black olives into his trouser pockets, blocked the exit to the house when Liz tried to go to the stationer.

Liz is going to watch Max do his thing on final night.

Max is going to belt it out tonight.

Method Acting

2004-11-06T14:37:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, Dinner played to a full house.

Max thinks he did an OK job. Sure, there was that awful moment when he slipped on the fifth step as he came in to hand Page her divorce papers. Or the split second where he got the wrong line when Page was waiting to knee him in the balls. Or the minute up to curtain call when he almost dried up.

But Max is coping. He is holding his own. He will hold his own for two more nights.

In the aftermath of the play, at the Castille Vaults, Max found himself speaking to a chap called Jeffrey, a dentist by day and an MP by night. Max found it hard not to be rude about Government, politics, partisanship, the proposed replacement of the Opera House by a new Parliament building, public tendering processes, Malta centre of the fucking Mediterranean.

Today, Max did what he normally does on Saturdays. He played trains with Jacob. He took Jacob to Saracino for a muffin and cappuccino. He took Jacob to San Anton to look at the caged peacock and throw scorn on a system that still thinks it is acceptable to keep beautiful animals in cages.

Max got home and found out that the Inland Revenue is demanding more money from him for a 'late payment of provisional tax'.

Max wonders what kind of human being becomes a Tax Inspector.

Max is trying not to think of what lies beyond Dinner.

Where to avoid the effect of Bush on you and your loved ones

2004-11-04T17:06:00.000+01:00

Now that George Bush is back for four more years.

Now that Iraq will continue to be raped and pillaged for oil and guns and anything goes for a piece of media attention

Now that NYC people feel more disenfranchised than ever, when nobody in NYC claims to know anyone who voted for GWB

Now that Michael Moore has to find something else to harp about for the next four years

Now that America seems to feel more safe or smug or beseiged or that terrorists have been banished to the other, outside world, on different time zones outside the border of the homeland

Max thinks that now is the time for Malta to make its claim as the centre of the world, the blog spot in the centre of the Mediterranean sea in the centre of Planet Earth, small, rudderless, non-threatening, ancient, pot-holed, sentient, rotten, dry, flooded, cored.

Max's PC hard disk has died, Jacob is away at a party, Liz is wearing hipsters, the storms have abated for a night, Soma FM is mulling in the background, Arafat is in a coma, Mutu is waiting for a ban for smoking cocaine to enhance his sex life, MPs are debating whether to turn the formal Opera House into the new house for MPs, at the taxpayer's expense.

Max is preparing for the final weekend for Dinner.

Max is not scared any more.

Leaks

2004-11-03T10:32:00.000+01:00

This is a country of extremes. It's either a neurosis of heat, or languishing under the flood gates.

The rains came last night at 10.30, just as a beseiged AC Milan caved in to a Ronaldinho piece of wizardry and lost 2-1 to Barcelona. Max then had to drive Frank back to his house in the Three Cities, say goodbye (Frank was leaving for Germany) and commence his journey back to Siggiewi. By the time he got to Qormi, the wheels of Polo were finding difficulty in remaining glued to the ground. Visibility was down to a couple of feet. What remained of the road was a grey river of slime and loose stones. The headlights of the car ahead vanished and reappeared like a limp Christmas tree.

By the time Max got home, his hands were shaking.

Max has spent the morning looking at leaks and restarting his computer. Jacob's potty is an emergency receptacle for a leak in the bathroom. Jacob has retreated to Max's study to watch Thomas the Tank Engine for the 400th time.

Max has just found out that George W. Bush will be the US president for the next 4 years.

Max thinks that the whole world appears to have sprung a leak

Opening night

2004-10-30T01:04:00.000+02:00

Dinner opened tonight. The house was nearly full. Max was surprised. He thought nobody would come to the opening night.

Max thought he was prepared, He arrived at the theatre in good time. He got his make up applied, sucked Fishermen's Friends, went through a line and cue, thought of how the last time he had performed at MITP, his mother was still alive and his father had refused to come and watch him play Malvolio.

Three minutes into the play, Max was in trouble. His heart missed a beat, then two, then it started to beat into his ears like a Burundi drum. Max could not hear what was being said. His shirt soaked within seconds. Sweat came down his forehead and stung his eyes. White light sparked the back of his retina. Max blinked, soldiered on, walked through his lines, trying to think of what's next, the next line, the next cue, the next second of respite. An hour and thirty minutes into the play, Max lost the plot totally and was left holding a tea bag and looking at Page. His mind was a blank sheet of text, and he squinted to make out a word or two. Then he spluttered back into life and clung on till the end. When the curtain call came, Max tried to avoid looking at the audience. There was rapturous applause.

Max apologised to his fellow actors and tried to tell them about his near death experience.

Frank, the director, asked him whether he was always miserable about everything.

Max tried to tell Frank that this was not depression, this was not a prima donna hypochondriac attack, this was a fucking near heart attack on stage.

Max found it difficult to talk to anyone after that.

He left the party early and drove home through a night of dew and dangerous roads.

Max wonders if he is really a miserable git, or whether he is going to die soon.

Rage

2004-10-28T10:57:00.000+02:00

Max doesn't think it is fair that people like John Peel die and scum stay alive, get fat, drive company cars, lie, screw other people's lives, go to cocktail parties and die silently in their sleep.

Max had an early morning phone call with a 60 year-old woman who wants him to cut the pepper tree because it is encroaching on her garden wall and 'damaging her property'.

Max asked if he could get access to the woman's garden so he can seal his office wall, which has sprung a leak.

The woman said it was Max's problem, he should have fixed it in summer, now that the rains had come, he could wait until next summer.

Max was about to ignite and then remembered that this was a woman who lost a 20 year-old daughter to a car crash 20 years ago and never recovered. Max put the phone down.

Max is spending his morning listening to noisy BBC tributes to John Peel.

Max wonders what he would do if something happened to Liz or Jacob.

Max yesterday fluffed his lines, sweated in a suit and wanted to be alone on a beach that was not called Malta.

Max has to do something fast. Time is running out for escapes.

Storms

2004-10-27T10:23:00.000+02:00

At last, the weather has broken. The seasonal bouquet of thunder and lightning has shown up and the island rattles, floods and leaks, like it always does in Winter.

Max thinks of the crack in his office wall, and knows he should have done something about it.

Max is still reeling about the death of John Peel, like several other millions who can still hear the gravel voice in their heads. How strange, Max thinks, that the voice never really quite ages, especially a voice on the radio.

Life for Max right now is a groundhog day of lines, lights, sweat, laughter, anxiety, introspection, narcissism, revenge. And it's only a play, says the inner voice.

Somehow, miraculously, the play is coming together. Some lines are still shaky, but the silent metamorphosis from words to theatre is starting to happen.

Max knows he will not be doing any more theatre, for a very long time.

He does not know if that is a good or bad thing.

Max is trying to live for the moment.

Time is running out

2004-10-26T14:38:00.000+02:00

In 72 hours, Max and the rest of the cast have to deliver Dinner to a paying audience.

Yesterday's run through was a sorry affair. Cues were missed, lines were fluffed, entries missed, egos squashed. Frank Hoerner smoked a cigarette in the courtyard at 11.15 pm and was silent for the first time in six weeks.

Max could follow his pacing in the dark by the burning tip of the cigarette.

At the end, the cast agreed it had to go for broke and rehearse every available time of day.

Max is grateful that he does not have to act for a living.

Max is not sure he knows what he is going to do for a living.

Max is not sure what he is going to do after Dinner.

Max is not having a good day.

2004-10-23T17:07:00.000+02:00

Dinner is nearly served.

Nightmares

2004-10-23T17:02:00.000+02:00

A couple of nights ago, Max got back late from a rehearsal. He ate his pasta with broccoli and anchovies in front of the Internet. Margaret Hassan from Care International was the latest kidnap victim in Iraq.

Max went to bed and was asleep in seconds.

Max dreamt Jacob had been taken hostage in Iraq. He spent the entire night looking for his son. All around him, a war ranged on.

Max woke up convinced he had just found Jacob.

Liz told him not to eat pasta at such a late hour.

Music

2004-10-17T17:19:00.000+02:00

Max is a great music buff.

His taste in music ranges from Gilles Peterson and the future of dance to the Cure and the Smashing Pumpkins and Kylie's bottom antics to David Bowie crooning in an obscure Brecht play called 'Baal'.

Max was there at Freddie Mercury's last concert at Knebworth, the Who's 25th Anniverary tours, Peter Gabriel's soaring concerts at Earls Court and Frank Zappa's last tour of Wembley.

Max would have loved to have spent his twenties with a guitar strapped to his chest and a flock of pubescent Motley Crue female fans waiting in the wings. Or as a U2 roadie (except his bad back would have precluded any serious lifting). Or as a member of the Brodski Quartet.

Max spent his twenties working as a Chartered Accountant in middle-management in the UK.

Max is teaching Jacob how to sing. He has managed to get through the first stanza of 'Octopussy's Garden'.

Max is wondering if it is not too late to go to guitar lessons.

Jacob asks for Piazzola tangos when he is playing with his train set.

Max is hoping that he will not succumb Jacob to unreasonable peer pressure.

Panic

2004-10-15T10:09:00.000+02:00

There are 14 days left until Dinner's opening night.

The play has yet to be blocked. Max is still struggling with his lines. His dog-eared script surfaces during tea-breaks and breakfast. Jacob has started to despair, and has taken to saying 'Waiter! Take it away!' every time he sees his father running his fingers over highlighted text.

And now the weekend rehearsals have to be transplanted elsewhere as the theatre has been taken over by two simultaneous performances: an intense play featuring barefoot people chatting around a candle; and a 'dance extravanganza' replete with smiling people with bongo drums and jangly bracelets.

Max is wondering if he is rapidly approaching another milestone of humiliation.

At least the Censorship Board woman has backed off from the threat of a war of words in the press.

Max secretly regrets not going to war.

Electricity

2004-10-12T10:06:00.000+02:00

At 08.13am, the electricity cuts out.

The living room is plunged into darkness.

TV switches itself off.

The Pavoni cappuccino machine splutters and steams up.

The toaster hiccups and ejects half toasted toast.

The computer UPS kicks in with a mournful bleep bleep.

Jacob starts to cry.

Jacob wants the TV back, the lights back on.

Liz asks Max if he thinks Enemalta will compensate small businesses for power outages within her lifetime.

Max wonders if he will have to spend the day walking by the Sliema front, next to the sea, away from his silent monitor.

Death of Superman

2004-10-11T23:50:00.000+02:00

Internet news frenzy. Every other picture has a man in tights and a cape. The first visual on the BBC site showing a bald Christopher Reeve in a wheelchair is rapidly replaced by a more dignified picture of the great man with a full head of hair and a suit.

Max spends the day running errands to keep him from thinking about beheadings in Iraq, girls shot in drive-by killings in Nottingham, and all the shit in the world.

Jacob says that he likes having chicken pox. He watches fourteen consecutive episodes of Thomas the tank engine before Max realises that a responsible father would find alternative entertainment for his toddler.

Max is starting to think that his own real life character bears many similarities to Lars.

Max gets home to a plate of pasta with M&S vegetable sauce.

Max doesn't know what he has become.

2004-10-08T14:50:00.000+02:00

Jacob and his spots

Spots

2004-10-07T10:37:00.001+02:00

Jacob has chicken pox.

Liz texted me while I was at rehearsals, in the middle of a heated discussion on censorship. A militant member of the Malta Censorship Board has taken umbridge to 'derogatory references to Jesus Christ in the play Dinner' and has ordered Irene, the producer, to make cuts. Frank, the German director, thinks it is a big joke and said that although cuts would be made, they would not be the ones referring to Jesus.

My communications & PR brain is spinning on how to leak the censorship threat to the press and drum up some interest in the play.

I drive back home on two wheels, dwelling on chicken pox and the responsibilities of fatherhood.

I will call my father tomorrow to establish if I have contracted chicken pox before.

Bells

2004-10-03T20:48:00.001+02:00

Nothing winds up Liz as much as bells on Sundays.

We live in the shadow of a baroque church in the village of Siggiewi. It is a splendid piece of architecture. On summer nights, the floodlit dome nestles above the furthermost corner of the garden, framed by the olive tree and the conifers. In June during the feast of St Nicholas, it is a candy box of yellow and orange. The church is the apex of the village, the reason for traffic jams on evenings and Sunday, the conch for all Christians.

And that is where the problem lies. Liz believes that Catholicism has turned the Maltese into an insular race that only cares for its own small circle, rather than the greater whole. It is why housewives throw buckets of water in front of their doorstep, knowing full well that this will only wash the rubbish down to their neighbours' doorsteps. Why what's left of valleys and beauty spots are full of discarded fridges and other white goods. Or grown men go and shoot on migrating birds. Liz has never been to the church of St Nicholas, although it is literally on her door-step.

On Sundays, the anti-Catholic sentiment explodes with the activities in the bell-fry. Today's 24 x 7 session was managed by an energetic roster that kicked in at 5am and never quite let go. All the way up to Jacob's bed time, the bells hammered their voice into our head.

Liz called Joyce and asked if there was any reason for the cacophony. Joyce said that it was the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

Liz delivered a monologue about Our Lady's various personality disorders, such that every other weekend she was reincarnated in some particular aspect - my favourite is Our Lady of Sorrows.

Today was Liz's 41st birthday.

Liz would like the bells to go away.

Dinner

2004-09-30T23:20:00.001+02:00

I have been roped into a play called Dinner.

Earlier in September, I escaped my desk for a morning at the Reef Club, a private beach for bored housewives and sunburnt tourists. I spent the morning fiddling with a faulty sun-lounger and reading a book on Neuro Linguistic Programming.

When my mobile rang, I did not recognise the number, and thought twice about answering. I took the call on the third ring. It was Irene, an actress from Berlin, washed up in Malta, looking for someone just like me. "But you don't even know me," I grinned. When I put the phone down, I was sure it was one of those life-changing moments.

I am now spending my evenings learning how to play Lars in a run down theatre in Valletta called MITP. Lars is a former City slick with a receding hairline who has made a lot of money from a self-help philosophy book called 'Beyond Belief'. Beyond Belief is outselling Delia Smith at Menzies and has caught the zeitgeist of people with the need to look away from their lives.

I am struggling to learn my lines.

I'm not sure what MITP stands for.

I have to eat ready-made meals I get back home from rehearsals in the evening.

I'm not not sure I like Lars.