The unbearable lightness of summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.