J’accuse : Preliminary Round

My mind’s been elsewhere this week since I’ve had to deal with a horrible combination of deadlines and convoluted case-work that managed to distract me to no end from my usual “side-job” of diligent observation and general filling of the pages of the ether with bits and bytes of bloggery. If I had to be frank I also think that the distraction has a lot to do with the beginning of what is generally known as the scholastic year. Mayans and Aztecs may have perfected the calculation of calendars and the passage of time and Popes may have adjusted the number of days in the year and whatnot but there is something about the scholastic cycle that is bred into the very make-up of the people of my generation.

I actually still wake up in the morning expecting the sound of the cockerel on the radio, as we were wont to here many years back while we were getting ready for school. That would be followed by a quick rush to perform the morning ablutions, showers and more before slipping into uniform to the sound of the sports newsreader maliciously mincing the names of teams while reading the football scores. Thursday morning could be quite a treat, especially during the earlier rounds of the Champions Cup, UEFA Cup or the sadly missed Cup Winners’ Cup.

It would become a virtual geography lesson replete with the most exotic of pronunciation twists as the sports reader would battle his way around such tongue twisters as Twente d’Enschede (they’re back), Lokomotiv Leipzig and Jeunesse d’Esch. I’d have a mental countdown , cringing inwardly as he approached the names of the more famous teams with the linguistic ability of a blind butcher culminating the experience with that ever so painful “Rijal Muddrid”. Somehow the ubiquitous omnipresence of the world of football has killed the charm of such pleasant moments and we have morphed to the daily observation of errors of all kind in the world of online news.

Varteks Varazdin
It is ironic that with the proliferation of European nations and the multiplication of clubs participating in UEFA competitions the young ‘uns of today rarely have any idea of the genealogy, geography and science behind every participating team. In my day (I hate these moments that make me feel old but hell it’s over twenty-five years ago now) I’d know that Jena was the city from which Karl-Zeiss hailed and by the time I found it in the Encyclopaedia (Caxton’s) I’d also have discovered that it would be famous for lens making.

I have surprised denizens of relatively unknown towns (by continental standards, no offence intended) with my knowledge of their local teams. True, it’s a geek’s world but hey, those were the pleasures of a pre-teen child in the era before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Now they play football on their PlayStation (great game by the way) but fail to gather the fruits of serendipitous knowledge that comes along with the fun of football.

Chernomorets Varna
So yes, this is the time of the year when the body sends signals that we have moved up one level as though I am living in some imaginary Pac Man world and we’ve moved from cherries to bananas. I’ve got no new schoolbooks to cover but I’ve still got that funny itch – 25 years on from the last time I started a primary school year. It’s not just the start of school but also exam time that gives you that funny feeling. It’s a bit like the whole world is programmed to work in bursts. I also have discovered that people from other nations have a different sort of “clock”.

Take the French for example (and most other people in the Grand Region i.e. Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, and Rhineland). The school season seems to work in eight week bursts. Basically every eight weeks the kids have a substantial block of holidays and their parents get a supposed moment of respite. The effect it has on the general populace is a general feeling of lightness of being for those of us who are left behind (traffic in the morning is blissfully absent) while there is a general rush to fit in another family holiday. French kids do not have the same kind of “clock” as ours you see?

Go Ahead Eagles
Enough of the school and football talk though. This drab week will remain notable mainly for the funerals of the unfortunate victims of the explosion that is already fading away from our collective memory. Trust me, it will be business as usual before you can say “hoist by my own petard”. Incidentally the whole expression of being hoist by one’s own petard comes from the early use of gunpowder in warfare. Sometime after the Great Siege in Malta armies developed units called “pétardiers”. These men were charged with the carrying of explosive gunpowder on their person as well as other paraphernalia that allowed them to create an explosive in situ.

One of the things a petard-man had to carry (petard being the French word for bomb at the time) was a wick that was constantly to be kept alight. “Lucifers”, or as we tend to call them “matches” were not yet easily available so the poor pétardier had to carry the lit wick, the gunpowder and cetera and cetera. As wars developed into a series of elaborate sieges during the period known generally as the Thirty Years War, the job of the pétardier would be to follow the sappers who had been busy digging tunnels close to bastions and once on site to plug sufficient explosion into a hole in the wall to blast it to Kingdom Come (protestant or catholic).

There was a slight snag. The pétardier’s equipment transformed him into a walking trap. He could literally explode at any moment. Just like most machines in the early period of gunfire this was a very unfortunate circumstance. What with guns backfiring (one in four times the gun injured the user) and loosely manufactured gunpowder life on the front was not easy. So pity the poor pétardier who with a brusque movement or a sudden jerk suddenly manages to ignite the gunpowder on his person and disappears in a bang and a puff of smoke. You see? Hoist by his own petard.

Portogruaro Summaga
But this week also brought us a stranded boat and a papal visit to the land of Henry VIII and Rowan Williams. That the Fernandez story was probably the most newsworthy this week accounts for much of the current dry spell in blogging. As for the Pope, poor Benedict. I couldn’t help wondering how he felt as he sat in Westminster Abbey across from Archbishop Williams reading his speech during evening prayers in his quasi-comic german accent. His papacy has been plagued by the whole issue of paedophilia and dark truths of the church. Benedict compounded his current PR position by sort of implying that such evils as Nazism were the product of atheism. He actually used the term “godlessness” which is slightly more equivocal and at least in my book implies more the kind of person who as strayed from god rather than someone who does not believe god exists.

In any case we live in the age of the touchy and false tolerance and political correctness. Benedict’s anti-godless words infuriated the atheist community and they once again presented the common fanatic front that we have gotten used to nowadays. Anyways. My biggest question in this not too reflexive a moment is simple – while I understand that popes must look like a more sober version of Santa Claus is it really necessary that they move and speak like robots? Rowan Williams may look like a wizard from the Harry Potter series but he does have the advantage of looking alive. As I type Williams has started to address the congregation while the Yoda lookalike is doing his best impression of a statue.

I apologise. This restless banter is the product of the nausea caused by the switch in season. A general lack of concentration, a doubled workload and a lapse of inspiration are to blame. I cannot really be bothered by the ailments true or imagined of the leader of opposition, the continued failure to address the needs of regulation in the firework industry and beached boats making the headlines, not to mention the lack of progres sin the regulation of party financing. Sadly even the lone columnist misfires every once in a while and this promises to be that once in a while for me.

Intercettati FC
While the recharging of mental batteries on the columnist front is taking longer than usual (also thanks to the dearth of bloggable material) we will soon be back in the thick of the political season. It is getting harder to decipher the real politics from the mediatic spin. In my five years of blogging I have witnessed the gradual creation of a virtual Maltese reality. As the papers have adapted to the scene and as more temporary bloggers appear we get a parallel Malta that is being conjured up on our computer screens.

Dom Mintoff’s hospitalisation provided us with the latest flurry of quasi-obituaries since Guido De Marco’s recent demise. Once again the noticeboards on the ether were filled with surreal proclamations and wishes as yet another window on this psychedelic island of weird customs gave transfrontaliers like myself a picture of the island we left behind. I met a Romanian person today who is a manager at a Luxembourg gym. He has been here for 27 years and we discussed the feelings of nostalgia for our respective homelands. He had an interesting observation to make – basically the nostalgia we have for our countries is for a country that no longer exists. For both Malta and Romania have continued to change in our absence. They will never be the same.

The land of Kinnie & Twistees I left five years ago when I embarked on this adventure to the forgotten duchy is no longer the same. On the other hand there is this parallel universe online that is a new, different Malta that seems to somehow occasionally cause ripple effects in the real world. So as the school bags are packed, the books covered and the lunchbox prepared J’accuse is still gearing itself for the new season. Have a good Independence Week.

www.akkuza.com is really in need of a good Kinnie (Zest). Can you match each heading in the article with a European nation? (Don’t bother with the last one, nobody does really)