Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/919364
Opinion 25 maltatoday SUNDAY 24 DECEMBER 2017 much to write about, too. Even if wasn't Christmas Eve... and it sure doesn't feel like it, let me tell you... there is so much of what Edwin Vassallo rightly called 'bullshit' going on, that the other me wouldn't even know where to begin. And yet, here I am writing an article about my dead cat. It feels wrong. It probably is wrong, and the other me would no doubt be able to elucidate exactly why in any of a dozen over-imaginative ways. It is wrong because I am allowing personal feelings - which are of no interest to anyone else, or shouldn't be – to usurp what is ultimately a public space. It is wrong because the feelings themselves are plainly disproportionate, when viewed from any other perspective. Let's face it: the death of a cat must seem perfectly insignificant, against the backdrop of what looks like an entire planet gone dangerously off the rails.... Unfortunately, however, the converse is equally true... at least, for the time being. Yet another unalterable fact is the one that has me temporarily trapped in this perspective bubble. Though I may be the only one stuck in it, the view from where I'm sitting – illusory though it may be - is quite the opposite. The loss of a cat seems to fill the horizon at the moment, while everything else pales into dreary insignificance. And it pains me to realise, even as I wrote that sentence, that that was exactly Maggie's own perspective on life all those years. She herself filled her own horizon, while everything else – including all things I've ever written about, with her looking on in manifest boredom – was clearly unimportant. Who's to say she was wrong? It was her perspective, not ours. And within that private bubble of hers, her logic was also completely unassailable. What could possibly be more important than food and sleep, any way? Certainly not some silly old Maltese political controversy or other... No, indeed. She was clearly onto something there. If some of our MPs took a leaf out of Maggie's book, and assessed their own priorities through her undeniable feline wisdom... there might be a good deal less 'bullshit' for people like Edwin Vassallo to actually complain about. Our MPs would be altogether too busy snoozing, eating or puking up fur-balls all over the carpet, to just keep pole-vaulting interminably from one controversy to another. But that's the other me talking now. He must have got out of the cellar while I wasn't looking. Sorry about that, I'll try not to let it happen again. Meanwhile, all I really have left in me to say right now is that I hope the New Year will usher in a happier note than the old one ended on. Oh, and Happy Christmas, of course. Can't leave that out, now can we? If some of our MPs took a leaf out of Maggie's book, and assessed their own priorities through her undeniable feline wisdom... there might be a good deal less 'bullshit' for people like Edwin Vassallo to actually complain about.