DOING GOOD

On Saturday, after the thuggish brawl that passes for a game of football when Everton and those other louts from Liverpool meet, and about thirty minutes into the bullying of Portsmouth by that other lot, the wife importuned me to go for a stroll.

We started out from Calypso's Cave, and with a view like that, you have to take a look at it. The view, I mean, because the cave itself is sealed off with coppers' tape and a crowd barrier. I'm not entirely sure it's not a crime scene, perhaps it's where the plot to dress up like nuns and priests next Saturday in Nadur is being hatched and the Rector has discovered it and despatched a platoon of Malta's finest to nip apostasy and irreverence in the bud.

Back to the view, it made me wonder whether the people who were kicking up such a fuss about the development that had been proposed for the hill side below the cave (leading down to the bars that do such a roaring trade in summer) had ever actually stood there and looked down.

I say (more properly, write) this because from the railings looking down, the buildings that are already there form an apparently continuous - and dilapidated and consequently displeasing to the eye - run of stone and concrete. I'm not saying that the buildings that there are should ever have been given a permit in the first place. The genius who allowed them to be built should be pilloried, presumably in memory, for all time, though the buildings have been there for pretty much as long as I can remember.

Consequently, I am unable, no doubt to the eternal chagrin of Labour's Babes, to blame the Mintoff Era for these excrescences, for all that I suspect, probably out of sheer spite, that they were built then.

But there they are and there they stand, it being highly doubtful that it's even conceivable that the land will ever be returned to what it should be. In the harsh reality of commercial dealing, no-one is going to pretty them up, either, unless there's some recompense at the end of it and I can imagine that the assorted ramblers and tree-huggers that seem to spend their time watching for a sight of a lesser-spotted bulldozer or listening for the sound of the speckled jack-hammer would kick up such a fuss if even a lawnmower were to be deployed that the game wouldn't be worth the candle.

So there's not much of a hope in hell that the crappy buildings that infest the landscape are ever going to be improved on. The options are not many, to be sure. One that occurs to me is that very strictly proscribed permits for a commercially viable development be given. The permits should be extremely strict and stringent controls on compliance with swingeing penalties imposed, leading to a finished product that is less hateful on the eye than the current disaster.

Alternatively, the site could be bought from the owners at its real commercial value, that is to say taking into account their reasonable expectation of profit as before the intervention of the nay-sayers.

What are the odds of any of the above happening? About the same as Arsenal winning the Premiership, I would imagine. I'm not naive enough to think that had development been allowed, there would not have been a clear and present danger that a larger blot on the landscape would have been perpetrated, but the fault here would lie with the enforcers.

And the fault for there being the mess that there is lies, to a slight extent, with the people who stopped the development in its tracks, for saying only "no" and not lobbying for a compromise which would have remedied the mess. Of course, they were well-meaning and as such I shouldn't really be dumping on them, but it's sad when such intelligent people don't think things all the way through.

There's a danger that the same thing, in a different context, is going to happen with the Nadur Carnival. From a truly unique experience, the whole thing is being transmogrified into a mainstream event, which means it will become as soul-less as the Valletta one, with jobsworths patrolling the defile' making sure that (their version of) good taste and decorum is preserved.

I mean, for the sake of all that's sacred, the Nadur Local Council is even boasting that it has drafted in extra cops to make sure that order is kept and the law observed. All we need are a few extra traffic wardens to hand out a few extra tickets are handed out (and maybe a couple of tow-trucks while they're at it) and a couple of exorcists and the game will be well and truly up.