It’s the crack of dawn on the Friday between a public holiday and the weekend and I’ve just had a look at the weather forecast to see if it would be probable that I get back from the main island if I traipse down to do a couple of things. Seems like it will, though if not, ‘Er Indoors will really be, because I’ll have the car.

Over the last week or so, I’ve had a small taste about how there is a distinct dearth of appreciation for the lightness of touch that makes life less tedious.

I made a wise-crack in the comments section of the Facebook page run by the young MP, Owen Bonnici. He had changed his status and referred to how he thought that Freedom Day should be given the importance it deserves, it being the thirtieth anniversary (is it, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?) an’all. Just to be slightly facetious and poke a little fun at life, I asked why it was so darn important, the event having been – pretty much – just the date on which the Brits’ lease ran out.

It was as if I had questioned the very essence of the workers’ movement and the integrity of its foundations and supporting columns. I hasten to point out that it was not Dr Bonnici himself who drew himself up to his full height and declaimed all manner of pompousness in my general direction.

Yes, I do know, then, that Freedom Day has its importance in a national sense. It gives us a holiday, when it doesn’t fall on a weekend (now that the nasty Nats have taken away the holidays that land on Saturday or Sunday) and this year it’s even better, because by the judicious taking of a day off, you can get yourself a four day stretch, much as we could do thanks to good ole St Joseph. Considering that Easter is following hot on the heels of these two nice long weekends, it’s a wonder anything gets done around this time of the year.

It’s almost as bad (or as good) as Xmas or August, though without the cold and heat, respectively.

But still, getting back to “Freedom Day”, within the panoply of National Days, does it hold the significance of the others? Actually, I’m getting a bit tired of having so many National Days or whatever we call them. Most normal countries have one National Day (England doesn’t even have one, unless you count Her Maj’s birthday) and don’t go around confusing everyone.

We just have to be special, of course. Such is the penchant we have for turning everything into a partisan spasm of pique, that as soon as the Nationalists got elected, way back when, they just had to react to Mintoff’s previous paroxysm of party political peculiarity (he had cancelled a number of public holidays, in his inimitable style – thank Heavens it’s inimitable, we really don’t want him back, in any way, shape or form) but instead of doing a Dom and consigning the other lot’s favourite days to the dustbin, they pulled off the usual Nationalist compromise of trying to please everyone.

As I just wrote, they did, really, because we now have a nice range of days on which to take time off, which is great, except that productivity tends to be a touch off.

Getting back to the large amount of rhetoric dumped on my hapless pate, though, you’d think that “Freedom Day” marked the culmination of armed struggle against an oppressor, with hundreds of our countrymen and women giving their lives in a bid to extricate our motherland from beneath the boots of the coloniser, bent on clinging to our rock tenaciously.

Actually, it doesn’t.

It marks the day that the British Armed Forces packed up their stuff, switched off the lights and closed the door behind them, leaving their bases in much better condition than they were when they found(ed) them a couple of hundred years before. As to the condition of said bases now, as far as I can see they’re in decent nick, though their condition had deteriorated somewhat. Must have been something to do with the parsimony and general low standards of public care bestowed on us by the Mintoff regime – and yes, for those who will no doubt comment, I do have less than unbounded admiration for him, for reasons that, if you are my age or even a bit younger, are self-evident.

This orderly departure of the Brits would not have been on the cards if the Nationalist Government a number of years earlier hadn’t turned Malta into an independent state. Mintoff and his slavish followers had always called this a sham (Mintoff, on the other hand, had originally campaigned for integration with Britain, though he did pull a U-ie on that later, when it suited him) and he just had to find himself another day to make his own, Republic Day just not having sufficient cachet for the purpose.

Still, it’s a day in our national make-up and we should recall it: just not with the solemnity and gravitas with which it is being imbued by those for whom history is just another means of showing the party’s colours.