When I first started writing this column a few years ago, one of my persistent worries was that over time, I might not have enough content to fill these column inches with. However, thanks to a completely bonkers few years, my weeklies are literally writing themselves, and that’s pretty much one of the only silver linings you will all be getting today.

After wading through all the “Will they? Won’t they?” Brexit posts, which is a tedious job in itself, I came across one particular news item that made me posi­tively bristle with anger: a photo of a truck loaded with discarded books, some dating back to the 1700s. It would be an understatement to say that I was disgusted; I literally wanted the perpetrator’s head on a silver platter.

You see, in my house, books are treasured and revered above anything else. We do not only treat each book or magazine we own as if it had feelings, but my father has literally galloped across the country to complete his collections, and it’s safe to say that he’s still haunted by that one book he didn’t buy in 1985.

From a young age, we were sternly instructed not to ever lend our books, and every time something happened to one, daddy wouldn’t just go bananas; he’d do the whole fruit bowl.

The Maltese read very, very little. A people that does not read, does not think

Throughout history, the burning or destroying of books has always carried great symbolic weight. When the German Student Union burnt books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s, the intention was to rid the world of anything that wasn’t in line with Nazi ideo­logy. As Milan Kundera put it: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.”

Of course, as always, why get an outsider to be callous and disrespectful to our culture when we can do it ten times better ourselves? In semi-literate Malta, where many know little of their own history save for that one battle in 1565 and a vague idea of soup kitchens and convoys around 1942, it is little wonder that such priceless specimens of our heritage were just chucked out like inconvenient clutter.

It says much about a people when they see books as a waste of space. It says even more when you look at the statistics and realise that the Maltese read very, very little. A people that does not read, does not think: people who don’t think allow themselves to be ex­ploited and manipulated by others who are far cleverer than they.

When the books were eventually located and saved by a clever woman who does read, and by our Archbishop, there were still some who were saying that what people throw away is their business.

We should have all wept for those books; we should have all chased them down to the ends of the island if needs be, because those books are as part of our identity as the sea we pollute and the trees we uproot every day.

I suppose there is another silver lining after all, at least our penchant for self-destruction is consistent.