Every so often you (or, at least I) you come across a word and think “that’s exactly the one I was looking for”. Of course, if you’re a pedant, like I, you should be thinking “that’s the word for which I was looking”.
In this case, it came courtesy of The Times (the other one, in England), found in a quote about London by the pioneer environmentalist John Evelyn written 360 years ago.
A contemporary of Samuel Pepys, Evelyn also kept a diary of significant events – the execution of Charles I, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London (1666) – but his records were less detailed than those of Pepys, so have been largely overlooked.
Nevertheless, he had a way with words and, in 1661, noted that the inhabitants of the city “breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour”.
Fuliginous: great word. Came of course from Latin (fuligo = soot). But then evolved to include noxious dust or vapours. So, I reckon it can be applied to the lovely island on which I chose, all those years ago, to make my home. You know, that clean, green and quiet one, just north of the cloud of pollution that shrouds Malta.
I look at the car, officially ‘glacier white’: it appears closer to the colour of my old Jag, that was called ‘Sahara gold’. I see the sand that has somehow penetrated the gnat-proof window screens on to the tiles inside my front room. From my balcony which, underfoot, reminds me of Ramla, I can both see and smell the exhaust fumes from private cars and overladen lorries grinding up from the ferries. I am ingesting air that I can see. And most days I hear the whine of stone cutting.
Our politicians and NGOs bang on a lot about the environment but seem unconcerned about the first layer of the atmosphere, the one that we need, in order to breathe.
And when my lungs achieve the consistency of breeze-blocks, whether through inhalation of local stone-cutting dust or Libyan sand or exhaust fumes (or even my inexcusable intake of nicotine), I will become a statistic for the ministry of health: another ‘smoking-related’ death.
That will keep the PC cohort content, as it would if the nearest I had ever been to tobacco was my grandfather’s stinky pipe because in that case it would satisfy the definition of ‘secondary smoking’.
What is the point of Malta targeting a ‘net zero’ policy for 2050 when we will still have stone cutting?- Revel Barker
More honestly, it should be recorded as ‘lung-related’ or even more accurately as ‘breathing-related’. However, enough about my autopsy.
What is the point or pretence of Malta targeting a ‘net zero’ policy for 2050 when we will still have stone cutting and still be the first point of call for the Sirocco (or Ghibli)? What bemuses me is that, after centuries – no, after millennia – of this wind pattern, there is still any sand left in the Sahara.
Or are they all sawing stones to size in Benghazi?
Exhausts are a different matter: more than one vehicle per person in Gozo; just less than that figure on Malta. Currently, slightly more than one per cent of them are electric or hybrid and a lot of the others are diesel-powered because, not so long ago, we were told it was best for the future of the planet (told, that is, by the government on advice from scientific ‘experts’). We could (a bit of constructive criticism, here) test exhausts of vehicles in the queue for the ferry.
Might I mention, in passing, that this (last) winter, being the longest and coldest that I can remember, was not very convincing in support of the threat of global warming. And yes, this summer may well be very hot but, then, it usually is. The point (my point) is that the climate changes: that’s what it does for a living, so to speak; it doesn’t seem to worry about what we think is best for it. But I probably digress.
My point is that the air that we breath is (mostly) of our own making and there are no plans, anywhere, to do anything about it.
It is, in a word, shitty. But a nicer word for it, as we now know, is fuliginous.