Newsreport by Saviour Balzan

Limpets and urchins at Maghtab!

The Bahar ic-Caghaq coast is no longer fit to swim in, which is great news to those who are enamoured with deserted shorelines.

The description that Bahar ic-Caghaq is a beach is a misnomer; it is a craggy shoreline with delicious limpets and sunken urchins waiting to be slurped.

Anyone who has taken a goggle and floated over the posidonia beds there, could opt to look the other way and believe that he or she is in paradise.

No longer in protest mode and now a fully-fledged middle-class conformist, I fail to understand the difference between the sea at Bahar ic-Caghaq and the one at Tigné or Ghajn Tuffieha.

Indeed, as long as bathers refuse to ingest large quantities of sea water on a daily basis, swimming at Bahar ic-Caghaq is far wiser a thing to do, than bathing ceremoniously in designer swim wear at the faeces-infested Tigné.

People there, tend to forget that some two and half kilometres away the largest sewage outflow is to be found.

Everyone has argued against the Maghtab mountain and we have heard and read about chemicals trickling down into the sea.

But with no rain for six to seven months, this is simply a figment of one’s imagination.

There are more toxins at Tigné than at Bahar ic-Caghaq.

Pollutant levels on the east coast have always been astronomically high, but the real threat at sea is the microbiological (urine and faeces) stuff and the dumping of in harbours.

With the outflow off Rinella, the whole coastline reaching out to the golden triangle at St Julian’s is one big E. Coli jungle.

All this talk of dioxin at Bahar ic-Caghaq is simple Greenpeace, which is usually imperialistic, exaggerated and based on suppositions.

The level of industrial waste dumped at Rinella dwarfs the level of water pollution at Bahar ic-Caghaq.

Not being a member of the Press Club, I find it very difficult to empathise with the association.

I declare my prejudice. In my subjective view, the Press Club only acts when someone presses their small red button, it fails to act when journalists are fined and treated unfairly by the judiciary.

Or when journalists act like stooges.

The latest fuss about passing on photographs or footage re the latest incidents involving Xlukkajri (Marsaxlokk folk) to the police is a typical example.

So, the Press Club is shocked that the police ask for photographs and footage but is not remotely perturbed that some journalists act and are acting as the long arm of the police.

I refer here to the persecution of some individuals in the judiciary.

All this reference to professional ethics from the Press Club makes me want to throw up.
Most especially when I recall the manipulation of edited footage from some of our political events.

There are few places to eat al fresco where one can get a feel of the old and new world. One entertaining, ugly but attractive place is Spinola.

On one side you have the lego apartments and behind that the last remaining summer houses inhabited by that small clan of Spinolese who made it their mission to nurture a cat and Anatidae colony much to the delight of animal lovers.

There is a string of restaurants along this promenade. Some better than others – the Terrazza and Allegro are unassuming but good.

It has become so unusual to describe the true quality of restaurants or retail outlets since most write-ups nowadays are advertorials, a new word that describes how journalists write wonderful pieces about very bad places after being asked to do so.

But, at least, print journalists do not have to sing praise on television to a deodorant or washing liquid.

I love to hate the sexy man competition organised by our rival newspaper The Independent.

The last time I wrote for a newspaper that produced such a competition, the newspaper was called all sorts of names: shallow, tabloid and cheap...by guess whom?

Plus ça change.

saviourbalzan@maltamag.com