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Recharging Batteries

28/10/2011

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After a month that has been more hectic and frustrating than usual it was time to call a timeout and recharge batteries. For me the best way to do that is to take a day off and descend to the boulder scree below the Manikata cliffs. It’s the one place I know where you can walk for three, four hours and you are almost assured you will not encounter anyone.

In an island so crowded and noisy this is a rare and precious luxury. You just make your way up, down and around boulders and rocky outcrops, clay slopes and stony paths. There is a varied and colourful vegetation even at this time of year when the first rains have only just started to colour summer’s uncompromising dry earth. The views are of the mighty cliffs above on one side and the open sea on the other. There is no building in sight except for some ancient remains of walls and what appear to be a few long abandoned animal pens scattered here and there.

This is probably the largest area of (almost) pure, unadulterated wilderness in Malta. It is certainly a magical place if you’re a nature lover or the type who simply loves the sound of silence.  An elementary skill to clamber over rocks helps of course, and an ability to remain calm if you happen to lose your way is also necessary. I have now trailed this area often enough not to worry about the second requirement. As for the first – I never venture down there if I feel the slightest bit unfit, queasy or in any way unsteady on my feet.

It is almost incredible to think that just a few years back official plans had envisaged a vast golf course on Xaghra l-Hamra which is the garigue plateau overlooking this amazing site. God only knows what sort of rubble and soil debris would have been happily chucked over the cliff top, ruining once and for all this majestic natural site. Thankfully what we euphemistically term as the “competent authorities”  backtracked from their madcap ways some time later and the whole area is now optimistically called the Majjistral (that’s the Northwest wind) Nature and History Park and given the highest (paper) protection possible.

I like this loose arrangement. This area (including the beautiful Xaghra l-Hamra garigue) was almost completely off limits up to a few years ago, and being chased off this vast, publicly owned piece of natural real estate was the order of the day. Various No Entry signs adorned the whole place – notably in the hunting and trapping seasons.  Enough said.

I usually do this trek on my own starting either at the Rdum id-Delli end and trudging southwards towards Ras il-Wahx – or the other way round. Once or twice a year I go down there in a small group of four to six people but it is difficult to do the complete trek with this number – someone always tires out and starts moaning to cut the trek short and find a way up.

This time I was just with my friend and co-worker Gilbert who probably needed this nature pilgrimage as much as I did. Talking of recharging batteries, Gilbert incidentally writes a wonderful motivational blog called Soul Hiker. The link is here http://soulhiker.com/

The official site of the Majjistral Nature and History Park is here http://www.majjistral.org/
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Game Over

20/10/2011

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It looks like game over for the Colonel and about time too. One less asshole in power. I suppose I was a bit premature (or very prescient??) when this cartoon was published late February but I'm glad the Libyan people are finally free of this bastard. And a humiliating end it was too if the video grabs of his capture are genuine. Live and act like a proper asshole and you die like one. And cornered in a hole too. Fitting end.
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Five Hundred

15/10/2011

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After an existence of nearly three months this site has huffed and puffed and finally made a small landmark - five hundred visits. Still a bit of a haul to make Alexa rankings but who’s counting?  

It was an experiment I had toyed with for some time and it was quite a difficult decision to publish the site as I am a great stickler for privacy. But then when your job is on the line (actually I have no idea if it is but that's another story called restructuring) you have to start gravitating towards a Plan B - however vague that plan may be.  

It all started while attending the Advance Tourism course. I did not choose to go myself but my company was hell bent to send about a hundred of us. Oh well, a day at the Westin once a month can't be that bad I reckoned, even  though I do get terribly tired and restless after a full day’s effort to listen attentively.

It was one of the course talks by Stephen D'Alessandro on Continuous Personal Development and lifelong learning that set me thinking. More specifically he asked - If I lose my job tomorrow what will I do? What else can I do apart from what I do in my current job, that is. That talk triggered something in me - so belated thanks Stephen, you were priceless that day.

Part of the course work was clocking up CPD hours. This could be done by attending seminars or talks on subjects as diverse as domestic violence, pet grooming, sanitary health in the Middle Ages or first aid - and getting signed statements of attendance. Frankly I did not care about this since I view that sort of CPD as force-feeding and plainly unfocused. I'd rather be watching a couple of TED talks - but that does not count as CPD as it can’t be quantified.

So I talked the matter over with my mentor (the course organizers thoughtfully assigned a mentor to each student, and a very valid and understanding mentor I had too) and I decided on improving my graphic skills. I started learning Indesign from scratch and I clocked much more than my required 30 hours of CPD that way. At the end I could produce a poster, booklet or restaurant menu with relative ease. I even started a mock publication of my cartoon work and I had gone as far as forty or so pages with this unpublished oeuvre.

There is such a lot to learn if you put your mind to it – and I am not claiming that I mastered this vast publishing program,  but I now do have a fairly good idea how it works and that was a start.  I also did exercises on Photoshop in areas of the program I hardly ever use. There are so many Photoshop tutorial sites out there and again if you want to do something then a bit of will and perseverance will eventually get you there.

So sometime in July I came across Weebly, a web hosting site which practically lets you set up a website for free with very user friendly building blocks. For a small fee you can buy your own domain name too. I built the site over four days and tested it on a few close friends – without any apparent collateral damage. Then I published and hoped against hope I wouldn’t be damned…

Once you publish a website you are obviously curious to know how much visits you are getting. Enter Google Analytics – a marvelous tool which tells you so much about your visitors (don’t worry I am not tabbing you).

Here I must admit that I am hopelessly fascinated with Google Analytics even though I am not into statistics. So let’s roll a few numbers.  The site reached 500 hits on 13th October. 384 of those 500 were unique visitors. The average visit was of thirteen minutes duration and the average pageview is 3.85. The bounce rate (visitors who view just one page and bounce off elsewhere) is 39%. A total of 1925 pages were viewed. Forty people visited the site five times or more – these must be the hardcore fans!

Visitors came from 33 different countries but the bulk of visits originate locally – a total of 318 visits from Malta. Weirdly enough Spain comes in second place with 38 visits then the UK with 24. The bit about Spain is a mystery with the average Spaniard spending 43 minutes on the site. I must be a cult figure of sorts there.

The site no longer gets its majority of visitors directly (read - me pestering people to visit by sending them the link). Direct traffic accounts for just 39% of visits, with 50% of visits now coming through referral sites. Facebook is the major referral site which is why I reluctantly signed up a few weeks ago after resisting for so long. If you want traffic you just have to be there. The other 11% of visits come through search engines – most of these google my name but a few come here via a mixed bag of search terms like “acid influenced drawing”, “maltese bus drivers”, and “cartoon left hand sketches”.

The blog on the site was an option I did not originally intend to use. Then I started posting a photo or two with a bit of comment. Now to my surprise I am actually enjoying writing. This is probably my longest post at 900+ words.

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Anthony Burgess in Malta

11/10/2011

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 There seems to be very scant information available on Anthony Burgess's brief stay in Malta during the years 1968-70. Certainly it can't have been a very happy stay here - in the first pages of his book Earthly Powers I seem to recall that he gives the narrow-minded representatives of Maltese officialdom quite a bit of stick - a very embarrassing read for a native of these Islands.

By all accounts the General Post Office and the Customs people (or more likely both) at the time frequently withheld books posted to him on censorship grounds - when Burgess needed to read the same books to earn a living from reviewing them.

“Certain books were not allowed in,” Burgess wrote. “At Luqa airport a team scrutinised the British newspapers and cut out or inked over underwear advertisements or bathing beauties which might inflame Maltese youth. One could sometimes buy a Daily Mirror that collapsed into scissored tatters.”

Censorship (then as now) was arbitrary, embarrassingly narrow minded and non consistent. This is hardly surprising seeing as the police in supposedly twenty-first century Malta can still request to vet potentially offensive lyrics for the Nadur Carnival, and dressing up as a nun or priest at the same event can still land one in court. Then there was the infamous incident where the same police requested that naked mannequins in a Mosta shop be dressed up… 


There is no memorial plaque on any house in Lija recording his stay - and I am saddened by the fact that the Lija Local Council hasn't thought of it either. Surely any present owner of the house would not object to a simple informative plaque - with one eye on the property’s potential resale value....  

So basically the author who gave us a whole new language replete with devotchkas, litsos and ptitsas in A Clockwork Orange is all but forgotten by his adoptive Maltese village. A real shame. 

The house where Burgess lived is apparently No. 168, Main Street, Lija (the house on the left in the photo above), described by the author as “a rather fine house built in 1798, the year of Napoleon’s invasion. It was floored in marble, had an impressive piano nobile, three bathrooms and four toilets, and a garden with its own artesian well and many lemon and orange trees. It had a bad reputation, so we heard in a local bar, because its former owner had hurled himself from the roof in a fit of depression”

I am grateful to Australian author Matthew Asprey for supplying important information (not least identifying Burgess’s house) for this revised blog entry.  Matthew has a very interesting article about following Burgess’s footsteps in Malta and Rome here

http://matthewasprey.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/peripatetic-burgess-2009-anthony-burgess-in-malta-and-rome/

(This blog post was revised on 24/12/2011)
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Addolorata - Notes and Oddities

9/10/2011

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A guided visit to the Addolorata Cemetery is not everyone's cup of tea but I was not going to miss this one - organized by Marthese's work colleagues and ably led by our guide who shall go by the name of Mr.M.

The Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery was designed by Emanuele Luigi Galizia, (1830 - 1906), of the Public Works Department, and opened on 9th May 1869. Galizia is mostly remembered as the architect who introduced the Gothic revival locally but he also designed the so called Turkish Cemetery in Marsa and a couple of exquisite houses in Moorish style in Sliema. Clearly the man was exceptionally talented and versatile.

Interestingly the Addolorata was not meant to be a national cemetery but rather a burial place mostly for the towns and villages in the vicinity which had no burial grounds of their own. There was also a reluctance to use it at first and no one was buried here for the first few years of its existence.  Today over 200,000 people are interred here.

The Addolorata can perhaps be called a monumental cemetery because of its exceptional use of topography - with the cemetery planned very symmetrically around a hill with the main chapel at the apex. There is a dearth of impressive monuments although the western side of the cemetery has quite a few beautifully designed, privately owned chapels.

The starting point was the Dominican chapel where the nun Teresa Parlar was buried in 1927. Parlar was known as something of a mystic in her time and was controversially reputed to have eaten little if anything from the age of eight - surely a record as far as hunger strikes go.  Parlar got into some trouble with the colonial authorities because of her saintly reputation and she was for a time hospitalized and put under observation. Today she is all but forgotten.
There is a short audio link about her on Campus FM here
http://www.campusfm.um.edu.mt/pages/webcastspages/nisamaltin.htm

One of the stranger curiosities is the tomb of a business family from Marsa whose crest is a tower. The tower is reproduced on the tomb and the family apparently chips a block off the tower every time a member dies.

Perhaps the most poignant monument is the one put up by a travelling businessman who, upon his unexpected return from abroad, so surprised his mother that she apparently died suddenly on seeing him. This is one of the finest sculptures at Addolorata even though it still has shrapnel damage (visible lower right in the photo above) when a bomb exploded nearby in the Second World War.

Also of artistic merit is the Sette Giugno monument which recalls the 1919 riots and contains the remains of four of the victims. The monument was designed by the Russian émigré artist Boris Edwards and recalls the style of our own Antonio Sciortino. Incidentally the cemetery did contain a few funerary sculptures by Sciortino himself but these have apparently all been stolen.  An interesting article on Boris Edwards can be found here
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110605/life-features/Between-myth-and-reality.369196

One other oddity is the tomb of an unfortunate boy who was killed by a fallen brick. The actual brick that killed him was incorporated in the statue adorning his tomb. Incidentally the unlucky boy was nowhere near as ugly as the tifel tal-precett represented on the tomb.

A last oddity and infamy - there is apparently only one illegally dug tomb in the whole cemetery and this belongs to a deceased former politician who was notorious enough in his life. It is not pretty to speak ill of the departed but to carry one's arrogance into the next life is something else…

Most of the information here was supplied by the very knowledgeable Mr.M who made this visit a highly interesting one.

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The God of Small Mercies

6/10/2011

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The God of Small Mercies smiled down on me today after a very trying day yesterday. My workhorse pc died on me and that immediately threw me in a funk. Took it for repairs with heart in mouth... Nothing much wrong with it - just the hard disk f***d up but thankfully all of the stuff on it was recoverable.

I do back ups on an external drive and in case of emergencies I can sort of work on my netbook but in reality working on graphics on a netbook screen is like trying out a Ferrari in the narrow streets of my village.

I took the photo below last Sunday while walking in Lija. It was such a picture perfect window sill that I decided to muck it up a bit...
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Ladies Of The Night

5/10/2011

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Work on this drawing is ready. This one took just about a month to complete. The coloring is almost an afterthought in this image as I saw color here as something simply to suggest a mood to the drawing. So the coloring is pretty much faded - almost hinted at. I used just one pen throughout - the Faber Castell TGIS 0.13. When I was through with the pen work I added some discreet pencil colors.

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