Election fever

In 2 days time the local council elections will be held. Anyone who lives on the island is aware of it, even the street-rats, their parasites, and the parasites of their parasites!!!

For the last couple of months we had to endure the controversies created by both parties and the struggle for some limelight by the third party. Our homes and streets were inundated with fliers of the contestants, electoral programs and sample ballot papers instructing us why and how we should vote and whom we are to give our no. 1 with an endless list of (crappy) reasons.

And obviously the inevitable house visits ~ an election can never reach its potential vertigo without them. Abruptly the candidates start to take interest in grooming; they start combing their hair, use deodorants (and unfortunately sometimes even some perfume that should have remained forgotten at the back of the underwear drawer) and invest in decent clothing and suddenly remember the concept of actually washing their clothes and use fabric conditioners to kill the stench of mould and sweat. And off they go round the village, with a mate in tow, knocking on every door, feigning interest in your requests and concerns, coming up with phantasmagorical excuses that not even the prolific mind of an exuberant 5 year old could come up with, shake your hand and leave off for a remake of their masquerade to your neighbor and eventually the rest of the village.

Every time it's the same old story with different actors playing the characters. And somehow we like it. Yes, deep down we do. We turn on the radio 'incidentally' when the political slot is on, and tune in on TV when a debate is scheduled or when the party leaders are invited to a talk show. And if we see a billboard of the other party placed in a prominent junction we start getting itchy if 'our' party doesn't place one right next to it... Ideally even hiding it a bit. And we start yelling at our TV sets if the one representing the other party gets to talk for an extra second (for what seems to us an extra hour). And we like to sift through all that junk we receive daily in our letterboxes and throw out the fliers of the other party. Yeah, the majority tends to like this fever.

Frankly I don't really care; I don't watch TV, don't listen to the radio, avoid anything that has to do with politics, don't answer the door even if it's that funny Cupid with a 72karat diamond with platinum and full of other gemstones ring, and I leave it up to my parents to sift through the mail. However there is one thing that really irritates me. If the candidates want to waste their time going round the village to show their new hair cut, and their new-found discovery of blades and how to apply them to remove facial hair, it's fine by me. But what it's not fine by me is that for 3 whole years they don't do a single thing. If you send a letter they won't even acknowledge it, let alone reply. If a streetlight needs to have its bulb changed, you won't get it and if the moon's surface is 99.9% much smoother than the road you live in, it's not in their hands. Obviously all this changes the week prior to the cast of votes. Ahh!! then suddenly all the lights are working, all the streets get patched (that lasts only till Sunday, [the day after the elections] as if on contract) and they might even find some money left to pay a group of men to clean the streets and maybe even cut some weeds from the roundabouts.

This is exactly what happened this morning at Fgura. Unfortunately I did not manage to take pictures of the works being done but here you can see the fresh tarmac in my road (even though I managed to capture one of the workers while leaving with his tools).

A note to all the contestants: If you really care for your locality, cut the crap and do your job. If you're not capable of that then get out of the way and stop resorting to this last minute, hope-you're-satisfied kind of works. They suck, are a sheer waste of money, and sooo fake.