OPR- Wednesday, 23rd November, 2005

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, 
Prime Minister, 
Distinguished Guests, 
Ladies and Gentlemen.  

The first royal visitor to Malta according to age-old tradition was Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, King of Ithaca.  On that occasion, according to Homer, Ulysses was entertained to dinner by the only person who could claim to represent the locality, Calypso by name.  There is, however, an apparent oddity in Homer’s story.  Ulysses and Calypso ate and drank at different tables and the menus were also different.  The explanation of the apparent oddity is that one of them was a mortal being and his food and drink were, I suppose, fairly similar to what we will be having;  the other was immortal or more precisely was not subject to any of the ravages of time, precisely because her food and drink were nectar and ambrosia.  Such catering kept anyone nourished by the stuff at the same age he or she was at the time they began eating.  

I am reminded of this episode from the legendary beginnings of Maltese history because of an immediately relevant fact that I find most impressive.  Practically all of us, the people of Malta , who have been brought up on the story of Calypso and Ulysses, deeply suspect that Your Majesty, in those happy years when you first visited our islands as the wife of a young lieutenant then stationed on our shores, must have been secretly given nectar and ambrosia to eat and drink.  What other reason could there be, we ask ourselves, that can explain this phenomenon:  in our eyes when we have the rare good fortune as now to have Your Majesty physically among us, the image of Your Majesty is always and exactly that of the fair young lady who lived in our midst, in a fairly ordinary Maltese house, following a fairly ordinary Maltese style of life but whom we all knew was a real princess, and whose ordinary appearances among us served only to nourish our feelings that she really was a fairy princess who had adopted a Maltese disguise.  

That was, Your Majesty, the first important phase of our acquaintance and relationship with you.  The second phase was when, after His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh had presented us with the Charter of our Independence in nineteen sixty four, Your Majesty was the Queen of Malta for a number of years in a similar constitutional relationship to the Maltese Government as to the British.  In this period, there occurred an incident which helped no end to foster the impression that, despite the passage of years and changing circumstances, Your Majesty was unalterably and essentially the same Princess who lived in our imaginations forever in Maltese dress.  A dispute had arisen between the Maltese and the British Governments; and the representative of Your Majesty as Queen of Malta, stated on your behalf, that he stood “four-square” with the Maltese.  That stance confirmed in our minds the belief in the indelible permanence of the honeymoon affectivity of that first encounter between us.  Its paradigmatic quality had projected it outside history and endowed it with a peculiar kind of timelessness.  

Today, we are celebrating the third phase of the relationship.  Your Majesty is the effective symbol of the unity of the Commonwealth in all its magnificent diversity and the many-coloured splendour of its multiculturalism.  It is now the achronic youthfulness or phoenix-like capacity of rejuvenation the Commonwealth displays that the image and presence of Your Majesty embodies for us.  There are still many homes in Malta as I am sure there are in all parts of the world-wide Commonwealth, in which families still cherish cups and plates and other souvenirs through which they continued to be reminded – by Your Majesty’s perennial radiation of inspiration  – of the traditional values of the Commonwealth.  

It is with the same spirit of domestic familiarity as well as deep respect that I invite all my guests to raise their glasses and drink to the continued health and time-defiance of Queen Elizabeth the Second.