Etna's Ash Lingers: A Dead Island Looks Up
He was 85, and for a generation of Maltese listeners he was the voice that came through the radio before you were old enough to know what a radio was.
Norman Hamilton is gone. He was 85, and for a generation of Maltese listeners he was the voice that came through the radio before you were old enough to know what a radio was. His death — announced quietly, as the deaths of genuinely beloved people often are — arrived on a Wednesday when this island had other reasons to look at the sky.
Mount Etna has been generous this week. The ash it sent across northern Malta and Gozo settled on cars, on windowsills, on the leaves of trees that have survived a dozen summers of drought. The Met Office says the conditions could hold the volcanic dust over the islands until Friday, and there is something almost philosophical about that — Sicily's volcano deciding, without consultation, to redraw the air quality map of a country it has never belonged to. The Times of Malta reported residents waking to find the familiar turned grey. Nobody voted for this particular inconvenience.
And yet, on the same evening, a partial solar eclipse was visible at sunset — the Perseid meteor shower queued behind it like a second act — and if you could set aside the ash and the grief, there was something almost generous about a sky this busy. Newsbook had the details on where to watch and how to photograph it safely, which is the kind of civic journalism that matters more than it gets credit for.
Lewis Capaldi played Ta' Qali to a sold-out crowd and thanked Malta for a second chance, referencing a difficult 2022 performance that has apparently lived in his mind. The crowd gave it to him. This island has always been better at forgiveness than its politics suggest.
Speaking of politics: Newsbook reported new data showing a deep disconnect between younger Maltese and the political establishment, published, with characteristic timing, on International Youth Day. Both Labour and the Nationalists issued their visions for youth engagement. I have read enough of these statements over four decades to tell you they are written to be forgotten. Until one of them produces a candidate under forty who wasn't already somebody's cousin, the youth engagement conversation is theatre.
The Church, meanwhile, welcomed proposed reforms to the planning appeals process, calling them long-overdue — which they are — while urging that this be the beginning, not the end. That is the correct position, and it is worth saying clearly: the planning system in Malta has operated as a private negotiation dressed in public clothing for long enough that reform feels radical. It isn't. It's the minimum.
And a professional diver is dead off the coast, with investigators believing a 60-kilogram tuna became entangled with him in the water. There is no political angle to that story. Just a man who went into the sea and did not come back.
Hamilton's obituaries will come in the days ahead, and they will be well-deserved. What they will not say — what obituaries never say — is that his kind of broadcasting is not coming back.
