If you come here regularly, I don’t need to tell you this blog has been neglected these last few days. Here’s why. You see, about two years ago, things were at a very hot point for me. My website was spoofed, my identity impersonated, my sanity questioned.  That’s while I was the target of an overt campaign by people working for Yorgen Fenech, including a lawsuit filed against me by a man presumed, for the sake of due process, to be innocent of the murder of a journalist.

It was then that some months away from the front, therapy, and some hard thinking, told me that if I was to do anything properly, I could no longer attempt to do only one thing in my life. I needed to diversify my activities and distribute my attentions somehow.

One of the things I did was call back up my geeky teens and twenties and the time in my life when waking hours seemed longer, my capacity to retain inordinate and quite unnecessary detail was vaster, and distractions called by the needs of children were still in my future. I always loved the movies. My collection of DVDs, a world film history of immodest proportions, continues to hog our sitting room, a memorial to a time when I would scour the back shelves of every specialist retailer on every trip I went to, for titles in the long list of movies one must see before one dies. For I am so old that I remember a time when you bought or rented movies from high street shops.

I reconnected to that old passion and started a part time masters in film studies at the Malta University mostly thinking that I could spend some time reading theory and watching classics. There was that but there was more.

The program gave me some training on writing a script. I’m no screenwriter by any means but at least I have an idea of the basics now and I used those basics to hand in a script which was picked by the program to be made into a short film.

Well, the last two weeks, together with my student colleagues, and alumni of the course who come back to give a helping hand to the people who follow them, and the guidance of some brilliant teachers the university flies from European film schools, we prepped, shot, and edited my first (and maybe last) ever film.

I did a couple of documentaries before. But this, of course, is different. It’s beautiful, blessed, hard work. No one outside the group has seen the finished work so I have no idea if anyone will ever think it’s any good. Fortunately for those who don’t like it a short film is short, this one about 18 minutes so as painful viewings go it’s not the most tortuous.

And yet, feeling the exhaustion that follows an entirely new exercise, where muscles I never knew I had, have been stretched in long hours of trying and failing and trying again to use images to tell a story instead of watching images to hear one, and without yet having the benefit of anyone’s reaction, I am happy I did this.

I’m sorry I was away from here for two weeks because there was much to talk about. In between takes I thought of a dozen ways to call that baby-eating witch doctor Manché a chocolate starfish in the hope that he might sue me. I cleared my throat several times to send Carmen Ciantar to that place after she seemed to complain people like me did not march in the street in her defence after the politicians she propped up stabbed her in the back. I raised my fist at the sky angrily several times elaborating complex insults in the general direction of Joseph Muscat, that pathetic masked thief caught in the searchlight with a big bag of loot over his shoulder.

But these two weeks I had to work on something else.

If you want to see my film Xogħol ta’ Tlieta, as well as another short by another team of students called Ieqaf, they’re both screening tomorrow, Sunday 18 June, at 18:00 at the Valletta campus of the University of Malta in St Paul Street. It’s one of those things that can safely called one time only.

If the room’s too full you may be told to wait outside for a second screening. The two films are 30 minutes in total so it’s not the sort of wait that a cold beer or a hot tea won’t cure.

And now I must rehearse my Oscars speech…