We Love Malta

Notes from Blighty – by Chris Cobb

Malta is roughly twice the size of a major metropolitan city, say Washington, DC., scattered in towns and villages.

It has a sun-scoured, hilly, Holy Land feel about it; the colors run the spectrum from eggshell to egg nog, all to do with the native rock, a kind of lithified mud typically formed in a river estuary. All the buildings are made from it. It bleaches in the sun to a blinding whiteness.

It was pushed up out of the sea by volcanic actitvity and has been in a headlong rush to return, in a geological sense, ever since. Waves are eating its sandstone hem like mice.

The place has a heap of past (its ruins are among the oldest on earth) but don't ask the natives about it. History is a luxury they cannot afford; it's all they can do to make a living.

It is a very Catholic island but they must let down their guard for the tourists who make up 40% of their annual income. Mediterrean toplessness is tolerated provided it is surreptitious.

Were it not for the sea breeze the island would suffocate in its own exhaust. Many of its buses are British Leylands and Bedfords going back to the fifties and sixties and Malta bears the stigma of the true third world nation: if you abolished public transport the air would be cleaner.

But in the end it is a Mediterranean climate, the natives are friendly, the beer is cheap and you can roll off a rock and dive among the fishes. As an Australian C&W singer we encountered put it:

"Malta, we love Malta.
These are the things we'd alte'."

Chris Cobb is our expatriate, graphic designer, writer, and raconteur reporting from his basement flat in London.

Comments

[Joe Cremona]

Dear Chris Cobb,

I don't know when you came to Malta, but for sure history its not the only thing we have to make a living, one thing is for sure, that women here are paid the same as men, while in UK do not, my friend.

on the buses you're right, although lately we have most of them cleared and have new ones.

regarding the beer, the british all come here ans ask for our local, best beer, Cisk, so please, next time, do your fucking home work good.

cheers
mr cremona