Walking, fast walking, jogging, running and cycling have at last all been catching on all over these islands. Wherever you go, mornings and evenings, summer and winter, you are bound to meet this ever-growing crowd of health-conscious individuals wearing the latest sports gear and footwear, electronic heart-rate gauges and water bottles stuck to different parts of their bodies, rushing past you on the seafront.

I know. I am one of many on this seafront stage today. I have purposely chosen a distant newsagent to have an excuse for making the fast walk to him for my daily newspapers, an obsession that seems to have grown older with me. But it has also given me the opportunity to make my social observation, another habit I have always had in the past when watching football at the stadium, sunning myself on the beach and, long before driving licences could be bought at a political canvasser’s rate, during bus rides.

People and the different characters they project have always fascinated me. It could be the writer’s innate curiosity in me, or a keen eye for detail that four decades of journalism can instil in you without actually realising it. It has become fun for me to go on my daily walk, sometimes fast, and sometimes not so fast when still feeling the effects of the football for over-50s I still happily, albeit eccentrically, indulge in. You soon realise the crowd of fellow walkers and joggers has become a rapid sequence of familiar faces and, hmmm, bosoms and legs.

There is the 40-something lady whose pace is dictated by the dog she follows, often giving the impression the leash is on her rather than on the sprightly animal. When she appears and disappears as quickly as this sentence has been written, I somehow know I am near Rene, my newsagent.

Reaching that particular spot, however, this summer has so far meant walking carefully to avoid the onslaught of sporadic groups of young Spanish students presumably here to learn English. I am amazed at how much energy they can muster to talk so fast and so loudly so early in the morning. They shout and they chatter in their lovely language, girls and boys, some of them romantically holding hands, some others less romantically holding bottles of beer or wine from which they sip randomly.

The Scandinavian students walk past in much smaller groups, often individually. Perhaps it is the characteristic northern penchant for solitude. I have seen them glide past, natural blondes with skeletal bodies, seeking comfort from the sea breeze as they try to avoid plodding, flip-flop first and not always successfully, into their vomit of the previous night.

Then there is the trio of Maltese joggers who talk as they run, oblivious to the rest of us, and who never seem to want for topics to discuss. One is fatter than the other two, so they sometimes slow their pace for him to catch up, let him take a breather, and on with the debate of the day.

One short Chinese girl, made up and presumably dressed to kill, walks past in her high heels. This is obviously no jogger, but an early bird on her way to work in one of the nearby ethnic restaurants, perhaps? The same goes for the gentleman in a dark-blue suit whose beady rows of perspiration glow wildly and inevitably on his forehead.

A man and a woman stop to talk to each other regularly while their dogs have a field day. I have focused for sometime on this couple and can now safely declare there is truth in the belief that dogs often resemble their owners, or vice-versa, whichever way it goes. While the two of them exchange daily niceties, their dogs exchange eager smelling sessions, rapid rubbing of noses and sexual organs and a bit of meaningful barking.

There is one particular runner I have come to await with some trepidation, though. The way he uses his arms and legs make me feel somewhat uneasy. There is a strange touch to it all. He may very well be the nicest of people, but I always make sure I am the one, not him, running behind on the seafront.

The tiniest walker every morning is a septuagenarian lady with the sweetest smile on her face as she delicately tiptoes past. She wears sunglasses and she must listen to some good music on her earphones to be able to make it look so easy and so happy an experience. Walking back to happiness, woopah oh yeah yeah, said goodbye to loneliness, woopah oh yeah yeah. I wonder if her name is Helen Shapiro, possibly from Birkirkara.

There is always this lonely Arab, not walking or running, but dozing on a public bench. He gazes mysteriously out at sea that, no doubt, holds a special fascination, perhaps even a feeling of foreboding, for the people of the desert. He brings to mind the boatloads of desperate immigrants reaching our shores and those of many other Mediterranean countries. You feel like you want to say a word of comfort to him, only to quickly presume that such sad human drama could very well be far removed from his early-morning thoughts.

The seafront is not just men and women in their colourful attires, a vast array of characters using it as a stage. There are the long-suffering trees, very often victims of late-night revelry. Thrown into the sickly soil that keeps them, I have seen discarded shoes, used condoms and the most awesome of animal excrement, some of which is bound to make you think there may have been some human involvement too.

As a player on the same stage myself, I must be on the receiving end of someone else’s observation list. There have been occasions when I felt I was being tempted into impromptu competition. When you are all too casually overtaken, you automatically increase your pace. It happens to me every morning. Human beings are by their very nature a competing species. I have reacted strongly when I felt someone, of my age of course, was delivering an I-am-fitter-than-you message as he shouldered past me in a manner that smelt of utter one-upmanship.

I have sometimes managed to gain lost ground and win. Rene’s shop is the finishing line of my imaginary races. When it is a she who has overtaken me, I tend to laugh it off, only to find I simply could not recover my territorial disadvantage. I will challenge her to a bout of arm-wrestling next time.

When my better half has the time and the inclination to join me on these seafront walks, my observations tend to stop as we keenly try to make up for lost talking time at home. But I bet my fellow walkers and joggers realise immediately that I’m in a lower gear…