A random taxi driver in Central America gave me a graphic description of how the Maltese man with whom he shared a cabin, on the cruise ship they both worked for in the early 1980s, used to speak.  To my (carefully concealed) revulsion, it was mainly creative obscenities which the taxi driver didn’t understand. He asked me to track him down and pass on a message when I got home, but I’ve got to confess that because I had got a really bad, and probably really accurate, impression of the man in question from the taxi driver’s description, I thought it best not to. An understanding of cultural differences rarely bridges cultural barriers in these contexts, and I guessed that my taxi driver had no idea of that particular variety of people peculiar to ports in general, but more particularly to those of the ports of the Mediterranean.

In any case, forget about that. It was just my lead-in to how the world has become a pretty kind of odd global village, and being Maltese really drives this home to you. People always remember meeting a Maltese in a way that they don’t remember meeting, say, a German or a British person because there are millions of them. But meeting a Maltese is like meeting a Gibraltarian or a Hawaiian. People think it’s a little bit unusual and freaky; they remember, and worse than that, the next time they meet another Maltese, they are going to be sure to tell them.

So if you’re Maltese and chatting to random taxi drivers who want to know what your strange accent is, just say your name is Mary Borg or John Spiteri, and then say you’re from Gibraltar and hope that he doesn’t ask you what it’s like. In this case, I couldn’t – because the taxi driver had my name. So obviously, I had to hope that he wasn’t going to pick up another Maltese passenger any time soon.

Of course, all this is made worse by my propensity to treat total strangers like interview subjects, not only because I find the lives of strangers completely enthralling, but because you never know what you will find out that you wouldn’t if you didn’t ask all sorts of leading questions. Any other people with me are generally horrified at what they see as completely unacceptable curiosity, but I generally find that most people I’m talking to are only too delighted to talk about themselves and their lives, while I absolutely detest talking about myself and my life, and will determinedly deflect any attempts at getting me to do so – so it works well for both parties. They speak, prompted by my questions and occasional remarks, and I listen. I hasten to add that mine is the natural curiosity of the novelist for the details of lives and the inflections of speech, except that I am unlikely ever to write one. But you only learn about life and people by listening to them.

A couple of years ago I emerged from a tube station in London to see a Chinese massage-cum-beauty parlour right there and thought on the spur of the moment that I may as well get my cuticles seen to. As women know, it is impossible to go through the process of a manicure – because you can’t read or check your phone, and because you are face to face with the assistant – without having a conversation of some kind. The inevitable followed. Oh, was I really Maltese? What an amazing coincidence. She had just had another Maltese in, a man, but it was a massage he wanted, not a manicure. He was a musician, very nice, told her a lot about himself, in town for a couple of days for a performance. He even asked her to supper, but they’re not allowed to fraternise with clients. (Lucky I never talk about myself, I thought at that point.).

I suppose it’s because while people understand that Malta is tiny – otherwise they wouldn’t be so fascinated about meeting a real, live Maltese and then, what do you know, another one on the same day – they don’t actually understand just how tiny it is, and that the likelihood of people knowing each other, of each other, or somebody who knows the other person is quite great. That night I was scrolling through the Maltese newspapers when I came across a piece about a musician currently in London for a performance. I browsed past it, thinking how he had probably been telling his wife what a tough time he had that day.

How did I come to be writing this? Ah yes – I’ve just read a news report quoting numbers released by the National Statistics Office, which reveal that 54 per cent of all Maltese who travel for tourism purposes go doggedly only to Italy or the UK. I had actually meant to write about what a great and narrow-minded shame this is when wider horizons are increasingly inexpensive to reach. But then the column went off in a different direction entirely as I realised it is probably just as well that 54 per cent don’t go anywhere else. Because if and when I finally make it to Alaska, I don’t want some ice-floe guide to be telling me, “I met another Maltese last week. He told me he works for your government. He was called Konrad.” But then again, maybe I do. Imagine what I could find out with some judicious questions.

 

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