Human beings are the most adaptable of creatures, which is why we are found in every part of the globe, from the one extreme of desert to the other of ice floe. If further proof of this were required, it is the sudden appearance in my car of a nice, big qoffa, in which six cloth shopping bags lie snugly curled up. The qoffa and its children now live in the car on a permanent basis. A few weeks ago, this kind of behaviour would have been unthinkable to me. If somebody had suggested then that this is what I should do to cut down on my voluminous use of plastic bags, I would probably have replied with an expletive. I have to tell you, though, that I have yet to discover a way of making that basket look hip and attractive. Short of sewing little Indian bells on, there seems to be little I can do to dampen down the granny effect, but there you go. I will have to adapt further. At least it’s not a tartan basket on wheels.
The qoffa sits next to me on the front seat, and makes a better conversational companion than the people who sometimes sit there instead, in my other life as an unpaid chauffeur. That is where I keep it because concealed in the boot is further proof of the adaptability of human nature: 12 jerry cans. They have to stay there because I never know where or when I am going to be able to buy paraffin. The paraffin market is one of the rare few in which buyers chase sellers, and chase them hard. Gas, it would seem, is another one.
The adaptability of my human nature does not extend to adjusting to life in a cold house; the Inuit can keep their ice floes because I’m having no part of that. Five years of schooling in an unheated Mdina convent, with chilblains as my red and itchy companions between November and April, have given me a lifelong aversion to any form of chilly interior, particularly when it is an old one with high ceilings. Now, even when I walk into a cold shop or showroom, I turn and walk right out again. Dismayingly, schools – even private schools and church schools – remain unheated in 2005, and during parents’ morning some weeks ago I found myself chatting to some very pleasant teachers, all of whom were muffled up behind their desks. One of them, in the most miserably ice-like classroom, was wearing a coat, a large scarf and gloves. I worried briefly whether my son’s presence there could be construed as parental cruelty. I went back home three hours later and crawled straight into bed, shivering and demoralised at the fact that everyone seems to accept such acutely uncomfortable conditions as normal and unchangeable.
That night, I had a horrific dream in which I was trapped in a basement classroom with no windows and high ceilings, my only protection against the plummeting temperature a couple of blue nylon jumpers, three thermal vests, two pairs of woollen tights and fingerless gloves that my grandmother had knitted so that I could wear gloves and write at the same time. I wasn’t allowed to leave until I had calculated, over and over again, how many litres of paraffin I could buy with Lm200 and how much burning-time this would give me for (a) one heater by Xbtu and (b) two heaters by Ybtu – calculators not allowed. Lurking in the corner was a tired-looking book of logarithms, with its nasty blue cover, that still features regularly in my dreams.
I woke up sweating and stayed anxious for the rest of the day. A quarter of a century later and I am unsurprised to discover that I still haven’t adapted to ice-cold classrooms. But then, the secret of adaptation is this: people rarely adapt when they have a choice not to do so, and when the thing to which they must adapt is not attractive to them, and I shall never have to go to school again.
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Fortunately, I have not had to adapt to a lack of gas with which to cook (you will have gathered that we don’t use it for heating). This is because I had already adapted to the abysmal gas supply system by laying down a decent-sized number of cylinders, so we have been sitting out the siege in relative comfort. When, in what I fervently hope will be the not-too-distant future, we are connected to the three-phase electrical supply that has so far evaded us, I shall merrily ditch even those and adapt to cooking with electricity. There is something that strikes me as distinctively primitive about all this chasing around after the gasman and lugging heavy cylinders into place. As it is, were I to try and use an electric oven to roast something, I would have to switch off the bathroom boilers, and taking a bath in tepid water is something else to which I may find myself unable to adapt. There are limits.
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We have just been told that the gas situation is “back to normal”, but what is “normal”? Whatever normal may once have been, the immediate crisis has jolted us into seeing it for what it is: an abnormal and completely unacceptable way for households to obtain fuel for heating and cooking. Sixty years down the line, the ship bringing in our gas was greeted like a second Santa Maria convoy. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that this is now a member State of the European Union.
You don’t have to deal with that kind of thing in places where the standard of living is high. This gas business has helped wake us up to the fact that our standard of living is not really that good at all, because warm homes and affordable fuel on tap, with which to heat them, are an essential part of that. There’s a major discrepancy in our homes. They’re big, they cost a lot to build and finish, the furniture and furnishings are just-so, the tiles shiny and the balustrades plundered from some African forest. But they’re uncomfortable because the single most important factor for comfort is missing: warmth. They’re chilly and damp, or there are noisy air-conditioners blasting hot air in erratic gasps all over the room.
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Malta is one of the few places where air-conditioners used for cooling in the summer are also used for heating in the winter. Again, this is proof of our adaptability: this time to the rather curious lack of central heating, which even buildings in Sicily-up-the-road now have. In other parts of the Mediterranean littoral, excluding most of North Africa, all but the poorest homes use central heating in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer. In fact, the term ‘air-conditioning’ is used to signify cooling and not heating.
New homes, including expensive apartment complexes with all mod-cons, continue to be built without a central heating system, and nobody considers installing such a system in existing houses and flats. We behave as though to do such a thing would be extraordinary and capricious, impossible almost. Yet the old buildings of towns and cities scattered right across Europe had no central heating, and now they do. The systems were variously put in place over the first 60 years of the 20th century. Only in Malta, forever hovering on the edge of subsistence, and with a subsistence mentality still in the age of consumerism, was such a thing thought unnecessary and deeply wasteful. Why heat homes, when human beings are so marvellously adaptable? Our bodies are designed to conserve heat by shivering and making all the little hairs stand up, and unlike animals, we can pile on clothing. Not so long ago, after all, the solution of many Maltese to the heating problem was to bed down with the animals in the hay, or to have all 10 children sleep in the same bed.
Ah, but here’s the rub: central heating needs a source of power, and sources of power, like sources of water, have been Malta’s greatest problem since time immemorial. Lack of fuel and lack of water hindered this country’s development through the millennia, and here we are, suffering still from the very same problems. At least we no longer have to scavenge for bits of thistle to keep our kenur going (instead, we run after Toni tal-gas), but we have to ship in everything we need. Wood, always such a scarce commodity here, is also our most expensive fuel, though we don’t realise it. A bag of logs that sells on the black market (no VAT) for Lm3 keeps a small fireplace fed for only a few hours, heating just one room.
Running central heating on imported fuel sold at the kind of prices we are now looking at would be prohibitive –the rich would think twice. In fact, even the homes of the rich are unheated in Malta, except for a Potez in the hall and perhaps another in the living-room (total running cost per month for two of these: Lm400), with all other rooms having that subtle chill factor. Walk out of the range of the Potez and you find yourself wrapping your arms around you. There’s no running around the house in a T-shirt and shorts in January, as you would in Britain or Germany, with the temperature outside at well below zero. That’s why people who come from elsewhere feel colder here than they do back home, even if Malta is a warmer country.
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No, the gas situation is not back to normal because it never was normal and never will be. This is 2005. We shouldn’t have to be doing this. It’s primitive and backward. We are primitive and backward for accepting it. We chase fuel, we pay money for it that we can barely afford, and still our homes are cold and unpleasant. Is this what we should be calling normal?
Normality can only be achieved by fundamental change that will shift us into the 21st century, with homes that are T-shirt warm at the press of a switch and the turn of a thermostat, paid for against a bill that comes once a month from the utility supplier without eating up too great a proportion of earnings. How this can be achieved when we are so backward is beyond me, but then I have not been elected to find out and to make sure that it happens. All I know is that when I was little, town-gas was piped into our Sliema house. Thirty-five years later my parents, living in the same house, are lugging cylinders around, while their daughters, variously, chase paraffin vendors and gasmen, or work out how many electric radiators and air-conditioning units they can switch on at once without creating an overload. It seems to me that we haven’t moved forwards at all.