Driving around southeast Sicily last weekend, I couldn't help thinking that this beautiful island must be one of the most underrated jewels in the Mediterranean, while our own Malaga building site cum dust bowl called Malta must be one of the most overrated.

The trouble with a holiday in Malta today is that if you come here and know people and they take you to the best places, the few jewels we have called restaurants, those cosy corners of loveliness that still exist, (more so in Gozo than in Malta) you are fine. But if you just had to arrive here, hire a car, set off and explore (as we did in Sicily) you would be hard pressed to think Malta was worth your while, or even worth a revisit.

Malta is dirty, Malta is shabby and sadly, some of it is now even ugly, really really ugly. How long are we going to say it and leave it as it is? Do we really need a Minister of Cleanliness to turn things around? Do we really need a Maggie Thatcher character to whip us all into shape, to beat out our selfishness and force us, kicking and screaming, into cleanliness mode? All that garbage we have to learn and regurgitate at school at exam and Matsec time, all the high sounding subjects like Systems of Knowledge, while one in seven children are leaving school practically illiterate?

And we can’t blame Labour for this. The young illiterate and so far unmotivated people who are out trying to find work today (and there are very, very few jobs for illiterate youngsters with no skills, particularly because many employers are using East European or African nationals and pay them slave labour wages instead!), were born in the late eighties and are totally the product of Nationalist administrations! A country where the teaching profession is up in arms over some unacceptable violence in schools, but does not hang its head in shame at the growing number of illiterates, of alienation and much worse, which our system of schooling is inculcating in our children!

What about teaching a sense of community if this does not appear to be taught in the Maltese family home? What about taking an intelligent pride in our own country that goes beyond winning the Eurovision? What about having the sense to realise that keeping your own house clean while you litter outside is as Third World as all the immigrants we love to bash and deride?

Fortunately, Malta is tiny so it should be possible to keep it pristine, as it is possible to keep our own homes as immaculately as we do. And I'm not in Malta bashing mode. I am certainly not saying this is a terrible place to live. It isn't. The Maltese, due to the island’s size, strong sense of family, love of socialising and much more, have a social and a family life that is second to none. No wonder and little surprise that we were recently polled as being the happiest people in the world.

But we do depend on tourism quite heavily. And the tourist experience here is not a good one. So many areas of the Mediterranean and southern Europe have improved dramatically over the years. Sicily, Cyprus, much of Portugal to name only three. Yet Malta is still lagging behind, or worse in decline, similar to all the “grotsville” towns you find along the Spanish coast, that boomed in the seventies and eighties with pack ’em high tourist villages that have ended up looking like giant Bugibbas and even nastier.

There has recently been a little bit of a revolt in Sliema over the Qui-si-Sana car park cum excuse for an entertainment complex in one of the most peaceful areas of our Sliema Front. This issue is a microcosm of the discontent we all feel as we watch our islands character disappear under a cloud of dust. Townhouses disappearing by the minute. Architecturally ugly blocks of flats litter our coast. And this was another thing I noticed along the coastline we drive along in Sicily. The preponderance of low, not high like ours buildings along the coast. Buildings that don’t dominate and destroy the coastline, but softly complement the undulating coastline and the picturesque Mediterranean Sea.

And all this achieved in Sicily, in a land bedevilled by the problems of criminal gangs, yet they are still managing to turn it around. Agrigento, Noto, the so called “garden of stone”, which had EU signs everywhere (where funds had been obtained for the towns’ restoration) and where cleanliness was self-evident.

We can’t wait for a good education system to take root in the next generation of youngsters to have a better Malta. We have to clean up Malta now. The only area that looks really good is that area around Castille where all the buildings including the public gardens and the car park have been given a face-lift.

That’s what Malta needs. An extreme makeover. A boob job, botox, face-lift and eyebrow shaping, manicured nails and most importantly, a good stylist for the hair.

It needs it all and it needs it now. Where oh where are the surgeons and stylists?