The people of the largest country on earth, and those of the smallest, have one thing in common. Entirely lacking in imagination, they are unable to innovate and so are reduced to surviving by copying other people’s ideas. I am speaking, of course, of the Chinese and the Maltese. The difference is that while China has turned copy-cat behaviour into a set of billion-dollar industries, churning out “designer” handbags, light fittings and furniture closely modelled on European and American patterns, we think small.

A pastizzi shop opens on the high street and does well and, sure enough, four months later another pastizzi shop opens for business three corners away and the owner wonders why he isn’t doing as well as the first pastizzi shop did. Six months later, both pastizzi shops close down, unable to survive on each getting half of the original amount of business.

On the street around the corner, Mrs Borg opens a shop selling clothes. Mrs Camilleri sees her making a buck or two, and decides to do the same. She rents the shop next door to Mrs Borg’s and puts exactly the same clothes in the window and on the rails. Mrs Borg’s business tapers off and Mrs Camilleri’s never picks up. By the time the year is out, both have gone bust.

Or let’s take restaurants. There must be a thousand places calling themselves restaurants on these two islands, and yet there’s almost nowhere to eat. Far from being maddeningly tempted by the vast array of choice, my friends and I find ourselves calling each other up on a Friday night and playing a game of verbal tennis. “Any bright ideas?” “How about X. I heard it’s good.” “Oh God, no, it’s rubbish. If I want a bowl of overcooked pasta or a grilled steak, I can make it at home, thanks. What about Y? Have you been?” “Yes, it’s awful. And the owner seems to think that the only place people can eat fish is in a restaurant, where they have to pay Lm9 for it. To whom does he think fishmongers sell their fish?” “Z, then? M? P? Q? R? S? T?” A pause. “Why don’t you just come over to us? I’ll run down to St Paul’s Bay and buy a couple of fish.” “Great idea. Shall I bring the wine?”

I eat like a pig (but with far more discerning habits). I eat more than the four men in this household do. I eat more than the dog. I love food so much that the thought of becoming one of those women my age who live in a constant state of starvation to be able to wear tight hipster trousers at parties makes me feel faint. I’d rather not wear the tight hipster trousers and eat.

Whenever I am away, I have to be prised from a close examination of restaurants over lunch, supper and even tea. I’d rather trawl the restaurants than trawl the boutiques, though I am fascinated by clothes. I look at menus in the same way that other women look at trays of bejewelled rings. Which shall I choose? Oh dear, I want all of them. And it’s not just the food that I love, but the whole wonderful atmosphere that makes a really good restaurant what it is. The smart service. The beautiful décor. The absence of pushchairs at the next table. But suggest lunch or dinner in Malta, and my initial, Pavlovian reaction (which I keep to myself) is: “Oh God, do I have to? How can I get out of this?” I would rather be at my desk.

The restaurant experience in Malta is overwhelmingly dismal because most of them have been set up on the pastizzi shop principle. There’s no feeling for the food, and boy, does it show. Tony sees Joe packing in the punters at his “Mediterranean cuisine” place down the road, and he thinks: “Well, that’s a jolly good idea. I’ll have some of that.” So he copies him. He takes out a loan on his house (probably without explaining the situation to his wife), pays a fortune in key money for a rented spot in a prime location, commissions an interior designer to do up the place at considerable cost and with off-putting overwrought results, hires a cook “from Sicily”, puts an ad in the newspaper and recruits a bunch of sixth formers on holiday to wait on the customers, and then, last and definitely least, he thinks: “Oh, I almost forgot – the food!” With so many restaurants, Malta has become one of the worst places to eat out on earth. And it’s not just me saying that, either.

We see the copycat principle at work in every sphere of Maltese life. Fifteen years ago, it was bathroom showrooms. There was one on every other street. “Are your people obsessed with washing themselves?” a friend from England once asked me. “No,” I said. “They’re status symbols. Many Maltese grew up without a bathroom.”

Now it’s computer shops. They’re all over the place, and still you can’t get what you want or need. At one stage, it was jewellery shops, all of them selling the same boring stuff bought from the very same wholesaler. Now it’s boutiques, selling the most unbelievable tat – the kind you only see worn by streetwalkers in Rome and Soho – and kitchen emporia. Yes, kitchens are the new copycat thing. Everyone and his brother are selling them.

The copycat syndrome is what makes us behave like sheep, too. Safety in numbers? Lack of imagination? If everyone’s doing it then it must be right? One couple in a group of friends splits up and the rest of them go down like skittles. Go to a party and all the women are wearing variations of the same thing. Now they are even the same shape and size, and look like they have been pressed out of ginger-bread moulds. Pop, another one! Pop, one more!

I went to a very popular coffee-shop between meetings the other day, and it was packed with women with their small kids, and other women on their lunch break. For some minutes I sat there, feeling spooked, like there was something weird, and then I realised what it was. I was the only one wearing the hair that God gave me, the only one with a dark crop up top. They all – and I mean all, without exception – had the same hair, the kind of hair that I think of as screaming out for help (“Help me! Help me! I’m being tortured to death!”). It was either dyed blonde or heavily streaked blonde on brown – for both of which processes prior bleaching is essential, making the hair lifeless and frayed – then blow-dried “straight”. As somebody with naturally straight hair, I can tell a blow-dry at 20 paces. The hair moves differently. It was like an Argentinean polo party, with absolutely none of the glamour or beauty.

Apparently, in Cyprus they have the same problem. I was stuck in a taxi in a European city with a Cypriot journalist some months ago, and I asked him what he liked best about the place. “The fact that all the women walking about are so creative with their clothes,” he said, to my surprise. “In big European cities, everyone tries to stand out, to be different, to look like an individual. In my home, all the women try their hardest to look like all the other women. They all look the same, and they’re terrified of being different. It’s so boring.”

As a former student of anthropology, I know the reason why: in small societies, difference is seen as a threat. People do their utmost to fit in, not to stand out, to keep their heads beneath the parapet. Being different is thought to be dangerous, and after years of indoctrination, people simply lose their individuality. Their imagination, if they ever had any at all, is sapped.

Then there’s the answer to the question of what shall I be when I grow up, to which half the nation’s teenagers, especially the girls, appear to have answered: “A lawyer.” The islands are creaking under the weight of lawyers, elsewhere other fields are burgeoning, the way for innovation is wide open, the growth areas of the future are in entirely unrelated disciplines, but what do our youth want to become? Lawyers.

Fine, I can understand taking a law degree and then moving into finance, or setting up a business. It’s a good discipline – or at least, it used to be but isn’t any more, judging by some of what I see. But these people actually want to work as lawyers – hundreds and hundreds of them. Something tells me that lack of imagination is a congenital problem. Too much in-breeding and the dullard genes win out. I can understand my generation becoming lawyers, because there was nothing else to do. But now? There’s so much choice, and we keep wearing down the same tracks.

Now we have copycat arson attacks, which is what triggered off the thoughts behind this column. Almost every day we wake up to hear that somebody else’s door/car/boathouse has been set alight. The police have said that, with the exception of the “Jesuit” arson attacks, the rest are unconnected. It’s clear what is happening. The fuss and debate after the cars belonging to the Jesuits and the refugee service lawyer were burnt ensured that everyone got to hear about them. It’s inevitable that, given the pastizzi shop principle, lots of people would think: “Gosh, that’s a good and easy way to get back at so-and-so.” They wouldn’t have thought of it before, you see. Imagination is in very short supply here. So suddenly, there are burnings almost every day, and they’ll go on until somebody gives a lot of publicity to an alternative form of getting your own back.

Politicians and others are forever casting about for reasons why Malta doesn’t move forward, why we’re still stuck in the mud, why we haven’t become a thriving, buzzing paradise. The answer is in three words: lack of imagination. Without imagination, there is no creative thought, and with no creative thought, there is no innovative action. We are condemned to being forever an island state of copycats, copying everything – from our clothes to our homes to our way of taking revenge on others. And, unlike the Chinese, we can’t turn this into big business. The market for ginger-bread women and arson attacks is very small.