There are certain groups of people who seem to live in a parallel universe, unaware that everyone else has moved on. Among them are those who think that loaves of bread are as crucial to the national diet, and hence pivotal to the political scenario, as they were during the June riots 90 years ago. They seem not to have realised that the Maltese no longer live on bread and water, enhanced with a little minestra, that our diet has become a little more varied since the days when people lived literally on the breadline – which in fact gives us that word.

Many Maltese, women especially, no longer eat any bread at all, unless it is wholemeal or brown bread. For these women, the traditional Maltese loaf has been banished to the land of No-No, there to live in the company of pastizzi, chocolate bars, potatoes and ice cream. Lots of families never see a hobza tal-Malti in their homes for a still more prosaic reason: there is not enough time to buy it. When both parents work, the food shopping is usually done in bulk on Saturdays, and the bread bought is the sort that can be put in the freezer and removed when needed. Maltese bread has to be bought fresh every day, unless you particularly like toast or have a lot of ducks and chickens in the garden.

And yet, and yet – I read in the newspaper that the government appears to be treating the threat of an increase in the price of a Maltese loaf in much the same way that John Kennedy’s men handled the Cuban missile crisis. The reportage was breathless, and one can only imagine the red alert at highest level. The threatened price increase was staved off in a dramatic round of negotiations, after the cabinet of ministers – all of whom appear to have nothing better to do than save our loaf – agreed to go into discussion with the cooperative of bakers.

At moments like these, I put down my newspaper and briefly wonder where I am living. The cabinet has every single operator in the tourism industry pressing the emergency

button for attention and action, but the cabinet pretends that nothing is happening. Meanwhile, those who make our daily bread – or rather, our once-in-a-while bread – only have to threaten ministers with a one cent price increase and they all start to hop about as though the leader of Iran has his finger on the nuclear button and the missile is pointed directly at Malta. I think it’s called “displacement activity” in psychological terms.

The president of the bakers’ cooperative addressed the media to say that his men are prepared to postpone action provided that the government is serious about holding real negotiations. If the government does not negotiate, and if agreement is not reached, then the bakers will put up the price of Maltese loaves to 21 cents for the large loaf and 13c for the small loaf. It’s like a spoof from Harry Enfield’s The Fast Show, but the scary thing is that it is not a spoof. It is real. This is our life.

Malta has moved on tremendously since the days when our little islands spun on the bread axis, and still we are behaving like this. The price of everything we use and need far more than bread has shot up – petrol, diesel, water, electricity, clothes, food, having fun, bringing up our children, travel – and still the cost of a loaf reduces the government, on one side of the barbed wire, and the bakers, on the other side, to a complete stand-off. This is sheer and utter madness.

I have just been told that the tax on air tickets for a two-hour flight for the five of us is close to Lm300 – that’s just the tax and other charges, and not the cost of the actual tickets. Where do a couple of cents on the price of an occasional loaf of bread figure in this? There is no comparison. Maybe we are all on the brink of going mad through too much inbreeding, if we make more fuss about a cent on a loaf than we do about everything else.

The bakers should simply put up the price of their loaves and the government should just stay out of it – and that’s it. No one expects the price of bread to stay stable, and no one is going to bankrupt themselves by paying a few cents more each week for a loaf. Let’s get back to reality, please. It really is frightening to see the government and the media paying so much attention to the price of a loaf.

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Now we have shopkeepers making an almighty fuss because they refuse to put in dual pricing on the products they sell. Pricing their products in both euros and liri will become mandatory as from 1 January, but the kicking and screaming is so bad that you would think they had been asked instead to instruct their salespeople to be polite, charming and civil to customers.

They complain that dual pricing will give them a lot of hassle and extra costs, at a time when business is bad, general overheads are shooting up, and anyway, they just don’t feel like the imposition. Well, what can I say? If you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen. They made the same fuss when VAT was introduced, but it had to be done to get us into line with the rest of civilisation.

Somebody should tell the shopkeepers that maybe, just maybe, this is not all about them. Too bad that this is the way they think. They want to open for business when they want to open for business, and not when their customers want to do their shopping. They want to sell what they want to sell, and not what people want to buy. They can’t be bothered to train their staff to be nice and helpful, and then they wonder why browsers rush right out of the shop before even bothering to ask the price of something.

Shopping in Malta is a horrible experience. Almost no one is nice to you. People who work in shops behave as though customers are nasty smells that have to be blanked out. Assistants have developed an amazing ability to avoid eye contact, and nobody, but nobody, seems to know what the correct response to “thank you” is, when said by the customer. Shop assistants appear to believe that the correct response is silence. It’s bad enough that it is always the customer who says “thank you” rather than the person who has made the sale.

I support dual pricing because it is essential for customers. We can’t simply switch overnight from using liri to using euros. People cannot get used to the new currency in 24 hours. We all need time to adjust, to start thinking in euros, rather than thinking in liri and “translating”. I remember the confusion when we switched from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency. While we children took to it in no time at all, having had prior lessons at school using plastic versions of the new coins, the grown-ups had a hard time, and old people could not get used to it for years.

In the beginning, we were told that five cents were equivalent to one shilling, and hence, a 10-cents coin was two shillings and the old sixpence was now worth two cents and five mils (for which there was no single coin). A 50 cents piece was 10 shillings. One hundred cents were 20 shillings, and so, one lira was equal to one pound, and in fact has continued to be called that right up to the present day. I know no one who says lira rather than “pound” when speaking English, except for British tourists. Because of this neat division, older people continued to work out prices in shillings for years afterwards. A five-cents piece remained a xelin (a wonderful corruption of the English word “shilling”) for a long time.

The point is that people need time to make the transition, and so we need dual pricing to help us get used to the value of a price in euros. If we see, months ahead of the final changeover, labels bearing the price of something in both euros and pounds and cents, then this will ease us into the new currency. If we are using pounds and cents one day, and then euros the next, with no easing-in, then it is going to be a nightmare for everyone, including the lazy shop assistants and the shop-owners who think they can avoid hassle now, only to have it later. The day that prices appear only in euros, they will have one customer after another coming into their shops and asking the price in real money – that is, pounds and cents. In other words, customers will start to do what I do now when buying things overseas in euros: I mentally divide the price by 2.5 to see what it costs in Maltese money and whether it is worth the expenditure. Some people I know actually carry a pocket calculator and a note of the price exchange rate, to work out the price exactly.

Bother now saves on more bother later. The saying “a stitch in time saves nine” (stitches, that is) is very true. People who do not sew may not understand it, but what it means is that if you go to the trouble of getting out your needle and thread and putting a couple of stitches into that seam that has started to come undone, it will save you the need of having to sew the entire seam when it unravels, as it inevitably will once the first stitch goes.

Dual pricing now is costly and bothersome, but it is as nothing compared to the confusion that will have to be coped with after the changeover, if there is no dual pricing beforehand. Please, GRTU, stop making a fuss and start thinking of your customers for a change.