I was amazed by the response to my column last Sunday – so many of you feel the same way about the shocking aggression and poor manners and standards in Malta. Yet we all seem to be cowering in the shadows, unable to do anything about it except shudder and learn to live with it. Those who care are greatly outnumbered by those who don’t care and who don’t even realise that something is very badly wrong with their behaviour. We have become a nation of coarse, rough people and it is difficult to see how the situation can be reversed or remedied. Many of the people who think and behave in this way are unwilling to change, because they genuinely cannot see why they should do so, or why their attitude might be considered problematic.

One man described to me how embarrassed he is by the table manners of those who work for him, at the annual staff lunch. They hold their cutlery like weapons, gripped in a full fist, and then swing it around while talking. Conversations are held while chewing food, unfamiliar food items are prodded warily with forks as though they might bite or bark and speculated upon loudly, knives are used to slice through pasta, mouths are wiped with hands, soup is slurped, and then, once the meal is over, knives and forks are cast down any old how on the empty plate. In 2006, everyone goes out to eat and uses tables, chairs, crockery and cutlery at home. It’s not like in the days when families sat around the communal borma and used their hands. So there’s no excuse for this ineptitude at table. But as this man knows, it is not his place to give instruction on table manners and he thinks – correctly – that it would come across as extremely patronising if he did so. So he just holds his breath and takes care that his ears don’t get sliced off with a knife being used to make a point.

What puzzles me is this. Presumably, these are fairly intelligent people with the discipline to hold down a proper job. So how do they fail to observe that their employer is doing things differently at table – that he is not waving his knife around or using it to cut pasta, that he is not chatting with a mouth full of food, that when he is finished, he puts his knife and fork neatly together on his plate? I find absolutely fascinating this inability – or unwillingness – to observe and to act accordingly. A truly intelligent person would do so, realising that it is in his or her interest. It is intelligence, then, that is lacking, because the truly intelligent realise that they have shortcomings and do all that they can to overcome them, so that they can improve their lives.

One of my favourite radio programmes was that of the late fashion designer, Ashley, who had a morning spot on Radio 101, in which he would take calls from listeners and advise them on what to wear to weddings, christenings, parties, and so on. No, he told one particular young man – do not go to a wedding wearing leather flip-flops with a casual suit. This might be a look that’s in fashion for parties, but parties with friends in a nightclub are not weddings. Wear a proper dark suit, a white shirt, and a sober tie, and make sure your shoes are polished black lace-ups. No, he told a woman – don’t go to a wedding wearing black, even if it is in the evening. It’s bad manners, like wearing white and competing with the bride. Black symbolises mourning, and a wedding is a celebration. Wear colour. Go out and buy a special dress for your friend’s birthday party, he told another woman. If she has made the effort to organise a celebration, then make the effort to dress up. Anything else is insulting to her. And so on, and so on. I loved that show. I was one of Ashley-the-broadcaster’s biggest fans, and I’m sure he did a lot to help. There are people who genuinely want to know what to do and what not to do. They just don’t know to whom to turn for help.

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I once knew a young woman who is the perfect example of this. She left school at 15 with no qualifications, and went to work on a factory production line. After a couple of years, she’d had enough. She began to go to secretarial school in the evenings, learning how to type and how to use a computer, studying English, finding out in theory how offices work. The secretarial school was so impressed with her determination and ability to pick up new information that she was recommended to a company that had come looking for new recruits. At first, things did not go too smoothly. She would turn up for work wearing clothes more suited to the factory floor than to a office where she greeted clients, and her telephone manners left a lot to be desired. But a quiet and polite explanation from her boss changed all this. Before long, she was transformed into a great asset to her workplace, dressing and behaving with flair and communicating in English – when required to do so – as though she had learnt it in childhood. She has, I suppose, what is called emotional intelligence. She knows when it is important to pick up information and to act on it. She can now move wherever she pleases with ease and confidence. She could do this because she had no chip on her shoulder. It is the chip on the shoulders of 90 per cent of the population that holds them back and makes them seethe with angry resentment at any suggestion that they might behave otherwise, for their own sake as well as for the sake of the country in which they live.

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Another man e-mailed me to say how exasperated he is with the attitude of his sales staff, who are in constant daily contact with customers. They have received all the right training but, he said, the fundamental problem of their negative attitude can’t be undone. “They can’t understand why they should be polite and civil to customers even when I am not there,” he wrote. In their way of thinking, I assume, you are only polite and civil because your boss wants you to be like that, so you are only polite and civil when he is there watching you.

One woman e-mailed to say that she travels for the pleasure of seeing good manners as well as seeing the sights, but then returning to Malta shocks her back to reality and makes life here seem even more unpleasant. I know what she means. The arrogant rudeness, surliness, and downright chippiness of Maltese sales people and serving-staff really hit me between the eyes on my return last month from a trip to Amsterdam. There, even a 20-year-old kid patiently giving me shoes to try on acted like nothing would give him more pleasure than to go into the store room, yet again, to rummage around for the right size. He wished me a pleasant stay, asked me what I had seen and hadn’t seen, suggested things that might be interesting, and told me that he liked my embroidered bag. And he wasn’t gay and he didn’t fancy me. He was just a nice, polite well-brought-up boy selling shoes. In every shop, museum, or ticketing office it was like that: perfect manners and sunny dispositions; not the sort of fake “have a nice day” robotic behaviour that you get in North America, but good old-fashioned civility. The man at the ticketing desk to one small museum actually excused himself before asking us where we are from, and even knew that English is one of Malta’s official languages, which is why we could speak it well. He talked to us as though we were making polite conversation at a dinner party. When I compared him, and others like him, to the aggressive louts placed front-of-house at so many Maltese “places of interest”, I felt almost ill with despair at the hopelessness of it all. The Dutch have the right idea. Front-of-house jobs don’t go to coarse illiterates who have been given a job as a favour; they go to well-educated people with perfect manners and a calm disposition. In the shops, it’s the same. I watched enthralled as an employee of a specialist cheese shop politely dealt with one of those annoying Italian women who talk incessantly without a care for the other customers, want the details on everything, touch products and pull them off shelves, then walk out with nothing. Not once did he snap or treat her with anything other than courtesy.

I returned to Malta and went to the local fish shop to buy supper. The man who served me shouted all the while at his colleague, who was standing two metres away, berating him for having forgotten to place an order for something or other. He snatched off the ice the fish I pointed out to him, gutted them as though killing a foe in battle, shoved them irritably under the tap, slapped them aggressively onto the weighing-scales, bunged them into a plastic bag while swearing beneath his breath, then shoved them in my direction across the counter. Through all of this, he ignored me completely. He interrupted his chastising of his colleague just long enough to tell me the price of the fish, but not long enough to thank me for the money or even to say goodbye as I walked out of the door.

Of course, there are shining beacons in the barbarian gloom, like the steward on the Air Malta flight from Amsterdam on 20 June, who behaved with perfect courtesy and concern when one of the boys threw up over my head, my lap, my seat and the floor while rifling around for a sick-bag. There wasn’t even a hint of a wince or a grimace. Without drawing any attention to what had happened, he threw a blanket over the mess, evacuated the neighbours, and put the sick one to bed on three seats at the back of the plane, bringing fresh pillows and blankets. Then he brought me coffee, offered me something to eat, sat down next to me and explained why I shouldn’t worry about the symptoms. There was also the Melita Cable technician who came to fix a fault a few weeks ago, realised that our cable was still scorched from that incident, and buzzed up and down ladders to and from the roof, on his own initiative and without a single grumble, to put in a new cable. Another man would have ignored it, on the grounds that he had been sent to do something else entirely. If only there were more of these people.

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I was gripped by another angle on all of this, given by the flamenco performer Andrej Vujicic, who is married to the Maltese dancer Francesca Grima, in a magazine interview last week. They live in Seville, but often visit Malta, to perform and because Francesca has a large extended family here. The interviewer asked Andrej about the differences between Seville and Malta, and he said: “The essential difference is in art and culture – the void that you feel in Malta as compared to its overwhelming presence in Seville. People there turn religion, food, a feast, the way they talk, what they think into an artistic experience. Everything has a little twist to it; everything is charged. There’s a sort of light-heartedness and wittiness and lack of aggression. Somehow it feels like the Maltese don’t manage to express themselves and to channel their energy into something creative – it becomes blocked. People become flat, apathetic, a bit aggressive, nervous with each other, whilst over there in Seville they are not frustrated. There’s no mhux xorta; it doesn’t exist. You constantly feel that everything is moving, everything is done with intention. The air is charged all the time, somehow.”

I understand exactly what he means, and agree with him perfectly. There is a blankness and emptiness in people here that is almost frightening. We express ourselves in drunkenness and aggression. A village feast is not an artistic experience, but an upsetting one to those who are not used to it. Drunkenness, shouting, jostling crowds, body odour, lots of sweating and stinking – it’s awful. I remember taking a visiting friend to a feast once, and saw that she was panicked, disgusted, frightened, and bewildered as hordes of the equivalent of British football hooligans pushed around her. There is a different art exhibition every week – the invitations come pouring into the letter-box - but little true creativity and almost no imagination. Creative and expressive style and flair are virtually non-existent. People paint the same things all the time: the same Maltese townscapes, the same Maltese ‘characters’, the same blessed symbols of the national identity that should have emerged and been done with years ago. Boredom festers. There is a crudeness and indifference that is perplexing, and all of this has contributed to making our island, and even our population, very unattractive. Beauty and civility are balm to the soul, but there is too little of either.