I am sure many readers have gone through the same experience. Wherever one goes in the world, it seems, there is no escaping a touch of Malta and the Maltese, however small a nation we have been and always will be. And I don’t mean the days when we all used to meet inside the duty-free shops at Heathrow and Fiumicino airports to clear out the chocolate shelves an hour prior to departure.

Social and historical developments over the centuries had of course been the chief reason for this widespread Maltese connection even in the most unlikely places.

My first such coincidence, though, was in a rather likely one. I was on my first trip ever to the UK, sitting on a bench inside London’s Victoria Station, and with my luggage safely in view at my feet. That was when railway stations still had benches and the poor hobos had no problem sleeping the night away in relative safety and warmth.

I soon realised an old lady was looking rather curiously at me and my luggage. This was London that had just come out of the Swinging Sixties and one would have thought female hippies wearing beads, sporting peace badges and colourful headbands would be eyeing you rather than this plump, pleasant lady in a twinset. She finally mustered enough courage to approach me.

“I notice you come from Malta,” she told me nicely, having obviously read the label on my luggage, then added: “You see, my son lives in Malta. He is a writer and you may have even heard of him.” The lady, I was to discover, was the mother of Ernle Bradford, famous author of The Great Siege and other books with a Mediterranean theme. Even more amazing was that at that moment in time he was actually living in Kalkara, the very village in the Cottonera area I had left a few hours earlier.

I replied saying Ernle Bradford was a good friend of Malta and explained how we – that’s her son and I with various others – often met inside the murky village corner watering hole for the serious business of taking part in the strictly non-literary activity of boozing. She smiled happily and left to catch her train.

On another occasion, while in Norway with my better half, we were walking down a breathtaking, beautiful valley when Mother Nature called. Surrounded by Norwegians and Australians on holiday, I thought it safe enough to declare somewhat loudly in Maltese, my urgent need to find a public loo. At that very instant, a voice behind me quickly told me where and how to find it... in Maltese. With my wife in hysterics, I simply wanted to go and hide somewhere in embarrassment as what looked like a couple of middle-aged Maltese spinsters vanished past us as quietly as they had come.

On Crete, that great beautiful Greek island that reminds me so much of Gozo, I was once with a small group of Maltese journalists walking on the beach as we searched for a good restaurant where we could have dinner and continue with our familiar banter in Maltese. All of a sudden, a woman came practically running and screaming at us from further up the beach.

She was Maltese, she told us, from Bormla, and had been married to a Greek from Athens before he had unceremoniously left her. She had not heard Maltese spoken for many years and couldn’t resist coming over to us. She was earning a living running a minuscule fast-food kiosk in Crete, and insisted with us that we join her there as we hesitatingly forgot all thoughts of a sumptuous, sophisticated dinner the night before departure. It was all worth it, though. Seeing the pleasure on that woman’s face as she joined in the loud discussion of Maltese politics and Maltese idiosyncrasies was enough joy to last a lifetime. Her tearful goodbyes, however, left us all with a sad feeling.

There have been many other similar instances in different places as, I’m sure, must be the experience of many people who have travelled widely. There is indeed “a corner of a foreign field” everywhere to remind us of this speck of land.

Peter Argent, a good friend of mine who works in the UK media, recently had to travel to a place called Wick up north in Scotland. Wick is the most isolated town; it lies 130 miles north of Inverness and there is nothing in between. The land is flat and devoid of any landmarks. On its way there, the train hugs the coast for much of the journey (there is a single track road with passing places) but when it ventures inland it is almost a wilderness that goes on for miles and miles. “It is no wonder that the people of Wick are very strange and hostile to newcomers,” he commented somewhat wryly.

So how does one kill time there? Peter decided to visit the Wick Museum inside which he soon stood before a glass-covered presentation displaying four embroidered flags and a crown surrounding a ceramic plate with the photograph of a hatless sailor on it. All of them hung under the title “Malta Present”, which, not surprisingly, reminded him instantly of his old friend in the Mediterranean. Malta in Wick.

Peter tried to obtain some on-the-spot information from the museum staff about that strange exhibit, but there was none to be had. It seems the whole story has been lost forever... unless there is someone out there who can come up with something about it, courtesy of this newspaper. See the picture for both veracity and illumination.

One wisecracker once commented that he can confirm that there is a God because he made Malta so small and the Maltese so insignificant in numbers. “If you can find them everywhere when they are so few, just imagine what they would have done had they had an empire.”

The mayor of the little island of Lampedusa to our west, may want to know this. Desperate as he is with the ongoing problem of illegal immigrants, he recently said maybe it was time they became part of the Maltese archipelago rather than remain lost as a forgotten outcrop in the Italian Republic. Perhaps it is not too late to have one, an empire, after all.