Someone, God knows who it was, wrote on a wall in the city of Bogota: “Let’s leave pessimism for better times.” Is our local pessimism as grounded in reality as we think? Are we pessimistic because times are bad or because that is the prevalent bug right now? And I already know that this article is going to be that much harder to write as I want to be positive this Sunday, than if I was going to moan about something, which is very very easy to do, and consequently much, much easier to write about! So are we all enjoying the moan, panting to find scapegoats, or what exactly?

Or is something much deeper going on? The attacks on Francis Zammit Dimech by leading hoteliers who have made a fortune in the business and by certain surprising others, are just one example of the prevailing bad aura. What relationship, emotional or business, would survive all this washing of its dirty linen in public I wonder? Is it really true that all Francis’s critics share no responsibility for ANYTHING that is wrong with our tourism product, are all great, and just Francis is doing everything wrong?

And here I am emphatically not talking about the political party stations. They have to do their job and their job is to paint the other half in a bad light, uncomfortable though that is. It must be tough, especially for those who are obviously beautiful and charming like Miriam Dalli, the Head of One News. But then no wonder, as I read lately, that her bedtime reading (and mine!) includes the Adrian Mole series. You just have to have some light relief when your job is to find the cracks and the mistakes of how the other half lives.

Any tourist who bothers to pick up any newspaper here would be amazed to find out that, statistically at least we are one of the happier nations on earth, and certainly much happier than most of our fellow Europeans. There is a level of negativity, a level of anger, and even a level of spite that is out of proportion to the challenges, although problems we have aplenty.

Yet if you plonk yourself in any European town or city, and start living the life of the average family, do any of you really really think they are so much better off and happier than we are? Do you think they have the outdoor life we have, the relatively short working day because of the short time it takes to travel anywhere, anything like our social life and sense of family cum community in the village rather than the national sense, and of course our amazing housing wealth though it is getting harder for people without family help to start on the property ladder? Most of my family live abroad, and when they visit they can’t understand what we’re all so negative about? Except for the very wealthy, times are tough in the UK, Germany, in much of France and elsewhere, whatever statistics might tell you.

Do you think engaged couples buy three-bedroomed flats abroad? Do you think they even have the cash to get engaged, have our kind of massive parties and the fortunes we spend on rings and weddings? And these are not just the pursuits of the rich here, this is what everyone, or practically everyone manages to achieve. Of course there are poor people, often women who only have social security or their pension to scratch a living from, often families with sickness or disability who have a huge challenge to survive. Yes, there are serious ouch factors. Basic wages have not gone up enough to cover rising costs. Nobody likes cutting back or down. For some there is nothing to cut down on! Petrol and our fuel bills are enormous, airport taxes are prohibitive and of course the thinking, floating voter is angry at the level of dust in the air, the amount of development and, in the other now famous words of Martin Scicluna, the uglification of Malta; although of course there have been pockets that have been improved enormously, Mdina, the Valetta Waterfront, Vittoriosa and so on.

Yet the media in recent weeks has taken to hounding Francis Zammit Dimech, our Minister of Tourism and Culture, acknowledged by all to be one of the most successful constituency MPs who always tries to help everyone, and who has been unlucky enough to oversee a drop in tourism, when there are problems all over the Med and not just in Malta, although our local media seems blind to this fact. Last year was OK for Malta compared to many of our competitors in the Med. We didn’t have outstanding growth, only marginal ones but we didn’t go down. Generally though, in the Med there is a shift from coastal island tourism to inland city tourism. We joined France, Cyprus and Turkey last year in not increasing as much as we needed to. And in Cyprus (which everyone who goes there tells me is much cleaner than Malta and not a building site!) the percentage decline was double that of Malta!

Terrorism isn’t helping either. With the trouble at Heathrow lately, more than a million package holidays remained unsold according to a report in The Sun. The World Cup delayed UK holidaymakers who wanted to see how England fared, and then the heat kept them home too. And this is the country from which we still get the bulk of our visitors.

So let’s hope low cost airlines can boost tourism here. Let’s also hope we can all get our act together and stop overpricing ourselves. Touristically speaking, can’t we at least be a bit optimistic and behave like one country?

Mind you I’m writing this with the San Bert petards of Gharghur blasting in my eardrums (last year, pictures fell off my walls at festa time). I hope the new archbishop will take these petard bulls by the horns and just ban them for the sake of some peace and quiet next summer, and just allow the ones that at least beautify our skies.

Not too much to ask is it?

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