I can’t believe there are still people around who think that the best jobs are with the government, and that the way to get one of those is to pay money to a parrinu who will open the back door for them. It’s true that government jobs were doled out as favours in the past, and to a certain extent even today – what are all those drivers, messengers and retinues of assistants? – but that was then and this is now. Twenty years ago, there was no work, no money and people were desperate. Being on the State payroll seemed like the height of cushiness. You’d never get sacked, barely get reprimanded or warned, worked with little or no supervision, had half-days off in the summer, had the time to moonlight in the grey and black markets, and got a pension at the end of it all. Now the private sector is screaming out for workmen and labourers, and putting the government under pressure to import labour, and still able-bodied young men are trying to beg or bribe their way into a gopp mal-gvern. It’s unbelievable that this is still seen as the sine qua non of jobs – sorry, gopps.

A case in court illustrates this mentality perfectly. A young man and his girlfriend paid Lm500 to a man who claimed that he could speak to someone who would in turn have the power to open the back door to a government job for the young man. The man whom he claimed was at the end of this complicated chain of bribery and brokerage was a sports journalist with NET television. I almost feel like putting a question mark at the end of that sentence: a sports journalist, for heaven’s sake, not even, say, a right-hand man to a Cabinet minister. I suppose that says a lot about the people who paid the bribe and their world view. In fact, the government job he selected – pay your bribe and take your pick – was with the army, which appears to be seen in Malta as the cushiest of the cushy. That’s the reason why our soldiers get so cheesed off when they actually have to do what they are there to do, and deal with trouble and risky situations.

The sports journalist in question didn’t even know that his name was being mentioned in vain as a broker of government jobs, and this must have been a really bad experience for him because when mud is thrown some of it tends to stick. More revealing of this “back door” mentality is the fact that when this couple tried to buy a job as a soldier, the army was engaged in one of its periodic recruitment drives, and if this young man had gone through the normal channels, he would probably have got the position he wanted. But going through the normal channels didn’t even occur to him and his girlfriend, because they learned somehow on their journey through life in Malta that you have to pay somebody to get something.

Of course, the man who took the bribe and claimed that he would pass it on to the unwitting sports journalist did nothing of the sort. He used the money to pay some of his debts to loan sharks. When the job with the army never materialised, the couple who had paid the bribe did something even more incredible: they went to the Office of the Prime Minister to lodge a complaint. Can you believe that? It’s amazing. Our politicians may steal the headlines with their profoundly boring statements, but the best stories are buried deep within the newspapers, presented so matter-of-factly that their true significance easily escapes you.

So the man who wanted a soldier’s job, and his girlfriend, bustled in to the Auberge de Castile with the wonderful intention of reporting the NET television sports journalist to The Boss: not for taking a bribe, but for taking a bribe and failing to deliver the job. They thought they were in the right, and morally justified. I love it. It’s like a sketch from The Fast Show. What kind of parallel Malta do these people inhabit? I don’t even want to think about it. As if to prove their point that bribery is a perfectly normal and acceptable transaction, they were charged in court with slandering the sports journalist, but they could not be charged with bribery or attempted bribery to get a government job, because a sports journalist with a political party television station is not a public official. Having thought that they had bought a job and were reporting the person who failed to give it to them, they must have been very surprised to find themselves facing a magistrate.

* * * * *

The anthropologist Paul Sant Cassia has written to the newspaper to complain about the inconvenience caused to those who live in Mdina by those who stage so-called historical enactments there. I don’t share his concern because I don’t live there, though of course, I do sympathise wholeheartedly. If some organisation were to take it upon itself to organise an enactment of medieval peasants pressing olives in my backyard, I would have to struggle against the urge to set the dogs on them. It would be difficult, given that these prat-like performances bear no relation to any kind of historical reality, and so annoy me very much, like that ridiculous business of telling everyone the spectacular untruth that the eye on fishing-boats is the eye of Osiris.

No, what really irritated me about the Mdina shenanigans was not the towing away of residents’ cars so much as the fairytale interpretation of the historical facts, and the shoddy, cheap costumes. Bad clothes always get my goat, even when they are worn in street performances – or rather, especially when they are worn in street performances. Ten years ago, I was in Florence when Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St John was put on show after being restored. The Maltese Tourism Authority, for some reason best known to itself, decided that a nifty little parade through the main square, in supposedly Maltese 16th century costume, would be just the thing to set the tourism figures alight. So the tourism authority dug into its budget, paid the connection flights and Florentine accommodation for a bunch of people, and had them kitted out in costume. I nearly fainted with embarrassment when they hove into view. Standing on the main entry steps of the palace where the painting was being exhibited, I turned to my companion and said: “Gosh, I didn’t know they had nylon curtain-lining in Caravaggio’s time.” Then the Florentines came out with their own banners and costumes and of course, they were the closest facsimile possible of the real thing, bar the pure gold thread and the seed pearls stitched onto the hems of their coats: sumptuous velvet and damask, ropes of silk cord, heavy embroidery, lace, the works. Fortunately, there was nothing to indicate that the people dressed in brightly coloured nylon, few of whom appeared to have applied deodorant before getting dressed, were the Maltese historical parade. When an Italian standing next to me asked who on earth these people were as they couldn’t be Florentine, I said “Non parlo Italiano”. On the other hand, I can’t imagine what the tourism-marketing people were thinking of, or what they imagined would be in it for Malta.

But back to Mdina, where the nylon costumes were pulled out of the mothballs once again, given a nip and a tuck to account for the 500 years between Caravaggio and Roger the Norman, and used to dress up another bunch of people who enacted the entry into Mdina of the Norman posse. Paul Sant Cassia, in his angry letter, called it “a classic example of ‘fakelore’”, and I have to agree. It has been established a hundred times over, by historians and historical researchers, that the Maltese people who were living in Mdina when the Normans arrived were not Christian at all, but Muslims who had originally come from Sicily. The only Christians around were their slaves, who had no family connection with Malta and who were put on the first ships out of the islands to go back home. The Muslims, on the other hand, stayed because it was their home – just as they stayed in neighbouring Sicily despite the Norman hegemony. The Mdina mosque is long gone, but we know where it was because the name survives in Misrah il-Mesquita, which means “the square of the mosque”, except that to avoid facing this truth, the Maltese name is wrongly given as Pjazza Mesquita and the English translation as Mesquita Square, leaving the possibly deliberate misleading impression that Mesquita was the name of some old woman who lived there, rather than the Arabic word for mosque.

* * * * *

The tourism authority has no business propounding myths that have already been debunked, and worse, wearing very bad clothes to do it. Nor can I see any tourism value in this kind of public embarrassment, because the only people I ever see watching these circuses in nylon are puzzled Maltese children, their parents commenting on the vacuous use of their taxes, and in the case of the Mdina show, a couple of bored-looking nuns from my old school.