Over the past three weeks, I must have spent a total of 25 hours in hospital waiting rooms. I didn’t mind at all. As long as I am warm, not hungry or thirsty, and armed with some magazines or an interesting book, I can sit anywhere for hours on end and not even notice the time pass. There was something I did notice, though – that in all that time, in all those waiting-rooms with all those different people in them, the only other person I ever saw reading was a medical representative who pulled out a novel as she sat and waited for her chance to see the surgeon. Everyone else just sat and stared, sighed and grumbled, stood up and sat down again, or exchanged muttered words with the person accompanying them – even for as long as two or three hours. More curiously still, there were times when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that, as I turned the pages and absorbed in what I was reading, I had become an object of interest. It was as though the sight of somebody reading for pleasure, rather than for information or study, was a freak show. Why wasn’t I texting, or playing games on my mobile phone?

On the most recent occasion, I waited for four hours in two different rooms each packed with at least 40 people, and not even one of them had so much as a newspaper. It made me wonder about the mindset of somebody who heads for the hospital knowing there is going to be at least a two-hour wait, without taking anything to read or even anything to do, like knitting. I know I’ve written about this subject before – that I think the reason most Maltese people don’t read is because they can’t read English or Italian and there’s nothing to read in Maltese – but my recent waiting-room experiences have given me a whole new slant on the matter. I got the impression that if somebody had walked through those waiting rooms with a trolley of party-politically neutral newspapers and quality magazines in Maltese, the attendant would have been mobbed – as long as they were free, of course. It’s not that people don’t want to read; it’s just that they have nothing to read in their mother tongue, and struggling to read something in a language in which you are not fluent is frustrating and unrewarding.

I know this from the direct experience of battling to read the Italian newspapers on Alitalia flights, when my own reading matter runs out. Language is a reflection of the culture that produces it. While English is restrained, never using two words where one will suffice, Italian writing is florid and cluttered with baroque turns of phrase, which obscure meaning or disguise the fact that there is no meaning at all. That is why translating a piece of Italian writing into English is an exercise in précis that leaves you with a brief paragraph instead of a 1000-word article.

There was a man next to me in one of those queues, looking very bored indeed. As I sat there munching Twistees and contentedly reading, I felt sorry for him and handed him one of my magazines. It wasn’t tough going – not The Economist or The Spectator or anything like that, because I’m very much a Hello magazine and Vogue kind of person. “Thank you,” he said, and did that thing which people who are unfamiliar with the concept of reading do. He gripped it like a steering wheel and held it out at arm’s length. Each time he got fed up of the view, he put the thing down flat on his lap, turned the page, then held it out like a steering wheel again. I found myself observing him intently, and then noticed people observing me observing him, and rapidly returned to my Twistees and magazine. I kept sneaking looks: he wasn’t reading; he wasn’t even looking at the pages. He was watching the pages, as though he expected them to do something – moving figures, like on television.

The words meant as much to him as German does to me. The pictures on the pages – George Bush, Kate Moss, Tony Blair – meant nothing to him, either. They were just shapes of people. And then I realised: the magazine had about as much meaning or entertainment value to him as a glossy magazine written in Hungarian and full of pictures of Hungarian people, politicians and stars would have for me. There is a significant difference, and therein lies the problem: the stars and politicians in the London glossy stalk across the world stage, and the language in which it is written is the first language of international communication. But it did allow me to understand what things are like for this man. In his world, if something is not written in Maltese, about Maltese people or subjects directly relevant to Malta, then it might as well be in Hungarian and about Hungary.

When I finished with my magazines, I left them on the communal table. Not one person reached forward. After two hours of staring, you would imagine that at least somebody would be climbing the walls in desperation for something to flick through – but no. I found this absorbing too. In popular Sliema and St Julian’s coffee-shops – where the customers are people from all over Malta, I hasten to add, before I get jumped on – the opposite is the case. You have to keep your magazine or newspaper locked in an iron fist, because if you so much as turn your face for a minute, somebody whips it away with an “Are you finished with that?” and then runs off before you have time to say, “No, actually I’m not, and that’s my magazine, not the café’s.” The difference in attitude is not because the people in Sliema coffee shops like reading and those in St Luke’s Hospital waiting-rooms prefer staring. It’s more fundamental than that: the people in Sliema coffee shops read English fluently, but more importantly, the magazines and newspapers are not from a culture that is alien to them. The people, ideas and concepts are familiar.

The people who like reading, but who can read only Maltese, are ill served. There is nothing for them to read. The Maltese-language newspapers are highly politicised. The Maltese-language magazines are shoddy. And please don’t get me started on Maltese-language books, most of which are so culturally cut off from what is going on in the rest of the industrialised world that they seem to have been written in 1960 in a parallel universe. There are exceptions, yes – but so what? Those who read English have thousands upon thousands of fantastic books, covering all genres of fiction and all sorts of non-fiction, to choose from. Those who read only Maltese have to make do with the few exceptions to the rule that most Maltese books are badly written and ill-conceived rubbish.

No doubt, one or two Maltese “authors” will now rush at me with an axe. Curiously, they seem to believe that anyone who pooh-poohs their output does so out of intellectual or linguistic snobbery, or the belief that Maltese is inferior to English. Rather than face the fact that their writing is crap, they prefer to think that those who criticize them are ignorant. Their approach to the Maltese novel is much like Samuel Johnson’s view of women preachers: “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

The situation is mirrored in television. Audience surveys bring out the same result time and time again: people want more Maltese-language programming. There is only one conceivable reason for this, given that homegrown shows are inferior in quality to their equivalent on the many other channels now available to us. This reason is language. People want homegrown shows because they cannot understand anything else. It’s not just the language that is alien to them, but also the culture from which the shows spring. To understand a television programme or film, to read a book or even a magazine or newspaper, it is not enough to understand the language in a textbook way. You also have to be able to decode the cultural signals and to interpret the non-linguistic information. Top-ranking Maltese shows are only top-ranking because the vast majority of the population can’t understand what’s going on in English or Italian programming.

The short-term solution is to give people what they need and want – more and better in Maltese. But the long-term solution is a lot harder. Instead of wasting our time translating the works of William Shakespeare into Maltese, we should be spending that time more profitably making sure that everyone who is Maltese can read Shakespeare’s work exactly as he wrote it. If thousands of others and I were taught how to do this, then why wasn’t everyone else who grew up in the same country taught the same? It’s discrimination, masquerading as national pride. At the end of the day, there’s no doubt who’s the better off – the ones who are fluent in English, or the ones who are not. Instead of trying to rewrite reality as a Maltese-language soap opera of slamming doors and offended honour, we should get started on introducing remedial English-as-a-foreign-language in all State schools. Children in private schools now have all the advantages, including the greatest advantage of all: that not one of them leaves school without being able to read, write and speak English. Most of them are already privileged to begin with, but fluency in English puts them way ahead of the rest. Those who can’t speak, write or even understand English are the victims of twisted national pride, and it’s just not fair to them.