On Friday 3 January, I went to buy a roll from one of the bread’ stands in City Gate. I gave the hawker 25 Maltese cents. He looked at it as if it came from the Moon. The poor man was completely flabbergasted. To make matters worse, he was continuously being harassed by other people who were urging him to hurry because they wanted to catch a bus. It took him the best part of 10 minutes to take the Maltese coin, do the conversion and give me the change in euros.

But the irony of all this hit me that same evening when, that same hawker was interviewed on television about the euro for one of the news’ bulletins, he came out as confident as the Governor of the Central Bank. He said, oh yeah, it’s okay, no problem. Yesterday a number of people came with Maltese money. But today many people are already using the euro!

And I couldn’t help smiling at how we bend over backwards to avoid showing the party we support in a bad light. But whom are we actually fooling?

V. Piccinino

Valletta