There was a multi-car traffic accident on the Regional Road yesterday morning. The accident took place on the S-curve over the Msida valley but the traffic snarl-up affected traffic all the way from the Gzira gas tank roundabout.

That’s Malta for you.

It was only last summer, readers will remember, when a truck carrying a crane bumped into the overhead bridge in Marsa. It blocked the entire Marsa, Paola, Luqa, Qormi areas. People missed their cruise liner departure times, pilots and cabin crew missed their flights, as did would-be passengers. It took hours to unsnarl the confusion.

That’s Malta.

A small island with lots of continuous interaction by its highly active population. People are all the time on the road, going somewhere – Malta has the densest car population in the world. Inevitably, accidents happen, and equally inevitably, they affect all sorts of other people who are on their way somewhere.

Ditto for the economy. Our very open economy can and is frequently affected by the smallest factors – such as one company, ST Micro, accounting for around half of our exports.

When it had problems but the rest of the country was doing well, the figures that emerged showed a country in strife. When it shook off its problems, the country became a shining light in the midst of the recession, even if that was not the case with most of the economy.

Air Malta is another case in point. Other countries saw their national airlines dropping out of the sky – Switzerland, Belgium, to name but two – suffered all with equanimity. But for the Maltese, problems with the national airline are huge national problems. People have been following the developments in this sector with fascination mixed with anxiety.

It is so easy to block progress or growth, rather more difficult to push things forward and upward.

This has its flipside as well. Small being the nature of things, it is a remarkable truth that Maltese society is so safe, that crime is rather contained, that the dark instincts that lurk in people somehow usually get controlled.

It does not take much to block Malta, we said. It does not take much to turn Malta into something we can never imagine, but somehow this very rarely happens.

Malta reached nationhood without civil war, it saw reversals of governments with something like equanimity, it continues to be a place where most people know most other people, not an anonymous society, nor a society where forces are blind and unfeeling.

We have had narrow escapes, of course, but at the crucial point we stopped short where other people would plunge in. For to hurt the enemy in front of you also means hurting someone who may be related to you. So we desist, mostly.

Time and again, most of us are brought low by the claustrophobia that living on an island inevitably engenders. Time and again most of us yearn for the wide open spaces that are impossible here, the anonymity of foreign crowds, the huge numbers that make economic sense. But time and again we come to realize that being small has its own special and impossible to replicate advantages.