In response to a survey by SOS Malta and the UNHCR, one African refugee said he used to think of the Maltese as rude people, but now understands that ‘they don’t know anything about migration’ and this accounts for certain bad behaviour.

I don’t think I agree with that. Whether people in Malta know anything about migration is irrelevant. The real point at issue is whether we know anything about the people we think of as The Other, and the fact is that we don’t. We don’t care why those who are black, North African or Muslim have left their homes and countries, and it makes no difference to us to know how much they have suffered getting here. We only know and care that they are different and represent a threat. And the only reason I use ‘we’ in this context is that being Maltese, I feel odd using ‘they’ even though I do not in any way share these views.

That Maltese social culture tends towards the abrupt, brusque, ill-mannered, loud and rude is beyond dispute. Even supposedly well-brought-up people think nothing of asking very personal questions of people they barely know, and then take offence when the other person pretends not to have heard them. People of all sorts of backgrounds talk over each other and interrupt as a matter of course. Those who should know better speak of black people, North Africans, Muslims and even women in the sort of derogatory tone that is straight out of another decade.

In shops and over counters, people make their requests with caveman grunts and are met with an equally sloppy and rude response. ‘Dik’ and ‘dak’ are thought to be acceptable and normal ways of referring to people, even by the leader of the Opposition who’s talking about his wife. Imagine Ed Miliband pointing at his wife and saying ‘That one’. And no, it isn’t different. It’s exactly the same. It’s just that we Maltese are so very uncouth that we don’t even know how uncouth we are. If even the leader of the Opposition refers to his wife as ‘that one’, just imagine how somebody digging up the streets is going to speak about a passing African.

And everywhere you go, there is noise and shouting. People hold conversations across a table at the sound-level of a foghorn. Instead of walking up to a person who is some distance away, to say something to him, the common practice is to raise your voice further still and shout that something out across the way. A Maltese sandy beach in the summer is one of the most nerve-wracking places you can be, as everybody seems to be shouting at once. A hundred Maltese people sound like two thousand drunken Germans, pipped to the post in the grating-sound stakes only by southern Italians. Being on a plane full of Sicilians or Italians from south or Rome is worse than being on a beach full of Maltese extended families.

The other day I had a compressed but perfect example of just how loud and rude and obnoxious Maltese people are. I swam out to sea and from that vantage point had a clear view, with sound effects, of a smart lido immediately adjacent to a small strip of public beach. Both were packed with people. Voices carry loud and clear over water, but I couldn’t hear a single voice from the lido. The babble from the public beach, though, was horrendous. It was a solid wall of loud voices and shrieks, a real babble. There can’t have been more than 80 people there but they sounded like a mass meeting after the beer had been passed round. The strangest bit is that I’d never really noticed it until I swam out and noticed the huge difference between the near-perfect silence on one side and the wall of noise on the other.

Since then I’ve noticed that many Maltese literally can’t speak quietly even if they want to and it’s pointed out to them that they’re bawling. Their voices have been pitched from toddlerhood at such a loud level that talking at a normal pitch is now out of the question. Look at all that shouting on television discussion panels, for instance. You’d think they were calling to somebody who lives across the bay. To everybody else who comes from outside Maltese culture, the sound of all this shouting, the tone of these voices, is frightening and seems rude and aggressive. Let’s face it, it is rude. And yes, it is aggressive, even if we are talking to friends. The sound of Maltese people having a conversation is, to the uninitiated, the sound of a fight.

That’s another public information campaign we need: one that tells people to tone it down by a few decibels, and reminds them that their conversation need not be broadcast to the entire beach.