Marie Louise Coleiro Preca spent part of Tuesday morning claiming and complaining that there are not enough pillows for patients at the general hospital.

She said that patients are given “sheets and pyjamas” to stuff beneath their heads instead. Really - and whose pyjamas would those be? Surgeon Anthony Zammit’s?

Even if this were true, Mrs Preca is so very much the wrong person to talk about it. Her credibility is zero, born-again nice person or not.

When she was secretary-general of the Labour Party and the Labour Party ran the country, the general hospital didn’t have doctors, not pillows. It didn’t have operating theatres and basic equipment. It didn’t have pillows either - I clearly remember taking my own with me - but that was the least of it.

We took it for granted that we would have to pack a bag with lavatory paper, cutlery, crockery, a mirror, soap and in the summer, an electric fan, for a stay at grand old Labour St Luke’s. Visiting hours were like meals-on-wheels, as families unpacked casseroles, sandwiches and Thermos flasks for starving patients who had gagged over an 11am ‘lunch’ of hard-boiled meat with purple lettering still stamped into the hide.

And we didn’t have the choice of going to a private hospital if we didn’t like it, because Mrs Coleiro Preca’s boss had shut them down. We could, if we wished, have gone to the minister of health’s private clinic in Fgura, which Vincent Moran ran as a thriving business which had some most interesting services on offer. But most of us preferred to endure the privations and risks of the general hospital.

Marie Louise Coleiro, as she was in those days before she married, never said anything at all about this. She never called a press conference to complain about the missing pillows. Maybe she screamed and shouted at Dom Mintoff and KMB in the privacy of their chambers, but somehow, I don’t think so. Perhaps she laid waste to Ċensu Moran in the parliament bar. But I don’t think so, either.

Like me, she probably thought it was normal and had to wait for the advent of a Nationalist government to find out that no, it wasn’t. Then she began complaining about pillows. I, on the other hand, can’t believe the luxury and comfort, in the same way that I still get that urge to buy lots of everything in case it runs out, and war children can’t believe they’ve got food on their plates.

I’ll give Marie Louise Coleiro Preca a description of breakfast at Karin Grech Hospital in 1986. All the women on the maternity ward are shooed into a room with tables and chairs and nothing else at around 7am, even those who have just been stitched up and can hardly move. The ones who can’t get out of bed because they have just given birth are left without breakfast because union rules dictate that patients must be taken to their breakfast and not the other way round.

There are hospital rules, too. These dictate that we are to wear a dressing-gown and slippers when not actually in bed, and even if it is summer and there is no air-conditioning (it is winter now). But many of the women do not know what a dressing-gown is, don’t own one and can’t afford one. They have no slippers. They have thrown old jackets over their nightdresses and are wearing their outdoor shoes.

A rough man in filthy overalls walks in bearing a plastic crate that is streaked with dirt. The crate contains a heap of stone-cold, soft-boiled eggs, some of them still with chicken-dirt attached. The women sit at table like children at school. The rough man plonks down one egg per woman directly onto the table-surface. He does not talk or say ‘good morning’, but grunts angrily. Those who have brought egg-cups and teaspoons with them from home proceed to eat the most disgusting food devised by man after boiled sheep’s eyes and stewed camel’s brains: cold soft-boiled egg full of ‘żlieġa’ or half-raw albumen. Those who have brought only teaspoons cup the egg in one fist and manage as best they can.

Those who have brought neither egg-cup nor teaspoon stare at the egg for a long while, and then go back to their beds to find a five-cent coin, queue at the public phone-box down the corridor, and hope that there is somebody home when they ring to ask for emergency sustenance.

We are not given any tea or coffee because we were given a cold cup of that already when we were forcibly shaken awake at 4am at the staff’s change of shift, and giving us another cup three hours later would be wasteful for socialists.

I go back to my bag and return with a spoon, a bowl and a packet of Coco-Pops. I also bring a roll of lavatory paper for the woman who is panicking because she had forgotten to pack any and because the staff were not allowed to lend her some from the socialist cupboard, which was bare anyway, possibly because all the lavatory paper had been spirited away to clean the backsides of Mintoff’s horses at the police stables, or had been piled up by some minister’s driver in his garage. Or maybe they hadn’t bought any in the first place, so that the coffers of the socialist paradise could continue to swell.

I go in search of the kitchen, with my bowl like Oliver Twist, except that I haven’t had any in the first place, let alone some more, and ask for milk. Milk is refused - to a woman who has just given birth. Staff nurses come in hot pursuit and tell me that the kitchen is out of bounds to patients. I point out that I am not a patient, that I have merely had a baby yesterday and will be going home later today, but if those are the rules, then I will make my request again from the doorway.

I fix the kitchen staff with my best authoritative stare - not an easy task as they are twice my age, three times my size and sound as though they spend long nights brawling in Testaferrata Street, while I am acutely, painfully aware that I am wearing a nice, middle-class old lady’s dressing-gown in a highly unflattering shade of green, and fluffy slippers, while carrying a bowl patterned with chickens - and insist. I cannot threaten to report to the press this refusal of milk to new mothers because the press has been reduced to a single page, number 13, in The Sunday Times, and its author has far more important matters to compress in that confined space, like people getting shot at army road-blocks and the murdered accountants of corrupt politicians found chopped up in wells. A milk bottle is grudgingly pulled out of a crate lying on the floor, unrefrigerated.

I go back to the room with tables and chairs and proceed to eat my cereal calmly. I am calm because this is all normal to me. Since the age of six I have known nothing else but life under Labour and freakish abnormality, rock-bottom standards, food shortages, privations, deprivation and violations of human rights and civil liberties have become normalised to me at 21.

The other women approach me but keep a safe distance. They have marked me out as different, one of those creatures who are not really Maltese but imposters, is-sinjuri (well, hahaha to that) who is-Salvatur and Karmenu talk about at public meetings. I am wearing one of two varieties of dressing-gown and one of three varieties of slippers which St Michael’s had in stock after an import licence came through, and which my mother hastily bought and foisted on me, overriding my objections to both on the grounds that I would rather drink ink than wear them.

They begin nudging each other and whispering as though I’m blind and foreign and can neither see them nor understand what they’re saying. “Saqsiha, saqsiha....”. For a moment there, I think they are discussing my horrid slippers (I will go on to never buy or wear another pair in the next 26 years), but then the appointed leader edges closer, draws breath and in a rush asks me what I’m eating. Is it a porga? Why does it make a noise?

I feel like Captain Cook landing on Kauai with a bag of wondrous coloured beads for the cautious, curious natives. It is 1986, and in Dom Mintoff’s and Marie Louise Coleiro’s socialist paradise, these women have never seen a packet of cereal. They do not even know what cereal is, that it is a food commonly eaten for breakfast throughout the developed world. We have had a socialist Labour government for 15 years and this is the result.

I show them the packet and explain. I describe cereal and toasted rice and chocolate flavouring, the popping sound when milk is poured on and how Sooty has been the Coco Pops mascot since the 1960s, how Coco Pops has been my favourite cereal since childhood, closely followed by Rice Krispies, which are the same thing but not brown. They listen with interest.

They tell me that their corner shops, their grocers, do not stock any of these things and so they have never seen them. I am momentarily astonished until I remember that they have no access to media other than Xandir Malta and RAI, and so no exposure to consumer information, advertising or the products that build social culture in developed countries. They do not buy magazines or newspapers. They have never left Malta. They are completely cut off, like people in Enver Hoxha’s Albania.

There are no supermarkets in Marie Louise Coleiro’s socialist heaven in 1986. Opening a supermarket means making a government minister or his thug a silent partner in the business, or paying him protection money or a large bribe. This would be worthwhile if there were money to be made, but there isn’t. People have no money to spend and there is nothing much to put on all those shelves. Import substitution, bulk-buying, corruption and quotas mean that even a simple grocer’s shop looks like Moscow’s GUM.

Village grocers do not stock cereals, except for a few packets of cornflakes for their more frivolous customers, because they are so heavily taxed, and people earn so little in this great socialist kingdom where Marie Louise is a princess, that they are considered great luxuries and entirely unnecessary. The importers are in a double-bind. This is a new market where people traditionally eat bread with margarine for breakfast and have no exposure to cereals at all, but they cannot penetrate it because cereal packets cost about twice as much as they do in Britain, while people earn a fraction of the average British wage. People continue to eat yesterday’s loaf with margarine packed in Malta, and the socialist government continues to boast about the excellent balance of payments and swelling national coffers.

Even I, who have grown up thinking of cereal as normal breakfast and (this is the crucial bit) a link with civilisation, have by now begun to consider Coco Pops an unnecessary expense. I have a packet with me in hospital because it is a special occasion. Coco-Pops, you see, have been selected apart from all other cereals by the great Labour government for especially draconian taxation and quota measures, because – drum roll here - they have CHOCOLATE in them. The importation of chocolate and chocolate products has been banned since 1976, and for the last 10 years, Coco Pops have been brought into the country only against rare special quotas. When I found this packet on my (Sliema) grocer’s shelves, I was delighted. “Take three,” he told me, “because it might be months before we see any again. I can’t give you more than three because I have my other customers to think of.”

So you’d be best off taking a running jump, Marie Louise, unless you’re counting on the votes of those who have selective amnesia, who are betting on creaming off a quid or two from Labour, or who are too young to remember you as Miss Secretary-General of the Great Socialist Paradise that was a peculiar form of hell for the rest of us.

The ability of some people to reinvent themselves for every occasion is just unbelievable. But they can do so because others allow them to and also collude in the pretence.