When one of my sons returned to Europe from Central America, where he had been living for a couple of years, he spent some months in Greece, on one of its many islands, before moving north. Why, I asked. Because I want to see what it’s like, living on a Mediterranean island, he said. There was a pause. You grew up on a Mediterranean island, I said. You lived on a Mediterranean island for 22 years before you left. There was another pause. How funny, he said. I never thought of it that way.

Of course, he did not – because by the time he was old enough to be conscious of the signifiers that we interpret as those which are characteristic of Mediterranean island life, they had gone. Like the proverbial (at least, I hope it’s proverbial) frog that will try to leap out if popped into boiling water, but will not notice if you put it into tepid water then slowly bring it to the boil, those of us who Maltese who are old enough to have grown up on what actually was a Mediterranean island, in the true sensory meaning, barely even noticed what we were losing while we were losing it. And now that it has gone for good, we have forgotten all those sensory aspects until we are brought up short, like Proust with his madeleine biscuit, by the scents and other sensory triggers which prompt our subconscious memory. And suddenly we are elsewhere, in another time and place that we used to call home.

There was a time not that terribly long ago when it would have been considered ridiculous for a Maltese person, living in Malta, to holiday on another Mediterranean island. It would have been considered a waste of time and money, and a pointless exercise because holidays are meant to be a different experience and not more of the same. But now more and more Maltese people, particularly those who remember that Malta once really was a Mediterranean island, and what it felt like, are spending summer days in the Greek or Balearic Islands, perhaps not even knowing what the primeval attraction is, because it is largely subconscious. Why do they do it, instead of going somewhere more exotic, perhaps? They do it because it is a memory of home, and they are homesick for the home that exists no longer except in their barely-there sensory memories.

Yesterday morning I had to drive from my home to St Julian’s, a journey that for the last two decades has taken no more than 20 minutes even accounting for a couple of hitches in traffic. It took three quarters of an hour, which over the past few months has become a regular occurrence. It wasn’t the rush hour, either – it was after 9am. Yet at every corner, juncture and turning, there were slow or unmoving lines of cars. The roads were rammed. Cranes, concrete mixers and diggers blocked key feeder routes. Drivers followed the signs in Paceville saying ‘Exit to Triq San Gorg’ only to find the exit blocked by construction machinery and have to turn about in a tight space packed with traffic, causing even more confusion. Nobody had thought to cover the signs.

I’m not one to complain about traffic; I think it’s a boring subject and a hideous fact of life. My point here is that when you are caught up in traffic at a standstill, you are forced to observe your surroundings, even to examine them closely. Now that we face stiff fines for looking at our phones in the car, even when stalled in a jam, gazing about us is the only distraction. And this is when we notice how truly ugly everything around us is. Urban Malta is hideous, there is no other word for it, and even with the best of intentions, it is impossible to find something good to say about the aesthetics, or the complete lack of them. There was a time when the haphazard building and ugliness was confined to Bugibba, with that name being used as a byword for lack of town planning, bad design and poor architecture.

Now the whole of Malta looks like Bugibba. Even expensive neighbourhoods look like Bugibba. St Julian’s, once a salubrious place where you could live content, where architects made an effort with the blocks of low-rise flats and the detached villas, and planners controlled them, now looks like Bugibba. Only the prices are different. It is not only the aesthetics. Even the general atmosphere is the same: that of cheap and tacky chaos, of everything being generally ugly and unpleasant, hot, noisy, dusty and messy. The only way any of this resembles a Mediterranean island is if you compare it to the nastiest resorts in Greece and the Balearics that are the preserve of cheap tourists who go there to get drunk. But those islands have their soothing, pristine and beautiful hinterlands, stretches of coast which are not contaminated by vileness. In Malta, we do not have that privilege, that respite – and that is exactly why the Maltese of Malta, born and bred on a Mediterranean island, are literally homesick for Mediterranean life and travel to find it elsewhere for two precious weeks a year.

 

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com