In a number of public loos a lovely sign above the wash-hand basin orders you to wash your hands. I hate people telling me what to do. But I hate them even more when I’m told what to do while I am doing it.
Shouldn’t that sign be stuck somewhere else – somewhere where people who were thinking of doing otherwise might, by reading the order, do the hygienic thing and wash their filthy hands?
This situation is a microcosm of Malta.
Pick any of our nicely tarmacked, treeless roads. When signs are actually there, you find them just before you have to perform some serious manoeuvring.
No GPS, or whatever those infernal things are called, can come to your assistance on Maltese roads which are new, nearly new, or new to you. It is painful seeing people who come on holiday and leave the airport in hired cars. I think how impossible it is to drive around our roads and enjoy it. I always wish to flash a placard saying ‘Go back! Do not drive on. Return your car. And, too bad, lose your money.” It’s better to lose money than to lose your sanity.
Someone once told me, super seriously, that we don’t need signs because we all know our way around. So, this super logician of a man reasoned, as we all know where what is where, we hardly need to be told. If this man was a human of sub-literate mind, I’d have laughed. But he headed a top local company so I nearly died on the spot.
Signage is an art – and a fine art at that. Even in life we need indications on where to go and what we want. If we just wander around, we get lost – as we all seem to be doing in this golden age of ours. It’s golden – according to the Prime Minister and his followers – because money is no problem. But do we have a plan B for – if and when problems hit our land? What strategy – with proper signage of what we need to do – is at hand if the EU does finally pull the plug to ensure that all its members have a harmonised tax regime?
What plan is there if we have a major downturn – as seems on the cards this year – in tourism? Or if the online gaming industry does not remain the apparent cash cow it is right now?
What are our sales in passports looking like? Still rosy and selling like glorified pastizzi?
Malta, clueless, plan-less, painful: to see, to drive in, to live in.
Our resplendent roads – except when they are badly in need of an expansion joint – have become the government’s biggest reflection of its aims and visions. Roads, and loads of tarmac, plastered with billboards and lacking all soul. You drive around seeing nothing but cranes, high-rises and cubicles. And this is the way of the future: unplanned, unhinged, without vision – or rather with a vision that is totally blurred.
We are lost forever in our flow-less land. So many experts and foreign organisations have been warning us that our quality of life is deteriorating. We hit the top spots in basically all the wrong areas: obesity, poor air quality, corruption. We keep sliding down in our basic freedoms, especially a free, unfettered press. The water and sewage situation are two aspects we hardly ever think about.
What about the unsustainable growth in the building of architectural monstrosities? What has happened to our burgeoning public employment? Is that sustainable? But who cares? Who does anything?
The signs in this case are all there, for us to wake up and do something, or at least to start planning something – anything.
Yet we drift on with no sign of changing – because we have survived with no idea, no plan, no rational way forward. So we might as well go ahead as we always have done – with no proper signage, no clue as to what our aims are, with blind hope that, if we keep on driving, eventually we’ll get to wherever it was we set out to go.
If anyone tries to create and introduce new ways of looking at how to tackle, or at least discuss, the future they are deemed negative soothsayers and boring harbingers of a terrible future.
Like Pontius Pilate of the New Testament we all wash our hands and decree that everything is fine in this land of poor signage and poorer planning.